A big hit in the waning years of the great Weimar film revolution, The White Hell of Pitz Palu was a pivotal success of its era, as it proved the apex for the popular “mountain film” genre in Germany and cemented the star status of actress Leni Riefenstahl. Such indeed was its blockbuster stature that Quentin Tarantino spun a major plot point around its cultural ubiquity for a 1940s German in Inglourious Basterds (2009). White Hell represented collaboration between two significant talents of the German film scene, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who was just coming off his epochal work with Louise Brooks, and Arnold Fanck, a geologist who had turned to documentary film work when exploring the rugged Alps, setting up a production company in 1920. Fanck laid the foundations for the alpinist genre with his The Holy Mountain (1926), for which he discovered Riefenstahl, a young interpretive dancer. Fanck approached Pabst for help on White Hell for the sake of bolstering the film’s dramatic depth and breadth of appeal. The complete film was missing for a long time, however, after scenes featuring Jewish supporting actor Kurt Gerron were clipped by the Nazis, whilst a rerelease added a dialogue track, and the full original work wasn’t recovered until 1996. The story is utterly elemental: Dr. Johannes Krafft (Pabst regular Gustav Diessl) is climbing the eponymous mountain, whose north face remains a perilous challenge for mountaineers, with his wife Maria (Mizzi Götzel), when she plunges into a ravine and is trapped. Krafft fails to find her as the ravine is flooded by melt run-off. Krafft becomes a sad and solitary myth of the mountains, as he continually returns to Pitz Palu to find Maria's lost body.
Enter another young couple, Hans Brandt (Ernst Petersen) and another Maria (Riefenstahl), who honeymoon in the hut used as a base station for climbing attempts on the mountain. Krafft turns up, intending another search, and they give him their hospitality. Maria is magnetically fascinated by the damaged loner, who narrates the circumstances of his wife’s demise and his failures to penetrate the cavernous abode where she still lies. When Krafft next heads for the mountain, Hans and Maria decide to come with him for aid and company. At the same time, a climbing party of young men tackles the north face, but take the ice-ranged gorge that Krafft avoided, and set off an avalanche that kills all of them. The smaller party soon comes into danger themselves when Hans, wanting to prove himself competent, insists on taking the lead whilst climbing a difficult section, and instead suffers a long fall. Krafft retrieves him at the cost of breaking his own leg, and the trio are instantly reduced to trapped, helpless microbes on the vast and rugged face of the mountain. Their friend Christian (Christian Klucker), a mountain guide, learns what has happened and rouses volunteers from the nearest town, to ascend the mountain and search for the desperate trio. Another friend, Ernst Udet (playing himself, basically), a flyer who parachuted a congratulatory bottle of champagne to Hans and Maria when they first arrived, brings his plane in to find them and then tries to drop supplies.
The White Hell of Pitz Palu is a cross-breed of documentary and drama, as Fanck’s location footage and Pabst’s studio work are blended. The hemispheric divide of the directors’ sensibilities usually complement each-other, to often powerful effect. Fanck films the high mountains, picturesque valley hamlets, and sweeping airborne vistas, articulating his passion for the region. The sight of the villagers streaming into the night on their rescue mission with torches aloft, becoming a river of light penetrating stygian darkness for a rite of resurrection, confirms Fanck had both the instincts of a poet and the eye of a skilled cinematic correspondent, capturing rare visions of the natural and human worlds with great technical expertise in a spirit similar to Robert Flaherty's or Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's popular docudramas of the same time. Pabst handles the intimate, sublimely concerted early scenes in which Hans and Maria loll in their idyll, into which Krafft strays like a black cloud over a noonday sun, capturing Maria’s silent fixation with his boding gravitas, and investing even the sight of a handful of ice slowly melting in a frying pan with a hint of eerie significance. The disparity of setting and worldview between this and The Joyless Street (1925) and Pandora’s Box (1926) seems superficially huge, but actually it’s mere contrast, swapping the septic mercilessness of society for the cleaner but equally merciless state of nature, and with compulsive amour the underlying drive that pulls its heroes in dual directions at once, towards life and towards death. Pabst also looks forward to Kameradschaft (1931) as the humanistic essence of communal action comes to the fore in the wake of disaster.
The film’s cinematographic rhapsodies invest the simple narrative with that most classically Germanic theme, the liebestod, a view of the rarefied altitude as a zone of mystic intimacy, with the image of Maria Krafft’s body locked in ice the beautifully morbid refrain. Fanck and Pabst organise the basic components of their drama in clear poetic oppositions and unities – ice, fire, love, death, heaven, hell. They strike a carefully, obsessively rhythmic intensity to the drama early on as Krafft, having lost his wife to the ravine, sits on the snow watching as icicles melt drop by drop in the rising sun, his emotional disintegration keyed to the quickening pace of the melt, in a dazzling display of silent cinematic technique. Krafft’s first appearance at the climbers’ hut is presaged by a gust of sudden, chilly wind just as Hans has told Maria about the earlier disaster, and then the man's sudden appearance in the doorway like one Murnau's supernatural emissaries come to visit. Krafft’s steadfast strength and obsessiveness is nonetheless the narrative’s backbone, and provides the film with another inescapable image as he stands waving his lamp, trying to signal for help, in the midst of a night blizzard, his beacon of assailed humanity in the midst of a hostile universe. The investigation by the searchers of icy caverns in search of the bodies of the dead young mountaineers becomes, by a title card’s behest, a descent into the Inferno (Hell), blazing torches exploring vertiginous depths and clefts to fish out the broken and gnarled bodies of hubristic whelps. Fanck’s location shooting captures the essence of his theme, the power of nature, in comprehending the pulverising force of avalanches and challenge of high peaks: under the filmmakers’ eye the mountain is perpetually alive, constantly changing shape for the fragility of its snowy mantle and looming implacably over the little humans who tackle it. Kudos, too, for Willy Schmidt-Gentner’s thunderous orchestral score.
The film’s superlative qualities are however counterbalanced by the ultimate failure of Fanck’s observational indulgences and Pabst’s artistic instincts to completely cohere. The narrative is distended and lacks complication. Even the most memorable scenes, of the villagers setting out and the exploration of the ice caves, ramble on excessively, as what would have been a truly grand fable at ninety minutes becomes a long hike at over two hours, especially as the sequences of retrieving the dead, though stunningly filmed, are essentially beside the point, and seem more about showing off how much great footage Fanck shot. And yet the climactic scenes of Christian and Ernst striving to aid the trapped threesome are effectively excruciating, whilst the vignettes of survival on a barren rock ledge are vivid, as Maria and Krafft having to tie down a delirious Hans and Krafft slowly strips himself of garments to help keep his charges warm at the expense of his own fading strength. The very climax veers the tale back towards the meeting point of corporeal extreme and perfervid mystical communion. Diessl’s performance is noteworthy, whilst Riefenstahl, in her third film for Fanck, is poised and physically convincing. Notably, her later directing career remixed many of the themes found here (The Blue Light, 1932; Tiefland, 1954) as Fanck's eminent protege, including, one might cynically note, the subtle but ominous swooning at the foot of the noble, self-sacrificing leader and rituals by torchlight. The mountain film steadily lost its popularity after this and was all but dead by World War 2, but just about any subsequent take on the same subject – The White Tower (1950), The Mountain (1956), Vertical Limit (2000), Nordwand (2008) – has one foot planted on this ledge.
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