Call of the mountain: modern enchantment on and off the screen

Mountains calling

In 2019, the film Free Solo won the Oscar for best documentary feature. It depicts Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of the route ‘Freerider’, climbing through the 1000 metre high vertical wall of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, USA, without protective equipment should he fall. The press hailed Honnold as ‘a superhero whose superpower is near fearlessness’ and the film as ‘the best climbing movie ever made’ which ‘causes your pupils to dilate, your palms to sweat, and your mind to boggle’ (Lawson Citation2018; Vigneron Citation2018; Stephens Citation2018). It marked the highest point yet in the marriage of mountaineering and the culture industry. However, mountain movies have been around for a hundred years, and like Free Solo, these earlier films used visual representations of fear-inducing verticality to take the audiences’ breath away. Invariably, the film critics wondered about Honnold’s motivation for risking his life, and one concluded ‘that utility alone is a poor way to measure the grandeur of one man’s spirit’ when watching ‘a young man, millimeters from extinction, transforming the unthinkable into the sublime’ (Stephens Citation2018).

The idea that a mountaineer transforms into ‘a soul freed’ (ibid.) when facing senseless death dates back to the formative period of mountaineering. It formed part of the mountaineers’ tales of their heroic endeavours. They charged mountains with sacred power, with simultaneously attractive and terrifying force, which, when confronted changed their lives and brought forth their best human qualities. Likewise, death-dealing mountains featured prominently in German mountain movies of the 1920s and 30s, which introduced moving pictures of climbers in real mountains to mass audiences. Their directors invented cinematographic techniques to represent the mountains’ danger, aimed at eliciting a bodily response in the audience, which still feature in documentaries about rock-climbers today. Here, I discuss how the visual representation of man (rather than woman) and mountain in both genres contributed to the construction of the cultural meaning of mountaineering, before analysing mountain religion, or rather the production of enchanting mountains in mountaineering, both on and off the screen.

Mountaineering, the climbing of mountains as an end in itself, developed alongside modern dis- and re-enchantments of nature. Occasional mountain climbs notwithstanding, the European Alps had been frightful places best to be avoided until the eighteenth century, when they were reimagined as expressions of the sublime and increasing numbers of bourgeois travellers visited the Alps to experience the new mountain aesthetics. By the turn to the nineteenth century, tourists grew dissatisfied with the view from the valley and turned into mountaineers willing to risk their lives climbing to the mountaintops. For them, mountains were both frightful and sublime, attractive because of their mortal danger.

In Mountains of the Mind (2003, 19), Robert Macfarlane frames his exploration of mountains’ attractive force with the assertion that ‘mountains are only contingencies of geology. They do not kill deliberately, nor do they deliberately please: any emotional properties […] are vested in them by human imaginations.’ Yet, he imagines mountains as active entities. After recalling his childhood fascination with ‘grisly details’ of ‘death or mutilation’ (ibid., 5) in mountaineers’ tales, he takes the readers along on an Alpine climb, onto the near vertical side of a ridge with a long drop below:

This recent tale shares motives with Edward Whymper’s account of his first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1866, the dramatic culmination of mountaineering’s golden age. One mountaineer slipped and dragged three others with him, who, after the rope broke, disappeared from Whymper’s view to fall ‘from precipice to precipice on to the Matterhorngletscher below, a distance of nearly 4000 feet in height’ (Whymper Citation1872, 156). While ‘the traditional inaccessibility of the Matterhorn was vanquished, and was replaced by legends of a more real character’, the mountain ‘proved to be a stubborn foe; … it was defeated at last …, but, like a relentless enemy – conquered but not crushed – it took terrible vengeance’ (ibid., 160).

These representations of mountains centre on their physicality, their verticality, in relation to the bodies of the mountaineers. Climbing a mountain entails the threat of falling, and moving through mountains without the fear of death is hiking, but not mountaineering. Mountaineers imagine mountains as malevolent foes, but this personification follows disenchantment. New, ‘more real’ legends replace old ones, and the mountains are imagined ‘as though’ they were animated. Nevertheless, in the tales of mountaineers, the mountains deal death, which is central to their terrible attractiveness. Reflecting on mountaineering, Macfarlane (Citation2003, 70–1) notes ‘how central to the experience is that risk and the fear it brings with it’. Verticality, risk and fear are also central elements in the visual representation of mountaineering.

Mountain movies

Mountain landscapes have been a topic in Western art since the sixteenth century, depicting the changing imagination of mountains from terrible to sublime. With the development of mountaineering, paintings showed climbers on glaciers and vertical walls, and while Whymper could only report on his comrades disappearing from view, Gustave Doré painted them, so that everyone could ‘immediately see’ how they fell ‘without any hope into the void and onto death’ (Scharfe Citation2013, 158–9).Footnote¹ By the early twentieth century, mountains were captured in photographs. The new medium promised indexical representation, the direct physical inscription of reality (Peirce 1998 [Citation1894], 5–6), but Benjamin (Citation2010, 14–5) argued that photography’s mechanical reproduction destroyed the ‘aura’ of art or mountains, with a ‘regrouping of apperception’ of modern mass audiences taking place ‘in film through the shock effect of its image sequences’ (ibid., 34).

From the 1920s onward, mountain movies shocked audiences. In Germany, Arnold Fanck established this new genre by directing eleven movies in alpine settings from 1920 to 1934. Shot on location, the movies showed people climbing real mountains for the first time. He directed Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain Citation1926), starring Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker, both of whom directed their own mountain movies, with Trenker’s Der Berg ruft (Call of the Mountain Citation1938) as a late example. In Der heilige Berg, two mountaineers compete over a woman, and, when their rivalry escalates in the middle of the ascent of a dangerous mountain wall, one falls. The other holds on to a rope and comrade throughout a stormy night, only to step off the cliff the next morning when the rescue party arrives. Der Berg ruft presents the first ascent of the Matterhorn with the added dramatic twist of an Italian guide retrieving the broken rope to prove the innocence of Whymper, who has been charged with cutting the rope in order to save himself.

While the mountain movies were relatively successful commercially, they received mixed reactions from film critics (see Rentschler Citation1990, 141–4). In 1927, Kracauer (Citation2004a, 298) judged Der heilige Berg to be ‘a gigantic composition of body-cult phantasies, sun foolishness and cosmic wallowing’, a masterpiece only as an expression of the worldview of youth groups countering ‘mechanization through obsessive nature worship, through a panic-stricken flight into the foggy brew of vague sentimentality’. He concluded that the climbers’ death ‘is the just revenge of the mountains for their violation. Even mountains don’t put up with everything’. Later, Kracauer argued that ‘the idolatry of glaciers and rocks’ of mountain movies generally ‘was symptomatic of an antirationalism on which the Nazis could capitalize’ (Kracauer Citation2004b, 112).

In contrast, Béla Balász celebrated Fanck in 1931 as ‘the greatest cinematographer of nature’ who ‘opened up a gargantuan world of titans for us and, with his camera, threw our human vision into the middle of it all, forcing us to live amongst them’. He ‘directs glaziers, avalanches and storms’, and these ‘natural elements become dramatic elements, living beings, because they encounter living beings. Rock becomes threatening because it threatens someone, and is seen with the eyes of the threatened’ (Balázs Citation2016a, 68–9).

Mountaineers also watched mountain movies and debated their value in the journal of the Alpine Club. Writing on Der heilige Berg in 1927, one author observed ‘that every mountaineer in the movies sits on the knife-edge top of a needle like tower, and then daringly jumps over a wide chasm’. He argued that showing these ‘haphazard tricks’ amounted ‘to call for carelessness, to teach the unexperienced audiences to underestimate the dangers of the Alps’. Another responded by admitting ‘without remorse’ to have undertaken all kinds of dangerous acts in the mountains and concluded: ‘If you want to be completely safe, sit behind the oven’ (all cited in Günther Citation1998, 140–2).

The sizeable academic literature on early mountain movies criticises Kracauer’s teleological argument, looks beyond the political to their wider socio-cultural context, or compares them with later revivals of the genre (see, e.g., Baer Citation2017; Rentschler Citation1990; Schaumann Citation2014). Here, I analyse how the movies represent mountains as places of mortal danger, and argue that they throw ‘our human vision into the middle of it all’ (Balázs Citation2016a, 68) in order to elicit an embodied reaction that makes it impossible for the audience to remain ‘in a state of disinterested contemplation’ (Baer Citation2017, 295). In the two movies, the dramatic climax takes place on mountain walls, and climbers fall to their deaths. To establish the setting, the directors use extreme long shots to show whole mountains, and the position of ant-like climbers on towering vertical walls. These are interspersed with long shots showing whole bodies in action, and close ups of hands grasping rock or ice axes, or feet driving crampons into the ice to convey the dynamics of climbing. Both directors employ match-on-action and point-of-view editing of rapid succession of short takes to present the climbers’ falls, drawing the audience into the action and the actor’s position.

Fanck uses an extreme long shot to show the rescue party arriving at the base of the mountain face, and another, side view, showing the location of the outcrop high on the wall, where a tiny mountaineer holds onto his friend hanging below. A close up of the face of a rescuer looking up is followed by a shot of the rising sun breaking through clouds, followed by a close up of mountaineer’s face. When the sun hits his face, he opens the eyes, smiles, and moves forward, out of focus. A frontal full-body shot shows him, still clutching the rope, moving towards the edge of the cliff. A close up of the rescuer, looking up, averting his head and covering his eyes is followed by a side view showing the mountaineer falling through the frame, through empty space against the background of clouds (Der heilige Berg, 1:38:17–1:39:15).

Trenker establishes the positions of a mountaineer on the vertical wall with a high-angle long shot, showing the glacier far below as background. A close up of a nailed boot scraping across rock shows his problems. Cross-cuts alternate between the climber on the wall, a close up of his face with widening eyes, and a view vertically down the wall, with the camera zooming into the depth and starting a rotating motion. A rapid succession of shots shows the terror of three other climbers tied to the rope, their being pulled off, and the view down, now completely out of focus, blurred in motion. The belaying team braces for impact, holding on to the rope, a close up shows the rope tightening and breaking, and the remaining mountaineers look over the edge. An extreme long shot shows four bodies falling down a mountain wall, and follows the bodies in a downward tilt. A quick succession of medium close-ups shows bodies tumbling heads over heels down a steep ice slope, and then they are falling again, now mere dots, all the way down to the base of the mountain wall. The last shot shows the Matterhorn in its iconic triangular form, with clouds streaming off its summit (Der Berg ruft, 1:14:52–1:15:57).

In his discussion of climbing films, Roger Cook emphasises a fundamental problem for the visual representation of the climbing experience. When climbing, mountaineers rely primarily on proprioceptive spatial orientation, based on ‘the pure movement of the body through an indeterminate space’, rather than on cognitive mapping, which uses ‘visual cues to reference one’s position within an imagined spatial grid’ (Cook Citation2012, 304). Looking down is dangerous, because when the ‘climber suddenly envisions the location of the body within a cognitively mapped larger space, namely perilously perched high up the mountainside’, this leads to ‘a chain of cognitive and emotional states that interfere in the sustained and concentrated work of proprioception needed to negotiate the task of climbing’ (ibid., 306).

Mountain movies try to convey precisely this moment of danger. They establish the climbers’ position on the vertical wall, and their ‘money shots’ are the view into the abyss and climbers falling through the frame. ‘Observation of an action leads to the activation … of the same cortical neural network … active during its execution’, hence visual information penetrates ‘into the experiential … motor knowledge of the observer’ (Gallese, Keysers, Rizzolatti Citation2004, 396). Movies create an ‘embodied simulation’ that forces viewers ‘to “move” within the space and time’ they re-create (Guerra Citation2015, 150–1). Mountain movies take their viewers to the edge of the cliff, make them look down, and let them fall off. Discussing cinema’s capacity to thrill audiences, a critic noted in 1912 that at least one knows ‘that the film … shown cost no human lives’, but wondered whether ‘the journey will not lead farther into the territory … of the gladiators and bullfighters’ (Forch Citation2016, 37). On that note, I turn to recent films depicting rock climbers in the next section.

Climbers and cameras

In the 1960s, climbers in Yosemite Valley, USA, developed free-climbing, a new style that allowed technical means for protection, but not for ascending the rock. It turned away from conquering summits towards solving increasingly difficult puzzles in short routes, and its playful creativity led to a rapid increase in the climbers’ skills. It lacked the mortal danger of earlier mountaineering, but this was quickly re-introduced in the form of free-soloing, ascending a route without any protection.

Alexander Huber became known to the wider public through the film Am Limit (To the Limit, 2007), which documented his attempts to break a speed-climbing record on El Capitan, Yosemite Valley. In 2002, he free-soloed ‘Diretissima’ (difficulty VIII+/5.12a), climbing through the 500 metres north face of the Cima Grande, Italy, a performance he re-enacted for the documentary Drei Zinnen – Grenzen der Felskletterei (Tre Cime – Limits of rock-climbing, Citation2012), directed by Tom Dauer. The film alternates close ups of Huber placing hands and feet on the rock, and high angle shots showing him climbing up unprotected and the long drop below (Drei Zinnen, 0:16:30–0:17:10). Reflecting on the challenge of free-soloing, he explains that one needs to blend out everything beyond the next grip, that he dissects the climb in manageable little steps because the dimension of the whole route would overwhelm him (ibid., 0:15:48–0:16:29).

For Free Solo (Citation2018), directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, I restrict my analysis to the trailer. It sets the scene with several extreme long shots of the vertical cliff face of El Capitan, with Alex Honnold explaining that this ‘is the most impressive wall on earth; it’s 3,000 feet of pure granite; it’s the centre of the rock-climbing universe’ (Free Solo Trailer, 0:42–0:50). Honnold states that ‘everybody who has made free-soloing a big part of their life is dead now’, his girlfriend Sanni McCandless asks ‘What if something happens? What if I don’t see him again?’, and director Chin explains that ‘it’s hard not to imagine your friend falling through the frame to his death’ (ibid., 1:18–1:20, 1:24–1:27, 1:35–1:44). For McCandless ‘it’s really hard … to grasp why he wants to do this’, while Honnold explains that ‘if you are pushing the edge, eventually you find the edge’ (ibid., 0:09–0:11, 2:05–2:07). Throughout, close ups of people talking are cross-cut with long shots of Alex in the route ‘Freerider’ (difficulty 5.14a), including one side view of him climbing past a cameraman roped to the vertical wall (ibid., 1:40). The trailer ends with a high-angle drone shot. As the camera moves over the edge of the cliff, Honnold gets into view, climbing high up on the wall, with the 1000 metres drop behind him. The music has stopped; the only sound is Alex breathing hard (ibid., 2:17–2:23).

Drei Zinnen focusses on climbing exclusively, while Free Solo combines it with a human-interest story. Both emphasise the mortal danger, and while they do not show climbers falling to their deaths like the early mountain movies, they use the same techniques to visualise it. Extreme long shots show the enormous dimension of mountain walls, and side views establish the position of the climber high up in them. Then, they take the viewers there with vertigo inducing high-angle shots looking down the cliff, the camera zooming into the void (Der Berg ruft, 1:14:18–1:14:28; Drei Zinnen, 0:12:33–0:12:44). Cross-cuts to bystanders reinforce audience identification. The medium shot of a crew-member turning away from the camera display, saying ‘I can’t believe you guys actually gonna watch’, followed by the view down onto Honnold climbing above the abyss (Free Solo Trailer, 2:12–2:23) closely resembles the close up of a rescuer averting his gaze followed by the climber falling through the frame (Der heilige Berg, 1:39:20–1:39:24).

If the viewers do not look away, they react bodily. Next to sweaty hands and dilated pupils, watching climbing films makes people feel ‘dizzy’ or ‘nauseous’, or provides a ‘white-knuckle climax’ and ‘at least a few moments of pure vertigo’ (Drei Zinnen, comments by TAO 2811 and Orangutanklaus; Vigneron Citation2018; Lawson Citation2018). Climbers emphasise the existential experience of pushing the edge, and viewers marvel at their mental strength, and credit them with ‘adamantine balls’ or the ‘superpower’ of ‘near fearlessness’ (Drei Zinnen, comment by Hego Sta; Lawson Citation2018). For Bret Stephens (Citation2018), Free Solo teaches a valuable lesson, namely that greatness of spirit has nothing to do with utility and that facing death is sublime and frees the soul. In 1925, writing on documentaries of British Antarctic expeditions in which ‘men looked death in the eye through the lens of the camera’, Balázs (Citation2016b) argued that in these films ‘the soul appears in its clearest and purest form, and that is why it is still so gripping and beautiful, even in its most absurd senselessness’. With audiences moved by the appearance of the human soul, machinated by cameras depicting men facing useless deaths, I now turn to religious elements in mountaineering.

Enchanting mountains

Eugen Guido Lammer, an Austrian schoolteacher and mountaineer, practiced and promoted high-risk solo climbs of alpine peaks from the 1880s onward. After ‘horrible doubts and the disintegration of human values’ had left him with nothing but ‘naked individualism’, he became filled with ‘red-hot burning desire for alpine action’ and ‘unquenchable thirst for mortal danger’. To live out his individualism, ‘alpinism … reckless to the point of self-destruction, was my only religion’ (Lammer Citation1923, 97). Yet, he never prayed, because he firmly believed, with ‘all heroes of mankind’ like Kant, Newton or Darwin, in an ‘intelligible world’ (ibid., 95). Or rather, he prayed differently. After having survived a fall into a crevasse, he first uttered a ‘word of spite towards the conquered, terrible foe’ and later thanked the ‘deeply veiled beings, who control my fate, who talk to me in mighty, mysterious urges. Thanks that you let me taste the sweetest of life’s pleasures: to have sipped from the cup of death!’ (ibid., 72–4). He found both fighting against and submitting to danger attractive, with his self either ‘intoxicatingly deified as master over nature’ or ‘wholly in the claws of the tiger, a helpless toy’ (ibid., 157).

Reinhold Messner became famous when he climbed the highest Himalayan peaks without oxygen in the 1970s and 80s, not least because he also wrote books about his experiences. In the one about mountains as death-zone, he stated that he was neither ‘a guru nor an alpine messiah’, and that he dislikes ‘substitute religions’ (Messner Citation1980, 7). Yet, he promoted ‘visionary’ against ‘aesthetic’ or ‘competitive’ mountaineering. While he considered his climbing to be an addiction linked to physiological factors, he believed that his borderline experiences in-between ‘getting out alive and getting killed’ enabled ‘the realisation of his true self’, of his soul, or of a Nirvana-like state (ibid., 214, 28, 182). During his descent from Nanga Parbat, he fought to survive, but death ‘caught up with me. I experienced dying then, and – from hindsight – learned a little about living’ (ibid., 27). Hence, mountaineering opens possibilities for ‘sport with a creative-playful character’, ‘becoming conscious of being through doing’ and ‘awareness through resisting the challenged death’, or even ‘a passage between “heaven” and earth’ (ibid., 5).

While explicitly rejecting religious interpretations, Lammer and Messner imagine mountains as death-dealing, fear-inducing agents. ‘[F]ear’s animation of objects is the first aspect of enchantment’, and they present their attraction to mountains ‘as a “magnetic”, “mysterious”, “electric”, or otherwise irresistible “magical” force’ (Morgan Citation2009, 11–2). Dissatisfied with the ‘impoverished life’ in a disenchanted world, mountaineering provides them with an enchantment ‘which simultaneously enchants and disenchants, which delights but does not delude’ (Landy and Saler Citation2009: 3, 14). For them, mountains fill ‘a God-shaped void’ by providing mystery and wonder, purpose and significance, and possess ‘the allure of the sacred’ by offering epiphanies, ‘moments of being in which … the center appears to hold’, promising ‘a quasi-mystical union with something larger than oneself’ (ibid, 2). Mountains become sites for the return of the old gods, disenchanted into the ‘form of impersonal forces’, sought after in a ‘ubiquitous chase for “experience”’ (Weber Citation1958, 127). Advertising an experience-based mode of being-in-the-world that transcends mundane life, mountaineering creates enchantment for disenchanted modern society.

The attraction to mortal danger in the mountains recalls Otto’s (Citation2004, 13, 42) fascinating and terrifying mystery of the numinous, and Durkheim’s (Citation1976, 409–12) pure and impure sacred. Mountaineering resembles rites of passage. Separated from mundane existence, mountaineers pass through vertical liminality, where ‘they are at once dying … and being born’ (Turner Citation1982, 26). Facing the ‘asocial powers of life and death’, they gain an outside view into the ‘cosmological systems’ underlying ordinary socio-cultural order (ibid., 27). With modernity, obligatory, liminal rituals turned into voluntary, liminoid ‘leisure’ activities whose enjoyment ‘is disinterested, unmotivated by gain, and has no utilitarian or ideological purpose’ (ibid., 37). From its inception, liminoid mountaineering included facing death and overcoming fear, but also the experience of ‘flow’, wherein a ‘centering of attention’ enables the ‘merging of action and awareness’ experienced as a ‘loss of ego’ (ibid., 56–7). Being ‘lost in focused intensity’ marks the enchanted core of modern sports, the epiphanies of ‘events of appearance’ showing ‘moving bodies as temporalized form’ (Gumbrecht Citation2009, 150) that characterise competitive performances for both athletes and spectators.

Filmmakers use cinematographic techniques to take their audience into the enchanted mountains. Shocked by the image sequences, the viewers get bodily lost in focused intensity, sweating and holding their breath, living through the cathartic experience of facing death, learning about fundamental values in their own, easily consumable, liminoid rite of passage. Climbing films advertise an ‘miraculous opportunity for the rest of us to experience what you might call the human sublime’ (Free Solo Trailer, intertitle, 1:00), and mountain movies spell out the teaching of mountaineering: ‘Above it all looms a holy mountain – a symbol of the greatest values that humanity can embrace – fidelity – truth – loyalty – faith’ (Der heilige Berg, intertitle, 1:43:49). There remains the question how enchantment relates to politics, or how anti-structural liminality feeds back into socio-economic structure (Turner Citation1982, 28).

If mountaineering frees souls, then it frees the souls of white men. In all the films discussed, men climb, and women are restricted to the role of either encouraging, or fearful lovers and mothers. With regard to gender politics, the early mountain movies reflected mountaineering at large (see, e.g., Günther Citation1998, 341–5; Rentschler Citation1990, 153–161). For Whymper (Citation1872, 161), mountaineering developed his ‘manliness’ alongside ‘noble qualities of human nature’. Charged with misleading youth, or even feminine hysteria, Lammer (Citation1923, 76) argued that men of action like him effected ‘a real betterment of race (in the English or Hellenistic sense)’, even if ‘dozens of brave boys taking the Icarian plunge into the depth’ were the price paid. In 1924, Gustav Müller, leading member of the Alpine Club, lectured about the duty to forge courage, will and bodies in the mountains in order to raise ‘steel-hard German lads’, willing and able to serve and die for the ‘fatherland’ (cited in Günther Citation1998, 232). In the same year, the Club excluded Jewish members. For many, mountain masculinities merged easily with Nazi masculinities. Hitler built his ‘Berghof’ in the Bavarian Alps, the regime sponsored expeditions, and climbers willingly conquered mountains or died for the Führer (Schaumann Citation2014, 418–20).

Present day rock-climbers moved beyond the nationalist mountaineering of the first half of the twentieth century. They are the heirs of the free climbers of the 1960s, routed in the counter-culture of the time. They left the mountain comrades behind, and, when free soloing, partake in the most individualised form of mountaineering. Still, they are heroes, pitting their fully trained male white bodies against mountains, ‘millimeters from extinction’ (Stephens Citation2018). In addition, they are heirs of the increasing commodification of mountaineering. Liminoid activities have turned into ‘entertainment genres of industrial leisure’ (Turner Citation1982, 39), and in turn, mountaineers became entrepreneurs. Messner became famous by climbing mountains, but he reached a wider public and made a living by publishing books about it. Today, books are no longer enough; it takes films to make an impact.

Vigneron (Citation2018) asks about the responsibility of the outdoor industry, working ‘with extreme risk to sell jackets and magazines’, and of the audience, comparing Free Solo with a ‘film about a man playing an actual game of Russian roulette’. He concludes with still being unsure whether ‘Honnold’s career would actually look much different if he’d never gained an audience’. However, the film is fundamental for his public fame, his ability to promote himself and hence for his economic success in the climbing business. Climbers compete over establishing routes of the highest difficulty, but to gain wider recognition they have to perform spectacular feats. Free soloing hard routes is no longer enough, they have to free solo big mountain walls, and they have to provide visual evidence. Alexander Huber links the high public impact of his first free-soloing ‘Diretissima’ in 2002 with one photograph, showing him ‘hanging on one grip in that wall, and only emptiness below. One does not have to explain that this is extreme’. The high angle shot simply showed the ‘absolute insanity’ of his performance (Drei Zinnen, 0:20:00–0:20:39).Footnote² Climbers have become ‘the gladiators and bullfighters’ (Forch Citation2016, 37) of the entertainment industry, who make a living by playing Russian roulette in public. In terms of self-exploitation and marketing, they have become ideal, if somewhat extreme, representatives the neo-liberal individual.

Mountaineering’s incorporation in the entertainment industry works both ways, however. It increases the pressure on the mountaineers’ performance, but it also increases the reach of their tales. While Messner rejected the role, his books made him a guru of visionary mountaineering, and carried his message of enchanting mountains of death into the public sphere. Honnold might climb free solo without the audience, but without the film, his message of living at the edge would reach only a few fellow climbers.

Conclusion

Mountain religion of mountaineering dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, when mountaineers advertised an experience-based mode of being-in-the-world transcending the strictures of existence in disenchanted modern society. Central to the re-enchantment of mountains was the mortal danger encountered in vertical walls, and mountaineers invested mountains with agency and imagined them as malevolent foes. As source of frightful attraction, enchanted mountains resemble the sacred or the holy in religious contexts. Mountaineering itself parallels rites of passage, as the mountaineers face death in liminal verticality, a transformative experience outside of mundane life believed to offer profound insights into human existence.

Early mountain movies as well as current climbing documentaries take their viewers into the enchanting mountains. With the signature shot down the mountain wall into the abyss, they induce an embodied reaction, and take their mass audiences through their own rites of passage, their own cathartic experience of facing death. The heroic white masculinity propagated in enchanted mountaineering and in films ‘spreading the gospel of proud peaks and perilous ascents’ (Krakauer Citation2004b, 110) fed into nationalisms in the first half of the twentieth century, not least into Nazi ideology, but has also driven mountaineering’s commodification, its incorporation into the neo-liberal entertainment industry. The Oscar for Free Solo marks a high point in the public impact of the tales of man in battle with a terrifying foe. Mountains’ agency forms a central element for the cultural construction of enchanted mountains, but it is also possible to account for nonhuman agents in the practice or performance of mountaineers.

Verticality ‘does modify a state of affairs by making a difference’ and hence turns mountains into ‘participants in the course of action’ of mountaineering (Latour Citation2005, 71). Human bodies, crampons, ropes and mountain walls form the components of a specific apparatus, whose intra-action produces the phenomenon mountaineering, while their ever-shifting intra-action – holding, slipping, falling, breaking – separates subject and object amongst human and non-human agents and constitutes ‘human bodily contours […] through psychic processes’ (Barad Citation2003, 810, 815–7). While psychic processes of facing mortal danger and hence the agency of the mountain has stayed the same, the apparatus of mountaineering has proceeded with an ongoing reduction of technical equipment. Free-soloing forms a culmination point, where only chalk on the hands and rubber-soles on the feet intra-act with human body and mountain wall. However, since the early mountain movies cameras have become part of the apparatus of mountain religion. A professional free-solo climber needs at least one rope team with a photographer, and the shooting of Free Solo required several teams and remote-controlled cameras in the wall, as well as one camera on the ground and a drone above.Footnote³ Since the 1920s, the enchantment of mountains has taken place in cinemas, when ‘men looked death in the eye through the lens of the camera’ (Balázs Citation2016b, 59).