 Poster: A snowHead
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I've just read a fascinating article by my Austrian friend, Telemark guru and ski historian Arno Klien in the latest issue (Volume 4) of the Telemark Journal International. I've extracted the much condensed information below from his article, but for anyone wanting to read his article in full (and the many other excellent articles in the journal) you can order a copy of the journal online here.
The first high mountain ski film was directed and produced in 1913 by a then 18 year old(!) film maker Sepp Allgeier (1895-1968). In 1913 he was invited to join a high mountain expedition as a cameraman by the expedition organiser Dr. Tauern. The aim of the expedition was to climb and then ski the formidable Monte Rosa, highest mountain in Switzerland and the second highest mountain in the Alps after Mont Blanc. It was a ski feat only achieved twice before, most notably the first descent by Oskar Schuster and Heinrich Moser.
The team consisted of Tauern, Allgeier, Arnold Fank (who was then a geology student and photographer and who was later to become one of the most well known mountain and ski film directors in his own right, producing many films including the 1931 film Der Weisse Rausch filmed in St.Anton with Hannes Schneider and Leni Riefenstahl in the cast) and Fank's friend Heinrich Moser.
With the team assembled they travelled through the Rhone valley by train to Visp. This was followed by the 37 kilometer trek to Zermatt using two donkeys as pack animals, the up-valley trek constantly endangered by avalanches and landslides. The Gornergrat cog railway was not running, so they spent the second morning painstakingly hiking up through ice-covered tunnels,over snow-covered bridges and slopes, to finally arrive at the Bétemps Hut at 2800 metres asl. Earlier Allgeier shot some footage of Old Zermatt and the Matterhorn, classic images of course nowadays. Allgeier used an old, heavy and fickle wooden French camera. The main challenge of using this was its maintenance in the bitter cold. The Bétamp Hut toilet served as Allgeier's film changing darkroom.
Climbing up, Allgeier captured the team bundled up in in thick woollen coats, wearing sunglasses. Their skis sported sealskins for climbing. They roped up simply around the waist. The film then shows the duo skinning up, kick turning, and moving efficiently. This was the main filming day. They entered an area of crevasses and seracs. The film shows one of them ski up to this, one pole and one ice axe, do a nice downhill kick turn and continue away.
The well oiled movie camera refused to work at the summit of Monte Rosa because of the bitterly cold weather. After three attempts a summit shot was captured with a still camera. Sepp Allgeier, accomplished producer, director, load carrying cameraman, and skier shot the downhill run manually and with great difficulty. The team skied over the glacier, skirting crevasses and seracs, reaching speeds up to 50km/h.
The technique the skiers used can be described as a mixture of Christiana and Telemark. The documentary which had been filmed without a script finishes off with scenes of ski waxing and packing up in front of the hut.
For many years the film was thought to be lost, until in 1999 a private collector in Switzerland rediscovered the film. The current version is 10 minutes in length. It was digitally restored and is available to watch via https://www.mntnfilm.com/en/film/4628-meter-hoch-auf-skiern-1913
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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they ski better than many of the local ski tourers
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Amazing for the date, of course. Massive ice axes. Pretty crude turns, although at one point they're doing that "feet together" stance thing. At least one of the powder turns looks like it's not stemmed. Those ropes were presumably not dynamic. There's a repeated scene at the end there - the one where the guy opens what looks like a camera [film] back.
I'm sure the technology was very heavy, uncooperative and expensive. I wonder how the funding worked: they presumably weren't farm boys or factory workers doing a weekend warrior thing. That's not a criticism, I'm just curious about which parts of a society could afford the time and risk of that sort of thing, and who for example would see the film, in what circumstances. Did local guides exist, or were these visitors whom the locals didn't really interact with?
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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| philwig wrote: |
| ...I wonder how the funding worked... |
I suspect they were "of independent means"
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| philwig wrote: |
| I'm sure the technology was very heavy, uncooperative and expensive. I wonder how the funding worked: they presumably weren't farm boys or factory workers doing a weekend warrior thing. That's not a criticism, I'm just curious about which parts of a society could afford the time and risk of that sort of thing, and who for example would see the film, in what circumstances. Did local guides exist, or were these visitors whom the locals didn't really interact with? |
The article gives a lot more detail on that. The organiser of the expedition Dr Deodatus 'Dodo' Tauern was an ethnologist (and skier obviously) who had the backing of a German film company the Express-Film Co Gmbh based in Freiburg. The company was co-founded in 1911 (just two years earler) by Berhard Gottfried who was also a skier and the brother-in-law of Sepp Allgeier. The company started making weekly newsreels and this was an extension of their activities to make a short but newsworthy documentary film.
The film was very well received by audiences, it was even screened very successfully on Broadway for a period of 3 years. In Germany itself after the outbreak of WW1 it ran only in German military cinemas on the Western Front. It was sometime during the war that the film was lost (not to be rediscovered until 1999).
As regards local guides, as you say the expedition members were visitors from Germany and although by 1913 the Zermatt local guides had been long established I'm pretty certain that their clients would have been pure mountain climbers, and few if any of the local guides would have been experienced skiers. So it seems the expedition didn't use any local guides.
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