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"Über allen Gipfeln..." It begins with leather-bound storybook in the Italian Dolomites, the stranger from Vienna (Mathias Wieman) arrives rather like the young clerk in Nosferatu, "not very joyful here." Geological pantheism out of the Arnold Fanck school, with mammoth slopes even more ominously photogenic: Mount Cristallo is contemplated as Nature's challenge to mortals, grimacing Christ statues are carved in memory of the villagers claimed by its precipices. Only the raggedy nymph can reach the peaks, beckoned by the full moon in a somnambulistic trance. Shimmering curse and unreachable beauty, "une berglegende von Leni Riefenstahl." The two outsiders form a bond, though the real love story is between landscape and camera, at once ethereal and intensely erotic—priapic heights can only be conquered by female innocence, tragedy comes through male invasion of a secret cave. A deadly treasure trove, the crystal grotto might be the heroine's pulsing heart, and when it is mined bare it feels like a vandalized cathedral. An explorer's fantasia, a symphonic approach (cf. Powell's Edge of the World). Weathered peasant faces contrast with the director-star's Teutonic glamour, location shooting merely accentuates her aestheticism of composition. (Steam from waterfalls on a bedrock, clouds and animals, mist and upside-down aquatic reflections, they all know their place in Riefenstahl's tableaux.) "What are men to rocks and mountains?" Much of it goes into Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Herzog in Heart of Glass gives the format a proper derangement. Shorn of her lambent visions, the wild child takes the plunge: A commentary on the fragility of visual splendor, or an eulogy for its inhuman perfection? Next stop, Nuremberg. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |