Workshop: Mountain / Film / Studies 

Mountains pose challenges of all kinds, including physical and psychological, technological and representational ones. This workshop is dedicated to challenges mountains raise for histories and theories of cinema. In German-speaking countries especially the relationship between mountains and cinema has been largely reduced to a very small 'canon' of Alpine filmmakers, whose work has been categorized as part of the avant-garde (Arnold Fanck and the so-called Freiburger Kameraschule) or as a sub-genre of the Heimatfilm (Luis Trenker). However, from transatlantic, transgeneric, and transmodern perspectives, the field of mountain cinema is not only much broader, but it also addresses questions that are vital to film and media studies. The key questions or 'peak' challenges our workshop will explore in particular relate to (1) the historical and cultural revisionism of the classical mountain film, (2) the role mountains have played in theorizing about film, and (3) the diverse ways in which mountains figure in anthropocenic re-conceptions of film and media theory.

Christian Quendler
christian.quendler@uibk.ac.at