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The Eiger’s North Face has long been considered a poetic symbol of Switzerland, but for a few unlucky athletes, its near-vertical surface has been hell on earth. In the tense new climbing film North Face (Nordwand), German director Philipp Stölzl takes us to that hell of rock and snow as vividly as a mountaineering Dante.
North Face may be one of the most white-knuckled and convincing survival-dramas made in cinematic history. This alone would be a mountainous feat, but Stölzl’s sweeping, cliff-climbing masterpiece also manages to push the sporting movie beyond the conventions of the drama. In doing so Stölzl might have displayed some dramatic rough edges, but North Face lingers potently with the viewer even after Stölzl takes the crampons off and lets the credits lower us back to solid ground.
For those who sought to climb the Eiger (“The Ogre” in German) before modern technology, the infamous, ice-bound and seemingly insurmountable cliffs of the North Face became known as “the Murder Wall.” To the Nazi propagandists of the late 1930s, altitude-sick from mountain symbolism, the deadly North Face became “the last problem of the Alps,” a problem that they believed only Aryan athletes could solve. At the opening of the film a news clip conveniently establishes that the Third Reich hopes to conquer the Eiger before the 1936 Summer Olympics, even after the tragic deaths of two climbers.
North Face proceeds to recount — in a loose but dramatically taut fashion — the true story of the ill-fated Austro-German Hinterstoisser Expedition. For the slowly paced first act, the film explores the motivations of its adrenaline-driven but decidedly apolitical protagonists, Bavarian mountaineers Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas). They are met through the lens of photojournalist Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek of The Baader Mienhof Complex), a tough but taciturn young woman who has a somewhat unspecified history with the heroic Kurz. Their romance is convincing but unfortunately under-developed.
A good portion of the film deals with Luise and her oscillating interactions with her hard-hearted bourgeoisie boss, Mr. Arau (Ulrich Tukur), a party-line journalist who is attempting to make Luise’s childhood friends into Aryan heroes. They can literally watch the cliff-climbing drama unfold from special telescopes installed at their luxury hotel, just as the mountaineers can see the lights of resort towns below them. In these slightly underdeveloped dramatic scenes, the doe-eyed Wokalek carries the film, despite some dead ends and extraneous conversations. Yet here is where the film is most political, though not in the way one might expect from a film set in Nazi Germany. The Nazis are obliquely villainous, but it is the terrible Eiger’s cliffs that are truly evil. Nevertheless, both work toward the ultimate tragedy of this film. The Germans pressure mountaineers into engaging in insane feats and then later prove indifferent when they fail. This unforgiving attitude toward athletes is the only atrocity committed in this film, but it’s presented as a universal criticism. Stölzl works this one-noted political statement well, and indicts society in general more so than the Nazi sports machine. The dynamic of the film can be categorized as the difference between doers and reporters. Though valorizing the doers with a heavy hand, North Face also criticizes the sometimes tragic manipulations of a sporting society with intelligence and restraint.
North Face’s driving element, though, is the multi-day climb of the mountaineers Toni and Andre. This is a vertiginous, awe-inspiring and terrifying experience for the viewer. Here on the cliffs, the movie hits its stride, primarily through Kolja Brandt’s sweeping cinematography. The discomfort and disorientation that he creates out of a few well-tilted angles is incredible. Stölzl manages to maintain a chair-gripping pace for a near hour, all the while treating the viewer to the terrible beauty of the Eiger, and punishing us with the meaningless sacrifices of the hapless mountaineers.
Rarely do true-story sports histories, with their ultra-narrow focus, have anything even near the impact of this brilliantly shot, thoughtful and carefully wrought movie. North Face is sure to become The Godfather of climbing films. Though North Face takes slight dramatic misteps, this film nevertheless does more than overcome the expected man-versus-nature clichés, it conquers a difficult subject through brilliant cinematography and near-brilliant writing. North Face is able to deliver a convincing tragedy that resides within the unfortunate overlap of politics, propaganda and sports.
North Face is now playing in select theaters nationwide.
4 out of 5 stars
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