DIE WEISSE HOLLE VOM PIZ PALU (1929)

ORIGINAL GERMAN RELEASE POSTER (DAS BLAUE LICHT.NET COLLECTION)

Spending many days, nights and weeks filming in the mountains, Leni Riefenstahl proves her self to her male colleagues. Fanck subjects her and the other actors to the rigors of alpine climbing, often without ropes, crossing crevasses and enduring snow and ice slides. The film allows her to mature as an actress though she relates a growing concern of being type cast. Riefenstahl admits her efforts in a 1933 text that she "has made many attempts...to stop the industry seeing me in such narrow terms..." but remained unsuccessful until she steps out on her own as director of Das blaue Licht.   

"The temperature hovered between minus 28 and 30 degrees Centigrade for weeks on end." Leni Riefenstahl describes conditions while filming Piz Palu off Morteratsch Glacier.

 The film is shot in 1929 from January - June and is released in November of the same year with a running time of approximately 133 minutes. The original film was released as a silent movie, then re-issued as a sound feature in 1935. It was without a doubt Arnold Fanck's most famous and well received Bergfilme (Mountain film). Riefenstahl biographer Audrey Saulkeld notes Piz Palu was "widely acclaimed as the best German film of its year." In 1998, the film was again reissued with a new soundtrack music (as screened at UCLA fall 1999).

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