Cinematic cultures of descent: the other sides of the mountaineering story

ABSTRACT This essay introduces the descent as a critical vantage point that broadens the mountain film genre and reconsiders modernist debates with an eye towards cinema’s socio-ecological substance. I analyze three films—Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand (2008), Nils Gaup’s Ofelaš (1987), and Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice (2012)—for how they highlight social connectivity and environmental sustainability in their accounts of national tragedy, Indigenous legend, and eco-catastrophe. Central to this inquiry are the multiperspectival and self-reflective qualities of cinema and the ways in which its immersive qualities dovetail into cinematic world-building and global decolonization. By bringing media ecology together with postcolonial scholarship on alpinist control and film historical reflections on descent, I argue that cinematic cultures of descent reveal the hidden stakes of alpinism and challenge established ideas of the perception of self and Other in modern mountaineering. This, in turn, prompts fresh registers of thinking mountains and mountaineering in ways that invite cultural renegotiations of gender roles, power, and individualism among mountaineers. Ultimately, it highlights the special role film plays in facilitating a change of perspective, thus affecting behavior in the human and non-human world.

To me, the only way you achieve a summit is to come back alive.
The job is half done if you don't get down again.
-John Mallory 1 If you climb a mountain for the first time and die on the descent, is it really a complete first ascent of the mountain? I'm rather inclined to think, personally, that maybe it's quite important, the getting down. And the complete climb of a mountain is reaching the summit and getting safely to the bottom again.
-Edmund Hillary 2 To successfully climb a mountain, it is not enough to have reached its summit. Edmund Hillary and John Mallory, George Mallory's son, came to this conclusion in the wake of the publication of Jeffrey Archer's bestseller Paths of Glory ). The novel rekindles the theory that George Mallory and Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine may have died after, not before, they reached the summit of Chomolungma. We might never know why Mallory's unbroken snow goggles were found in his pocket, whether a photo of Mallory's wife Ruth was placed on the 'roof of the world', or whether he and Irvine were actually the first imperial summiteers of Chomolungma, 3 but we do know that the historic and heroic gesture of standing on top of the world-a moment Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay claimed for themselves on 29 May 1953-is only recognized as such because it was followed by a successful descent.
Although a 'general principle in mountaineering circles warns that the real danger in any climb attends the descent, and not the ascent', mountaineering history has a tendency to focus on first ascents and bagged summits as monuments of achievement (Slemon 2012, 37). This ascent-centered historiography attests to a culture that privileges supremacy, control, personal heroism, and national glory and attributes little value to downward movement, which has largely negative connotations. The fact that 'alpinism presents itself as a great history of ascents' (Peskoller 1997, 238;my translation) speaks to the values of power that gained ascendancy with and through mountaineering (see Hansen 1995Hansen , 1996Hansen , 2013Slemon 2000Slemon , 2008Slemon , 2012Bayers 2003;Grupp 2008;Mathieu, Bachmann, and Butz 2018;Dhar 2019). The classic Bergfilm genre of the 1920s and 1930s, which has served as a generic model for mountain film (Rapp 1997;Haque 2012;Schaumann 2014;Martin 2017), likewise communicates power and control via the trope of the summit, which, according to Stefanie Weinsheimer, is 'the highlight and standard situation in mountain film' (Weinsheimer 2002, 62;my translation). 4 Faced with the prospect of extensive socio-ecological disaster, the standard image of a man standing alone on a mountaintop appears as egocentric as it does outdated. Today we know that the individual climber has never been a sovereign in practice (Hansen 2013, 3) and that the 'kind of mountain travel that prioritises arrival at its summit is relatively new' (Dhar 2019, 6). Many alpinists state that they 'have moved past notions of ascent that assert man's dominion over nature' (Hung 2019, 113), and reflections on the myth of modern mountaineering likewise unmask the notion of transcendental individual imagination as a solitary, rather than communal, practice (Hansen 2013). As the mountaineering community recognizes that stories of individual heroism leave little space for respect-for the mountain and the fellow humans who call it home-they assume perspectives on mountains that are far more enriching than focusing on summits alone (Dhar 2019, 20). That the most remote summits on this planet have experienced multiple human ascents and that even the most enthusiastic alpinists have come to appreciate the athletic and symbolic quality of mountains beyond their summits is perhaps a signal for mountain studies to abandon itself to the downward perspective.
Taking as its point of departure the premise that descent is central to mountaineering and reveals the (hidden) stakes of alpinism, which have largely been neglected in the field of mountain studies, this article exhibits not only the human but also the larger socio-ecological limits of the mountaineering project and in doing so assumes an ironically privileged perspective for an investigation of current changes in alpinist and academic approaches to mountains. Furthermore, if ascent is a distinctive feature of many classic mountain films, descent promises a meaningful way in which to broaden the genre. Thinking about mountains through cultures of descent thus not only offers a long overdue corrective to orthodox approaches in mountain studies, it also highlights the special role of film in facilitating a change of perspective and allows us a better understanding of socio-ecological concerns that come to the fore via mediations of descent. Embracing descent and seeing the limitations of the summit can further contribute to reconsidering the modernist debate on mountain film from an environmental point of view. By analyzing representative mountain films from the sound era, this article showcases film and film theory's long reliance on the downward perspective by addressing contemporary social and planetary concerns. It asks how established ideas about the perception of self and Other (both human and nonhuman) that are entrenched in modern mountaineering become questionable on the slippery slopes of descent; how mountain films renegotiate the aesthetic, social, and material experience of being in the mountains; and how cinematic mountains of descent move the way in which we think, feel, and behave in alpine worlds.
This article maps out three significant downward movements and three mediations and (con)figurations of descent in mountain films that highlight the cultural potential of downward movements and make the urgency of social connectivity and environmental sustainability on (and off) the mountain viscerally felt. The first category of descent is a tragic form of mediation found in classic accounts of summiting. This kind of mediation of descent is often inherent in the traditional mountain film and shows great revisionist potential for cultural renegotiations of gender roles, power, and individualism among mountain travelers and their Others. The second category takes a different route by understanding descent as ancestry and examining a mountain film by an Indigenous filmmaker who frequently addresses the strong relationship between social and ecological equality in alpine environments. Lastly, the third category discusses a film that assumes an affective grounding as it points toward ecological catastrophes and highlights the role of the moving image in affecting human behavior in the nonhuman world. The critical potential of cinematic cultures of descent is emphasized by the fact that at all three categories are fleshed out by highly popular and, at times, also controversial films.
To present such films, each from very different historical moments and geographical locales, runs the risk of generalization, decontextualization, and incompleteness. It is not possible to articulate in this article the full detail of these figurations of downward movement in mountain film. But if, after having followed the three routes sketched out here, readers find that the project of deconstructing prevalent summiting discourses on mountains remains an incomplete project, to echo Chakrabarty (2000, 250), this article will have served its purpose. My hope is that the examples presented will convey some of the tremendous potential for variability in cinematic cultures of descent. It would be unfortunate, however, if, by privileging three kinds of mediations, the article accomplishes its aim of enhancing precisely that which it intends to critique, namely, a singular perspective on mountaineering-a homogenizing flattening of a summiting discourse on mountains that has often failed to show that there is always 'an Other story '. I approach the Other sides of the mountaineering story via the methodologies and vocabularies of film studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocritical discourse. From film studies, I take its interest in the transformative and multiperspectival properties of the camera, its conviction about 'cinema's socio-ecological significance ' (Ivakhiv 2013, 67), and its 'power to "revision" (in Rosenstone's term) both the past and the other' (Christie 2000, 165). From postcolonial (film) studies, I utilize its interest in 'the interrogation of history and space' (Hulme and Weaver-Hightower 2014, 4-5) and postcolonial theory's underlying principle that the social real can be changed if truth is spoken to power, as well as a number of core contributions the discipline has made to the field of mountain studies, such as the acknowledgement of the symbolic and geographical relevance of mountaineering in staking out imperial authority (Slemon 2000(Slemon , 2008(Slemon , 2012, the recognition of 'colonial continuance' in alpinism's treatment of Others (Slemon 2000, 55), and the Orientalist legacies in representations of mountain travel (Müller 2019). The cues I take from ecocriticism have already informed film theoretical approaches (see works in media ecology and ecocritical film studies by scholars such as Cubitt 2005; Parikka 2011; Ivakhiv 2013; Peabody 2017) and the postcolonial (Curtin 2005;Huggan and Tiffin 2010). They rely on the conviction that social justice and environmental justice are 'parts of the same whole' (Curtin 2005, 7), that representations of the nonhuman 'set out symbolic guidelines for the material transformation of the world' (Huggan and Tiffin 2010, 14), and that 'the worlds constituted through film relate in various ways to the world outside cinema ' (Ivakhiv 2013, 25) in a network of 'relational ecologies ' (ix).
My inquiry into cinematic cultures of descent draws on a long tradition of thinking with film that can be traced from Jean Epstein to the recent work of Adrian Ivakhiv, bringing together their explorations of the ways in which cinema (re)configures human and nonhuman relationships in order to produce a survey analysis of cinema's socio-ecological role in mediating downward perspectives. Epstein's reflections on descent as a facilitator for the multiperspectival, self-reflective, and immersive qualities of cinema are brought together here with the kind of socio-ecological mindfulness inherent in what Ivakhiv (2013, 25) calls 'cinematic world-building', which he considers vital for understanding the broader ecology of the moving image in the twenty-first century.
Epstein's work on film evidences the mountain's suitability for theoretical vistas and emphasizes the fundamental role that downward movements have played in the understanding of film. With 'Cinema Seen from Etna' (Epstein 1926), a theoretical parable that voyages to the core of cinema, Epstein produced 'one of the most powerful early texts on film aesthetics and technological mediation' (Wild 2012, 115). As if blending the two prime locales of the classic Bergfilm-the mountain and the hotel-Epstein presents his transformative theory via the ascent up a volcano and the descent from a hotel staircase. In the text he discusses descent in four significant ways: In the first kind of descent, he acknowledges 'a great silence [that] descended' (Epstein 1926, 288) following the calamity of an eruption, which echoed the silence experienced by Petrarch after his ascent of Mont Ventoux (Petrarch 1898). 5 This silence is one that reconnects to the literary tradition of mountaineering and makes the post-climactic movement readable as a form of reflection. Like Petrarch, Epstein is guided by theoretical curiosity. He finds his object of reflection in the second instance of descent: in the material world that 'fall[s]-wherefrom?-into the space of light ' (289). The mountain that so descends into cinematic illumination offers insights into the social experience of mountaineering and the conception of cinema through renewed references to the downward experience. One such experience occurs in an encounter with Others. When Epstein meets a Swedish geologist and the guides of an Italian journalist on Etna, he is confronted with the third type of descent: the mountain as a medium of exchange between self and Other (291). In making the descending guides visible in his essay, Epstein also makes visible the 'enabling labour' of Others in mountain travel (Slemon 2008, 241). Acknowledging the cultural Others in alpinism is an ongoing project within postcolonial mountain studies that has been undertaken by scholars such as Stephen Slemon and, recently, Amrita Dhar (2019) and me (Müller 2019), and that project will figure prominently as this analysis continues. In Epstein's essay, the relationship between the (mountaineering) self and Other is most intensely experienced in the closed-in space of a hotel when the narrator descends a mirrored spiral staircase and, step by step, leads downward the alpinist hero who had set out earlier to summit Etna in the fourth kind of descent: I saw myself stripped of my sustaining illusions, surprised, laid bare, up-rooted unfeelingly and presented truthfully, exactly for what I was. I would have run a long way to escape this spiraling movement in which I seemed thrust down toward a terrifying center of myself. Such a lesson in egotism in reverse is pitiless. (Epstein 1926, 291-292) Multiple new reflections, angles, and cinematic projections cast unease onto previously established vistas of heroism and (visual) control, making the downward climb an uncomfortable one for the alpinist ego. While the spectating mirrors humiliate the self now 'presented truthfully', workers, laboring away at the unfinished banister, are 'chanting insults at Mussolini' (Epstein 1926, 291). A postcolonial reading of these passages affords an understanding of the downward movement as a moment in which cinematic reflection upsets the powers of nationalism and the alpinist self. With his text, Epstein provides not only a foundational theory on cinema but also a basis from which to 'revision' mountain films' summiting agenda in general and the Bergfilm's central premises of nationalism and heroism in particular. Instead of a singular governing perspective, the downward spiraling staircase affords 'an overlapping of presences (rather than a strict division of roles)' and 'an interweaving of gazes (rather than the dominance of one)' (Casetti 2008, 144).
That which overlaps, connects, multiplies, blends, conflates, and becomes truthful in reflection is also where, in a certain way, Epstein's musings on cinema connect with Ivakhiv's contributions to film theory. Theory has explored film as a means of reflection, immersion, and transformation that not only enables us to assume the perspectives of Others but also allows us to see ourselves as Others. Ivakhiv's contribution, then, is to point to the connectivity of these stances and the various ontological modes of film. He reminds us that cinema 'creates a mediated world of infinite connectivity ' (Ivakhiv 2013, 74) in which 'ourselves-as-image' meet with 'film-as-image' (58). Connectivity, for Ivakhiv, links us not just to our fellow humans but 'all the way back to the places from which their raw materials were sourced and were crafted into manufactured works ' (5). Ivakhiv develops our thinking on an 'ecologically inspired ethic of cinema' and makes it clear from the start that the material ecology of film is inseparably linked to the perceptual and the social (22). Based on the claim that cinematic cultures of descent make these moments of connectivity visible and viscerally felt, I will now move on to the specific cinematic routes of descent that, in various ways, mediate the fall of mountaineering individualism, the visibility of the Others in mountain travel, and the perception of connection in cinematic mountainscapes that expand beyond the alpinist self. The three routes I trace here are tragic, Indigenous, and ecodescents, and they are only the beginning of a more comprehensive analysis of cinematic cultures of descent.

Tragic descent
The types of descent considered in classic summitting accounts are those that result in tragedies rather than conquests. Whymper's disaster on the Matterhorn or Mallory's third attempt to scale Mount Everest have a place in mountaineering history and were deemed worthy of narration because of their tragic character. These narratives have predominantly functioned to heighten the achievements of other mountaineers who descended successfully. However, they are also recognizable for upsetting the dominant structures in alpinism and offering alternative visions of the German mountain film despite replaying some of the genre's thematic and aesthetic features. 6 Such narratives of descent often exhibit great potential for cultural renegotiations of gender roles and power and the relationship between local (mountain) people and mountaineers.
These tragic descents, which I analyze through Philipp Stölzl's North Face (Nordwand, 2008), bring out the hidden networks, the brotherhood of the rope, and the communal local support that safeguard the heroic celebration of individual triumphs. To ground this argument, I turn to Stephen Slemon, who notes that 'the mountaineering community has presented itself as something inherently resistant to inclusivity, to mutuality, and to outreach' and has 'manifested itself as a "brotherhood": something inherently difficult for Others-non-whites and women' (Slemon 2008, 241). Fictional appropriations like Stölzl's North Face provide an even more dynamic space for renegotiation than actual representations from the mountaineering community. When Stölzl's film portrays moments of failure and loss, it disrupts the gender-specific boundaries, the elitist, masculinist, nationalist, and imperialist forces that have historically consolidated the highly exclusive mountaineering community (Slemon 2008, 237, 239). In North Face, this disruption occurs predominantly in the visual dramatization of the rope, the critical role of mountain locals in rescue, and, most explicitly, in the liberation of the female protagonist Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek). Luise, a childhood friend of the German alpinists Andi Hinterstoißer (Florian Lukas) and Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann), follows the 1936 tragedy on the Eiger as an aspiring journalist with a hidden passion for photography.
The film's remarkable positioning of a woman is established early in the opening sequence, which shows Luise leafing through Toni's notebook while smoking a cigarette. The scene is part of a fictional frame that, according to Caroline Schaumann, can be seen as Stölzl's effort to 'reclaim the cinematic tradition of the Bergfilm while renouncing its ideological saturation' (Schaumann 2014, 436). It can also be seen as a way of highlighting the female perspective in mountain film-a perspective that North Face clearly situates in the descent. As Luise reads the notebook, she recalls a conversation with Toni in which he said: 'When you are at the top, hours later, looking down, you've forgotten everything. Except the one person you promised you would come back to'. In this scene, the safe descent is equated with returning home to a woman. Throughout the film we get the sense that Toni remains arrested in heroic male utopian solipsism-he even expresses his relationship to Luise via the summit-while Luise, on the other hand, is cast as a character within a larger international and social network. Although she has to prove herself as an alpinist toward the end of the film, her role as a networker-as a person who is connected to New York City, photographic practices, and Swiss mountain guides-is conspicuous and becomes most visible in the descent. On various occasions, the film makes apparent that Luise cares more about a successful descent than about the ascent and that she is interested in inter-relational networks rather than exhibiting heroism. An example of this happens during the dinner scene the night before the German and Austrian alpinists set out for the summit. In this scene, Luise's male urbanite dining companions raise their glasses to the climbers' presumptive German victory at the Eiger and utilize several military metaphors. Luise skillfully corrects her boss at the Berliner Zeitung, Henry Arau (Ulrich Tukur), and instead proposes a toast for 'all [to] return safely', emphasizing that 'that's the most important thing '. Luise gestures toward the importance of a safe descent throughout North Face and ultimately frees herself from the demands and expectations of her callous boss. In the course of the film, she realizes that she has a right to her own story and follows her passion as a photographer. In contrast to the beginning of the film, when she looks at a Kodak camera in a storefront window and later begs her climber friends to attempt an assault at the Eiger so the newspaper will publish her story, by the end of the film, Luise confidently resists Arau's offer to take her back to Berlin after the Eiger tragedy and moves to New York to work as a photographer. When she says, 'I am not going back to Berlin. I'm not going back. There are too many people like you there', she turns her back on Nazi Germany and the exclusionist, masculine, and nationalist interests it embodies. Part of this confidence is awakened when Luise follows the fatal descent of the climbing party from the hotel to which she has been relegated and decides to come to her friends' rescue. She takes the train halfway up the mountain, climbs through the stone block, ends up spending the night on the Eiger, and earns the respect of a local guide right before she ascends to her dying friend. In a sense, her liberation process unfolds parallel to the progression of Toni's descent. Luise begins to explore her possibilities and can ultimately set herself free once the alpinist hero begins his tragic descent.
The presence of the female Other in North Face goes hand in hand with that of the alpine Other, represented in the film by the signalman von Allmen and the local mountain guides, whose indispensable roles in the alpinist project are undeniable. Without the local infrastructure that provides mountain travelers with a railway line, hotels, campgrounds, and a local service industry, there would be little chance for a mountaineering experience, let alone a historic first ascent. Today, the tourist infrastructure provides mountaineers with pack animals, porters, hostels, guidebooks, and local mountaineering guides, who [. . .] regularly plan the climbing routes, organize the support teams of animals and men, put up the expedition tents, cook the camp meals, and then professionally lead amateur enthusiasts upward to the summits of other peoples' mountains. (Slemon 2012, 33) In line with the power unleashed by cinematic cultures of descent that involves a redirection of the gaze toward the individuals who safeguard the alpinist project, viewing North Face beyond the discourse of tragedy gestures toward mountaineering as a social pursuit.
The focus on the social networks of mountaineering is further emphasized in Stölzl's film through the effective dramatization of the rope, which is the ultimate lead character in North Face. This quintessential object-symbolic of joint efforts, communal success, and a shared fate-is employed in several highly visceral moments and signals a sense of togetherness that, if abandoned, spawns fatal consequences. Stölzl foreshadows the prominent role of the rope even before the story of personal victory and national glory on the Eiger goes downhill. Several close-ups (medium, big, and extreme) highlight the utility of the rope, which, in various instances, is reeled, grabbed, swung around rocks, tied, and untied. The film most effectively highlights the prominence of the rope in a scene depicting the legendary Hinterstoißer Traverse: Rousing extra-diegetic music, aerial shots, and shots framed through a telescope dramatize the poignancy of the scene below the Rote Fluh, an overhanging cliff and one of the most difficult sections on the North Face. Andi successfully installs a temporarily fixed rope in traverse, establishing a connection to Toni and the Austrian counterparts. The fact that the German climbers permit their Austrian competitors access to the rope invites consideration of the rope as symbolizing a certain abandonment of individualist and national(ist) claims, which is further emphasized through a binocular framing of the four climbers a few moments later. The rope joining the two teams is more than a bit of dead hemp; it is a lifeline that ties their fates together. It is a sense of togetherness, it seems, that also extends to the past and connects the climbers to those who went before them, as suggested when the rope team pay their last respects to Max Sedlmayr, whose body they find when they pull out the loose end of a rope from the snow. How much this newly found sense of connection is threatened by individualist and nationalist interests becomes apparent once Andi, post-traverse, decides to get rid of the temporarily fixed rope because he thinks this will help their ascent. Despite Toni's warning that they also need to think about the reverse, Andi pulls out the rope, asserting that the way is 'upward to Berlin'. This standard practice in climbing is used by Stölzl to dramatize the rope: The whipping sound of the loosened rope and other diegetic noises, such as ropeless pitons hitting icy rock, together with extreme close-ups and high-angle shots of the rope, mark the moment that seals the climbers' fatea tragedy that could have been avoided if equal attention had been paid to the descent, or, in accordance with the symbolism of the rope, if individualist and nationalist desires had not taken precedence over a shared responsibility.
It grows increasingly difficult to account for individualist desires during the premature descent, which covers almost half of the film's length and is unavoidable because of injured rope members and severe weather changes. As a way to emphasize the communal effort in the descent, individual climbers become more difficult to identify as soon as the roped-in team starts to move downward. Severe winds obstruct clear vision and the climbers are covered by snow with their bodies partly hidden by heavy clouds. It no longer matters, it appears, who does (or does not) do something; the impact of their (mis)behavior affects them all. When the roped-in team reaches the Hinterstoißer Traverse during the descent, dramatic music swells as Andi realizes his shortsightedness in having pulled the rope and, in shock, stammers: 'The rope'. Despite the panicked cries of the Austrian climber Edi -'He pulled the rope! He pulled the rope!' -Andi still attempts to reverse, but it is to no avail. The characteristic music previously used to highlight dramatic events suddenly stops and diegetic sounds such as falling snow, the bursting storm, and clicking pitons are foregrounded. But the sound of a firm grip in the wall is never heard, and the rope cannot be fixed. The alternative route, a straight-down descent, is just as impossible, and the precariousness of their situation begins to sink in when they realize they 'don't have enough rope'.
The lack of rope, which in the above scene is symbolic of shortsightedness and unsustainability, will also play a role when tragedy strikes a third time. After Edi, Andi, and Willy, the second Austrian climber, have already lost their lives during the descent, Luise hopes to offer Toni a final chance at survival when she arrives at the scene with the local guides, who are fully equipped with enough rope, or so they think, to rappel Toni to safety. For this purpose, Toni, who is not long for this world, has to first unravel one of his ropes and lower it down to his helpers. The powerful symbolism of the rope as a lifeline is dramatized when the end of the rope slowly enters the frame and moves toward its center in an extreme close-up followed by several long shots highlighting this moment of connection. However, the joy of a possible last-minute rescue is quickly dampened when two of the mountain guides realize that the rope is too short. As they tie ropes together, the diegetic sound of ropes pulled tightly changes to extra-diegetic dramatic music, foreshadowing the significance of a rope that is not long enough. They begin to rappel Toni and just before his body reaches the ledge, a knot-too large to pass through the carabiner-stops the rescue. Unable to take weight off the tied rope, Toni dies midway through the descent.
If one follows Caroline Schaumann in arguing that 'Stölzl takes great care to imbue his film with an anti-Nazi message' (Schaumann 2014, 417), rather than assuming he tragically fails to bypass National Socialist ideologies, one is invited to see in this episode, which is also retold in Heinrich Harrer's The White Spider (Harrer 1959), not nationalist undertones but a renegotiation of what it means to be entangled for the duration of a belay. From a revisionist perspective, North Face underscores the symbolism of the rope, which, on the one hand, highlights the importance of connection on and off the mountain and suggests that the lack of rope (or its shortcomings) signals a lack of togetherness while, on the other hand, implies the vital need to act sustainably and consider the journey that follows the ascent. The rope in tragic descent, then, is different from the symbolically exclusionary rope that consolidates the kind of brotherhood described by Slemon. While the brotherhood Slemon describes is situated in the Golden Age of Mountaineering and continues its legacies of colonial expansion and exclusion through global tourism, the one afforded through cinematic cultures of descent extends beyond the alpinist self (and national interests) and reminds us to care for the connection to the natural, gendered, and alpine Other. It is a brotherhood that, in a truly postcolonial perspective, maps out new routes after ascent-routes that may indeed be tragic for the alpinist self but are a blessing in disguise for the Others of mountaineering, namely women, nontravelers, and mountains.
Although I have focused on North Face to outline how tragic descents set the alpine Other (woman, local, and mountain) free, a similar case can also be made with other revisions of the Bergfilm, such as Joseph Vilsmaier's Nanga Parbat (Vilsmaier 2010) or Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog 1972). While the controversy surrounding the revisionist potential of these films does not cease once the attention shifts from ascent to descent, the change of perspective clearly offers a set of themes, symbols, and roles different from the ones associated with the traditional German mountain film.

Indigenous descent
While tragic descents mediate downward movements on the mountain, Indigenous descents add the perspective of heritage to mountain film by understanding 'descent' not exclusively as an act of moving down but also as an issue connected to ancestry. Questions of alpinist heroism, which feature prominently in tragic descents despite the increased awareness of Others, give way to more profound engagements with the human and nonhuman Other and explore cinematic possibilities to communicate a sense of connectivity and ecological mindfulness via downward movements. My sample analysis explores Sami filmmaker Nils Gaup's Pathfinder (1987), the first Sami feature-length film. Having been shot in Sami, featuring a majority Sami cast, and incorporating traditional joik singing and a Sami legend, the film is considered part of the process of Indigenous revitalization in Scandinavia (Christensen 2012, 66;Ramnarine 2013, 240). It is an adaptation of a Sami legend about a band of raiders, the Tchudes (also Chudes), and a young man, Aigin (Mikkel Gaup), who outwits them by descending an icy mountain pass after having been taken hostage and forced to be their guide.
Two aspects of the film make it especially pertinent for an analysis of the socio-ecological significance afforded via cinematic cultures of descent. The first is the film's renegotiation of the role of the mountain guide. The eponymous pathfinder's role is not restricted to navigating the material alpine landscape but involves the guidance of a community through an uncertain present, which, in Pathfinder, arises from internal conflicts as well as attacks from outside. The fact that the guiding role of shaman leader passes down from Raste (Nils Utsi) to Aigin in the course of the film additionally suggests that Indigenous leadership does not sit well with the narrative of singular heroism. Importantly, this kind of leadership is established through downward movement: Aigin's role as shaman pathfinder is consolidated only after he leads the horde of Tchudes down the mountain pass. In this crucial downward-oriented scene, the rope, that core symbol of cinematic cultures of descent presented earlier, unsurprisingly takes a prominent role. The fall of the Tchudes begins the moment Aigin unropes himself from them and runs down the mountain flank. Hurrying after Aigin, they slip, plummet, and fall off the mountain-weapons smash on the rock, the rope is torn and cut, and, finally, an avalanche bursting with downward energy washes the Tchudes off the mountain, as if to expel violence in a downhill movement. The scene is sonically framed by the steady beat of a drum, which blends the stomping theme of invasion with the shamanic drum carried by Aigin. While the drum is associated with the Sami colonial experience, it is also a significant symbol of Saminess and shaman leadership. When Aigin hands over Raste's drum to the community following his descent and explains the loss of their pathfinder, the female elder returns the drum to Aigin, symbolically mediating the transition of the role of community guide (as opposed to geographical guide) from Raste to Aigin (Ramnarine 2013, 244).
As guides, both Raste and Aigin actively seek the community's well-being and consider fellow humans and nonhuman Others as integral parts of a more comprehensive socio-ecological network. This depiction of collective rather than individual value is the second significant aspect of Pathfinder's role within a cinematic culture of descent. Over and again, one encounters awareness of collective strength and shared responsibility. The phrase 'the village must keep together if we are to survive' is reiterated on several occasions, underscoring the power of the collective that is essential for survival in arctic and alpine spaces. Collective action extends beyond the immediate settlement, includes other Sami groups, and also involves the nonhuman. How much Indigenous descents communicate the connection between human and nonhuman worlds becomes apparent in a scene in which Raste teaches Aigin about the danger of retribution, highlighting that 'we are all children of the greater family'. Aigin, unable at this point to see the kinship bonds that tie him to the Tchudes, asks how he can trust something that he cannot see. Raste smothers him with the palm of his hand and explains that even the invisible can be felt: 'You can't see the air around you, but your very existence depends on it. In this way all things are bound together'. The kind of connection Raste invokes plays out on both social and ecological levels, taking place in the narrative junction between human massacre and the ritual subsistence killing of a bear (Ramnarine 2013, 252). In this manner (and following Ivakhiv), the film teaches us that survival on this planet is threatened by environmental damage and the disintegration of social solidarity alike (Ivakhiv 2013, 254). Part of the stabilization of social solidarity is the refoundation of a sustainable socio-ecological network that also redeems the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Pathfinder takes a prominent position in reminding humans of all descents of their relations to one another and to the planet they inhabit together. The sociological and environmental lesson of the film is thus relevant not just for Sami cultures but for everyone; and the issues affirmed in Indigenous oral memory pertain to global political concerns (Ramnarine 2013, 249-250). Tine Ramnarine likewise stresses that ritual knowledge, the sonic images of ecology and sacrality conveyed in the film, are important in thinking about current environmental issues and move beyond a story superficially representing human antagonists. Like other inhabitants of the Circumpolar North, Sami commentators have spoken consistently about the everyday impacts of climate change. Dwelling in fragile Arctic ecosystems, they are only among the first witnesses. (252) Part of Pathfinder's capacity to speak about and to 'a world of infinite connectivity' might also lie in its composition (Ivakhiv 2013, 74): As a perfect example of the transnational cinema of the 1980s, the film combines modes of representation that descend from various cultures (Nestingen and Elkington 2005). By adapting a popular Sami legend and deploying 'the familiar and comprehensible idiom of the Hollywood adventure thriller with a small add-on of Scandinavian Bildungsroman', the film plays equally to inside and outside audiences (DuBois 2000, 258, 256). In this way, 'Gaup presents to an outside audience a culture resilient and resistant to outside threats' and 'plays to an "insider" audience of Sami, deeply divided by national, religious, and occupational differences, creating common ground upon which to assert a unified identity ' (258). Following this dual agenda, the film stands as a landmark not just for Sami cultural revitalization but for the socio-ecological substance of Indigenous mediations of descent.

Ecodescents
If one wishes to consider an alpinist descent in terms of the way back home, any discussion of its cinematic mediation must offer a form of ecological reflection, considering that the prefix 'eco-' derives from the Greek word oîkos, meaning 'house'. In this article, my thinking about the ecologies of cinematic cultures of descent reflects on mountain film's environmental motifs rather than 'the environmental footprint of media technologies' (Cubitt 2014, 164). It understands the ascent-based construction of progress as an exploitative reliance on the downward flows of resources and looks at mountain film's projections of environmental decay. Understanding mountains as a medium through which global-scale environmental destruction becomes perceptual, this section analyses the US eco-documentary Chasing Ice (Orlowski 2012) because of its depiction of the raw, emotional impact of contemporary ecological horrors, which can elicit 'audience involvement in the film's narrative' and a 'deepened understanding and capacity to act in response to them ' (Ivakhiv 2013, 281). The film follows photographer James Balog, whose Extreme Ice Survey highlights the urgency of climate change by documenting, through time-lapse photography, the waning ice in four glaciated regions in three countries. The film processes footage from twelve cameras positioned in such a way as to capture glaciers in the process of calving, which involves the downward flow of ice, from a downwardoriented perspective.
In Chasing Ice, the camera, long perceived as the 'environmentalists' first tool ' (Ivakhiv 2013, 84), 7 functions as an unbiased witness of climate change, and while the films previously discussed in this article all affirm, in one way or another, the socio(-ecological) potential of cinematic cultures of descent, Chasing Ice does so in a way that explicitly speaks to the core of what Adrian Ivakhiv called 'cinematic world-building ' (25). First, the documentary presents the rawness of the effects of climate change by utilizing cinema's ability to 'present presentness'-that is, in this case, to show the 'moving-image nature ' (59). This sense of directness and immediacy allows Chasing Ice to resound viscerally and affectively; in other words, it allows its moving image to move us. Balog's aim is to trigger cinematic experiences in order to 'study nature in a more seductive fashion' and 'look at it in ways that would engage people-pull them in'. That Balog himself is not exempt from these affects becomes apparent in a scene in which he observes the vanishing ice and connects the fate of the glacier to his own death-an experience of affective memory not unusual in such moments of hyper-immediacy (Branigan 2019, 196). Connection, then, is portrayed in a variety of ways in Chasing Ice: As is characteristic of cinematic cultures of descent, there are various rope scenes and large networks of ropes spanning crevices that underscore the Extreme Ice Survey as a team effort. But the most prominent kind of connection elicited via ecodescents reminds us of the world's boundless connectivity. The glacier is portrayed as a medium that reacts to human behavior and consequently has an effect on humans' livelihoods, reminding us that the precarious situation of climate change-of living in and provoking a world of melting glaciers-binds us all. In the vast imagery of Balog's time-lapse photography, a feeling arises that outweighs a concern for the self alone. 'It is a feeling', Epstein says, 'that cinema brings to the world' in that it extends beyond the duration and images of the film (Epstein 1981/82, 193). Both Epstein and Ivakhiv would likely find great joy in Orlowski's documentary as its mesmerizing images set off a 'flow of sensations ' (Ivakhiv 2013, 4).
Balog's project is based on the conviction that film is not just effective in getting people to feel something about receding glaciers but also in getting them to do something about it. At one point, he says that photography is, as much as it is about anything, about raising awareness. Balog's stated belief is that faced with visual evidence, 'humans will understand the magnitude of the anthropogenic impact on the Arctic region and feel motivated to take action toward mitigating climate change ' (Weik von Mossner 2017, 341). 8 Part of the doing in the face of global warming, then, is to allow the camera to turn humans into vehicles in order to raise awareness outside their own experiences and become a type of messenger. Balog closes the film by underscoring that worlds are set into motion through cinematic practice: 'When my daughters, Simone and Emily, look at me twenty-five or thirty years from now, and say, "What were you doing when global warming was happening and you guys knew what was coming down the road?" I want to be able to say I was doing everything I knew how to do'. In this way, Balog highlights the role of the moving image in environmental action. It is important to mention that Chasing Ice draws its persuasive power from art, not science. Balog contends: 'We do not have a problem with economics, technology, and public policy. We have a problem with perception', arguing, as this article has also done, that the ways down rendered by cinematic cultures of descent become much-needed lessons in perception.
Redirecting our perception of mountain film by engaging descents 'invites us', as Amrita Dhar has argued in the context of mountain literature, 'to extend our imagination into high places in fresh registers of engagement that encompass ecological thinking and global decolonization' (Dhar 2019, 3). In this sense, ecodescents, perhaps more explicitly than tragic and Indigenous descents, echo Hillary's words in demonstrating that the getting down is, indeed, quite important. The descent is important, however, not in how it consolidates an individual's heroic achievement but for what it tells us culturally about inclusivity and sustainability, about valuing the relations between humans and nonhuman Others.
As cinematic cultures of descent move us through the vast network of our complex alpine ecosystem and shape the theoretical, geographical, and cultural landscapes of mountains, we are invited to ask whether the directions they follow remain close to the tropes and themes traditionally deployed in the Bergfilm or whether they can truly guide social change and environmental action. And if we do find that the images, camera angles, and editing echo all too familiar mediations of mountains and that cultures of descent might never fully upset the powers of modern mountaineering or undo the generic corset of the Bergfilm, we need not be discouraged. Part of adopting the downward perspective is to adopt-in a postcolonial manner-a stance of hope. If we learn to see the Other side of the mountaineering story, we will neither see in Balog a 'melodramatic hero ' (Weik von Mossner 2017, 341) or in his documentation of the beauty and horror of glacial death a repetition of the sublime, nor will we see in Stölzl's occasional reaffirmation of traditional Bergfilm tropes a failed opportunity. What becomes visible instead is the ambivalence of mountain mediation, in which everything is connected to everything else through mutual integration, cross-referencing, blending, and convolution. If mountain cinema means creating an endless network of relations, it might also mean that mountain film is 'necessarily complicit in the apparatus it seeks to transgress' (Slemon 1990, 37) and that Other perspectives on mountain cinema are always entangled with the aesthetics and politics they challenge. This ambivalence in cinematic cultures of descent, to stay in the fall line of postcolonial hope, is highly enabling because to embrace the ambivalence of cinematic cultures of descent is to embrace the rich and diverse mediations of mountains that stand alongside the German mountain film and shape the diversity of mountain cinema which, like cinematic mediations of descent, runs through the history of mountain film.
3. Stephen Slemon foregrounds the imperial rhetoric that heralded a 'New Elizabethan Age' following the ascent of Chomolungma (2000, 55). 4. How far the traditional ski film (generically rooted in the Weimar tradition and perhaps the most obvious form of descent in mountain cinema) can be read as a reverse narrative of ascent, replaying ideas of alpinist control and dramatizing a dualistic confrontation between the human and nonhuman, lies beyond the scope of this article and is best approached in a separate study. Kamaal Haque's "Arnold Fanck, He Directed Glaciers, Storms, and Avalanches: A Film Pioneer Recounts (1973) -Excerpts" (2020) is an important step in approaching the role of (skiing) descents in the mountain film. 5. The Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, who ostensibly climbed Mont Ventoux with his younger brother in 1336, descended in silence after enjoying the earthly pleasure of a summit view. Not only does the summit increasingly lose its significance in his downward reflection, but the unique quality of mountaineering for the human soul becomes perceptible through the contemplation of his (literary) descent. 6. See Schaumann (2014)