‘See the Crashing Masses of White Death …’: Greenland, Germany and the Sublime in the ‘Bergfilm’ SOS Eisberg

• Main Author: Körber, Lill-Ann
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2015
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Rasmussen; greenlandic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694174.003.0011

This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.