Global Mountain Cinema - (Traditions in World Cinema) by Kamaal Haque & Christian Quendler & Caroline Schaumann (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first academic book to approach mountain film culture from transgeneric, transnational, ecotritical, and transmedial perspectives.

Book Synopsis

This book is dedicated to the particular challenges and opportunities mountains raise for histories and theories of cinema. In German-speaking countries, the relationship between mountains and cinema has been largely reduced to a small canon of Alpine filmmakers whose work has been categorized as the Classical Bergfilm. However, from a transnational and transgeneric perspective, the field of mountain cinema is not only much richer and more diverse, but also addresses questions that are vital to film and media studies and inform postcolonial and environmental discourses in the Anthropocene. In this vein, our volume goes beyond national contexts to provide a timely and much-needed investigation into the generic innovations and intersectional negotiations of national, ethnic, and gender norms that take place in mountain cinema and its related media forms.

Review Quotes

Challenging the dominance of the 'Alpine model' in the German Bergfilm,
this volume with profound essays by seventeen film experts broadens the lens
of mountain cinema from traditional Eurocentrism to transcultural
contexts, transnational networks, and genre-crossing innovations. The
exploration of intermedia, gender and queer relations, environmental
issues, and digital technologies in global mountain cinema offers fresh
views and surprising insights into an often-contested genre.

-- "Gabriele Dürbeck, University of Vechta"

The essays in this wide-ranging collection take readers from the peak of mountain cinema in the 1920s and 30s to the alternative political, affective, and aesthetic possibilities that emerge in their long shadow. Recruited into film genres of nationalist and imperial domination in which the visibility and majesty of mountains work to naturalize a political order, mountains are also the secreted spaces for resistance, endurance, and queer intimacy. What we learn from the diverse essays in this collection is how mountains shape our understanding of cinema and how cinema frames mountains to the measure of fantasies that span the 20th and 21st century globe.-- "Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene"