The Rise and Fall of Espe

Sports enthusiast Ernest is to cover 6,000 kilometers on his motorcycle in 15 days, crossing Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the Balkans and Czechoslovakia.

The two unemployed engineers Franzl and Bertl want to be the first to climb the Matterhorn from the dangerous north face. They travel by bicycle with Mizzl and Traudl but without telling them about their intentions. The women accompany them on the assumption that it is a touristical trip. All four camp in a tent at the foot of the Matterhorn and Franzl and Bertl secretly begin the dangerous ascent. The girls will have to follow the ascent together with the residents of the village and the guests of the mountain hotel using binoculars. The role of Franzl is played by Franz Schmid, the actual conqueror of the north face of the Matterhorn together with his brother Toni in 1931.

Junta is hated by the people in the village where she lives, especially by the women, who suspect her of being a witch. Only she can climb the nearby mountains to a cave high up, whence a mysterious blue light glows when the moon is full. Many young men of the village have died trying to follow her. She is driven out of town, and takes to living in the mountains. Eventually she shares the secret of the blue light with one man, and he betrays it.

The inhabitants of a village learn to overcome their fears of the unknown.

The Great North Faces of the Alps: Cima Grande di Lavaredo

The Great North Faces of the Alps: Eiger

The Great North Faces of the Alps: Piz Badile

Joseph Vallot and his team of guides and porters climb Mont Blanc in 1906. Their ascent will take three days. They spent their nights at the Grands Mulets refuge and the Grand Plateau refuge. This is the very first successfully filmed ascent. Joseph Vallot (1854-1925), rich heir of Lodève in Occitania. He devotes part of his fortune to the observation of the Alps, sometimes opposing the scientific community. He built an observatory, still standing today.

In a village near a deadly mountain ascent the people repeatedly have to help climbers in danger who didn't make it to the top, in fact nobody made it yet up there. Hansi Knoteck can't stand anymore the danger after a member of the rescue party dies and demands from Attila Hörbiger that he steps back from participating in his rescue efforts. Finally he relents but the villagers ostracize them. In the meantime Winnie Markus tries to seduce Richard Häußler who makes the life for his wife Viktoria von Ballasko a hell through his infidelities.

In The Call of the Mountain (L’appel de la montagne) a couple are childhood sweethearts who are separated, she marries a rich man and he becomes an alpine guide. The woman’s husband dies, and she returns home to Switzerland, her wealth and beauty drawing interest from a foreign rake, rogue, and roué named Billinsky. He talks her into a mountain ascension that meets with disaster when some of the climbers fall to their deaths. Her loyal friend the alpine guide rescues his sweetheart, and saves her again.

After Sita's disappearance at Mount Sarangan on Drupadi's 10th birthday, Tito's attitude became cold, leaving Drupadi sad. Her boyfriend, Raka, and her best friends, Maya, Ucok, Jamal, and Nurul, along with her parents' friends Bagus and Oji, and her uncle, Gancar, provided support for Drupadi. However, this was not enough, and on her 17th birthday, Drupadi set off for Mount Sarangan to search for her mother.

The mountain guide and ski instructor Hans Turri has been hired by the tourist Gregory Milacz to make a route in the mountains. Both are caught by a storm, so while Milacz is waiting at the Concordia Hut, Turri returns to the valley again. On the way back, Milacz has disappeared. Suspicions turn against Turri as a murder suspect for the jealousy he might have for the beautiful Mary Dulac. To get rid of the accusation of murder, Turri sets out to find Milacs. There is a French version of the film (Les chevaliers de la montagne), shot the same year by the same team but with different actors.

German film about a Himalayan expedition and the search for a mountain spirit, who guarded, according to the tradition of the locals, the peaks of high mountains. The long-lost and recently rediscovered and restored film is now a unique cinematic document because it is the first feature film that was shot directly in the Himalayas (up to 6400 m altitude). Hans Ertl even turned his Bell & Howell to the main summit of Sia Kangri, 7422m. Likewise, the film contains footage from India and Tibet, from a time long before the emergence of mass tourism. Some of the footage was later recycled in ‘Lost horizon’ (1937) by Frank Capra and in ‘Storm over Tibet’ (1952).

In the mountains, Diotima meets Karl and fall in love and have an affair. Karl's friend Vigo mistakenly believes she's in love with him, causing rifts in all relationships.

"The ascent of the Aiguilles Ravanel and Mummery", climbed by young guides in cycling pants: The brothers Armand Charlet and Georges Charlet, Arthur Ravanel, Henri Couttet and Charles Balmat. The film was shot by Georges Tairraz II, Chamoniard mountain photographer, representative of the third generation of a family line of mountain photographers and filmmakers. George Tairraz II's film will lay the groundwork for a French vision of mountain film; In the 1930s, a French school of mountain cinema emerged, less expressionist, more stripped down and realistic than the German school. These are the films of Marcel Ichac, Roger Frison-Roche, Samivel, Georges Tairraz II, etc. It develops according to the principles set by Marcel Ichac, in opposition to the German school. It is both about getting out of the dramatic vision of the mountain and placing the mountain and the climbers at the heart of the plot.

An abundant fog has engulfed the coastal cove where Agatha lives, preventing her father, a humble fisherman, from returning home. Unable to take care of her, her mother casts her out.

Marcel Ichac accompanied the mountaineer Armand Charlet, in 1943, in the repetition of the first crossing of the Aiguilles du Diable that the guide of the Chamonix valley had made in 1925. A roped party joined on snow and ice the Col du Géant, reached at the Mont-Blanc-du-Tacul stop and on the Col du Diable. The men cross the needles by climbing chimneys, cracks and abseiling walls. They access the eastern slope of the Mont-Blanc massif which offers a panorama of the Grandes Jorasses and Mont-Blanc. Armand Charlet was the first to reach the summits of four needles above 4000 meters: the Devil's Horn, Pointe Chaubert, Pointe Médiane and Pointe Carmen; he also tells how he successfully climbed the furthest, the Isolated. Marcel Ichac shot these scenes as close as possible to his subject, he responded with this film with a “truth” cinema, the principle of which we find in his later productions.

The journey of Imo, a helpless and frightened little seed, takes a turn she never imagined when she falls of her tree and get carried away by a powerful storm. She must find the courage to overcome the challenges around her and finally become the large and beautiful tree she was destined to be.

Hannes is employed at the Mont Blanc Observatory; the only outside connection is a pilot and Hella over the radio. Hella ascends the mountain but her father dies along the way.

Account of the first French expedition to the Himalayas, which attempted to climb the hidden peak (Gasherbrum I) in 1936, from the preparations for the trip to the end of the ascent. After a long approach walk through quasi-desert regions, then on a huge glacier, the caravan of 700 porters arrives at the foot of Hidden Peak. The expedition was led by Henry de Ségogne, with Jean Charignon, Pierre Allain, Raymond Leininger, Jean Carle, Jean Deudon, Louis Neltner, Jacques Azémar, doctor Jeand Arlaud and director Marcel Ichac. Weather conditions, logistical problems and a strike among Sherpas forced the team to retire at 6900m on the south face. The film received the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1938.