The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929)

Original title

Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü

Directed by

Arnold Fanck, Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Genre

drama film, silent film, adventure film

Country

Germany

Runtime

2h 19m

Rating

6.9 of 10 from 27 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A man loses his wife in an avalanche on the Piz Palü mountain. Years later he meets a young couple and they join him on a dangerous climb up the same peak.

awe-inspiringtragicstarkharrowingmelancholicvisually grandtenseslow-burn

What happens

The White Hell of Pitz Palu (German: Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü) is a 1929 German silent mountain film co-directed by Arnold Fanck and G. W. Pabst and starring Leni Riefenstahl, Gustav Diessl, Ernst Petersen, and World War I pilot Ernst Udet. Written by Fanck and Ladislaus Vajda, the film is about a man who loses his wife in an avalanche while climbing the Piz Palü mountain, and spends the next few years searching the mountain alone for her body. Four years later he meets a young couple who agree to accompany him on his next climb. The White Hell of Pitz Palu was filmed on location in the Bernina Range in Graubünden, Switzerland. The film is regarded as one of the earliest examples of mountain films that combined adventure with human drama. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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