Aging, Auteurism, and the Bergfilm: Olivier Assayas's Sils Maria/Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Paolo Sorrentino's La giovinezza/Youth (2015)

Introduction

the renewed cinematic interest in mountains reveals not only the transformative virtue of mountains as mediators of new experiences, ranging from rituals of spiritual purification to consumerist tourist culture, but also the fluid nature of mountains as historical agents. Rather than representing fixed coordinates on geographical, political, and historical maps, mountains can themselves be approached as reflexive objects. Following W. J. T. Mitchell's conception of landscape as "dynamic medium" (2), cinematic mountainscapes can be seen as stages where sociocultural, geopolitical, ethnic, and gender identities are negotiated along with cinematic forms. Recent film productions such as Philipp Stölzl's Nordwand [North Face] (2008), Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009), Ruben Östlund's Turist [Force Majeure] (2014), and Andreas Prochaska's Das finstere Tal [The Dark Valley] (2014) have revisited mountains as historical sites of cinematic self-reflection to renegotiate notions of gender, genre, tourism, and environmentalism in transnational and global contexts. This article complements this list by examining how mountains and mountain films come into play in addressing the very question of auteurism and its historicity.¹

Drawing on Eric Rentschler's seminal essay "Mountains and Modernity," we suggest viewing Olivier Assayas's Sils Maria [Clouds of Sils Maria] (2014) and Paolo Sorrentino's La giovinezza [Youth] (2015), both European coproductions (of France, Germany, and Switzerland and Great Britain, Italy, France, and Switzerland, respectively), as mountainous meditations on aging that draw on mountains and the classical mountain film in order to relocate auteur cinema in a transnational context. We will place aging, auteurism, and mountains in triangular relations––not unlike the love triangles frequently found in melodramatic mountain movies. With our discussion set against an established cultural frame that associates mountains with old age, we will focus on the relationship between auteurism and mountains, on the one hand, and the relationship between auteurism and aging, on the other. While the former calls for an exploration of the aesthetic traditions and genres that have shaped independent cinema, the latter addresses the shift in auteurism from an artistic to a commercial category in the historical development of auteur theory. Although commercial aspects of auteurism have received much attention in recent scholarship (e.g., Corrigan, Cinema without Walls; Buckland), they are still largely viewed in disjunction from the artistic definition of auteurism as a filmmaker's personalized vision. Both Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria and Sorrentino's Youth pay tribute to this disjunction through surprising and insightful invocations of the classical Bergfilm, a genre that is generally seen in national German and Austrian contexts and seldom regarded as a historic model for auteur cinema.

Aging: Mountains and Auteurs

There is an age-old mythological link that associates longevity with mountains. Whether it is something in the air or water, a mysterious or sacred power, or the remoteness to unhealthy city life, mountains play a prominent role in longevity myths. Such myths about exotic and mysterious places increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, when upper-class travel through Europe, the so-called Grand Tour, took a significant educational turn and its travelers became increasingly older (Imorde and Pieper). In the late nineteenth century, experimental physiologists discovered the Alps as a privileged site of scientific research, since at high altitudes life appears to be more intense and extreme (Felsch). Along with the burgeoning Alpinism, mountains could be prescribed as an invigorating medical treatment to combat the social disease of fatigue associated with modern urban and especially industrial life.

This productive intersection of educational tourism and new forms of "scientific" therapy in a non-urban setting, secluded by nature, turned the mountain hospital into a powerful heterotopia of crisis (Foucault). Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924) can be seen as a prototypical model for this modernist discovery of mountains as privileged sites of pseudoutopi an alterity. In a parody of the Bildungsroman, this novel replaces the educational wanderings of a youthful protagonist with a medical sojourn of middle-aged characters in a mountain hospital in the Swiss Alps, modeled on...