The Great Leap

The self-assured goat herder Gita (Leni Riefenstahl) is courted by Toni (Luis Trenker), a mountain dweller who adores her, and Michael Treuherz (Hans Schneeberger), a wealthy city dweller who is initially completely inexperienced at skiing. His Berlin doctor has prescribed “climbing and a little bit of marriage”—and so, during his clumsy mountain excursions, Treuherz meets the athletic Gita, who teaches him how to ski. The two men’s romantic rivalry literally “culminates” in a ski race, for which Gita offers herself as the prize. Arnold Fanck’s lighthearted mountain and ski comedy was made in 1927 during the Weimar Republic and combined spectacular exterior shots in the Dolomites and on the Arlberg with winter sports, slapstick, and a love story. In film history, the movie epitomizes the German mountain film genre, which introduced important technical innovations through on-location filming at authentic sites as well as dynamic nature and action sequences. At the same time, the genre conveyed ideals such as a connection to nature, physical achievement, and self-transcendence, which were later co-opted for political purposes. Key figures involved in *The Great Leap* went on to play far more problematic roles during the Nazi era: Leni Riefenstahl, who played Gita, became a leading director of Nazi propaganda. Arnold Fanck joined the NSDAP in 1940 and later worked on material aligned with the regime. Luis Trenker (“The Mountain Calls”) increasingly linked the mountain film to nationalist notions of homeland. And cinematographer Sepp Allgeier later worked on Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and for wartime newsreels. “The Great Leap” itself is not a Nazi propaganda film. Rather, it is a technically innovative work from the Weimar Republic, yet one that clearly illustrates how the aesthetics of nature and the human body in mountain films were later exploited and co-opted for Nazi imagery.