The Epic of Everest

The Epic of Everest (1924) is an extraordinary landscape film - mainly shot in black and white but sometimes tinted in vivid colours, including pink, as you can see above. It was shot by John Noel, 'a soldier by profession but an artist in spirit', as Wade Johnson says in an excellent Sight & Sound essay He was heavily influenced by Herbert Ponting's footage of the equally ill-fated Antarctic expedition that was eventually turned into a film, The Great White Silence, which was also released in 1924. Both have beautiful shots of ice and snow and both now have soundtracks by Simon Fisher Turner. Noel also drew on the pioneering mountain photography of Vittorio Sella, whose work you can see at the extensive Fondazione Sella website.  

In my last post about Michael Snow, I talked about a new kind of camera installed on top of a mountain. The climax of The Epic of Everest is footage Noel took using a state of the art telephoto lens. Through this we watch George Mallory, Sandy Irvine and the others who helped their ascent as tiny black figures silhouetted against the snow, creeping up the North East ridge. While Snow deliberately excluded any human figures, Noel is desperate to spot them. But after two days the party returns, signalling from a distance with blankets in the shape of a cross that the expedition has ended in the climbers' deaths. The film’s final title card reads “if you had lived, as they had lived and died in the heart of nature, would you, yourself, wish for any better grave than a grave of pure white snow?” It is a noble idea, although in recent years these snows have been trodden by thousands of climbers and the remnants of their bodies have been identified on the mountain. 

A review of the BFI restoration noted that ‘modern viewers may squirm at the contrast between Noel's reverent approach to the mountain and his condescension toward the Tibetan locals.’ This is indeed what I felt when I watched it. And, as another article on the film notes, there is a shocking moment when an intertitle notes the death of two porters without providing their names (they were Darjeeling cobbler Manbahadur and Gurkha Lance Corporal Shamsherpun). The first performance of the The Epic of Everest, with Tibetan monks brought over to 'perform', set off a chain of events that influenced the history of Tibet. This 'Affair of the Dancing Lamas' has its own Wikipedia page where you can read the details. As Wade Johnson explains, the controversy ended up 'undercutting the reforms of the 13th Dalai Lama – reforms that no doubt would have placed Tibet in a much stronger position to cope politically and militarily with the Chinese invasion of 1950, which led to the death of an independent nation.'