Cinema in Extremis: Mount Everest and the Poetics of Monumentality

ABSTRACT:Two British attempts to climb Mount Everest cosponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club in the 1920s, equipped with motion-picture cameras, telescopic lenses, and filters, promised to elevate Britain's reputation within international mountaineering circles, as well as claim victory for machine and humanity in extreme altitude. This essay examines how ideas of monumentality circulate textually and discursively in the two extant films, Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924), homing in on how Everest's scale denuded cinema of some of its essential capabilities while paradoxically capturing saturated moments of monumentality through specific cinematic techniques. Though commercial success eluded the filmic records of the failed climbing attempts, the films' negotiation of the complex dialectics of British national identity and Tibetan life brings the poetics of monumentality into conversation with issues of culture, memory, indigenous agency, and history.