The Dark Glow of the Mountains

‘We didn’t want to make a film about mountaineering or climbing techniques. We wanted to understand why mountaineers embark on extreme projects,’ Herzog comments at the beginning of the film. Messner is an exceptional mountaineer who still holds a number of world records today. Herzog seeks to understand why he takes on such dangerous sporting challenges, while claiming to have ‘no death wish’. It would be possible to write pages and novels about Messner as a character. In front of Herzog’s camera, he is both calm and resigned in the face of death and physically and mentally prepared to succeed at anything. He is a kind of gruff animal and a tortured man who must regularly confront his ability to survive. He is the one who will go where the camera, whose film would freeze, will not go, into the ‘death zone’, the obsessive imagination, off camera outside the world. And who may, perhaps, return. Here we see that Herzog’s passion for filming the invisible is also a game: he likes places to remain impossible to film. (Camille Pollas; critikat.com)