“Wilhelm was fascinated by this film. He used to marvel at the fact that the true nature of the landscape revealed itself in these images,” states playwright Wilhelm Melchior’s widow, Rosa (Angela Winkler), in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). The film in question is Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja, a short documentary by German geologist-turned-filmmaker Arnold Fanck. A pioneer of the mountain film genre, Fanck here depicts the extraordinary cloud formations around the Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, including the so-called Maloja Snake. Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja contains similar imagery to Fanck’s narrative feature Der Berg des Schicksals (The Peack of Fate), released the same year. Reviewing the latter work, Siegfried Kracauer celebrated the timelapse photography of cloud movements: “Cumulus clouds, giant white massifs that disintegrate, seas of clouds that well up and ebb away, striped drifts and vast herds… The cloud events concentrate and the distortion of time produces an enchanting optical intoxication.”

Nicholas Baer