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…