Chamonix - The Mer de Glace. Ascent
1900 · 0h 1m · Documentary
Skip it unless you're a cinema history obsessive—this 1900 Lumière short is a fascinating artifact of filmmaking's infancy, but at under a minute of silent mountaineering footage, it's more museum piece than entertainment. If you want to understand how cinema began, watch it; if you want to actually enjoy your evening, pick something else.
Plot
Four roped men jump a crevasse and ascend through the seracs of the Mer de Glace using long ice axes. The shot belongs to a collection of scenes that were presented together as a kind of travelogue film under the title of 'Voyages animés' in a diorama pavilion in the Universal Exhibition of Paris of 1900. The mountaineering scenes in this series include four scenes in the Mer de Glace and one in the Meije glacier. These five scenes, under a minute long, are the first mountaineering images ever filmed. Several of the 'Voyages animés' scenes were included in the Lumière catalog in 1901 under the title of 'À travers la France'.
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