The full-length (74-minute) version of Arnold Fanck's seminal The White Ecstasy, a ski-chase comedy featuring Hannes Schneider, Leni Riefenstahl, Guzzi Lantschner, Walther Riml and about two dozen of Schneider's St. Anton ski school instructors. Produced in 1930-31, the film helped spark popular interest in alpine skiing across Europe. Fanck held a PhD in geology and in the late '20s pioneered filmmaking about mountaineers and mountaineering. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he at first refused to work with them but after an exile in Japan returned to Germany and joined the Nazi party in 1940. In the postwar years his films were banned by the Allied occupation and he was forced out of film-making. His work was revived for TV broadcast after 1957.
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