Abstract ID: 3.10022 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

The first recognized mountain film festival was held in Trento, Italy, in 1952. Soon after a number of film festivals in this genre began to appear, first in Europe, then in North America and finally worldwide. For this panel, the first Swiss and Canadian festivals will be considered: the Diablerets International Alpine Film Festival (1969) and the Banff Mountain Film Festival (1976). These events became annual landmarks for mountaineers, filmmakers, tourists, nature lovers, and advertisers. At these festivals, organizers selected films for screening, and juries adjudicated film awards and prizes. Much as these films showed the exploits of the mountaineering world, they also helped create the cultural image of the ideal mountaineer who was seen through the camera lens. The image of the “mountain man” will be examined to analyze how cinema visually constructed this gender image, and how it evolved. Did this image include or exclude women? Where can we find women in these festivals, if they are excluded from the films? Are they present as organizers, volunteers or directors? This paper will try to uncover, on one hand, the image of the woman mountaineer in the later half of the 20th century and on the other, the often invisible work done by women at these festivals. Various archival sources from the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and Swiss National Film Archive will be combined with literary and gender theory (Julie Rak, 2021) in this historical analysis.