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2023

‘The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.'
–The Age of the World Picture, Martin Heidegger

In this essay, I engage with the issue of whiteness and white identity creation in early expeditionary films. I take whiteness to be a social construct that first emerged as a self-fashioning force during the early years of the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century – a period that Maldonado-Torres (2007) identifies as the start of modern colonialism. The emergence of anthropology and expeditions in the 18th and 19th centuries played a significant role in the consolidation of this white identity, relying, as both did, on pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference to justify their existence. In recent years, anthropology has been reassessed in light of decoloniality. Yet, despite the close connection and entanglement of anthropology and expeditions (including expeditionary anthropology), the role of expeditionary films in the creation of whiteness, white identity, and coloniality has been less scrutinised.

Here I focus on one film, John Noel’s The Epic of Everest (1924), which the BFI restored and re-released in 2013. It is widely regarded as a masterpiece of early expeditionary film, which BFI Head Curator Robin Baker describes as the ‘first film to reach cinemas across the world […] that captured the reality of what the world of the Himalayas was like’[1] – and so shaping generations of armchair travellers’ imaginations regarding the Himalayas and its people. I would go further and argue that The Epic of Everest also provided a visual blueprint and visual grammar that has since become baked into the DNA of successive representations of Everest and indigenous groups in the Himalayas.[2] In this essay, I will therefore seek to unpick and examine the specific conditions and context surrounding The Epic of Everest in the late Victorian and early twentieth century and expose the mechanisms deployed in the film that helped to actively self-fashion a particular form of white masculinity that continues to this day.

Expeditionary Film and Ethnographic Film

Expedition films today conjure images of colonial expansionism, scientific discovery, and bearded men pursuing adventure. Yet in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, expeditions and accompanying films came in many forms, including official state expeditions, museum-sponsored zoological trips, and amateur entrepreneurial adventurers documenting their travels, to name a few. Bell, Brown and Robert (2013) argue that these expeditions and amateur ‘expeditionary anthropology’ were, in practice, indistinguishable from early 'ethnographic fieldwork' and that any difference between the two was ‘largely a question of different travel arrangements and self-positioning’. The amateur expeditionary anthropologist and ethnographic researcher immersed in long-term fieldwork both concerned themselves with the colonial act of ‘gathering and creation of knowledge about other communities and places through travel and collecting.’

In both cases, the focus at first may have been on extracting physical items, but this quickly shifted to collecting data on people and landscapes by accumulating still and moving images. So, whether fieldwork was conducted by the expeditioner or the anthropologist, and involved continual travel or more immersed observation, it was scientific research (as it was then defined) that tended to underpin both pursuits, and when it came to documenting their findings and experiences through film, the two activities shared many commonalities. Indeed, newly captured territories and new technologies[3] to document travels offered expeditioners and anthropologists the opportunity for social mobility through profit and prestige. As Bell, Brown and Robert (2013) write: ‘Global capitalism made it possible for a small segment of the world’s population to have adventures afield, glossed as “scientific” or “anthropological.”’ The ethnographic researcher perhaps worked to obscure the technology they used, whereas the expeditionary anthropologist delighted in ‘the sheer materiality of their endeavour’, but the films produced by both were ultimately rooted in two sides of the same colonial coin, in that both were made possible by colonialism and in turn served the Empire through knowledge accumulation.

Today this landscape has changed. Expeditionary film (if it exists at all) tends to fall into one of any number of other categories, such as adventure film, documentary film, travel film or vlog. Likewise, ethnographic film is today defined in a way that did not exist in its infant years. Yet, in the case of ethnographic film, conceptions and definitions remain highly contested. In the past fifty years, attempts at a definition have shifted according to evolving 'ways of seeing' due to specific theoretical turns (ontological, decolonial, and so on) and 'ways of doing' primarily due to technological developments. Today even often agreed upon criteria when discussing ethnographic films, such as the need for ethnographic film to be grounded in a practice of embedded participant-observation, remain disputed due to the inherently colonial and extractive basis of this relationship. As Bejarano, Juárez, García, Goldstein (2019) write:

‘Ethnographic research was -- and still is -- based on a unidirectional subject/object knowledge transfer, in which information flows from (knowable) object to (knowing) subject, with the latter able to represent that information to others of its kind.’ (De 28)

As Bejarano, Juárez, García, Goldstein (2019) continue: today’s question should therefore be less about whether ‘early anthropologists colluded with colonisers to facilitate colonial rule than to examine the inscription of coloniality in anthropology's DNA.’ The intention here, therefore, is not to offer a contemporary working definition of ethnographic film or ‘ethnographicness’ nor to apply a contemporary definition in retrospect to The Epic of Everest and its counterparts. It is instead to examine the inscription left by The Epic of Everest. I would argue that the scrutiny of The Epic of Everest is necessary for three reasons. Firstly, an analysis of Epic exposes the extent to which ideals of adventure and travel underpinned and informed early filmic representations of the 'exotic' and how expeditionary film and ethnographic film are still entangled today in forms of what Maldonado-Torres calls coloniality. Secondly, and this connects to the first point, an examination of Epic and its broader socio-economic context sheds light on how Britain actively self-fashioned itself as a nation and how a newly emerged middle-class self-fashioned a specific image of white masculinity to serve Britain’s colonial ends. Thirdly, an examination of Epic also sheds light on the emergence of a tension in filmmaking in anthropology between a desire to document and a need to entertain that continues to this day. It is these three factors I will focus on below.

Expeditions to Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924

The Epic story began in 1913 when a young British army officer named Captain John Noel snuck into Tibet dressed as an ‘Indian Mohammedan’. Six years later, and shortly after World War 1, Noel recounted his Tibet experiences in the form of a lantern slide show at the Royal Geographic Society (RGS). Thomas Holdich, then president of the RGS, was won over and officially proposed the ascent of Everest as ‘the outstanding task which remains for geographers to accomplish.’ The British had already claimed the highest mountain after giving it the name of George Everest, the lead surveyor in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. However, no one in Britain had ever been within 40 miles of the mountain. So the RGS founded the Mount Everest Committee and set a reconnaissance mission to the Himalayas in motion.

Nepal was closed to foreigners, so Tibet and the mountain's northern face became the focus. It took two years of Anglo-Tibetan negotiations before the Dalai Lama permitted British explorers access, on the condition that the British would provide weapons to help Tibet defend itself on its Chinese border and that the expedition would respect Tibetan customs and religions. So, in 1921, the first reconnaissance expedition set off to the Himalayas. Although the mountaineers failed to reach the summit, they did identify a route, and so a year later, a second British-led expedition returned – this time with Noel and his cameras in tow. This 1922 expedition proved to be a reconnaissance expedition of a different kind. Despite failing to reach the summit again, the expedition enabled Noel to gauge the lay of the land as a filmmaker, including the specific challenges of filming at 7,000 meters and developing film in a tent at 5,000 metres. Noel would edit the footage he shot into a film titled Climbing Mount Everest, which will be discussed later in part because it is a fascinating counterpoint to the more well-known and celebrated film that he would shoot two years later. The filming of Climbing also focused Noel’s attention on the sheer logistics of the operation, and the expedition enabled Noel to return two later in 1924 with adapted cameras for the harsh conditions as well as a telephoto lens so that he would be able to capture climbers above 7,000 metres. In 1924 he even bought a piece of land in Darjeeling where Noel would develop his film. As Davis (2020) writes:

‘The film itself would travel to Darjeeling in relays of porters and horsemen, carried in air- and watertight containers, which had been custom-built in London. Altogether Noel had fourteen cameras, including one pocket-sized model, designed to carry just two minutes of film, for the men to take on the summit attempt.’

It was an example of how technological developments and innovation enabled new ways of seeing and filmmaking. Yet despite the evident benefit of the 1922 expedition in terms of logistical, technological planning, and location scouting, Noel also returned to London after 1922 with a particular idea and shape for Epic forming in his mind – one that would seek to pull together and visualise several different popular strands that had been fermenting and consolidating since the mid-Victorian period. These included ideals around masculinity, spiritualism, and nationhood, drawn from Romantism and middle-class anxieties around industrialisation. In Epic, Noel would seek to repackage and reformulate these elements into a rich and highly imaginative, if also violent and extractive, visual poem that would become one of the most-watched films in Britain in 1924. In many respects, Noel was building on the success of earlier narrativisations and imaginings of mountaineering, such as Albert Smith's phenomenally successful lantern slide show in the mid-1850s about Mont Blanc, which helped popularise mountaineering amongst the middle classes.

Mountaineering as Self-Fashioning Whiteness

Mountaineering as a sport only consolidated as a middle-class leisure activity in the mid-Victorian period, and culminated with what, in hindsight, is considered the Golden Age of mountaineering in 1865. Hansen (1995) has charted this emergence and argues that mountaineering in the mid-Victorian period provided a cultural focal point around which middle-class men – or ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ – began to actively self-fashion and shape a new identity for themselves. Improvements in infrastructure, such as rail networks and steamboats, enabled travel, and a general air of colonial and capitalist expansion encouraged ideas of physical and moral well-being, patriotism and traditional ideas of chivalry and honour to combine and forge a new image of masculinity. This white male self-fashioning was cultivated and institutionalised through certain rituals and organisations such as the Royal Geographic Society (RGS), founded in 1830 and the Alpine Club, founded in 1857. These institutions forged close ties with the military and the scientific and political elite to fuel and cultivate this identity and actively promote and encourage a thirst for adventure. A robust print and image media eco-system dedicated to distributing images of foreign lands and peoples also established itself to feed an ever-increasing appetite amongst the middle classes. As the century developed, this media landscape would also expand to include video production companies which would even provide instructional how-to videos for mountaineers, such as the Pathé Baby shorts in the 1920s – which today might be viewed as a form of early Instagram reel.

As well as drawing from Romanticism, this mid-Victorian image of masculinity also drew from movements such as Muscular Christianity and public-school athleticism which both centred ‘patriotic duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, masculinity, and the moral and physical beauty of athleticism’. Macfarlane (2003) captures changing sensibilities in the following:

‘The deeper one advances into the [nineteenth] century, the more entangled become concepts of risk with concepts of selfhood and self-knowledge. In contemporary journals, biographies and expedition accounts, certain themes and attitudes towards wild landscapes recur. Foremost among them is that of victory and defeat, of struggle and reward. In these books nature is figured usually as an enemy, or lover, to be vanquished or ravished according to how you saw it. While an alertness to the desolate beauties of wilderness remains in place, what moves decisively to the fore is a sense of a wild landscape, with all its hazards and asperities, as a testing-ground – a stage on which the self can be best illuminated […] Importantly, exposure to the risks and beauties of wilderness didn’t only elucidate one’s personal qualities; it could also actively improve them.’

Epic, then, is not so much a beginning in terms of ideas and representations. Instead, it is a visual narrativisation of pre-existing ideas concerning a newly emerged image of white masculinity centred around the leisure activity of mountaineering. In Epic, these threads are complex and knotty and sometimes contradictory. Still, it is possible to identify three strands that help fashion this idea of white masculinity in Epic, which establishes these ideals as a visual blueprint and visual grammar that inscribes itself on all future visual depictions of the mountain and its people. These are (1) race, (2) spiritualism (be it of a uniquely militaristic and muscular form) and (3) nation-building. These all fall under a fourth category of storytelling, narrativisation, and mythmaking.

(1) Race

Bradburd (2013) has noted the contrasting depictions of representations of the indigenous population and ‘natives’ in Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack’s two films Grass (1925) and King Kong (1933):

‘In Grass Bakhtiari tribesmen are presented as an attractive and, to a large degree, he people, and Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison’s expedition to the Bakhtiari has features of a nostalgic visit to distant kin still living in the ancestral home. In contrast, the expedition dramatized in Kong brings the travelers and viewers into contact with dangerous, perhaps monstrous, others, dramatizing and accentuating the differences between the authors and audience and those subjected to their gaze.’

A comparison of Noel's 1922 film Climbing and 1924 film Epic charts a similar trajectory. As already discussed, Climbing marked Noel’s first actual visit to Everest, and his 1922 film is grounded in the ethnographic and travelogue tradition. Climbing is, in fact, less about climbing and mountaineering than it is Tibet. Climbing is structured into four parts, starting in Darjeeling in India, 350 miles from Everest, and it is only the final part at around the 55-minute mark of the 80-minute running time that the expedition enters Everest’s foothills. The film is largely descriptive – focusing on botany, landscapes and Tibetans. Noel’s representations of Tibetans is grounded in the colonial and Orientalist framework of the time, but, if anything, the inter-titles describing Tibetans are respectful and admiring. The women are attractive, the men are strong, and the people friendly, courteous and clever. Climbing's ambulatory pace also allows it to hone in and focus on certain cultural practices, including dance rituals, for which the intertitles provide a series of captions. The film is part travelogue, part ethnography and part cultural listicle. It has no clear protagonist or agenda beyond documentation. The limited shots of Everest reflect Noel's adjustment to shooting at a high altitude, but the imagery and intertitles on the indigenous population are curious and open. This cannot be said of Epic, made two years later.

Epic charts a similar route across the Himalayas. Yet, this later film is dramatic rather than descriptive and contrives a series of dichotomies to create tension and narrative excitement. The shift in tone is striking. Epic opens with dramatic shots of Everest and a poetic register that draws from Romanticism and the world of make-believe. The viewer is told they are entering a 'far-off land' which 'to the explorer is the last of the world's great lodestones of romance and adventure'. At one moment midway through the film, a sequence of climbers disappearing into the mountain is accompanied by an intertitle that reads:

It is of this Fairyland, that you shall now see that the Tibetan legends speak of Imps, Gnomes, Goblins and Hairy Men holding high revels during the frozen night.

The film’s narrative – and increasingly expressionist imagery – becomes stylised to such an extent that it becomes completely divorced from reality. In short, Epic is much less concerned with documentation, and even reality, and much more concerned with storytelling and imagination. Perhaps the clearest indicator of this is Noel's first introduction to Tibetans in Epic:

Amid dirt and mud and stinking refuse, the people live with their dogs and cattle in these hovels begrimed with the smoke of the ardo fires. The men and women exist from the cradle to the stone slab, on which their dead bodies are hacked to pieces without a wash the whole of their lives.

Noel is determined to revile the Tibetans and to centre and mythologise the white male climbers – the latter of which is the second clearest indicator of where Epic departs from its predecessor. The Tibetans are described as impure and dirty in contrast to the purity and nobleness of the white climber-heroes. These climber-heroes (George Mallory and Andrew Irvine et al.) are introduced individually and positioned centre stage. Pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference are used to glorify a version of white masculinity – and to also position the white climbers as the natural inheritors of the mountain.

(2) Spiritualism

This connects to a second thread as it’s not only the purity of the white male climbers who are contrasted to the dirt of the Tibetans. The mountain itself is also positioned as a place of purity in contrast to the Tibetans. In other words, the ‘mountain space’ is aligned with the British mountaineers, who are positioned as the mountain's natural inheritors. It is the white men alone who have the right to enter the mountain (as one intertitle reads: ‘Such is their birthright. And such is their destiny’). Christian imagery is invoked as part of this white self-fashioning. Driscoll and Atwood (2021) go as far as to call this 'mountaineering religion' and note the extent to which, historically, mountaineers actively relied on a religious register when describing mountaineering. Indeed, in many cases, mountaineers went as far as to describe the emotional and embodied experience of alpine climbing as akin to a religious experience. This is captured in visual form in Epic, where Everest is positioned as a cathedral whose peak is touched by ‘heavenly realms’. The mountain has ‘a sacred character’ wherein ‘pure sanctuaries of ice and snow’ lie. Mallory’s and Irving’s deaths, too, are couched in similar language, the mountain positioned as ‘a grave of pure white snow.’

One of the characteristic features of whiteness is often its very invisibility, yet in the case of Epic, the landscape of snow and ice stands in as a frequent identifier of whiteness and purity and spiritualism. The climbers are not the direct objects of these identifiers, but the climbers are aligned with mountain space, and so self-fashioned through the descriptive power of the mountain in the same way that worshippers in a church are aligned with the religious symbolism of wall paintings, statues and architecture. Also, in positioning Everest as a place of worship – as a spiritual sanctuary – it also underscores the idea that only the initiated are invited and welcome on the mountain. As with many other religious spaces, it is exclusive and only open to the gentlemanly capitalist. As Victorian Alpinist Stutfield makes clear in 1918: 'Their invasion by unorthodox people, or in unorthodox ways, is to us a profanation of hollowed mysteries’ (Driscoll and Atwood, 2021). Significantly, Everest is also positioned – as Macfarlane noted earlier – as a space where self-knowledge and self-improvement can be attained – again, much like the role of a cathedral in a religion.

(3) Nationhood

Muscular Christianity originated in the mid-Victorian period and centred physical prowess, discipline, self-sacrifice and patriotism. It was an idea introduced and cultivated in British public schools, out of which the many climbers – and aspirational middle classes – emerged. As French (1994) writes:

‘They were generally not the visionaries or the viceroys, but the middle-class stalwarts who formed the backbone of the imperial administration. Their training had given them the discreet arrogance and lack of self-doubt that was required to fight the Great War, or administer thousands of square miles of frontier territory with the aid of nothing but a clipped voice and a light rattan cane.’

One of the most prominent elements in Epic is its military register. In other words, Everest was not just a self-fashioning of white men in terms of chivalry, honour and self-improvement, but also, as a collective or ‘army’, a self-fashioning of Britain itself, especially in light of World War 1. As in war, the stakes in high-altitude mountaineering are life and death and as the climbers approach Everest, the summit attempt is described as a ‘battle’ in which men ‘march’ as an ‘army of five hundred men and animals.’ It is a militaristic register that affirms Britain’s position as a colonial superpower comprising of ‘supermen’. At times, it is easy to miss this amongst the Romanticism and poetry of Epic – but it is also a work of propaganda. The film’s nationalistic tone, along with imagery of conquest and ownership, reverberates in successive depictions of mountain climbing in the Himalayas.

Epic was not a state-sponsored film, but the tone it deploys at times reads like an early forerunner to German Bergfilme and its later appropriation by the Nazis. In many respects, the high adventure, narrativisation and nationalism in German Bergflme – which critics have described as a genre of German mountaineering film-equivalent to the American Western – was director John Noel’s intentions with Epic. Indeed, the sheer force of the tonal shift regarding Noel’s differing depictions of Tibetans in Climbing and Epic belies an anxiety, even vulnerability, in the filmmaker – not to mention masculinity and nationhood in Britain in the early 1920s. Epic was released only six years after the end of World War 1. Yet Noel’s determination to build in tension was also tied up in the fact that for Noel, Epic was a commercial endeavour that needed to make a profit.

Climbing, which had been partially funded by the RGS and Alpine Club, had only very moderate success at the box office, and so Noel was not given funding for the filming of the 1924 expedition. So in 1923, Noel set up a production company called Explorer Films Ltd to make Epic. From the start, it was a commercial endeavour, and Noel funded much of the expedition from his pocket. As a consequence, Noel needed Epic to appeal to and entertain as broad a Western audience as possible because his financial livelihood was tied to the success or the failure of the film’s ability to hold audiences. Although Noel came from a well-to-do family, he did not have limitless finances. Yet, he put £8000 into the expedition – a massive amount at the time – and secured additional funds by selling exclusive image rights to The Times in advance, who paid £1,000 for the rights. Noel also established links with Pathé News, a producer of newsreels and documentaries, to whom he sent updates throughout the expedition.

In other words, Noel needed the film to sell and, as a market-driven product, this affected both its structure and tone as well as its broader eco-system and audience. The images of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white heroism’ that Noel built into Epic at an individual and national level were, therefore, consequences of capitalist and market forces. Even before the expedition set off in 1924, Noel sought to drum up hype around Epic in advance through a series of pre-expedition publicity events. As the sole owner of the film’s rights, Noel alone was able to make decisions regarding content and distribution, and it is clear from the pre-expedition publicity that he had already started to formulate the narrative structure of the film and ways in which he would tie together its various threads. In an interview in Bioscope, Noel told the reporter that Epic should be 'not merely a stereotyped record of travel but ... should embody, in the form of a continuous narrative, the romantic spirit of this fight between Man and Nature in her most formidable aspect.' Hollywood and the silent feature film – often consisting of swash-buckling characters and epic narratives – and the arrival of large-capacity picture palaces in Britain in the 1920s, no doubt fuelled Noel's vision and intentions. Noel was certainly highly influenced by Italian mountain photographer Vittorio Sella and by the films of Herbert Ponting who shot Walter Scott’s Antarctic expedition of 1910-11 but, entertainment not truth, became the primary driver and one in which the heroism of the white male climbers was paramount. The publicity exercise carried through to the first screenings of the film in London in 1924.

At the film's premiere, and driven in part by concern that the death of Mallory and Irving was far from the optimal climax envisaged, Noel illegally ‘brought’ over five Tibetan lamas to 'perform' as part of a prologue to the film. Noel's decision to do so caused a diplomatic fallout with the Tibetan government, effectively resulting in the Tibetan authorities banning all future expeditions to Everest via Tibet, which remained intact until the Tibetans required military support in 1933. The ‘Affair of the Dancing Lamas’, as it came to be known, is a case in which British explorers not only extracted depictions of people through images but also the literal extraction of Tibetans to promote the film. The then prime minister of Tibet complained to British authorities: and demanded ‘the immediate return to Tibet and handing over of the monks, who have been taken away deceitfully.’ Hansen (1996) notes that Noel misread the global reach of his film as it was Tibetans in the UK, India and Tibet that saw footage of the lamas in the press, and argues that the 'lamas of Everest thus appear to be an early example of the complex process by which ‘modern modes of representation (e.g. film and video) have helped to reconstitute colonised subjectivities'. This may well be the case. Still, the lasting legacy of the affair and certainly of Epic itself is that it established a visual blueprint and narrative that remains in iterative forms in films about Everest and the region today.

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I have not discussed in this essay the myriad ways this blueprint remains inscribed on visual depictions today. In many cases, the three identified threads above (race, spiritualism, nationhood) have shape-shifted and today been rolled into other more acceptable forms – such as white rights to Everest today being justified along the lines of overcrowding, pollution, and the corruption of the Nepalese government. This is not to say that these aren’t real issues that require attention, just that they are often invoked by the very same white climbers that evoked racial superiority in the 1920s. The justifications have differed, but the underlying power dynamics remain and white mountaineers rarely, if ever, question their role when it comes to contemporary issues on the mountain. In recent years it has perhaps become most visible in strained relations between high-altitude porters and (often) white western climbers whose desire to climb often relies on subaltern relationships established in the colonial period. One only has to imagine the relationship in reverse: Nepalis coming to England to climb and being supported by British porters who die each year to enable this desire.

Interestingly, much of the myth-making surrounding the conquering of Everest in the 1920s entailed climbers downplaying Everest’s significance as much as it did deify the mountain. Mallory, famously enamoured with Everest and its Romance, is often quoted as replying to the question, “Why climb Everest?” with the retort “Because it’s there”. Likewise, Francis Younghusband, who headed up the Mount Everest Committee, claimed that there was ‘no more use in climbing Mount Everest than in kicking a football about, or dancing’ but that its conquest would ‘elevate the human spirit’ and give men the feeling that ‘they were getting the upper hand on the earth, and that they were acquiring a true mastery of their surroundings.’ Yet mountain climbing helped legitimise exploration and broader imperial expansion ‘by transforming imperialism from an abstraction into something tangible and accessible to ambitious professional men’ (Hansen 1995), and that had – and continues to depend upon – extractive relationships and coloniality. Mallory’s retort is recounted in the Hollywood film Everest (2015), and it is a phrase that contains within it a set of hidden agendas and assumptions: ‘Because we can…’ ‘Because we will…’ ‘Because we’re white…’.

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Bibliography

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxKprBbltTN7l0ZNjXcNOXwTLqG55Z8WWi

[2]Note that I unpick a number of these inscriptions in later films of Everest in my desktop documentary An Image of Whiteness.

[3]William Kennedy Laurie Dickson invented the first movie camera called the Kinetograph.