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Documentary, The Fight to Film Everest, BBC, 2015
#Everest #Documentary #MountEverest
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00:00Music
00:21In 1963, an American expedition did something never before achieved.
00:27They filmed from the summit of Mount Everest.
00:30Before them is a sight to lift the heart and bring tears to the eyes.
00:35These are the first moving pictures ever taken from the summit of Everest.
00:41Narrated by Orson Welles, this film was the first time the world saw the view from its tallest mountain.
00:49But these cameras were also capturing something else.
00:54The final chapter in the conquest not only of Everest, but all the Himalayas' great peaks.
01:01This was the epic era of mountaineering.
01:06An era when filmmakers helped turn mountaineering into a global struggle for prestige.
01:12There was this sense that there was an international race going on.
01:15Nothing was more important than those mountains.
01:18Between the 1920s and the 1960s, the highest mountains on earth became symbols of status and achievement.
01:27So come in the fight for the hochkipfel, the best mannes tugenden to use.
01:34This was really mountaineering as politics.
01:37The largest expeditions ever assembled became displays of national power.
01:42The expeditions themselves were branded with empire.
01:47From the beginning, filmmakers risked everything to capture these great spectacles.
01:52This was something that nobody had done before, to climb up to those levels and film under extreme conditions.
01:58And their films didn't just immortalize these historic expeditions, but helped inspire and finance them.
02:06In an era when the great peaks became great propaganda.
02:11The epic era of mountaineering required an epic stage.
02:32The Himalayas.
02:35A mountain range on a scale unmatched anywhere.
02:39It's a great arc of mountains stretching for over 1500 miles all the way from Afghanistan in the west to Burma in the east.
02:51It's just on a colossal scale.
02:53The world's 14 highest mountains are all in the Himalayas.
02:57The only peaks on the planet that reach over 8,000 metres.
03:02In 1913, a British army officer and filmmaker called John Nowell gazed from Darjeeling in India towards these distant peaks.
03:14He dreamed of seeing one in particular, the tallest, Everest.
03:20Everest had been measured from afar by the British in 1856.
03:28And such was a wizardry of differential calculus and mathematics that they could literally peer across the skyline to the peaks that scored the horizon.
03:38And from considerable distances, come up with astonishingly accurate measurements of their height.
03:45Once they discovered that this was the tallest mountain in the world, it captured the imagination.
03:50But before Nowell, no one had been within 40 miles of the mountain.
03:57Because while the British could see it, they could not approach it.
04:02Everest wasn't just shielded by the vast Himalayan range, but by the two nations on whose borders it sat.
04:09Nepal to the south, and Tibet to the north.
04:13These were nations caught between the great powers of their day.
04:18The British Raj, China, and the Russian Empire.
04:23To survive, both Tibet and Nepal had isolated themselves to outside influence.
04:30Throughout the 19th century, people have been trying to get to Tibet.
04:35Explorers, travellers, scholars, soldiers, missionaries, colonial officers.
04:41And effectively, Tibet had been closed to outsiders.
04:44None of which was going to stop John Nowell.
04:49In 1913, Nowell disguised himself as a pilgrim and crossed illegally into Tibet with two companions,
04:57determined to photograph a route to Everest.
05:01He was about to set in motion the epic era of mountaineering.
05:06This is a photograph of my father in 1913 in the disguise that he adopted to go to Mount Everest.
05:14And he had this coat made.
05:16In his case, he had to blacken his face with boot polish in order to affect a better disguise.
05:22He realised that he was going to have to avoid habitation because he didn't want to be seen.
05:30And so he had chosen this rather slightly obscure route.
05:34And he's written down here that this was an unguarded pass which has hitherto never been explored by a white man.
05:41It was incredibly courageous, you know.
05:45I mean, you read his packing list.
05:47Disassembled rifles, a revolver, automatic pistols.
05:52There's no doubt about it.
05:53They knew what kind of welcome they were going to get.
05:56Noel's photographs chart an eight-week odyssey.
06:00He was the first Westerner to come within 40 miles of the mountain.
06:05And he got close enough to see that there was a series of ridges still between him and Everest.
06:11But no one had gotten that close.
06:13But he had also been spotted by local militia.
06:18And they fired a shot in my father's direction.
06:23And they didn't realise that, A, he was well supplied with arms.
06:26And that also he was a very fine shot.
06:28And so when he launched a shot, they disappeared rather quickly.
06:34His cover blown, Noel's journey was over.
06:38But he had proved that Everest could be reached.
06:42The initial scheme of going to Everest, this was very much the creation of John Noel before the First World War.
06:50Having photographed a route to the mountain, next Noel would help inspire the first ever expedition to climb it and film it.
07:00In 1919, five months after the end of the First World War, John Noel addressed a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London.
07:14It's very modern, you know, lantern slides and a smoky room.
07:18He approaches the podium.
07:20There's cigar smoke all over the place.
07:24Noel projected slides of his journey to Everest captured six years earlier.
07:30And so Noel began his talk saying that had it not been for the war, Everest would have been achieved.
07:41And we must achieve it in the wake of the war.
07:45And everybody erupted in applause.
07:48Noel's audience was filled with veterans of the war.
07:51You can't understand who these men were without factoring in the reality that they spent four years and four months with the war.
08:00It was eye-deep in hell, in the blood, mud and agony of the Western Front.
08:05To men jaded by years of industrialized warfare, Everest had new meaning.
08:11By then, the mountains almost become a symbol of regeneration for a nation bled white by the war.
08:19His presentation is a huge hit.
08:22It all begins with that incredible evening in March of 1919.
08:28Following Noel's address, a mission to climb Everest was proposed.
08:34An Everest committee was formed.
08:37And in 1922, the first great expedition of the epic era of mountaineering departed from northern India.
08:47Filming it is the man who had inspired it, John Noel.
08:52This expedition carries all the hallmarks of the epic era of mountaineering to come.
08:59The first is its huge scale.
09:03Over 300 pack animals and 100 Sherpa porters recruited from Nepal carry several tons of supplies.
09:13The second hallmark is the expedition's military structure.
09:18In command is General Charles Bruce.
09:22He and the other 13 British, Noel included, had all served in the First World War.
09:28Military guys understand logistics.
09:31They understand moving materials from A to B and fighting a campaign.
09:35There was a symbiotic relationship between the army and the climbing community.
09:42The third hallmark is that this is no leisure pursuit.
09:46The expedition's scale and lofty goal means that national prestige is at stake.
09:53How it was presented to the public was very much as a kind of expression of national will and ability.
09:59And this will bring glory to the nation.
10:01The expeditions themselves were branded with empire.
10:07Nearly two weeks after leaving Darjeeling, the expedition enters Tibet.
10:14Passage to the mountain had been secured in return for British aid in Tibet's simmering conflict with China.
10:21The final permission to go into Tibet was part of an arms deal.
10:26So, Everest was never divorced from the geopolitical ebb and flow of empire.
10:32It was always integral to it.
10:39No one has ever filmed in Tibet before Noel.
10:43His camera captures the first moving images the Western world will see of this hidden land.
10:48It's the first time that a film was made in Tibet.
10:53And it's the first really ethnographic film, or film about the people of Tibet.
10:58It is a deeply feudal society. You know, a third of the people are in monasteries or nunners.
11:06It is, you know, life expectancy is not good.
11:08There is no education, you know, it's basic.
11:13It's not just the aristocracy that's filmed.
11:15He films the man in the street who comes up to look at the camera and smiles.
11:20The women out in their tents churning milk, who are obviously embarrassed by the camera.
11:25I think it's delightful to have captured those kind of images.
11:31As the landscape becomes more alien, so does the culture.
11:36At the final monastery before the mountain, Noel films a religious festival.
11:42Dancers wear suits of human bones and play drums of human skin.
11:47Most of Noel's film of this expedition is of the journey through Tibet and its culture.
11:58Because the filming of the mountain, like the climbing of it,
12:02would prove harder than anyone could have imagined.
12:10It was the moonshot of the 1920s.
12:13They were going somewhere.
12:14They didn't even know whether they could survive there.
12:16They didn't know whether they could breathe.
12:18It was just so beyond ordinary human experience.
12:25As the expedition heads into the unknown, Everest appears on film for the first time.
12:37Base camp is established at nearly 5,500 metres.
12:42Above even the tallest peak of Europe,
12:44Noel sets up the world's highest ever photographic laboratory.
12:51He has a tent for developing his films that he sets up by the side of a glacial stream.
12:56His film and negative are sort of cracking brittle in the frozen temperatures.
13:01It was a nightmarish proposition because, you know, developers would freeze in the cold, dust would enter the tent and ruin emulsions.
13:10He sets up a wee little stove fueled by yak dung to try and dry out his negatives.
13:16He was a truly original photographer and filmmaker.
13:23Nothing escaped his imagination.
13:25Fighting altitude sickness, Noel shoots and processes 10,000 feet of film.
13:31Two attempts are made on the summit.
13:38Noel can only film them disappearing up the vast slopes.
13:44Out of his camera's range, each party sets new altitude records.
13:49But these are conditions no man has before experienced.
13:54Noel films the two defeated teams returning.
14:00Basically the camp is too low, they give it a good try, but they are just not in the right place with the right stuff at the right time.
14:11With the monsoon approaching, the expedition retreats from the mountain and the long journey back to Britain begins.
14:21In London, Noel's film accompanied the climbers' lecture tour and was not widely seen.
14:28Everest remained unclimbed.
14:31But the expedition hadn't been for nothing.
14:34In many ways it was a good first attempt.
14:36I mean, you talk about failure, well they didn't do it, but they learnt a great deal.
14:40The mountain hadn't been climbed, but there was a strong sense that we've got to go back.
14:45Noel shared the climbers' desire to return to the mountain.
14:50But a return expedition was in doubt.
14:56The first expedition had cost a colossal £12,500, over £600,000 today.
15:03The Everest Committee could not raise that sum again quickly.
15:09But Noel had a radical solution in mind.
15:13He would form a film company, find investors, and fund the next expedition himself.
15:20In exchange for all film rights, he will give the Everest Committee £8,000,
15:29and in doing so also relieve them of the obligation of paying for the photographic work,
15:35which is essentially another contribution of £2,000, so £10,000.
15:40I mean, that's entrepreneurial brilliance.
15:43And it saves the RGS's bacon, because, you know, they need the cash.
15:47This is very expensive. It puts them back in the field.
15:49The same filmmaker who had inspired the first ever Everest expedition
15:55was now single-handedly financing the second.
16:04The expedition enters Tibet in 1924, along the same route as its predecessor.
16:12Expectations are high, not just among the climbers, but the British public.
16:16If you look at the amount of coverage in the Times and the newspapers,
16:21it's really remarkable.
16:23Given everything else that was going on in the world,
16:26there was a total expectation of success.
16:30At base camp, Noel shoots a portrait of the climbers.
16:34He was actually quite aware that many of the climbers didn't really want a filmmaker on the expedition.
16:39So, actually, Noel is quite discreet. He's sensitive to the explorer's needs.
16:45One figure finds his way to the centre of the line-up.
16:49This is George Mallory, second-in-command of the expedition,
16:54and the finest British climber of the age.
16:57Mallory famously said,
16:58this isn't Hollywood, why do we need a filmmaker?
17:02Filming was seen as kind of an unnecessary vulgarity.
17:06They didn't want a cameraman interfering with the climbers.
17:09What the climbers did not know
17:11was that Noel's film was going to change the course of mountaineering history.
17:15As the expedition prepares for the climb,
17:19Noel begins putting into practice the lessons learned from 1922.
17:24He realised that there was no way you could develop film on the mountain,
17:30so he did the extraordinary.
17:32He bought land in Darjeeling, he built a photographic studio,
17:36and he arranged a relay system.
17:39So he's sending back his film on runners and on yaks
17:43to have this footage developed and processed.
17:47Without having to develop overnight,
17:50now Noel can concentrate exclusively on his cinematography.
17:55He uses coloured tinting to create atmosphere,
17:58as the men struggle across jagged, glacial ice.
18:02I really think he has captured the enormity of it,
18:07the desolation.
18:10I think with the tinting,
18:11it's given us a very good impression of the temperature.
18:15I can feel it.
18:17Chilly.
18:19There's artistry in this film.
18:21Shots of high-speed winds on the ridges of mountains catching the clouds.
18:26There are shots of sunlight moving across the surface of glaciers
18:30that are just magic to watch.
18:33Noel has with him 14 cameras.
18:35Here he demonstrates his primary cine camera.
18:38It features several of his own innovations.
18:43Electric motors allow both time-lapse and slow motion.
18:48Rubber casing prevents freezing.
18:51Adjustments reduce static electricity that can damage the film.
18:55If you look at his film technique itself, he pioneered in so many ways.
19:02His use of lenses, his use of slow motion, his use of aperture.
19:07All of these techniques that hadn't yet been used, certainly not in the Himalayas.
19:14Perhaps the greatest feat of filmmaking of its day was about to unfold.
19:21Noel climbs with his cameras to around 6,700 metres,
19:26the third of six camps and the limit of his endurance.
19:29Here he locates a ridge to film the final summit teams.
19:36That's my father with one of his porters looking for a suitable place to position the cameras.
19:42No one has ever filmed before at these altitudes.
19:46He said on occasions he was so cold and so numb that he couldn't even think,
19:53let alone try and manipulate the cameras.
19:56Noel switches to his customised telephoto lens.
20:01What all of Britain hopes will be the ascent of Everest is about to begin.
20:06Two climbers, Somerville and Norton, depart with their porters to the higher camps for the first summit attempt.
20:16At nearly two miles distant, no one has ever filmed at this range before.
20:21As the climbers recede into distant specks, Everest moves to centre stage.
20:31And the star of the film is the mountain.
20:33This kind of elemental colossus that's constantly just outside the tent.
20:39I mean, that's the great brilliance of this film, is that you begin to understand the scale of the objective.
20:50And you're an increasingly weak and ill and uncertain creature in front of it.
20:58Norton and Somerville return two days later, lucky to be alive.
21:05Snow blind and in agony, Norton is carried to his tent.
21:09Now the final assault begins.
21:18From afar, Noel films George Mallory and his climbing partner Sandy Irvin as they depart with their porters.
21:26Using bottled oxygen, they are about to climb higher than any human before them.
21:32You can hardly see them in, they're like little ants, aren't they?
21:37You just see them at a distance.
21:39You're incredibly fragile against this backdrop that, you know, they're gone.
21:45But now you can even begin to see in this footage the mist rolling in across the northeast ridge.
21:51Nobody knew whether it was even physically possible for Mallory and Irvin to reach the summit.
21:59The drive to climb these peaks for the first time was pushing men way beyond the limits of perhaps what was sensible.
22:10Medicine just didn't know what was going to happen.
22:13But perhaps Mallory's sense of risk had been shaped by his years spent on the Western Front.
22:21In a sense for that whole generation, it's an obvious reality that the war was the backdrop of their lives.
22:29At some level they had seen so much of death that it had no hold on them.
22:34I think life mattered less than the moments of being alive.
22:37And I think that is how they are able to accept the level of risk that actually Everest demanded.
22:48Dawn brings no news of Mallory and Irvin.
22:52Noel and his porters scan the peak for any sign of the men.
22:57A search party is sent to the highest camp.
23:01Noel's camera captures the extraordinary scenes that unfold.
23:05For me the most powerful sequence in the film is when they are waiting at a lower camp, waiting for men to return.
23:15And we see tiny little figures assembling blankets in the form of a cross.
23:22The figures are the search party and the cross is a pre-arranged signal.
23:28A symbol for, you know, effectively all hope is lost.
23:32You know, the men have died. There's no hope of rescue.
23:40Well, there's one figure staying by the, um...
23:43He's just slumped down in the snow.
23:47God, this is heartbreaking.
23:48It's very moving to see this even, you know, almost a hundred years later, um, as the moment where people knew, finally, that no one else was coming down.
24:03It must have been a crushing blow for Noel, behind the camera, which invested this money in taking a film of this expedition, and all of a sudden he's behind the camera thinking, oh no, tragedies happened.
24:17Noel then films Sherpas laying out a responding message to the search party above.
24:24So it's six blankets laid in threes, rows of blankets, the message, abandon all hope, come on down.
24:31And it's like they're laying out bodies in the snow, these blankets, it's beautiful, it's moving, it's terrible.
24:37Mallory's body was found in 1999.
24:45Irvin's remains on the mountain.
24:49It's unknown whether they reached the summit.
24:52The Great Everest Expedition of 1924, so certain of success, has ended in tragedy.
24:59Noel's hopes of being the man to film the climbing of Everest are dashed.
25:07Looming large is the massive £10,000 outlay that needs recouping.
25:15The pressure on him to make a successful film, particularly in 1924, was intense.
25:22He had to recoup that investment and he had to have a hit.
25:25The challenge for Noel is that the expectation is victory and the reality is death.
25:32His story has gone from being this incredible epic success to being a eulogy for the death of Mallory and Irvin.
25:41He's fretful, is it going to be successful?
25:44To make back the money, Noel hit upon an extraordinary way to publicize the film.
25:49He comes up with a scheme to get seven monks to come out and accompany the film at its opening.
25:59Here you have Tibetan monks who look glorious, playing tunes on human thigh bones.
26:06How could you not want to see that?
26:08The so-called dancing lamas that accompanied Noel's film were the talk of Britain.
26:15But news of this stunt, together with some of the scenes depicted in the film, was not received well in Tibet.
26:23The Tibetans are furious. These monks have been reduced in their mind to a carnival show.
26:29The religion's been insulted. This affair of the dancing lamas so offended the Tibetans that they refused any permission for future expeditions into Tibet.
26:46Thanks to Noel's film and its publicity, the British would be denied further access to Everest for nearly a decade.
26:53When Tibet readmitted Britain in 1933, they found the Himalayan game had changed.
27:08The great problem for the Mount Everest Committee in the 1930s is that other people, other countries, damn them, have shown up on the scene wanting to climb the Himalayan giant.
27:18There's lots of interest from Germany and Austria. There's interest from America. They want to come and play as well.
27:27Nazi Germany launched its first large-scale expedition to the Himalayas in 1934.
27:34Its target was Nanga Parbat, the ninth highest of the 8,000-meter peaks in what is modern-day Pakistan.
27:43The expedition was financed by the Nazi state.
27:46The film, introduced by the Nazi Reichsführer, left no doubt why they were here.
27:55The war for the Himalayas is the...
27:59It is the self-centered will of the people to defeat the material.
28:03They are there in order to further the standing of the German nation, driven by a sense of competition with the other great mountaineering nations, first and foremost the British.
28:17German mountaineers had come to believe that they could elevate their nation status during the disastrous aftermath of the First World War.
28:30To the Germans, the First World War left a deeper imprint on their mountaineering practice than it had even for the British.
28:38And mountaineering is clearly seen as a tool to regain German standing as a nation.
28:45And it becomes official policy of the German and Austrian Alpine Association.
28:52The German and Austrian Alpine Association soon aligned itself with Germany's rising right wing.
28:58A Jewish section is expelled from the German Alpine club in the early 1920s.
29:05These are sort of proto-Nazi policies.
29:09So it becomes associated with fascist politics early on.
29:13In the 1920s, Germany and Austria were home to the biggest climbing club in the world.
29:20This explosion in mountaineering's popularity saw a new genre of film flourish called Bergfilm, or mountain films.
29:31The Holy Mountain was one of these films.
29:35Tales of heroism and love set against the Alps.
29:38It wasn't long before Bergfilm was also drawn into the Nazi sphere.
29:46The Holy Mountain was notable for the debut of its female star, Lenny Riefenstahl.
29:53Riefenstahl was a former dancer who became a leading lady in Bergfilm in the 20s and 30s.
29:59In 1932, she directed her first mountain film, The Blue Light.
30:05Riefenstahl's film, like others in the genre, used striking imagery to hint at a greater struggle than simply man against mountain.
30:17The imagery of mountaineering is a really powerful thing, and Riefenstahl, I think, really nailed that.
30:24Among the Blue Light's many admirers was Germany's new Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
30:32Hitler employed Riefenstahl to film the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg.
30:37He also had her film the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the great showcase of Nazi values.
30:45Her balletic celebration of the physical form harked back to the dancing sequences of her mountain films.
30:55The quality of her work in the Olympics arose from her experience gained in the Bergfilm.
31:01I mean, I think the two are intimately linked. I mean, you know, you can't have the one without the other.
31:07It was at the Olympics that the Nazi takeover of German mountaineering and mountain film was made complete.
31:15Joining Riefenstahl's film was the premiere of the Nange Paabat expedition documentary.
31:20The expedition had been a disaster, with ten killed in storms.
31:27Their deaths are presented as heroic sacrifices for the fatherland.
31:34Coffins are shown wrapped in swastikas.
31:38And the Nazi Reichsfuhrer provides his stirring epitaph.
31:42So come in the fight for the High Gipfels, the most important duties of the menace.
31:51Unordnung in the military spirit of the community.
31:56Friendship.
31:58Fight, courage,
32:00and no point.
32:03The Germans weren't alone in harnessing the symbolic power of the Himalayas.
32:11A group of Britons, fearful of Nazi expansion, were about to turn Everest into the star of perhaps the greatest publicity stunt of the 1930s.
32:25In 1933, a camera crew films a British expedition to Everest arriving at Karachi, India.
32:32But this is not mountaineering equipment being unloaded.
32:37They were aircraft.
32:40And they were part of an audacious plan to be the first to fly over the summit of Mount Everest.
32:45The absolute crest.
32:58The pinnacle of the world.
33:00The last mystery, Blacker.
33:03Well, do realize you could put Everest on the map in three hours.
33:05The film portrayed the driving force behind the adventure as British plaque and derring-do.
33:14But forget the plaque.
33:16This was propaganda.
33:17The expedition was led by RAF officer, Air Commodore Peregrin Fellows.
33:24A man who had become fearful of the rapidly expanding Nazi Luftwaffe.
33:29My great uncle Peregrin had always been interested in the development of flight and he felt very, very strongly that we were in danger of going into a war with Germany totally unprepared in terms of air power.
33:47This flight over Everest was to be a PR stunt for the Royal Air Force.
33:52It was a romantic practical purpose.
33:54It was to catch the imagination of the public.
33:58They thought that, you know, Everest had always been the great sort of challenge to man.
34:03The costs were huge, around £1.2 million today.
34:10This finance came from private backers, with a stipulation that would cause the pilots great discomfort.
34:17That they cooperate fully with the seven strong camera crew.
34:22There's quite a few tales about the way the filmmakers imposed themselves upon the whole business.
34:29Here's poor old Pell having to act enthusiasm on the telephone.
34:38You could sort of see what agony he was in, can't you really?
34:42He couldn't stand publicity. He absolutely hated it.
34:45The filmmakers shadowed the pilots as they crossed India to their final base south of Nepal.
34:51Two customised aircraft based on cutting edge British technology set off to attempt a record breaking flight.
34:59That they hated doing, when they were all waving their hats.
35:02They said it was absolutely ghastly.
35:06Of course, the Englishmen, you can imagine.
35:09More enthusiasm, chaps! Come on!
35:12While Air Commodore fellows awaited news from the ground,
35:16McIntyre piloted the second aircraft.
35:18What these men were doing had the ring of a suicide mission.
35:26To save weight, they would not be carrying parachutes.
35:31Even if you bailed out, nobody would know where you were. There was no communication.
35:36A mad exploit, a mad exploit going up in an open cockpit plane in a heated suit.
35:43It should never have worked. It was mad.
35:46The vicious air currents the planes hit above the Himalayas are captured in the jolting camerawork.
35:50As they were approaching Everest and the southern flanks of Everest, they found themselves caught in this tremendous downdraft.
36:02McIntyre's aircraft was nearly dashed on the mountainside, barely cresting Everest's southern ridge.
36:08He describes the event as experiencing a terrific bump, like passing over an explosive factory when it explodes.
36:19The other aircraft made it over the summit and got the crucial shots.
36:25How extraordinary must that have been, knowing that no human being had ever seen this sight?
36:33None of the climbers, nobody, had ever seen Everest from this angle.
36:40I mean, it's really unbelievable.
36:48Both aircraft returned unscathed.
36:51Did you get there?
36:55What is it like?
36:58The film, eventually called Wings Over Everest, was a huge success.
37:03And would win an Oscar.
37:06For Air Commodore Fellows, the real success would be evident when Britain would have to fight its war years later.
37:13It did achieve its goal.
37:16I mean, after that, investment in air power did change substantially over the next few years.
37:23And we did have a fighting air force by the time war was declared.
37:28But there was another aspect to the Everest flight that makes it central to the epic era of mountaineering.
37:38As well as the film they shot, the pilots took extensive aerial photographs of the unknown southern approaches to the mountain.
37:44As we shall see, in time these photographs would be vital in planning a route by which the mountain could be climbed.
37:53For the rest of the 1930s, however, while Britain had captured Everest from the air, it could not conquer it from the ground.
38:07Expeditions to Everest in 1933 and 1936 ended in failure.
38:14These were smaller affairs than the great expeditions of the 1920s.
38:20Neither had official cameramen.
38:23Interest at home was fading.
38:25The Germans returned twice more to Nangar Parbat.
38:32Even with Luftwaffe supply drops, these expeditions also failed.
38:39But the films made of them continued to serve Nazi propaganda.
38:44In 1938, a final pre-war British expedition to Everest joined the other British efforts of the decade in failure.
38:56These were all truly dreadful failures.
38:59Long forgotten and overlooked expeditions.
39:02But in a way they had become symbols of the impotence of England and Britain on the eve of Hitler's war.
39:08As war broke out, Everest and the Himalayas' other 8,000-meter peaks remained unclimbed.
39:17Europe's climbing elite was drafted into specialist mountain units to fight from the Alps to the Caucasus.
39:28The violence didn't reach the Himalayas.
39:30But when the fighting stopped, the quest for the so-called 8,000-ers would become a race.
39:38The whole political map changes absolutely fundamentally in all kinds of ways.
39:44In 1947, India and Pakistan were granted independence by a Britain weakened by war.
39:51In 1950, the Chinese invaded Tibet, forcing Nepal to open up for the first time.
40:00And they said, all right, well, we will open our doors to the west.
40:04Nepal didn't want to be swallowed up by China or India.
40:07From now on, the British would have no control over who could climb in what was once their Raj.
40:13The 14 8,000-meter peaks were open for business to all comers.
40:22And in 1950, a French expedition became the first to climb an 8,000-meter peak, Annapurna.
40:30By climbing the 10th highest of the 8,000-ers, a psychological barrier had been broken.
40:36The first ascent of an 8,000-meter peak was a kind of signal that, you know, it was possible to get to the top of big mountains.
40:45But what nobody had achieved before the war was now starting to happen.
40:49There is a fundamental understanding that these things are going to be climbed and soon.
40:54And if you don't get on with it, you're going to miss out.
40:57French success on Annapurna was especially alarming for the British.
41:01Nepal hadn't just opened up a route to Annapurna, but to the southern slopes of Everest.
41:09With Tibet occupied, this was now the only way to reach the mountain.
41:16And in 1952, the unthinkable happened.
41:20The Nepalese granted access to Everest to a Swiss expedition.
41:25The film the Swiss made highlighted the expertise of their climbers.
41:29Whereas most of the nations of Europe were fighting each other during the Second World War, the Swiss were neutral.
41:37So there was a lot more climbing going on in Switzerland than anywhere else.
41:42And the Swiss nearly did it.
41:45They nearly did it.
41:47They got to 8,500 meters.
41:49A mere 300 meters.
41:51God, they were so close.
41:52It would have been utter dismay that they thought that a Swiss might gazump the Brits their mountain.
42:02Britain secured a permit to attempt Everest through Nepal the following year.
42:07The competition to climb the mountain was entering overdrive.
42:12There was this sense that there was an international race going on for who could get up Everest.
42:18The Nepalese government was giving permission for one country each year to have a go.
42:23In 1952, it was the Swiss. In 1953, it was the British. In 1954, it was going to be the French. In 1955, it might have been the Americans or the Swiss.
42:33There were requests coming in from all over the world.
42:35As the British planned their 1953 expedition, they knew it was now or never.
42:48The pressure was intense on the expedition leader, John Hunt, another military man.
42:54He was a sort of army officer who was at that point working for Montgomery in France.
43:00You know, he'd been through the war. He was a very, very successful soldier.
43:03He understood logistics. An army marches on its stomach.
43:09He accepted, hook, line and sinker, the notion that we've got to get to the summit by whatever means are necessary to get there.
43:18Hunt used the film and photography taken by the Wings Over Everest pilots in 1933 to help plan the route up Everest's southern flanks.
43:27A cameraman records the expedition's journey to base camp.
43:34But this ascent would be filmed differently to those before.
43:39As the climbers progress higher on the mountain, one of them, George Lowe, becomes chief cameraman.
43:46He was given a little camera. It's called a gun camera.
43:52These sort of robust cameras that were actually developed in the war, attached to the wings of fighter planes, trained on machine guns so they could sort of record footage.
44:01In George Lowe's hands, these lightweight gun cameras mean for the first time filming can take place on the higher reaches of the mountain.
44:11At around 7,500 metres up, the expedition meets its greatest challenge.
44:22The Lhotse Face.
44:25A 1,200 metre slope of ice.
44:29Hunt plans to haul nearly a ton of supplies up this frozen face to support his final assault teams.
44:35George Lowe and his team are tasked with cutting the steps the porters will follow.
44:42Getting up the Lhotse Face really was a sort of epic of tenacity.
44:49The big fear for any expedition was that you wouldn't get up in time before the monsoon.
44:56Struggling with exhaustion, Lowe and his team fall behind schedule.
45:00With the expedition in the balance, Hunt climbs up to Lowe.
45:06There was something slightly mischievous sometimes about George Lowe's filming because he sort of liked to show people, you know, in desperate straights.
45:15Here was Hunt coming up to chivvy him along and he's saying, you know, actually, look, you're exhausted, you know.
45:21You can just see that look on his face, you know, George, stop filming.
45:25To break the deadlock on Lhotse, Hunt orders the use of some of the expedition's precious oxygen.
45:32The reinvigorated team complete their task.
45:36And supplies are ferried up to the South Col, the jumping off point for the summit.
45:41This was the big carry.
45:43This is a long chain of Sherpa porters carrying supplies up, oxygen, tents, food, to the South Col.
45:51The moment has come for the assault team to leave to the higher camps.
45:57Hunt selects the two climbers he feels are strongest and best acclimatised.
46:03They are a summit team unlike any the British have sent before.
46:07One is a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, and the other a Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay.
46:16They leave for the highest camp and the summit attempt.
46:20But this is where the filming stops.
46:23At the last minute, Ed Hillary said, all right, go through your rucksacks, boys, and get rid of anything which is non-essential.
46:32And one of those non-essential things turned out to be the film camera.
46:36And so even though George Lowe went up to the high camp, he didn't film it.
46:41Out of sight of the cameras, Hillary and Tenzing will have a hidden advantage on their summit attempt.
46:49A crucial scientific edge provided by the expedition's physiologist, Griffith Pugh.
46:54About 20 years ago, I interviewed most of the team who were still alive then.
46:59And when I went to see the doctor, well he's a surgeon, Michael Ward.
47:04The first thing he said to me, the most important person, the man who really made Everest a success in 1953, was Griffith Pugh.
47:13Griffith Pugh had studied the physiological reasons why previous Everest expeditions had failed.
47:19As Hillary and Tenzing began their final climb, they were using oxygen sets with double the flow rate of previous designs.
47:29This was thanks to Pugh's research into why previous oxygen sets had not been effective.
47:35The sets had been developed from high altitude flying and Griffith realised absolutely immediately that pilots are sitting in their cockpits, not carrying the sets.
47:46Whereas climbers are taking strenuous exercise.
47:50So if pilots need two to two and a half litres of oxygen, it's obvious that climbers must need much more to get any benefit.
47:59190,000 litres of bottled oxygen were taken to Everest by the British.
48:05Four times as many as any previous expedition.
48:08Along with oxygen, the other fundamental advantage Pugh gave Hillary and Tenzing was equipment to melt large quantities of snow into water.
48:19What Griffith realised was, apart from sweating and evaporation, climbers also lose water because they breathe out hot, wet air and they breathe in dry mountain air.
48:31So they lose water from their lungs.
48:35In 1952, the Swiss had been reduced to melting snow over a candle for water at their highest camp.
48:42When Hillary and Norgay became the first men to stand on the summit of Everest on the 29th of May 1953, Hillary was so well hydrated that he was forced to answer the call of nature.
48:57Hillary talking about having a pee on the summit.
49:02Yes, she had to have a pee on the summit. Yes, good point. Yes.
49:05I mean, that's incredible because he's so well hydrated.
49:10I mean, you cannot overstate the importance of that issue.
49:14The day after Hillary and Tenzing summited the mountain, cameras at the lower camps spot three figures returning.
49:22It's the two climbers along with George Lowe.
49:26No one knows if the mountain has been climbed.
49:29This is kind of, you know, one of the most famous scenes in mountaineering film.
49:34And what makes it so great is it is spontaneous.
49:39Hunt doesn't know.
49:41Can you imagine?
49:42You know, he's the expedition leader and he doesn't know they summited.
49:46And all of a sudden George is at the front of the boat, starts putting his thumb in the air and pointing to the summit with his ice axe.
49:53You know, we've done it, we've done it.
49:55Hunt leaps on Hillary and just leaps on Tenzing.
50:00You get to see the relief. What a wonderful piece of film.
50:06The highest mountain in the world has been climbed.
50:10The timing was impeccable.
50:13News was rushed back to Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth's coronation.
50:19This thing turned into something which nobody could have predicted.
50:22If the fact of these things coming together at the same time sort of turbocharged the expedition,
50:27and it was all over the newspapers, all over the world.
50:31The film was released with the triumphant title, The Conquest of Everest.
50:37George Lowe's gun camera photography brought home the thrill and danger of high altitude mountaineering like never before.
50:45A stirring commentary ramped up the heroics.
50:48Hillary and Tenzing stood on the summit of Everest.
50:54The top of the world has been reached.
50:57It was a blockbuster success.
51:02This was the story of the moment.
51:04And everything about Everest was selling in enormous numbers.
51:08The film's climactic image was the summit photograph of Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa.
51:15Flying the flags not just of Britain, but of the United Nations, Nepal and India.
51:21It was a story for a new Britain.
51:24No longer the head of an empire, but a new Commonwealth.
51:27This was the period where Britain was trying to sell the idea of the Commonwealth.
51:34And so they liked the fact that this was a sort of a rainbow coalition.
51:39The Foreign Office occasionally sponsored shows of the film abroad.
51:46They certainly saw it as British propaganda.
51:48It's their attempt to say, this is Britishness today.
51:54It's not just white.
51:55It includes all the peoples of the Queen's dominions and territories and so forth.
52:03Britain had taken the ultimate prize in international mountaineering.
52:08But it had only returned with still photographs of the summiteers.
52:12There was still prestige to be found among the twelve remaining 8,000-ers.
52:18Including being the first to film from one of their peaks.
52:23The same year Britain climbed Everest, the Germans and Austrians returned to Nangapaba.
52:30The expedition film was German propaganda of a new sort.
52:35Not to promote Nazi ideals, but the fruits of the post-war German economic miracle.
52:42It depicts tents made by Deuter.
52:45It depicts Löwenbräu beer.
52:48It depicts communications devices by Telefunken and so on.
52:53A strategy that nowadays is very common and that's called product placement.
52:58The flag the Germans took with them to the summit was the flag of Pakistan.
53:03But it wasn't the German flag and it was not the Austrian flag.
53:06So a clear dissociation from previous nationalistically tainted events.
53:14As the climbers leave for their summit attempt, like the British on Everest, the cameras can go no higher.
53:21This wasn't going to stop the filmmakers from visualising the climb's finale.
53:26When it came to making the movie, they did something which nobody else had done, which is they reconstructed it.
53:34What's interesting is that it wasn't accurate.
53:37Herman Boole famously crawled to the summit of Nangapaba on his hands and knees.
53:43Fueled by amphetamines. Totally exhausted. In the movie you see this rather nice steady progress of this guy with his ski poles silhouetted against the sun.
53:57The film was made by Hans Ertel, a veteran cameraman of pre-war German mountain films and a former lover of Lenny Riefenstahl.
54:06Hans Ertel had learned his craft from the father of the German mountain film, Dr. Arnold Funk.
54:14A lot of play between mountain and light and shadow.
54:19It's the filmic language of the mountain film that Hans Ertel was trained in.
54:23While German mountaineering had thrown off its pre-war political associations, German filmmakers were still enthralled to the aesthetic of the 1930s.
54:37German success on Nangapaba was followed a year later by an Italian expedition to K2, the second highest of the 8,000 metre peaks.
54:46The Italians wanted to outdo the British on Everest.
54:53K2, they said, was the Himalayas most difficult peak.
54:59And they were determined to not only reach the summit, but to film it.
55:03They knew from the beginning they were going to make a movie.
55:05And the thing that the summaters wanted to do, in particular Achille Compagnone, was to film on the summit.
55:14The Italian government had seen the prestige Britain had taken from Everest and financed the biggest, most expensive expedition ever.
55:23Over 700 men helped get the Italian climbers to the summit.
55:30These are the first ever moving images from the peak of an 8,000 metre mountain.
55:36You don't see very much. It looks pretty dark. They look very cold. It looks pretty miserable. But this is it. You know, this is the real McCoy.
55:48Lead climber Achille Compagnone removed his glove to operate the camera and lost two fingers to frostbite.
55:55But these were the all-important images the Italians had come for.
56:01When the film was sold, this was very much part of it. You know, you've seen Everest, you've seen the film on Nanga Parbat, you've seen the Yannapurna film.
56:08But now we're actually going to give you some footage of what it's like on the top of an 8,000 metre peak.
56:13The expedition's success was heralded as a moment of national healing for a country still confronting its fascist past.
56:20The welcome the Italians got as they came off the boat, having climbed K2, was just staggering.
56:26I mean, here was something that was spirited and joyful with a little bit of danger.
56:31And they were leading the world. And that meant a great deal, I think.
56:36After Everest and K2, the floodgates opened in the Himalayas.
56:41Improved technology and physiology meant that by the end of the 1950s, all but one of the 14 8,000 metre peaks had been climbed.
56:53And in 1963, the Americans did what the British could not.
56:58Brought back film from the summit of the highest, Everest.
57:02The cameras followed an historic traverse of the mountain, ascending one route and descending another.
57:11But for the superpowers, mountaineering's prestige was fading.
57:17The Americans climbed Everest in 1963. They did it brilliantly, fated by Kennedy.
57:23But, you know, there was a sense, well, that's that. We've done that.
57:30Now let's get on with this going to the moon thing, because that's going to be the next big thing.
57:36Even Everest paled in comparison to the new frontier of exploration.
57:40And when, in 1964, a Chinese team climbed the last of the 8,000ers, Shisha Pangma, the curtain fell on the epic era of mountaineering.
58:00Today, more people climb mountains than ever.
58:04But the symbolic power of the 14 great 8,000ers is forgotten.
58:11The difference between modern mountaineering and the mountaineering from the 20s to the end of the 1950s, early 60s,
58:18is that in those days it was a national event.
58:21People were able to get funding to go to big mountains by saying,
58:26this is all about our country planting our flag on the top.
58:29They were seen in this bigger nationalistic context.
58:34That has gone now.
58:36And in the digital era, film and filmmaking no longer plays the key role it once did.
58:42Nowadays, everyone thinks he or she is a filmmaker.
58:46Because everyone can take film on a camera this big.
58:49You don't take out an ice axe and unravel some flags.
58:52When you climb a mountain now, you want a mobile phone, you take a selfie, and then you instantly whiz it back to your family at home.
59:08Tragedy strikes two of the finest climbers of their time,
59:12as the Epic of Everest charts Mallory and Irvine's ill-fated expedition in just a moment here on BBC4.
59:17And then the climbing continues at 11.25 as we don the crampons and prepare to get stuck in to the Iger's Wall of Death.
59:27Stay with us.
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