In 1963, an American expedition did something never before achieved -
they filmed from the summit of Mount Everest.
'Before them is a sight to lift the heart and bring tears to the eyes.
'These are the first moving pictures
'ever taken from the summit of Everest.'
Narrated by Orson Welles, this film was the first time
the world saw the view from its tallest mountain.
But these cameras were also capturing something else...
The final chapter in the conquest not only of Everest
but all the Himalayas' great peaks.
This was the epic era of mountaineering.
An era when film-makers helped turn mountaineering
into a global struggle for prestige.
There was this sense that there was an international race going on.
Nothing was more important than those mountains.
Between the 1920s and the 1960s,
the highest mountains on earth became symbols
of status and achievement.
IN GERMAN:
This was really mountaineering as politics.
The largest expeditions ever assembled
became displays of national power.
The expeditions themselves were branded with Empire.
From the beginning, film-makers risked everything
to capture these great spectacles.
This was something that nobody had done before,
to climb up to those levels and film under extreme conditions.
And their films didn't
just immortalise these historic expeditions...
but helped inspire and finance them
in an era when the great peaks became great propaganda.
The epic era of mountaineering required an epic stage.
The Himalayas - a mountain range on a scale unmatched anywhere.
It's a great arc of mountains stretching for over 1,500 miles,
all the way from Afghanistan in the west
to Burma in the east.
It's just on a colossal scale.
The world's 14 highest mountains are all in the Himalayas -
the only peaks on the planet that reach over 8,000 metres.
In 1913, a British Army officer and film-maker called John Noel
gazed from Darjeeling in India towards these distant peaks.
He dreamed of seeing one in particular, the tallest - Everest.
Everest had been measured from afar by the British in 1856.
And such was a wizardry of differential calculus
and mathematics that they could literally
peer across the skyline to the
peaks that scored the horizon, and from considerable distances,
come up with astonishingly accurate measurements of their height.
Once they discovered that this was the tallest mountain in the world,
I mean, it captured the imagination.
But before Noel, no-one had been within 40 miles of the mountain.
Because while the British could see it, they could not approach it.
Everest wasn't just shielded by the vast Himalayan range,
but by the two nations on whose borders it sat -
Nepal to the south, and Tibet to the north.
These were nations caught between the great powers of their day -
the British Raj, China and the Russian Empire.
To survive,
both Tibet and Nepal had isolated themselves to outside influence.
Throughout the 19th century, people have been trying to get to
Tibet - explores, travellers, scholars, soldiers, missionaries,
colonial officers - and effectively, Tibet had been closed to outsiders.
None of which was going to stop John Noel.
In 1913, Noel disguised himself as a pilgrim
and crossed illegally into Tibet with two companions,
determined to photograph a route to Everest.
He was about to set in motion the epic era of mountaineering.
This is a photograph of my father in 1913 in the disguise that he
adopted to go to Mount Everest, and he had this coat made.
In his case, he had to blacken his face with boot polish in order
to effect a better disguise.
He realised that he was going to have to avoid habitation
because he didn't want to be seen.
And so he had chosen this rather slightly obscure route.
And he has written down here that this was an unguarded
pass which is hitherto never been explored by a white man.
It was incredibly courageous.
You know, I mean, you read his packing list -
disassembled rifles, a revolver, automatic pistols.
There's no doubt about it,
they knew what kind of welcome they were going to get.
Noel's photographs chart an eight-week odyssey.
He was the first Westerner to come within 40 miles of the mountain.
And he got close enough to see that there was a series of ridges
still between him and Everest, but no-one had gotten that close.
But he had also been spotted by local militia.
And they fired a shot in my father's direction.
They didn't realise that A, he was a well supplied with arms
and that also he was a very fine shot so when he launched a shot,
they disappeared rather quickly.
His cover blown, Noel's journey was over.
But he had proved that Everest could be reached.
The initial scheme of going to Everest, this was very much
the creation of John Noel before the First World War.
Having photographed a route to the mountain,
next Noel would help inspire the first ever expedition
to climb it and film it.
In 1919, five months after the end of the First World War,
John Noel addressed a meeting
of the Royal Geographical Society in London.
It's very modern. You know, lantern slides, a smoky room...
He approaches the podium, there is cigar smoke all over the place.
Noel projected slides of his journey to Everest
captured six years earlier.
And so Noel began his talk saying that had it not
been for the war, Everest would have been achieved
and we must achieve it in the wake of the war.
Everybody erupted in applause.
Noel's audience was filled with veterans of the war.
You can't understand who these men were without
factoring in the reality that they spent four years and four months
eye-deep in hell in the blood, mud, and agony of the Western Front.
To men jaded by years of industrialised warfare,
Everest had new meaning.
By then, the mountain's almost become a symbol
of regeneration for a nation bled white by the war.
His presentation is a huge hit.
It all begins with that incredible evening in March of 1919.
Following Noel's address, a mission to climb Everest was proposed.
An Everest Committee was formed, and in 1922, the first great expedition
of the epic era of mountaineering departed from Northern India.
Filming it is the man who had inspired it - John Noel.
This expedition carries all the hallmarks of the epic
era of mountaineering to come.
The first is its huge scale.
Over 300 pack animals and 100 Sherpa porters recruited from Nepal
carry several tonnes of supplies.
The second hallmark is the expedition's military structure.
In command is General Charles Bruce.
He and the other 13 British Noel included
had all served in the First World War.
Military guys understand logistics.
They understand moving materials from A to B and fighting a campaign.
There was a symbiotic relationship between the Army
and the climbing community.
The third hallmark is that this is no leisure pursuit -
the expedition's scale and lofty goal
means that national prestige is at stake.
How it was presented to the public was very much a kind of expression
of national will and ability, and this will bring glory to the nation.
The expeditions themselves were branded with Empire.
Nearly two weeks after leaving Darjeeling,
the expedition enters Tibet.
Passage to the mountain had been secured in return for British aid
in Tibet's simmering conflict with China.
The final permission to go into Tibet was part of an arms deal,
so Everest was never divorced from the geopolitical
ebb and flow of Empire.
It was always integral to it.
No-one has ever filmed in Tibet before Noel.
His camera captures the first moving images the Western world will
see of this hidden land.
It's the first time that a film was made in Tibet and it's
the first really ethnographic film or a film about the people of Tibet.
It is a deeply feudal society.
You know, a third of the people are in monasteries and nunneries.
It is, you know, life expectancy is not good. There is no education.
You know, it's basic.
It's not just the aristocracy that is filmed,
he films the man in the street who comes up to look at the camera
and smiles, the women out in their tents churning milk
who are obviously embarrassed by the camera.
I think it's delightful to have captured those images.
As the landscape becomes more alien, so does the culture.
At the final monastery before the mountain,
Noel films a religious festival.
Dancers wear suits of human bones, and play drums of human skin.
Most of Noel's film of this expedition is of the journey
through Tibet and its culture.
Because the filming of the mountain, like the climbing of it,
would prove harder than anyone could have imagined.
It was the moon shot of the 1920s.
They were going somewhere... They didn't even know
whether they could survive there.
They didn't know whether they could breathe.
It was just so beyond ordinary human experience.
As the expedition heads into the unknown,
Everest appears on film for the first time.
Base camp is established at nearly 5,500 metres.
Above even the tallest peak of Europe, Noel sets up
the world's highest ever photographic laboratory.
He has a tent for developing his film that he sets up
by the side of it glacial stream.
His film and negative are sort of cracking,
brittle in the frozen temperatures.
It was a nightmarish proposition because, you know, developers would
freeze in the cold, dust would enter the tent and ruin emulsions.
He sets up a wee little stove fuelled by yak dung to try
and dry out his negatives.
He was a truly original photographer and film-maker.
Nothing escaped his imagination.
Fighting altitude sickness, Noel shoots and processes
10,000 feet of film.
Two attempts are made on the summit.
Noel can only film them disappearing up the vast slopes.
Out of his camera's range, each party sets new altitude records.
But these are conditions no man has before experienced.
Noel films the two defeated teams returning.
Basically, the camp is too low.
They gave it a good try,
but they are just not in the right place with the right stuff...
..at the right time.
With the monsoon approaching, the expedition
retreats from the mountain and the long journey back to Britain begins.
In London, Noel's film accompanied the climbers' lecture tour,
and was not widely seen.
Everest remained unclimbed,
but the expedition hadn't been for nothing.
In many ways, it was a good first attempt.
I mean, he was talking about it fairly well.
They didn't do it, but they learnt a great deal.
The mountain hadn't been climbed, but there is a strong sense of
"we've got to go back."
Noel shared the climbers' desire to return to the mountain.
But a return expedition was in doubt.
The first expedition had cost a colossal £12,500 -
over £600,000 today.
The Everest Committee could not raise that sum again quickly.
But Noel had a radical solution in mind.
He would form a film company, find investors,
and fund the next expedition himself.
In exchange for all film rights, he will give the Everest Committee
£8,000, and in doing so, also relieve them
of the obligation of paying for the photographic work which is
essentially another contribution of £2,000, so £10,000.
I mean, that's entrepreneurial brilliance.
And it saves the RGS's bacon
cos they need the cash.
This is very expensive. It puts them back in the field.
The same film-maker who had inspired the first ever Everest expedition
was now single-handedly financing the second.
The expedition enters Tibet in 1924
along the same route as its predecessor.
Expectations are high, not just among the climbers,
but the British public.
If you look at the amount of coverage in the times
and the newspapers, it is
really remarkable given everything else that was going on in the world.
There was a total expectation of success.
At base camp, Noel shoots a portrait of the climbers.
He was actually quite aware that many of the climbers didn't really
want a film-maker on the expedition.
So actually, Noel is quite discrete.
He is sensitive to the explorers' needs.
One figure finds his way to the centre of the line-up.
This is George Mallory, second in command of the expedition,
and the finest British climber of the age.
Mallory famously said,
"This isn't Hollywood. Why do we need a film-maker?"
Filming was seen as kind of an unnecessary vulgarity.
They didn't want a cameraman interfering with the climbers.
What the climbers did not know was that Noel's film was going
to change the course of mountaineering history.
As the expedition prepares for the climb,
Noel begins putting into practice the lessons learned from 1922.
He realised that there was no way you could develop
film on the mountain, so he did the extraordinary -
he bought land in Darjeeling, he built a photographic studio,
and he arranged a relay system.
So he is sending back his film on sort of runners
and on the yaks to have this footage developed and processed.
Without having to develop overnight,
now Noel can concentrate exclusively on his cinematography.
He uses colour tinting to create atmosphere as the men
struggle across jagged glacial ice.
I really think he has captured the enormity of it, the desolation...
I think with the tinting,
he has given us a very good impression of the temperature.
I can feel it. Chilly.
There is artistry in this film.
The shots of high-speed winds on the ridges of mountains,
catching the clouds...
There are shots of sunlight moving across the surface of glaciers
that are just magic to watch.
Noel has with him 14 cameras.
Here, he demonstrates his primary cine camera.
It features several of his own innovations.
Electric motors allow both time-lapse and slow motion.
Rubber casing prevents freezing.
Adjustments reduce static electricity
that can damage the film.
If you look at his film technique itself,
he pioneered in so many ways -
his use of lenses, his use of slow motion, his use of aperture.
All of these techniques that hadn't yet been used,
certainly not in the Himalayas.
Perhaps the greatest feat of film-making of its day
was about to unfold.
Noel climbs with his cameras to around 6,700 meters -
the third of six camps, and the limit of his endurance.
Here he locates a ridge to film the final summit teams.
That's my father with one of his porters looking for a suitable
place to position the cameras.
No-one has ever filmed before at these altitudes.
He said on occasions he was so cold and so numb that he couldn't
even think let alone try and manipulate the cameras.
Noel switches to his customised telephoto lens.
What all of Britain hopes will be the ascent of Everest
is about to begin.
Two climbers - Somervell and Norton - depart with their porters
to the higher camps for the first summit attempt.
At nearly two miles distant,
no-one has ever filmed at this range before.
As the climbers recede into distant specks,
Everest moves to centre stage.
And the star of the film is the mountain.
This kind of elemental colossus that is constantly just outside the tent.
I mean, that's the great brilliance of this film is that you...
you begin to understand the scale of the objective.
And you're an increasingly weak and ill
and uncertain creature in front of it.
Norton and Somervell return two days later, lucky to be alive.
Snow-blind and in agony, Norton is carried to his tent.
Now the final assault begins.
From afar, Noel films George Mallory
and his climbing partner, Sandy Irvine,
as they depart with their porters.
Using bottled oxygen,
they are about to climb higher than any human before them.
You can hardly see the men. They're like little ants, aren't they?
You just see them at a distance.
You know, incredibly fragile against this backdrop that, you know,
they are gone.
But now you can even begin to see in this footage
the mist rolling in across the north-east ridge.
Nobody knew whether it was even physically possible for Mallory
and Irvine to reach the summit.
The drive to climb these peaks for the first time,
it was pushing men way beyond the limits of what perhaps was sensible.
Medicine just didn't know what was going to happen.
But perhaps Mallory's sense of risk had been shaped by his years
spent on the Western Front.
In a sense, for that whole generation,
it's an obvious reality that the war was the backdrop of their lives.
At some level, they had seen so much death that it had no hold on them.
I think life mattered less than the moments of being alive.
And I think that is how they are able to accept
the level of risk that actually Everest demanded.
Dawn brings no news of Mallory and Irvine.
Noel and his porters scan the peak for any sign of the men.
A search party is sent to the highest camp.
Noel's camera captures the extraordinary scenes that unfold.
For me, the most powerful sequence in the film is
when they are waiting at the lower camp, waiting for men to return.
And receipt tiny little figures assembling blankets
in the form of a cross.
The figures are the search party,
and the cross is a pre-arranged signal.
A symbol for, you know, effectively all hope is lost.
You know, the men have died. There is no hope of rescue.
There is one figure staying by the...
Just the way that he slumped down in the snow.
God, this is heartbreaking.
It's very moving to see this, even, you know, almost 100 years later.
As the moment where people knew, finally,
no-one else was coming down.
It must have been a crushing blow for Noel behind the camera.
He invested this money in taking a film of this expedition
and all of a sudden, he is behind the camera thinking,
"Oh, no, tragedy has happened."
Noel then films Sherpas laying out a responding message
to the search party above.
So it is six blankets laid in threes. Rows of blankets.
The message, "Abandon all hope. Come on down."
And it's like they are laying out bodies in the snow, these blankets.
It's beautiful, it's moving, it's terrible.
Mallory's body was found in 1999.
Irvine's remains on the mountain.
It's unknown whether they reached the summit.
The great Everest expedition of 1924, so certain of success,
has ended in tragedy.
Noel's hopes of being the man to film
the climbing of Everest are dashed.
Looming large is the massive £10,000 outlay that needs recouping.
The pressure on him to make a successful film,
particularly in 1924, was intense.
He had to recoup that investment and he had to have a hit.
The challenge is for Noel is the expectation is victory,
and the reality is death.
His story has gone from being this incredible epic success
to being a eulogy for the death of Mallory and Irvine.
He is fretful. Is it going to be successful?
To make back the money,
Noel hit upon an extraordinary way to publicise the film.
He comes up with this scheme to get seven monks to come out
and accompany the film at its opening.
Here you have Tibetan monks who looked glorious
playing tunes on human thigh bones.
How could you not want to see that?
The so called Dancing Lamas that accompanied Noel's film
were the talk of Britain.
But news of this stunt, together with some of the scenes
depicted in the film, was not received well in Tibet.
The Tibetans are furious.
These monks have been reduced, in their mind, to a carnival show.
Their religion has been insulted.
This affair, the Dancing Lamas, so offended the Tibetans that they
refused any permission for future expeditions into Tibet.
Thanks to Noel's film and its publicity, the British would be
denied further access to Everest for nearly a decade.
When Tibet readmitted Britain in 1933,
they found the Himalayan game had changed.
The great problem for the Mount Everest Committee in the '30s
is that other people, other countries, damned them,
have shown up on the scene wanting to climb the Himalayan giant.
There's lots of interest from Germany and Austria.
There is interest from America. They want to come and play as well.
Nazi Germany launched its first large-scale expedition
to the Himalayas in 1934.
It's target was Nanga Parbat, the ninth highest of the 8,000m peaks,
in what is modern day Pakistan.
The expedition was financed by the Nazi state.
The film, introduced by the Nazi Reichsportsfuhrer,
left no doubt why they were here.
IN GERMAN:
They 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.
German mountaineers had come to believe that they could
elevate their nation's status during the disastrous aftermath
of the First World War.
To the Germans, the First World War left a deeper imprint
on their mountaineering practice than it had even for the British.
And mountaineering is clearly seen as a tool to regain German
standing as a nation.
It becomes official policy of the German
and Austrian Alpine Association.
The German and Austrian Alpine Association
soon aligned itself with Germany's rising right wing.
A Jewish section is expelled from the German Alpine
club in the early 1920s. These are sort of proto-Nazi policies.
So it becomes associated with fascist politics early on.
In the 1920s,
Germany and Austria were home to the biggest climbing club in the world.
This explosion in mountaineering's popularity saw a new genre of film
flourish, called bergfilme, or mountain films.
The Holy Mountain was one of these films -
tales of heroism and love set against the Alps.
It wasn't long before bergfilme was also drawn into the Nazi sphere.
The Holy Mountain was notable for the debut of its female star -
Leni Riefenstahl.
Riefenstahl was a former dancer who became a leading lady
in bergfilme in the '20s and '30s.
In 1932, she directed her first mountain film, The Blue Light.
Riefenstahll's film - like others in the genre - used striking imagery
to hint at a greater struggle than simply man against mountain.
The imagery of mountaineering is a really powerful thing,
and Riefenstahl, I think, really nailed that.
Among The Blue Light's many admirer's was Germany's new
Reichschancellor, Adolf Hitler.
Hitler employed Riefenstahl to film the Nazi rallies at Nuremburg.
He also had her film the 1936 Berlin Olympics -
the great showcase of Nazi values.
Her balletic celebration of the physical form
harked back to the dancing sequences of her mountain films.
The quality of her work in the Olympics arose from her experience
gained in the bergfilme.
I mean, I think the two are very intimately linked.
I mean, you can't have the one without the other.
It was at the Olympics that the Nazi takeover of German
mountaineering and mountain film was made complete.
Joining Riefenstahl's film was the premier of the Nanga Parbat
expedition documentary.
The expedition had been a disaster with ten killed in storms.
Their deaths are presented as heroic sacrifices
for the fatherland.
Coffins are shown wrapped in swastikas.
And the Nazi Reichsportsfurhrer provides his stirring epitaph.
IN GERMAN:
The Germans weren't alone in harnessing
the symbolic power of the Himalayas.
A group of Britons,
fearful of Nazi expansion, were about to turn Everest into the star
of perhaps the greatest publicity stunt of the 1930s.
In 1933, a camera crew films a British expedition to Everest
arriving at Karachi, India.
But this is not mountaineering equipment being unloaded.
They were aircraft.
And they were part of an audacious plan to be the first to fly
over the summit of Mount Everest.
The absolute crest.
The pinnacle of the world.
The last mystery, Blacker.
Well, do realise that you could put Everest on the map in three hours.
The film portrayed the driving force behind the adventure
as British pluck and derring-do.
But forget the pluck, this was propaganda.
The expedition was led by RAF officer
Air Commodore Peregrine Fellowes...
..a start this year. There's not much time...
..a man who had become fearful
of the rapidly expanding Nazi Luftwaffe.
My great-uncle Peregrine 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.
This flight over Everest was to be a PR stunt for the Royal Air Force.
There's a romantic, practical purpose.
It was to catch the imagination of the public.
They thought that, you know,
Everest had always been the great sort of challenge to man.
The costs were huge - around £1.2 million today.
This finance came from private backers,
with a stipulation that would cause the pilots great discomfort -
that they co-operate fully with the seven-strong camera crew.
There's quite a few tales about the way the film-makers imposed
themselves up on the whole business.
..£40 and a guarantee. Splendid!
Here's poor old Per having to act enthusiasm on the telephone.
You could sort of see what agony he was in, can't you, really?
He couldn't stand publicity. He absolutely hated it.
The film-makers shadowed the pilots as they crossed India to
their final base south of Nepal.
Two customised aircraft based on cutting-edge British technology
set off to attempt a record-breaking flight.
That they hated doing. When they were all waving their hats.
They said it was absolutely ghastly.
HE CHUCKLES
Of course, the Englishman, you can imagine...
"More enthusiasm, chaps! Come on!"
While Air Commodore Fellows awaited news from the ground,
MacIntyre piloted the second aircraft.
What these men were doing had the ring of a suicide mission.
To save weight, they would not be carrying parachutes.
Even if you bailed out, nobody would know where you were.
There was no communication.
A mad exploit, going up and an open cockpit plane in a heated suit.
It should have never worked. It was mad.
The vicious air currents the planes hit above the Himalayas
are captured in the jolting camerawork.
As they were approaching Everest...
..on the southern flanks of Everest,
they found themselves caught in this tremendous downdraft.
McIntyre's aircraft was nearly dashed on the mountain side,
barely cresting Everest's southern ridge.
He describes the event as experiencing a terrific bump.
Like passing over and explosives factory when it explodes.
The other aircraft made it over the summit
and got the crucial shots.
How extraordinary must that have been knowing that no human being
had ever seen this site?
None of the climbers, nobody had ever seen Everest from this angle.
I mean, it's really...
unbelievable.
Both aircraft returned unscathed.
Did you get that?
What was it like? All right.
The film, eventually called Wings Over Everest,
was a huge success and would win an Oscar.
For Air Commodore Fellows, the real success would be evident
when Britain would have to fight its war years later.
It did achieve its goal.
I mean, after that, investment in air power did change substantially
over the next few years.
And we did have a fighting air force by the time war was declared.
But there was another aspect to the Everest flight that makes it
central to the epic era of mountaineering.
As well as the film they shot, the pilots took extensive aerial
photographs of the unknown southern approaches to the mountain.
As we shall see, in time these photographs would be
vital in planning a route by which the mountain could be climbed.
For the rest of the 1930s, however, while Britain had captured
Everest from the air, it could not conquer it from the ground.
Expeditions to Everest in 1933 and 1935 ended in failure.
These were smaller affairs than the great expeditions of the 1920s.
Neither had official cameramen.
Interest at home was fading.
The Germans returned twice more to Nanga Parbat.
Even with Luftwaffe supply drops, these expeditions also failed.
But the films made of them continued to serve Nazi propaganda.
In 1938, a final pre-war British expedition to Everest joined
the other British efforts of the decade in failure.
These were all truly dreadful failures,
long forgotten and overlooked expeditions.
But in a way, they had become symbols of the impotence of England
and Britain on the eve of Hitler's war.
As war broke out, Everest and the Himalayas'
other 8,000m peaks remained unclimbed.
Europe's climbing elite was drafted into specialist mountain units
to fight from the Alps to the Caucuses.
The violence didn't reach the Himalayas.
But when the fighting stopped,
the quest for the so-called 8,000-ers would become a race.
The whole political map changes. Absolutely fundamentally.
In all kinds of ways.
In 1947, India and Pakistan were granted independence
by a Britain weakened by war.
In 1950, the Chinese invaded Tibet,
forcing Nepal to open up for the first time.
And they said, "Well, we will open our doors to the West."
Nepal didn't want to be swallowed up by China or India.
From now on, the British would have no control over who could climb
in what was once their raj.
The 14 8,000m peaks were open for business to all comers.
And in 1950, a French expedition became the first to climb
an 8,000m peak - Annapurna.
By climbing the tenth highest of the 8,000-ers,
a psychological barrier had been broken.
The first ascent of an 8,000-metre peak was a kind of signal that,
you know, it was possible to get to the top of big mountains.
What nobody had achieved before the war was now starting to happen.
There is a fundamental understanding that these things are going
to be climbed, and soon.
And if you don't get on with it, you're going to miss out.
French success on Annapurna was especially alarming for the British.
Nepal hadn't just opened up a route to Annapurna,
but to the southern slopes of Everest.
With Tibet occupied, this was now the only way to reach the mountain.
And in 1952, the unthinkable happened...
The Nepalese granted access to Everest to a Swiss expedition.
The film the Swiss made highlighted
the expertise of their climbers.
Whereas most of the nations of Europe were
fighting each other during the Second World War, the Swiss were neutral.
So there was in lot more climbing going on in Switzerland
than anywhere else.
And the Swiss nearly did it.
They nearly did it. They got to 8,500 metres. A mere 300 metres.
God, they were so close!
It would have been utter...dismay.
The thought that the Swiss might gazump the Brits.
Their mountain.
Britain secured a permit to
attempt Everest through Nepal the following year.
The competition to climb the mountain was entering overdrive.
There was this sense that there was an international race
going on for who could get up Everest.
That Nepalese government was giving permission for one country
each year to have a go. In 1952, it's the Swiss. In 1953, was the British.
In 1954, it was going to be the French.
In 1955, it might have been the Americans or the Swiss.
There were requests coming in from all over the world.
As the British planned their 1953 expedition,
they knew it was now or never.
The pressure was intense on the expedition leader,
John Hunt, another military man.
He was a sort of army officer who was at that point,
working for Montgomery in France. You know, he'd been through the war.
He was very, very successful soldier. He understood logistics.
An army marches on its stomach.
He accepted hook, line, and sinker the notion that we have got to
get to the summit by whatever means are necessary to get there.
Hunt used the film and photography taken by the Wings Over Everest
pilots in 1933 to help plan the route up Everest's southern flanks.
A cameraman records the expedition's journey to base camp.
But this ascent would be filmed differently to those before.
As the climbers progress higher on the mountain, one of them,
George Lowe, becomes chief cameraman.
He was given a little camera. It was called a gun camera.
These sort of a little 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.
In George Lowe's hands,
these lightweight gun cameras mean for the first time filming can take
place on the higher reaches of the mountain.
At around 7,500 metres up,
the expedition meets its greatest challenge -
the Lhotse face...
..a 1,200 metre slope of ice.
Hunt plans to haul nearly a tonne of supplies up this frozen face
to support his final assault teams.
George Lowe and his team are tasked with cutting the steps
the porters will follow.
Getting up the Lhotse face really was sort of epic of tenacity.
The big fear for any expedition was that you wouldn't get up
in time before the monsoon.
Struggling with exhaustion,
Lowe and his team fall behind schedule.
With the expedition in the balance,
Hunt climbs up to Lowe.
There was something slightly mischievous sometimes
about George Lowe's filming because he sort of
liked to show people, you know, in desperate straits.
Here was Hunt coming up to chivvy him along and he is saying,
You know, actually you're exhausted.
You know, you just see that look on his face.
You know, "George, stop filming."
To break the deadlock on Lhotse,
Hunt orders the use of some of the expedition's precious oxygen.
The reinvigorated team complete their task, and supplies are
ferried up to the South Col, the jumping off point for the summit.
This was the big carry.
This is a long chain of Sherpa porters carrying supplies up -
oxygen, tents, food - to the South Col.
The moment has come for the assault team to leave to the higher camps.
Hunt selects the two climbers he feels are strongest
and best acclimatised.
They are a summit team unlike any the British have sent before.
One is a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary,
and the other a Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay.
They leave for the highest camp and the summit attempt...
but this is where the filming stops.
At the last minute, Ed Hillary said,
"All right, go figure rucksacks, boys,
"and get rid of anything which is non-essential."
One of those non-essential things turned out to be the film camera.
And so even though George Lowe went up to the high camp,
he didn't film it.
Out of sight of the cameras, Hillary
and Tenzing will have a hidden advantage on their summit attempt -
a crucial scientific edge provided by the expedition's
physiologist, Griffith Pugh.
About 20 years ago, I interviewed most of the team who was
alive then, and when I went to see the doctor, well,
he's a surgeon, Michael Ward, the first thing he said to me -
the most important person,
the man who really made Everest a success in '53, was Griffith Pugh.
Griffith Pugh had studied the physiological reasons
why previous Everest expeditions had failed.
As Hillary and Tenzing began their final climb, they were using
oxygen sets with double the flow rate of previous designs.
This was thanks to Pugh's research into why previous oxygen sets
had not been effective.
The sets had been developed from high-altitude flying,
and Griffith realised absolutely immediately that pilots
are sitting their cockpits not carrying the sets,
whereas climbers are taking strenuous exercise.
So if pilots need two to 2.5 litres of oxygen,
it's obvious that climbers must need much more to get any benefit.
190,000 litres of bottled oxygen were taken
to Everest by the British -
four times as many as any previous expedition.
Along with oxygen,
the other fundamental advantage Pugh gave Hillary and Tenzing
was equipment to melt large quantities of snow into water.
What 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.
So they lose water from their lungs.
In 1952, the Swiss had been reduced to melting snow over
a candle for water at their highest camp.
When 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.
Hillary, talking about having to pee on the summit.
He had to have a pee on the summit! Yes, good point.
I mean, that's incredible. Because he is so well hydrated.
I mean, you cannot overstate the importance of that issue.
The day after Hillary and Tenzing summited the mountain,
cameras at the lower camps spot three figures returning.
It's the two climbers along with George Lowe.
No-one knows if the mountain has been climbed.
This is kind of you know, one of the most famous
scenes in mountaineering film.
And what makes it so great is that it is spontaneous.
Hunt doesn't know. Can you imagine?
I mean, he is the expedition leader
and he doesn't know they have summited.
And all of a sudden, George, who's at the front of the rope,
starts putting his thumb in the air
and pointing to the summit with his ice axe.
You know, "We've done it! We've done it!"
Hunt leaps on Hillary and just leaps on Tenzing.
You get to see the relief. What a wonderful piece of film. Ah!
The highest mountain in the world has been climbed.
The timing was impeccable.
News was rushed back to Britain on the day
of Queen Elizabeth's coronation.
This thing turned into something which nobody could've predicted.
The fact of these things coming together at the same time
sort of turbo-charged the expedition
and it was all over the newspapers all over the world.
The film was released with the triumphant title,
The Conquest Of Everest.
George Lowe's gun camera photography brought home the thrill
and danger of high altitude mountaineering like never before.
A stirring commentary ramped up the heroics.
'Hillary and Tenzing stood on the summit of Everest.'
'The top of the world has been reached.'
It was a blockbuster success.
This was the story of the moment
and everything about Everest was selling in enormous numbers.
The film's climactic image was the summit photograph
of Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa,
flying the flags, not just of Britain,
but of the United Nations, Nepal and India.
It was a story for a new Britain - no longer the head of an empire,
but a new commonwealth.
This was the period
where Britain was trying to sell the idea of the Commonwealth.
And so they liked the fact that this is sort of a rainbow coalition.
The foreign office occasionally
sponsored shows of the film abroad.
They certainly saw it as British propaganda.
It's their attempt to say, "This is Britishness today."
It's not just white.
It includes all the peoples of the Queen's dominions
and territories and so forth.
Britain had taken the ultimate prize in international mountaineering.
But it had only returned with still photographs of the summiteers.
There was still prestige to be found among the 12 remaining
8,000-ers, including being the first to film from one of their peaks.
The same year Britain climbed Everest,
the Germans and Austrians returned to Nanga Parbat.
The expedition film was German propaganda of a new sort...
..not to promote Nazi ideals,
but the fruits of the post-war German economic miracle.
It depicts tents made by Deuter.
It depicts Lowenbrau beer.
It depicts communications devices by Telefunken and so on.
A strategy that nowadays is very common
and that's called product placement.
The flag the Germans took with them to the summit
was the flag of Pakistan.
But it was in the German flag and it was not the Austrian flag, so
a clear dissociation from previous nationalistically tainted events.
As the climbers leave for their summit attempt,
like the British on Everest, the cameras can go no higher.
This wasn't going to stop the film-makers from visualising
the climb's finale.
When it came to making the movie, they did something which
nobody else had done, which is they reconstructed it.
What is interesting is that it wasn't accurate.
Hermann Buhl famously crawled to the summit of Nanga Parbat
on his hands and knees.
Fuelled 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.
The film was made by Hans Ertl, a veteran cameraman of
pre-war German mountain films, and a former lover of Leni Riefenstahl.
Hans Ertl had learned his craft from the father
of German mountain films, Dr Arnold Fanck.
A lot of play between mountain and light and shadow,
it's the filmic language of the mountain film
that Hans Ertl was trained in.
While German mountaineering had thrown off
its pre-war political associations,
German film-makers were still in thrall
to the aesthetic of the 1930s.
German success on Nanga Parbat was followed a year later
by an Italian expedition to K2,
the second highest of the 8,000-metre peaks.
The Italians wanted to outdo the British on Everest.
K2, they said, was the Himalaya's most difficult peak.
And they were determined to not only reach the summit,
but to film it.
They knew from the beginning they were going to make a movie
and the thing that's the summiteers wanted to do,
in particular Achille Compagnoni, was to film on the summit.
The Italian government had seen the prestige Britain had taken
from Everest, and financed the biggest,
most expensive expedition ever.
Over 700 men helped get the Italian climbers to the summit.
These are the first ever moving images from the peak
of an 8,000-metre mountain.
You don't see very much. It looks pretty dark. They look very cold.
It looks pretty miserable. But this is it. This is the real McCoy.
Lead climber Achille Compagnoni removed his glove
to operate the camera, and lost two fingers to frostbite.
But these were the all-important images the Italians had come for.
When the film was sold, this was very much part of it. You've seen Everest.
You've seen the film on Nanga Parbat, you've seen the Annapurna film,
but now were actually going to give you some footage
of what it is like on the top of an 8,000-metre peak.
The expedition's success was heralded as a moment
of national healing for a country still confronting its fascist past.
The welcome as the Italians got as they came off the boat
having climbed K2 was just staggering.
I mean, here was something that was spirited
and joyful was a little bit of danger.
And they were leading the world.
And that meant a great deal, I think.
After Everest and K2, the floodgates opened in the Himalayas.
Improved technology and physiology meant that by the end of the 1950s,
all but one of the 14 8,000-metre peaks had been climbed.
And in 1963, the Americans did what the British could not -
brought back film from the summit of the highest, Everest.
The cameras followed an historic traverse of the mountain
ascending one route, and descending another.
But for the superpowers,
mountaineering's prestige was fading.
The Americans climbed Everest in 1963. They did its brilliantly.
Fated by Kennedy, but, um...
You know, there was a sense, well,
"That's that. We've done that.
"Now let's get on with this going to the moon thing
"cos that's going to be the next big thing."
Even Everest paled in comparison to the new frontier of exploration.
And when in 1964, a Chinese team climbed the last of the 8,000-ers,
Shishapangma, the curtain fell on the epic era of mountaineering.
Today, more people climb mountains than ever.
But the symbolic power of the 14 great 8,000-ers is forgotten.
The difference between modern mountaineering
and the mountaineering from the '20s to the end of the 1950s, early '60s,
is that in those days it was a national event.
People were able to get funding to go to big mountains by saying,
"This is all about our country planting our flag on the top."
It was seen in this bigger nationalistic context.
That is gone now.
And in the digital era,
film and film-making no longer plays the key role it once did.
Nowadays, everyone thinks he or she is a film-maker cos everyone
can take film on a camera this big.
You don't take out an ice axe and unravel some flags.
When you climb a mountain now, you're on a mobile phone,
you take a selfie and you instantly whizz it back to your family at home.