Die Herrgottsgrenadiere

Let us now praise Anton Kutter, one of those geniuses equally at home in genre as well as documentary whom conventional film histories rarely mention! Although his fiction feature debut, Die Herrgottsgrenadiere, at least secured him a safe place in the annals of Swiss film history, as it was the nation’s first talking picture – albeit in standard German, being a co-production with the Reich, instead of in the vernacular (the first dialect feature, Walter Lesch and Richard Schweizer’s Wie d’Warret würkt, would open a year later).

This is the story of an impoverished alpine hamlet whose inhabitants hope for a better life thanks to the building of a road, but go suddenly wild when a nearby mining company finds gold. It’s also a reason for discussing questions of heritage and progress, faith and making change happen, not to mention for filming the Lötschen Valley’s extraordinary alpine landscape, done here in a New Objectivity-influenced style that makes the mountains look like high-rises. Kutter would stay in the mountains with his fiction features, which add up to one of the most unusual, often unexpectedly modern(ist) oeuvres in alpine cinema. Besides that, he’s famous among hobby astronomers for having constructed the off-axis reflecting telescope, to this very day the gold standard for instruments of its kind. What a guy!

– Olaf Möller

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