The Ties that Bind. Mark S. Weiner Draws Lessons from Filmmaking for the Future of the Transatlantic Relationship.

Among the many photographs of my experiences with Austria over the past two decades, the one that I treasure most is valuable to me precisely because I wasn’t there when it was taken:

The picture–and my absence from it–speaks to how I view the future needs and opportunities of the Austrian-American relationship. Although I have participated in multiple programs of trans-Atlantic exchange, including three Fulbrights, the project that gave rise to this photo was of a different kind, and it shifted my perspective in subtle but important ways.

For the past five years, I have been involved in creating a feature-length documentary film about two mountain rescue organizations. The groups are Seattle Mountain Rescue (SMR), the oldest mountain rescue unit in America, and the storied Bergrettung of Tyrol. The documentary is called “The Volunteers: Mountain Rescue Brings Us Home.”

When I began the film, I wanted to suggest that mountain rescue groups offer an imaginative framework for bridging key philosophical divides that have cleaved the west since 1945, and which today underlie our most intense political conflicts. I half-jokingly referred to what I was making as “a philosophical film about mountain rescue,” which usually got people tilting their heads in curiosity. Let’s just say that while there are more than a few movies and television shows out there that depict red-jacketed rescuers saving hikers in the backcountry, not many of them quote Hegel. What’s more, the implicit philosophical purpose of the documentary was to engage with the ideas of Carl Schmitt, so the conception was far from typical. Basically, I set out to make the ideological and aesthetic mirror image of a Bergfilm.

This was my first feature-length documentary—my first feature-length film—and I was involved from soup to nuts. Here I am at left, interviewing a mountaineering archivist:

And here are some other film stills—their excellent German subtitles created by students at the University of Innsbruck—which capture some of the project’s basic interests and ideas:

We’ve had a good run for an indie doc. I launched a fundraising campaign for the project in January 2020 (BIAAS was our first supporter), and our 106-minute director’s cut premiered in August 2024 at a local video store in Connecticut, in a room packed with professors. By the end of this year, “The Volunteers” will have screened over fifty times in a wide range of venues—at universities, museums, film festivals, ethnic clubs, high schools, churches, art organizations, and community halls. It will also have screened in nine countries: Austria, Germany, Hungary, Canada, the UK, Australia, Israel, Argentina—and in the United States from Anchorage to New Orleans. The hands-down highlight was a screening to a packed house at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, DC, with the Austrian Ambassador in the audience:

In the meantime, a compressed 56-minute version has been streaming on PBS, and a more brainy 86-minute cut is available on Prime Video. Before long, “The Volunteers” will be broadcast in German-speaking Europe and released with spoken narration in Chinese. For me as a scholar who remains totally content to speak to an audience consisting of two fellow panelists and a random person who mistakenly walked into the room, this was all a real thrill. It also opened my eyes.

When I began creating “The Volunteers,” I viewed the value of filmmaking in terms parallel to those of academic research and teaching. My goal was to discover something true about the world and then to convey that discovery in the classroom and to fellow specialists. Filmmaking was like writing an academic article, but with image, light, and motion. I now appreciate how different the process and its outcome were—not better, just different—and these differences have shaped my understanding of future needs and opportunities in the Austrian-American relationship. My understanding has also been shaped by the very spirit of mountain rescue that the film documents.

This is an important moment in Austrian-American relations in part because it is a challenging time, even a turning point, in relations between the United States and Europe. It would be a mistake to simply blame the current administration for this situation, for its roots are epochal. We are witnessing the end of the post-war period. The structural dependency of Europe on America, long intrinsic to our security arrangements, is being broken by a deep, cultural reassertion of national sovereignty and national interest in America as part of a larger rejection of the professional-managerial class. Good and bad things will come with this transformation. One of the dangers is that Europe may find itself cut loose.

Some Europeans strike a sanguine pose about this prospect. That’s to be expected. The United States is large and influential, which in itself generates ill will. Yet the pose is tragically misguided. The close association of Europe and the United States is critical for Europe and for its individual nations, including Austria. It’s important for America, too, for our security, our prosperity, and our human flourishing. If our parting of ways proceeds much further, it will bring with it consequences terrible and profound on both sides of the Atlantic. Austria’s historic neutrality will not save it from these consequences or render them irrelevant.

For our fruitful connection to endure, what’s ultimately necessary is popular political will, and that can’t long be nourished by abstract ideals about the value of state-to-state ties in international affairs. Nor will recollections of past experiences and intergenerational connections be sufficient: in America, the mystic chords of memory that have bound us to Europe in general, and to Austria in particular, are fading fast. The old saw that average Americans don’t know the difference between Austria and Australia is something that should cause shudders of anxiety in Vienna, not bemused eye-rolling.

What’s needed for the future of Austrian-American relations is active friendship among average citizens, and friendship of a particular kind. Fortunately, the sort of friendship I have in mind can be cultivated. Many people have devoted a great deal of time in their careers to doing just this. Yet perhaps my experience with “The Volunteers” can speak to their work and how it can be publicly articulated, or at least provide the texture of a positive example. In capsule form, here are some features of international documentary filmmaking that may provide a framework for thinking about how to meet this historic moment. Many of these features are also characteristic of mountain rescue.

Network connections to achieve practical goals. Creating a film requires professional and interpersonal cooperation well beyond that which most scholars ever undertake. This isn’t meant as a slight to scholars. I have spent my life proudly alone together among fellow monks. But a film requires networks upon networks of interconnected people working together toward a common goal that ultimately exists in a physical form within the world. There’s a reason why film credits are usually incredibly long. Every film production, even an indie doc, is like a pop-up business that necessarily draws in hundreds of people. To bind our countries closer together in the future, fostering such practically-oriented networks over and above the work of individual scholars should be an important priority. Such networks are also effective at generating a sense of what common goals should be.

Beyond educational elites. Creating a film involves, and immediately benefits, people well outside the circles of intellectual and educational elites. Even when I was a Fulbrighter, I sought to reach out as much as I could beyond the boundaries of the university for lectures and conversations. But a film goes well beyond such dialogue. Like mountain rescue, it brings people into a common project who likely could have never ever hoped to benefit from a sophomore year abroad or an Erasmus-sponsored jaunt. In the wake of World War II, Europe was able to maintain its welfare states by directing significant benefits to the middle and upper-middle classes. The Austrian-American relationship in the future could be advanced even more effectively by adopting a parallel strategy.

Locally oriented, subnational connections. Filmmaking is an international enterprise, and to that extent it shares cultural features with academic life. But production is a locally-oriented process, and it requires cathexis on a place. One of the first tasks of pre-production is location scouting. In this respect, the most meaningful connection I made during the course of creating “The Volunteers” was with the Tyrolean film commission, Cine Tirol, which in myriad ways seeks to encourage filmmakers to shoot their movies there.

It seems to me that Cine Tirol provides a model for cultivating Austrian-American relations in general in part because its focus is not national, but regional—a cinematic parallel to the consciousness essential to mountain rescue organizations. As it looks to the United States in the future, Austria could usefully advance its goals by focusing the cultivation of networks of exchange on particular American states. The advocacy and programming of local honorary consults is essential.

Sharing technology and skills. The networks created in the filmmaking process involve technological exchange and skills transfer. They are eminently practical, and they certainly don’t involve squishy ideas about mutual understanding. In the field of mountain rescue after 1945, Austrians were in the forefront of engineering knowledge about how to save people in distress; today, knowledge flows the reverse direction.

How might international exchange bind us more closely together by taking this process as a model?

Institutional endurance beyond individuals. Because they are based around the sharing of technology and skills in pursuit of a practical goal—and precisely because they are rooted locally in distinctive knowledge—the relationships of mountain rescue have a strong basis to endure over long distances. The same could be said of film. “The Volunteers” led to a cascade of connections that have led to my video production company working with a studio based in Vienna to develop two new documentary projects that showcase the connections between the United States and German-speaking Europe (stay tuned). Likewise, the historical connection it investigated between Seattle Mountain Rescue and the Tyrolean Bergrettung has led to the forging of strong and enduring institutional ties between those organizations. We celebrated those ties at our film screening at the Austrian Embassy:

They were being celebrated as well in the photograph with which I began these reflections. It shows members of Seattle Mountain Rescue and the Tyrolean service climbing together to the top of the Space Needle in Seattle. I’m told that when the American rescuers reached the peak, they demurely looked about and climbed quickly back down. The Austrians, however, gazed into the distance and let out a hoot and a holler—a Whitmanian yawp over the rooftops of America! Later that evening, the two groups would share a round of drinks. And throughout the time they shared together, I was far away, happily imagining what was taking place, and thrilled that the further their cooperation continued into the future, the less necessary to the relationship either I or my film would become.