In July 1956, together with the mountaineer Gaston Rébuffat, the actor and cellist Maurice Baquet made the first ascent of the south face of the Aiguille du Midi (3,842 m/12,606 ft), a magnificent wall of red granite soaring up like a rampart above the Vallée Blanche (the White Valley) in the Mont-Blanc Massif. Thirty-two years later, as if to pay tribute to the memory of his friend Gaston, now deceased, Maurice Baquet once again climbed this mighty crag, suspended between sky and earth, behind Christophe Profit.
For Gaston Rébuffat, a passionate and generous guide, a summit is much more beautiful when you look at it in the eyes of his climbing companions. Rébuffat talks to us about his profession and his conception of mountaineering, based on transmission and the love of his client. We follow him in the footsteps of the pioneers of the mountains, in the ascent and crossing of the Matterhorn.
For Gaston Rébuffat, a passionate and generous guide, a summit is much more beautiful when you look at it in the eyes of his climbing companions. Rébuffat talks to us about his profession and his conception of mountaineering, based on transmission and the love of his client. We follow him in the footsteps of the pioneers of the mountains, in the ascent and crossing of the Matterhorn.
This documentary was released in France 1953 only 8 weeks before Tenzing and Hillary conquered Mount Everest. The first 8,000 m peak to be climbed was the Annapurna I, three years earlier in 1950, by a French expedition including Maurice Herzog, Lionel Terray, Gaston Rébuffat, Jean Crouzy, Marcel Schutz, Jacques Oudot, Francis de Noyelle an cinematographer Marcel Ichac, the only one who had already an Himalayan experience (see 'Karakoram', film of 1936 awarded at Venice Film Festival in 1938). It's an epic adventure filmed in difficult conditions by an expert of mountain film and which ended in an anticlimax of disasters and injuries.
