The Volunteers: Mountain Rescue Brings Us Home

I created “The Volunteers” because I wanted to explore a philosophical and political problem in a down-to-earth way through the special medium of film, and I wanted to offer a constructive, unifying civic message in time of conflict and strife. The problem is how ideals of universal solidarity can be reconciled with local sovereignty and self-determination. The solution is captured by our tagline—“To save a stranger, first love your home”—and is embodied in the spirit of mountain rescue volunteers near Seattle, Washington and in Tyrol, Austria.

I hope that viewers of the film will feel the ways in which we might foster a positive civic culture by embracing the model that these volunteers offer, especially in their training and practice rituals, and that they will be surprised by the unexpected relationship between the two organizations that we depict across time, growing out of the cauldron of World War II—a relationship that runs, especially, through a book. In the spirit of mountain rescue, geographic knowledge, social solidarity and historical consciousness merge in the course of shaping the meaning of home.

Some of the key rescuers that the film profiles are artists or craftspeople. The work they do with their hands, and their relationship with their media, seemed to us strikingly parallel to the way all rescuers approach their techniques and tools in the field. And just as artists help us reimagine the world, so mountain rescue acts on the civic imagination—rescue is a process of building civic community akin to the process of making art.

Creating “The Volunteers” was challenging in countless ways. The most interesting challenges were narrative and aesthetic. Most important, how could we show the relevance of the mountain rescue service in Austria to civic life in America? This implicated an ethical challenge as well, because I resisted showing images of actual rescues, as dramatic and engrossing as that would have been, as I didn’t feel it right to benefit from another person’s distress, even for a good cause. One of the ways that we addressed our narrative challenges was stylistically, through what we imagined as two opposing yet complementary cinematic looks. In Austria, we wanted locked-off shots that would linger. In the United States, befitting a country still in process and that is never finished, we chose a more dynamic style.

It was all exceptionally rewarding. Among other things, as a scholar I had never really worked before on a team, and I was profoundly inspired by our crew members and their creativity and dedication. Along the way, my old college buddy David Ritsher came on board as a partner, and I learned countless things from his expertise. I was thrilled to watch the way that producing the film ended up shaping the communities that we were observing, fostering a new historical consciousness and leading to new institutional developments. Above all, I remain in awe of the generosity of the people I met, everyone involved in mountain rescue in Austria and America, who believed in my unusual idea, gave me their trust, and let me into their lives.

I grew up in Los Angeles, but my world was entirely outside the film industry, though movies were a part of growing up. The first film that went into my bones, and which I can still feel today, was Akira Kurosawa’s “Dersu Uzala.” As a teenager, I was glued to the Z Channel, where I watched the films of Werner Herzog over and over—yet I view the spirit of mountain rescue as the opposite of the spirit of risk and self-assertion he often depicts. If I had to choose to watch anything now, it would be by Ernst Lubitsch.