They called it useless. He called it everything. A 31-minute obsession with going up.
Biography of ski instructor, mountain guide, mountaineer and filmmaker-lecturer Lionel Terray. Film-portrait of an emblematic figure of French mountaineering in the 1950s and 1960s, reconstructing the life, the great races and the expeditions of the "conqueror" of the most difficult walls and summits of Europe, the Himalayas, the Andes and North America. Marcel Ichac produced in 1966, the day after the Gerbier accident, this illustrated tribute by bringing together personal archive documents, unpublished animated sequences or extracts from expedition images as well as comments taken from the autobiographical texts of Lionel Terray " The Conquerors of the Useless" and "Battle for Jannu". This film, presented at the Cannes Film Festival, has won numerous awards at specialized film festivals, including the Trente Festival and the Banff Festival.
Cinematography
16mm footage from actual 1950s expeditions — no safety net, no second takes
Direction
Ichac's elegiac structure, completed days after Terray's death
Editing
Terray's own words as narration — posthumous autobiography
Director
Marcel Ichac
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The title comes from Terray's own phrase for mountaineering — he stole it from Mallory, who stole it from skeptic critics.
This 31-minute film helped cement the 'heroic alpinist' archetype that dominated French culture until sport climbing democratized the mountains in the 1980s.
No ratings yet
Sign in to join the discussion — comments are spoiler-gated to your watch progress.
Discussion starters
FR
