Quest For Fire (1981) [DVDRip]
907 MB | DVDRIP | AVI | XviD 1.1.0 Beta 2 | 720 x 576 | 25 fps | MP3 44100Hz 96 kb/s tot , Joint Stereo
Genre: Adventure
| “ | The Ulam tribe are numerous and strong thanks to their possession of the gift of fire. However, one morning their life becomes infinitely more complicated when another tribe's attack leaves many of them dead and their fire extinguished. Unable to light a fire themselves, they send off three hunters to find more fire and bring it back to the tribe. After blundering around the wilderness, they happen across a tribe of cannibals. Risking their lives they manage to steal some fire and liberate a female who turns out to come from a far more advanced tribe. By the time the hunters return home they not only have fire but something far more valuable; the gift of knowledge. Due to its lack of dialogue, Quest For Fire doesn't really function as a drama. While the film has character arcs, Annaud is clearly less interested in these characters as individuals than he is in their symbolic role as exemplars of the early human condition. This leaves the characters rather thin with the onus of the performance placed clearly on expressing the fact that despite being ultimately human, primitive men were really nothing more than animals. Indeed, it's easy to see this film with the characters as little more than ballast as Annaud runs them through a series of set-pieces, each more unique and spectacular than the last seeing the film's mood shift from primal terror to sentimentality to broad humour as incredibly graphic fight scenes give way to intimate scenes of lovemaking to people getting their genitals bitten in a fight. Indeed, the strength of the performances here is in their scientific veracity and the sheer physicality demanded of the actors as they take on board renowned primateologist Desmond Morris' observations about primate gestures and grunt their way through 'dialogue' written by Anthony Burgess, who came up with the pidgin-Russian in A Clockwork Orange. Beautifully shot in Scotland, Kenya and Canada, Quest For Fire is a feast for the eyes - but great design, performances and direction give it real intellectual substance as, by sacrificing the chance to make a film about human characters, Annaud manages to make a film about the human story itself. Despite such rich intellectual credibility, the film is never ponderous or heavy going and that lightness of tone is perhaps why the film's reputation and popularity has dimmed with age; its crime is not only being intelligent and rigorous, but it does so in a light-hearted and accessible manner. -- Jonathan McCalmont |
The story takes place 80,000 years ago, likely in Europe and Africa during the last major Ice Age. However, in the commentary accompanying the DVD release, the director Annaud stated a much earlier date would actually have been more reasonable if he had made the film recently with modern knowledge of the subject matter. It focuses on a group of Paleolithic humans who travel their dangerous world in search of a flame to rekindle their lost fire. In the era of Quest for Fire, not all people know how to produce it at will. This film demonstrates the difficulty of keeping a fire going under the harsh conditions of the primordial past.
The anthropology in the film was ahead of its time; four separate groups are represented: the Ulam, Kzamm, Wagabus and Ivaka. The Wagabus are the most primitive tribe, representing Homo erectus, the Kzamm and Ulam are Neandertals and Ivaka are more or less the modern Homo sapiens who emerged in Africa.
It should be noted that the Wagabu tribe is depicted as distinctly morphologically different and less advanced than the Kzamm and may be interpreted as Homo heidelbergensis. At the time of the film, H. heidelbergensis was simply considered an archaic version of the Neandertal rather than a separate species. The dating techniques now used to firmly place the two different species in different stages of the Pleistocene epoch did not exist at the time of the film. This is why in the documentary of the film both the Wagabu and Kazamm tribe were referred to as Neanderthals even though the former lacked the language, morphology, and advancements of the latter.
The invented language spoken by the prehistoric humans was created by Anthony Burgess. The gestural and body language was overseen by Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape. The story was difficult to tell without any dialog in a recognizable language, but the cave people's language (a combination of signs and speech) worked well; along with the natural visual tapestry, the language was one of the most successful attractions of the film.
Everett McGill... Naoh
Nicholas Kadi... Gaw
Rae Dawn Chong... Ika
More info - http://imdb.com/title/tt0082484/
Awards for this film
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