Quest For Fire

Jean-Jacques Annaud’s dialogue free, well, quest for fire, of 8000 years ago. That is the story is 6000BC; the film was made in 1981
Filmed in ‘Scope, it looks much like some ‘Scope films from the sizties; especially early on, it shot with long horizontal compositions, quite a bit of depth. Bit of panning around, though in these moments we generally we have distinctively wide shots. Away from this, for the action sequences we have cuts for tension/ emphasis, much more quickly done, with a bit of movement.
The lack of dialogue is really only discernible from the way it’s directed, with little shot/reverse stuff, only a few occasions of that, and a need to keep moving the positions around. The audience is in a position detached from the character’s experience, due to cross-cutting, moving away from what they can see (note to the shots with animals).
This film has elements of the Western and the Road movie; in fact it moves by a set-up, climax structure like a lot of mainstream film making. It would be difficult to say this applied at all to what it’s depicting.
This is a film of cavemen with us clearly in mind; with some exceptions, it is too neutral to be a phenomenological account, as we are directed towards what is strange/ different/ exciting. As these are emphasised, it rather takes away from all the other efforts at authenticity (such as the teeth; presuming that they really were that good).
If the film had though wanted to be a pure ethnographic/ educational study, it should just have been a documentary, which would have taken away the ‘dress up’ aspect. This is really an impossible film to make; perhaps the only way would have been to apply it directly to the modern day, losing ‘authenticity’.
The emphasis on things like the sex is slightly troubling; if it was actually felt like that, then why can’t we just be told so? This isn’t a building of their worldview. Yet if it wasn’t, the film becomes ridiculous, and importing our norms on them, making it a traditional and rather baffling picture (this is the case with the love-story; it is wholly ridiculous).
This is by no means a film that is entirely bad; it has aspects of the ‘what it is like’, is perfectly decent to sit through with an engaging enough plot (as thought these were enough). The images created are not without merit. But neither does it really do anything that well, not ethnography, doesn’t really apply to then, or now.
This film, in a way not meant to be overtly critical, is neither here nor there.