Quest for fire

In the Quest for Fire the director, J.J Annaud has made the movie an extraordinaire in its time. With the many great film techniques used and with no dialogue apart from the occasional grunt made it a quite different movie from any other film. In this passage I am going to outline some of the best film techniques in the movie and tell u why they were so effective.

When the film begins as the camera pans across a huge, barren hillside with no real light, very little colour and as if it, the hillside, was trying to look as dull as it could, until the panning finally comes across one tiny light, a fire. At the time of the panning the background music is really daunting and you can here wolves growling and the wind howling and all combined together it makes the land seem very eerie. But when the panning comes across to the fire the music lightens slightly as if this fire is important. I find that this is an excellent start to a film because it really gives you a good idea of the scenery and showing how big the land is and how tiny that fire is. It makes it look as if that fire is the only true bright light in the world. As we find out in the movie that to the caveman it’s not just a bright light, its their life.

After Naoh has stolen the fire from the cannibals and is quite badly injured, they are surrounded by the cannibals with no likely chance of escape, when from behind them a loud grunt pierces the air. Naoh and his men slowly turn to see that they are looking straight into the eyes of a small herd of the planets biggest land mammal ever, the mammoth. They are completely frozen in fear but Naoh realizes that to get past the cannibals they will have to use the mammoths to their advantage so he slowly approaches the mammoths with a handful of grass. His whole body is trembling with fear. When he finally gets to the lead animal he puts the grass out for it to it. The mammoth sniffs it cautiously and eventually accepts the offering to Naoh’s’ delight. Throughout the exchange between the two the director has made it look as if the camera is looking directly up at the mammoth making it look very big. And it the camera is almost directly above Naoh making him look very small. The way the high angle shots and low angle really shows the difference in Naoh and the mammoth really showing who the dominant beast was. I believe that in this scene the director is showing the start of animal domestication and this might have been the time that the cavemen realized that animals aren’t just hunks of meat, they are much, much more.

After Naoh is captured by the homo-sapiens he is shown how to make fire. One of the humans take him to a cave dug into a rocky outcrop sits Naoh down next to a pile of twigs and logs. The homo-sapien then sits down and begins to rub a stick end on into a log. Naoh has a puzzled expression sown across his face but the human continues to rub. In the background a soft piece of music is being played. Soon a faint wisp of smoke begins to protrude from where the stick is rubbing and Naoh begins to show a slight bit of understanding. The music in the background begins to get louder.  When the small ember turns into a flame Naoh is flabbergasted and his face is like a bowl of emotion. The music has now turned into a huge crescendo. The way the music does this makes me believe that this is an important part of the movie so the music is really showing this. This information of how to start a fire has really brought the cavemen’s predicament down a bit.

I feel that this film is very powerful. With the lack of dialogue it was surprisingly easy to follow. This movie proves that you don’t always need words to make a message because this movie certainly had some very powerful messages in it.