This post isn’t about my opinion of the film, The Revenant, although I would like to say, I have mixed feelings about the film and the hype which surrounds it. This post has been inspired by a documentary posted by 20th Century Fox on the ‘World Unseen’, exploring the exact history which the Revenant is drawing attention to and why it is so desperately relevant to us, as a humanity, today.
The documentary shows the great lengths to which Alejandro Iñárritu and his team went in order to most truthfully depict the world in which the film takes place.
It called forward a number of thoughts about the nature of truth in cinema, an idea and philosophy drummed into us on my University course, and how films (like life) are a quest for truth. What this documentary has proven to me is how important it is to find truth in a story and not just present it, but to create it, to work with it and be surrounded by it. The experience of making a film is the experience of searching for truth and so it is important to explore it as much as you can in preparation for filming, in the hope that by luck of place and timing, you will capture something entirely honest and wholly true.
The documentary also reminded my of a conversation I had with a friend just a couple of days ago, which I’d like to share.
He told me about the ‘State of Nature’, a philosophy exploring what life before civilisations would have been like. It looks into the hypothetical reasons why law, order and government is needed and attempts to identify how and when a civil world began to take place.
In a state of nature there are no rights, only freedom. In a world like this, would anarchy ensue? This documentary sparked thoughts on this subject. The Native Americans in the film, although civilised, were treated like cattle and were at the beckoning of what we now know as civilised America. The film uses the destruction and devastation of these tribes as a reflection of what is still taking place in the world today, with particular regard to nature and climate change.
One stand out quote, which I’d like to end with comes when Iñárritu is discussing this imposing and forever-growing problem.
“I don’t know when we will understand. Until we kill the last animal and we eat the last fish and we cut the last tree, we will not understand that we are not able to eat money.”
