Our First Ancestors Weren’t Animals

Quest for Fire, by J. Rosny, is a novel of adventures that take place in prehistory, when man knew how to preserve fire but not yet how to light a fire. It’s a French book (La guerre du feu) from 1911, which when I was a boy seemed wonderful to me, and it still seems quite wonderful today. It’s almost a fable, without didactic presumptions: ingenuous, graceful, literarily skillful. Its characters, especially the three who set out to conquer fire, are intelligent and courageous, and loyal to their tribe, like Homeric heroes, although perhaps a little too monogamous, polite, and clean for their era.

The film that was made from it, and which I hurried to see, is guilty of the opposite sins. It’s not at all naïve. Of course, it’s hard to remain ingenuous when tens of millions of dollars are at stake, but it could have been polite, and the progenitors of this film were scarcely that; as for the characters, they appear surprisingly amazed and dirty. Our ancestors were not supposed to be gentlemen, and they certainly didn’t wash often, but, given that they had learned to wear the skins of the animals they killed, it’s not credible that they hadn’t also invented a way of fastening them around their hips: I don’t mean for purposes of modesty (though that must have been invented fairly soon) but for protection from the cold.

Garments like the ones we see in the film are pointless; they serve only to convey to the spectator the redundant notion that these savages were very savage. I think it’s likely that they possessed a certain physical nobility—precisely because they were animal-like. Here, instead, they are unpleasant and ridiculous ogres: they move with a clumsiness that doesn’t seem compatible with hunting; they hardly ever run, and when they do they are slow and unsteady. But perhaps the fault lies with the actors, whom the scientific consultants have forced to go barefoot on all terrains without giving them sufficient training.

A few words should be said about the consultants. Anthony Burgess, who already has on his conscience A Clockwork Orange, was not ashamed to appear in the credits as the author of the dialogue: now, there is no dialogue—there are only shouts, grunts, and vague verbal cues from which a single clearly articulated word emerges, atra, evidently meaning “fire.” Burgess didn’t work too hard; but maybe he was paid by the piece. Nor was Desmond Morris ashamed to be cited as a consultant for the movements. Morris had already seemed a little dubious in his famous book The Naked Ape (which is man); and here his dubiousness is confirmed.

Of course, pornography is an art of all times and all places, and so we may think that it responds to a human need. It’s silly and pointless to try to repress it. The way should be open to pornographic films and books, but both should be taken as such, for connoisseurs and experts. Normal commercial practice, and good sense, prohibits us from selling vinegar with a label that says oil and vice versa. Morris has done this, disappointing enthusiasts on both sides, anthropologists and lovers of porn.

Ultimately, the characters do not move in interesting ways: the only amusing gestural sequence may be the one in which the protagonist, returning from the victorious expedition, “recounts” his adventures sitting beside the fire that he himself has recaptured. He encountered mammoths, and he imitates their curved tusks by holding under his chin the skull of a goat with twisted horns; with his hand and forearm he imitates the movements of the proboscis. His listeners understand and laugh. But Morris, in keeping with the vocation mentioned above, has introduced another gestural theme: there is a woman, a little less prehistoric than the other characters, who teaches the foreigner the “correct” position for coupling: these foreigners, it seems, had never thought of it. He learns rapidly and, in so doing, becomes civilized.

How many wasted opportunities! With a little more taste and imagination, the filmmakers might have told the story of (or let us understand) the laborious means by which man learned to make fire, through countless centuries of attempts, through trial and error, but certainly intelligent trial and error: nothing indicates that those Vichian beasts were stupider than we are. It would have been, cinematographically as well, a good story. Instead, we get from the film the notion that the crucial stratagem in making fire by rotating a stick is to spit on one’s hands in advance: the girl demonstrates this to the stranger, and, lo and behold, the fire is kindled.

The same, or worse, can be said of the nonaggression pact with the mammals; one could choose between a fablelike, Kiplingesque tone, such as is found in the book, and a seriously educational one; but in the second case the viewer would have to be given the impression of the span of time required by this fundamental phase of humanity, the domestication of animals. The film has chosen neither version: the episode is over in a few seconds, and the elephants disguised as mammoths cooperate reluctantly, encumbered by the enormous tusk-shaped prostheses sticking out of their mouths.

We know that making a book into a film involves risks, that the film is always of another species compared to the book, and generally worse, for the obvious reason that its distinctive quality is diminished. It’s a pity, however; here we are able to watch only one event des âges farouches (of prehistoric times, as the original subtitle of the book had it). Of the future Homo sapiens there are only a few traces: these ancestors of ours really are poor naked apes.

La Stampa, March 14, 1982