In the film Alive, struggle is shown in a very explicit and raw sense; it shows how many different ways people deal with struggle. A European rugby team crashes down in the Andes, and they each struggle with the instant physical change in their own way. This film is very different in the way it presents struggle. Most of the film shots are medium-close, and the music is fairly constant. Thus it is up to the actors to present struggle within the film. The director uses many different techniques to show the struggle becoming present within the group. Pathos is incited within the audience through the use of presenting the rugby team as innocent kids, building a personalization between the characters and the audience. The idea of the situation which the rugby team has been placed in constructs a sense of panic within the audience; the predicament causes terror within the audience.
Pathos, which is evoked within the audience in the first scenes, is placed by the effect of personalizing the characters in the film. This draws the audience closer to the characters and helps the audience to ‘feel’ the struggles, and terror, being faced by the young rugby team. It is evoked in the first scenes through the voices of the characters:
“Those mountains below us don’t look beautiful, they look like big white teeth waiting to swallow us up.”
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This give the audience something to think about before any of the action occurs with the crash scene. After the crash scene, pathos is evoked in the audience with the effect of each individual characters struggle to survive, and the visual effect of seeing their suffering up-close.
Ten days after the crash, the characters in the film need to eat, and there isn’t any food, so they resort to cannibalism. This presents an idea with is considered a taboo in our society, and thus the struggle of the characters in the film is seen as frightening rather than hard. This idea which is shunned in our present society, is presented in Alive as the next logical step to survival, and thus, even though (the audience is) repulsed by it, the director gives the audience the idea that it is virtuous, therefore juxtaposing our normal lives and habits, and thus escalating the effect of physical struggle within the movie.
The emotional struggle is presented extremely well in this text; there are many different characters, and the director has chosen to let each one of them have a distinct way of dealing with the physical struggle, thus giving the audience and array of thoughts and emotions to with it is hard to fully deal with, and thus the film is almost overwhelming. Some characters go crazy, some take the lead, others try to kill themselves, but they are all united by the same physical struggle, and this is what binds them until the end.
The film is based on a true story, and thus the film techniques are simple, but this is shown as a technique in itself. The director uses this simplicity to give the audience a sense of pathos, which is established from the start of the film, and returns at the end of the movie. Pathos is also achieved within the movie with the language revolving around God:
“I feel like God is everywhere today. Can you feel it?”
“Sometimes you can feel God, but in the mountains, when you are all alone, you can feel him, looking down upon you, smiling.”
These induce pathos within the audience and give symbolism in the film: the characters feel as if they are close to God, and they are high in the mountains, lost and alone. All of theses techniques are used by the director to show that everyone deals with struggle differently, and that struggle is only as perceived.
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The cinema itself is not the storyteller, but it is essentially the medium through which the story may be told. The creative work of the writers, actors, director, producer and the movie photographers themselves bring together their talents portrayal of action and the details of the story, using the means of cinema to reach their audience. In the film 'The Untouchables' De Palma uses the ...
