Survival is
not the supreme value, but it has a unique power to put other values into
perspective.
We say, too often and unthinkingly,
that we would “rather die” than do this or that. It is a salutary thing not to
fear death, but there is nothing salutary about trivializing the precious gift
of life ? precious, not only to ourselves, but also to those left behind.
To return, as if from the dead, to
family and loved ones … What would we not do? We would “move mountains” for
them, we say ? another unthinking phrase.
There are no moving mountains, not
even one mountain. What if there was more than one? How many mountains would it
take, snow-capped and treacherous, to come between you and your life?
What happens when we are really,
irreducibly confronted with such stark realities? Most of us can only guess, or
fear. A few have discovered
in extremis
what we
hope never to have occasion to learn about ourselves.
Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane
That Crashed on the Mountains
, a haunting new documentary about the
infamous 1972 Uruguayan flight disaster, vividly explores the memories and
experiences of a group of college rugby players who crawled out of a shattered
fuselage on Friday, Oct. 13, to find themselves in a desolate, snowbound valley
somewhere in the Andes, with no special gear or clothing ? and virtually
nothing to eat.
The 10-day trek of two of the survivors,
2 1/2 months later, across more than 20 miles of rugged, snow-covered mountain
terrain, and the subsequent rescue of 14 additional survivors, captured the
world’s attention. At first it was called a miracle; later, the eventual
acknowledgement of the most shocking element of their story was sensationalized
in lurid headlines that both vulgarized a dreadful necessity and trivialized
the ingenuity, altruism and fortitude that made their survival possible.
Even today the incident is exploited
for an exercise in bumper-sticker sports bravado (“Rugby players eat their
dead”).
The story has been told before,
notably in English Catholic writer Piers Paul Read’s 1974 book
Alive:
The Story of the Andes Survivors
. Twenty years later, in 1993, the
Disney-Paramount film
Alive
, directed by
Frank Marshall, offered a semi-fictional take on the story, and there have been
at least two documentaries and a cheap Mexican film. Two years ago, survivor
Nando Parrado published his own memoir,
Miracle in the Andes
.
Documentary filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon
and cinematographer Cesar Charlone (
City of God
), who
collaborated on
Stranded
, are both
Uruguayans and childhood friends of several of the survivors, and
Stranded
is arguably the definitive retelling of the disaster, the 72-day ordeal and the
immediate aftermath.
Blending interview footage with all
16 survivors as well as family members and others with evocative, effectively
wordless reenactments, real photographs taken before and after the crash, and
post-rescue footage, the film tells the survivors’ stories in their own
conflicted, sometimes conflicting, words.
The filmmakers also return with some
of the survivors and their families to the site of the crash, now called the
Valley of Tears, and the harrowing mountain trek that led to rescue.
What the survivors reveal about
their experiences offers unique light on what it means to be human. Some
concerns and priorities cease to have meaning; money becomes paper, and
ordinary social customs fall by the wayside.
Other attachments and affections
persist, even as you discover that they no longer constrict your actions in
ways you could scarcely have imagined. Questions of ultimate meaning, of God or
blind chance, take on new urgency.
In the end, we can only hope, our
perpetual preoccupation with self becomes irrelevant, and the common good
becomes the sole priority.
Though the players were all
Catholics and many were observant, the survivors offer divergent spiritual
perspectives on their experiences. There are repeated images of hands gripping
rosary beads, and some sang hymns as well as prayed.
One, Roberto Canessa, who describes
losing faith in a God who could have allowed this catastrophe, nevertheless
joins in the prayers. Like the atheist mountain climber in
Touching
the Void
who describes the impression of a malign cosmic force
toying with him, Canessa sees the crash as a kind of laboratory experiment with
the players as guinea pigs.
Yet another survivor describes
feeling closest to God at the moment of greatest vulnerability on the mountain;
when the sun rises, he says, “it was as if God were coming to save us.”
Returning to the mountain decades
later, with adequate food, clothing and shelter, he adds that he no longer
feels God’s presence there the same way as when his life was on the line.
Religious categories became
particularly charged when it finally became necessary to confront the
inevitable. One survivor notes that it seemed especially “sacrilegious” to use
the bodies of the dead without their permission. Another appealed to the
Eucharist itself as a precedent for what they had to do: “Jesus gave us his
flesh and blood to eat. It’s like holy Communion.”
This metaphor would be repeated to
the press when it became necessary to publicly address the rumors of cannibalism
? something that the players had been trying to avoid out of respect for the
families, whom they wanted to learn the truth from them rather than from the
media.
Despite press sensationalism, the
players’ survival was much more than grisly pragmatism. Two of them were
medical students who set broken bones and so forth, and the survivors developed
techniques for collecting melted snow to drink, and later crafted a sleeping
bag with fabric from plane seats and insulation from the tail.
Without rules or laws, the survivors
shared everything equally, rotating the most sheltered sleeping areas as well
as what they had to eat.
Like
Man on
Wire,
another recent documentary of a 1970s event,
Stranded
makes effective use of unobtrusive recreation footage. Utilizing a
high-contrast, strobe-like style, the camerawork simultaneously evokes still
photography and the dreamlike quality of old but indelible memories.
Though many were appalled by the
grim revelation of the players’ survival and felt that death would have been a
better choice, the Catholic bishops of Montevideo, and later
L’Osservatore
Romano
theologian Gino Concetti, confirmed what the rugby players
had already concluded amid agonizing on the mountains: As the only viable
alternative to starvation, it is legitimate to resort to the bodies of the
slain in order to survive.
Paradoxically, the taboo against
eating the dead, and the justification for putting aside the taboo, have the
same source: the sacredness of human life.
Stranded
is a
powerful meditation on life and death, on why taboos matter, and why they are
not always absolute.
Steven D. Greydanus is editor and
chief critic at DecentFilms.com.
Content advisory:
Occasional objectionable language; disturbing subject matter; mixed religious
musings. Might be okay for mature teens.