I’ve written about the movie The Red Tent previously. Had been a number of years since we’d watched it so pulled it in from Netflix. Marty at first was saying that he couldn’t watch it again, that it was too much. Because he didn’t want to see it and I thought it would be too powerful for H.o.p., I put off viewing until last night.
Not as if I’m particularly interested in the polar regions, though I must be to some extent if I read Admiral Byrd’s memoir “Alone” while writing “In Search of the Giant Penguin” though the book has nothing remotely to do with polar expeditions. What I was interested in were the psychological rigors experienced. I suppose much as in the same way I’ve been fascinated with the Umberto Nobile expedition and the ability of the survivors to live for nearly two months on the polar ice. Fascinated? Well, fascinated and horrified. The daily facing of a horizon that is all white or all blue and white or all gray and white. The unremitting frozen barren.
Though fictionalized, “The Red Tent” communicates well on the psychological level what it must be like to daily awake to this landscape and attempt to endure without confidence that rescue is at hand, or when it is at hand that it may still come too late. Though there are breaks, the action not absolutely centered around what is happening on the ice with the survivors, this fearful solitude is never relaxed.
What the film also communicates well are the emotions of the various would-be rescuers. In particular there is the scene of a Siberian ham radio operator, children flying a kite as the radio’s aerial, picking up on the SOS of the survivors of the Italia. Why is it so important for him when he picks up the SOS? Why the elation? Why the desperate urgency to communicate the news that they’ve heard the SOS, that there are survivors? The radio operator and the other villagers don’t know these individuals–and yet it is important.
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