, selected
Like many modern lives, the film Iceman starts with sex, a birth, and a religious ritual. When the mother dies in labour, her child is adopted. Surrounded by rugged mountain peaks, the new-born is wrapped in furs and lifted high above the clan鈥檚 heads as they chant a few syllables in an ancient tongue.
Advertisement
Then comes violence. The small settlement is attacked, men, women and children are brutally murdered and their wooden huts set alight. Something is stolen. Only two people remain alive: the infant, miraculously spared, and a senior clan member who was off on a solitary hunt in the peaks above the village. He spots the flames and races down but is too late.
Thus begins the epic journey of 脰tzi, as imagined by German writer and director Felix Randau. Fuelled by a desire for revenge, Kelab (脰tzi鈥檚 name in the film) sets off over the Alps, with the newborn in a fur sling.
The real iceman鈥檚 mummified remains were discovered in 1991 by two hikers 3000 metres above sea level in the 脰tzal-Alps near the Italian-Austrian border. Analysis revealed the body to be 5300 years old, making 脰tzi one of the best preserved humans from that period.
Frozen in ice, many of his perishable belongings had also been preserved: clothes, shoes, a hand axe, a bow and some unfinished arrows, all yielding unprecedented insights into life in the Copper Age.
Scans revealed a flint arrowhead in his left shoulder: 脰tzi had been shot in the back, not lost his way or taken a lethal fall. Pollen in his airways and moss on his clothes suggest that he came from a region 20 kilometres south of where he was found, and not nearly as high up the mountainside. A recent analysis of his tools suggests he was in a critical situation, with dulled tools and no means of improving them. Some have suggested he was fleeing a disaster in his home region, but we will never know for sure.
The makers of Iceman worked backwards from the science. The research, Randau has said 鈥渓eft me enough freedom for the fictional aspect that was meant to merge logically and organically with the historical facts about 脰tzi鈥�.
So what was a 40-to-50 year old Copper Age male doing at this altitude, far from his home? Their solution is a fairly standard revenge narrative: a tragic event and robbery, followed by a chase through an inhospitable landscape.
Both sides incur losses; both sides are all too human. But we mostly root for the lone hunter even though we can see that he is also prepared to kill 鈥� yearns to, in fact.
The friend I watched it with was unimpressed. The Revenant, he said, had rendered the same plot to greater effect. It鈥檚 true, but for those who are interested in our origins I think there is more depth and delicacy to this film.
As Kelab leaves his village in one of the earliest scenes, we see him pack his belongings. He crouches beside a fire, pulls out a smouldering ember, carefully wraps it in something and pops it into a container. Clearly, this is a nod at the birchbark containers that were found with 脰tzi and which are believed to have been used to carry embers wrapped in leaves.
Like 脰tzi, Kelab carries a backpack, is dressed in the skins of several species stitched together (we see a child sewing by a hearth in an early scene), and wears a bearskin hat. The men he鈥檚 chasing carry a . He and his clan members also have tattoos: Otzi鈥檚 may have had had medicinal purposes.
Then there are more intangible details. People living in the Copper Age almost certainly had some form of mystical belief. In the film they involve a mysterious wooden box called Tineka 鈥� a shrine of sorts 鈥� stolen by the attackers. Kelab appears to be both hunter and shaman, and one of the reveals that drives the film to its final scenes is what sits inside that wooden box.
The dialogue is minimal and delivered in a fictional language, created by the filmmakers with the help of linguist Chasper Pult. He developed words and phrases that could conceivably have been ancestral to Rhaetian 鈥� an extinct language once spoken in the Alps. There are no subtitles but they would have been superfluous: the action is self-explanatory and the sounds of streams, pebbles, the wind and birds are more than enough to bring the environment to life.
A sense of loneliness and deep sorrow accompanies our solitary hunter as he travels through the wild landscape. Here and there he happens upon other humans. It is these complex relationships I was most struck by, created by individuals who must assess the threat posed by each other using very limited shared communication.
Don鈥檛 watch Iceman if you鈥檙e after Hollywood-style narrative thrills: it鈥檚 a portrait, not a drama. After all, we all know how this story ends.
