Dersu Uzala (El cazador)

A wonderful film. It showcases the natural beauty of the Taiga and presents a contrast between the technological and the pastoral. Dersu is one with the forest. He knows its ways and its moods. The Russians scoff at his ways and his 'primitive' belief system, but eventually come to rely on him, and even love him. It is a beautiful story that takes place in an world that very few of us in the West have had a chance to see. I thought the fact that the film was set in the pre-revolutionary period gave it a peculiar sort of charm - Russia before the Great War and the Russian Revolution was innocent and even naive, the same way the Russian soldiers were innocent of the wonders and the dangers of the Taiga. One of the things I loved most about this film was the cinematography - there are long, lingering shots of the landscape, the endless steppe, the forest, the rivers, the mountains. We believe ourselves to be powerful because we have been moderately successful in our attempts to harness nature for our own uses, but the film shows us that we are deluding ourselves, that nature cannot be controlled or resisted, and the truly powerful are those, like Dersu, who co-exist in harmony with nature and learn what the wilderness teaches.