The story of the Andes tragedy of 1972, when a Uruguayan Air Force plane crashed in the mountain range and 16 of the 45 people on board, presumed dead, managed to survive in extreme conditions for more than two months, continues to impact 50 years later. Its new film version, The Snow Societyby JA Bayona, has been Netflix's most viewed film worldwide since its premiere on the platform on January 4.
Based on the book of the same name by Pablo Vierci published in 2008, the film is nominated for 13 Goya awards, is Spain's candidate for the Oscars and has returned the focus to the calamitous experience lived by that group that was mainly made up of team players. amateur of Old Christians Club rugby, family and friends, who resorted to eating the flesh of the corpses to save themselves. A detail that caused enormous controversy at the time, with the Chilean newspaper The Mercury publishing on the cover a photo of a half-eaten leg and another, The secondtitled “May God forgive them.”
“At the Last Supper, [Jesús] He distributed his body and blood to all his apostles. There he was making us understand that we should do the same. It was an intimate communion between all of us,” declared Pancho Delgado in Press conference offered by several of the survivors on December 28, 1972, just six days after the rescue. The news, which according to the writer Piers Paul Read, author of the book They live! (1974), was leaked by mountaineers, had dismantled the previously offered “white lie” that they were nourished by herbs and cheese.
“The story of the survival of the young Uruguayans was sensational enough to interest all the newspapers in the entire world, but when the news spread that they had managed to survive by eating the bodies of the dead, those same media seemed to become enraged,” he wrote. Read, who recorded in his text the discomfort of those recently saved by the suggestion of an Argentine journalist that “the strongest had killed the weakest to feed themselves” or the two pages of photographs of limbs and bones published by a magazine “ specialized in pornography.”
Although the explanations convinced public opinion and families, in addition to receiving the tacit approval of the Church authorities, the morbidity was served. For this reason, in 1973, before a single year had passed since the tragedy, it had already reached bookstores. Survive!, by Clay Blair, Jr., a summary of what happened that, from its very title, sought to anticipate Read's more than predictable best-seller, the official account that would have, the following year, with the collaboration and approval of those who They came out of the Andes. And as soon as that first book was published, the film adaptation was launched, Survivors of the Andesa Mexican production signed by René Cardona, a key director in the golden age of national cinema, responsible for almost a dozen films by the fighter Santo and a couple of musicals by Lola Flores within a filmography close to 100 titles.
A May 1975 report in the magazine People It recorded the climate of tension surrounding the filming, which took place at the Churubusco Azteca studios and which, to recreate the snowy Andean landscapes, included shots at the top of the Popocatépetl volcano. “I am going to file a defamation suit against [Roberto] Canessa,” Cardona threatened in the interview following the accusations of “piracy” that the survivor had leveled at the project. Journalists Renée Sallas and Eduardo Forte told how Cardona displayed the contract for the acquisition of the rights to Survive!to settle: “If there was piracy, it was not ours, but the author's.”
Cautiously, however, in Survivors of the Andes other names were given to the characters. Written and produced by Cardona's son, one of the most prominent figures of exploitation and B-series cinema in Mexico, the film, which premiered in 1976, featured Hugo Stiglitz in its cast and received criticism for its attention to the aspects more gruesome, with graphic scenes dedicated to anthropophagy. At 114 minutes long, half an hour was subtracted from the production in the United States, where it was released dubbed into English in just 60 movie theaters and managed to exceed a million dollars in revenue.
Eat or die
He trailer of Survivors of the Andes It already pointed very directly to the crux of the issue with a marked yellow tone. One of the men trying to track down the plane asks another affectedly: “If some of them have been saved, what are they going to eat?”, and then jumps to a conversation in the Andes inside the fuselage of the plane. Fairchild, with a survivor pointing out to his companions that “there are seven frozen corpses out there” and a voice-over announcing that the film addresses “a dramatic event of cannibalism that shook the world.”
Close from the staging and the soundtrack to a horror film record, already in the moments after the accident the director portrays one of the plane's passengers putting a piece of intestine into another's belly, in clear parallelism with what happened to Enrique Platero, who had a metal bar stuck in his abdomen and had to face the same problem when extracting it. The film, otherwise narrated very soberly and without frivolity, also introduces images of corpses with their muscles exposed, does not show the process from a distance and places the emphasis on the religious sphere, with the survivors evaluating the correctness of their actions through based on biblical quotes and plans of the crucifix that one of them holds, interspersed with each portion of meat that we see them cut from the bodies. In one of the most intense sequences, the one
who takes the initiative to resort to anthropophagy is shown in close-up crying uncontrollably while he cuts open a dead body and tastes the initiatory morsel.
Yes ok Survivors of the Andes was relegated to oblivion, especially after the American They live! (1993), which adapted the book of the same name and had the collaboration of Nando Parrado—the passenger who, together with Canessa, undertook the final 38-kilometer walk for 10 days that led to the rescue—as a technical advisor, the protagonists of the story Yes, they have remembered her over time. Antonio Vizintín, alias Tintinhe wrote in the Facebook group Re-Viven Group! The Tragedy of the Andes – The Miracle of the Andes regarding a publication about Mexican production: “A rubbish film, it is unfortunate that Mexico has made a macabre work [como esta]”. Gustavo Zerbino, another of her survivors, described her as “very bad” in an interview from 2023 for The world. “At night they went out to pray the rosary around the plane at 40 degrees below zero,” he lamented about his lack of rigor, despite adding that the film, regardless of his reputation, did seem “respectful” to him. .
“It is evident that they wanted to exploit morbidity, but I don't think it is a sensationalist film. Although there are crude scenes, it is done with surprising responsibility,” says film critic and historian Antonio José Navarro, author of The infamous banquet: Representations of cannibalism in cinema (Hermenaute, 2022). For Navarro, it is, at the very least, substantially better than They live!, the film directed by Frank Marshall: “That was a Hollywood film where the central theme was omitted, everything became a story of adventure and improvement. But Survivors of the Andes It is made hot, only four years after the catastrophe, and its approach seems correct to me. It talks about how a group of religious, civilized people, who were studying at university and preparing to be doctors or lawyers, are pushed by circumstances to eat not anonymous dead people, but people they knew, friends and family. It addresses the fundamental question, what is the process by which a person with these characteristics comes to devour his like? And he does it in a direct, honest and human way, he does not paint them as monsters or degrade them.”
Although the critic has his reservations towards The Snow Society, also believes that Bayona's version is a much superior version than the American one. “He has been more conscious than Marshall when it comes to addressing the issue. It is very Bayonne, it does not want to be cruel or dwell on the sinister part, although there is a creepy and very well filmed scene, when, after being trapped by the avalanche [el que les sobrevino cuando descansaban en el avión el decimoséptimo día, que se cobró ocho víctimas], one of the boys says “I think we'll have to eat”, he goes to another of his recently dead companions and begins to chop him up in there. A terrible and very successful moment,” he says. “They were in a dilemma: be victims of their moral and cultural prejudices or survive. Throughout history there have been situations such as shipwrecks or sieges of cities due to war where anthropophagy has been resorted to. But the fact that it was done in peacetime and the cultural level of those involved caused an impact. In Survivors of the Andes Yes, there was a point of exploitation if we refer to making the most of a current topic, but just as there was with various books,” Navarro reasons. “The survivors themselves, with their explanations or the books they have written, may also have had an exploitative interest, something that I do not judge or condemn at all.”
With The Snow Society Cinematographic peace has been achieved with the survivors who remain alive (14 out of 16, although José Luis 'Coche' Inciarte, who died in July 2023, advised and was also able to see a montage before dying). In the film there has been close collaboration with the survivors, in the same way that the 2008 book, on which it is based, tried to encompass the entire experience of the group by giving a chapter to each one to tell their version. More transcendental and mediated by decades where the protagonists have given talks and sought a deep meaning, mostly religious, to their painful experiences, The Snow Society has neither the urgency nor the direct interest in the anthropophagy of Survivors of the Andesbut a degree of precision and thoroughness in the recreation until now unique, with an immersive focus on the suffering, day by day, of those who fought to preserve life in the mountain range.
Although the true horrors of reality seem to remain unattainable by fiction. “It's a super light version of what happened on the mountain. “It was much worse,” Canessa has declared recently to the France-Presse agency. “If I made a movie about what it was really like, the audience would leave the room.”
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