22 mins., b&w, sound, titles in Portuguese
Production : Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI), Ministério da Agricultura.
Source : This film is held at the Museu do Índio, Rio de Janeiro, though the copy available for public viewing lacks sound. It can also be viewed on-line here, though in addition to the lack of sound, there has clearly been a technical problem with the upload of the second half of the film.
The film is also available as part of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica collection held by TIB, the German National Library as detailed here. A transcript of the voice-over commentary in both Portuguese and German is available here.
The TIB also holds many other shorter films by the director, Harald Schultz. These include Totenkulttänze [Dances of the Cult of the Dead] released in 1962 and shot at the same time as Os Umutina. This concerns three dances performed at an annual ritual commemoration of the dead. It is silent, has a running time of 4 ½ mins and, significantly, it is in colour.
A study guide in German relating to this shorter film is available here. This provides background context that is also useful for understanding the main film.
Here Schultz explains that he was working with a mixture of 16mm and 35mm stock using a Bolex camera for the former and a Bell & Howell for the latter. The stock was mostly black and white since due to the fact that the Second World War was going on at the time, it was not possible to get sufficient colour stock to shoot the whole film. Schultz also made location sound recordings of music.
Schultz seems to have decided to reserve the colour stock for shooting the most important ritual performances. While this is understandable, this decision had the unfortunate consequence that these events were not included in the main film, presumably precisely because they were in colour. Instead, they were reserved for a separate film that was not released until more than fifteen years later and which did not carry any sound.
Background: Traditionally, the Umutina lived on various small right-bank tributaries of the upper Paraguay River, in western Mato Grosso, between the Sepotuba and Bugres rivers. Their language is considered to be distantly related to Bororo, and there are also certain cultural features that are common to both groups, though there are also some major differences.
‘Umutina’ is a relatively recent term, dating only from the 1930s and first used by other indigenous groups to refer to them. In earlier texts, they are often referred to as the Barbados (literally, the ‘bearded ones’) on account of the light beards that men traditionally wore, unusually for an Amazonian indigenous people.
The Umutina came into violent contact with non-indigenous people in the late nineteenth century and were not pacified by the SPI until 1911. At that time, their population is estimated to have been around 300 individuals, but an outbreak of measles in 1919 reduced them to 200. Due to the effects of further epidemics, by the time that Harald Schultz first came to study them in 1943, they had been reduced to 73 individuals, of whom 50 were living on the SPI post.
The remaining Umutina were then living in a single village of three or four houses on a tributary of the upper Paraguay River. This is the group that is the subject of this film. Schultz made three visits to this village, totalling eight months, spread over three years, 1943, 1944 and 1945. The material for the film was shot in the course of the latter two visits. It is also this group that is the principal subject of the fieldwork memoir that Schultz published in 1954 and which alluded in its title to the fact that at that time, there were only 23 of them.
In 1945, while Schultz was visiting them, this group suffered an outbreak of whooping cough, and despite his attempts to aid them medically, they were reduced to only 15 people. Shortly afterwards, they too moved into the SPI post.
The Umutina continue to live on the site of the former SPI post and have been assigned a territory in the vicinity. By 2014, their population had increased to 515 but they are now extensively intermarried with the Paresí and Nambikwara who also live at the former SPI post and they no longer speak their own language. (More detailed information about the life of the Umutina today is available here).
Os Umutina and Totenkulttänze therefore represent the final period of the Umutina’s existence as an autonomous people living freely in the forest.
In the study guide for the supplementary colour film, Totenkulttänze, Schultz remarks that his filming was cut short when he suffered ‘a serious accident’. In fact, as described in his fieldwork memoir, this consisted of the severe wounding that he suffered when his aggrieved interpreter (an Umutina man who had grown up outside the group) attacked him with a knife, almost killing him.
The technical quality of the Schultz’s cinematography in Os Umutina is remarkably good. In contrast to most of his many later films, which primarily consist of very short works of descriptive documentation, this film is clearly intended to be a documentary in the sense that the material has been skilfully re-ordered and cut in accordance with the editorial codes of the period.
In his preface to Schultz’s fieldwork memoir, which was published in 1954, Herbert Baldus, who was Schultz’s principal academic patron and a foundational figure in modern Brazilian anthropology, described this work as “one of the best films that has yet been made of a South American tribe”. It was a view that he would reiterate in the obituary that he wrote about Schultz after the latter’s sadly premature death in 1966.
Film Content :
The film is organised into two parts. In the first, after a preliminary map showing the location of the traditional territory of the Umutina, the film opens with a series of portraits of individuals of various different ages, illustrating their remarkable forms of body decoration and hair styling..
This is a followed by a series of sequences on crafts, broadly defined, including house-building, the making of bowstrings and arrows, digging sticks and the curing of animal skins.
In the midst of these, there is a particularly interesting sequence of an old man feeding some macaws. The voice-over explains that the Umutina consider that after death, their relatives’ souls may take up residence in certain animals and particularly birds, which they then adopt as pets and look after with great care. This does not, however, prevent them from using their feathers to make their body ornaments.
The film then moves on to themes of subsistence, with the voice-over commenting that for the Umutina, daily life is normally a constant struggle for food. A man is shown shooting a large fish with bow and arrow, another is shown cutting down a tall tree with an axe acquired through trade with non-indigenous people. His purpose is to get at the beehive in its upper branches: honey, we are told, is much appreciated by the Umutina.
The final section of the first part begins with a man setting light to the roof of a house. It is explained that this is done when a family moves to a new location to prevent bad spirits congregating at the old site. However, when a family member is buried within the house, they leave the house to decay naturally.
This introduces the theme of mortality which is then continued with a sequence in which the father and other male relatives are shown singing mourning songs following the recent death of young male child.
The second part of the film begins with a sequence showing a fishing expedition that involves the damming and poisoning of a river. This is followed by a brief sequence about horticulture and the cultivation of maize, the principal crop.
But the main business of this part of the film are the ceremonies that take place at the time of the maize harvest, early in the rainy season, when the struggle for subsistence is less intense than usual.
The film shows the structure being built and then various sequences of dancing. As night falls, a guttural singing in imitation of bird calls and the sound of flutes announces the arrival of the spirits of the dead. A second form of dance begins and the dancers go into a sort of ecstasy as the spirits enter their bodies.
In a final intervention, the voice-over reflects on whether the spirits know that the end is nigh for a “once great indigenous tribe”.
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