Author: Paul Henley

51 mins, b&w, silent (music in some parts), titles and intertitles in Swedish.

Production: Swedish Chaco Travellers Association

Source: Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg. A version with Spanish titles and intertitles produced in 2016 is available here.

Background

This film was shot in the course of a privately funded Swedish expedition in 1920 to the Formosa ‘national territory’ of northeastern Argentina. This province lies within the general region known as the Gran Chaco which extends across the frontiers into Bolivia and Paraguay.

The main part of the film documents the encounter between the expedition and the Pilagá, one of the main indigenous groups of the Argentinian Chaco. It also includes scenes of the life of the local criollos, i.e. non-indigenous cattle-herding settlers then moving into the region.

The film was shot by actor and film-maker Wilhelm Hansson (1885-1948). A photograph of the expeditionaries on their way home suggests that Hanson was using a Burke and James ‘Universal’ camera, an aluminium-cased model then only recently developed for particularly rugged environments. Both the technical and aesthetic standard of Hansson’s shooting is generally good, though as the technology of the time required, many scenes were very evidently staged.

Hanson was assisted on location by Mauritz Jesperson (1888-1969), who served as the expedition guide. Jesperson, who was also Swedish, had arrived in the Argentina in 1913 and would continue live in the Chaco for many years, establishing a cotton plantation there and assisting in the development of colonies based on cattle-herding.  At the same time, he wrote a number of books about his experiences in the region, including his encounters with its indigenous inhabitants.

First versions of the film were produced in 1922 and 1924 under the titles With Stockholmers amongst Redskins (Med Stockholmare bland rödskinn ) and Amongst Indians and Gauchos (Bland indiander och gauchos). These are described on the Swedish Film Database here as being variously 45 and 60 mins in duration.

Some scenes from the  original material were also used in newsreels, or were edited into short films to be shown before the main feature film in cinemas in Sweden, Germany, Italy and France between 1921 and 1943. Despite this widespread distribution, Hansson was disappointed with the economic returns from the film.

In 1947, Hansson began to work on a new version but he died the following year, leaving Jesperson to take over the editing. This version was sponsored by a private organisation, the Swedish Chaco Travellers Association and was intended, not for cinema release, but for circulation around specialist audiences. It was finally released in 1950 under the title, On Indian Trails by the Pilcomayo River (På Indianstigar vid Pilcomayofloden).

The film is silent, though in some parts the original may have featured flute music recorded in the 1902 in the Tarija valley in Bolivia. These recordings, entitled ‘Inca March’ (Inkamarchen) were made during an expedition led by Erland Nordenskiöld (1877-1932), a foundational figure in the Swedish tradition of Americanist ethnography associated with Gothenburg Museum.

A version with Spanish titles and intertitles was produced in 2016 by Carolina Soler. This was based on an original script by Mauritz Jesperson discovered in Gothenburg Museum by Anne Gustavsson, who also assisted with the editing of the Spanish version.

Film Content

In development

According to one of the film intertitles, the principal goal of the expedition was to visit the Pilagá indigenous people. However, in various associated documents, an interest is also expressed in studying the potential establishment of criollo colonies in the areas visited by the expedition.

The first third of the film is dedicated to the introduction of the expedition members, their progress through the tall grasses of the Chaco and their visit to a community of criollo cattle herding settler families.

Finally, after about twenty minutes, the expedition arrives at a Pilagá village on the edge of the forest, close to the Pilcomayo river. After some preliminary pans across the village houses and an introduction to the people, the film proceeds to cover the standard topics of ethnographic films at that time, i.e. crafts (pottery, weaving by women) and subsistence activities (hunting and fishing by men, gathering of roots and grasses by women).

The film then turns to more recreational subjects. Children are shown playing with their pets, including a baby ostrich, while men are shown engaged in a dice game.

Most of the intertitles are straightforwardly descriptive, but some are crassly jocose in the manner typical of the travelogue genre. For example, an image of a young woman with an ample bosom is accompanied by an intertitle that refers to the “eternal female” enhancing her beauty with a necklace of shells and waving her fire fan with a “seductive air”.

After a scene of a family on the move across the savanna with the man carrying only his weapons and the woman everything else, including a child, there is a rather voyeuristic sequence of women gathering water, who hurry past the camera to hide their nudity.

The last quarter of the film is mostly dedicated to ceremonial activities, broadly defined. It begins with women preparing aloja, a fermented drink based on the chañar fruit. Some young men are then seen gathering for a ‘cocktail’ at the house of the chief, Negaladik.

This is followed by some dancing sequences and competitive spear-throwing. There is also a brief sequence, obviously staged, of a shaman effecting a cure.

A ‘war dance’ then supposedly anticipates a conflict with a neighbouring indigenous group. Negaladik gives an inspiring speech and an impressive group of 60-80 warriors set off across the savanna in all their finery, feather head-dresses quivering in the wind.

The expedition, meanwhile, returns to ‘civilization’. An intertitle laments the fact that ten years later, the indigenous way of life shown in the film was brought to an end by the invasion of the Pilagá’s lands by ‘the white man’ – presumably represented in this case by the criollo cattle herders seen earlier in the film.

The film then ends with a nostalgic recapitulation of some of the most striking shots shown in earlier scenes.

Text: Gustavsson and Giordano 2013.

Many thanks to Anne Gustavsson for her revision of this entry and for providing the link to the Spanish version of the film.