Author: Paul Henley

24½ mins. , silent, German titles and intertitles

Production: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica/ IWF

Source: Encyclopaedia Cinematographic/IWF collection at the TIB. Further details are available here.

Background: This film was shot in 1959 and is one of 28 films about the Krahô indigenous group of the Tocantins valley, Central Brazil that were shot at various points between 1949 and 1965 by the Brazilian ethnographer Harald Schultz.

In common with all Schultz’s films, this film was released by the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, a collection of films set up by the IWF in Göttingen, Germany. The principles on which this collection was based are described here.

This particular film was released in 1962 and is the longest, not only of all Schultz’s Krahô films, but of all the 67 films that he shot between 1944 and 1965. He published a study guide to this film in 1964 which is available here.

Film Content :

The full significance of this film is impossible to determine without reference to the study guide. Here it is explained that a Krahô village is typically divided into two ceremonial moieties, one identified with the ancestral figure of the Sun, the other with the ancestral figure of the Moon, an arrangement that may cross-cut the more fundamental system of exogamous moieties on which the layout of Krahô villages are based.

During the dry season, the Krahô move out of their villages and set up camp out on the savanna for several weeks. Here they build a series of temporary shelters, though these are laid out in the same pattern as the permanent village. Whilst they are in these dry season camps, men from the two ceremonial moieties will go out together to hunt, to build up food supplies for an approaching ceremony, or simply to meet the food needs of the village in general.

They will be accompanied by a number of women without marital obligations, typically widows or women who have been abandoned by their husbands, whose role is to cook for the men and prepare the surplus meat for bringing back afterwards. According to the study guide, they also meet the sexual needs of the men at night.

After a preliminary shot of the village, this film shows the men out on a series of hunting expeditions and then butchering the animals after they have brought them back to the camp. The women meanwhile are shown cooking the meat in the stone-lined pits that are typical of the Krahô. From a technical point of view, the cinematography is generally very competent, though it is evident that certain scenes showing the capture of particular animals have been staged.

Schultz admits to this in the study guide, but claims that the film nevertheless shows how hunting takes place in actual practice. To the viewer, however, it is quite clear that the animals have been restrained since they do not escape when the hunters approach them.

A particularly interesting sequence concerns the distribution of the meat once it is brought back to the camp, which is clearly being done with great care. The study guide explains that all the dead game is scrupulously divided equally between the two ceremonial moieties.

At the end of the film, the camp begins to break up prior to departure but just at that point, some young men begin a log-racing competition. (These are traditionally an almost daily feature of Krahô life and were the topic of one of Schultz’s earliest films, described here).

20½ mins., colour, silent with German titles and intertitles

Production: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC), IWF.

Source: EC/ IWF collection at TIB, the German National Library, see here. A copy is also held  at the Museu de Anthropologia e Ethnografia (MAE) at the Universidade de São Paulo. Details of this copy can be accessed via the on-line catalogue here.

Background: this is one of 67 short films made among the indigenous peoples of Amazonia in the period 1944-1965 by Harald Schultz. In 1959-60, Schultz made nine short films among various subgroups of the Karajá that inhabit the Ilha do Bananal in the Araguaia River, of which this film, shot in 1959, is the longest. A complete listing of these nine films may be consulted here.

All these films were ‘published’, i.e. released by the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica in 1962, though Aruanã Dances would appear to deviate somewhat from the normative methodology of this collection in that it brings two rather different types of event together in a single film (masked dancing and honey gathering).

In 1970, posthumously, Schultz published a study guide to this film which is available here. Although this provides a considerable amount of social and cultural context, Schultz is unable to explain what the meaning of the Aruanã dances might be, other than to suggest that they are “obviously related to fertility” (see p.6).

The Aruanã masked dances had featured both in Luiz Thomaz Reis’s film Ao Redor do Brasil (1933) and in Heinz Förthmann’s film, Os Carajá (1947) though in those two films, the dancers are shown performing to the sound of twinned long flutes, which is not the case in Schultz’s film.  This suggests that traditionally, Aruanã dances took place on different occasions, possibly for different ceremonial purposes.

Film content:

[As it was not possible to view this film first-hand, this highly condensed summary is based on a combination of the catalogue entry of the EC/IWF collection at the TIB and the description offered in the study guide].

A row of temporary dry season shelters  of the Javahé village of Jatobá stands on a sandbank at the edge of a small river within the Ilha do Bananal. At some distance, stands the shelter that serves as the Mask House, which women are forbidden to enter. As the film opens a pair of masked dancers are shown dancing with two women in the space between the temporary village and the Mask House.

There is then a sequence inside the Mask House, where several young men are putting on mask costumes. Two pairs of masks emerge from the Mask House in pairs,  singing and shaking rattles and then dance towards the village. They dance together in the open space between the Mask House and village huts. Various other dances follow before a pair of masks approaches the village huts but some women emerge and the Masks rapidly retreat to the Mask House.

There are then a series of scenes in which women are shown dancing with the masks interspersed with scenes of the young men being supplied with food and drink by the women of the village.

In the final part of the film, the young men from the Mask House are shown out on the savanna gathering honey. They then return to the village and the masked dancing begins again, though this time, some of women dancers offer the Masks calabashes that contain cakes laced with honey.

8½ mins., colour, silent with German titles and intertitles.

Production: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, IWF.

Source: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, IWF collection at TIB, the German National Library, see here. A copy is also held  at the Museu de Anthropologia e Ethnografia (MAE) at the Universidade de São Paulo, which can be accessed via the on-line catalogue here.

Background: this is one of 67 short films made among the indigenous peoples of Amazonia in the period 1944-1965 by Harald Schultz. This is the only film that he made among the Cashinahua who, in 1951 when he shot this film, were living on the Curanja, a left bank tributary of the upper Purus river and had only very recently entered into contact with the outside world.

In order to visit them, Schultz had to get special permission from the Peruvian government, because their village lay about 100 kms within Peru though it seems that they had migrated there from Brazilian territory in the relatively recent past.

Although the film was shot in 1951, it was not ‘published’, i.e. released, by the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) until 1962. Although it conforms in certain respects with the norms of the EC, it is somewhat discrepant in that it incorporates two quite different events. Typically in an EC film, these would each be dealt with in a separate film.

A study guide was published in 1971, after Schultz’s death in 1966. This was written by Schultz’s widow, Vilma Chiara, though as she had not accompanied him on his trip to the Cashinahua, one assumes that this text must have been based on his notes. It is available here.

In 1984, Patrick Deshayes and Barbara Keifenheim showed this film to a Cashinahua community,  along with some footage of the then present-day Germany, and filmed their reactions. By this time, the Cashinahua had undergone a considerable degree of social and cultural change as a result of contact with the outside world, which by then had extended over more than thirty years. The reactions of the Cashinahua are presented in a English-language version of the film released by the IWF in 2009, entitled Naua Huni – Watching the White World.

Film Content:

The film is more or less equally divided between the collective fishing expedition and the subsequent celebration.

In preparation for the fishing expedition, women gather the poisonous leaves of the báka shrub, which is cultivated and grows in the vicinity of the village. A man then pulverises these leaves in a mortar. A boy seated on a beautifully carved bench looks on.

The study guide tells us that men, women and children then walked upstream for three days until they reach a point on the river at which fish are known to be particularly abundant. Here we see the baskets containing the báka powder being emptied into the river.  Everyone then moves downstream to wait for the fish, which will either be killed outright by the poison or at least made very sluggish.

The men shoot the fish that are still alive with bow and arrow while women and children collect the dead or almost dead fish by gathering them up in baskets or by hitting them over the back of the head with a machete and then picking them out by hand. A man then lights a fire by the drilling method and the fish are smoked on a grate positioned over the fire.

On returning to the village, at the midpoint of the film, people begin decorating themselves in preparation for the feast. The study guide observes that due to a lack of knowledge of the language, Schultz was unable to establish whether this was directly connected to fishing or merely a general festivity.

A woman paints a man red with urucu and plucks his eyebrows. She then cuts his hair with scissors which the study guide reveals were supplied by Schultz himself. Some men bring out some headdresses from long boxes. Another man puts a long macaw feather through the septum of his nose. A young girl has some thin sticks inserted through her septum.

The dance then begins with men dancing in a long line through the house and onto the village plaza. Apparently only men dance, since women merely look on and the children play. The dancers are wearing beautiful headdresses, with an array of different coloured feathers – yellow, white and red. They begin to dance in a circle on the village plaza but the film then ends very abruptly.

5 mins., colour, silent with German titles and intertitles.

Production: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, IWF.

Source: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, IWF collection at TIB, the German National Library, see here. A copy is also held  at the Museu de Anthropologia e Ethnografia (MAE) at the Universidade de São Paulo, see here.

Background: this is one of 67 short films made among the indigenous peoples of Brazilian Amazonia in the period 1944-1965 by Harald Schultz. Twenty eight of these films concerned the Krahô of the Tocantins River valley. Four of these films, including this one, were shot during his first visit to the Krahô in 1949.

The other films shot during this visit include two very short films about a Morning Ceremony, 2 minutes, and an even shorter film about Slash and Burn Cultivation, 1½ minutes. The footage for the remaining film, Preparation of a Large Manioc Cake, was combined with further footage on the same topic shot in 1959, resulting in an eventual film of 10½ minutes.

However,  none of these films was  ‘published’, i.e. released, by the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) until 1962.

Although Ritual Relay Races conforms in some regards to the methodology normally required by the EC, notably in being silent, without either ambient sound or explanatory commentary, it is discrepant in that it constructs several different events as if it were a single event.

A study guide to accompany the film which was written by Schultz and published in 1964 is available here.

Film Content:

The Krahô are one of several Gȇ-speaking peoples of Central Brazil who hold relay races involving the carrying of burití palm logs weighing as much as 90 kgs.  In the Krahô case, these races take place on a dedicated track of several kilometres around the village, and end in the village plaza. Given the great weight of the logs, each runner only runs for a short distance, before handing the log over to a fellow team member. On no account, ideally, should the log be put down or the runner begin to walk.

At the time that this film was made the holding of such races was an almost daily occurrence among the Krahô and there were races both for women and for men. In their most formal ritual form, they involved a competition between two ceremonial moieties, each identified with one or other of two ancestral figures, the Sun and the Moon. However, they could also take place between different age grades, or between villages. Often they would take place between a group of young people just for amusement.

The film begins with a men’s race over 2-3 kilometres. In the study guide, Schultz explains that since it was impossible for him to keep up with the runners, he shot the various stages of the race on different occasions, though he argues that as the format is always the same, this amalgamated version of the race is representative of such races generally.

In the digital version viewed at the MAE, the race consisted more of a series of stills than sequences, though this may possibly have been the effect of a problem with the transfer from the original film.

The men’s race ends with the logs being dropped in the central plaza of the village in front of the house which, in the study guide, Schultz describes as being dedicated to the ‘vutú woman’, the patroness of one of the ceremonial groups. The participants then enter the house.

There is then a very similar women’s race, which is generally more animated, though here too there are freeze frames.

Finally, there is a race involving logs that are exceptionally heavy, requiring two men to carry them.  There is a large crowd urging on the runners, and the course is very demanding: at one point, there is a dramatic shot in late afternoon sunlight of the runners passing through a stream (see the image above).

When the runners eventually reach the plaza, they drop the logs and both teams then dance in a circle and begin to sing, with a rocky bluff forming a dramatic background. As the film is silent, it is not possible to hear what they are singing, but the study guide explains that they are beseeching Sun and Moon, the ancestral figures from whom the ceremonial moieties are descended, to allow further such beautiful races in the future.

58 mins., b&w, silent with German titles and intertitles.

Production: Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (RWU)

Source: IWF/TIB (German National Library), viewable here.

Background:

This film was shot by the German ethnologist and ornithologist Emil Heinrich Snethlage (1897-1939) during various research trips carried out in the years 1933-1935.

Although this film has evidently been professionally produced with formal titles, Snethlage had clearly had  no cinematography training as the quality of material is technically very poor, with many shots poorly exposed and framed, with scenes often shot from so far away that it is not possible to see clearly what is happening. For this reason, even from the most straightforwardly descriptive perspective, the ethnographic value of this footage is very limited.

Film Content

According to the TIB catalogue, the film offers “insights” into the lives of the following groups of the Brazil-Bolivia border region: More, Itoreauhip, Kumaná, Amniapë, Pauserna and the europeanised Tshikitanos (material culture; festivals; dances etc.).

This is a stub: more information to follow