Author: Paul Henley

12 mins., b&w, sound – French voice-over commentary, extra-diegetic music.

Source: Gaumont-Pathé Archives, PRS 1931 12 1.

Background: This appears to be a fragment of a longer travelogue film. Despite the title given in the Gaumont-Pathé archive, there are no scenes involving the Incas in this fragment. There is also no main title – it simply opens onto what is clearly an intertitle saying ‘En suivant le cours de l’Amazone’ [‘On following the course of the Amazon’]. Nor is the authorship of the film indicated, be it on the film fragment itself or in the Gaumont-Pathé documentation.

Judging from their dress, body decoration and artefacts,  the indigenous people who appear in the fragment are members of groups whose traditional territories are located on the upper reaches of the Ucayali, a major tributary of the Amazon which descends from the Peruvian Andes. Primarily, they appear to be either Asháninka (Campa) or Shipibo-Conibo, though sequences of the two groups are mixed up indiscriminately. Possibly other groups are featured as well.

Film content: In general, this film fragment is ethnographically incoherent, the voice-over is laden with overblown assertions while the music sounds absurd to modern ears. Even so, particularly given its early date, once its many deficiencies are allowed for, it has a certain value as ethnographic reportage.

The fragment begins with various shots of the river and stock shots of forest animals before arriving at an indigenous village at the river’s edge, with some houses standing on stilts right next to the water. There is then an unexplained cut to what appears to be a different village and there are various shots of domestic life, followed by a sequence of individual portraits. This is interesting in that many of the subjects have faces that are painted or possibly tattooed in the manner that is typical of the people of the upper Ucayali (see images above)

After brief sequences of fishing with bow and arrow which involves the damming of a stream and of the weaving of an extraordinarily long piece of cloth by a bare-breasted woman who giggles as she is filmed in close up, there is then an equally brief sequence of a fully clothed woman making a clay pot. This then cuts suddenly to a museum exhibition of what appears to be some rather fine pieces of Shipibo-Conibo pottery.

The fragment concludes with two sequences that have clearly been directed by the film-makers. The first of these is a dance to music played by a line of sullen-faced young male drummers. This looks more like a European folk dance than an indigenous performance. Only young women are shown dancing, mostly fully clothed and waving handkerchiefs in the air, but there is also a ‘star’ woman dancer, who is bare-breasted and wears a elaborate necklace and head-dress. In the background, a helmeted European can be seen indicating to the dancers where they should dance.

The final sequence concerns a ‘war’ between two villages that supposedly breaks out when a woman is kidnapped. The young ‘beauty’ herself, bare-breasted and wearing what appears to be a skirt with Shipibo-Conibo patterns, is then shown posing for the camera. However, the ‘warriors’ who come to reclaim her are wearing cushmas, the ponchos typical of the Asháninka (as in the frame-grab at the head of the entry)

There are some dramatic scenes of archers exchanging volleys of arrows across a small creek and an attack with flaming arrows ‘many of which are poisoned’ on a small house. The thatch bursts into flames and the inhabitants flee by canoe to set up a new house ‘on the other side of the Amazon’.

The dramatic music superimposed on the ‘war’ scenes then gives way to some more lyrical strings, and the action suddenly jumps to the Iguassú Falls on the Brazil-Argentinian border, which the film-makers supposedly encountered ‘on the way back to their point of departure’.

The voice-over commentary then indulges in some grand generalisations suggesting that the film as a whole is about to end, though there is no end-title to confirm this.