Category: Film-makers

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Schultz, Harald (1909-1966)*

Harald Schultz with a Caduveo woman, Posto Indígena, Presidente Alves de Barros, Mato Grosso do Sul, 1942. Photographed by Heinz Förthmann, when both were working for the Research Section (Seção de Estudos) of the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI). Though barely visible in the photograph, Schultz’s face is decorated in the traditional Caduveo manner. Acervo Museu do Índio.

Today, some fifty years after his death, Harald Schultz is a largely forgotten figure in the history of ethnographic film. And yet, if the number of ethnographic films that a film-maker released in the course of their career were the only criterion, one would have no hesitation in acknowledging Schultz as by far the most important ethnographic film-maker working in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century.

For in the two decades between 1944 and 1965, Schultz shot 67 films among a large number of different indigenous groups across Brazilian Amazonia. Details of all these films are held in the German National Library (TIB) and are available here. There may be further films, yet to be released, in the possession of his descendants.

Of those that have been released, a remarkable 28 films concern the Krahô (referred to in the older literature as the Eastern Timbira) of the Tocantins River valley in Central Brazil, while nine concern their indigenous neighbours to the west, the Karajá, of the Ilha do Bananal on the middle reaches of the Araguaia River.

Schultz shot a further 20 films in the upper Xingu River region among various indigenous groups,  five among the Rikbatsa (whom he called Erigpactsá) of the upper Juruena, two on the upper Purus, among the Tukurina (linguistically related to their better-known near neighbours, the Kulina) and the Cashinahua, and another about the Tikuna of the upper Amazon mainstream.

Two particularly interesting films, his first, are those that Schultz made in 1944-45 about the Umutina, a small group, linguistically related to the Bororo but now extinct as an autonomous group, but who then inhabited the headwaters of the Paraguay River in Mato Grosso state. These two films were shot when Schultz was working for the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI). All his later films were shot after he was appointed to a research position at the Museu Paulista in São Paulo in 1947.

By and large, the cinematographic quality of Schultz’s films is high. They were almost all shot on 16mm film stock and in 80% of cases, in colour. However, the great majority of his films are very short.  Two-thirds are only ten minutes or less in duration, and of the remaining third, the longest is only 24½ minutes. The total duration of all 67 films comes to no more than ten hours.

Moreover, the subject matter of the films is very limited. The great majority are about technical or aesthetic processes such as craft activities, subsistence practices and body decoration. Although he also filmed ceremonial dances, he tended to film these as isolated events rather than attempting to cover the ceremony as a whole. Though his films have titles and sometimes explanatory intertitles, they are almost all silent, with neither ambient sound, nor voice-over commentary.

A major exception is Schultz’s very first film, Os Umutina and also one of his longest at 24 minutes, which was made when he was still at the SPI. This is of a more general documentary character, combining sequences of subsistence activities, self-decoration and ceremonial practices within an overarching narrative structured by a voice-over commentary as well as an introductory map. There is also intra-diegetic non-synchronous sound.

Another distinctive feature of Schultz’s work is that the production and release of his films was very uneven over time. After his two films about the Umutina, four years elapsed before he made his first three films among the Krahô in 1949. These were all very short, the longest being Ritual Relay Races with Wooden Logs, which was five minutes long and dealt with Krahô’s celebrated log-racing.

In 1950, Schultz travelled to the upper Purus River accompanied by his new wife, Vilma Chiara, who had studied anthropology at the Universidade de São Paulo. Here, Schultz shot a short film of only 3½ minutes duration, about the treatment of the sick among the Tukurina.

While working with the Tukurina, Schultz heard about the Cashinahua, a Panoan-speaking group which had then only recently entered into prolonged contact with the outside world. He visited them the following year, but as the Cashinahua were actually living within Peru at that time, he had to get special permission from the Peruvian government. It was during this visit that he shot Fishing Expedition and subsequent Ceremony. This is a partial exception to the general pattern of Schultz’s films in that it combines two different events, though it is still only 8½ minutes in duration.

After the Cashinahua film, there was an extended interlude in Schultz’s film-making activities. In 1952-53, he went on various research expeditions to indigenous groups living along the Bolivian border in Mato Grosso as well as to the Karajá and Tapirapé of Central Brazil, but he appears not to have shot any films. In 1954-58, he is reported to have been primarily involved in archeological expeditions in eastern Brazil and similarly, does not appear to have made any films.

It would not be until 1959 that Schultz started making films again, though when he did do so, he was highly productive, shooting 59 films before his tragically premature death in January 1966.

In the first year of this highly active final stage of his career, Schultz visited both the Karajá and the Krahô, shooting six films with the former and ten with the latter. Most of the Karajá films concerned craft activities, but they also included a longer film of 20½ minutes about their Aruanã Masked Dances. This is another unusual film in the corpus of Schultz’s films in that it combines two different types of event (ritual performance and honey-gathering).

The Krahô films also mostly consisted of short process films, but included one longer work, Hunting Expedition of Both Ceremonial Groups, which, with a duration of  24½ minutes is the longest of all the films that Schultz made.

In 1960, Schultz returned to the Karajá and shot a further three short process films, one about basket weaving and two about fishing techniques, but he also visited the upper Xingu, where he shot further five process films among the Suyá, the longest, at 16½ minutes, being Making an Arrow. On the same trip, he shot a curious two-minute film among the Kayapó, showing how a man could eat, drink and smoke while wearing a large lip plug.

It was also in 1960 that he shot his single film about the Tikuna on the Amazon mainstream. This is Making Bark Cloth, a very straightforward process film which, at 22 minutes, is another of his longer films.

All 25 films that Schultz shot in 1959-60 were then ‘published’ (i.e. released) in 1962 as part of the so-called Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC), a collection of films produced by the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (the Institute of Scientific Film/IWF), located in Göttingen, in what was then West Germany. Schultz went in person to Göttingen on two separate occasions, in consecutive years (probably 1961 and 1962), and worked with the IWF producer, Werner Rutz, to prepare them for inclusion in the EC.

Remarkably, although Schultz only stayed for a short period on each occasion, during these visits he and Rutz also prepared all his earlier films for inclusion in the EC as well. (In the case of Os Umutina, this constituted, in effect, a second release, since this film had first been released by the SPI back in 1945). In total therefore, in 1962, no less than 32 of Schultz’s films were added to the EC.

In terms of the sheer number of films produced, this represented only the mid-point of Schultz’s career. Over the remaining five years of his life, he would shoot a further 35 films.

In 1962 itself, he visited the Rikbatsa of the upper Juruena, while in 1964, he returned to the upper Xingu, this time to film the Waurá. The five films that he made about the Rikbatsa and three Waurá films were released by the EC in 1965. Another eleven Waurá films were released in 1966. The longest of the Rikbatsa films, Weaving a Carrying Basket was only ten minutes while the longest of the Waura films, 18 minutes, described the process of Extracting Salt from Aquatic Plants. By this time, Dore Kleindienst-Andrée had taken over in Göttingen as the producer of Schultz’s films for the EC.

In 1964 and again in 1965, Schultz  received a visit from some Krahô men at his home in São Paulo and he shot two films about them making string figures. It was also in 1965 that Schultz made his final  visit to the Krahô, shooting thirteen films, all of which, with the assistance of Vilma Chiara, were released posthumously at various points by the EC, the last release not being until 1988.

The longest of these Krahô films, 16½ minutes, was the second film about the making of String Figures, a testimony to the remarkable importance ascribed to this activity in early ethnographic texts generally. A film perhaps speaking more directly to present-day concerns is a ten-minute film about an important ceremonial event, Climax of the ‘Piegré’ Festival Cycle.

To understand this rather extraordinary pattern of film production, one must look more closely at the detail  of Schultz’s career.

Biographical background

Schultz was born to German-Danish parents in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, on the Atlantic coast of southeastern Brazil, in 1906. After attending school in Germany until he was 15, he  returned to Brazil and began his career as a photographer. For five years, he worked in the communications office of the then President of Brazil, Getúlio Vargas. His widow, Vilma Chiara much later reported that it had been Vargas himself who had invited Schultz to work in Rio de Janeiro.

In Rio, Schultz came into contact with the charismatic figure of General Cândido Rondon and was recruited to the SPI, which Rondon himself had founded in 1910. In 1939, in a sort of reprise of his appointment of Luiz Thomaz Reis to head up the new Section of Photography and Cinematography of his Commission in 1912, Rondon invited Schultz to set up a new Research Section (Seçao de Estudos) for the SPI.

Schultz remained with the SPI until 1946. During this time, he worked primarily as a photographer, though he also carried out ethnographic research. Among the groups that he visited were the Terena, the Caduveo and the Bakairi, all of whom live in the Mato Grosso region.

Among his colleagues at the SPI was Heinz Förthmann, also then working primarily as a photographer, but who would also later become an ethnographic film-maker, albeit one with a very different approach to that of Schultz. Both were from families of German descent based in Porto Alegre, and they were related by marriage. (Förthmann’s sister was married to Schultz’s brother). Indeed it had been Schlutz who had recruited Förhtmann to the SPI in 1942. It was while they were visiting the Caduveo later that same year that Förthmann took the photograph at the head of this entry.

It was during his time at the SPI that Schultz worked with the Umutina of the upper Paraguay river. He made his first visit in 1943, returning in 1944 and 1945, spending eight months in total with them. During his second and third visits, he shot the material for his general documentary Os Umutina and also for a much shorter film, Dances of the Cult of the Dead, 4½ minutes, which concerns three ceremonial dances, though this was not released until 1962, long after Schultz had left the SPI.

Schultz among the Umutina in 1943-45 (photograph in Schultz 1954, p.73).

In addition to these two films, Schultz also produced a large number of photographs of the Umutina and a short fieldwork memoir, in which, in addition to conventional ethnographic descriptions, he relates how his fieldwork was brought to an abrupt end when his Umutina interpreter, who had been brought up by non-Indians,  stabbed him, almost killing him, having been angered by what he considered an act of disrespect on Schultz’s part.

Shortly after this experience, Schultz left the SPI, frustrated by its general disorganisation and enrolled on the courses  being offered at the Museu Paulista in São Paulo by Herbert Baldus, a German anthropologist who had arrived in Brazil in the 1930s and is regarded as one of the foundational figures of modern Brazilian anthropology.

In January 1947, Baldus appointed Schultz to be his ethnographic research assistant at the museum, a post that he would hold for the rest of his life. Initially, Schultz accompanied Baldus on his field trips to Southern and Central Brazil, though he did not make any films during these expeditions. But thereafter he struck out on his own.

Schultz’s move to the Museu Paulista coincided with a major change in the style and approach of his film-making. Os Umutina, the film that he made whilst still with the SPI, was one of several films that the SPI produced around that time that purported to give a general account of a particular indigenous group. These films included Calapalo (1946) directed by Nilo Oliveira Vellozo, Os Carajá (1947) directed by Heinz Förthmann and Os Índios “Urubus” (1950), jointly directed by Förthmann and Darcy Ribeiro.

But after he moved to the Museu Paulista in 1947, Schultz began to to make films in accordance with a very different methodology. As this methodology was then the dominant orthodoxy in German educational film-making, it seems very likely that it was Herbert Baldus who most influenced him in this regard.

This is the methodology that would be explicitly adopted by the  Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) when this was set up at the IWF in 1952 and it was in this film collection that, ten years later, all Schultz’s films would be ‘published’.

Films that were ‘published’ by the EC had to conform to a strict set of methodological rules designed to ensure that they were as scientifically objective as possible. As applied to the making of ethnographic films, the EC methodology encouraged the production of short ‘monothematic’ films that followed processes, cultural as well as technical.

The general aim was to produce data, not cinematic narratives. In the hope of ensuring objectivity, the rules required that there should be no interference in the process filmed, nor any changes of chronology at the editing stage. If synchronous sound was not possible for technical reasons (which was usually the case in remote locations until the late 1960s), the films should be silent: soundtracks based on non-synchronous ‘wild’ sounds or library effects were not permissible. Nor should there be any voice-over commentary. Instead, all necessary explanation and contextualisation should be provided in the form of an accompanying written text.

The overall effect of these principles was to encourage a preponderant focus on topics that lent themselves well to the particular underlying methodology: that is, technical processes, subsistence activities, the performance of particular dances (but not a whole ceremonial event). Aspects of social life that were less obviously processual, for example, the emotional tone of interpersonal relationships, were simply not covered.

The great majority of Schultz’s films conform very closely to the norms of the EC, both in a technical sense and in terms of content.  They are also all accompanied by study guides that provide ethnographic contexualization, though this is mostly descriptive rather than analytical or comparative. Theoretical discussion is almost wholly absent. (Again, Os Umitina, the film that Schultz made for the SPI, is an exception here: although it too was also ‘published’ by the EC, there is no accompanying study guide, only a transcription of the commentary text).

These texts also describe the circumstances of production: the cameras and film stocks are listed, the lenses, the tripod, even on one occasion the light meter. Schultz also frequently explains whether or not he had to ask his subjects to move to take advantage of the available light since he had no means of artificially lighting a scene.

The writing and publication of these texts usually took place some years after the release of a film: many were written in part or entirely by Vilma Chiara after Schultz’s sudden death in 1966. The last text to be published, along with the last of Schultz’s films, did not appear until 1988.

The legacy of Harald Schultz

Schultz had no formal higher education qualification either as a film-maker or as an anthropologist. Although Baldus claimed in his obituary for Schultz that he was a student of both General Rondon and the leading Brazilian indigenist, Curt Nimuendajú, this was only true in the sense that both had given classes on a two-month short course on ethnology at the Museu Nacional that Schultz had taken after he was appointed to the SPI in 1939.

No doubt Schultz would also have learned much from working with Baldus himself and from following his courses at the Museu Paulista. He would equally surely have learned a great deal from his anthropologist wife, Vilma Chiara, who was his companion through much of his film-making career.

But notwithstanding his lack of formal training, Os Umutina, Schultz’s first film, proved that he was a film-maker of great artistic sensibility as well as considerable technical ability. His companion study guides and many other publications showed that he had an ethnographic sensibility to match, as well as being an accomplished story-teller.

By undertaking the most arduous journeys, Schultz was able to visit the most remote indigenous communities on which the impact of the outside world was still then minimal. And he carried with him the same film-making equipment that around the same time in Africa, Jean Rouch and John Marshall were using to create a number of the great ‘classics’ of ethnographic film history.

Yet once Schultz adopted the EC methodology, in the hope of achieving a chimerical objectivity, his films became restricted to mute registrations of mostly banal everyday processes or decontextualised ceremonial performances that today challenge the patience of most audiences, even those with the most dedicated specialist interest in the subject matter.

Thus, although Harald Schultz’s films undoubtedly offer an extensive descriptive record of certain, mostly technical, aspects of Brazilian indigenous life in the mid-twentieth century, when considering his body of film work as a whole, one cannot help but feel the most profound sense of lost opportunity.

Texts :  Schultz 1954, Baldus 1966, Campos 1994, Campos 1999, Souza Mendes 2006, Husmann 2007, Arruda 2013, Marcolin 2013. This entry also draws on a number of generous personal communications by Werner Rutz (June 2020).

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Förthmann, Heinz (1915-1978)*

Heinz Förthmann with the principal subjects of Os Índios “Urubus” (1950), the Kaapor family, Xiyra and her son Beren, and her husband Kosó. Photograph by Darcy Ribeiro, Acervo Heinz Förthmann.

Heinz Förthmann (sometimes referred to as Henrique Forthmann or Foerthmann) was probably the most accomplished of all early ethnographic film-makers in Brazil, but his best films exist only in degraded or fragmentary form, or have been lost entirely, and he has therefore not received the recognition that he deserves, even within Brazil.

Förthmann was born in Hanover, in Germany, but as a teenager, he moved to Brazil with his family and settled in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. Here his older sister married the brother of Harald Schultz, the head of the Seção de Estudos of the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI). After a period working in a photographic and design studio, it was through his connection with Schultz that Förthmann was recruited into the Seção de Estudos in 1942.

Schultz encouraged him to take a basic course in cinematography, but initially Förthmann worked for the SPI as a photographer and later as sound-recordist before eventually beginning to direct his own films around 1946.

Förthmann’s  first films were mostly informational works about SPI posts, though they sometimes also included ethnographic passages, as in Os Carajá. Notwithstanding the informational subject matter, these films showed that Förthmann was a highly talented cinematographer and as a director, of a generally more artistic inclination than his mentor, Harald Schultz.

In his later works for the SPI, Förthmann collaborated with the eminent Brazilian anthropologist, Darcy Ribeiro, who had also by then joined the Seçao de Estudos. With Förthmann contributing his cinematographic skills and Ribeiro his anthropological expertise, they shared the direction of two substantial ethnographic films: Os Índios “Urubus”, released in 1950,  and then, in 1953, a film about a Bororo funeral.

Sadly, the original negative of the first of these films was destroyed in a fire in the Cinemateca Brasileira in 1982, and the film now appears to exist only in a degraded form without the original soundtrack, while the Bororo funeral film was never completed and now exists only as an incomplete rough cut.

In the later 1950s, with the SPI facing severe budgetary cuts, Förthmann reluctantly went to work in the US with an American producer on some 16mm colour films that he had shot in the Xingu Park, but these too were not finished for budgetary reasons and now appear to be lost. While he was away in the US, his contract with the SPI was terminated on the grounds that he had neglected his duties in Brazil.

Heinz Förthmann in later life

In 1959, Förthmann returned to Brazil and spent the last fifteen years of his life at the Universidade de Brasilia, where along with informational films about architecture, he also shot some short films in the Xingu Park, including the charming Jornada Kamayurá (1966).

Förthmann’s last film, Rito Krahô, concerned the sweet potato festival of the Kraho of Central Brazil, the indigenous group with whom his mentor, Harald Schultz,  had made many films. This film was shot in 1971-1973 but it was not until some fifteen years after Förthmann’s death in 1978, aged only 63, that the editing was undertaken by his former student, Marcos de Souza Mendes. It was finally released in 2015 on the centenary of Förthmann’s birth.

A filmed interview about the shooting of this film with the anthropologist Júlio Cézar Melatti, who acted as an adviser, and which includes a numer of clips, is available here.

Texts : Mendes 2006, Mendes 2011, Arruda 2013, Labaki 2015. An extensive filmography of Heinz Förthmann can be found on website of the Cinemateca Brasileira.

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Santos, Silvino (1886-1970)*

Silvino Santos ,appropriately dressed for filming in Amazonia, in hunting gear and a jaguar skin hat, in what was probably a publicity photograph for No Paiz das Amazonas (1922).

Silvino Simoẽs dos Santos e Silva was a pioneer figure in the history of Brazilian documentary film-making, most remembered for the films that he made in Brazilian Amazonia and the neighbouring Putumayo region of what was then Peru.

Of the many films that Santos made in the Amazon region, a large number, perhaps the majority, are lost. Of those that have survived, by far the best known is No Paiz das Amazonas, first released in 1922 on the occasion of the celebration of the centenary of Brazilian independence. This offered an epic and unprecedentedly comprehensive overview of a region that was still largely unknown to most of the urban population of Brazil.

It is a film that has many ethnographic qualities in that although its principal purpose was to celebrate the natural resources of the region and the potential that it held for economic development, it also focuses in a sympathetic manner on the everyday activities of the workers involved in extractive industries (rubber-tapping, Brazil nut collection etc), ranching, fishing and hunting.

There are also three sequences on indigenous groups. Two of these were then still living under relatively traditional circumstances, the recently ‘pacified’ Parintintin of the Madeira River region and the Witoto of what was then Peruvian Putumayo (in a political settlement in the 1920s, this region became part of modern Colombia). The third was the Sateré-Mawé, a group that had undergone a much greater degree of change as a result of contact with the national society and whose territory lies on the right bank of the Amazon, downstream from Manaus.

Also frequently cited among Silvino Santos’s films is No Rastro do El Dorado, released in 1926. This film follows the expedition led by the amateur US geographer Hamilton Rice in its progress up the Rio Branco and Uraricoera Rivers in Roraima, in the far north of Brazil, in what would prove to be a vain attempt to reach the headwaters of the Orinoco via a tributary of the Uraricoera, the Parima River.

However, this is not only a much less complex film, but it is also of only limited ethnographic interest in that it is primarily concerned with the logistics of the expedition, its scientific and technical objectives, and the natural environment. Although it refers to the expedition’s contacts with a number of indigenous groups, these sequences are all very brief and mostly consist merely of the encounter itself rather than offering an account of the way of life of the indigenous groups in any more general sense.

Biographical background

Silvino Santos was born into a well-to-do family in  northern Portugal in 1886 but as he showed only limited academic aptitude, in 1899, when he was fourteen, his father allowed him to go to Brazil where the family had  business interests. At first, Santos lived in Belém do Pará on the Atlantic Coast, where he worked in a bookshop. At the same time, he became an assistant to the painter and photographer, Leonel Rocha. At some point, Santos appears to have travelled with Rocha to Iquitos in Perú.

In 1910, Santos moved to Manaus, the capital of Brazilian Amazonia and the commercial centre of the rubber boom that was still then in full flood.  Initially, he worked in his brother’s retail business, but after only a year, he set up his own photography studio. It was through his photographic work that he came into contact with Carlos Rey de Castro, the Peruvian consul in Manaus. Rey de Castro commissioned Santos to travel to the Putumayo region and over two months, August to October 1912, to take photographs during a tour of inspection of the rubber collecting stations of the notorious Casa Arana.

On board his steamer, The Liberal, Julio César Arana, extreme left, entertains the US consul, Stuart Fuller (in white suit) and the UK consult George Michell (in starched collar). To the right of Michell, is Carlos Rey de Castro, the Peruvian consul in Manaus who recruited Silvino Santos, and on the extreme right, the steamer captain, Ubaldo Lores (photographs by Silvino Santos, in Chirif et al. 2013, pp.55, 102).

This tour of inspection involved the British and US consuls in Iquitos as well as Rey de Castro and the owner of the company himself, Julio César Arana. It was taking place in response to the denunciation of the Casa Arana in London, where the company was registered and many of its leading investors were based.

In 1910, following allegations in the British press that Casa Arana was holding indigenous workers in conditions of slavery and that it was responsible, directly or indirectly, for tens of thousands of indigenous deaths, the British government had sent an official  envoy, Roger Casement, to inspect.

In his report, published in March 1911, Casement had confirmed the truth of these allegations, as had a parliamentary committee report in June 1912, based on a broad range of witness statements, including by both Casement and Arana. The purpose of the consular tour to be recorded by Santos was to prove that Casement’s original report had been exaggerated and that in any case, conditions had improved.

Photographs taken by Silvino Santos during the consular inspection of the operations of the Casa Arana in the Putumayo, August -October 1912 (from Chirif et al. 2013, pp.113, 140).

In accordance with the tour’s aims, Santos’s photographs show the indigenous people to be in a generally reasonable state of health, without any evidence of coercion. The photographs themselves are technically competent though aesthetically limited in that they consist largely of subjects standing in a line before the camera or of distant shots of indigenous dancing.

Arana was seemingly pleased with the results, however, because he then commissioned Santos to make a film about his operations in the Putumayo, probably for the same purpose, i.e. to demonstrate the probity of his operations to his British investors.  He was sufficiently convinced of the potential value of such a film that he paid for Santos to go to Paris to buy the equipment from Pathé and tropically adapted stock from Lumière, and most importantly, to train as a film-maker.

Santos returned to the Putumayo in August 1913, married Arana’s step-daughter Anna María Schermuly, an orphan of German descent, and over the following two months shot the film commissioned by his new father-in-law.

What happened to this material is surrounded by legend. The most commonly repeated story is that it was lost at sea when the ship carrying the negatives sank in the Pacific on the way from Iquitos to Lima (via the Panama Canal, as was then a common practice ), or in some accounts, on the way from Lima to the US to be developed. Some even claim that it was on its way to Europe, while others suggest it was on the way back. Moreover, it is often alleged  that the German navy was responsible for the sinking: in some versions of the story, it involved bombardment, in others a torpedo. But neither  seems likely at that stage of the First World War, certainly not in the Pacific theatre, if indeed the war had even begun by the time that Santos was sending off his negatives.

What is certain is that Santos returned to the Putumayo several times over the ensuing years (which is hardly surprising since his wife came from Iquitos and his father-in-law continued his operations there with impunity) and he appears to have shot a considerable amount of further footage there.

In July 1916, according to the catalogue of the Cinemateca Brasileira, the local press in Manaus contained reviews of Índios Witotos do Rio Putumayo, a film by directed by Santos and produced by none other than Julio César Arana. But it is not clear whether this was based on the footage supposedly lost at sea, or on some part of the footage shot in 1913 that had not been dispatched on that fateful journey, or possibly on entirely new footage. Unfortunately, however, this film too is lost, and neither technical details nor its content are described in the catalogue.

The following year, 1917, again according to the Cinemateca Brasileira catalogue, Santos shot another film in the Putumayo, though it was not until 1919 that it was actually released as Scenas Amazônicas. This appears to have been a very substantial film: the catalogue reports that it was organised into “four long parts” with a duration of 2.5 hours. This too is lost but the catalogue reports that in the last part, it features “Indians in a savage state, completely naked, just as they are in nature”.

This film was produced Amazônia Cine-Film, a company set up by a group of Manaus businessmen. Santos himself was a partner, as well as technical director. In the years 1918-20, he made a number of films in and around Manaus for the company on a variety of mostly local topics :  the botanical garden, a football match, the inauguration of a bank, a flag ceremony in a local barracks, the arrival of a transatlantic liner, local family scenes, an eclipse. Sadly, these too are all lost.

But he also went further afield. Santos’s most significant project for Amazônia Cine-Film was a film entitled Amazonas, O Maior Rio do Mundo. To make this film, he travelled from the mouth of the Amazon to Iquitos, with a further trip to the Putumayo to film “the Indians in their ceremonies”. All told, he is reported to have shot five hours of footage which he then cut into a six-part film.

Silvino Santos at the Salto de Teotónio, Madeira River. This image has been dated to 1918 but it is probably later since he appears to be using a Mitchell Standard camera, a model launched in 1921.

Not only did Amazonas cover the Putumayo but it also included a number of sequences on topics that also crop up in his subsequent film, No Paiz das Amazonas, including fishing, Brazil nut collecting and rubber tapping. But after it had been edited, though before it had entered distribution, the master copy of Amazonas was stolen and sold to the French distributor Gaumont, who then screened it all over Europe under a different title and without authorial attribution for almost a decade.

Although no copy of this pirated version of the film has yet been located, on the basis of some subtitles that have turned up in Germany as well as various contemporary reviews in France, Italy and Britain, some scholars now believe that various parts of Amazonas may have been recycled and included in No Paiz das Amazonas.

But whether all the footage shot for Amazonas was lost, or only a part, the theft was sufficient to bankrupt Amazônia Cine-Film. It was at this point, in 1920, that Santos first came to be employed by João Gonçalves de Araújo, a leading Manaus businessman of Portuguese origin, who since the collapse of the rubber price had diversified into many other fields.  It was Araújo who commissioned Santos, in conjunction with Araújo’s son, Agesilau, to make No Paiz das Amazonas.

Around 1923, Santos went to Rio de Janeiro to promote the film, remaining there about a year. During this time, again in collaboration with Agesilau de Araújo, Santos shot a film about the city, emphasising its modernity and sophistication. The film was given the title, Terra Encantada. Only some fragments have survived, though these were reconstituted into new films in the 1970s.

On his return to Manaus in 1924, Santos made a number of further films in and around the city before setting off in August on the  Rio Branco expedition of Hamilton Rice during which he would shoot the material for No Rastro do El Dorado. This would prove to be Santos’s last major film, though he remained an employee of the J. G. de Araújo company for the rest of his working life.

Silvino Santos in his improvised ‘laboratory’ during the shooting of No Rastro do El Dorado, 1924-25. Photograph by A. Hamilton Rice.

In 1927, Santos moved back to Portugal in the company of the Araújo family and spent several years with them there. Whilst in Portugal he shot some  footage about the Araújo family as well as various other local events. A selection of this footage was gathered together into Terra Portuguesa: O Minho, with Agesilau de Araújo credited as a co-director. This was released in 1934 when Santos returned to Brazil.

Santos appears not to have gone back into full-time film-making at this point and to have held various managerial positions in the Araújo company.  But alongside this more conventional employment, he continued to make films about the company’s activities as well as about the Araújo family.

Between 1948 and 1957, Santos made his last film, which was the only film that he made in colour. Produced by Agesilau de Araújo, this film chronicled the construction of Santa Maria da Vila Amazônia, a new town which lies downstream from Manaus, towards the mouth of the Amazon. This was built on land bought by the Araújo company after it had been expropriated from Japanese settlers following the Second World War. A highly deteriorated copy is reported by the Cinemateca Brasileira to exist in Manaus.

By this time, Santos was a largely forgotten figure in Brazilian cinema circles. It was only in October 1969, shortly before his death in May of the following year, that his major contribution to Brazilian cinema history was finally recognised in the form a personal homage during the course of a new film festival in Manaus.

It was also in 1969 that he wrote an as-yet unpublished account of his extraordinarily varied life as a film-maker in Amazonia.

Texts:  Santos 1969, Chirif et al. 2013,  Martins 2013a, Martins 2013b, Oliveira 2014, Stoco 2016, Stoco 2017, Paiva 2018.

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Ribeiro, Darcy (1922-1997)

Darcy Ribeiro with Xiyra and her son Beren, two of the principal Kaapor subjects of the first film that Ribeiro made with Heinz Förthmann, Os Índios “Urubus” (1950). Photograph by Heinz Förthmann. Acervo Museu do Índio.

Darcy Ribeiro was one of the leading Brazilian anthropologists of the twentieth century and also an eminent public intellectual.

Early in his career, he carried out fieldwork with many different indigenous groups across the country while working for the Seção de Estudos of Serviço de Proteção aos ĺndios (SPI). He then moved on to a distinguished career in education and politics while publishing a number of important works on broad anthropological, indigenist and historical themes. He also published four novels.

Ribeiro also made a significant contribution to the history of ethnographic film in Brazil. This took the form of two films made in collaboration with Heinz Förthmann  when they were colleagues at the SPI. The first, Os Índios “Urubus”, shot in 1950, offered a day-in-the-life portrait of the indigenous group now more commonly known as the Kaapor, while the second, shot in 1953, concerned a Bororo funeral. Sadly, the former now only exists in a highly degraded copy, while the editing of the latter was never completed.

After studying with Herbert Baldus in the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política, at the Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeiro entered the SPI in 1947 and remained there for ten years. He was named head of the Seçao de Estudos in 1952 and in this capacity, he was instrumental in the creation of the Museu do Índio the following year.

The combination of fieldwork and comparative research that he carried out whilst at the Seção de Estudos laid the groundwork for the publication for which he is probably best known in anthropological circles, namely, Os Índios e a Civilização,  a comprehensive and devastating analysis of the impact on indigenous groups of contact with the national society. This was first published in 1970 but has since gone through multiple editions in several languages and is still frequently cited today.

But following a series of crises within the SPI as a result of severe budgetary cuts, Ribeiro left the organisation in 1957 and moved into matters of educational policy and national politics, eventually becoming Minister of Education in the left-leaning Goulart government. When this was brought down by a military coup in 1964, he went into exile but continued to write broadly on anthropological, indigenist and historical topics while holding various academic posts across Latin America.

After returning to Brazil in 1976, he continued to participate in political and academic matters at the highest national level, though his last publication, Diários Índios, which came out in 1996, the year before he died, was based  on the notes that he wrote while carrying out fieldwork with the Urubu-Kaapor in 1949-51.

In 1992, he was elected to the Academia Brasileira de Letras, arguably the highest academic honour for the Humanities in Brazil. The Academy has published a summary account of his career which can be accessed here.

Texts: Ribeiro 1996a, Ribeiro 1996b. See also Henley 1978, Mendes 2006, Mattos 2011, Pereira Couto 2011.

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Reis, Luiz Thomaz (1879-1940)*

Luiz Thomaz Reis as he appears with his Debrie Studio camera in the opening sequence of Ao Redor do Brasil (1933).

The principal contribution of Luiz Thomaz Reis to ethnographic film history is the film  Rituais e festas borôro, which was shot in 1916 and released in 1917, and which Reis shot, directed and probably also edited.

This film constitutes possibly the very first ethnographic documentary in the modern sense in that it was based on a comparatively extended shoot of three months, and presents a narrativised account of the Bororo funeral that is its central subject matter, without any of the fictional elements that characterised the work of Robert Flaherty and other early ‘documentary’ makers in his mould.

However, this film, which was made relatively early in Reis’s career as a film-maker, was not typical of his work as a whole. Most of his works were expedition films, shot in the course of Brazilian government expeditions through remote parts of the interior of the country or around the frontiers. These offered very literal, chronologically-structured accounts of the logistics of the journey undertaken by the expedition as well as of the places and people whom the expedition encountered along the way.

Many of these expeditions were led by Colonel and then later General  Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, a leading figure in Brazilian public life on account of his role in ‘opening up’ the interior of the country. In accordance with Rondon’s personal interests, many of these expeditions involved contact with indigenous groups, and this is reflected in the films that Reis made about them.  But never again did Reis remain long enough in any one indigenous community to produce a film with anything like the ethnographic complexity of Rituais e festas borôro.

In addition to Rituais e festas borôro, this website includes entries for one of his earliest and most commercially successful films, Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso (1915) and for Ao Redor do Brasil (1933), a compilation of some of his later work. There is also an entry concerning a number of film fragments of ethnographic interest held by the Museu do Índio in Rio de Janeiro, most of which were shot by Reis, here. His other films are discussed more briefly in the tentative outline of his complete filmography offered here.

Biographical background

Luiz Thomaz Reis [right] and Colonel Cândido Rondon [centre] with a group of Paresí beside the Utiariti waterfall. This photograph was probably taken during the shooting of Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso , c. 1914. [Acervo do Museo do Índio/ FUNAI – Brasil, CRNV0614].

Reis’s film-making career began in 1912, when he was appointed to run the Photography and Cinematography Section of the ‘Rondon Commission’. The official name of this body was Commissão de Linhas Telegráficas e Estratégicas do Matto Grosso ao Amazonas, but on account of Rondon’s high personal profile, as well as for brevity, it was, and is, almost invariably referred to in this shorthand form.

The Rondon Commission was originally set up in order to build telegraph lines connecting the western frontier of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro and other important cities in the east. But right from the time of  its establishment in 1900, Rondon went out of his way to involve scientists of various kinds in the activities of the Commission, including the anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto, so that they could study  both the natural and social environments  that were being opened up by these new lines of communication.

Rondon also had a very modern sense of the need to use visual media to bring his Commission’s work to the attention, not only of the politicians, but also to the Brazilian public at large. From early on, he had employed photographers for this purpose but by about 1907, he began to feel that the Commission should be making films as well. After some unsatisfactory results using private studios, he decided that the Commission should set up its own film-making unit.

When he was appointed to run the new section of the Commission, Reis seems to have had no previous training or professional experience even as a photographer, let alone as a film-maker. At the time, he was a 2nd lieutenant in the Brazilian army and had been appointed to the Commission in 1910 to work in the Design Section, which was primarily concerned with producing, distributing and archiving documentation associated with the Commission’s activities, including photographs as well as such things as maps, scientific reports and budget statements. Even so, within a short period of time, Reis proved himself to be both a highly accomplished film-maker as well as photographer.

Reis was clearly highly competent in a technical sense, managing to maintain his equipment and develop his films under the most adverse conditions in the field. But he thought of himself not merely as a technical operator, as many cinematographers of his era did, but rather as an artist and he often identifies himself as such in his reports.

Shortly after he was appointed, Reis was sent by Rondon to Europe to buy the equipment necessary to set up the new section. This consisted primarily of two cameras, a Williamson bought in London, and a Debrie Studio, purchased in Paris. Of the two, Reis preferred the Debrie, probably because it could hold a much larger roll of stock, offering around six minutes of shooting, then considered a great deal.

In Ao Redor do Brasil, released in 1933, the opening shot is of Reis himself operating a Debrie Studio,  certainly of the same model and perhaps even the same camera that he had purchased in Paris two decades earlier (see the image at the top of his entry). Shortly afterwards, he appears to have upgraded to the Debrie Parvo L (launched in 1928) since it is this model of camera that appears in the equipment list of the  Inspetoria Especial de Fronteiras, for whom Reis shot his last film in 1938. The Williamson, however,  is still listed as one of the back-up cameras [Lasmar 2011: 312].

Reis’s first major success as a film-maker was Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso, released in 1915 to great popular acclaim. This film follows a number of expeditions led by Rondon in the far west of the country, close to the Bolivian border, through the Serra dos Parecis, which acts as the watershed between the upper Paraguay River and the Amazon Basin.

In the course of the film, the expeditionaries encounter various groups of Paresí and Nambikwara, though these contacts are mostly relatively brief and superficial, so  the ethnographic interest of the material is therefore limited. A prominent feature of all these encounters is Rondon giving away gifts of industrially manufactured goods, often clothes. This would become the pattern for most of Reis’s films thereafter, though none of his later expedition films would have quite the popular impact that this one did.

Frame-grab from Luiz Thomaz Reis’s film Parimã, Fronteiras do Brasil (1929). Colonel Rondon observes the body decoration of a young Trio man in a village close to the northern border with Surinam.

In the early 1920s, Reis accompanied Rondon on a number of different projects, including the relief of drought in the Northeast of Brazil and the suppression of a military revolt in the state of Paraná in the southwest of the country, but the films that he made on those occasions are lost. Later in the decade, he made several films with Rondon when the latter became the Inspector of Frontiers. Extracts from some of these were gathered together in Ao Redor do Brazil.

Thereafter Reis’s film-making activities diminished as the political star of his principal patron, Rondon, was temporarily eclipsed. Inspetoria Especial de Fronteiras, released in 1938, proved to be his last film. This followed Rondon’s successor as Inspector of Frontiers on his visits to the Colombian and Venezuelan borders around the headwaters of the Rio Negro. Whereas Rondon had had a deep suspicion of missionaries, his successor did not, and much of the film, which is very long at 99 minutes, consists of visits to mission stations. There is only a very brief visit to a traditional indigenous village right at the end of the film, seemingly after the main business of inspecting the region has been completed.

Not long afterwards, in 1940, having survived all manner of physical challenges during his many years in the interior of Brazil, Reis lost his life in the most tragically banal circumstances, when he was aged only 61. As he was filming the demolition of an army barracks in Rio de Janeiro, he was struck by falling masonry and died not long afterwards in hospital.

Texts: Rodrigues 1982, Tacca 2005, Lasmar 2011, Lobato 2015, Caiuby Novaes, Cunha and Henley 2017.

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Pöch, Rudolf (1870-1921)*

Rudolf Pöch in heroic fieldworker mode during his expedition to New Guinea, 1904-06.

As an ethnographic film-maker, the Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch is best known for the series of short research films that he made during two separate expeditions: to New Guinea in 1904-06, and to southern Africa in 1907-09. However, in 1915, he took his camera to various First World War prison camps and made a series of short films of Russian prisoners-of-war making artefacts and performing dances.

Pöch is celebrated as a pioneer in many standard accounts of ethnographic film history. Although his films are neither very skilled, nor numerous, his work became particularly well-known after 1984, when a short film that he shot in Botswana in 1908 of a San “Bushman” telling a story into the horn of a phonograph was approximately synchronised with the audio recording made simultaneously by the phonograph  This version, which was produced by Dietrich Schüller of the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is now widely available on the web.

However,  in recent years, Pöch’s reputation has darkened considerably. He held strongly raciological views, believing that culture was determined by physiology, and along with his substantial field collections of artefacts, photographs, sound-recordings and films, he also collected human body parts in the hope of being able to prove his theories. This reached a peak during his expedition to southern Africa in 1907-09, after which he shipped back to Vienna some 80 San skeletons, 150 skulls and even the preserved corpses of a San couple. This has led to a more general denunciation of Pöch and all his work, while the southern African human remains have been the subject of a still on-going process of repatriation.

Texts : Spindler 1974, Szilvássy et al. 1980, Schüller 1987, Niles 2000, Lange 2013, Rassool 2015.

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O’Reilly, Père Patrick (1900-1988)*

Père Patrick O’Reilly in 1964

Père Patrick O’Reilly was a French anthropologist of Irish descent who traced his ancestry to a forebear who moved to France in the late eighteenth century. Having interrupted his studies at the Sorbonne, first for a term of military service, then to study at a seminary of the Marist Fathers, O’Reilly was finally ordained as a priest in 1928. He was then appointed to be the chaplain at the Marist hostel in Paris, which allowed him to complete his studies at the Institut d’Ethnologie, graduating in 1932.

In 1934-35, with the support of both his Marist superiors and Paul Rivet, then the director of the Musée d’Ethnologie du Trocadéro, the predecessor of the Musée de l’Homme, O’Reilly carried out a field research project on the North Solomons island of Bougainville, where Marist missionaries were strongly entrenched. The island then formed part of Australian New Guinea and now is part of the independent state of Papua New Guinea.

The purpose of the field trip was to carry out a general ethnographic study, collect objects for the museum and make a film. For the latter purpose, he took with him a Debrie Parvo camera with a 120m magazine and a lightweight Bell & Howell as a back-up. Initially, he was assisted by a professional operator, Pierre Berkenheimer but he appears to have shot the remainder of the material himself.

The material was later edited into two different films: Bougainville, a silent film of 70 minutes which offered a general ethnographic account of life on the island, and Popoko, île sauvage, aimed at a more popular audience and only 20 minutes in duration but with a soundtrack featuring two songs and some general atmosphere effects recorded on location.

Many years later, in the early 1970s, the CNRS funded the release of a restored, shorter version of Bougainville, with a new voice-over commentary recorded by O’Reilly.

Text : Laracy 2013

© 2018 Paul Henley