Category: Amazonia

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.

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

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.

12 mins, b&w, silent footage

Source: Cinemateca Brasileira

Background: This footage was shot by the pioneer Brazilian anthropologist, Edgard Roquette-Pinto during the course of an expedition to the Serra dos Parecis,  a plateau in the extreme west of Central Brazil, close to the Bolivian border, straddling the boundaries between what are now Mato Grosso and Rondônia states. The expedition arrived at the Serra dos Parecis in September 1912 and remained there for two or three months.

According to the catalogue , a copy of this film is held in the Cinemateca Brasileira. The catalogue describes the material as consisting of 132m (approx. 430 feet) of 16mm film. As film in this gauge was not manufactured until 1922, this suggests that the material would have been transferred from the original, highly flammable 35mm nitrate film for safety reasons.

At the time that he made this film, Roquette-Pinto was an assistant professor at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro and his main objective was to make a collection of Nambikwara artefacts. He was accompanied by Lieutenant Antonio Pyrineus de Souza of the ‘Rondon Commission’, a federal government organisation set up in 1900 under the charismatic leadership of Colonel (later General) Cândido Rondon with a brief to build telegraph lines across the region.

Roquette-Pinto’s expedition travelled along the routes cut through the semi-forested plateau for the telegraph lines, visiting not only the Nambikwara, but also the Paresí (Halíti) communities adjacent to the Rondon Commission telegraph posts at Aldeia Queimada and Utiariti.

Roquette-Pinto later described this journey, including a brief reference to his film-making activities, in a substantial monograph published in 1917 in which he proposed that the area should be named ‘Rondônia’ in honour of  Rondon’s role in connecting the area with the rest of Brazil. Although this suggestion was later taken up by the Brazilian government, the area so named was actually somewhat to the north of the region through which Roquette-Pinto himself travelled.

Roquette-Pinto reports that he screened this material for the first time at the Museu Nacional in March 1913. It did not represent the first time that the indigenous peoples of Amazonia were filmed since it was preceded by the footage shot by the German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg among the Taulepang of Roraima in 1911, described here. But it appears to represent the first filmic representation of an indigenous people of Brazil by a Brazilian anthropologist film-maker.  It would not be until 1950, when Darcy Ribeiro worked with Heinz Förthmann on Os Índios Urubus that another Brazilian anthropologist would follow Roquette-Pinto’s example.

Film content: According to the catalogue entry, the footage shows aspects of the life of  two different groups: the ‘Tagnani’, the term used by Roquette-Pinto to refer to the northerly groups of Nambikwara who traditionally lived around the headwaters of the Roosevelt River, and the ‘Kozárini’, a Paresí subgroup who live at Aldeia Queimada, a village on the southern edge of the Serra dos Parecis, and the point where Roquette-Pinto first arrived on the plateau.

Given the time at which it was made, it is very likely that Roquette-Pinto shot this material, not to make a narrative-based film as such, but simply as a form of visual data collection, in much the same way that on this expedition, he made a series of sound recordings of indigenous music and assembled a very substantial collection of material artefacts for the Museu Nacional.

The topics covered in the material are listed in the catalogue as shooting arrows (see below), bathing in the river, a ceremonial war dance, pounding maize, digging in the ground, breast-feeding children and houses.

It is not clear from the catalogue which of the topics listed applies to which of the two groups. However, in his monograph, Roquette-Pinto gives a more extended description of a warrior dance that he filmed among the Nambikwara who had gathered around the base that he had set up in October 1912 at the Rondon Commission telegraph post at Campos Novos, close to the modern town of Vilhena.

“Armed with bows and arrows and stamping on the ground to mark time as they chanted a two-bar song, the warriors formed a line about 15 metres from a piece of wood that represented the enemy. Two men, with arrows at the ready and half-drawn bows, broke off from the line, and as if they were hiding among the bushes of the savanna, set off in a great arc until they got close to the ‘enemy’, then they fired their arrows at it. This was the sign to attack: the chanting ceased and a volley of arrows rained down upon the ‘unfortunate’ tree trunk. They then went right up to it and finished it off with clubs, bows and other sticks” (p.172).

The particular performance described here involved the members of several different Nambikwara groups though not the Tagnani, the group specified in the archive catalogue entry. However, shortly afterwards, at Três Buritís, another Rondon Commission post close to Campos Novos, Roquette-Pinto observed the same dance among the Tagnani.

Text: Roquette-Pinto 1917.

Lost, exact duration unknown, though probably between 60 and 90 minutes, b&w, silent with Portuguese titles and intertitles.

Source : a few fragments are held in Museu do Índio, available as part of a broader collection of isolated fragments of films made by the Rondon Commission here.

Background: this was the first major film made by Luiz Thomaz Reis after he had been appointed as head of the Photography and Cinematography section of the Rondon Commission in 1912. It is an expedition film chronicling one or more expeditions to remote regions of Mato Grosso that took place in 1914, and possibly also in 1915, and which were led by the then Colonel (later to be General) Cândido Rondon himself.

The place of Os Sertões in Reis’s overall filmography, and its relationship to an earlier, seemingly prematurely aborted and also lost film about the expedition to the Mato Grosso jointly led by Rondon and the former US President, Theodore Roosevelt, is discussed here.

Although Os Sertões itself may be lost, one can get some sense of it from the intertitles, which are preserved in a Rondon Commission report dating from  1916. These indicate that the film was organised into six parts, each with a number of subsidiary sequences. As the length of the parts of such films at that time could be up to 15 minutes, this suggests that overall duration of the film could have been as much as 1.5 hours. [These intertitles are reproduced in Lasmar 2011: 260-263].

Rondon asked Reis to make Os Sertões because the interior of Mato Grosso was more or less unknown, not only to Brazilian citizens of the great cities of the eastern seaboard of the country, but even within the state of Mato Grosso itself.

The film fulfilled its remit in this sense magnificiently. When it was released on the commercial cinema circuit in 1915, it was a huge success and attracted very large audiences, not only in Rio de Janeiro, but also in a number of other major cities. Indeed, it generated a substantial income that was assigned to various charitable causes, as well as helping to fund the Rondon Commission itself and its film-making activities [see Lobato 2015: 303-306].

Film Content

As described above, the surviving intertitles indicate that Os Sertões was divided into six parts:

The first two parts follow an expedition that departs, seemingly in January 1914, from Tapirapuã, a small village on the headwaters of the Sepotuba River, north of Cáceres, close to the Bolivian border,  and travels in a northwesterly direction across the Serra dos Parecis to Utiariti on the upper reaches of the Papagaio River. This was the site of a Rondon Commission telegraph post, and also a village of the Paresí visited by Edgard Roquette-Pinto in 1912. (The autonym of the Paresí is Halíti, often corrupted to Aríti in early sources, as in the name of their village).

These two parts are mainly concerned with the logistics of the expedition itself and aspects of the natural environment, including the Salto Bello waterfall on the River Sacre.

Most of the third and the fourth parts are then dedicated to sequences about the Paresí at Utiariti. The first of these is mainly about Paresí women,  showing them coming back from their horticultural plots with laden baskets and preparing food. There are also various individual portraits of women and another of the chief of the village, wearing an army major’s uniform and accompanied by his wife.

There is also a sequence showing the distribution of presents to a group of young Paresí women, which is represented in one of the fragments in the Museo do Índio archive. A curiosity of this sequence is that the person in shot giving away the presents is Luiz Thomaz Reis himself, raising the question as to who is operating the camera at this point.

The second part concerning the Paresí (and fourth overall) shows boys diving and swimming in a river, and young men playing a game with a rubber ball, which they hit back and forth using only the head. Both these sequences are also amongst the fragments in the Museu do Índio. This part also shows the Paresí working for the Commission and ends with some shots of the impressive Utiariti waterfall. This is where the photograph, shown above, of Reis and  Rondon with a group of Paresí was taken.

The last two parts of Os Sertões are primarily concerned with the Nambikwara.  There are grounds for believing that these sequences were filmed during a different and probably later expedition to that on which the first four parts of the film were shot. (For a detailed explanation of these grounds, see the Reis filmography available here).

The first part concerning the Nambikwara (and fifth overall) shows various groups coming to visit the Rondon Commission telegraph posts on the Juína river and at Três Buritis, both lying to the northwest of Utiariti, with Rondon giving gifts to both groups. The Três Buritis group are referred to as the ‘Tagnanis’ and appear to be the same group that had been filmed by Edgard Roquette-Pinto in 1912. In Os Sertões, the Tagnani chief declares his intention to attack another Nambikwara group, the ‘Taimandês’.

The final part is preceded by a warning to the audience that it will show the Nambikwara ‘completely naked, just as they live in the bush’. This was supposedly to warn women and children that it was time to leave the cinema, but no doubt when news of the warning spread, it would have done nothing to reduce general interest in the film.

This part begins with a group of Nambikwara arriving at Utiariti, where they are given a cordial welcome, despite being traditional enemies. One of the fragments that survives in the Museo do Índio shows the Nambikwara and Paresí in a dance of reconciliation [see above].

This part and the film as a whole then concludes with Rondon meeting yet another group of Nambikwara, described as ‘Nenés’, when he visits their village on the Juruena river, to the west of Utiariti. Here, he again distributes presents. His travelling companions are reluctant to remain because they are afraid that the Nambikwara will eat their horses, but the Nambikwara themselves entreat Rondon to stay, offering to build him a house.

Texts: Rodrigues 1982; Portugal Lasmar 2011; Lobato 2015.