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Índios “Urubus”, Os : a vida diaria numa aldeia indígena da floresta tropical [The “Urubu” Indians : daily life in an indigenous village in the tropical forest] (1950) – dir. Heinz Förthmann and Darcy Ribeiro*

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Nightfall – the end of a day-in-the-life of a young Kaapor family –  Os “Urubus” (1950), dir. Heinz Förthmann and Darcy Ribeiro.

38 mins., b&w, sound; in the original version, there was a voice-over commentary in Portuguese, and also a classical music sound-track.

Production : Seçao de Estudos, Serviço de Protecão aos Índios (SPI).

Source : The Museu do Índio, Rio de Janeiro holds a copy that may also be viewed on YouTube here. However, this copy has no soundtrack and is in very poor condition. It has also been stretched and is offered in a widescreen format instead of the original 4:3 aspect ratio. 

A somewhat differently ordered and abbreviated version of around 18 minutes but with the correct aspect ratio, is also available on YouTube here. This features an informal voice-over commentary by Darcy Ribeiro, one of the original film-makers. This seems to have been recorded in the mid-1990s.

Background

This film was both shot and released in 1950, and was directed by the film-maker Heinz Förthmann and the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro. Its subject is a day in the life of the “Urubu”, more commonly referred to today as the Kaapor or Ka’apor, a Tupi-speaking indigenous group who live in the northeast of Brazil, on the border between Maranhão and Pará states. It was the first of two film collaborations between Förthmann and Ribeiro, the other being a joint film project about the Bororo, shot in 1953.

At the time that they were filming with the Kaapor, both Förthmann and Ribeiro were members of the Seçao de Estudos of the Serviço de Protecão aos Índios (SPI). Originally recruited to the SPI as a photographer in 1942, Förthmann had started making films in 1946. His previous films had taken the form of reports about the work of particular SPI posts, though they might sometimes have also included more ethnographic passages. Os Índios “Urubus” was Förthmann’s first film that was unambiguously ethnographic in intention.

Ribeiro had been recruited to the SPI in 1947 as part of a more general initiative to base the development of future plans for the integration of indigenous groups into national life on first-hand research by anthropologists. Since joining the SPI, Ribeiro had made relatively brief visits to various indigenous groups in Mato Grosso. The filming expedition to the Kaapor was but one of several extended visits that he made to this group between 1949 and 1951.

The principal publications arising from Ribeiro’s fieldwork with the Kaapor were a  short book about their feather art, written jointly with his wife Berta Gleizer, published in 1957, and a very much more substantial diaristic account published in 1996, shortly before his death the following year.

The film was shot in and around three small Kaapor villages on the middle reaches of the Gurupí river, Maranhão state. The actual production took place over about a month in February and March 1950, and the finished film was released before the end of the year.

Initially, Ribeiro had very ambitious plans. He envisaged that the film would culminate in a sequence showing all the different stages of a child naming ceremony, the most important public ritual occasion for the Kaapor, when they would dance and sing, and appear in all their most elaborate feather ornaments.

However, he also wanted to show all the labour that went into such events in the form of hunting, the gathering of wild fruits and the harvesting of agricultural produce and the lengthy process of preparing all the food and drink necessary to satisfy the participants.

Ribeiro further envisaged that the person who bestowed the name would be one of his principal informants, Anakampukú, a headman with a prodigious genealogical memory, whom he also imagined relating  his experiences of warfare with a neighbouring group to the assembled company. The handing out of cigars to senior visitors would be another touch … (see Ribeiro 1996b, pp. 181-182)

In actual practice, Ribeiro was obliged to scale down the project considerably. When he and Förthmann arrived, the Gurupí river valley had recently been struck by a measles epidemic and many indigenous people had died. Although the film-makers provided medical attention as best they could, the general social dislocation caused by the epidemic meant that the celebration of a naming ceremony was out of the question.

 An additional consideration was Förthmann’s preferred way of working, which was to shoot according to a carefully prepared script, covering any particular scene with multiple takes from various different angles and with various different framings. He even had a make-shift dolly constructed by a local carpenter and used this for travelling shots in the Kaapor village where he shot most of the material. Although this approach produced images of excellent visual quality, it would undoubtedly have been extremely time-consuming.

This way of working also required the indigenous subjects to perform the same actions for the camera over and over again. If anyone looked at the camera, the take would be abandoned and another one started. While some subjects showed exemplary patience, others soon tired of these requests and declined to take any further part in the filming.

The film-makers also had to struggle with frequent days of rain or low light that made filming impossible. In order to finish the film within the time frame available, Ribeiro concluded that they should structure the film around a fictive day-in-the-life of a young couple, Kosó and Xiyra, and their two-year-old son, Beren. This small family became what Ribeiro referred to as the ‘cast’ of the film.

Heinz Förthmann with the ‘cast’ – Xiyra and Beren, Kosó. Photograph by Darcy Ribeiro, Acervo Heinz Förthmann.

Although Ribeiro makes no reference to Flaherty, this was the device that had been used to structure Nanook of the North (though in that case, the film actually covers two days in the life of Nanook and his family). It was also a device that Förthmann’s mentor, and the former head of the Seção de Estudos, Harald Schultz, had recommended as being suitable for SPI films aimed at the general public. Förthmann would use this device again later in his career in making a film about the Kamayura of the Xingu Park.

The day-in-the-life device had the great advantage of enabling the film-makers to yoke together various different aspects of Kaapor life within a single narrative story line. But it also had the downside that it could make the subjects’ daily life  seem unrealistically full.

There was also the problem that in confining the film to a very young couple, barely more than teenagers, it offered only a limited perspective on Kaapor society. The older and more experienced people who feature in Ribeiro’s writing about the Kaapor, a number of whom impressed him deeply, were by definition almost entirely excluded from the film.

In its final edited form, the original version of the film carried a soundtrack that featured both an informative, ethnological voice-over commentary and some extra-diegetic music. The commentary is reported to have been written by Ribeiro, though it is not indicated in the film credits who actually performed it. The music track is reported to be  La Mer, a symphonic sketch by Claude Debussy, though again there is no indication as to who performed it for the film.

Why this music was chosen is unclear. It seems a rather strange choice,  particularly since Förthmann is reported to have taken a Pierce Wire recorder to the field and to have recorded flute music and other sound effects. The reason may simply have been that the sound-editing process would inevitably have been lengthy and therefore too costly for the Seção de Estudos budget. The films that Förthmann had previously made for the SPI had featured European classical music on the soundtrack, probably because clearing the rights of these works would have been easy and relatively cheap.

Tragically, the master copy of the sound version of the film was lost in a fire at the Cinemateca Brasileira in 1982. The only versions that seemingly now exist are the stretched and silent version at the Museu do Índio, which is in extremely poor condition, and the abbreviated version with an informal commentary by Darcy Ribeiro. (Both these versions are viewable on YouTube via the links given above. The transcript of Ribeiro’s original, more formal, voice-over text is reproduced in Souza Mendes 2006, pp. 199-218).

Very much more tragic than the fate of the film was that of the ‘cast’. Ribeiro reported in his field diary that not long after he left, first the baby Beren died, then shortly afterwards, both Kosó and Xiyra, devastated by their loss, seemingly lost the will to live and died also.

Film Content

Tupinamba women return from the fields with manioc roots (taken from Hans Staden, 1557)

The film begins with a series of woodcut prints that form the background to the opening titles. Although this is not indicated in the film, these come from the well-known account by Hans Staden, a German mercenary, first published in 1557, in which he described his period of captivity among the Tupinamba. They were one of a number Tupi-speaking indigenous groups who inhabited the Atlantic coast of Brazil in the early sixteenth century, when the Europeans first arrived.

These images are an allusion to the proposition that Ribeiro makes in his diary concerning the cultural continuity between these groups and the Tupi-speaking people of modern Brazil, including the Kaapor, particularly in relation to the way in which they have adapted to the local natural environment (Ribeiro 2006b, pp.18-19).

The main body of the film then opens with various shots of this natural environment, before, first some feet, and then some human bodies emerge from within the foliage. This is the young couple, Kosó and Xiyra, on their way back to their village.

Kosó is carrying a recently killed deer on his back, while Xiyra is carrying a large backpack of the precisely the kind carried by the Tupinamba women in the woocut print of the opening shot. Beren, their baby son, hangs from a sling around her neck.

This heavily directed sequence sets the tone for the film as a whole. The camera is everywhere: beside, in front and behind the protagonists. As they enter the village, there is a travelling shot, executed no doubt with the aid of the make-shift dolly: this is taken from behind the large collective house, with hanging baskets, hammocks, and other people in the foreground and the young couple beyond.

In his handwritten draft of the script, Förthmann had envisaged the opening sequence in precisely this way (see Souza Mendes 2006, p.262). For his part, Ribeiro reports that for some days, they had had a backpack full of fruit ready for Xiyra to carry, while they waited for someone to kill a deer.  When a yellow deer finally fell into a trap set by one of the film-makers’ assistants, they gave it to Xosó and shot the sequence immediately, taking advantage of one of the few days of full sunlight.

A complication was that the deer was of a species that it was normally taboo to bring into the village without butchering it first. But they managed to overcome their hosts’ scruples by offering to give the deer to the person who unloaded it from Xosó’s back. They were then able to film the smoking of the deer on a barbecue rack (Ribeiro 1996b, p.236).

An older man makes a sieve, one of the few shots of an older person.

This opening sequence is followed by various shots around the collective house showing a range of people engaged in everyday craft activities: a young man sharpens an arrow head while an older man weaves a sieve. A young woman weaves a cloth on a vertical loom, while another shows a child how to weave a hammock. The voice-over commentary maintains the fiction of the day-in-the-life device by suggesting that these activities are all taking place in the same early morning.

A rare moment of reflexivity as Kosó acknowledges Förthmann behind the camera.

This domestic sequence concludes with an intimate scene of Xosó and Xiyra painting one another with urucu. Xosó briefly acknowledges the camera, rupturing the ‘fourth wall’. Presumably Förthmann kept the shot because it was simply too good to lose.

At this point, about a quarter of the way into the film, the young couple set out for their gardens to harvest manioc. This is where the day-in-the-life device has produced a particularly unrealistic situation since it is very unlikely that having been hunting and gathering first thing in the morning that they would then set out again so soon for their gardens.

At six minutes, this is the longest sequence in the film and it is beautifully executed. The voice-over stresses the importance and labour-intensive nature of this horticultural work, explaining that it is equally divided, albeit in a complementary fashion, between men and women.

The sequence ends with a particularly engaging moment when the family stops at a stream on their return. While Xiyra bathes Beren, Xosó uses a leaf to improvise a beaker and, in close-up, takes a drink. The couple then proceeds, but before arriving at the village, they stop again to soak the manioc roots in another stream.

In the long version of the film, there is then a fade to black and in what the voice-over commentary unconvincingly claims is the heat of midday, Xosó is seen with another man making arrows. They exercise great skill as they straighten the shafts in a fire, attach the points and prepare the feathered flights. Two boys are then seen practising their archery skills.

This sequence, as reported by the leading French ethnographic film-maker Jean Rouch, particularly excited André Leroi-Gourhan, noted archaeologist and then director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (cited in Souza Mendes 2006, pp.190-191).

At the end of the scene of the boys practising their archery,  there is another fade to black before Xosó is again seen returning to the house with Xiyra, this time carrying backpacks of manioc pulp. The make-shift dolly again comes into operation as the camera withdraws in front of them as they arrive.

Manioc flour is dried out on a ceramic griddle.

This is the opening shot in another lengthy sequence showing the process whereby this pulp is turned into manioc flour, first by extracting the water through pressing it in a telescoping basketry device known as a tipití, then by sieving it, and finally by toasting it on an impressively large ceramic griddle.

This is supposedly ‘the afternoon’ according to the voice-over, though this does not make much sense according to the fictive chronology of the day-in-the-life diegesis. Not only has the lengthy and laborious process of peeling and grating the manioc been omitted, but three days are supposed to have elapsed since the manioc was shown being soaked in the stream in the ‘morning’.

In the abbreviated version of the film, the manioc processing sequence follows on directly from the soaking and the arrow-making is  then placed afterwards. Although this is in some ways more satisfactory, it still involves an editorial sleight of hand insofar as the manioc grating stage is concerned.

Kosó smokes a cigar in late afternoon sunlight.

The final quarter of the film, supposedly set in the late afternoon, shows the young family back at home. They eat and drink food prepared from the manioc flour by Xiyra. Beren plays with some pet birds and a young woman, possibly Xiyra, is shown feeding a bird by mouth. Kosó, exquisitely shot contre-jour in late afternoon sunlight is shown smoking a cigar.

The approaching night is then signalled by a series of classical cinematic tropes. In what is perhaps a reference to the conclusion of Nanook of the North, there are two shots of dogs asleep at dusk – though here they are settled snugly around a fire while in Nanook, the unfortunate creatures are shown hunkering down in a snowstorm outside, as Nanook settles down to sleep in his igloo.

Next, in a shot reminiscent of Dina and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s film about the Bororo village, a macaw is shown on the spur of a roof, silhouetted against the darkening sky. 

Finally, there is a long shot of Xiyra slowly swinging in her hammock in the half light, with a contemplative expression on her face and Beren asleep on her chest (see the image at the top of this entry). The very last shot shows her foot dangling over the edge of the hammock.

*****

At the end of the filming, Ribeiro confided to his diary that the film would be able to offer no more than a poor caricature of Kaapor culture. Yet for all its shortcomings, it was still the richest and most detailed ethnographic documentary that he knew (Ribeiro 1996b, p.255).

This was  a sound judgement on both counts, even if rather harsh. While it is undoubtedly true that in the early 1950s, there were very few ethnographic films of any great depth or sophistication, the value of this film as an ethnographic account of Kaapor life at the time that it was made is questionable.  Although its cinematic qualities are remarkable, in being confined to a single young couple, it is ethnographically very limited. 

One should also recognize that it presents Kaapor life in a highly romantic light, as if they were living in a timeless idyll – no allusion is made to the epidemic then raging through the community which had made the filming itself so difficult, nor to the many challenges that developing contacts with the national society represented for them. In this sense also, Os “Urubus” is a very Flahertian film.

 

Texts : Ribeiro and Ribeiro 1957, Ribeiro 1996b, pp. 161-263; Mendes 2006, pp. 129-264; Mattos 2011, Mendes 2011.

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No Rio Içana [On the Içana River] (1928) – dir. José Louro Fernandes*

Senior men prepare for the culminating dance of the festival in No Rio Içana (1928).

29 mins b&w, silent – Portuguese titles and intertitles

Production :  Inspetoria de Fronteiras.

Source :  Museu do Índio, Rio de Janeiro. This film can be viewed on-line here

Background: The full title of this film is No Rio Içana  –  Affluente do Rio Negro, Fronteira da Colombia.  The subtitle is an allusion to the fact that it was shot in the course of an expedition to the upper Rio Negro region to demarcate the frontier between Brazil and Colombia in the period July 1928 to February 1929.

Led by Major (later Marshall) Boanerges Lopes de Sousa, this expedition formed part of the second year of a nationwide campaign to demarcate the frontiers of Brazil that had been initiated in 1927 with the creation of the Inspetoria de Fronteiras under the direction of the prominent public figure of General (also later Marshall) Cândido Rondon.

The film-maker was José Louro, a civilian photographer who had been appointed to the Inspetoria as an assistant to the principal film-maker of the organisation, Luiz Thomaz Reis. With the exception of Reis’s own film, Rituais e festas borôro, released in 1917, No Rio Içana is arguably the most accomplished ethnographic film made in Brazil prior to the Second World War. For this reason, it was chosen as the film that runs permanently on the About page of the Silent Time Machine website.

Regrettably, it also appears to have been the only film that Louro made. In terms of cinematography, it demonstrates a level of skill that in certain respect is superior even to that of Reis, not merely with regard to technique, but above all in terms of the close informal rapport that Louro was able to achieve with his indigenous subjects.

In editorial terms, on the other hand, it demonstrates a certain awkwardness, though this does not detract significantly from its overall quality. More concerning is the fact that the physical quality of the film is considerably deteriorated and many scenes are heavily speckled.

The expedition during which the film was made followed the same route as the celebrated ethnologist of German extraction, Curt Nimuendajú, who had travelled through the region the previous year in the course of preparing a report for the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI).

Starting from the regional centre of São Gabriel on the Rio Negro, this involved travelling up the Içana and along the the Aiari, a right-bank tributary, all the way to its headwaters, and then taking the day-long overland trek to the village of Iutica (also known as Jutica and Yapima in modern sources), which is located on the mainstream of the river Uaupes. Then and now, Iutica is a village of the Wanono people (also known as Uanana, Botiria, Kotiria etc.) and is situated very close to the frontier between Brasil and Colombia.

Although No Rio Içana is – mostly – structured around the chronology of the expedition, it makes very few visual references to the expedition itself or to its members. The purpose of the expedition may have been to inspect the frontier with Colombia but in the film, absolutely no frontier inspection is shown taking place. Now and again, men dressed in military uniforms stroll briefly into shot, but otherwise, the film shows only indigenous people. This is in very marked contrast to the other films made for the Inspetoria de Fronteiras, which were all the work of Luiz Thomaz Reis (see the filmography for Reis offered here).

Film Content: The most notable example of editorial awkwardness in No Rio Içana is the three-minute sequence  with which the film begins, which has very little directly to do with the rest of the film. This sequence concerns the harvesting and processing of piassava, a palm fibre used in the manufacture of brooms, which, as an intertitle observes, had replaced the gathering of wild rubber as the principal extractive industry of the region. Prior to the collapse of this industry some fifteen years beforehand, the collection of rubber had had the most devastating effect on the local indigenous population, but this is not mentioned here.

After this introductory passage, the film then simply follows the progress of the expedition, beginning with brief visits to two Baniwa villages. At the first of these, Tunuí, still on the Içana itself, the villagers are shown looking at some photographs, which are evidently those taken by Nimuendajú the previous year. But neither the significance of this, nor the villagers’ reaction is commented upon.

At Cururú-Poçy, on the Aiari, the chief’s sons play twinned flutes for the expedition.

Instead, the film moves swifly on to Cururú-Poçy on the Aiari where two young men are shown marching back and forth playing long twinned bamboo flutes of the kind found in many different parts of Amazonia, including the Guianas and the upper XIngu river region. However, they are not dressed in a ceremonial fashion, and this is evidently just a one-off performance for the camera.

At about six minutes, i.e. a fifth of the way into the film, the expedition arrives at Iutica and the remainder of the action of the film takes place there. This is where the film really begins.

As Nimuendajú had reported, at this time, although the Wanano of Iutica had retained a largely traditional way of life, the village had suffered very badly at the time of the rubber boom at the beginning of the century and was now under increasing pressure from Salesian missionaries coming upstream from São Gabriel and from rubber-gatherers who continued to come downstream from Colombia intent on enslaving young men and capturing young women.

An unscrupulous Peruvian criminal by the name of Barreto held many people in the village in debt peonage and although he personally had taken refuge from the law elsewhere, he had left a Brazilian accomplice to run his business selling cachaça (rum). Shortly before the Lopes de Sousa expedition arrived, this man had been murdered by Wanano on the Colombian side of the frontier in revenge for his violence and raping of young women.

Felicio, the young headman who sought to reconcile diverse pressures on the village.

Nimuendajú regarded the young headman of Iutica, Felicio, as untrustworthy and too addicted to cachaça, but acknowledged that he was intelligent and that he was seeking to reconcile the various competing pressures on the village. Thus, although he was building some adobe houses for individual families in the Brazilian manner, the village had also maintained its traditional long house and practised elaborate festivals.

None of this complex history is alluded to in Louro’s film. Rather the Iutica section begins with a long sequence of adolescents, girls as well as boys, engaged in a mock fight, throwing mud at one another when they are supposed to be making bricks for the headman’s scheme to build adobe houses. This element of fun is another feature that distinguishes Louro’s work from Reis’s films.

This sense of sympathetic engagement, which is also characteristic of Louro’s photographs of indigenous people, continues into the next sequence. This contrasts the hard work of young girls grating manioc with a group of boys fishing in the nearby rapids and then eating around a common plate, looking round conspiratorially at Louro as they do so. Such reflexive touches were unusual in films of the era.

In an unusual reflexive touch, boys look round conspiratorially at the film-maker.

However, these personally intimate sequences then give way to a more classical ethnographic concern, namely, the celebration of a traditional festival, requiring the preparation of considerable quantities of manioc beer and elaborate masked costumes.

Under traditional circumstances, festivals of this kind only took place following the death of leading headmen, but on this occasion, the festival was performed for the purposes of the film, with the promise that the expedition would buy all the ritual paraphernalia made for the event on behalf of the Museu Nacional (where presumably it all perished in the recent fire).

Preparing to separate the outer from the inner bark used to make dance masks.

Although he may have had only limited cinematographic experience, Louro shows considerable skill in following the elaborate process of making and subsequently painting the masks made from the inner bark of a tree as well as the weaving of the palm fibre skirts that are then attached to these masks to completely hide the identity of the wearer.

Not only does he cover all the stages of the process of manufacture very well, starting with the raw material and ending with the finished article, but he also clearly understood how to change from a wide to a close shot of a technical process, and how to use foregrounds to create a sense of depth within a shot.

In covering technical processes, Louro often uses foregrounds to create a sense of  depth. See also the image at the head of this entry.

Once the dancing begins, the coverage is somewhat more eclectic and is not helped by the fact that some of the intertitles do not seem to be in quite the right place. Nor is there any attempt to interpret the symbolic significance of the masks, the dances or the event as a whole. However, the cinematographic description is sufficiently well done to give a clear sense of the three different kinds of dancing involved in the event, and also the great quantity of collective energy that is engaged by it.

The masked dancers were all male and danced in pairs, but the film makes no attempt to explain the symbolic significance of their costumes.

The sequences of dancing are prevented from becoming too monotonous by being broken up with  sequences on other matters such as the drinking of beer, the preparation of coca snuff and, in a rather anachronistic touch, a series of Wanono ‘types’, i.e. formally posed portraits of young men in their finery. The film as a whole ends with more engaging and informal personal portraits of the headman Felicio and his uncle, the ‘former headman’.

Between dances, cachiri (manioc beer) is served in the long house. In this shot, Louro again uses the foreground to give a sense of depth, while also employing incidental light to good effect.

The ethnographic value of this account of the Wanano feast is no doubt seriously compromised by the fact that it was performed at the expeditionaries’ request and that some of phases of it that were normally performed inside at night were performed outside during the day, when there would be sufficient light to film.

Moreover, certain aspects described by Nimuendajú were either left out or perhaps censored, most notably a concluding aspect of the feast in which men strapped on enormous twisted phalluses and jumped about grunting, as if they were seeking to copulate with both men and women, much to general amusement.

Dancing to panpipes normally takes place inside the long house. In contrast to the masked dancing, it involves women as well as men.

The final dance involved almost the whole village in a grand circular ring, with women interlacing themselves amid the male dancers.

But notwithstanding these limitations, there can be no doubt about the authenticity of the dancing, and the elaborate costumes, nor the energy and conviction with which people participated in the event.

As such, the film stands as an inestimable record of what was once a magnificent cultural phenomenon, widespread across Northwest Amazonia, but which now continues only in the most attenuated form.

Texts: Nimuendajú 1950, Lopes de Sousa 1959, Lasmar 2011, Athias 2015.

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Ao Redor do Brasil: Aspectos do Interior e das Fronteiras Brasileiras [Around Brazil: Aspects of the Interior and the Frontiers](1933) – dir. Luiz Thomaz Reis*

Nambikwara boys …

… react to Luiz Thomaz Reis’s camera

b&w, silent, 80 mins.

Source : this may be viewed on the web here 

This is a compilation of extracts from films that Luiz Thomaz Reis had shot during   various different expeditions around Brazil in the period 1924-1930. The film begins with a 1924 army expedition led by Captain Vasconcelos to the Ronuro, a tributary of the upper Xingu, but all the other expeditions were led by Reis’s principal patron, General Cândido Rondon, under the aegis of the Inspetoria de Fronteiras, with which Rondon was encharged in 1927. Details of the original films are available in the tentative filmography offered here.

Ao Redor do Brasil is a technically accomplished work and introduces the viewer to many different aspects of the interior of Brazil. However, the references to indigenous groups are all relatively brief and scattered through the film. None of this footage has the complexity of Reis’s earlier film, Rituais e festas Borôro (1917).

In the early section dealing with the Xingu headwaters expedition, there are some brief shots of various Xinguano groups, with the Bakairi, Kamayura and the ‘Ianahuquá’  (the Nahukwá, later decimated by epidemics) being mentioned by name. The sequence concludes with the Xinguanos being dressed in absurdly over-sized clothes.

Towards the middle of the film, there is an interesting sequence on the Karajá on the Araguaia river, shot during an Inspetoria de Fronteiras expedition in 1929. This shows the impressive ‘Aruan’ dance which features elaborately masked dancers performing to music from long paired flutes reminiscent of those played in the Xingu. (This is the same dance as is shown briefly in Heinz Förthmann’s 1947 film, Os Caraja).

Around 70 minutes into the film, there is a relatively extended sequence on the Nambikwara, whom the expedition meet at Porto Amarante (close to the modern town of Vilhena), on the Rio Cabixis,  a tributary of the Guapore River. This appears to be a different group of Nambikwara to those who appear in Reis’s earlier and now-lost film Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso (1915). The footage is not very profound, consisting merely a of a series of portraits. However, these are particularly striking and engaging, and very reminiscent of the photographs of the Nambikwara that Claude Lévi-Strauss took when he visited them in 1938.

Judging by its position in the film, this material appears to have been shot in early 1930, as part of Rondon’s third year of duty as the Inspector of Frontiers. Some of this material also turns up in the fragments of footage in the Museo do Índio film archive, described here.

The last indigenous group referred to in this film, immediately following the Nambikwara sequence, at about 73 minutes, are the Pakaas Novas (now known as the Wari’). But this material was shot at a Posto Indigena, where the Wari’ are shown to be receiving instruction in the ways of ‘civilisation’. Women are shown pounding grain and sifting flour, while men hoe in a line, all dressed in the European manner.  There is even a portrait of a Wari’ woman married to a local Brazilian functionary.

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Rituais e festas Borôro [Bororo Rituals and Ceremonies] (1917) – dir. Luiz Thomaz Reis*

Rituais e Festas Borôro – Luiz Thomaz Reis, 1917 [image presented in Rondon 1946: 263].

31 mins., b&w, silent. Portuguese titles and intertitles.

Source: available at the Museo do Índio and on their YouTube playlist here 

Background

This film represents the first of a number of early ethnographic films, of varying complexity and seriousness, that refer to the Bororo funeral ceremony. Others include works by Aloha Wanderwell (1931), Dina and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1936) and Heinz Förthmann and Darcy Ribeiro (1953).

This film by Luiz Thomaz Reis is not well-known in the English-speaking world, but it deserves to be considered an early masterwork of ethnographic cinema. It also represents one of the first examples of an ethnographic documentary in the modern sense, that is, a narratively structured account of an event or situation without the fictional element found in work of Robert Flaherty and other ‘documentary’ film-makers of this period.

This film was shot between July and October 1916 in São Lourenço, a now extinct Bororo indigenous community of some 350 people situated on the banks of the São Lourenço river, about 100 kilometres south of Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso State, in Central Brazil. The principal subject matter is the funeral of a Bororo woman. The director and cameraman, and probably also the editor, was a Brazilian army officer, Luiz Thomaz Reis, the head of the Photography and Cinematography section of the Rondon Commission, which was the federal agency then responsible for ‘opening up’ and colonising the interior of the country.

This was one of several films of ethnographic interest that Reis made for the Commission, but most of the others were expedition films based on much more transitory contacts with the indigenous subjects. A tentative filmography, indicating the place of Rituais e festas borôro within Reis’s career as a whole, is offered here.

Reis wrote a detailed report about the making of this film that has recently been republished (see Reis 2011 in the listing of Texts below).  From this, it is clear that the making of this film involved a large investment of resources and it is therefore inconceivable that it could have been made without the explicit endorsement of the head of the commission that bore his name, that is, Colonel (later to become General) Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who was one of the most well-known figures in Brazilian public life at the time.

Luiz Thomaz Reis [right] and Colonel Cândido Rondon [centre] with a group of Paresí beside the Utiariti waterfall, c. 1914, shortly after the setting up of the Photography and Cinematography section of the Rondon Commission [Acervo do Museo do Índio/ FUNAI – Brasil, CRNV0614].

Rondon would have had various motives for approving the making of this film. One would have been the fact that he himself was of part-Bororo descent and therefore not only spoke the Bororo language but was also aware of how elaborate Bororo funeral ceremonies can be.

Another very likely motivation would have been related to the fact that São Lourenço was the location of one of the most important posts of the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI), the organisation that Rondon had set up in 1910 to act as the principal intermediary between the indigenous populations and the expanding Brazilian state. The role of the SPI was to offer ‘protection’ as an alternative to the ‘catechisation’ imposed by missionary organisations which up until that point had acted as the principal intermediaries between Brazilian indigenous groups and the outside world.

In the particular case of the Bororo, Rondon was especially critical of the Italian Salesian missionaries who were then seeking to establish themselves in the region. As the Salesians actively sought to suppress the traditional Bororo funeral, considering it literally the work of the devil, a film that recorded this ceremony would have represented a direct challenge to their authority.

The film would also undoubtedly have had another propaganda purpose which was that of the Rondon Commission generally, namely, to celebrate the contribution of the indigenous population to the formation of modern Brazilian national identity. Accordingly, the film presents the Bororo in a somewhat romantic light, excluding any reference to their contact with the non-indigenous world, such as the sugar mill set up in the village by the SPI itself. The film also shows them in what is largely traditional dress rather than in the ragged European-style clothes that many of them would have been wearing by this time, if not on ritual occasions, then certainly while working in the mill.

Still photograph taken at the same time as the making of the film, showing the leading male participants in the funeral ceremony. [Acervo do Museo do Índio/ FUNAI – Brasil, CRNV0499]
Bororo men of São Lourenço, photographed around the same time as the ceremony, wearing everyday work clothes. It is very likely that some individuals appear in both photographs. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 239]

This propaganda purpose was probably also at least partially the reason for the exclusion of certain aspects of the funeral from the account offered by the film and also for a major alteration to the chronology of the event as will be discussed in greater detail below.

Film Content

This being still the silent era, there is no sound track, not even a voice-over commentary. Instead the film is structured by a series of intertitles, 38 in total, mostly identifying particular dances or other component events of the ceremony.

The first ten minutes of the film are dedicated to preparations for the ceremony, including a fishing expedition, the making of ritual paraphernalia and other artefacts, and the erection of the palm leaf screen behind which male dancers will be hidden from the eyes of women and children at certain important points.

This first period also introduces the people who will be taking part in the ceremony, mostly through various posed ‘team photographs’ of both women and men, a common device in early ethnographic film (this sequence includes a shot similar to the photograph above of the leading male participants). Certain individuals are also introduced, notably two leading shamans, but in contrast to a strategy often adopted in later ethnographic works, there is no attempt to follow them through the course of the ceremony.

A rare close-up portrait, in this case of a shaman who will play a leading role in the ceremony. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 270]

The film then follows the unfolding event, which is spectacular. For the era, the cinematography is accomplished though mostly straightforwardly observational in the sense that it merely follows what is going on in front of it. There are, however, a few moments of evident direction, such as the sequence in which leading figures, having been shot from the front in close-up, are then asked to turn sideways. This is reminiscent of the anthropometric photography of the era and unsurprisingly, since although he was not a trained physiologist, Reis often took anthropometric measurements during the course of his filming expeditions.

Dancers compete to see who can dance longest carrying ‘mariddo’ discs on their heads. These were made of palm leaf stalks and weighed around 60kgs. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 280].

Although the film is a remarkable work of ethnographic documentation in many ways, it is clear from the intertitles that Reis had only a limited understanding of what he was filming and some of its symbolism is completely misinterpreted. There are also some important phases of the ceremony that are simply missing from the account.

Male dancers decorate themselves in isolation from women. In an intertitle, Reis suggests that the man painted black and covered with tufts of white down represents a jaguar, while the man being painted brown with mud represents a puma. This is not correct: the ‘spotted’ man represents one of the ancestral spirits who customarily attend funerals, while the man being painted brown with mud represents ‘aije’, a particularly important spirit being who is considered supremely dangerous for women. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 288].

But the most significant limitation on the value of the film as a record of a traditional Bororo funeral arises from Reis’s entirely intentional manipulation of the chronology of the event during the process of editing.

For, in reality, the traditional Bororo funeral normally involved a secondary burial. That is, immediately after death, the corpse was buried in the village plaza, as indeed is shown in the film. As the burial was taking place, it was doused with water to encourage the decomposition of the flesh (see the image below). There then followed an elaborate series of dances and other ceremonial events, spread out over a number of weeks, by which time only the bones of the corpse would remain. These were then dug up, cleaned, ceremonially decorated with feathers and placed in a basket before being immersed in a nearby lagoon as the final destination.

The corpse is buried in the village plaza and doused with water to speed decomposition. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 278].

Reis had witnessed this stage of the ceremony in person and in his report, describes it as providing an important key to understanding the Bororo as a people. But as he also explains, much of it took place at night, so he was unable to film it, much to his great regret. He adds, however, that the final stripping of the bones of their flesh was a scene that was “hellish and frightening”, enough “to make one’s hair stand on end”. (These scenes would later be filmed by Heinz Förthmann, see his joint work with Darcy Ribeiro, Funeral Bororo, filmed in 1953).

Being unable to film this final stage, Reis clearly decided to place the first burial in the plaza at the end rather than, as occurred in reality, at the beginning of the ceremonial events that make up the main body of the film. He does not explain the basis for this decision in his report, and his reasons may have been purely editorial.

However, this ordering of the event would certainly have been more congenial and familiar to the metropolitan audiences at whom the film was aimed and whom the Rondon Commission wanted to convince of the important contribution made by indigenous people to the formation of Brazilian national identity.

Texts : Rondon 1946;  Tacca 2002;  Caiuby Novaes 2006a, Caiuby Novaes 2006b; Cunha 2010; Reis 2011; Caiuby Novaes 2016; Caiuby, Cunha and Henley 2017

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No Paiz das Amazonas [In the Country of the Amazons] (1922) – dir. Silvino Santos.*

A tobacco leaf picker poses for the camera in No Paiz das Amazonas (1922)

129 mins., b&w, silent – Portuguese titles and intertitles

Production: J.G. de Araújo e Cia.

Source : see the Cinemateca Brasileira catalogue entry here.  A reconstruction with the addition of a musical soundtrack was released on DVD in 2014 by Versátil Home Video. This can also be viewed on-line here.

Background: The director, Silvino Santos was commissioned to make this film by J.G. de Araújo, a large business enterprise based in Manaus, for the specific purpose of screening at the exhibition celebrating the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922. This exhibition opened in Rio de Janeiro in September of that year, though No Paiz das Amazonas was not actually screened there until March 1923, some three months after its première in Manaus.  In recognition of the epic account that it offered of a region then little known to most urban Brazilians, the film was awarded a Gold Medal.

The poster featured bare-breasted female warriors on horseback, the legendary Amazons after whom both the river and the film were named.

Despite this accolade, the producer of the film, Agesilau de Araújo initially had difficulty in persuading commercial cinemas  to take the film as it was ‘un film natural’, i.e. a documentary. He therefore used his connections to organise a screening with the President of Brazil, Dr. Artur Bernardes, who was seen to applaud enthusiastically at the end, thereby greatly improving the prospects for distribution.

In order to promote the film in the cinemas,  Araújo resorted to various publicity devices, including a poster that evoked the legendary warrior Amazons alluded to in the title, though of course they did not appear in any form in the film itself.  Other publicity devices included personal appearances at screenings by  Silvino Santos himself, appropriately dressed in his film-making gear, complete with jaguar skin hat (see the photograph at the head of the biographical entry for Silvino Santos) .

No Paiz das Amazonas is usually reported to have been shot over the two years prior to its first release in 1922. However, recent scholarship suggests that this is an oversimplification.  Over the period of almost a century since its first release, a number of different versions of No Paiz have been produced. Some parts of the footage in the most recent version, released in 2014, may have been shot as early as 1913 while at least one sequence could not have been shot before 1929.

Other parts again were reworked in the 1930s and released as separate films but were then later reintegrated with the original material with new intertitles. The latter included a series of pedagogical films about forest products distributed by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE).

The film as whole appears to have gone out of distribution in the 1930s and then to have been effectively lost for many years until reconstructed for the first time in analog form in 1986. But by then most of the original documentation had been lost, so it was not possible to determine exactly which sequences formed part of the original film and which were later additions. Nor was it possible to be entirely sure of the running order of the sequences.

A second, digital, reconstruction was released on DVD in 2014. This involved some re-ordering of the sequences on the basis of more recent research, but doubts about the precise form of the original 1922 film persist. What is certain is that the film as it has come down to us in the 2014 reconstruction does not exactly reproduce the film as it was when it was first screened.

The material introduced after 1922 includes some of the scenes shot around Manaus with which the film opens. In one such scene, a nanny is shown with some children who, it transpires, are the offspring of the Araújo family but some of whom had not been born by 1922.  In another sequence, dedicated to recreational water sports,  a power boat passes under a bridge that was not inaugurated until 1929.

The material added later also includes the sequence about the indigenous group, the Parintintin, a subgroup of the Tupi-speaking Kagwahiv,  who were then settled around the upper reaches of the Jiparaná (Machado) river, a right bank tributary of the Madeira. This comes about a third of the way into the 2014 version of the film.

A group of Parintintin pose for the camera in a production still associated with No Paiz das Amazonas. Although the release date of the film is commonly given as 1922, the Parintintin were engaged in violent confrontations with outsiders until 1923 and certainly could not have been filmed before that date.

Although in later life Santos recalled visiting the Parintintin in the years 1918-20, contemporary reports indicate that at that time, the Parintintin were in extremely violent confrontation with non-indigenous Brazilians. The Parintintin were not fully pacified until 1923 and it would have been quite impossible for Santos to film them at any time before then. There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest that this sequence may in fact have been shot in 1924.

Recent scholarship not only suggests that certain parts were added to No Paiz after 1922, but also that some parts of the original film may have been recycled from films that Santos had shot prior to 1920, even before he began working on the J.G. de Araújo commission.

This earlier material almost certainly includes the sequence on the Witoto indigenous group that appears in the latter part of the film and which was shot in the Putumayo region of what was then Peru (in a political settlement in the course of the 1920s, this region was transferred to Colombia).

This sequence may have been filmed as early as 1913, when Santos was commissioned to make a film by the notorious rubber-tapping company, Casa Arana (for further details on this stage of this career, see the biographical entry for Silvino Santos). Alternatively, it may have been shot in the course of the one or more visits that Santos made to that region later in the same decade when working for Amazônia Ciné-Film, a company set up in Manaus by a group of businessmen around 1917. Santos was  himself both a partner and the technical director.

The most significant project that Santos carried out with this company was a film entitled, Amazonas, O Maior Rio do Mundo [The Amazon, the Largest River in the World], which appears to have been similar in conception to No Paiz das Amazonas. In order to shoot this film, Santos travelled all over Amazonia in the years 1918-20. In doing so, he not only shot material in the Putumayo region, but also covered a number of the topics that turn up again in No Paiz, including rubber-tapping, Brazil nut collecting and fishing.

But after it was edited and before it entered distribution,  the master copy of Amazonas was stolen by a relative of one of the directors of Amazônia Cine-Film and sold to a French production company which then distributed it all across Europe under a different title. This theft drove Amazônia Cine-Film into liquidation which in turn led Santos to seek employment with J.G. de Araújo.

For a long time, it was thought that the film itself was lost. However, recent scholarship suggests that some parts at least may have survived and may even have been recycled in No Paiz. (For further details, see the biographical entry for Silvino Santos).

Film Content:

The primary purpose of No Paiz das Amazonas was to celebrate the natural resources and economic potential of the region. Throughout the film, the intertitles stress the region’s natural abundance and there are a large number of cutaways to the animals and plants of the region, as well as many striking shots of features of the landscape, particularly the rivers.

Silvino Santos at the Salto de Teotónio, Madeira River. Judging by the model of camera that he is using, this photograph was probably taken around 1921 or 1922, during the production of No Paiz das Amazonas.

At the same time, almost incidentally, there are many sequences of ethnographic interest. Most obviously, there are three sequences about indigenous groups, two living in traditional circumstances, the Parintintin of the Madeira River and the Witoto of the Putumayo River in Peru, but also a third group, the Sateré-Mawé, a group living downstream from Manaus who by the 1920s had undergone a great deal of social and cultural change, and who were then heavily engaged in the guaraná extractive industry.

However, none of these sequences featuring indigenous groups is particularly lengthy or complex, so notwithstanding their exotic character, they are generally less rich ethnographically than the many sequences that the film offers of the everyday working lives of the non-indigenous inhabitants of the region. Through the progressive accumulation of these sequences, one becomes aware of how labour-intensive the economic development of Amazonia has been.

No Paiz das Amazonas covers a great number of different topics and does so employing a variety of narrative modes. The overall structuring narrative is that of a journey, in effect a grand tour around the Amazon Basin. Although the component parts of this journey may have been shot in a different chronological order to that in which they appear in the film,  they have been edited together in such a way as to make geographical sense as a systematic journey – albeit with one notable exception, discussed below.

A paddle steamer sets off upstream from Manaus early in the film, metaphorically initiating the master journey narrative around which the film as whole is constructed.

Along the way, as it were, this master journey narrative is  supplemented by more localised narratives based on particular economic production processes.

The film begins with a lengthy sequence set in Manaus. This is mostly concerned with the modernity of the port and the grandeur of the public buildings, including, of course, the celebrated ‘opera house’, the Teatro Amazonas. But there are also some charming sequences of families at leisure by the waterside, with their children and their dogs, as well as of the surprisingly cosmopolitan water sports activities practised in the city.

The famous landmarks of Manaus are shown, such as the Teatro Amazonas. But so too are more intimate aspects of private life.

The journey narrative then takes over as the action heads upriver, first on the Amazon itself, then on its right-bank tributary the Purus where it pauses for lengthy sequences of fishing, first of manatees, then of pirarucú (giant catfish) on the lake of Aiapuá. It then transfers to the Madeira River and heads upstream towards Porto Velho, making a stop at the vast Trȇs Casas rubber and tobacco estate.

Here, in an intertitle, the film offers an extended panegyric about the extraction of rubber and the “herois obscuros”, the unsung heroes, the workers who have turned this forest product “into gold”. Whereas the fishing sequences had been structured purely by a technical process narrative with little development of character, here Santos introduces an additional element, namely a ‘day-in-the-life’ device, showing a seringueiro (rubber tapper) going about his daily routine.

The seringueiro bids goodbye to his family as he begins his day’s work.

This starts with the seringueiro leaving his family in the morning, follows him throughout the day and ends with him smoking the material when he returns. This personal story is then finished off with a sequence of balls of rubber being cut up ready for sending downstream.

After a long day in the forest, the seringueiro still has to smoke his material.

The dayin-the-life of the seringueiro is followed by the sequence about the Parintintin. Although the cut from one sequence to the next is visually very abrupt, it makes sense in terms of the geography of the journey narrative in that the Parintintin also lived in the Madeira river valley and following pacification, one group settled close to the Trȇs Casas estate.

But although the Parintintin look very exotic, the ethnographic value of this sequence is  limited. The Parintintin are shown wearing traditional dress, which in the case of the women consists of little more than a necklace, and in the case of the men, feather crowns and remarkably long penis sheaths. But they are clearly not living in traditional circumstances in the forest.

The women are shown lying in their hammocks in an encampment but in the background, one can clearly discern a substantial building, possibly part of the Trȇs Casas estate. The men, meanwhile, are filmed lined up on a neatly tended lawn (see the image above in the ‘Background’ section of this entry). They turn sideways, in a manner reminiscent of anthropometric photography, before executing a clearly artificial small circular dance and then walking off through camera.

More interesting ethnographically is the next major sequence, which is set on the tobacco farm of the Trȇs Casas estate. This follows on from a brief shot of the exterior of the J.G. de Araújo office building in Porto Velho, a series of dramatic ‘phantom ride’ shots taken from the famous Madeira-Marmoré railway (one of the sequences now thought to have been originally shot for Amazonas, O Maior Rio do Mundo) and an equally dramatic sequence of the Teotónio rapids on the Madeira river itself (see the image of Santos filming the rapids above)

A ‘phantom ride’ on the Madeira-Marmoré railway.

The tobacco farm sequence is again structured around the process of production, from the picking of the leaves in the plantation through the sorting and wrapping of the leaves into long cylinders for onward distribution. In terms both of the variety of shots employed, the interaction between the workers themselves and their relaxed manner in front of the camera (see the image at the head of this entry), this sequence represents something of a  step up from the technical process sequences shown earlier in the film.

Women wrap tobacco leaves on the Trȇs Casas estate …

a Brazil nut collector empties a shell of nuts.

The Brazil nut gathering sequence that follows shortly afterwards is even more elaborate. As in the rubber gathering sequence, the technical process is supplemented by a day-in-the-life of the nut-gatherers, but in this case, the process is followed all the way downstream back to Manaus. Here the nuts are sorted, shelled in a factory by rows of manually dextrous women dressed in white, and loaded onto ships for export. In what is probably a chapeau to Santos’s training as a cinematographer at the Lumière establishment in Lyons, the sequence ends with a shot of the workers leaving the factory.

Using the latest machinery, a woman deftly shells Brazil nuts in the J.G. de Araújo factory in Manaus.

The workers leave the J.G. de Araújo factory in Manaus –  probably a ‘chapeau’ to the Lumières.

After Manaus, the action continues further downstream to Parintins, where there is yet another technical process sequence, this time involving guaraná, a plant from which a drink with medicinal qualities is made.  This was first developed by the Sateré-Mawé indigenous people of this part of Amazonia and in the film, they are shown engaged in the extractive industry that has grown up around it. Intentionally or otherwise, this sequence communicates very powerfully how intensively their labour is exploited in producing their traditional drink on an industrial scale.

The guaraná seeds are toasted ….

…  they are then reduced to a paste under the watchful eye of a white-suited supervisor.

From Parintins, the film returns to Manaus, but without lingering there, it immediately heads north into the valley of the Rio Branco and the state of Roraima. This region is construed in an intertitle as similar to the US ‘Far West’, in that it is populated by cowboys and endowed with vast natural resources. This will be where most of the remaining 40 minutes of the film will be spent, representing about a third of its total duration.

This part mostly consists of various further technical process sequences, including collecting turtle eggs on the exposed sandbanks of the river, balatá gathering and smoking (a process that is shown to be interestingly different to the rubber gathering process), brief sequences about the hunting of egrets and of deer, and more extended sequences about the herding and management of cattle and horses.

But, bizarrely, a short way into this part, after the balatá sequence, the action suddenly jumps to the Putumayo region in Peru, about a thousand kilometres to the west, completely rupturing the otherwise geographically coherent master journey narrative.

Judging by their physical appearance and dress, this sequence  in the Putumayo involves several different indigenous communities. But as with the Parintintins sequence, the treatment is very superficial.

Various groups appear in the Putumayo sequence, which begins with a line-up of types. The man above is probably an ‘Orejon’ (literally, Big Ears), while the man below is probably an ‘Encabellado’ (literally ‘Long Hair’).

Again Santos lines his indigenous subjects up in order to film them. In the first line-up, one man, with large ear plugs, appears to be from the  Orejón group, while another with long hair is apparently an Encabellado. Others again, wearing barkskin loincloths appear to be Witoto, probably of the Ocaina or Bora subgroups who at that time mostly still wore traditional dress. But in other shots within the Putumayo sequence, almost all the subjects, both men and women, are wearing European-style clothing.

This is not the case, however, with yet another line-up, this time of pubescent girls. An intertitle comes up beforehand to warn the  viewer that they are “highly decorated …”. Then, obviously by pre-arrangement, about twenty five girls, almost entirely naked apart from their elaborate body decorations and in some cases, girdles around their waists,  emerge in a line from a longhouse, walk round in a circle and then disappear into the house again.

An intertitle warns the the audience that the Putumayan women are ‘highly decorated ….’

They are then shown all in a line, with the camera panning slowly across them several times. This image is highly reminiscent of the photographs that Santos took in the Putumayo when commissioned to cover the consular visit around the installations of the Casa Arana in 1912. (See the ‘Biography’ section of the Silvino Santos entry: also the images that the Marquis de Wavrin shot in the late 1920s in the same region for his film Au Pays du Scalp).

Ostensibly, the girls in the line are waiting for a collective dance to begin, but when it does, it seems to be a performance by a completely different group, since the dancers are all entirely clothed.

Apparently in preparation for this dance, the Witoto are shown building a curious structure out of palm tree branches. This is then shown in a remarkable shot, apparently taken from the top of a palm tree, and we see that it is very long. But the purpose of this structure remains a mystery …

An intertitle explains that the Witoto put great effort into preparations for their dances, but the purpose of the large structure, shot from above, is not explained …

After this “spiritual digression”, as an intertitle puts it, the action switches back to the cowboys of the Rio Branco. There are no bare-breasted Amazons riding the horses here, but there are a few portraits of pretty girls, and some virtuoso shots of cattle being wrangled and branded.

The last sequence, shot from a hill above, shows a  group of cowboys herding large numbers of cattle across the limitless plains. Bringing the narrative of the film as whole to an end in a classical fashion, the very last shot features a group of about twenty cowboys galloping furiously down the slope of a vast rock, proclaiming the patriotic slogan, ‘Viva o Brasil!’

Texts: Nimuendajú 1924, Santos 1969, Martins 2013a, Stoco 2016, Stoco 2017, Paiva 2018.

© 2018 Paul Henley