Category: Films

Five films of various  lengths between 3 and 10 mins., b&w, silent – intertitles in Portuguese (with French subtitles in some versions).

Production :  Departamento de Cultura, Prefeitura of São Paulo.

Source : Museu do Índio , Rio de Janeiro and at the Discoteca Oneyda Alvarenga, Centro Cultural da Cidade de São Paulo. These films have been uploaded onto YouTube and are accessible via the links embedded in the titles of the films in the ‘Film Content’ section below.

Background

These films were shot by Dina Dreyfus (1911-1999) and her then husband, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), during a field trip to the interior of Brazil taken between November 1935 and March 1936. At the time, they were both young academics teaching anthropology in São Paulo and they took advantage of the southern hemisphere summer vacation to carry out some fieldwork.

They were accompanied by René Silz, an agronomist and  friend of Claude from his school days, who came out from France to join them. The expedition was later famously described in Claude’s 1955 memoir, Tristes Tropiques (republished in various forms, including in the 1976 English translation indicated below in ‘Texts’).

Dina’s name appears first, analphabetically, in the directorial credits that appear in  the films themselves, suggesting that she may have played the leading role in making them.

In December 1935, they shot two films in Kejara, a Bororo village, now extinct, on the Vermelho river, a tributary of the São Lourenço river in Mato Grosso state, close to the western frontier of Brazil with Bolivia. They then moved further south in Mato Grosso and, in December 1935 and January 1936, they shot two films in the Caduveo village of Nalike, in the Serra Bodoquena. They also shot a very short film on the rounding up of cattle on a nearby ranch.

In a brief memoir about this film-making experience, published much later, in 1994, Lévi-Strauss reports that they were equipped only with “an oval-shaped miniature 8mm camera” though he could not remember the make (the description suggests that it could have been the Bell and Howell Filmo ‘Straight Eight‘). It seems that their objective was not to make a documentary film structured by a narrative, but rather to use the camera for simple documentation purposes.

Unsurprisingly, since they do not appear to have had any previous training, the quality of the cinematography is very poor. It suffers from the usual novice’s faults of being unstable, moving too quickly from one subject to another and being too far from the action.

But despite these shortcomings, the original footage was later blown up to 16mm, furnished with some stylish intertitles in Portuguese, and made into a series of short films. These were produced by the Department of Culture of the Prefecture of São Paulo, a body directed  by the leading Brazilian intellectual, Mário de Andrade, who was a friend and in some senses the patron of the Dina and Claude Lévi-Strauss while they were living in São Paulo. These edited versions appear to have been intended for Dina to use in her classes on ethnography.

Some months later, in May 1936, Dina and Claude directed another film, this time on a very different subject, namely, the Divino Espirito Santo festival in Mogi das Cruzes, a small town in São Paulo state. On account of its syncretic mixture of African and European elements, this festival, said to have been celebrated since the earliest days of Portuguese colonisation, was of particular interest to Mário de Andrade and again his department produced the film.

In this case, not only does Dina’s name come first in the directorial credit intertitle, but she is also specifically identified as the cinematographer. Interestingly, the quality of both the cinematography and the editing of this film is very much higher than those of the Mato Grosso films.

For his part, in his 1994 memoir, Claude gives a very negative account of his experience of film-making in Mato Grosso. He was the son of an artist and an excellent photographer, and his notebooks are filled with beautiful sketches. But he confesses that he soon lost patience with cinematography since he felt “guilty” if he kept his eye glued to the viewfinder “instead of observing and trying to understand what was going on”. The material that he and Dina had produced in Mato Grosso he describes as no more than “a few disjointed series … snatches of film”.

Claude was clearly not sufficiently persuaded of the value of a moving image camera to shoot any films on his more substantial second field trip to the interior of Brazil in 1938, when he visited the Nambikwara, Mundé and Tupi-Kawahib.

Although Dina accompanied him on this field trip too, she was obliged to return home shortly after it began with a severe toothache.  If she did indeed play the principal role in their joint film-making activities, this may be the main reason why no films arose from this trip.

Film Content

BORORO FILMS

A vida de uma aldeia Bororo [Life of a Bororo Village] (8 mins.). This begins with a rather unsteady shot taken from the roof of one of the houses on the outer perimeter of Kejara. This pans across the village showing its celebrated circular layout, with the large men’s house in the centre. There is a very well-known photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss taken from a similar position, quite possibly at the same time (see Lévi-Strauss 1994, pp. 88-89).

The title of the film suggests that it will offer a general portrait of the village but, in fact, following this opening shot, the remainder of the film consists entirely of shots of craft and subsistence activities, almost exclusively involving men.

The first sequence relates to a very Lévi-Straussian concern, namely, fire-making. A man drills a fire stick in another piece of wood held steady by a woman whom one presumes is his wife – the only woman to appear in the film. The quality of shooting here is reasonable – there is even a close-up shot of the moment when the fire stick begins to smoke (albeit one that ‘crosses the line’).

This is followed by a sequence showing a man braiding a cord, followed by another of a man weaving a cotton armband on a simple loom. Though this is not explained in the film, this second man is Pore Gudawu (aka Roberto Ipureu), Claude Lévi-Strauss’s principal informant (and later that of Herbert Baldus) who, falsely, claimed to have been taken by missionaries to Rome to meet the Pope (see Martins 2013c, p.195).

At what is roughly its midpoint, the film then turns to subsistence activities. But the sequence entitled ‘Hunting’ consists merely of a series of unsteady shots of men posing and shooting arrows. The following sequence, ‘Fishing’ consists of a series of shots of men paddling canoes out on the nearby river, often standing in an impressive manner to do so. However, it does not include any shots of fishing as such.

The film is rounded off with a sequence clearly aimed at narrative closure: men are shown returning from the river with clusters of fish, some carrying large nets, others paddles, often accompanied by dogs. Some disappear into the men’s house.

Finally, there is another pan across the village, this time at dusk, ending with a shot of two domesticated macaws on the spur of a rooftop, silhouetted against the moonlight – an image that would become something of a trope in ethnographic films about Amazonian peoples (see, for example, Os Indios “Urubus” ).

Cerimónias funeraes entre os índios Bororó  [Funeral Ceremonies among the Bororo Indians] (7½ mins.) – Again, notwithstanding the general title, this film deals only with certain restricted aspects of the Bororo funeral ceremony.

The first third of the film is concerned with the construction and decoration of the marid’do, the large circular wheels made of palm fibre, up to 1.5m in diameter and weighing as much as 60kgs, which, at a certain stage in the proceedings, men place on their heads and then dance with in a competitive manner to see who can sustain the weight the longest (as featured in Luiz Thomaz Reis’ 1917 film, Rituais e festas Borôro).

This is followed by various shots of dances performed on the plaza in front of the men’s house. Although the film does not make this clear, these are not directly connected with the marid’do. Rather they are aroe-etawujedu, that is, dances that embody certain ancestral spirits, identifiable by their body decoration, mode of dance or the musical instruments that they play.

In this case, the presence of Bakororo, the spirit associated with the western moiety of the village, is indicated by various shots of a dancer playing the ika, a long transverse flute. He is accompanied by another dancer, blowing on a pana, a sort of trumpet fashioned from three or four gourds stuck together with resin. This identifies him as an embodiment of Itubore, the spirit associated wtih the eastern moiety of village. Together, they are welcoming the spirits of the dead to the ceremony.

As explained by an intertitle, a dancer embodying Bakoro, his body painted with that spirit’s characteristic red and black stripes, then emerges from the men’s house, followed by a number of other dancers described as his ‘cortège’.

However, although these shots are certainly ethnographically interesting, they are not well executed and give only a fragmentary sense of the event.

In the final two minutes of the film, the film returns to the marid’do. At first, elaborately decorated dancers are shown from afar dancing in a circle around the marid’do. But then the camera moves in closer as some of the dancers hoist the marid’do onto their heads, and begin to dance with them. The most valiant jump and down.

Again, the quality of the cinematography is very poor. Many shots are unsteady and some are fogged. Here too the material is ethnographically interesting but frustratingly fragmentary.

(There is a more comprehensive photographic account of the Bororo funeral, including the dancing with marid’do in Lévi-Strauss 1994, pp.98-105).

CADUVEO FILMS

Although Claude Lévi-Strauss describes it in Tristes Tropiques as “a wretched hamlet” of “no more than five huts”, Nalike, the village where the two Caduveo films were shot, was then the “capital of the Caduveo country”.

Aldeia de Nalike, part 1 [The Village of Nalike, part 1] (10 mins). This begins with some very unsteady shots apparently taken from the back of a horse, as the film-makers approach the village. These are followed by various equally unsteady pans back and forth within the village before the camera goes inside the houses.

These interior shots begin with one of the film-makers’ own sleeping area, with Dina in the background talking to a Caduveo woman and René Silz in the foreground looking dolefully at the camera. They end with a group of men drinking maté tea.

Around 3 minutes into the film, a ‘puberty feast’ is announced in an intertitle. This 2½ minute sequence mostly consists of shots of couples dancing in the modern Brazilian manner, though in between, some older women are dancing in what is perhaps the traditional indigenous form.

The event is poorly covered, however, since there is not a single shot of the puberty feast as such. It is not even clear where the music for the dancing is coming from.

(This feast is described in Tristes Tropiques, see Lévi-Strauss 1976, pp.226-228  while in Lévi-Strauss 1994, p.76, there is a portrait of the girl whose feast it is).

The second half of the film concerns women’s crafts. First, there is a lengthy but repetitive sequence of shots showing the weaving of a cotton hammock in the neo-Brazilian manner on a vertical loom.  In the last minute or so , this gives way to a sequence showing the weaving of a cotton baby-sling, followed by the weaving of a palm-leaf fire fan.

Aldeia de Nalike, part 2 [The Village of Nalike, part 2] (6 mins). The second Nalike film continues with the theme of crafts. It begins with a sequence showing a woman preparing twine cords, followed by a brief shot of these same cords being used to knot together a traditional indigenous hammock.

There is then a sequence of almost two minutes showing a man making a series of string figures  – a reminder of how important this subject was to anthropologists in the early years of the discipline. The man not only uses his hands, but also his big toe. Many of these shots are overexposed and at no point does one see the man’s face.

The second half of the film concerns the Caduveo’s celebrated facial designs . Initially, some women are shown working out the designs on paper, as requested by the film-makers. This is followed by a sequence of a woman decorating her face in a small mirror and then a young girl is shown having her face painted, as in the image at the head of this section on the Nalike films.

The film ends with a series of close-up individual portraits, including the image immediately above, and the one at the head of the entry as a whole.

(These facial designs are discussed at length in Tristes Tropiques, see Lévi-Strauss 1976, pp. 229-256, and there are many photographs in Lévi-Strauss 1994, pp.71-77).

CATTLE-HERDING FILM

Os Trabalhos do Gado num Curral de uma Fazenda do Sul de Mato Grosso [Working with Cattle in a Corral of a Ranch in the South of Mato Grosso] (3 mins.) – This is barely a film at all, consisting merely of a series of unsteady shots of cattle being herded through a corral. Despite its short length, it is very repetitive and there is only one shot, a poor one, of one of the men managing the cattle.

Texts : Lévi-Strauss 1955/1976, Lévi-Strauss 1994, Caiuby Novaes 2006a, Caiuby Novaes 2006b, Debaene and Keck 2009, Martins 2013c, Cunha and Caiuby Novaes 2019.