The Marquis de Wavrin (centre) with two Yuko (Motilón) elders – Chez les Indiens Sorciers (1939)
31 mins., b&w, sound – extra-diegetic music, voice-over commentary in French
Source : CINEMATEK (Royal Film Archives of Belgium) – DVD + booklet
Background – This is an expedition film shot in 1931-32, when the Marquis de Wavrin visited Colombia at the behest of the Belgian Ministry of Education to collect ethnographic objects for Belgian museums. It consists of sequences shot in a number of different indigenous groups around the country. It was first released in Paris in 1934, but for reasons unknown, it was not released in Belgium until 1939. This second version is the only one that is known to have survived.
By 1939, a new temperance law had been passed in Belgium with the result that de Wavrin was obliged to cut a lengthy sequence dedicated to a secondary burial ceremony since this had involved the consumption of large quantities of maize beer. Fortunately, this sequence has also been preserved in the Royal Film Archives and is available separately on the CINEMATEK DVD.
Film content – Although the film presents itself as an account of the expedition of the ‘courageous explorer’ de Wavrin – who often appears in shot as a link between the various sequences – it does not follow a geographically coherent route in the manner of de Wavrin’s earlier South American films. Although there are undoubtedly some passages of ethnographic interest, the film is generally very muddled and the voice-over commentary is often erroneous and sometimes patronising. The extra-diegetic music is generally execrable.
Starting from Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, the film first makes a brief visit to the Guajira peninsula before jumping back to the Pacific Coast, where there is a somewhat more extended sequence that is mainly concerned with shamanic curing among an indigenous group of the Chocó region (probably the Embera). After a brief excursion to the mountains to attend a wake amidst an unidentified indigenous group, the film then jumps to the extreme southeast of Colombia to show a dance of the Yagua, who live in the Amazonian border region with Perú.
The film then cuts back and forth between the Yagua and the Guahibo, a very different group culturally, who live in the Llanos, a savanna region far to the north. The theme of the film here is the simplistic proposition that inebriating substances cause indigenous people to dance – beer brewed in large pots in the case of the Yagua, the hallucinogen drug yopo inhaled through the nostrils in the case of the Guahibo. There is also a brief sequence showing criollos (non-indigenous Colombians) playing and dancing to ‘rhumba’ music, to show that they are much the same also.
The film then returns to the mountainous regions in the northwest of the country, first for a brief visit to the Arhuacos of the Sierra Nevada, followed by a somewhat more extended visit to the ‘Motilones’ (today known as the Yuko or Yukpa) of the nearby Sierra de Perijá. The film lingers here for a while, showing daily life in their villages and camps, and aspects of their subsistence. It was here that de Wavrin also filmed the secondary burial scene that he was obliged to cut.
Perhaps for this reason, the last five minutes of the film are especially incoherent from an ethnographic point of view. Some petroglyphs found in the Sierra Nevada provide an unconvincing segue to a sequence of Bora girls on the Amazonian frontier having their lower bodies painted. This consists of only three shots totalling 20 seconds. As it seems unlikely that de Wavrin would have travelled so far for so little, it seems very probable that this is an outtake from his previous film, Au Pays du Scalp, in which there is an extended sequence of Bora body-painting.
The narrative then prepares for closure with a voice-over comment that the explorer ‘sets off again, tirelessly’. Back in the Llanos, we see de Wavrin setting out with a column of Guahibo porters, who make small bamboo rafts to cross a river. There is then a brief catalogue of stock shots of local wildlife, before a sequence showing a large dug out canoe being built. Another sequence of 20 seconds, this time showing two women, probably Piro, painting designs on large ceramic pots and probably also an outtake from the earlier film, signals that the expedition has returned to Amazonian mainstream. A final sequence on a raft in the middle of a large river, culminating in a sunset, brings the film to an end.
Production : Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique
Source : CINEMATEK – DVD released in 2017.
Background – This film is based on the South American travels of the Marquis de Wavrin over a four-year period, between May 1926 and June 1930. At least as constructed in the film, he started in the Galapagos Islands, then travelled through Guayaquil and the Ecuadorean Andes before descending along the Putumayo river on the Ecuador-Colombia-Peru border to the upper reaches of the Amazon. He then returned to the Andean altiplano through Peru, visiting Macchu Pichu and Cuzco on the way. After a brief visit to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, he finally descended to the Pacific again, finishing his journey amid the guano islands off the Peruvian coast.
The film was constructed from 60,000 feet of 35 mm film (i.e. around 16 hours, if shot at the then-standard rate of 16-18 fps). Although a considerable proportion of this material concerns the natural environment, including its wildlife, and the Hispanic towns and cities through which the expedition passed, a particular focus is the indigenous communities visited during the Amazonian phase of the expedition.
It is not entirely clear who shot the film. While the voice-over commentary asserts that de Wavrin travelled entirely alone, at the beginning of the film he is shown loading a camera. This particular sequence could have been reconstructed afterwards, but de Wavrin also appears in shot at various important points in the narrative. Clearly, therefore, the film must have been shot at least partly by someone else.
The film was edited by the celebrated Brazilian editor and director, Alberto Cavalcanti (1897-1982), then based in France, while the music for the soundtrack was written by the French avant-garde composer Maurice Jaubert (1900-1940).
De Wavrin had no training as a film-maker and claimed that he never sought to become one. His objective was simply to provide visual documentation of the regions through which he travelled since they were so poorly known in the academic disciplines of geography and ethnography. Even so, when the film was first released in Paris in 1931, it received very positive reviews. Among its many merits, one critic noted, was that it was devoid of the colonialist propaganda typical of expedition films of the period.
Content – This film constitutes a major contribution to the genre of expedition films, particularly in Amazonia where such films are relatively rare. Even so, its ethnographic value is limited by the fact that de Wavrin was constantly on the move and, with some notable exceptions, does not appear to have remained for very long in any particular community. Certainly the ethnographic material presented in the film rarely goes beyond relatively brief accounts of ceremonial performances and technical processes.
One major exception, however, is the material shot in a community of the indigenous groups then known as the Jívaro, and more recently as Aénts Chicham (for the reasons for the name change, see here). This was located on the Santiago River in the Oriente province of Ecuador and therefore probably part of the Huambisa subgroup. This material includes some interesting sequences on a range of different subsistence activities and cultural practices. There is even the relation in the voice-over commentary of a charming legend concerning the origin of fire.
On the other hand, the footage related to the principal concern of this stage of the expedition, namely the Aénts Chicham practice of hunting and shrinking heads (to which the title of the film refers, though somewhat misleadingly, since scalping was a rather different process to head shrinking) is so evidently staged that it fails to convince. Though equally staged, these ritual and technical processes are much more effectively represented in Haut Amazone, a French film made a decade later.
De Wavrin also filmed among many other indigenous groups. In Otovalo, in the Ecuadorean Andes, there is an effective sequence of a street dance involving elaborate head-dresses. In Amazonian Ecuador and Peru, there are sequences in Ocaina, Bora, Canelos Quichua and Piro communities. There are also some shots of the “very poor” Uro living on Lake Titicaca in the Bolivian Andes, as they go about gathering reeds for constructing their canoes.
One notable scene, and unusual within the film as a whole, concerns a shamanic curing session among a group referred to as the Napo, living at the junction of the river of the same name and the Amazon. This is an interesting sequence from an ethnographic point of view, albeit shot from a poor angle and underlit.
A Bora dancer pretends to threaten the camera – ‘Au Pays du Scalp’ (1931) – Robert, Marquis de Wavrin
But of all the sequences concerning indigenous groups other than the Aénts Chicham, undoubtedly the richest concern a group whom de Wavrin refers to as the ‘Boro’. This is undoubtedly the group more usually referred to today as the ‘Bora’, who live primarily on the Colombian side of the international border that runs along the Putumayo River and divides Colombia from both Ecuador and Peru. This was one of the indigenous groups who suffered most severely at the hands of the rubber-tapping industry in the early years of the twentieth century, until this was denounced some twenty years before de Wavrin arrived. It is reassuring then to see them looking so strong and healthy in his film.
No doubt on account of their previous experience of outsiders, the Bora were not initially welcoming. But de Wavrin seems to have taken some trouble to win acceptance. The four minute sequence that the film offers of the “totemic dances” of the Bora is particularly interesting (see image at the top of the post). There is also an engaging moment when a dancer comes right up to the camera and pretends to threaten it (see image immediately above).
The interpretations offered in the voice-over commentary regarding the meaning of these dances are certainly erroneous, but from a visual perspective, this is perhaps the strongest material in the film as whole. It also seems to be particularly authentic: in contrast to the Jivaro material, which was evidently mostly performed for the camera, the Bora seem to be engaged in these dances entirely for their own reasons.
Young Lengua man – “Au Centre de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue’ (1924) – Marquis de Wavrin
39 mins, b&w, silent – titles and intertitles in French.
Source : DVD distributed by CINEMATEK (Royal Film Archive Belgium).
An expedition film that follows the journey of the Marquis de Wavrin from Buenos Aires, through Paraguay, northern Argentina and Bolivia, right up to the border with Brazil, but then suddenly jumps far to the north to Manaus, where the journey ends.
This film has been heroically reconstructed from fragments. Unfortunately, these seem to have been transferred at too high a speed, so the original film would probably have been somewhat longer.
Apart from a two-minute sequence, about ten minutes into the film, which shows the dancing of some Chiriguano peons on an Argentinian sugar cane plantation, it is only in the last third that the film focuses on the indigenous population.
These sequences primarily concern the Lengua, but there are also briefer sequences on the Mataco and some generically defined ‘Indians of the Gran Chaco’. In the final three minutes, the film crosses into Bolivia, and here it encounters a group of fishermen with tall nets on the Rio Grande who certainly look indigenous, and finally, from afar, there are a couple of shots of a group identified as’Pareci of the Rio Guapore’.
Clearly, none of these sequences is based on an extended relationship between the film-maker and the subjects. The images of indigenous people are mostly distant shots of them dancing, or if they are closer portraits, the subjects are often treated as anthropological ‘types’ and asked to turn around and around for the camera, which some of them find highly amusing. Others just stare fixedly at the camera looking deeply uncomfortable. Although these images are all of some ethnographic interest, their value is primarily descriptive.
These outtakes from the material shot for Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness primarily concern dances, though there is also a fascinating sequence in the middle of men operating bull-roarers.
The first two minutes of the material concern the night-time dances around a large bonfire that are a striking feature of Matto Grosso and also the more abbreviated version of the more ethnographic material, viewable here. Here you can see that the dancers are being led by a player of the panna calabash trumpet. The dance also appears to be taking place at one side of the baimanagejeu, the men’s house.
There then follows about a minute of two men whirling bull-roarers. Unlike the other sequences in these outtakes, no part of this material was used in either of the Matto Grosso films, which is surprising, particularly in the case of the more academic short film, since the material is well-shot and such sequences are comparatively rare in Amazonian ethnographic film. The sound of the bull-roarer, on the other hand, was used in the longer film to cover some of the dancing shots.
The remainer of the outtakes again concern dancing, but this time during the day. Again, it is men wearing magnificent headdresses who are dancing. Initially, they are led not by the panna, but by one, or sometimes two, men shaking maracas. The women sit beyond on the ground and behind them is the baimanagejeu. Later, the panna returns, however, and a man playing both the panna and a maraca leads the dancing.
It is quite clear that the situation has been set up for the camera. There are several takes of the same dance and for most of these takes, the cameraman’s assistant comes into shot to hold up an identifying slate (see above).
Also noticeable is that as the takes proliferate, the dancers, presumably because they are getting hotter, throw off the pieces of cloth that that they have been using as loincloths, and instead dance dressed in the traditional manner, which as far as the genitalia are concerned, means no more than a penis sheath.
An Otomaco woman among the Pumé? – ‘Yaruro footage’ (1934) – Vincenzo Petrullo
7:32, b&w, silent
Source : Penn Museum. This film can be viewed on-line here.
This appears to be lightly edited footage that was shot while Vincenzo Petrullo was carrying out fieldwork among the Yaruro (today often referred to in academic literature as Pumé) living along the Capanaparo river in Apure state. Who shot the material is not entirely clear as Petrullo himself appears in shot at one point. However, whoever it was, it is clear that they had little camera expertise.
After some initial shots of llanero cowboys, most of the film consists of sequences of the Pumé engaged in craft activities, or fishing from canoes. As Dr. Russell Greaves points out on the Penn Museum website, the pristine nature of the loincloths that many younger people are wearing, as well as the sun tan lines on the upper bodies of the women suggest that Petrullo had asked his subjects to take off the clothing that they would normally have been wearing and dress in traditional loincloths only.
Similarly, the teenagers shooting fish with bow and arrow while standing up in their narrow canoes appear to be performing for the camera in that they look up to get a cue, and then having dispatched their arrow take no interest in whether they might have shot a fish. It is still possible, however, to admire the feat of doing so.
Towards the end of the footage there are some engaging portraits of individual Pumé. One of these is particularly interesting as it is of a woman with series of bone pins beneath her lower lip. She also appears to have some face painting (though this may be no more than scratches on the film!) (see above). According to Greaves, Petrullo claims that this woman is Otomaco, a once numerous ethnic group in the middle Orinoco region and one that featured frequently in the Jesuit chronicles of the eighteenth century, but long extinct as a viable social group.
Initial dances are series of performances for the camera, seemingly in some public location (at a museum perhaps?). Subsistence activities (pounding grain, smelting metal) in village seem less contrived. Nice shot of teenage girls attending to one another’s hair. Also of young couple washing in a stream. Followed by sequences of mock combat, musical performance, women working in the fields and carrying produce home on their heads, locusts, men sitting by a large jar (?), harvesting of grain by hand.
Information from Penn Museum:
Photographed by Charles Martin and produced by Dean C. Worcester. It may be that the footage here has been re-assembled and cut by unknown parties over the years.
Os Carajá begins with a series of heroic portraits. Here the subject carries the circular tatto on his cheek that is a distinguishing marker of the Karajá.
This film mainly concerns the inspection of the SPI posts on the Araguaia and Río das Mortes rivers, and as is usual with SPI productions of the 1940s, it is covered with what now seems quite absurd extra-diegetic music and an extravagant voice-over commentary.
However, in the first four minutes, there are some more ethnographic sequences that have been very beautifully shot by Heinz Förthmann. First, he offers a series of magnificent views of the Araguaia river followed by heroic head-and-shoulder portraits of individual Karajá (highly reminiscent of the indigenous portraits in Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film, ¡Que Viva México!).
There is then a brief sequence of men engaged in ceremonial dancing (the Aruanã festival filmed at greater length by Harald Schultz) and another slightly more extended sequence of men wrestling. This is then followed by sequences of two women, one of whom is making a ritual adornment, the other working with pestle and mortar.
But at this point a map appears, and the film thereafter is dedicated to informational matters and an SPI medical expedition to the Karajá.
52 mins., b&w, sound – voice-over commentary in Portuguese, extradiegetic classical European music
Source : Museo do Índio, can also be viewed on-line in a poor copy here
Expedition film covered with absurd classical music (e.g the Blue Danube waltz music), and uneven cinematography by Nilo de Oliveira Velloso (Heinz Förthmann was the sound-recordist on this occasion), but there are some interesting sequences nevertheless.
This is footage taken by Vincent Biava, a gold prospector, among the Shuar, a subgroup of the Aénts Chicham (the indigenous group formerly known as the ‘Jívaro’), who were then living near the confluence of the Zamora and Nangarisa rivers, north of Loja, in the province of Zamora Chinchipe, southern Ecuador.
This material was not viewed for the Silent Time Machine project, but this is the entry form the NAFC catalogue:
Footage includes: prospecting party on horseback in the foothills north of Loja; aerial shots over the mountains; contact scenes between prospectors and Shuar; posed shots of adults and children around Shuar communal houses; Shuar men building a large communal house (setting posts, climbing posts, and lashing cross members with lianas); woman making a clay pot by coil method; women making and distributing nijimanche (fermented manioc beer); taking meals; women with lip plugs and men in feathered headdresses; river scenes including swimming and bathing; Shuar and prospectors in dug out canoes; prospectors and Shuar at each others’ encampments; and Shuar men with rifles and other evidence of cultural contact.
Aloha Wanderwell uses sign language in The River of Death to discuss the disappearance of Colonel Fawcett, five years previously and 500km away.
28 mins., b&w, sound – English titles and intertitles
Source : Library of Congress archive, also available on YouTube here, but the film is very badly damaged in the central passages.
An earlier silent version, dated to 1930-31 and with the title, Last of the Bororos, can be viewed at the NAFC (catalogue no. SA-76.5.1).
The NAFC also holds the texts of two different commentaries by Aloha Wanderwell in relation to this silent version of the film. One of these is a manuscript accessioned in 1977, following an interview that Aloha gave to the ethnographic film historian Emilie de Brigard the previous year. This appears to be a text for use in connection with ‘added attraction’ screenings at which Aloha herself appeared. The other text is based on the notes made by Jake Homiak, then director of the NAFC, during an interview that he conducted with Aloha in 1993.
There is also a later version of this film entitled Flight to the Stone Age and other South American Lands and released possibly as late as the 1970s, that combines some of the material that appears in The River of Death with material shot in a number of other South and Central American countries, as well as the US. Copies of this film are held by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the Academy Film Archive.
See below for further details on these other versions.
Background – Aloha Wanderwell Baker (1906 or 1908-1996) was a celebrity travelogue film-maker who in the 1920s, travelling with her first husband, the self-styled ‘Captain’ Walter Wanderwell (1897-1932 ), made her name as the first woman to circumnavigate the world in a car, passing through some then-remote places in East and Central Asia as she did so.
Aloha was a stage name, as was her married name (Walter was born in Poland as Valerian Johannes Pieczynski). In fact, Aloha was born in Canada and grew up as Idris Hall. Shortly after returning from this shoot, Walter was murdered in still unresolved circumstances. The following year, Aloha remarried, taking her second husband’s family name, Baker, thereafter.
The material for this film was shot in 1930-31 when Aloha and ‘Captain’ Wanderwell travelled to Corumbá, a small town on the river Paraguay in Mato Grosso state, on the western frontier of Brazil. The ostensible purpose of this journey was to look for traces of Colonel Percy Fawcett, an eccentric British explorer who had disappeared in 1925 on an expedition to the upper Xingu river region.
However, this region lies about 1000kms to the northeast of Corumbá and if one were really looking for Fawcett, it would make more sense to start from the Mato Grosso state capital, Cuiabá, which is 500kms closer. This suggests that the search for Fawcett may have been an idea that was added at the post-production stage to give the film an extra dimension of interest for potential audiences.
Film Content – The first five minutes of the film is taken up with the journey to Corumbá, first by sea to Rio de Janeiro, then by train. As they pass through Rio, Aloha, ostentatiously wearing an aviator wings broach, meets at the grand Copacabana Hotel with the Brazilian national hero, General Rondon, described in Aloha’s voice-over as “a full-blooded Indian” (referring to Rondon’s part-indigenous inheritance) who provides her with some maps.
We then see Aloha and some companions (the exact number is never clear in the film) as they travel across the country by train, supposedly in a box car. In an obviously set up scene, Aloha cooks a meal while the ‘Captain’ plays a harmonica. This is one of a number of scenes in the film in which they both appear, thereby indicating that the attribution of the cinematography exclusively to them in the initial film credits is, at best, only part of the story.
In Corumbá (mispronounced as ‘Corúmba’ by Aloha), the Wanderwells hired an amphibious plane from Condor Air, a local affiliate of Lufthansa that provided a regular air service to Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso state. In the film, they take off with Aloha herself apparently piloting the plane. But although she had recently taken some flying lessons in Chicago, it would have been extremely risky for her to fly an unknown plane in unknown conditions – it seems far more probable that in reality the plane was flown by the German First World War veterans who were the regular pilots of Condor Air, with Aloha, at most, assisting.
They then make what is supposedly an emergency landing close to what the NAFC catalogue says is the Bororo village of ‘Bobore’. The evidence is contestable but some sources suggest that this is Pobore, a village which still exists today and which is located near the junction of the São Lourenço and Vermelho rivers.
But this is not only over 500kms short of the upper Xingu where Fawcett disappeared and which was supposedly the Wanderwells’ goal, but it is also more than 100kms south of the Rio das Mortes, the name of which, when literally translated, means ‘River of the Deaths’ and from which the title of the film derives, as indicated by the subtitle, erroneously rendered on screen in the opening shot as ‘Rio dos Mortes’.
The reliability of the footage concerning the Bororo of the village of ‘Pobore’ is no greater than the account of the journey to get there. The voice-over commentary is both highly fallacious and ethnocentric, even racist.
The arrival of the expeditionaries at the village begins with a truly comical enacted scene, as if it were a ‘first contact’ situation. As supposedly recommended by Rondon, Aloha leaves some mirrors on a log and climbs up a tree to observe. Sure enough, a man soon emerges from the undergrowth and contact is established.
However, the ‘indians’ in this scene are white-skinned actors who are certainly not Bororo. They are also wearing loincloths that traditionally the Bororo did not wear. In one of her commentaries in the NAFC, Aloha alludes to certain parts of the film having been filmed in Hollywood: this is surely a prime candidate to be one of those.
Once the expeditionaries enter the village, the wrap-around cloths worn by the women and the trousers worn by some men testify to the relationship that the villagers must have had with the non-indigenous world. In one scene of women pounding grain, in the background there are some people fully clothed in the European style, and beyond, a fence suggesting the presence of cattle. But in other aspects of dress and body decoration, and in terms of architecture and general layout, the village does appear to have preserved a largely traditional way of life.
Notwithstanding the egregious attitudes expressed in the voice-over, the film-makers appear to have established a good rapport with the villagers, not just through the giving of gifts but also through being prepared to participate in their lives. Both Aloha and the ‘Captain’ agree to have their faces painted, and Aloha participates in their dances. She is also filmed from afar bathing, apparently naked, with a group of Bororo women. The ‘Captain’, for his part, entertains the women by taking his false teeth in and out.
The film-makers appear to have established a good rapport with the Bororo.
No doubt on account of this rapport, the Bororo seem remarkably relaxed in front of the camera, and there are some charming individual portraits. Although much of the filming of dancing is technically poor, apparently for having been filmed in low light, there are also some sequences that are interesting. This is particularly the case with a dance which is construed in the film as a farewell dance to the visitors and which, on these grounds, Aloha is allowed to observe, even though women are normally excluded from dances of this kind.
What this appears to be in reality is a dance of the kind that is performed at funerals when the spirits of the dead are thought to return to dance with the living. However, the coverage of the event is highly truncated because, as Aloha explains in one of her commentaries, in order to conform to then-current US censorship norms, it was necessary to edit out any images of genitalia. As many of the men who were dancing would probably have been wearing nothing more than a penis sheath fashioned from a rolled-up palm leaf, this would explain why there are so few shots of the event.
The ‘farewell dance’ appears to be a dance normally performed at funerals.
But apart from these brief moments and also some shots of women involved in everyday subsistence tasks around the village, there is almost nothing of genuine ethnographic value in this film and much that has been quite intentionally falsified.
The final part which begins with two men lying down and waving their arms histrionically is particularly absurd. Aloha claims in the voice-over narration that they are possessed by ‘the evil spirit’ and that the chief had wanted to burn them alive. Although she had managed to dissuade him, the house in which the men are imprisoned is burnt down during the night. But this dastardly act is carried out by the same group of loincloth-wearing non-indigenous actors who had appeared in the ‘first contact’ scene.
The following morning Aloha is shown poking around in the embers, relieved to discover that there is no trace of their remains. She therefore concludes that they must have made good their escape.
The next day, she makes good her own departure, even though she had not been able to discover anything about the fate of Colonel Fawcett – unsurprisingly, since as she herself explains, she has had to conduct her enquiries using sign language. Even if she had shared a language with the Bororo, it would have been difficult since Fawcett had disappeared some 500kms away and at least five years previously.
As the amphibious plane takes off with a canoe in the foreground, the voiceover offers a concise synthesis of the tropes that are typically at play in travelogues of this kind “And so we left this land of mystery, of beauty, and of danger, a paradise untouched by civilisation. Au revoir, we’ll come back again some day!’
Other versions – Last of the Bororos
Last of the Bororos, the version held in the NAFC collection and dated to 1930-31 has no titles, intertitles, nor any voice-over commentary or soundtrack of any kind. There are also some differences in terms of content. There is no journey by sea to Rio, as there is in The River of Death, rather the film begins with a rapid montage of images of the Bororo dancing, various dangerous animals associated with Amazonia (vulture, alligator, bat, snake) and Aloha herself, culminating in a shot of Aloha being fêted at the 1930 Chicago Air Races. This seems to be a pre-title sequence but in fact there is no main title and the action moves directly on to the meeting with General Rondon at the Copacabana Hotel.
The main body of the film is largely the same as in The River of Death, though here too there are certain differences. These include the scene shortly before the end in which two prone men are shown gesticulating. In The River of Death these men are said to be possessed by ‘the evil spirit’ while in Last of the Bororos, by contrast, they are said to be practicing some sort of couvade, i.e. ritual behaviour in which men engage when their wives are pregnant. The scene which followed in The River of Death, in which actors burn down the houses in which the two men are supposedly imprisoned, is completely absent in Last of the Bororos.
After the departure scene that also features inThe River of Death and serves as its conclusion, there is a rather disparate collection of shots in Last of the Bororos, some of which are repeats or perhaps alternative takes of shots that appear in the main body of the film. These appear to be outtakes. Mainly on account of these, the total length of Last of Bororos is about four minutes longer than The River of Death.
Taken all together, these various features suggest that the version held in the NAFC represents an assembly of materials to be used in conjunction with the text written to accompany Aloha’s personal appearances at screenings. Aloha is reported to have constantly re-edited her material for different audiences and this could have been the reason for the seemingly superfluous outtakes at the end of Last of the Bororos, i.e. they may represent shots that were included in some versions but not others, depending on the nature of the audience.
Whether this material was ever developed into a definitive form as a conventional release print with titles, intertitles and soundtrack is unclear. Although it is thought that Aloha recorded a voice-over narration for this version of the film, it does not appear to have been married and circulated with the print. Possibly, like the out-takes, its use may have depended on the nature of the audience and/or whether Aloha herself was present to provide live narration in person, in which case, it would have been superfluous.
Comparing The River of Death with Last of the Bororos more generally, it is clear that certain elements were added to the former to make it more entertaining for popular audiences. In addition to the elegant titles and jaunty Latino music track, there are also some additions to the content that would surely have had the same aim. These include the main title reference to the Rio das Mortes (which Aloha never reached), the trip across the Caribbean (in a hurricane, of course) and the heavy emphasis on the search for Fawcett (who disappeared some 500kms from the village supposedly visited by Aloha).
The scene added shortly before the end of The River of Death, in which non-indigenous actors burn down a group of houses and which was probably shot in Hollywood, adds an element of danger, even, it is hinted, to Aloha herself, thereby legitimating the reference to danger in the concluding passage of narration.
Other versions – Flight to the Stone Age
The banner headline of a flyer held in the NAFC relating to Flight to the Stone Age dates the film to 1930 (see above). However, this would appear to refer, not to the release date, but rather to the date of filming of some, though not all, of the footage. Meanwhile, the description of the film in the text of the flyer suggests that this version may not have been released until the 1970s since it promises that the film will show “ceremonies … captured over forty years ago”.
This description also indicates that this version has become even more fictionalised than The River of Death, with the expedition even being rescued by General Rondon. It also features material shot on Aloha’s journey down the river Paraguay in 1931, and various other sequences shot in South and Central America on her way back to the US.
The film is reported to conclude with a shot of the Graf Zeppelin airship as it was displayed at Chicago, thereby allowing this example of then state-of-the-art aviation to be contrasted with the ‘stone age’ Bororo. But this event did not take place until 1933.
Even with all the extra material, Flight to the Stone Age is still only 32 minutes in duration, i.e. no more than four minutes longer than The River of Death. This suggests that some of the sequences that appear in the latter were dropped.
Please note: The details concerning the manuscripts held by the NAFC are based on a personal communication from Jake Homiak in April 2020, while details about the Condor Air service are based on a personal communication from Eric Hobson, also in April 2020. See also the entry for the Women Film Pioneers Project website prepared by Jessica DePrest here.
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