Category: Films

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

Production :  J.G. de Araújo e Cia

Source : Cinemateca Brasileira. This copy was itself copied from one held in the British Film Institute (BFI) archive, where it is listed under the title, Amazon; Dr. Hamilton Rice  and given a release date of 1926. This is not available on-line but a request to consult the film may be made via this link.

A shorter and substantially different version of film, presented as supporting material for an on-screen lecture by Hamilton Rice, is available at the NAFC, catalogue no. 1994.6.1, under the title Explorations in the Amazons Basin. This was produced by the University Film Foundation, Harvard University and has a running time of 64 minutes. The film titles do not indicate the date of release but the edge numbers of the film stock suggest that it was shot in 1934 [thanks to Mark White of the NAFC for this information].

The NAFC also contains some further edited footage without sound or titles of any kind, and with a running time of around 74 mins. This could perhaps be the original edited picture track from which both the English titled version of the film found in the BFI and the lecture-based version of the Harvard University Film Foundation were derived.

Background: This film is the record of an expedition to the headwaters of the Parima river, a tributary of the Uraricoera in Roraima state, northern Brazil. This took place between August 1924 and June 1925 and was led by the US medical doctor and amateur geographer, A. Hamilton Rice (1875-1956). This was Rice’s seventh and last expedition to the Amazon region, and the only one on which he took a cinematographer.

Originally, Rice had thought to appoint a cinematographer brought from the US. But on being shown No Paiz das Amazonas (1922), shot and directed by the Portuguese-Brazilian film-maker, Silvino Santos, he changed his mind and agreed with Santos’s employer, J.G. de Araújo, that he should make the film.

The ultimate aim of the expedition was to trace the overland route connecting the headwaters of the Parima with the headwaters of the Orinoco in Venezuela, a connection that indigenous interlocutors had been informing European travellers about since the early nineteenth century and which they themselves had long been using for trading purposes.

Rice assembled approaching 100 people for the expedition which he ran on quasi-military lines. At the beginning, the participants included his wife, Eleanor, whose personal wealth was largely funding the expedition, though she and a team from the Harvard Medical School left the expedition at Vista Alegre, before the most arduous part of the expedition began.

The initial expeditionaries also included the leading German anthropologist, Theodor Koch-Grünberg, though while the expedition was based in Vista Alegre, he contracted malaria and died, a consequence, as Rice brusquely observes in Explorations in the Amazons, of Koch-Grünberg’s “disregard for the necessary prophylactic measures”.

The expedition was possibly the first to use short-wave radio to send reports about its progress to public mass media back in the US, but from a film-making point of view, a more important feature was an amphibious aeroplane, a Curtiss Seagull. This was baptised Eleanor III, after Rice’s wife, and piloted by two experienced US military pilots, Walter Hinton and Albert W. Stevens, the latter being a specialist in aerial photography.

Not only did Stevens take some stunning aerial photographs during the expedition, but he also executed some remarkable cinematographic shots by means of a Bell & Howell camera mounted on the nose of the plane. In the catalogue entry of the Cinemateca Brasileira, Stevens is credited, along with Silvino Santos, as being one of the ‘photographers’ of the film.

Film Content:  The expedition is very competently filmed by Santos, in much same manner as No Paiz das Amazonas, that is, through the serial accumulation of mostly wide-angle shots, with relatively little changing of angle or framing. These are sometimes intercut with close-ups of features of the plants or wildlife of the forest but in sharp contrast to No Paiz das Amazonas, there are few extended sequences describing particular situations or events.

In terms of subject matter, the film remains very closely focused on the natural environment, particularly the rivers and the logistical difficulties that the expedition had in passing through the many rapids. From a specifically ethnographic point of view, the value of the film is no more than limited in that there are very few sequences of social or cultural life, be it of indigenous or non-indigenous people. Both the variety and charm of No Paiz das Amazonas are also absent.

No doubt these characteristics of No Rastro reflect the interests and attitudes of Hamilton Reis, who appears to have been a self-absorbed and driven individual, with little interest in social or cultural matters, nor sympathy for other people generally.  For although Santos was ostensibly the director of the film and also the principal camera operator, he would surely have been responding to the requirements of Hamilton Rice who had employed him.

At a stretch, it could be argued perhaps that No Rastro offers of an ethnographic account of the expedition itself, many of whose members were Makushi, Taulipang and Maku (a group that had recently migrated to the Uraricoera from further west and not to be confused with the Maku of the Rio Negro region). There are also some sequences showing everyday aspects of camp life (cooking, eating, shaving),  the setting up of the short wave radio, the gathering of geological samples, hunting etc. But these represent only a relatively small part of the film as a whole.

Other than the indigenous oarsmen, the meetings with indigenous people are all very brief and consist of little more than a  record of the first meeting with the expedition. As in his earlier work, Santos often organises his indigenous subjects into a line and then films them: only occasionally does the film get beyond these stiff and awkward encounters. Here too, the contrast with No Paiz das Amazonas is very marked.

There is a sequence of anthropometric measurements being taken and another showing a survey of an indigenous garden. There are also some brief general views of indigenous villages. But for the most part, the body language and the often anxious or resentful facial expressions of the indigenous subjects suggest that they are very uncomfortable with being filmed.

As the expedition proceeds west along the Uraricoera and is approaching the mouth of the Parima, it makes a brief visit to a village that Rice describes as belonging to the “Xiriana”. This a derogatory term meaning ‘howler monkey’ that is used to refer to the Yanomami by the neighbouring Ye’kuana (themselves referred to by Rice as Maiongong or Makiritare).

Rice is clearly of much the same opinion, describing the Yanomami in his Explorations film as “miserable and despised”. In his parallel textual account, he explains that he found their appearance so disgusting that it quite put him off his dinner that evening. Superficial though this sequence might be, it is nevertheless of some historical interest as it may be the first time that any group of Yanomami had been filmed.

Rice’s opinion of the Ye’kuana themselves, one of whose villages, Kujuma, the expedition visits shortly afterwards, is only slightly higher: he complains that they refuse to do any work for the gifts that he offers and always drive a hard bargain. Although Silvino Santos was able to take some shots around the village, it is clear that Ye’kuana are not comfortable with the expedition’s presence and the chief refuses to allow any members of the village to join the expedition, nor will he sell them any canoes.

Only the Maku appear to welcome the expedition and they agree to take over as oarsmen for the final push to the headwaters of the Parima after the Makushi and Taulipang insist on going back down river. Santos shoots a good sequence in and around a Maku village, showing women processing manioc and a boy weaving a basket. Another boy shows off his skill with a blowgun. Other boys return with some birds that they have shot with a blowgun, while others again play in the rapids. Two boys pose for the camera.

Although this sequence is not particularly profound ethnographically, it is nevertheless historically significant and also poignant, since within a few years the Maku had become extinct as an autonomous group, so this may be the only film record of their existence.

In the final part of the film, the expedition carries on to the headwaters of the Parima. The aerial team discerns the presence of a Yanomami village in the vicinity, but although Rice and the team on the ground attempt to visit this village, they are stopped on the trail by a group of Yanomami who will not allow them to proceed any further. Nor will they allow Santos to take any shots, so this episode is not actually shown in the film.

Rice realises that the expedition can go no further and that he will have to abandon his ambition to reach the headwaters of the Orinoco overland. The film therefore ends with a few panoramas of forested mountains slopes within Venezuela, followed by a single shot of an expedition canoe shooting some rapids as it returns downriver.

Texts : Rice 1928, Santos 1969, Martins 2013b.

37 mins., b&w, silent (French titles and intertitles)

Production : Société de Géographie

Source :  CNC at the Bnf.

Background  –  A rare film concerning the last surviving groups of indigenous Fuegians, the Alakaluf (today often referred to as Kawéskar) , the Yaghan and the Ona. At the time this film was made, all three groups were already substantially acculturated to non-indigenous ways and their future survival, not only culturally, but even physically, was threatened. Despite its rather downbeat subject matter, the film enjoyed great success when it was first released.

This film was made in the course of an expedition organised by the Société de Géographie which left Punta Arenas in Chile in March 1925 on board the cutter,  Jupiter, with the specific aim of producing a filmic documentation of Tierra del Fuego and its inhabitants.

The principal film-maker and head of the expedition was Paul Castelnau (1880-1944), a geographer by training but also a highly experienced cameraman who had acquired this skill in the French army film unit during the First World War and had then worked for Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète. After leaving the Kahn project in 1919, he had made various films in Africa, including the film covering the first Citroën expedition across the Sahara in 1922-23.

Film content  –  The copy of this film that is held by the CNC opens with a title that reads ‘Second Part’. If this film had conformed to the conventional expedition film trope of the period, the missing first part would probably have consisted of a series of departure sequences, showing the ship loading up and leaving port, with possibly an introduction to the leading participants in the expedition.

This second part continues with a series of shots of the majestic natural environment of ice floes, glaciers, mountains, alternating with shots of the crew, before around six minutes into the film, the Jupiter drops anchor off Clarence Island. One of the crew members then slaughters two seals for food, which duly attracts a small group of Alakaluf in a dinghy.

The next 15 minutes of the film consists of a series of sequences of this Alakaluf family on the beach. They put on clothes and smoke the tobacco that the expeditionaries have given them. The senior man, a shaman named as ‘Loukemi’, demonstrates aspects of his curing technique. Intertitles explain that the Alakaluf  depend primarily on shell-food and have only two types of possession: their dogs, of which we see many, and their canoes. The latter are no longer made from tree bark  but rather from planks taken from wrecked ships.

There is then a good sequence of the Alakaluf building some shelters, with close ups showing animal skins being sewn onto a frame. However, the Alakaluf then detect the presence of olapatou, described as ‘invisible were-wolves’ in the intertitles, so they set light to the shelters and take off in their dinghies.

The Castelnau Mission decides to abandon “these unfortunates” to their “idiocy and distress” (“à leur abrutissement et à leur détresse”) and to go off down the Beagle Channel in search of the Yaghan and the Ona.

There are further shots of glaciers before the expedition eventually arrives at Ushuaia and there are then some four minutes showing the Yaghan living in shacks on the edge of the settlement and engaging in the hunting of dolphins with harpoons. A well-executed sequence shows a small group building a fire and engaging in face-painting, though the intertitle claims, dubiously, that these ‘totemic’ designs are intended to protect them from the consequences of eating rotten dolphin meat.

The final four minutes of the film moves to the very different pampas environment on the Atlantic side of Tierra del Fuego. Here the film introduces the “completely civilised” Ona very briefly in the form of three old women in shawls hiding from the wind, a younger woman and child, and a young man, possibly young woman, who turns to address the camera.

But before we see the Ona engaged in any kind of social life, an inter title declares that the expedition has completed its mission of documenting Tierra del Fuego. The last few shots of the film offers further views of the natural environment as the expedition heads off to explore some islands even further south.

 

15:50 mins, b&w, sound: English voice-over commentary, extra-diegetic music and effects

Source : Penn Museum film archive.

Background – This film was edited from footage shot during the course of the expedition that gave rise to the feature travelogue,  Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness, released in 1932. It was one of a pair of shorter films cut from this material, the other film being about the Bororo.

The film material produced by this expedition is of particular historical interest because it represents one of the earliest cases of synchronous speech being recorded outside a studio, let alone in such a remote location as the interior of Mato Grosso. The system employed was the RCA Victor Photophone.

However, the travelogue was made for a popular audience and used the ethnographic footage in a very misleading fashion. The two shorter films carry a common title that will trouble  modern audiences, but they present this ethnographic material in a manner that is much more  respectful of its integrity, albeit in the language of 1930s ethnology.

During the course of the original expedition, while some of  the expeditionaries went to a Bororo community on the São Lourenço river, the anthropologist Vincenzo Petrullo went overland to the upper Xingu river region, where he was later joined by the assistant cameraman Arthur Rossi. They spent about three weeks in various Xinguano villages, but appear to have spent most time with the Yawalapiti and the Naravute.

Both shorter films were produced by Ted Nemeth, a film-maker who in the 1950s would become a leading figure in US experimental cinema. He had not been on the original expedition but worked with commentary scripts drafted  by Petrullo at some point before  he left Penn Museum in 1935. The circumstances of this departure were acrimonious and perhaps for this reason, Petrullo’s name does not appear on the credits, nor is he named when he appears in person in the film. The commentary was performed by the then well-known broadcaster Lowell Thomas.

Whereas the Bororo short film consists mainly of footage that had already featured in Matto Grosso, in the case of this film, a considerable amount of footage that had not appeared in the travelogue was  added. However, Petrullo and Rossi were not equipped with the sophisticated sound equipment brought by the main expedition, so there is therefore no diegetic sound.

Film content –  The first four minutes of the film are given over to standard arrival devices :  maps, shots of an amphibious plane taking off, followed by aerial shots of the rainforest, and finally by the arrival of “the ethnologist” – unnamed, but in fact, Vincenzo Petrullo – by bark canoe, which, it is explained, is being paddled by his two Bakairi guides. This last shot is taken from a camera on the riverbank clearly indicating that it has been set up. The commentary claims that this is the first time the region has been visited by a “white man” though is entirely spurious since a considerable number of expeditions had passed through the upper Xingu since the 1880s.

The main body of the film then offers a very straightforward ethnology lesson,  with almost all the action clearly being performed for the camera. The women stand in a line looking awkard, the men a little less so. There are well-executed sequences of house-building, the processing and making of manioc bread in characteristic Xinguano fashion, involving mats rather than tipitis, and basket-weaving. There is a particularly interesting sequence of pequi fruits being stored underwater in the river in great bark cylinders. We also see men demonstrating their archery skills, which are praised in the commentary here, whereas in Matto Grosso  they are derided.

Perhaps the most interesting sequence of all, but one not included in Matto Grosso, shows a pubescent girl currently in seclusion, with white skin, hair over her face, and ligatures on her legs. It is explained that these ligatures along with the scraping of the skin that she routinely has to carry out, are all intended to encourage strong physical growth and fertility.

There is then a final dance before “the ethnologist” departs again in the bark canoe, again shot from the riverbank. This dance is very low key, and is accompanied only by a single extra-diegetic rattle  (probably a rattle brought back to Penn Museum by the expedition ). The commentary promises that the dance will become “much more violent” later, but this is not shown.

The last four minutes of the film consist of a montage of the artefacts brought back by the expedition as they are prepared for display in the museum.

Texts : Petrullo 1932, King 1993, Petrullo 1993, Pourshariati 2013, Pezzati 2018, Caiuby, Cunha and Henley, in press.

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18:12 mins, b&w, sound: extra-diegetic music and English voice-over commentary but also some passages of on-location synchronous sound

Source : Penn Museum film archive

Background – This film was edited from footage that first appeared in Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness, a travelogue released in 1932 and  based on an expedition, sponsored by Penn Museum and various wealthy private individuals, that had taken place the previous year. It was one of a pair of short films cut from material shot during this expedition, the other film being about indigenous villages on the upper Xingu river.

The film material produced by this expedition is of particular historical interest since it represents one of the earliest cases of synchronous speech being recorded outside a studio, let alone in such a remote location as the interior of Mato Grosso.  The system employed was the RCA Victor Photophone.

However, the travelogue was made for a popular audience and uses the ethnographic footage in a very misleading fashion. The two shorter films carry a common title that will trouble modern audiences, but they present this ethnographic footage in a manner that is much more respectful of its integrity, albeit in the language of 1930s ethnology.

Both shorter films were produced by Ted Nemeth, who had not participated in the original expedition but worked with commentary scripts written some years earlier by Vincenzo Petrullo, the anthropologist who represented Penn Museum on the expedition. The commentaries were performed by the then well-known broadcaster Lowell Thomas.

As with the travelogue, this film is structured around the visit of the expedition, led by ‘Uncle George’, a fictional character played by a non-professional actor, George Rawls, who had originally been recruited to the expedition as a general handyman. But whereas in the travelogue, Uncle George is identified as an explorer arriving in the region for the first time, in this film, he is presented as an anonymous ‘trader’ who, it is implied, is very  familiar with Bororo ways. His synchronous English dialogues that  featured in the travelogue are replaced by ethnological commentary and he becomes merely a narrative device to take the film from one  sequence to the next.

Film content  –  the first three minutes of film are dedicated to arrival tropes – maps, shots of the river bank, the retailing of general information about the environment, and eventually to the arrival of the expedition steamer at a riverbank close to a Bororo village, albeit shot from the perspective of someone already on shore.

This village is explicitly identified as being on the São Lourenço river and is probably Córrego Grande, which exists to this day. The arrival scene is followed by a highly contrived trading scene that one finds  at greater length in the travelogue, but here the original synch dialogues are replaced by ethnological commentary about how Bororo dress has changed since they were ‘pacified’, and also about the Bororo’s new-found appreciation of the products of “civilization”.

Again as in the travelogue, the trader is then given a ‘guided tour’ of  various Bororo craftsmen and women at work, the high point of which is a pair of remarkable shots, which did not appear in the travelogue and which in total are almost two minutes long, which show a man explaining how to plane arrow shafts, in synch, in Bororo (see below). This represents the most elaborate use of the expedition’s Photophone equipment to record Bororo speech and probably represents the first extended recording of an indigenous voice in synch in ethnographic film history.

The film then moves onto dances “held specially for the expedition”. This sequence begins with a man blowing on a calabash trumpet called pana by the Bororo (see above). What is not explained is that this musical instrument is customarily used to call the spirits of the dead at funerals.

The “jaguar dance” that immediately follows is said to be an impersonation of a jaguar at the moment that it has been cornered by hunters. In fact, it is a performance of the dance of the aroe-maiwu, an embodiment of the spirit of the recently deceased person at a funeral. Unknowingly then, the segue from the blowing of the pana to the aroe-maiwu is very appropriate, though in reality, the “jaguar dance” shown in the film was shot several months beforehand, in a completely different Bororo community on the upper Paraguay river.

The dancing continues into the night and, as in the travelogue, there is an extraordinarily beautiful sequence of men with magnificent diadem headdresses dancing in silhouette against a very large bonfire (undoubtedly built by the cameramen to light this scene).

The film ends with the departure of the expedition, immediately preceded, as in the travelogue, by the trader giving the parting gift of a penknife to a young Bororo boy. But here the English synch dialogue of the travelogue is replaced by voice-over commentary explaining  that in Bororo society, a gift must always be followed by a counter-gift, so the boy always made sure to give the trader something in return.

As the expedition steamer pulls away accompanied by much theatrical waving on both sides, the commentary makes yet another classical Amazonian ethnological point that it is matter of social convention to engage in expressions of grief at a departure. Then, in a final remark, it reassures the audience that although the expedition had given many gifts to the Bororo, this had not been enough to disturb “their primitive mode of life”. This is in sharp contrast to the travelogue that ends by suggesting that the expedition had briefly lit a match in the “blackness” of the cave that is Mato Grosso.

The remaining three minutes of the film shows the Bororo artefacts brought back from Brazil being accessioned in Penn Museum.

Texts : Pourshariati 2013, Pezzati 2018, Cunha and Caiuby 2019, Henley, Caiuby and Cunha, in press.

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49 mins., b&w, sound : English voice-over commentary, extradiegetic music, but also some location sound.

Production: Matto Grosso Expedition Inc., New York.

Source : Penn Museum – this film is not available as part of the museum’s on-line collection, but it invites interested parties to make contact. A DVD copy is held by the NAFC.

This film is one of four films made during the course of the Matto Grosso Expedition (MGE), a privately sponsored venture that took place in 1930-31 in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, usually referred to simply as ‘Penn Museum’. The title of both the expedition and this film features the double ‘t’ that was standard in the Brazilian Portuguese spelling of the name of the Mato Grosso region until 1938.

This film is particularly interesting from an historical and technical point of view since it is one of the first films made outside a studio that features passages of synchronous speech. From an ethnographic point of view, on the other hand, it is very confused, and therefore only of limited value as a representation of the indigenous peoples of Central Brazil at the time that it was made.

Some ten years after the release of the original film, the more ethnographic footage was re-edited to produce two short films, one about the Bororo, the other about various indigenous groups of the upper Xingu, which although also limited, certainly  have greater ethnographic integrity than the original film.

The same film-makers also made a short fiction, The Hoax, apparently aimed at children, which was released in 1932, the same year as the main film. But this is a light-hearted fantasy that is not intended to be taken too seriously and if it has any ethnographic value, it is no more than minor and indirect.

Background: The original idea for this film was formulated by Alexander Siemel (1890-1970), a Latvian adventurer who spent many years as a professional jaguar hunter in South America. In April 1930, he travelled to the US to seek financial backing for the making of a film. There, he was introduced to the then-active world of wealthy  private organisations on the East Coast dedicated to hunting, fishing and exploration by  Vladimir Perfilieff (1895-1943), an emigré Russian artist, and David M. Newell (1898-1986), a journalist and maker of newsreel shorts about hunting. The trio  approached John S. Clarke, a wealthy New York businessman who wanted to get into film production. Together, the four of them set up a joint stock company, Matto Grosso Expedition Inc. and developed a film proposal with the working title Big-Cat!, in which Siemel featured prominently spearing jaguars.  They then sought private investors who would be offered the additional opportunity to join the expedition themselves.

The most significant investor was E.R. Fenimore Johnson (1899-1986), who was the son of the founder of the Victor phonograph business, which had recently merged with the Radio Corporation of America to become RCA Victor. Johnson provided funding for the expedition and also the latest sound-recording technology in the form of the RCA Victor Photophone system. He also had links with Penn Museum, and through him, it too became involved in the expedition, sending a graduate student of anthropology, Vincenzo Petrullo (1906-1991), to act as its representative.

Various other scientific and technical personnel also joined the expedition, including a team of professional film-makers. Among the latter was Floyd D. Crosby (1899-1985), who had just completed the shooting of Tabu (directed by F. W. Murnau and initially by Robert Flaherty), for which he would win an Academy award immediately following his return from Brazil. Crosby was assisted by Arthur P. Rossi, while the principal sound recordist was Ainslie R. Davis, who was on loan from RCA Victor.

The film-making team also eventually included George Rawls, a hunting and fishing guide from Florida, originally recruited as a general handyman, but later asked to play the role of Uncle George, the leader of the expedition for the film, thereby testifying to the fact that in the 1930s, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction film-making was more blurred than it would subsequently become.

On the film itself, the direction is credited primarily to John S. Clarke, whose name appears in large letters, and in smaller letters, to Floyd Crosby and David Newell.

Circumstances of production : The expedition arrived in Mato Grosso in February 1931, when the rainy season was at its height, and based themselves at Descalvados, a vast US-owned cattle ranch on the upper Paraguay river, some 400 kms north of Corumbá. They then engaged in hunting and the collection of zoological specimens, and shot a considerable amount of footage on these subjects while they waited for the waters to subside and for a permit to enter indigenous areas.

During this period, the anthropologist, Vincenzo Petrullo visited Laguna, a nearby village of Western Bororo accompanied by Fenimore Johnson, Floyd Crosby and others. Here they shot some footage of a “jaguar dance” performed at their request. From the description that Petrullo gives in his 1932 report, and in the light of subsequent ethnographic research, it seems clear that this was a performance of the dance associated with the traditional Bororo funeral.

But although they participated enthusiastically in this performance, Petrullo reported that the Laguna villagers were not only in a very poor physical condition, but they had abandoned many of their traditional customs and were unable (though perhaps only unwilling?) to explain the meaning of the dance. Petrullo concluded that the expedition would have to penetrate much further into the interior of Mato Grosso to find indigenous groups still living in a traditional manner.

By June 1931, the permit had come through and the waters were low enough for the expedition to travel beyond the immediate vicinity of Descalvados. Further enabled by an amphibious plane donated by Fenimore Johnson’s father, they began to explore the headwaters of the Xingu river. Having sighted some Xinguano villages from the air, Petrullo set off overland, eventually reaching the confluence of the Curisevo and Culuene rivers after six weeks. By prior arrangement, he met up there with other members of the expedition who had arrived by air. Arthur Rossi , the expedition’s assistant cameraman, then remained behind and, over a period of about three weeks, he accompanied Petrullo and shot some footage of everyday Xinguano life. Although they visited several villages, most of the material appears to have been shot in the villages of the Yawalapiti and the Naravute.

Meanwhile, in July 1931, the other members of the expedition  travelled south and established themselves at Córrego Grande, an Eastern Bororo village on the São Lourenço river, a left-bank tributary of the Paraguay. Here they remained for about two weeks and shot most of the material concerning the Bororo there.

Film content – Although Penn Museum had been an important patron of the project, this film was aimed unambiguously at a popular audience and there is no mention of the museum in the credits. The subtitle of the film constituted an obvious reference to Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Theodore Roosevelt’s hugely popular account of his travels through Mato Grosso in 1914.

In general form, the film conforms in many ways with the conventional tropes of the interwar US travelogue. It is heavily structured by a jocose and ironic ‘green hell’ commentary. Rather than presenting the world encountered by the expedition directly to the audience, in almost every sequence the commentary presents that world as it is experienced or understood by  the travellers.

The film was not a box-office success: far from making a handsome profit, as they had hoped, the investors in the project lost a great deal of money. There were undoubtedly many reasons for this, but a contributory factor would have been the disjointed narrative. This can be attributed to the diverse motives and interests underpinning the expedition. What had started as a project to make a commercial adventure film about spearing jaguars had become, with the participation of the Penn Museum, a scientific expedition that aimed to report on the ethnography and natural history of the region. In order to combine these various elements together into a single unitary story, the narrative jumps back and forth between materials shot at various different times and in various different places, and seeks to make connections between them that are at times not merely factually spurious, but also threaten the very credibility of the film as an account of what was supposedly a real-life venture.

This weakness was exacerbated by the fact that George Rawls was not a professional actor and his performance as ‘Uncle George’, whose presence is supposed to hold all the disparate sequences together, is very stilted. The requirement to set shots up so that synchronous sound could be achieved would not have helped in this respect.

The first ten minutes of the film charts the expedition journey first by sea from New York, and then up the Paraguay river.  The long stop over at Descalvados is  omitted and the expedition is shown arriving at Córrego Grande in the river steamer.  This scene is manifestly contrived, not least because the camera is already ashore as the steamer approaches. As Uncle George disembarks and shakes hands with the chief, there is some stilted conversation in synch in a mixture of English and Bororo.

The remainder of the film then takes footage shot in the upper Xingu and  Descalvados and combines this with footage shot in Córrego Grande so as to form a single unitary narrative supposedly all happening in Córrego Grande and its surroundings. Thus immediately after the arrival scene, there are various establishing shots of a village that are said to be of Córrego Grande but which in fact were shot in the upper Xingu. The film then cuts back to Córrego Grande to show Uncle George, in another self-evidently set-up scene, engaged in trading with the Bororo. After being shown various Bororo artisans at work, he then makes friends with the chief’s son, Tari who introduces him to his pet otters.

This is followed by various fishing and natural history sequences, most of which were shot in Descalvados, before the hunting theme is reintroduced by a commentary point stating that the peaceful atmosphere of the village has been disturbed by the roar of a jaguar.

The Bororo are then shown preparing to hunt the jaguar with various dances to appease its “demon spirit”. However, this sequence is based on an entirely indiscriminate jumbling of material from Córrego Grande, the Western Bororo village of Laguna and the upper Xingu. The sequence concludes with a line of Xinguano archers practising their marksmanship, supposedly in preparation for the hunt. On the grounds that the “Bororo” marksmanship is “feeble”, the commentary explains that the expeditionaries decided to go after the jaguar by themselves. But the real reason that there are no Bororo in the following hunting sequence is that it was shot at Descalvados.

The hunting sequence is very well executed and involves two hunts, one of a puma, the other of a jaguar, nicknamed ‘El Tigre’ (a Spanish name, probably due to the fact that Descalvados was very close to the Bolivian border). These are led by the jaguar-hunter Siemel but neither involve any spearing because  this had proven impossible to film. Both animals are finished off by rifle shots after they have taken refuge in a tree.

The Bororo of Córrego Grande are then shown celebrating the jaguar’s death. This sequence quickly turns to night and there is some remarkable footage of men dancing, their bodies and their magnificent diadem headdresses silhouetted against a large fire (see above). They are accompanied by sound apparently recorded on location sound and the total effect is entrancing. This should probably be put down to the skill of  the Oscar-laureate director of photography, Floyd Crosby.

But now it is time for the expedition to go home, and the last five minutes of the film begins with Uncle George giving a penknife as a parting gift to Tari. However, the boy playing Tari in this scene is considerably older than the Tari who introduced Uncle George to his pet otters earlier in the film. This was because the gift-giving scene was shot in Córrego Grande whereas the scene with the pets was shot in Descalvados, so it was necessary to cast two different boys.

There is then a departure scene at the river bank that is as self-evidently contrived as the arrival scene and which was probably shot at the same time and certainly at the same time of day as the light is coming from the same direction. A boy waves goodbye whom we are led to assume is the same Tari who has just received the penknife. This boy waving goodbye had also appeared in the arrival scene, but he is clearly different both to the boy who received the penknife and to the boy who showed Uncle George his pets.

The film concludes with a long sequence on board the ship home, showing all the live animals that the expedition has captured. These include ‘El Tigre’, the jaguar, though this does not make much sense since the unfortunate creature had been declared unequivocally dead at the end of the hunting sequence.

As the film finally draws to a close, a passage of voice-over synthesises the core idea that underpins the film as a whole. For all the expedition’s success, it declares, “our results were as if a match were lighted in the blackness of some enormous cave. In Mato Grosso, the vast silence remains unbroken”.

The reaction of present day Bororo to the film – In 2011, the Brazilian anthropologists Edgar da Cunha and Sylvia Caiuby Novaes screened this film to the Bororo of Tadarimana, a village about 150kms upstream to the east of Córrego Grande. The villagers greatly enjoyed the film, particularly those sequences involving animals. As they did not follow the English narration and read the film as a series of self-contained scenes , they were not at all disturbed by the mixing up of the Xinguano and Bororo material. On the contrary, they were sorry that there was not more footage of the Xinguanos as they found it very interesting.

More generally,the screening evoked many memories for the older members of the audience. The trading scene reminded one elderly man of the time before ‘pacification’, when the Bororo were regarded as potentially hostile, and he interpreted the distribution of goods by Uncle George as a strategy to ensure that the expedition received a friendly welcome. More touchingly, and notwithstanding the fact that the image had been taken eighty years previously, he recognised in one of the intimate cutaways of the crowd at the arrival scene, the decorated face of Tiriacu Areguiri Ópogoda, a bari aroe toarari or ‘shaman of the souls’, renowned in his day for his bravery in killing both men and jaguars.

Texts : Duguid 1931, Petrullo 1932,  King 1993, Petrullo 1993, Pourshariati 2013, Hobson 2018, Pezzati 2018, Cunha and Caiuby 2019, Henley, Caiuby and Cunha in press. See also the comprehensive Penn Museum website specifically dedicated to this film here. This entry also draws on a series of personal communications from Professor Eric Hobson, of Belmont University, Nashville, who is currently writing a book about the MGE.

11 mins., b&w, sound (voice-over in Portuguese, extra-diegetic music)

Source : Museo do Índio, Rio de Janeiro. Can be viewed on-line here

Despite execrable music, a patronising voice-over and poor cinematography, this film also contains some interesting sequences of the life of the Kalapalo, one of the constellation of indigenous groups living on the upper Xingu river, Mato Grosso. At the time the film was made, the Kalapalo numbered around 200 and were in recovery from the devastating effects of epidemics of externally introduced disease.

The most notable sequence concerns an initiation ceremony,  which involves dancing in the central plaza and the scraping of a child’s skin with a piranha jawbone to encourage strength and resistance. There are also some mostly distant shots of the playing of the ‘takwara’ paired flutes (see above) that later would become emblematic of the peoples of the Xingu region .

Right at the beginning of the film , there is an interesting aerial shot of one of the famously horse-shoe shaped villages of the Xavante, then still out of contact with Brazilian national society.

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