20½ mins., colour, silent with German titles and intertitles
Production: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC), IWF.
Source: EC/ IWF collection at TIB, the German National Library, see here. A copy is also held at the Museu de Anthropologia e Ethnografia (MAE) at the Universidade de São Paulo. Details of this copy can be accessed via the on-line catalogue here.
Background: this is one of 67 short films made among the indigenous peoples of Amazonia in the period 1944-1965 by Harald Schultz. In 1959-60, Schultz made nine short films among various subgroups of the Karajá that inhabit the Ilha do Bananal in the Araguaia River, of which this film, shot in 1959, is the longest. A complete listing of these nine films may be consulted here.
All these films were ‘published’, i.e. released by the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica in 1962, though Aruanã Dances would appear to deviate somewhat from the normative methodology of this collection in that it brings two rather different types of event together in a single film (masked dancing and honey gathering).
In 1970, posthumously, Schultz published a study guide to this film which is available here. Although this provides a considerable amount of social and cultural context, Schultz is unable to explain what the meaning of the Aruanã dances might be, other than to suggest that they are “obviously related to fertility” (see p.6).
The Aruanã masked dances had featured both in Luiz Thomaz Reis’s film Ao Redor do Brasil (1933) and in Heinz Förthmann’s film, Os Carajá (1947) though in those two films, the dancers are shown performing to the sound of twinned long flutes, which is not the case in Schultz’s film. This suggests that traditionally, Aruanã dances took place on different occasions, possibly for different ceremonial purposes.
Film content:
[As it was not possible to view this film first-hand, this highly condensed summary is based on a combination of the catalogue entry of the EC/IWF collection at the TIB and the description offered in the study guide].
A row of temporary dry season shelters of the Javahé village of Jatobá stands on a sandbank at the edge of a small river within the Ilha do Bananal. At some distance, stands the shelter that serves as the Mask House, which women are forbidden to enter. As the film opens a pair of masked dancers are shown dancing with two women in the space between the temporary village and the Mask House.
There is then a sequence inside the Mask House, where several young men are putting on mask costumes. Two pairs of masks emerge from the Mask House in pairs, singing and shaking rattles and then dance towards the village. They dance together in the open space between the Mask House and village huts. Various other dances follow before a pair of masks approaches the village huts but some women emerge and the Masks rapidly retreat to the Mask House.
There are then a series of scenes in which women are shown dancing with the masks interspersed with scenes of the young men being supplied with food and drink by the women of the village.
In the final part of the film, the young men from the Mask House are shown out on the savanna gathering honey. They then return to the village and the masked dancing begins again, though this time, some of women dancers offer the Masks calabashes that contain cakes laced with honey.
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