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.
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