13:34, b&w, sound – extradiegetic music, Portuguese voice-over commentary and titles.
Production : Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI)
Source : Museu do Índio. A poor copy is viewable here.
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.
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