24½ mins. , silent, German titles and intertitles
Production: Encyclopaedia Cinematographica/ IWF
Source: Encyclopaedia Cinematographic/IWF collection at the TIB. Further details are available here.
Background: This film was shot in 1959 and is one of 28 films about the Krahô indigenous group of the Tocantins valley, Central Brazil that were shot at various points between 1949 and 1965 by the Brazilian ethnographer Harald Schultz.
In common with all Schultz’s films, this film was released by the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, a collection of films set up by the IWF in Göttingen, Germany. The principles on which this collection was based are described here.
This particular film was released in 1962 and is the longest, not only of all Schultz’s Krahô films, but of all the 67 films that he shot between 1944 and 1965. He published a study guide to this film in 1964 which is available here.
Film Content :
The full significance of this film is impossible to determine without reference to the study guide. Here it is explained that a Krahô village is typically divided into two ceremonial moieties, one identified with the ancestral figure of the Sun, the other with the ancestral figure of the Moon, an arrangement that may cross-cut the more fundamental system of exogamous moieties on which the layout of Krahô villages are based.
During the dry season, the Krahô move out of their villages and set up camp out on the savanna for several weeks. Here they build a series of temporary shelters, though these are laid out in the same pattern as the permanent village. Whilst they are in these dry season camps, men from the two ceremonial moieties will go out together to hunt, to build up food supplies for an approaching ceremony, or simply to meet the food needs of the village in general.
They will be accompanied by a number of women without marital obligations, typically widows or women who have been abandoned by their husbands, whose role is to cook for the men and prepare the surplus meat for bringing back afterwards. According to the study guide, they also meet the sexual needs of the men at night.
After a preliminary shot of the village, this film shows the men out on a series of hunting expeditions and then butchering the animals after they have brought them back to the camp. The women meanwhile are shown cooking the meat in the stone-lined pits that are typical of the Krahô. From a technical point of view, the cinematography is generally very competent, though it is evident that certain scenes showing the capture of particular animals have been staged.
Schultz admits to this in the study guide, but claims that the film nevertheless shows how hunting takes place in actual practice. To the viewer, however, it is quite clear that the animals have been restrained since they do not escape when the hunters approach them.
A particularly interesting sequence concerns the distribution of the meat once it is brought back to the camp, which is clearly being done with great care. The study guide explains that all the dead game is scrupulously divided equally between the two ceremonial moieties.
At the end of the film, the camp begins to break up prior to departure but just at that point, some young men begin a log-racing competition. (These are traditionally an almost daily feature of Krahô life and were the topic of one of Schultz’s earliest films, described here).
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