129 mins., b&w, silent – Portuguese titles and intertitles
Production: J.G. de Araújo e Cia.
Source : see the Cinemateca Brasileira catalogue entry here. A reconstruction with the addition of a musical soundtrack was released on DVD in 2014 by Versátil Home Video. This can also be viewed on-line here.
Background: The director, Silvino Santos was commissioned to make this film by J.G. de Araújo, a large business enterprise based in Manaus, for the specific purpose of screening at the exhibition celebrating the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922. This exhibition opened in Rio de Janeiro in September of that year, though No Paiz das Amazonas was not actually screened there until March 1923, some three months after its première in Manaus. In recognition of the epic account that it offered of a region then little known to most urban Brazilians, the film was awarded a Gold Medal.
Despite this accolade, the producer of the film, Agesilau de Araújo initially had difficulty in persuading commercial cinemas to take the film as it was ‘un film natural’, i.e. a documentary. He therefore used his connections to organise a screening with the President of Brazil, Dr. Artur Bernardes, who was seen to applaud enthusiastically at the end, thereby greatly improving the prospects for distribution.
In order to promote the film in the cinemas, Araújo resorted to various publicity devices, including a poster that evoked the legendary warrior Amazons alluded to in the title, though of course they did not appear in any form in the film itself. Other publicity devices included personal appearances at screenings by Silvino Santos himself, appropriately dressed in his film-making gear, complete with jaguar skin hat (see the photograph at the head of the biographical entry for Silvino Santos) .
No Paiz das Amazonas is usually reported to have been shot over the two years prior to its first release in 1922. However, recent scholarship suggests that this is an oversimplification. Over the period of almost a century since its first release, a number of different versions of No Paiz have been produced. Some parts of the footage in the most recent version, released in 2014, may have been shot as early as 1913 while at least one sequence could not have been shot before 1929.
Other parts again were reworked in the 1930s and released as separate films but were then later reintegrated with the original material with new intertitles. The latter included a series of pedagogical films about forest products distributed by the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo (INCE).
The film as whole appears to have gone out of distribution in the 1930s and then to have been effectively lost for many years until reconstructed for the first time in analog form in 1986. But by then most of the original documentation had been lost, so it was not possible to determine exactly which sequences formed part of the original film and which were later additions. Nor was it possible to be entirely sure of the running order of the sequences.
A second, digital, reconstruction was released on DVD in 2014. This involved some re-ordering of the sequences on the basis of more recent research, but doubts about the precise form of the original 1922 film persist. What is certain is that the film as it has come down to us in the 2014 reconstruction does not exactly reproduce the film as it was when it was first screened.
The material introduced after 1922 includes some of the scenes shot around Manaus with which the film opens. In one such scene, a nanny is shown with some children who, it transpires, are the offspring of the Araújo family but some of whom had not been born by 1922. In another sequence, dedicated to recreational water sports, a power boat passes under a bridge that was not inaugurated until 1929.
The material added later also includes the sequence about the indigenous group, the Parintintin, a subgroup of the Tupi-speaking Kagwahiv, who were then settled around the upper reaches of the Jiparaná (Machado) river, a right bank tributary of the Madeira. This comes about a third of the way into the 2014 version of the film.
Although in later life Santos recalled visiting the Parintintin in the years 1918-20, contemporary reports indicate that at that time, the Parintintin were in extremely violent confrontation with non-indigenous Brazilians. The Parintintin were not fully pacified until 1923 and it would have been quite impossible for Santos to film them at any time before then. There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest that this sequence may in fact have been shot in 1924.
Recent scholarship not only suggests that certain parts were added to No Paiz after 1922, but also that some parts of the original film may have been recycled from films that Santos had shot prior to 1920, even before he began working on the J.G. de Araújo commission.
This earlier material almost certainly includes the sequence on the Witoto indigenous group that appears in the latter part of the film and which was shot in the Putumayo region of what was then Peru (in a political settlement in the course of the 1920s, this region was transferred to Colombia).
This sequence may have been filmed as early as 1913, when Santos was commissioned to make a film by the notorious rubber-tapping company, Casa Arana (for further details on this stage of this career, see the biographical entry for Silvino Santos). Alternatively, it may have been shot in the course of the one or more visits that Santos made to that region later in the same decade when working for Amazônia Ciné-Film, a company set up in Manaus by a group of businessmen around 1917. Santos was himself both a partner and the technical director.
The most significant project that Santos carried out with this company was a film entitled, Amazonas, O Maior Rio do Mundo [The Amazon, the Largest River in the World], which appears to have been similar in conception to No Paiz das Amazonas. In order to shoot this film, Santos travelled all over Amazonia in the years 1918-20. In doing so, he not only shot material in the Putumayo region, but also covered a number of the topics that turn up again in No Paiz, including rubber-tapping, Brazil nut collecting and fishing.
But after it was edited and before it entered distribution, the master copy of Amazonas was stolen by a relative of one of the directors of Amazônia Cine-Film and sold to a French production company which then distributed it all across Europe under a different title. This theft drove Amazônia Cine-Film into liquidation which in turn led Santos to seek employment with J.G. de Araújo.
For a long time, it was thought that the film itself was lost. However, recent scholarship suggests that some parts at least may have survived and may even have been recycled in No Paiz. (For further details, see the biographical entry for Silvino Santos).
Film Content:
The primary purpose of No Paiz das Amazonas was to celebrate the natural resources and economic potential of the region. Throughout the film, the intertitles stress the region’s natural abundance and there are a large number of cutaways to the animals and plants of the region, as well as many striking shots of features of the landscape, particularly the rivers.
At the same time, almost incidentally, there are many sequences of ethnographic interest. Most obviously, there are three sequences about indigenous groups, two living in traditional circumstances, the Parintintin of the Madeira River and the Witoto of the Putumayo River in Peru, but also a third group, the Sateré-Mawé, a group living downstream from Manaus who by the 1920s had undergone a great deal of social and cultural change, and who were then heavily engaged in the guaraná extractive industry.
However, none of these sequences featuring indigenous groups is particularly lengthy or complex, so notwithstanding their exotic character, they are generally less rich ethnographically than the many sequences that the film offers of the everyday working lives of the non-indigenous inhabitants of the region. Through the progressive accumulation of these sequences, one becomes aware of how labour-intensive the economic development of Amazonia has been.
No Paiz das Amazonas covers a great number of different topics and does so employing a variety of narrative modes. The overall structuring narrative is that of a journey, in effect a grand tour around the Amazon Basin. Although the component parts of this journey may have been shot in a different chronological order to that in which they appear in the film, they have been edited together in such a way as to make geographical sense as a systematic journey – albeit with one notable exception, discussed below.
Along the way, as it were, this master journey narrative is supplemented by more localised narratives based on particular economic production processes.
The film begins with a lengthy sequence set in Manaus. This is mostly concerned with the modernity of the port and the grandeur of the public buildings, including, of course, the celebrated ‘opera house’, the Teatro Amazonas. But there are also some charming sequences of families at leisure by the waterside, with their children and their dogs, as well as of the surprisingly cosmopolitan water sports activities practised in the city.
The journey narrative then takes over as the action heads upriver, first on the Amazon itself, then on its right-bank tributary the Purus where it pauses for lengthy sequences of fishing, first of manatees, then of pirarucú (giant catfish) on the lake of Aiapuá. It then transfers to the Madeira River and heads upstream towards Porto Velho, making a stop at the vast Trȇs Casas rubber and tobacco estate.
Here, in an intertitle, the film offers an extended panegyric about the extraction of rubber and the “herois obscuros”, the unsung heroes, the workers who have turned this forest product “into gold”. Whereas the fishing sequences had been structured purely by a technical process narrative with little development of character, here Santos introduces an additional element, namely a ‘day-in-the-life’ device, showing a seringueiro (rubber tapper) going about his daily routine.
This starts with the seringueiro leaving his family in the morning, follows him throughout the day and ends with him smoking the material when he returns. This personal story is then finished off with a sequence of balls of rubber being cut up ready for sending downstream.
The dayin-the-life of the seringueiro is followed by the sequence about the Parintintin. Although the cut from one sequence to the next is visually very abrupt, it makes sense in terms of the geography of the journey narrative in that the Parintintin also lived in the Madeira river valley and following pacification, one group settled close to the Trȇs Casas estate.
But although the Parintintin look very exotic, the ethnographic value of this sequence is limited. The Parintintin are shown wearing traditional dress, which in the case of the women consists of little more than a necklace, and in the case of the men, feather crowns and remarkably long penis sheaths. But they are clearly not living in traditional circumstances in the forest.
The women are shown lying in their hammocks in an encampment but in the background, one can clearly discern a substantial building, possibly part of the Trȇs Casas estate. The men, meanwhile, are filmed lined up on a neatly tended lawn (see the image above in the ‘Background’ section of this entry). They turn sideways, in a manner reminiscent of anthropometric photography, before executing a clearly artificial small circular dance and then walking off through camera.
More interesting ethnographically is the next major sequence, which is set on the tobacco farm of the Trȇs Casas estate. This follows on from a brief shot of the exterior of the J.G. de Araújo office building in Porto Velho, a series of dramatic ‘phantom ride’ shots taken from the famous Madeira-Marmoré railway (one of the sequences now thought to have been originally shot for Amazonas, O Maior Rio do Mundo) and an equally dramatic sequence of the Teotónio rapids on the Madeira river itself (see the image of Santos filming the rapids above)
The tobacco farm sequence is again structured around the process of production, from the picking of the leaves in the plantation through the sorting and wrapping of the leaves into long cylinders for onward distribution. In terms both of the variety of shots employed, the interaction between the workers themselves and their relaxed manner in front of the camera (see the image at the head of this entry), this sequence represents something of a step up from the technical process sequences shown earlier in the film.
The Brazil nut gathering sequence that follows shortly afterwards is even more elaborate. As in the rubber gathering sequence, the technical process is supplemented by a day-in-the-life of the nut-gatherers, but in this case, the process is followed all the way downstream back to Manaus. Here the nuts are sorted, shelled in a factory by rows of manually dextrous women dressed in white, and loaded onto ships for export. In what is probably a chapeau to Santos’s training as a cinematographer at the Lumière establishment in Lyons, the sequence ends with a shot of the workers leaving the factory.
After Manaus, the action continues further downstream to Parintins, where there is yet another technical process sequence, this time involving guaraná, a plant from which a drink with medicinal qualities is made. This was first developed by the Sateré-Mawé indigenous people of this part of Amazonia and in the film, they are shown engaged in the extractive industry that has grown up around it. Intentionally or otherwise, this sequence communicates very powerfully how intensively their labour is exploited in producing their traditional drink on an industrial scale.
From Parintins, the film returns to Manaus, but without lingering there, it immediately heads north into the valley of the Rio Branco and the state of Roraima. This region is construed in an intertitle as similar to the US ‘Far West’, in that it is populated by cowboys and endowed with vast natural resources. This will be where most of the remaining 40 minutes of the film will be spent, representing about a third of its total duration.
This part mostly consists of various further technical process sequences, including collecting turtle eggs on the exposed sandbanks of the river, balatá gathering and smoking (a process that is shown to be interestingly different to the rubber gathering process), brief sequences about the hunting of egrets and of deer, and more extended sequences about the herding and management of cattle and horses.
But, bizarrely, a short way into this part, after the balatá sequence, the action suddenly jumps to the Putumayo region in Peru, about a thousand kilometres to the west, completely rupturing the otherwise geographically coherent master journey narrative.
Judging by their physical appearance and dress, this sequence in the Putumayo involves several different indigenous communities. But as with the Parintintins sequence, the treatment is very superficial.
Again Santos lines his indigenous subjects up in order to film them. In the first line-up, one man, with large ear plugs, appears to be from the Orejón group, while another with long hair is apparently an Encabellado. Others again, wearing barkskin loincloths appear to be Witoto, probably of the Ocaina or Bora subgroups who at that time mostly still wore traditional dress. But in other shots within the Putumayo sequence, almost all the subjects, both men and women, are wearing European-style clothing.
This is not the case, however, with yet another line-up, this time of pubescent girls. An intertitle comes up beforehand to warn the viewer that they are “highly decorated …”. Then, obviously by pre-arrangement, about twenty five girls, almost entirely naked apart from their elaborate body decorations and in some cases, girdles around their waists, emerge in a line from a longhouse, walk round in a circle and then disappear into the house again.
They are then shown all in a line, with the camera panning slowly across them several times. This image is highly reminiscent of the photographs that Santos took in the Putumayo when commissioned to cover the consular visit around the installations of the Casa Arana in 1912. (See the ‘Biography’ section of the Silvino Santos entry: also the images that the Marquis de Wavrin shot in the late 1920s in the same region for his film Au Pays du Scalp).
Ostensibly, the girls in the line are waiting for a collective dance to begin, but when it does, it seems to be a performance by a completely different group, since the dancers are all entirely clothed.
Apparently in preparation for this dance, the Witoto are shown building a curious structure out of palm tree branches. This is then shown in a remarkable shot, apparently taken from the top of a palm tree, and we see that it is very long. But the purpose of this structure remains a mystery …
After this “spiritual digression”, as an intertitle puts it, the action switches back to the cowboys of the Rio Branco. There are no bare-breasted Amazons riding the horses here, but there are a few portraits of pretty girls, and some virtuoso shots of cattle being wrangled and branded.
The last sequence, shot from a hill above, shows a group of cowboys herding large numbers of cattle across the limitless plains. Bringing the narrative of the film as whole to an end in a classical fashion, the very last shot features a group of about twenty cowboys galloping furiously down the slope of a vast rock, proclaiming the patriotic slogan, ‘Viva o Brasil!’
Texts: Nimuendajú 1924, Santos 1969, Martins 2013a, Stoco 2016, Stoco 2017, Paiva 2018.