18:12 mins, b&w, sound: extra-diegetic music and English voice-over commentary but also some passages of on-location synchronous sound
Source : Penn Museum film archive
Background – This film was edited from footage that first appeared in Matto Grosso, the Great Brazilian Wilderness, a travelogue released in 1932 and based on an expedition, sponsored by Penn Museum and various wealthy private individuals, that had taken place the previous year. It was one of a pair of short films cut from material shot during this expedition, the other film being about indigenous villages on the upper Xingu river.
The film material produced by this expedition is of particular historical interest since it represents one of the earliest cases of synchronous speech being recorded outside a studio, let alone in such a remote location as the interior of Mato Grosso. The system employed was the RCA Victor Photophone.
However, the travelogue was made for a popular audience and uses the ethnographic footage in a very misleading fashion. The two shorter films carry a common title that will trouble modern audiences, but they present this ethnographic footage in a manner that is much more respectful of its integrity, albeit in the language of 1930s ethnology.
Both shorter films were produced by Ted Nemeth, who had not participated in the original expedition but worked with commentary scripts written some years earlier by Vincenzo Petrullo, the anthropologist who represented Penn Museum on the expedition. The commentaries were performed by the then well-known broadcaster Lowell Thomas.
As with the travelogue, this film is structured around the visit of the expedition, led by ‘Uncle George’, a fictional character played by a non-professional actor, George Rawls, who had originally been recruited to the expedition as a general handyman. But whereas in the travelogue, Uncle George is identified as an explorer arriving in the region for the first time, in this film, he is presented as an anonymous ‘trader’ who, it is implied, is very familiar with Bororo ways. His synchronous English dialogues that featured in the travelogue are replaced by ethnological commentary and he becomes merely a narrative device to take the film from one sequence to the next.
Film content – the first three minutes of film are dedicated to arrival tropes – maps, shots of the river bank, the retailing of general information about the environment, and eventually to the arrival of the expedition steamer at a riverbank close to a Bororo village, albeit shot from the perspective of someone already on shore.
This village is explicitly identified as being on the São Lourenço river and is probably Córrego Grande, which exists to this day. The arrival scene is followed by a highly contrived trading scene that one finds at greater length in the travelogue, but here the original synch dialogues are replaced by ethnological commentary about how Bororo dress has changed since they were ‘pacified’, and also about the Bororo’s new-found appreciation of the products of “civilization”.
Again as in the travelogue, the trader is then given a ‘guided tour’ of various Bororo craftsmen and women at work, the high point of which is a pair of remarkable shots, which did not appear in the travelogue and which in total are almost two minutes long, which show a man explaining how to plane arrow shafts, in synch, in Bororo (see below). This represents the most elaborate use of the expedition’s Photophone equipment to record Bororo speech and probably represents the first extended recording of an indigenous voice in synch in ethnographic film history.
The film then moves onto dances “held specially for the expedition”. This sequence begins with a man blowing on a calabash trumpet called pana by the Bororo (see above). What is not explained is that this musical instrument is customarily used to call the spirits of the dead at funerals.
The “jaguar dance” that immediately follows is said to be an impersonation of a jaguar at the moment that it has been cornered by hunters. In fact, it is a performance of the dance of the aroe-maiwu, an embodiment of the spirit of the recently deceased person at a funeral. Unknowingly then, the segue from the blowing of the pana to the aroe-maiwu is very appropriate, though in reality, the “jaguar dance” shown in the film was shot several months beforehand, in a completely different Bororo community on the upper Paraguay river.
The dancing continues into the night and, as in the travelogue, there is an extraordinarily beautiful sequence of men with magnificent diadem headdresses dancing in silhouette against a very large bonfire (undoubtedly built by the cameramen to light this scene).
The film ends with the departure of the expedition, immediately preceded, as in the travelogue, by the trader giving the parting gift of a penknife to a young Bororo boy. But here the English synch dialogue of the travelogue is replaced by voice-over commentary explaining that in Bororo society, a gift must always be followed by a counter-gift, so the boy always made sure to give the trader something in return.
As the expedition steamer pulls away accompanied by much theatrical waving on both sides, the commentary makes yet another classical Amazonian ethnological point that it is matter of social convention to engage in expressions of grief at a departure. Then, in a final remark, it reassures the audience that although the expedition had given many gifts to the Bororo, this had not been enough to disturb “their primitive mode of life”. This is in sharp contrast to the travelogue that ends by suggesting that the expedition had briefly lit a match in the “blackness” of the cave that is Mato Grosso.
The remaining three minutes of the film shows the Bororo artefacts brought back from Brazil being accessioned in Penn Museum.
Texts : Pourshariati 2013, Pezzati 2018, Cunha and Caiuby 2019, Henley, Caiuby and Cunha, in press.
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