Major Luiz Thomaz Reis: o cinegrafista de Rondon. Embrafilme.
This pamphlet is available here
Ribeiro, Darcy (1996b)
Diários Índios: Os Urubus-Kaapor. São Paulo : Companhia das Letras.
Comissão Rondon, fragmentos de filmes [Rondon Commission film fragments] (1914-?) – Luiz Thomaz Reis*
9 mins., b&w, silent
Production : Rondon Commission/ Inspetoria de Fronteiras
Source : Museo do Índio. This footage is also viewable here.
This series of fragments consist primarily, though probably not exclusively, of sequences shot by Luiz Thomaz Reis. A number appear to be from Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso (1915), one of Reis’s earliest films. This now seems to be otherwise definitively lost, making these fragments particularly valuable. Other fragments are from films of his that are still readily available. The place of all these films within overall trajectory of Reis’s work is indicated in the tentative filmography offered here.
(1) first 2 mins. : this shows a sequence of indigenous people in canoes, followed by a series of portraits taken in a village in the rainforest. These were shot at the same time as Parima, fronteiras do Brasil (i.e. in 1928 or 1929), the second film that Reis made for the Inspetoria de Fronteiras and which follows General Cândido Rondon as he inspects the frontiers between Brazil and first French Guiana, then Dutch Guiana. Some of these fragments appear in that film, others would appear to be outtakes. All of them appear to relate to the same indigenous community living at the headwaters of the Oiapoque river, on the French Guiana border. They are not specifically named in the intertitles, but given the location of the encounter they are probably Wayampi (see image at the head of this entry). The full film can be viewed here.
(2) 2:00-3:00 mins.: this is a sequence showing two or three men gathering Brazil nuts. They are dressed in the caboclo rather than the indigenous manner. One man cuts open a shell directly in front of the camera, shows the nuts inside and eats one. However, there is no direct evidence that the film-maker in this case was Reis. Nor is it is clear where this sequence was shot, or when. However, as it comes between two fragments that were shot while Reis was working for the Inspetoria de Fronteiras in Roraima in 1927-1929, it is possible that he shot it around the same general time. Certainly, Brazil nuts do grow abundantly in the region.
(3) 3:00-4:25 mins.: this is a sequence showing the exploration of an indigenous burial place located in a cave beneath a large rock. Since many of the shots in the sequence are common to both, it was clearly shot at the same time (August-October 1927) as Reis’ film, Viagem ao Roroimã. This follows an expedition travelling north through the State of Roraima to demarcate Brazil’s borders with the then British Guiana and Venezuela. The intertitles of Reel One of this film identify the site as ‘Monte Maruai’ and explains that a four-man team from New York Museum, headed by a Mr. Tate, also participated in the expedition [Lasmar 2011: 258-259]. One of the men reconstructing the skeletons brought from the cave does indeed appear to be an American.
(4) 4:25-5:25 mins.: this sequence shows some gifts being handed out to a group of young Paresí (Halíti, Aríti) women, followed by a sequence of three of them pounding vigorously with a large pestle and mortar. These appear to be the shots that are referred to in intertitles nos. 13 and 3 of Reel 3 of the lost Reis film, Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso [Lasmar 2011: 261] .
They were probably therefore taken at Utiariti, a Paresí village on the upper reaches of the Papagaio river, where there was a Rondon Commission telegraph post and which Reis visited in January 1914. However, there is a complication in that a European appears in shot distributing the gifts in the first of the shots and this seems to be Reis himself. If so, this fragment must have been shot by an assistant.
At this stage of the production of Os Sertões, Reis seems to have been travelling alongside the expedition headed by the former US President, Theodore Roosevelt and guided by Reis’ patron, Colonel Rondon. This would explain the intertitle that appears midway through the fragment, in English and in reverse, which reads “The Roosevelt party gave the women some calico dresses — and they thought it was Christmas”. The fact that this title is in English suggests that the fragment may have been used in a compilation film, Wilderness (1918) which Reis later took to the US in an (unsuccesful) attempt to find a commercial distributor there for his films.
(5) 4:27-6:55 mins.: this sequence consists mostly of series of strikingly intimate portraits of Nambikwara people, mostly of women and children, but also one or two men, mostly just sitting on the ground and/or posing for the camera, These portaits include those of the two boys above. Towards the end of the sequence, a woman is shown mashing up some small pineapples with a pestle and mortar.
Many of these same shots (including the one featuring the two boys) appear in Ao Redor do Brasil, a compilation film released in 1933, in a scene in which General Rondon meets with a group of Nambikwara at Porto Amarante on the Cabixis river. This occurs about 70 minutes into the film and was probably shot in early 1930.
(6) 6:57-7:33 mins.: this shows a group of men, some in ragged European clothes, dancing in a small circle around a smouldering log and some sticks set upright in the middle. This appears to be the dance of reconciliation between the Nambikwara and Paresí referred to in intertitle no. 12 in Reel Six of Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso [Lasmar 2011: 263]. It was probably therefore shot at some poin tin 1914 or 1915.
(7) 7:35-8:07 mins.: this shows a group of Paresí men playing their characteristic ball game, using a rubber ball, which they head back and forth to one another. This appears to be the sequence referred to in intertitle no. 3 in Reel Four of Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso [Lasmar 2011: 262]. It was therefore shot in Utiariti, probably in January or February 1914.
(8) 8:09-8:31 mins.: this shows some men or boys diving into the water, swimming around and then clambering into a dug-out canoe. This seems to be the shot referred to in intertitle no. 2 in Reel Four of Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso [Lasmar 2011: 262]. Again, probably shot at Utiariti in January or February 1914.
(9) 8:33-8:53 mins.: this sequence begins with a group of people, both men and women, walking across a village plaza and then posing in a line for the camera. The head-dresses worn by two of the men indicate that they are Bororo. This is then followed by a ‘team photograph’ of two lines of women, with five standing up and three sitting down in front of them with two children.
The latter shot is identical to one that appears in Reis’ film Rituais e festas borôro, shot in 1916 in the now disappeared village of São Lourenço, located on the banks of the river of the same name. But the material earlier in this sequence seems to have been taken elsewhere since the village in the background does not look at all like São Lourenço as shown in Reis’s film. There is also something about the quality of the film stock that suggests that this material was shot much later, possibly as late as the 1940s or even the 1950s. If so, this part of the Bororo sequence certainly would not have been shot by Reis since he died in 1940.
Texts : Rodrigues 1982, Lasmar 2011.
Calapalo (1946) – dir. Nilo de Oliveira Vellozo*
11 mins., b&w, sound (voice-over in Portuguese, extra-diegetic music)
Source : Museo do Índio, Rio de Janeiro. Can be viewed on-line here
Despite execrable music, a patronising voice-over and poor cinematography, this film also contains some interesting sequences of the life of the Kalapalo, one of the constellation of indigenous groups living on the upper Xingu river, Mato Grosso. At the time the film was made, the Kalapalo numbered around 200 and were in recovery from the devastating effects of epidemics of externally introduced disease.
The most notable sequence concerns an initiation ceremony, which involves dancing in the central plaza and the scraping of a child’s skin with a piranha jawbone to encourage strength and resistance. There are also some mostly distant shots of the playing of the ‘takwara’ paired flutes (see above) that later would become emblematic of the peoples of the Xingu region .
Right at the beginning of the film , there is an interesting aerial shot of one of the famously horse-shoe shaped villages of the Xavante, then still out of contact with Brazilian national society.
Marcolin, Neldson (2013)
Retratos de culturas alheias. Pesquisa no.205, March 2013.
Article can be accessed here
Campos, Sandra de la Torre Lacerda (1999)
Por una antropologia do olhar : a coleção Harald Schultz no Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia. Cadernos de Antropologia e Imagem 8(1) : 145-160.
Labaki, Amir (2015)
Heinz Forthmann aos 100. Catalogue of 2015 edition of É Tudo Verdade, International Festival of Documentary Film. Brasil.
Available here.
Mendes, Marcos de Souza (2006)
Heinz Forthmann e Darcy Ribeiro: cinema documentário no Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, SPI, 1949-1959. Doutorado em Multimeios. Campinas.
Available as a pdf via this link.
Cosandey, Roland (2002-03)
Un film palimpseste: Yopi: Chez les Indiens du Brésil. Société Suisse des Américanistes, Bulletin 66-67, pp.199-213.
An on-line version can be read here
Yopi: Chez les Indiens du Brésil [Yopi : With the Indians of Brazil] (1945) – Felix Speiser/ Georges Lobsiger*
75 mins., b&w, sound, with voice-over commentary in French and extradiegetic music. Titles and intertitles in French, with German subtitles available in some versions.
Production: uncertain, though possibly Les Films Indépendents S.A., the company of the Swiss producer Max Linder.
Source: Archival copies are held by the Cinémathèque suisse. Video copies may consulted at the Musée d’ethnographie, Geneva and the Museum der Kulturen, Basle. In addition, the Museum der Kulturen holds around 500m (approx. 30 mins) of fragmentary material that appears to have been part of one or more earlier versions.
Background
Note: it was not possible to view this film for The Silent Time Machine project. This entry is based primarily on an article by the Swiss film historian, Roland Cosandey (see ‘Texts’ below).
This film was cut from material originally shot in 1924 by the leading Swiss anthropologist, Felix Speiser, and his travel companion, Arnold Deuber, in Tucano, an Apalai-Wayana village at the headwaters of Paru River, a tributary of the lower Amazon, in Pará state, northern Brazil.
Speiser was already established as the Professor of Ethnology at the University of Basle while Deuber was a dentist by profession, and also from Basle. Up until this point, Speiser had carried out all his research in Melanesia but it seems that he decided to do some comparative work and turned to Theodor Koch-Grünberg, the leading German Americanist, for advice.
Koch-Grünberg presumably encouraged him to work in Amazonia since they travelled to Brazil together, on a ship departing from Liverpool in June 1924. While Speiser and Deuber stopped off at Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon river, Koch-Grünberg continued to Manaus in order to join the Branco-Uraricoera expedition being prepared by the American amateur geographer, A. Hamilton Rice. (Three months later, shortly after the Rice expedition began, Koch-Grünberg contracted malaria and died).
Due the political unrest then affecting the region, Speiser and Deuber were obliged to remain in Belém for longer than they expected. During this time, they met up with Yopi, the headman of Tucano and five Apalai companions, and agreed to go with them on their return to their village. They appear to have remained in Tucano for a period of around six weeks and to have shot at least two hours of silent footage.
What Speiser did with this footage once he returned to Basle is unclear, though he certainly developed it and organised it into various categories. He may have used it in his teaching and may even have shown it around the local Kulturfilm circuit in Basle (i.e. to non-academic but educated audiences).
At some point during the Second World War, when the importation of films about exotic places was highly restricted in Switzerland, Speiser appears to have been approached by Georges Lobsiger (1903-1988), a civil servant with an active accademic interest in Americanist matters, and a film producer, Max Linder, with a view to producing a film from his material aimed at popular audiences.
With a commentary scripted and performed in French by Lobsiger himself, and a music track composed by the Swiss musician, Alexander Krannhais (1908-1961), this film was released in 1945.
It is not clear what role, if any, Speiser himself played in the editing. However, in his correspondence with Koch-Grünberg prior to going to Brazil, Speiser had encouraged his German colleague to propose the making of a film to Hamilton Rice, aimed at popular audiences, as a means of raising funds to support his research (Fuhrmann 2013, p.53n17).
In the event, the film of the Rice expedition was made by the Brazilian documentarist, Silvino Santos. But given that he made such a proposal to Koch-Grünberg, it seems very likely that Speiser would have approved of the plan by Lobsiger and Linder to use his footage for a similar purpose.
Film content
As described by Roland Cosandey, Yopi conforms to the conventional expedition film format of the period. By using the name of the headman of the Apalai village as the principal title of the film, the producers may have been trying to suggest that Yopi was a film of the same kind as Nanook of the North, which had enjoyed great commercial success.
But, in fact, Yopi the headman does not play a particularly prominent role in the film. Meanwhile, the photographs and productions stills of the film reproduced by Cosandey suggest that the cinematographic skills of Speiser and Deuber were very much more modest than those of Robert Flaherty.
The film begins by documenting various stages of the journey upstream through the rapids of the Paru river. The film-makers eventually reachTucano, which proves to be a small village of less than twenty people.
The film then documents their day-to-day life, including subsistence and craft activities, the daily bathing of the women in the river, the collective meal of the men and a healing session in which a shaman deals with a gum abscess.
Children are shown learning various life skills, such as shooting with bow and arrow, avoiding snakes, climbing trees. The making of a ceremonial mask is followed by a masked dance.
The film concludes with scenes of the return downstream, ending at the last set of rapids before the Amazon river itself.
Texts : Cosandey 2002-03, Fuhrmann 2013.
You must be logged in to post a comment.