29 mins b&w, silent – Portuguese titles and intertitles
Production : Inspetoria de Fronteiras.
Source : Museu do Índio, Rio de Janeiro. This film can be viewed on-line here
Background: The full title of this film is No Rio Içana – Affluente do Rio Negro, Fronteira da Colombia. The subtitle is an allusion to the fact that it was shot in the course of an expedition to the upper Rio Negro region to demarcate the frontier between Brazil and Colombia in the period July 1928 to February 1929.
Led by Major (later Marshall) Boanerges Lopes de Sousa, this expedition formed part of the second year of a nationwide campaign to demarcate the frontiers of Brazil that had been initiated in 1927 with the creation of the Inspetoria de Fronteiras under the direction of the prominent public figure of General (also later Marshall) Cândido Rondon.
The film-maker was José Louro, a civilian photographer who had been appointed to the Inspetoria as an assistant to the principal film-maker of the organisation, Luiz Thomaz Reis. With the exception of Reis’s own film, Rituais e festas borôro, released in 1917, No Rio Içana is arguably the most accomplished ethnographic film made in Brazil prior to the Second World War. For this reason, it was chosen as the film that runs permanently on the About page of the Silent Time Machine website.
Regrettably, it also appears to have been the only film that Louro made. In terms of cinematography, it demonstrates a level of skill that in certain respect is superior even to that of Reis, not merely with regard to technique, but above all in terms of the close informal rapport that Louro was able to achieve with his indigenous subjects.
In editorial terms, on the other hand, it demonstrates a certain awkwardness, though this does not detract significantly from its overall quality. More concerning is the fact that the physical quality of the film is considerably deteriorated and many scenes are heavily speckled.
The expedition during which the film was made followed the same route as the celebrated ethnologist of German extraction, Curt Nimuendajú, who had travelled through the region the previous year in the course of preparing a report for the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI).
Starting from the regional centre of São Gabriel on the Rio Negro, this involved travelling up the Içana and along the the Aiari, a right-bank tributary, all the way to its headwaters, and then taking the day-long overland trek to the village of Iutica (also known as Jutica and Yapima in modern sources), which is located on the mainstream of the river Uaupes. Then and now, Iutica is a village of the Wanono people (also known as Uanana, Botiria, Kotiria etc.) and is situated very close to the frontier between Brasil and Colombia.
Although No Rio Içana is – mostly – structured around the chronology of the expedition, it makes very few visual references to the expedition itself or to its members. The purpose of the expedition may have been to inspect the frontier with Colombia but in the film, absolutely no frontier inspection is shown taking place. Now and again, men dressed in military uniforms stroll briefly into shot, but otherwise, the film shows only indigenous people. This is in very marked contrast to the other films made for the Inspetoria de Fronteiras, which were all the work of Luiz Thomaz Reis (see the filmography for Reis offered here).
Film Content: The most notable example of editorial awkwardness in No Rio Içana is the three-minute sequence with which the film begins, which has very little directly to do with the rest of the film. This sequence concerns the harvesting and processing of piassava, a palm fibre used in the manufacture of brooms, which, as an intertitle observes, had replaced the gathering of wild rubber as the principal extractive industry of the region. Prior to the collapse of this industry some fifteen years beforehand, the collection of rubber had had the most devastating effect on the local indigenous population, but this is not mentioned here.
After this introductory passage, the film then simply follows the progress of the expedition, beginning with brief visits to two Baniwa villages. At the first of these, Tunuí, still on the Içana itself, the villagers are shown looking at some photographs, which are evidently those taken by Nimuendajú the previous year. But neither the significance of this, nor the villagers’ reaction is commented upon.
Instead, the film moves swifly on to Cururú-Poçy on the Aiari where two young men are shown marching back and forth playing long twinned bamboo flutes of the kind found in many different parts of Amazonia, including the Guianas and the upper XIngu river region. However, they are not dressed in a ceremonial fashion, and this is evidently just a one-off performance for the camera.
At about six minutes, i.e. a fifth of the way into the film, the expedition arrives at Iutica and the remainder of the action of the film takes place there. This is where the film really begins.
As Nimuendajú had reported, at this time, although the Wanano of Iutica had retained a largely traditional way of life, the village had suffered very badly at the time of the rubber boom at the beginning of the century and was now under increasing pressure from Salesian missionaries coming upstream from São Gabriel and from rubber-gatherers who continued to come downstream from Colombia intent on enslaving young men and capturing young women.
An unscrupulous Peruvian criminal by the name of Barreto held many people in the village in debt peonage and although he personally had taken refuge from the law elsewhere, he had left a Brazilian accomplice to run his business selling cachaça (rum). Shortly before the Lopes de Sousa expedition arrived, this man had been murdered by Wanano on the Colombian side of the frontier in revenge for his violence and raping of young women.
Nimuendajú regarded the young headman of Iutica, Felicio, as untrustworthy and too addicted to cachaça, but acknowledged that he was intelligent and that he was seeking to reconcile the various competing pressures on the village. Thus, although he was building some adobe houses for individual families in the Brazilian manner, the village had also maintained its traditional long house and practised elaborate festivals.
None of this complex history is alluded to in Louro’s film. Rather the Iutica section begins with a long sequence of adolescents, girls as well as boys, engaged in a mock fight, throwing mud at one another when they are supposed to be making bricks for the headman’s scheme to build adobe houses. This element of fun is another feature that distinguishes Louro’s work from Reis’s films.
This sense of sympathetic engagement, which is also characteristic of Louro’s photographs of indigenous people, continues into the next sequence. This contrasts the hard work of young girls grating manioc with a group of boys fishing in the nearby rapids and then eating around a common plate, looking round conspiratorially at Louro as they do so. Such reflexive touches were unusual in films of the era.
However, these personally intimate sequences then give way to a more classical ethnographic concern, namely, the celebration of a traditional festival, requiring the preparation of considerable quantities of manioc beer and elaborate masked costumes.
Under traditional circumstances, festivals of this kind only took place following the death of leading headmen, but on this occasion, the festival was performed for the purposes of the film, with the promise that the expedition would buy all the ritual paraphernalia made for the event on behalf of the Museu Nacional (where presumably it all perished in the recent fire).
Although he may have had only limited cinematographic experience, Louro shows considerable skill in following the elaborate process of making and subsequently painting the masks made from the inner bark of a tree as well as the weaving of the palm fibre skirts that are then attached to these masks to completely hide the identity of the wearer.
Not only does he cover all the stages of the process of manufacture very well, starting with the raw material and ending with the finished article, but he also clearly understood how to change from a wide to a close shot of a technical process, and how to use foregrounds to create a sense of depth within a shot.
Once the dancing begins, the coverage is somewhat more eclectic and is not helped by the fact that some of the intertitles do not seem to be in quite the right place. Nor is there any attempt to interpret the symbolic significance of the masks, the dances or the event as a whole. However, the cinematographic description is sufficiently well done to give a clear sense of the three different kinds of dancing involved in the event, and also the great quantity of collective energy that is engaged by it.
The sequences of dancing are prevented from becoming too monotonous by being broken up with sequences on other matters such as the drinking of beer, the preparation of coca snuff and, in a rather anachronistic touch, a series of Wanono ‘types’, i.e. formally posed portraits of young men in their finery. The film as a whole ends with more engaging and informal personal portraits of the headman Felicio and his uncle, the ‘former headman’.
The ethnographic value of this account of the Wanano feast is no doubt seriously compromised by the fact that it was performed at the expeditionaries’ request and that some of phases of it that were normally performed inside at night were performed outside during the day, when there would be sufficient light to film.
Moreover, certain aspects described by Nimuendajú were either left out or perhaps censored, most notably a concluding aspect of the feast in which men strapped on enormous twisted phalluses and jumped about grunting, as if they were seeking to copulate with both men and women, much to general amusement.
But notwithstanding these limitations, there can be no doubt about the authenticity of the dancing, and the elaborate costumes, nor the energy and conviction with which people participated in the event.
As such, the film stands as an inestimable record of what was once a magnificent cultural phenomenon, widespread across Northwest Amazonia, but which now continues only in the most attenuated form.
Texts: Nimuendajú 1950, Lopes de Sousa 1959, Lasmar 2011, Athias 2015.
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