This is a compilation of extracts from films that Luiz Thomaz Reis had shot during various different expeditions around Brazil in the period 1924-1930. The film begins with a 1924 army expedition led by Captain Vasconcelos to the Ronuro, a tributary of the upper Xingu, but all the other expeditions were led by Reis’s principal patron, General Cândido Rondon, under the aegis of the Inspetoria de Fronteiras, with which Rondon was encharged in 1927. Details of the original films are available in the tentative filmography offered here.
Ao Redor do Brasil is a technically accomplished work and introduces the viewer to many different aspects of the interior of Brazil. However, the references to indigenous groups are all relatively brief and scattered through the film. None of this footage has the complexity of Reis’s earlier film, Rituais e festas Borôro (1917).
In the early section dealing with the Xingu headwaters expedition, there are some brief shots of various Xinguano groups, with the Bakairi, Kamayura and the ‘Ianahuquá’ (the Nahukwá, later decimated by epidemics) being mentioned by name. The sequence concludes with the Xinguanos being dressed in absurdly over-sized clothes.
Towards the middle of the film, there is an interesting sequence on the Karajá on the Araguaia river, shot during an Inspetoria de Fronteiras expedition in 1929. This shows the impressive ‘Aruan’ dance which features elaborately masked dancers performing to music from long paired flutes reminiscent of those played in the Xingu. (This is the same dance as is shown briefly in Heinz Förthmann’s 1947 film, Os Caraja).
Around 70 minutes into the film, there is a relatively extended sequence on the Nambikwara, whom the expedition meet at Porto Amarante (close to the modern town of Vilhena), on the Rio Cabixis, a tributary of the Guapore River. This appears to be a different group of Nambikwara to those who appear in Reis’s earlier and now-lost film Os Sertões de Matto-Grosso (1915). The footage is not very profound, consisting merely a of a series of portraits. However, these are particularly striking and engaging, and very reminiscent of the photographs of the Nambikwara that Claude Lévi-Strauss took when he visited them in 1938.
Judging by its position in the film, this material appears to have been shot in early 1930, as part of Rondon’s third year of duty as the Inspector of Frontiers. Some of this material also turns up in the fragments of footage in the Museo do Índio film archive, described here.
The last indigenous group referred to in this film, immediately following the Nambikwara sequence, at about 73 minutes, are the Pakaas Novas (now known as the Wari’). But this material was shot at a Posto Indigena, where the Wari’ are shown to be receiving instruction in the ways of ‘civilisation’. Women are shown pounding grain and sifting flour, while men hoe in a line, all dressed in the European manner. There is even a portrait of a Wari’ woman married to a local Brazilian functionary.
This film by Luiz Thomaz Reis is not well-known in the English-speaking world, but it deserves to be considered an early masterwork of ethnographic cinema. It also represents one of the first examples of an ethnographic documentary in the modern sense, that is, a narratively structured account of an event or situation without the fictional element found in work of Robert Flaherty and other ‘documentary’ film-makers of this period.
This film was shot between July and October 1916 in São Lourenço, a now extinct Bororo indigenous community of some 350 people situated on the banks of the São Lourenço river, about 100 kilometres south of Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso State, in Central Brazil. The principal subject matter is the funeral of a Bororo woman. The director and cameraman, and probably also the editor, was a Brazilian army officer, Luiz Thomaz Reis, the head of the Photography and Cinematography section of the Rondon Commission, which was the federal agency then responsible for ‘opening up’ and colonising the interior of the country.
This was one of several films of ethnographic interest that Reis made for the Commission, but most of the others were expedition films based on much more transitory contacts with the indigenous subjects. A tentative filmography, indicating the place of Rituais e festas borôro within Reis’s career as a whole, is offered here.
Reis wrote a detailed report about the making of this film that has recently been republished (see Reis 2011 in the listing of Texts below). From this, it is clear that the making of this film involved a large investment of resources and it is therefore inconceivable that it could have been made without the explicit endorsement of the head of the commission that bore his name, that is, Colonel (later to become General) Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who was one of the most well-known figures in Brazilian public life at the time.
Luiz Thomaz Reis [right] and Colonel Cândido Rondon [centre] with a group of Paresí beside the Utiariti waterfall, c. 1914, shortly after the setting up of the Photography and Cinematography section of the Rondon Commission [Acervo do Museo do Índio/ FUNAI – Brasil, CRNV0614].
Rondon would have had various motives for approving the making of this film. One would have been the fact that he himself was of part-Bororo descent and therefore not only spoke the Bororo language but was also aware of how elaborate Bororo funeral ceremonies can be.
Another very likely motivation would have been related to the fact that São Lourenço was the location of one of the most important posts of the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI), the organisation that Rondon had set up in 1910 to act as the principal intermediary between the indigenous populations and the expanding Brazilian state. The role of the SPI was to offer ‘protection’ as an alternative to the ‘catechisation’ imposed by missionary organisations which up until that point had acted as the principal intermediaries between Brazilian indigenous groups and the outside world.
In the particular case of the Bororo, Rondon was especially critical of the Italian Salesian missionaries who were then seeking to establish themselves in the region. As the Salesians actively sought to suppress the traditional Bororo funeral, considering it literally the work of the devil, a film that recorded this ceremony would have represented a direct challenge to their authority.
The film would also undoubtedly have had another propaganda purpose which was that of the Rondon Commission generally, namely, to celebrate the contribution of the indigenous population to the formation of modern Brazilian national identity. Accordingly, the film presents the Bororo in a somewhat romantic light, excluding any reference to their contact with the non-indigenous world, such as the sugar mill set up in the village by the SPI itself. The film also shows them in what is largely traditional dress rather than in the ragged European-style clothes that many of them would have been wearing by this time, if not on ritual occasions, then certainly while working in the mill.
Still photograph taken at the same time as the making of the film, showing the leading male participants in the funeral ceremony. [Acervo do Museo do Índio/ FUNAI – Brasil, CRNV0499]Bororo men of São Lourenço, photographed around the same time as the ceremony, wearing everyday work clothes. It is very likely that some individuals appear in both photographs. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 239]
This propaganda purpose was probably also at least partially the reason for the exclusion of certain aspects of the funeral from the account offered by the film and also for a major alteration to the chronology of the event as will be discussed in greater detail below.
Film Content
This being still the silent era, there is no sound track, not even a voice-over commentary. Instead the film is structured by a series of intertitles, 38 in total, mostly identifying particular dances or other component events of the ceremony.
The first ten minutes of the film are dedicated to preparations for the ceremony, including a fishing expedition, the making of ritual paraphernalia and other artefacts, and the erection of the palm leaf screen behind which male dancers will be hidden from the eyes of women and children at certain important points.
This first period also introduces the people who will be taking part in the ceremony, mostly through various posed ‘team photographs’ of both women and men, a common device in early ethnographic film (this sequence includes a shot similar to the photograph above of the leading male participants). Certain individuals are also introduced, notably two leading shamans, but in contrast to a strategy often adopted in later ethnographic works, there is no attempt to follow them through the course of the ceremony.
A rare close-up portrait, in this case of a shaman who will play a leading role in the ceremony. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 270]
The film then follows the unfolding event, which is spectacular. For the era, the cinematography is accomplished though mostly straightforwardly observational in the sense that it merely follows what is going on in front of it. There are, however, a few moments of evident direction, such as the sequence in which leading figures, having been shot from the front in close-up, are then asked to turn sideways. This is reminiscent of the anthropometric photography of the era and unsurprisingly, since although he was not a trained physiologist, Reis often took anthropometric measurements during the course of his filming expeditions.
Dancers compete to see who can dance longest carrying ‘mariddo’ discs on their heads. These were made of palm leaf stalks and weighed around 60kgs. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 280].
Although the film is a remarkable work of ethnographic documentation in many ways, it is clear from the intertitles that Reis had only a limited understanding of what he was filming and some of its symbolism is completely misinterpreted. There are also some important phases of the ceremony that are simply missing from the account.
Male dancers decorate themselves in isolation from women. In an intertitle, Reis suggests that the man painted black and covered with tufts of white down represents a jaguar, while the man being painted brown with mud represents a puma. This is not correct: the ‘spotted’ man represents one of the ancestral spirits who customarily attend funerals, while the man being painted brown with mud represents ‘aije’, a particularly important spirit being who is considered supremely dangerous for women. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 288].
But the most significant limitation on the value of the film as a record of a traditional Bororo funeral arises from Reis’s entirely intentional manipulation of the chronology of the event during the process of editing.
For, in reality, the traditional Bororo funeral normally involved a secondary burial. That is, immediately after death, the corpse was buried in the village plaza, as indeed is shown in the film. As the burial was taking place, it was doused with water to encourage the decomposition of the flesh (see the image below). There then followed an elaborate series of dances and other ceremonial events, spread out over a number of weeks, by which time only the bones of the corpse would remain. These were then dug up, cleaned, ceremonially decorated with feathers and placed in a basket before being immersed in a nearby lagoon as the final destination.
The corpse is buried in the village plaza and doused with water to speed decomposition. [image presented in Rondon 1946: 278].
Reis had witnessed this stage of the ceremony in person and in his report, describes it as providing an important key to understanding the Bororo as a people. But as he also explains, much of it took place at night, so he was unable to film it, much to his great regret. He adds, however, that the final stripping of the bones of their flesh was a scene that was “hellish and frightening”, enough “to make one’s hair stand on end”. (These scenes would later be filmed by Heinz Förthmann, see his joint work with Darcy Ribeiro, Funeral Bororo, filmed in 1953).
Being unable to film this final stage, Reis clearly decided to place the first burial in the plaza at the end rather than, as occurred in reality, at the beginning of the ceremonial events that make up the main body of the film. He does not explain the basis for this decision in his report, and his reasons may have been purely editorial.
However, this ordering of the event would certainly have been more congenial and familiar to the metropolitan audiences at whom the film was aimed and whom the Rondon Commission wanted to convince of the important contribution made by indigenous people to the formation of Brazilian national identity.
A tobacco leaf picker poses for the camera in No Paiz das Amazonas (1922)
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.
The poster featured bare-breasted female warriors on horseback, the legendary Amazons after whom both the river and the film were named.
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.
A group of Parintintin pose for the camera in a production still associated with No Paiz das Amazonas. Although the release date of the film is commonly given as 1922, the Parintintin were engaged in violent confrontations with outsiders until 1923 and certainly could not have been filmed before that date.
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.
Silvino Santos at the Salto de Teotónio, Madeira River. Judging by the model of camera that he is using, this photograph was probably taken around 1921 or 1922, during the production of No Paiz das Amazonas.
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.
A paddle steamer sets off upstream from Manaus early in the film, metaphorically initiating the master journey narrative around which the film as whole is constructed.
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 famous landmarks of Manaus are shown, such as the Teatro Amazonas. But so too are more intimate aspects of private life.
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.
The seringueiro bids goodbye to his family as he begins his day’s work.
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.
After a long day in the forest, the seringueiro still has to smoke his material.
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)
A ‘phantom ride’ on the Madeira-Marmoré railway.
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.
Women wrap tobacco leaves on the Trȇs Casas estate …
a Brazil nut collector empties a shell of nuts.
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.
Using the latest machinery, a woman deftly shells Brazil nuts in the J.G. de Araújo factory in Manaus.
The workers leave the J.G. de Araújo factory in Manaus – probably a ‘chapeau’ to the Lumières.
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.
The guaraná seeds are toasted ….
… they are then reduced to a paste under the watchful eye of a white-suited supervisor.
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.
Various groups appear in the Putumayo sequence, which begins with a line-up of types. The man above is probably an ‘Orejon’ (literally, Big Ears), while the man below is probably an ‘Encabellado’ (literally ‘Long Hair’).
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.
An intertitle warns the the audience that the Putumayan women are ‘highly decorated ….’
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 …
An intertitle explains that the Witoto put great effort into preparations for their dances, but the purpose of the large structure, shot from above, is not explained …
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!’
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