This post is a stub and will be developed later.
In the history of early ethnographic film-making among the indigenous peoples living in Amazonia and adjacent regions, two film-makers stand out in particular. One of these is Luiz Thomaz Reis, a major in the Brazilian army who was active from around 1912 until 1938, working all over the interior of the country, first for the Rondon Commission and later for the Inspetoria de Fronteiras. The other is Heinz Förthmann, a Brazilian of German extraction, who joined the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI) in the early 1940s as a photographer, but later became a film-maker and in the 1940s and 1950s made a number of films, the best of which, tragically, either remained incomplete, or now seemingly exist only in degraded forms.
However, in addition to these two major figures, there were also quite a number of minor contributors to this history. In roughly chronological order, these included Theodore Koch-Grünberg, Silvino Santos, Félix Speiser, Melville J. Herskovits, Jose Louro Fernandes, Jean-Paul Goreaud, Floyd Crosby, Aloha Baker, Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss, Hans Krieg, Fred Matter-Steveniers, Robert de Wavrin, Paul Fejos, Harald Schultz and Nilo Oliveira Vellozo. It is also indisputably the case that Heinz Förthmann’s best work was achieved in collaboration with the celebrated Brazilian anthropologist, Darcy Ribeiro.
The very first film-maker to make a film about an indigenous community in Amazonia, broadly defined, appears to have been the German anthropologist, Theodore Koch-Grünberg. He took a moving image camera with him on a field-trip to the Roraima region in 1911 and here he shot a modest series of ‘views’, totalling approximately 11 mins in a Taulipang village. Most of these ‘views’ concern domestic female subsistence activities, though there is also a view of a staged collective dance. This film may be viewed here.
The professional cameraman who was supposed to accompany Koch-Grünberg had to return to Germany unexpectedly, so he had to shoot these views himself. Although Koch-Grünberg was an excellent photographer, he had no previous experience with a moving image camera, and he was obliged to work in challenging tropical circumstances.
Not surprisingly, the results were not very good. The camera is often too far from the action to see what is going on, and the framing so poor that the subjects threaten to disappear out of the edge of frame. When Koch-Grünberg attempted to film the collective dance, the camera kept breaking down, and he had to ask the subjects repeatedly to stop and start, with the result that their dancing lost all spontaneity and instead of being a lively dance around the village plaza, as it should have been, it become instead a plodding march..
Apart from Reis, the other well-known Brazilian film-maker to shoot material of any ethnographic significance prior to 1940 was Silvino Santos. Strictly speaking, he was Portuguese rather than Brazilian in that he was born in Portugal, though he came to Brazil while still a young teenager. He got his first break as a film-maker when the Júlio Cesar Arana, owner of the notorious Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company sent him to Paris to train as a film-maker so that he could shoot footage that would counter the accusations that had been made against the company in London and elsewhere, namely that it was enslaving the Indians and mistreating them in an outrageous fashion.