72 mins. , b&w, sound : extra-diegetic music, voice-over commentary
Production : Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique
Source : CINEMATEK – DVD released in 2017.
Background – This film is based on the South American travels of the Marquis de Wavrin over a four-year period, between May 1926 and June 1930. At least as constructed in the film, he started in the Galapagos Islands, then travelled through Guayaquil and the Ecuadorean Andes before descending along the Putumayo river on the Ecuador-Colombia-Peru border to the upper reaches of the Amazon. He then returned to the Andean altiplano through Peru, visiting Macchu Pichu and Cuzco on the way. After a brief visit to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, he finally descended to the Pacific again, finishing his journey amid the guano islands off the Peruvian coast.
The film was constructed from 60,000 feet of 35 mm film (i.e. around 16 hours, if shot at the then-standard rate of 16-18 fps). Although a considerable proportion of this material concerns the natural environment, including its wildlife, and the Hispanic towns and cities through which the expedition passed, a particular focus is the indigenous communities visited during the Amazonian phase of the expedition.
It is not entirely clear who shot the film. While the voice-over commentary asserts that de Wavrin travelled entirely alone, at the beginning of the film he is shown loading a camera. This particular sequence could have been reconstructed afterwards, but de Wavrin also appears in shot at various important points in the narrative. Clearly, therefore, the film must have been shot at least partly by someone else.
The film was edited by the celebrated Brazilian editor and director, Alberto Cavalcanti (1897-1982), then based in France, while the music for the soundtrack was written by the French avant-garde composer Maurice Jaubert (1900-1940).
De Wavrin had no training as a film-maker and claimed that he never sought to become one. His objective was simply to provide visual documentation of the regions through which he travelled since they were so poorly known in the academic disciplines of geography and ethnography. Even so, when the film was first released in Paris in 1931, it received very positive reviews. Among its many merits, one critic noted, was that it was devoid of the colonialist propaganda typical of expedition films of the period.
Content – This film constitutes a major contribution to the genre of expedition films, particularly in Amazonia where such films are relatively rare. Even so, its ethnographic value is limited by the fact that de Wavrin was constantly on the move and, with some notable exceptions, does not appear to have remained for very long in any particular community. Certainly the ethnographic material presented in the film rarely goes beyond relatively brief accounts of ceremonial performances and technical processes.
One major exception, however, is the material shot in a community of the indigenous groups then known as the Jívaro, and more recently as Aénts Chicham (for the reasons for the name change, see here). This was located on the Santiago River in the Oriente province of Ecuador and therefore probably part of the Huambisa subgroup. This material includes some interesting sequences on a range of different subsistence activities and cultural practices. There is even the relation in the voice-over commentary of a charming legend concerning the origin of fire.
On the other hand, the footage related to the principal concern of this stage of the expedition, namely the Aénts Chicham practice of hunting and shrinking heads (to which the title of the film refers, though somewhat misleadingly, since scalping was a rather different process to head shrinking) is so evidently staged that it fails to convince. Though equally staged, these ritual and technical processes are much more effectively represented in Haut Amazone, a French film made a decade later.
De Wavrin also filmed among many other indigenous groups. In Otovalo, in the Ecuadorean Andes, there is an effective sequence of a street dance involving elaborate head-dresses. In Amazonian Ecuador and Peru, there are sequences in Ocaina, Bora, Canelos Quichua and Piro communities. There are also some shots of the “very poor” Uro living on Lake Titicaca in the Bolivian Andes, as they go about gathering reeds for constructing their canoes.
One notable scene, and unusual within the film as a whole, concerns a shamanic curing session among a group referred to as the Napo, living at the junction of the river of the same name and the Amazon. This is an interesting sequence from an ethnographic point of view, albeit shot from a poor angle and underlit.
But of all the sequences concerning indigenous groups other than the Aénts Chicham, undoubtedly the richest concern a group whom de Wavrin refers to as the ‘Boro’. This is undoubtedly the group more usually referred to today as the ‘Bora’, who live primarily on the Colombian side of the international border that runs along the Putumayo River and divides Colombia from both Ecuador and Peru. This was one of the indigenous groups who suffered most severely at the hands of the rubber-tapping industry in the early years of the twentieth century, until this was denounced some twenty years before de Wavrin arrived. It is reassuring then to see them looking so strong and healthy in his film.
No doubt on account of their previous experience of outsiders, the Bora were not initially welcoming. But de Wavrin seems to have taken some trouble to win acceptance. The four minute sequence that the film offers of the “totemic dances” of the Bora is particularly interesting (see image at the top of the post). There is also an engaging moment when a dancer comes right up to the camera and pretends to threaten it (see image immediately above).
The interpretations offered in the voice-over commentary regarding the meaning of these dances are certainly erroneous, but from a visual perspective, this is perhaps the strongest material in the film as whole. It also seems to be particularly authentic: in contrast to the Jivaro material, which was evidently mostly performed for the camera, the Bora seem to be engaged in these dances entirely for their own reasons.
Text : Winter 2017
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