Chez les Indiens Sorciers [Among the Indian Sorcerers] (1939) – Marquis de Wavrin *

The Marquis de Wavrin (centre) with two Yuko (Motilón) elders – Chez les Indiens Sorciers (1939)

31 mins., b&w, sound – extra-diegetic music, voice-over commentary in French

Source : CINEMATEK (Royal Film Archives of Belgium) – DVD + booklet

Background  –  This is an expedition film shot in 1931-32, when the Marquis de Wavrin visited Colombia at the behest of the Belgian Ministry of Education to collect ethnographic objects for Belgian museums. It consists of sequences shot in a number of different indigenous groups around the country.  It was first released in Paris in 1934, but for reasons unknown, it was not released in Belgium until 1939. This second version is the only one that is known to have survived.

By 1939, a new temperance law had been passed in Belgium with the result that de Wavrin was obliged to cut a lengthy sequence dedicated to a secondary burial ceremony since this had  involved the consumption of large quantities of maize beer. Fortunately, this sequence has also been preserved in the Royal Film Archives and is available separately on the CINEMATEK DVD.

Film content – Although the film presents itself as an account of the expedition of the ‘courageous explorer’ de Wavrin – who often appears in shot as a link between the various sequences – it does not follow a geographically coherent route in the manner of de Wavrin’s earlier South American films. Although there are undoubtedly some passages of ethnographic interest,  the film is generally very muddled and the voice-over commentary is often erroneous and sometimes patronising. The extra-diegetic music is generally execrable.

Starting from Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, the film first makes a brief visit to the Guajira peninsula before jumping back to the Pacific Coast, where there is a somewhat more extended sequence that is mainly concerned with shamanic curing among an indigenous group of the Chocó region (probably the Embera). After a brief excursion to the mountains to attend a wake amidst an unidentified indigenous group, the film then jumps to the extreme southeast of Colombia to show a dance of the Yagua, who live in the Amazonian border region with Perú.

The film then cuts back and forth between the Yagua and the Guahibo, a very different group culturally, who live in the Llanos, a savanna region far to the north. The  theme of the film here is the simplistic proposition that inebriating substances cause indigenous people to dance – beer brewed in large pots in the case of the Yagua, the hallucinogen drug yopo inhaled through the nostrils in the case of the Guahibo. There is also a brief sequence showing criollos (non-indigenous Colombians) playing and dancing to ‘rhumba’ music, to show that they are much the same also.

The film then returns to the mountainous regions in the northwest of the country, first for a brief visit to the Arhuacos of the Sierra Nevada, followed by a somewhat more extended visit to the ‘Motilones’ (today known as the Yuko or Yukpa) of the nearby Sierra de Perijá. The film lingers here for a while, showing daily life in their villages and camps, and aspects of their subsistence. It was here that de Wavrin also filmed the secondary burial scene that he was obliged to cut.

Perhaps for this reason, the last five minutes of the film are especially incoherent from an ethnographic point of view. Some petroglyphs found in the  Sierra Nevada provide an unconvincing segue to a sequence of Bora girls on the Amazonian frontier having their lower bodies painted. This consists of only three shots totalling 20 seconds. As it seems unlikely that de Wavrin would have travelled so far for so little, it seems very probable that this is an outtake from his previous film, Au Pays du Scalp, in which there is an extended sequence of Bora body-painting.

The narrative then prepares for closure with a voice-over comment that the explorer ‘sets off again, tirelessly’. Back in the Llanos, we see de Wavrin setting out with a column of Guahibo porters, who make small bamboo rafts to cross a river. There is then a brief catalogue of stock shots of local wildlife, before a sequence showing a large dug out canoe being built. Another sequence of 20 seconds, this time showing two women, probably Piro, painting designs on large ceramic pots and probably also an outtake from the earlier film, signals that the expedition has returned to Amazonian mainstream. A final sequence on a raft in the middle of a large river, culminating in a sunset, brings the film to an end.

Text : Winter 2017

© 2018 Paul Henley