38 mins., b&w, sound; in the original version, there was a voice-over commentary in Portuguese, and also a classical music sound-track.
Production : Seçao de Estudos, Serviço de Protecão aos Índios (SPI).
Source : The Museu do Índio, Rio de Janeiro holds a copy that may also be viewed on YouTube here. However, this copy has no soundtrack and is in very poor condition. It has also been stretched and is offered in a widescreen format instead of the original 4:3 aspect ratio.
A somewhat differently ordered and abbreviated version of around 18 minutes but with the correct aspect ratio, is also available on YouTube here. This features an informal voice-over commentary by Darcy Ribeiro, one of the original film-makers. This seems to have been recorded in the mid-1990s.
Background
This film was both shot and released in 1950, and was directed by the film-maker Heinz Förthmann and the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro. Its subject is a day in the life of the “Urubu”, more commonly referred to today as the Kaapor or Ka’apor, a Tupi-speaking indigenous group who live in the northeast of Brazil, on the border between Maranhão and Pará states. It was the first of two film collaborations between Förthmann and Ribeiro, the other being a joint film project about the Bororo, shot in 1953.
At the time that they were filming with the Kaapor, both Förthmann and Ribeiro were members of the Seçao de Estudos of the Serviço de Protecão aos Índios (SPI). Originally recruited to the SPI as a photographer in 1942, Förthmann had started making films in 1946. His previous films had taken the form of reports about the work of particular SPI posts, though they might sometimes have also included more ethnographic passages. Os Índios “Urubus” was Förthmann’s first film that was unambiguously ethnographic in intention.
Ribeiro had been recruited to the SPI in 1947 as part of a more general initiative to base the development of future plans for the integration of indigenous groups into national life on first-hand research by anthropologists. Since joining the SPI, Ribeiro had made relatively brief visits to various indigenous groups in Mato Grosso. The filming expedition to the Kaapor was but one of several extended visits that he made to this group between 1949 and 1951.
The principal publications arising from Ribeiro’s fieldwork with the Kaapor were a short book about their feather art, written jointly with his wife Berta Gleizer, published in 1957, and a very much more substantial diaristic account published in 1996, shortly before his death the following year.
The film was shot in and around three small Kaapor villages on the middle reaches of the Gurupí river, Maranhão state. The actual production took place over about a month in February and March 1950, and the finished film was released before the end of the year.
Initially, Ribeiro had very ambitious plans. He envisaged that the film would culminate in a sequence showing all the different stages of a child naming ceremony, the most important public ritual occasion for the Kaapor, when they would dance and sing, and appear in all their most elaborate feather ornaments.
However, he also wanted to show all the labour that went into such events in the form of hunting, the gathering of wild fruits and the harvesting of agricultural produce and the lengthy process of preparing all the food and drink necessary to satisfy the participants.
Ribeiro further envisaged that the person who bestowed the name would be one of his principal informants, Anakampukú, a headman with a prodigious genealogical memory, whom he also imagined relating his experiences of warfare with a neighbouring group to the assembled company. The handing out of cigars to senior visitors would be another touch … (see Ribeiro 1996b, pp. 181-182)
In actual practice, Ribeiro was obliged to scale down the project considerably. When he and Förthmann arrived, the Gurupí river valley had recently been struck by a measles epidemic and many indigenous people had died. Although the film-makers provided medical attention as best they could, the general social dislocation caused by the epidemic meant that the celebration of a naming ceremony was out of the question.
An additional consideration was Förthmann’s preferred way of working, which was to shoot according to a carefully prepared script, covering any particular scene with multiple takes from various different angles and with various different framings. He even had a make-shift dolly constructed by a local carpenter and used this for travelling shots in the Kaapor village where he shot most of the material. Although this approach produced images of excellent visual quality, it would undoubtedly have been extremely time-consuming.
This way of working also required the indigenous subjects to perform the same actions for the camera over and over again. If anyone looked at the camera, the take would be abandoned and another one started. While some subjects showed exemplary patience, others soon tired of these requests and declined to take any further part in the filming.
The film-makers also had to struggle with frequent days of rain or low light that made filming impossible. In order to finish the film within the time frame available, Ribeiro concluded that they should structure the film around a fictive day-in-the-life of a young couple, Kosó and Xiyra, and their two-year-old son, Beren. This small family became what Ribeiro referred to as the ‘cast’ of the film.
Although Ribeiro makes no reference to Flaherty, this was the device that had been used to structure Nanook of the North (though in that case, the film actually covers two days in the life of Nanook and his family). It was also a device that Förthmann’s mentor, and the former head of the Seção de Estudos, Harald Schultz, had recommended as being suitable for SPI films aimed at the general public. Förthmann would use this device again later in his career in making a film about the Kamayura of the Xingu Park.
The day-in-the-life device had the great advantage of enabling the film-makers to yoke together various different aspects of Kaapor life within a single narrative story line. But it also had the downside that it could make the subjects’ daily life seem unrealistically full.
There was also the problem that in confining the film to a very young couple, barely more than teenagers, it offered only a limited perspective on Kaapor society. The older and more experienced people who feature in Ribeiro’s writing about the Kaapor, a number of whom impressed him deeply, were by definition almost entirely excluded from the film.
In its final edited form, the original version of the film carried a soundtrack that featured both an informative, ethnological voice-over commentary and some extra-diegetic music. The commentary is reported to have been written by Ribeiro, though it is not indicated in the film credits who actually performed it. The music track is reported to be La Mer, a symphonic sketch by Claude Debussy, though again there is no indication as to who performed it for the film.
Why this music was chosen is unclear. It seems a rather strange choice, particularly since Förthmann is reported to have taken a Pierce Wire recorder to the field and to have recorded flute music and other sound effects. The reason may simply have been that the sound-editing process would inevitably have been lengthy and therefore too costly for the Seção de Estudos budget. The films that Förthmann had previously made for the SPI had featured European classical music on the soundtrack, probably because clearing the rights of these works would have been easy and relatively cheap.
Tragically, the master copy of the sound version of the film was lost in a fire at the Cinemateca Brasileira in 1982. The only versions that seemingly now exist are the stretched and silent version at the Museu do Índio, which is in extremely poor condition, and the abbreviated version with an informal commentary by Darcy Ribeiro. (Both these versions are viewable on YouTube via the links given above. The transcript of Ribeiro’s original, more formal, voice-over text is reproduced in Souza Mendes 2006, pp. 199-218).
Very much more tragic than the fate of the film was that of the ‘cast’. Ribeiro reported in his field diary that not long after he left, first the baby Beren died, then shortly afterwards, both Kosó and Xiyra, devastated by their loss, seemingly lost the will to live and died also.
Film Content
The film begins with a series of woodcut prints that form the background to the opening titles. Although this is not indicated in the film, these come from the well-known account by Hans Staden, a German mercenary, first published in 1557, in which he described his period of captivity among the Tupinamba. They were one of a number Tupi-speaking indigenous groups who inhabited the Atlantic coast of Brazil in the early sixteenth century, when the Europeans first arrived.
These images are an allusion to the proposition that Ribeiro makes in his diary concerning the cultural continuity between these groups and the Tupi-speaking people of modern Brazil, including the Kaapor, particularly in relation to the way in which they have adapted to the local natural environment (Ribeiro 2006b, pp.18-19).
The main body of the film then opens with various shots of this natural environment, before, first some feet, and then some human bodies emerge from within the foliage. This is the young couple, Kosó and Xiyra, on their way back to their village.
Kosó is carrying a recently killed deer on his back, while Xiyra is carrying a large backpack of the precisely the kind carried by the Tupinamba women in the woocut print of the opening shot. Beren, their baby son, hangs from a sling around her neck.
This heavily directed sequence sets the tone for the film as a whole. The camera is everywhere: beside, in front and behind the protagonists. As they enter the village, there is a travelling shot, executed no doubt with the aid of the make-shift dolly: this is taken from behind the large collective house, with hanging baskets, hammocks, and other people in the foreground and the young couple beyond.
In his handwritten draft of the script, Förthmann had envisaged the opening sequence in precisely this way (see Souza Mendes 2006, p.262). For his part, Ribeiro reports that for some days, they had had a backpack full of fruit ready for Xiyra to carry, while they waited for someone to kill a deer. When a yellow deer finally fell into a trap set by one of the film-makers’ assistants, they gave it to Xosó and shot the sequence immediately, taking advantage of one of the few days of full sunlight.
A complication was that the deer was of a species that it was normally taboo to bring into the village without butchering it first. But they managed to overcome their hosts’ scruples by offering to give the deer to the person who unloaded it from Xosó’s back. They were then able to film the smoking of the deer on a barbecue rack (Ribeiro 1996b, p.236).
This opening sequence is followed by various shots around the collective house showing a range of people engaged in everyday craft activities: a young man sharpens an arrow head while an older man weaves a sieve. A young woman weaves a cloth on a vertical loom, while another shows a child how to weave a hammock. The voice-over commentary maintains the fiction of the day-in-the-life device by suggesting that these activities are all taking place in the same early morning.
This domestic sequence concludes with an intimate scene of Xosó and Xiyra painting one another with urucu. Xosó briefly acknowledges the camera, rupturing the ‘fourth wall’. Presumably Förthmann kept the shot because it was simply too good to lose.
At this point, about a quarter of the way into the film, the young couple set out for their gardens to harvest manioc. This is where the day-in-the-life device has produced a particularly unrealistic situation since it is very unlikely that having been hunting and gathering first thing in the morning that they would then set out again so soon for their gardens.
At six minutes, this is the longest sequence in the film and it is beautifully executed. The voice-over stresses the importance and labour-intensive nature of this horticultural work, explaining that it is equally divided, albeit in a complementary fashion, between men and women.
The sequence ends with a particularly engaging moment when the family stops at a stream on their return. While Xiyra bathes Beren, Xosó uses a leaf to improvise a beaker and, in close-up, takes a drink. The couple then proceeds, but before arriving at the village, they stop again to soak the manioc roots in another stream.
In the long version of the film, there is then a fade to black and in what the voice-over commentary unconvincingly claims is the heat of midday, Xosó is seen with another man making arrows. They exercise great skill as they straighten the shafts in a fire, attach the points and prepare the feathered flights. Two boys are then seen practising their archery skills.
This sequence, as reported by the leading French ethnographic film-maker Jean Rouch, particularly excited André Leroi-Gourhan, noted archaeologist and then director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (cited in Souza Mendes 2006, pp.190-191).
At the end of the scene of the boys practising their archery, there is another fade to black before Xosó is again seen returning to the house with Xiyra, this time carrying backpacks of manioc pulp. The make-shift dolly again comes into operation as the camera withdraws in front of them as they arrive.
This is the opening shot in another lengthy sequence showing the process whereby this pulp is turned into manioc flour, first by extracting the water through pressing it in a telescoping basketry device known as a tipití, then by sieving it, and finally by toasting it on an impressively large ceramic griddle.
This is supposedly ‘the afternoon’ according to the voice-over, though this does not make much sense according to the fictive chronology of the day-in-the-life diegesis. Not only has the lengthy and laborious process of peeling and grating the manioc been omitted, but three days are supposed to have elapsed since the manioc was shown being soaked in the stream in the ‘morning’.
In the abbreviated version of the film, the manioc processing sequence follows on directly from the soaking and the arrow-making is then placed afterwards. Although this is in some ways more satisfactory, it still involves an editorial sleight of hand insofar as the manioc grating stage is concerned.
The final quarter of the film, supposedly set in the late afternoon, shows the young family back at home. They eat and drink food prepared from the manioc flour by Xiyra. Beren plays with some pet birds and a young woman, possibly Xiyra, is shown feeding a bird by mouth. Kosó, exquisitely shot contre-jour in late afternoon sunlight is shown smoking a cigar.
The approaching night is then signalled by a series of classical cinematic tropes. In what is perhaps a reference to the conclusion of Nanook of the North, there are two shots of dogs asleep at dusk – though here they are settled snugly around a fire while in Nanook, the unfortunate creatures are shown hunkering down in a snowstorm outside, as Nanook settles down to sleep in his igloo.
Next, in a shot reminiscent of Dina and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s film about the Bororo village
, a macaw is shown on the spur of a roof, silhouetted against the darkening sky.
Finally, there is a long shot of Xiyra slowly swinging in her hammock in the half light, with a contemplative expression on her face and Beren asleep on her chest (see the image at the top of this entry). The very last shot shows her foot dangling over the edge of the hammock.
*****
At the end of the filming, Ribeiro confided to his diary that the film would be able to offer no more than a poor caricature of Kaapor culture. Yet for all its shortcomings, it was still the richest and most detailed ethnographic documentary that he knew (Ribeiro 1996b, p.255).
This was a sound judgement on both counts, even if rather harsh. While it is undoubtedly true that in the early 1950s, there were very few ethnographic films of any great depth or sophistication, the value of this film as an ethnographic account of Kaapor life at the time that it was made is questionable. Although its cinematic qualities are remarkable, in being confined to a single young couple, it is ethnographically very limited.
One should also recognize that it presents Kaapor life in a highly romantic light, as if they were living in a timeless idyll – no allusion is made to the epidemic then raging through the community which had made the filming itself so difficult, nor to the many challenges that developing contacts with the national society represented for them. In this sense also, Os “Urubus” is a very Flahertian film.
Texts : Ribeiro and Ribeiro 1957, Ribeiro 1996b, pp. 161-263; Mendes 2006, pp. 129-264; Mattos 2011, Mendes 2011.