At the beginning of the 20th century, the ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg arrived in the Amazon intending to study its indigenous people. A few dozen years later, the North American biologist Richard Evan Schultes appeared in the jungle to study plants used by the same indigenous population. These two true stories are the point of departure forEmbrace of the Serpent, a film by the 34-year-old Colombian director Ciro Guerra. Using these two scientists as a framework, Guerra fictionalizes the history of a forgotten indigenous community, including how the last member of the tribe embarked on important journeys, first in his youth with Koch-Grünberg and later when much older with Schultes.
The film, which won the biggest prize at Cannes Directors' Fortnight and has left American critics breathless with praise, relays the same magnificent spirit of the jungle as in Werner Herzog's classic Fitzcarraldo, but this time tells its story from the indigenous perspective. It's a film that's constantly on the move through this vast, sacred jungle—a sort of psychedelic road trip by canoe—that deals with the history of colonial oppression, religion, and madness. What makes Guerra's film so moving and unique is how well it captures the immensity of the jungle and the incredible lives of the people who have existed there for centuries.
I spoke with Guerra over Skype as the director was preparing to travel from Colombia to Sundance to present Embrace of the Serpent before it opens at select theaters in the United States.
At first I was worried about being faithful to historical and scientific fact, but later I realized it was more important to let it go and immerse myself in imagination, in dream. I started to lose my western logic and tried to embrace another logic. I wanted the film to feel like an indigenous story, like an Amazonian myth. But Amazonian myth is, for us, almost incomprehensible. Its narrative logic absolutely opposes ours.
Another protagonist, beside the natives and the scientists, is the jungle, like a giant living entity that communicates, that says things. This is a bit like the perspective they have of the jungle. We did a very particular thing. We wrote the jungle like a female character, in part because there wasn't a female character in the film. In the actual history there wasn't a way to put a female character in, but then I started to understand that the jungle has this connotation for them. I started to do something I've always wanted to do: create a character out of the environment. We made it feminine because they see it this way. This is incomprehensible in our narrative tradition but makes all the sense in the world in terms of Amazonian myth.
Is there fantasy in the film? The last member of the tribe, the search for the flower, is this based in reality? It's based on a real thing, but it's modified for various reasons. For me to give the native group a real name, the film would have to be an extensive anthropological investigation. I didn't have the right to do that, but fiction gave me permission. The indigenous people don't feel comfortable if we speak of real plants, real myths, real songs because they're sacred. With fiction, however, you can modify these things. We wanted to arrive at the most profound truth, not the superficial truth of anthropological data.
The part of the film involving the messiah is shocking. What's the story there? When we showed the film to the indigenous communities, we showed it in different places in the Amazon and various people were grateful we'd dealt with the evangelical monks. It's a taboo theme there. Everything that happened one must leave in the past, but this is something they remember and that's been part of their lives.
Later in the diaries there appears the story of a mestizo named Niceto. He arrived at the border of Colombia and Brazil, in Yavarate, at the end of the 19th century, and proclaimed that he was the messiah. He had as many as 2,000 followers and did crazy things, demented things, much more so than what's in the film. His group became unstable and the Brazilian army in the end had to remove them by force. It was out of control. Twenty years later, someone else named Venancio also proclaimed he was the messiah and had hundreds of followers. It all ended in a massive suicide. It's a phenomenon that keeps repeating itself up until today. Even now, on the border of Colombia and Ecuador, there are these Amazonian Israelites. It's a phenomenon related to the fact that the Amazon is a spiritual place. When spirituality is removed by force, it creates a vacuum in which fundamentalism and madness grows.
Director Ciro Guerra
The use of language is particular in this film. The messiah speaks a type of Portuguese, he speaks Spanish, German is heard, there are local dialects. How did you decide to make a multilingual film instead of using just one language? It has to do with the region. In the area where we filmed they speak 17 different indigenous languages. You meet indigenous people who speak 108 indigenous languages without a problem—and they're not languages that resemble one another. You have to recognize that the whole world has come to the Amazon. Everyone comes looking for wealth or resources or expanded consciousness. It's a story that's been told by the Germans, French, Austrians, Americans, besides the Portuguese and Spanish. The Amazon is a tower of Babel. We wanted to reflect this.
The two indigenous protagonists are from the Amazon? Yes, they're from the region. We found them where we were filming. It was difficult to find virgin forest because really it's not easy to find jungle unaffected by agriculture, livestock, commerce, tourism. Once we found it, we started walking through the region, passing through communities and inviting everyone to join us. They were very enthusiastic. Everyone wanted to participate. They were very considerate. They didn't ask what we wanted to do. They only asked that we be transparent and not have hidden motives. The people participated without doubt.
Once we found those indigenous actors, we had a space of three months to teach them about acting and movies. Although many of them hadn't had contact with this—not with theatre, movies, or anything like that—they had a strong oral tradition that's persisted for thousands of years, they've maintained it generation after generation, and this gave them the capacity to listen. They really know how to listen, which is hard to find in an actor.
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