Originally appearing as chapter 14 in Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, edited by James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati.
Catherine Russell picks up a thread from her groundbreaking Experimental Ethnography to return to her favorite avant-garde mode of filmmaking to learn how to navigate Amazonia in sounds and images by offering a reading of Lothar Baumgartner’s film Origin of the Night (Amazon Cosmos) (1978) and Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015). Russell investigates how Amazon cinema is not only a primal scene of first contact narratives but also a visual spectacle, a physical and technical challenge, and a spatially disorienting experience for filmmakers and spectators alike.
The dense jungle of the Amazon is a longstanding chronotope of exploration cinema, from the silent period (Matto Grosso, 1931) to the anthropological work of the 1970s by Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch, to the epic features of Werner Herzog. Amazon cinema is not only a primal scene of first contact narratives; it is also a visual spectacle, a physical and technical challenge, and a spatially disorienting experience for filmmakers and spectators alike. While it has been the site of some important Indigenous filmmaking (e.g., the Video in the Villages project, which began in 1987), the Amazonian travel narrative remains a vital dynamic of media culture as a mode of intercultural experience and representation. I would like to propose that we can learn something from the avant-garde about how to navigate this infamous region in sounds and images.
