Embrace of the Serpent (2015)
Mar. 1st, 2025 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeEarlier this week, I not only got to see this remarkable film, I was able to participate in a video-link Q&A with the director, Cero Guerra.
At the start of the film an indigenous man dressed in traditional garb (which is to say, just with necklace, arm bands, and a loin cloth) watches as a canoe approaches. The year is 1909. The canoe holds a desperately ill German ethnographer and is paddled by his indigenous (but more assimilated) assistant. "Go away!" the man on the shore shouts, but the assistant, Manduca, addresses him by name: "Are you Karamakate, the world mover?" Manduca says that no shaman has been able to heal his friend Theodore Koch-Grünberg: they all say that only Karamakate will be able to. "I'm not like you," Karamakate replies. "I don't help whites." But eventually he does agree to help.
In 1940, this same Karamakate, now an old man, is approached by a different Westerner, the botanist Evan Schultes (whom we find out is from Boston--he's a fictionalization of Richard Evans Schultes, who, Wikipedia says, "is considered the father of ethnobotany"). Evan is searching for the rare flower that Karamakate had sought out to heal Theo.
These two timelines and stories ripple in and out of each other like the water of the river.
The harrowing effect of colonialism on indigenous people is the large topic, but the near-at-hand one is the attempts of the main characters to understand one another.
In the Q&A, Guerra said he shot the film in black and white to capture the feeling of the actual Theodore Koch-Grünberg's sketches and photographs and also to escape the easy touristic appeal that comes with color filming. Also, he said, when you're filming in black and white, there's not the same distinction between people and forest--everything shades into each other... which goes with the world view there.
Many languages get spoken in the film, both colonial ones and indigenous ones, and among the indigenous ones spoken was... Tikuna! The character Manduca speaks in Tikuna,** and a couple of times I could understand whole sentences he said (... only a couple of times--but I could also catch the odd word here and there). I was so pleased! And I was mind blown when I was talking about the film with my tutor and she said that the actor is her uncle! He's her mother's brother.
Some quotes from the film:
"You'll devour everything," Karamakate says to Theo, speaking of white people generally. Later Manduca is speaking with Karamakate about Theo, and he says "He's afraid, but he can learn ... If we can’t get the whites to learn, it will be the end of us. The end of everything.” --those quotes feel very pertinent for our climate-changed reality.
At one point the older Karamakate is frustrated with Evan and grabs his map, crumples it up, and tosses it. He says, “What do you see? The world is like this, huge.” (He holds his arms out wide) “But you choose to see just this.” (He indicates the map.) “The world speaks; I can only listen.”
The movie is available to see for pay through Youtube and Apple, and is free (but with ads) on Tubi. I highly, highly recommend it.
**I've seen him before: he played the shaman in Frontera Verde.
At the start of the film an indigenous man dressed in traditional garb (which is to say, just with necklace, arm bands, and a loin cloth) watches as a canoe approaches. The year is 1909. The canoe holds a desperately ill German ethnographer and is paddled by his indigenous (but more assimilated) assistant. "Go away!" the man on the shore shouts, but the assistant, Manduca, addresses him by name: "Are you Karamakate, the world mover?" Manduca says that no shaman has been able to heal his friend Theodore Koch-Grünberg: they all say that only Karamakate will be able to. "I'm not like you," Karamakate replies. "I don't help whites." But eventually he does agree to help.
In 1940, this same Karamakate, now an old man, is approached by a different Westerner, the botanist Evan Schultes (whom we find out is from Boston--he's a fictionalization of Richard Evans Schultes, who, Wikipedia says, "is considered the father of ethnobotany"). Evan is searching for the rare flower that Karamakate had sought out to heal Theo.
These two timelines and stories ripple in and out of each other like the water of the river.
The harrowing effect of colonialism on indigenous people is the large topic, but the near-at-hand one is the attempts of the main characters to understand one another.
In the Q&A, Guerra said he shot the film in black and white to capture the feeling of the actual Theodore Koch-Grünberg's sketches and photographs and also to escape the easy touristic appeal that comes with color filming. Also, he said, when you're filming in black and white, there's not the same distinction between people and forest--everything shades into each other... which goes with the world view there.
Many languages get spoken in the film, both colonial ones and indigenous ones, and among the indigenous ones spoken was... Tikuna! The character Manduca speaks in Tikuna,** and a couple of times I could understand whole sentences he said (... only a couple of times--but I could also catch the odd word here and there). I was so pleased! And I was mind blown when I was talking about the film with my tutor and she said that the actor is her uncle! He's her mother's brother.
Some quotes from the film:
"You'll devour everything," Karamakate says to Theo, speaking of white people generally. Later Manduca is speaking with Karamakate about Theo, and he says "He's afraid, but he can learn ... If we can’t get the whites to learn, it will be the end of us. The end of everything.” --those quotes feel very pertinent for our climate-changed reality.
At one point the older Karamakate is frustrated with Evan and grabs his map, crumples it up, and tosses it. He says, “What do you see? The world is like this, huge.” (He holds his arms out wide) “But you choose to see just this.” (He indicates the map.) “The world speaks; I can only listen.”
The movie is available to see for pay through Youtube and Apple, and is free (but with ads) on Tubi. I highly, highly recommend it.
**I've seen him before: he played the shaman in Frontera Verde.
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Date: 2025-03-01 08:17 am (UTC)That's so cool!
The film sounds so, too.
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Date: 2025-03-01 02:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-01 07:08 pm (UTC)I love that this particular person was connected.
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Date: 2025-03-01 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-01 07:07 pm (UTC)I love it! Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966) uses color in its finale for the icons which we have not seen all black-and-white film, but this sounds even more numinous.
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Date: 2025-03-01 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-02 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-04 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-03-04 08:38 pm (UTC)