A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film: From Nationalism to Protest

By Darlene J. Sadlier

Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilians have turned to documentaries to explain their country to themselves and to the world. In a magisterial history covering one hundred years of cinema, Darlene J. Sadlier identifies Brazilians’ unique contributions to a diverse genre while exploring how that genre has, in turn, contributed to the making and remaking of Brazil.

A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film is a comprehensive tour of feature and short films that have charted the social and political story of modern Brazil. The Amazon appears repeatedly and vividly. Sometimes—as in a prize-winning 1922 feature—the rainforest is a galvanizing site of national pride; at other times, the Amazon has been a focus for land-reform and Indigenous-rights activists. Other key documentary themes include Brazil’s swings from democracy to dictatorship, tensions between cosmopolitanism and rurality, and shifting attitudes toward race and gender. Sadlier also provides critical perspectives on aesthetics and media technology, exploring how documentaries inspired dramatic depictions of poverty and migration in the country’s Northeast and examining Brazilians’ participation in streaming platforms that have suddenly democratized filmmaking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781477325254

Book preview

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

A CENTURY OF BRAZILIAN DOCUMENTARY FILM

FROM NATIONALISM TO PROTEST

DARLENE J. SADLIER

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sadlier, Darlene J. (Darlene Joy), author.

Title: A century of Brazilian documentary film : from nationalism to protest / Darlene J. Sadlier.

Other titles: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021047900

ISBN 978-1-4773-2523-0 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2524-7 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2525-4 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—Brazil—History and criticism. | Documentary films—Social aspects—Brazil. | Documentary films—Political aspects—Brazil. | Documentary films—Technological innovations—Brazil. | Brazil—In motion pictures.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 S23 2022 | DDC 070.1/8—dc23/eng/20211027

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047900

doi:10.7560/325230

For Jim, as always

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. The Jungle and the City: Modernity in Two 1920s Documentaries

CHAPTER 2. Government Educational Shorts, Bandit Footage, and Vera Cruz Documentaries

CHAPTER 3. Documentary and Cinema Novo

CHAPTER 4. Documentary, Dictatorship, and Repression

CHAPTER 5. Biographies of a Sort, Part I (1974–1989)

CHAPTER 6. Documenting Identity

CHAPTER 7. Biographies of a Sort, Part II (1994–2016)

CHAPTER 8. The City and the Countryside

Epilogue: A Country in Crisis

Select Filmography

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book began to form in 2017 shortly after I received a package from my friend and São Paulo theater critic Jefferson del Rios, who wanted me to see the extraordinary 1922 documentary No país das amazonas (In the country of the Amazons). Production of the special-edition DVD Jefferson sent was supervised by another São Paulo friend, Felipe Lindoso. Jefferson and his wife, Bia, and I would regularly see one another at the São Paulo home of the writer Edla van Steen, who introduced us and, like Jefferson but in a different way, was instrumental in my decision to write this book. In 2018 Jefferson and Bia introduced me to Sérgio Muniz, who is a mine of information about the Farkas Caravan in which he played a central role and whose documentaries I write about in chapter 4. The Universidade de São Paulo film historian Eduardo Morettin has been a touchstone for my questions about Brazilian history and documentary; his extensive writings on documentary along with his activities encouraging publication in the field are inspirational. São Paulo is also the home of the Cinemateca Brasileira, where I conducted research; there I received the generous support of Gabriela Sousa de Queiroz, head of the Center for Documentation, who called my attention to many invaluable resources for the book.

In Rio I worked with the archive of Edgard Roquette-Pinto at the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters). Cícero Sandroni greatly facilitated my research there, and I cherish my friendship with him and his wife, Laura. Knowing of my documentary interest, Ivelise Ferreira wrote from Rio of a seminar about contemporary Brazilian documentary to take place online; we both enrolled and as student-participants had many lively discussions about the films and interviews we saw in class, all of which kept our friendship close as the pandemic raged around us.

I received two grants from Indiana University to support research at the Cinemateca Brasileira. At Indiana, the Moving Image Archive specialist Carmel Curtis provided invaluable help with the preparation of images for the book.

For several years I have had the good fortune to work with senior editor Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press. Jim has sound editorial judgment, and I am grateful for his advice and excellent sense of humor. My thanks to assistant editor Sarah McGavick and senior manuscript editor Lynne Ferguson for their work on this book.

James Naremore has always encouraged me in my writing, and this book is no exception. There are no words to convey my deep appreciation for his enthusiasm about the project, his careful reading of chapters, his invaluable feedback, and most of all his loving support. The book is dedicated to him.

INTRODUCTION

This book covers one hundred years of documentary film in Brazil, with films organized in roughly chronological order, often grouped according to their thematic concerns. Brazilian scholarship classifies documentaries as curtas (shorts up to thirty minutes), médias (mediums from thirty to sixty-nine minutes), and longas (feature-lengths over seventy minutes). Examples of all three appear in this book, although I have used the terms shorts and feature-lengths as descriptors. I discuss a wide variety of documentaries—anthropological, propagandistic, biographical, autobiographical, instructional, educational, state-sponsored, independent—without worrying too much about employing the term documentary to cover them all, but I trust readers will accept my use of it.

Any commentary on documentary films, whether from Brazil or elsewhere, is haunted by the question of what counts as a documentary. We can all think of examples of such films, but like every generic category in cinema, documentary is a loose concept with members at its margins that make precise definition difficult or perhaps impossible. The range of works that could count as documentary include observational, fly-on-the-wall studies of people or institutions; extended talking-head interviews; essay films; and reenactments mixed with on-the-spot footage. Not all documentaries must contain original or archival photographic evidence; for example, it would be possible to make a documentary about the history of Brazilian cartoons consisting entirely of clips from animated pictures. The term nonfiction film is somewhat easier to manage, but it, too, is difficult to pin down exactly. From at least the time of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) until now, documentary filmmakers have staged events, sometimes without revealing that fact, and their practice often raises questions about ethics or truth-telling. Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1973) is a nonfiction film with plenty of documentary footage, but its whole purpose is to trouble the distinction between truth and fakery by openly playing tricks on the audience.

I hope to demonstrate both the art and social purpose of documentary, and I believe a study of this kind has another value. Taken together, the films provide a way of discussing the larger history of Brazilian society, politics, and culture. In addition to celebrating certain achievements or individuals, they document the nation’s social problems and radical shifts between liberal-democratic and authoritarian governments. The earliest examples I discuss tend to be nationalistic and propagandistic, and as I show, several later examples were made during periods of heavy censorship or repression. But as technology began to give filmmakers greater flexibility, documentary became a powerful means of social protest, an alternative to the official accounts in mainstream media. In all such cases, I have tried to give readers the historical context for these protests, developing an implicit narrative that runs alongside them.

The rich history of Brazilian cinema as a whole has been studied in English by numerous scholars, beginning with Randal Johnson and Robert Stam’s seminal volume Brazilian Cinema (1982, revised 1995) and more recently by Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison’s Brazilian National Cinema (2007). These and other works, such as Lúcia Nagib’s edition The New Brazilian Cinema (2003), all include insightful discussions of documentary films within their larger focus on fiction films. David William Foster’s Latin American Documentary Filmmaking: Major Works (2013) and Vinícius Navarro and Juan Carlo Rodríguez’s edited volume New Documentaries in Latin America (2014) offer other Brazilian contributions to this growing cinematic field. Looking back in time, Luciana Martins’s Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil (2014) focuses on the role of image-making in the country’s first four decades of the twentieth century, and Maite Conde’s Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (2018) is required reading on silent cinema and film culture of the Belle Époque at the turn of the twentieth century. In his 2019 Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil, Gustavo P. Furtado studies a broad range of films since 1985, when Brazil returned to democracy after twenty-one years of dictatorship. Every film scholar owes a debt of gratitude to Julianne Burton Carvajal for her groundbreaking Cinema and Social Change in Latin America (1988) and for The Social Documentary in Latin America (1990), with essays on documentary by two of Brazil’s leading film critics, Jean-Claude Bernardet and Ismail Xavier. My study is indebted to these and many other important works.

Public interest in films documenting the Brazilian reality dates to the end of the nineteenth century, before my history begins, with what were initially called naturals. Some of the oldest to appear, 1897–1898, feature fishermen, forts, and warships in Rio’s Guanabara Bay; a train’s arrival in Petrópolis, the summer home of royals and presidents; and a visit with President Prudente de Morais’s family in the Catete Palace.¹ The last two were filmed by Afonso Segreto, son of Italian immigrants; along with his brother Paschoal, Afonso Segreto was a major figure in early Brazilian cinema. Paschoal opened the country’s first movie theater, the Salão de Novidades de Paris in Rio, then the nation’s capital. Afonso is credited with making Brazil’s first documentary, in 1896, composed of scenes of Rio he filmed from a ship entering Guanabara Bay.² The Lumière cinematograph’s debut at the Teatro Lucinda on July 15, 1897, and at the Salão de Novidades a few days later was widely publicized and a cause for celebration; most titles were imported from Europe, especially Portugal, as local production geared up.³ The Teatro Lucinda program offered, among other things, sights of Portugal’s trains, boats, and seascapes and a segment on firemen from Oporto.⁴ Cinema operators often changed titles, announcing already exhibited films as new attractions to ensure income but leaving repeat customers often disenchanted with the sly switch.

Documentaries from the Belle Époque (1898–1914) centered on topics common to those of other countries.⁵ Dignitaries’ visits, especially those of presidents and notable foreigners, were popular with audiences, who possibly for the first time saw their nation’s leaders up close and in motion. This was certainly the case of the moviegoing public outside Rio, where presidents resided until the construction of Brasília some fifty years later. President Afonso Pena was filmed visiting São Paulo in 1908; one year later, movie theaters were showing his funeral on screen. The oldest surviving documentary footage was also made in 1909. A film sponsored by the Automobile Club of Brazil, Circuito de São Gonçalo (São Gonçalo circuit),⁶ captures an enthusiastic crowd cheering drivers at the country’s second major automobile race held in Niterói.⁷ Footage of expeditions into the little-known interior were also popular. The short Rondônia (1912), filmed on location by the anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto, was an ethnographic study of the remote Nhambiquara tribe. Theodore Roosevelt was often the subject of shorts commemorating his exploits in Brazil; celebrations in Rio over his visit there were the subject of the 1913 Festejos realizados no Rio de Janeiro em honra do ex-Presidente Theodoro Roosevelt (Festivities held in Rio de Janeiro in honor of former President Theodore Roosevelt). Shortly after that, cinemas were featuring Expedição Roosevelt ao Matto Grosso (1915, Roosevelt expedition to Mato Grosso), about his adventures in the interior. Brazil’s large German immigrant population no doubt delighted in seeing compatriots in Almoço no Kaiser oferecido ao Presidente da República e esposa (1914, Lunch on the Kaiser offered to the president of the Republic and his wife). Hermes da Fonseca was president during the German visit on the cusp of World War I. Publicity beckoned audiences to see the salutes exchanged and the Brazilian and German squads in Rio de Janeiro’s bay.⁸

Thousands of miles from the nation’s capital, footage was being shot of the jungle and river systems in the Amazon. As festas no Amazonas (1909, Festivities in the Amazon) was among the shorts shown at the cinema Recreio Amazonense in Brazil’s rubber capital, Manaus. Roaming Amazonian waterways with his 35 mm camera, the photographer-turned-cinematographer Silvino Santos spent three years, 1918–1920, filming the feature-length Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (The Amazon, the largest river in the world). The story of that lost project, his follow-up prizewinning feature, and Santos’s long undervalued role as one of Brazil’s most important silent-film directors is where this book begins.

Many of the films I discuss, among them the 1929 São Paulo symphony film, the government educational shorts begun in the mid-1930s, and the 1950s Vera Cruz Companhia Cinematográfica’s documentaries made during that studio’s short lifetime, fortunately were available at the Cinemateca Brasilieira in São Paulo. Were it not for that institution, with its excellent library, paper and film archives, preservation center, digitized catalogues, online resources, and dedicated specialist staff, this book and many others would not be possible. Of special importance is the rich trove of materials in its Banco de Conteúdos Culturais (Bank of Cultural Contents).⁹ As I write this introduction, however, the Cinemateca has only recently been opened by the government, which seized the keys in August 2020. On July 27, 2021, a fire in one of its shuttered warehouses destroyed three rooms of films and paper documents. Many online forums, petitions, and articles appeared insisting that the Cinemateca’s holdings, which are invaluable for study of the nation’s audiovisual history, be returned to the public and researchers.

In 2020, as the COVID pandemic raged through Brazil and moviegoing shifted almost completely to cable, streaming networks, and other viewing platforms, a four-week online seminar was announced in Brazil on the topic of the contemporary Brazilian documentary. Curated and moderated by the filmmaker Bebeto Abrantes and critic Carlos Alberto Mattos, the twelve two-and-a-half-hour sessions included live interviews with directors and online access to one or more of their films, supported by bibliographic selections. Produced by Márcio Blanco, director of the nonprofit association Imaginário Digital, the subject and timing of the seminar, entitled Na Real_Virtual, was fortuitous for the present book as I began to write about twenty-first century documentary. Sold out prior to its July 20 opening with acclaimed director Maria Augusta Ramos’s O processo (2018, The Trial), a documentary about the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, the seminar coincided with that year’s National Documentary Day, celebrated annually in Brazil on August 7. Established by the Association of Brazilian Documentarians, the date is an homage to Olney São Paulo (August 7, 1936-February 15,1978), whose short fiction film Manhã cinzenta (1969, Gray morning), about the arrest and torture of two protesters, resulted in his own arrest and torture in 1969 by the military dictatorship then in power.

What the organizers of Na Real_Virtual were recognizing with the opening seminar and its equally successful Part II in November 2020 was the rise in production and scholarly and popular interest in documentaries. Historically relegated to private showings, film clubs, and film festival circuits, documentaries were capturing larger audiences with occasional theatrical releases such as Aurélio Michelis’s O cineasta da selva (1997, Filmmaker of the Jungle) and José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda’s Ônibus 174 (2002, Bus 174) and more importantly with television. Among the earliest programs devoted to documentary was journalist Nelson Hoineff’s Documento especial: Televisão verdade (Special document: Television truth), which first aired in 1989 on the Manchete network and continued on two other networks until 1998. Pay-TV channels like GNT began featuring documentary series such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s four-part Casa grande & senzala (2001, Masters and the Slaves), which he followed with Raízes do Brasil (2003, Roots of Brazil), a commercially released documentary on the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and his classic study for which the film is named.

What is known as the retomada (resurgence) of Brazilian cinema in 1995, with the international success of Carla Camurati’s historical satire Carlota Joaquina: Princesa do Brasil (Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil) saw, in the following year, the first É Tudo Verdade (It’s All True) film festival, featuring twenty-nine works by Brazilian and international documentary filmmakers.¹⁰ Festival founder Amir Labaki’s prescient decision to use Orson Welles’s tongue-in-cheek title for the film that Welles was forced to abandon in Brazil served to call attention to the mix of objective and subjective, of truth and fake strategies that have characterized documentary from before the time of No país das amazonas in 1922. In the context of the pandemic, É Tudo Verdade held its twenty-sixth festival online in 2021 with a roster of seventy feature-length and short documentaries from twenty-four nations.

The creation of DOCTV in 2003 in association with TV Cultura in São Paulo brought more regional works into the public television sector, supporting independent filmmaking with prizes and other financial incentives. It also enlisted some of Brazil’s major documentarians, including Eduardo Coutinho and Geraldo Sarno, to evaluate projects and advise on selections to be aired. In 2006 the government of Brazil launched DOCTV Ibero-América in collaboration with fourteen other countries to promote documentary production and distribution. Now called DOCTV América Latina, the documentaries made under its auspices also appear daily on the public network TV Brasil and online. The cable TV and online arts and culture channel Curta! is dedicated exclusively to documentary.

In 2018 government edicts launched under the Ministry of Culture boosted financing for documentaries about Black and Indigenous peoples, childhood and youth, and subjects to commemorate Brazil’s bicentennial in 2022. However, the dismantling of that ministry by President Jair Bolsonaro on his first day in office in 2019 and his administration’s attacks on culture and the arts, including the closing of the Cinemateca Brasileira in 2020, do not bode well for government-funded projects unless they are economically beneficial to the Ministry of Tourism, which oversees the Special Secretariat of Culture, where the Audiovisual Department is located. At the same time, digitalization has made filmmaking of all kinds more affordable, while major festivals and online programs offering films below theater costs, along with platforms like Vimeo, Netflix, and revived cinema clubs, have increased viewing and distribution potential and revenue streams. The history of documentary is ongoing in Brazil, and the possibilities, as evidenced by the Na Real_Virtual seminars, are endless. I hope the following pages will indicate how significant its history has been.

CHAPTER 1

The Jungle and the City

MODERNITY IN TWO 1920S DOCUMENTARIES

Two of the most important and, until recently, rarely seen works of Brazilian silent cinema are No país das amazonas (1922, In the country of the Amazons), directed by Silvino Santos, and São Paulo: A sinfonia da metrópole (1929, São Paulo: Symphony of the metropolis), directed by Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Rex Lustig. The first is a travelogue-style documentary about the Amazon rainforest economy with occasional ethnographic sequences; the second is a city symphony in modernist montage about a day in the industrial capital. On the surface, the two films could not be more different. At bottom, however, each is designed to celebrate a modern nation of industry, commerce, and distinctive identity. Both laud the order and progress, the motto on the national flag, of a Brazil eager to proclaim its modernity. The films are also implicitly about migration within the country and from Europe that helped compensate for the loss of labor after the abolition of slavery in 1888. Both films were in fact made by immigrants.

No país das amazonas

Viva Brazil! The pleasure is complete: neither an idiotic love story nor a dull farce, nothing, ultimately, of those imbecilic episodes that constitute the mediocre plot of moving pictures.

Estado de São Paulo, July 27, 1923

The quote is from a review in the Estado de São Paulo newspaper in response to the feature-length documentary No país das amazonas, which was about to open in São Paulo after a three-month run in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil. Featured at the government-sponsored Exposição Internacional do Centenário da Independência (International Exhibition for the Centenary of Independence), a world’s fair held from September 7, 1922, to July 24, 1923, the film attracted large, enthusiastic audiences and received a gold medal. US officials in attendance were so impressed by the film that they organized a special Amazons Day to screen it at the US pavilion.¹ The São Paulo theatrical run also proved successful, with showings at the Teatro Avenida, where it opened on August 8, and at sixteen other locations around the city. From there the film traveled to northeastern and southern Brazil and later crossed the ocean to theaters in London and Lisbon and was shown in the United States.²

No país das Amazonas was nearly left out of the Rio exhibition despite agreement by officials that motion pictures were an ideal way to promote Brazil’s natural resources to the fair’s other thirteen nation-participants. To achieve this end, fair officials had selected items from extant films on the country’s history and regional economies; they also created guidelines for newly contracted works, paid for by the metric foot, to hype commodities such as coffee, sugar, and cotton. Not surprisingly, given the financial incentives, filmmakers often expended greater efforts on length than artistry.

Unlike the films commissioned by the exhibition, No país das amazonas was a private initiative financed by Joaquim Gonçalves J. G. Araújo, a rubber baron and entrepreneur in Manaus who decided to make a documentary about Amazon commodities sold by his company domestically and abroad. Araújo found the exhibition a perfect venue for a film about the region’s economy that could be used as a stage for attracting new markets to his business. He hired Silvino Santos, who worked for his firm and had considerable experience photographing the Amazon, as the ideal director. Negotiations between Araújo and Rio officials began in 1921, as Santos was well into filming, but stumbling blocks soon appeared. Among the organizers’ chief concerns was that other filmmakers had been contracted for films about the Amazon region, and a feature documentary, a natural as it was called then, by an unknown director might not appeal to Rio audiences. Subsequent disagreement arose over film rights. Discussions continued off and on after the fair opened. Frustrated by the impasse, Agesilau de Araújo, J. G. Araújo’s son and Santos’s collaborator on the film, contacted Minister of Agriculture Miguel Calmon about the scope and significance of the project. Convinced of its appropriateness for the centennial, Calmon arranged a private showing for Artur Bernardes, the newly elected president of Brazil, and his ministers at the presidential palace.³ Bernardes’s praise was sufficient to end the stalemate, and No país das amazonas debuted at the exhibition on March 22, 1923. The film’s enthusiastic critical and public reception proved that a documentary could succeed as box-office entertainment.

Mythical women warriors as publicity for No país das amazonas.

Born to a middle-class family in Portugal in 1886, Silvino Santos left home for the Amazon when he was fourteen years old. In his unpublished memoir, he recounts that he was captivated by a story about the Amazon River in an illustrated magazine for high school students.⁴ With Portuguese relatives already relocated in the Amazon, he booked passage to Belém. His trip was part of a pattern of heavy migration from Portugal to Brazil, especially to the Amazon region, where fortunes were made during the rubber boom. The Portuguese Ferreira de Castro’s bestselling 1930 novel, A selva (The Jungle, 1935), is based on his own experiences as a young migrant who travels to Belém. J. G. Araújo also was among the thousands of Portuguese who migrated to the Amazon during the rubber boom and the much smaller number of them who made their fortunes. Unlike most export companies, Araújo’s business was diversified with commodities from different regions, including tobacco, rubber, and nuts. Because his son Agesilau was interested in photography, Araújo invested in a laboratory for developing negatives and in the sale of imported film stock. Santos supervised the company’s film division, which operated until 1934, then moved to another part of the business. To complement the company’s film section, J. G. Araújo opened a separate shop called Manaus Arte that specialized in photographic and film equipment.⁵

Silvino Santos.

Although unknown in Rio prior to the exhibition, Silvino Santos was a seasoned photographer and filmmaker who began his photographic career in Manaus in the final years of the rubber boom of 1879–1916. The harvesting of rubber transformed Manaus from a remote jungle capital into a modern metropolis and popular destination for international travelers. Among the city’s attractions was the Teatro Amazonas, where noted Italian opera companies regularly performed. One of Santos’s first large albeit controversial photographic commissions was from the Peruvian Consul Carlos Rey de Castro on behalf of the Peruvian Julio César Arana, a latifundista and head of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. Complaints had been lodged against the company by Walter Hardenberg, an American engineer in Peru who accused Arana of killing Indians and enslaving thousands more in the Putamayo district to work as rubber tappers. The company’s executive board in London, where Arana arranged financing, was informed of the atrocities and sent a representative to Putamayo who confirmed Hardenberg’s account.⁶

To discredit the accusations, Arana employed Santos to travel to Putamayo and make still photographs of the Indians’ working and living conditions. Santos’s visual record from the period August to October 1912 survives. Perhaps not surprisingly, his photographs document a tranquil jungle environment, with shots of fraternal gatherings of rubber workers alongside company foremen, local politicians, and Arana. Numerous photographs focus on Indigenous families and their festivals that likely served as evidence that workers were free to practice their cultural traditions. The photographic record also includes portrait studies of individual Indians, who pose in traditional as well as European dress, the latter likely to demonstrate the company’s supposedly civilizing effect.⁷

Arana was convinced that a motion picture about the Putamayo workers was an even better way of combating adverse reports and publicity. In 1913 he sent Santos to study filmmaking for three months at Pathé-Frères and Lumière Brothers in Paris. In 1914 Santos returned to Peru to make his first feature documentary about the Putamayo communities and labor conditions. But World War I had begun, and the ship carrying the film negative to England for processing was destroyed at sea and the film lost. Santos’s interest in the Putamayo people nevertheless continued. In 1920 he completed his second feature, Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (The Amazon, the largest river in the world), a three-year project that cut across the Amazon Basin beginning at the mouth of the river in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, and ending in Peru. The Peru segment featured footage of festival performances by the Putamayo Indians, some of whom Santos had photographed years earlier. Although not lost at sea, the negative sent to London for processing was never to return.⁸

By the time Santos made No país das amazonas in 1922, he had directed sixteen feature-length and short documentaries. His films were mostly about the Amazon River and its tributaries, although several shorts focused specifically on Manaus. Like No país das amazonas, his early films were often sponsored by individual entrepreneurs; Amazônia Cine-Film, a company founded in 1918 by Amazon businessmen, financed Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo and other works. But after joining J. G. Araújo’s firm in 1920, Santos gained access to state-of-the-art equipment, including a Bell and Howell camera and a Duplex copier, and was able to develop his own negatives, beginning with the footage of No país das amazonas. By the end of his life, he had filmed most of the Amazon Basin in Brazil and parts of Peru. Of his approximately one hundred films, only forty survive today.⁹

A straightforward, impressively photographed, sometimes relatively artless film, No país das amazonas has lost none of the fascination and wonder it must have had for its original audience. We, of course, see it differently, aware of certain historical ironies. It gives striking evidence of an early form of Taylorized, assembly-line production that was still dependent on arduous, amazingly skillful manual labor, and it shows the remarkably wide range of goods the Amazon Basin made available to industry. It documents the strange flora and fauna of the jungle and provides images of the Indigenous populations, who are presented to the camera almost as museum exhibits. It demonstrates a burgeoning economy that gave employment to thousands but overlooks the dangers to the Native population and the ecological crisis that would inevitably result from modernity. The film celebrates nature and wildness while at the same time celebrating the forces that commodify and destroy nature.

No país das amazonas is organized paratactically as a series of episodes devoted to various commodities: fish, latex, Brazil nuts, tobacco, cattle, and more. Each episode has a kind of plot, showing how a product is harvested, industrially developed, sometimes brought to a factory, and shipped domestically or abroad. The temporally organized sections on the industrial processes are interspersed with what might be called travelogue-style digressions, less time-bound sequences showing the rail and shipping infrastructure in the jungle, the architecture and urban population in the capital of Manaus, the local folklore, and the beauties and dangers of the jungle in its native state. Significantly, and perhaps not always consciously, the film juxtaposes two orders of time that are symptomatic of modernity: on one hand are sequences organized by the efficient clock time of industrial labor and the production of commodities; on the other hand are almost still shots or sequences that seem outside time, impervious to development or change, illustrating the surrounding jungle and its Native inhabitants. The result is a kind of catalogue of wonders, all the more intriguing for viewers today because it depicts what has long passed.

The film opens with a series of title cards that describe the size and resources of Amazonas, a remote and little-known region that was still largely associated with myth and legend. In fact, the word amazonas in the film’s title refers not to the geographic area but to the Amazons, the mythic women warriors of ancient times for whom the river and state were named. So compelling and pervasive were the tales surrounding these women that speculation about their existence carried into the nineteenth century. The Austrian naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix and Karl Friedrich Phillipp von Martius wrote about Brazil during that century; their descriptions of a New World of fantastic beings were often designed to engage readers, shock Old World sensibilities, and, one might add, boost sales. Santos and Araújo may have had a similar strategy in mind when titling their work and using a woodcut of naked Amazons on horseback to publicize it.

The language of the film’s title cards, which were written by Agesilau Araújo, harks back to colonial times and the ufanista (hyperbolic) prose that extolled Brazil’s natural wealth. There are also titles modeled after a seventeenth-century nativista rhetoric that was used to tout Brazil in comparison with other countries, such as that Amazonas is an enormous territorial expanse greatly superior to that of so many other countries. New World writers employed ufanista and nativista rhetoric to convince Portuguese kings to invest in the bountiful land with its endless profit potential. King Manuel, who reigned from 1495 to 1521, and his successors did just that, and the returns were immense. Discovered in the late seventeenth century, Brazilian gold, along with silver and diamonds, bankrolled one of the most luxurious periods in the history of the Portuguese Empire and, indirectly, the industrial revolution in Britain. No país das amazonas employs similar rhetorical devices to attract new markets for goods handled by Araújo’s firm. Once it was approved for the exhibition, the film was perfectly placed to accomplish its aims.

Following the introductory title cards, an iris-out appears featuring Manaus’s modern port facilities, also described in ufanista terms as a center of great activity and progress. Footage of river commerce segues into a title card commentary that despite eight hundred miles that separate Manaus from the mouth of the Amazon River, there are no obstacles to shipping goods; the large transatlantic British freighter Hildebrand is shown smoothly gliding from port into the Rio Negro. Santos also draws attention to the port’s large warehouses, long floating docks, and easy loading and unloading of passengers and products.

From the port scenes the film broadens to showcase the Amazonian capital’s large public squares and such architectural landmarks as the Municipal Palace, St. Sebastian’s Cathedral, the Governor’s Palace, and the world-famous Teatro Amazonas opera house with its stained-glass dome. Inserted into this architectural tour is footage of the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. The street scene is not especially interesting, yet the camera lingers until a title card appears to inform viewers that the J. G. Araújo Company occupies buildings on the avenue. This is the first of several references to Araújo’s firm. In this way, Santos emphasizes the company’s importance by seamlessly featuring it alongside Manaus’s most influential institutions and landmarks.

Transitions between scenes of the modern capital and the surrounding jungle take on a conventional travelogue rhetoric in which viewers are invited to board ship on a river journey into the rainforest. Most of what follows consists of stops along the Amazon River and its tributaries to observe the collection and processing of different products. Like entries in a textbook or encyclopedia, title cards appear at regular intervals to identify each product by name in Portuguese and Latin.

A title card for the first stop informs viewers that the Manatus Americanos is one of largest inhabitants of the jungle’s lake system. Devoted largely to the manatee, also known as the sea cow, these scenes are both riveting and unsettling. Santos begins the segment with a disturbing shot of four dead manatees arranged in a row on their backs. Manatees are large, strange-looking mammals, like the fantastic sea creatures described in colonial works that were both captivating and frightening. A close-up of one of the manatees with closed eyes and armlike flippers crossed and resting on its body looks uncannily like a human laid to rest. Consumed as an alternative to fish, the meat of the manatee did not appeal to everyone because it resembled human flesh. Following these intriguing yet eerily grotesque images, the documentary turns into a primer of sorts on the skill and labor required to capture, kill, and process the mammals.

Manatees are strong and agile; they can be as long as thirteen feet and weigh a ton. The film documents these characteristics by showing a harpooned manatee pulling a fisherman in a rowboat at waterskiing speed until the animal finally tires and gives up. A subsequent scene focuses on the rower’s struggle to haul the giant catch onboard. It is an amazing