Sertão

222
THE NEW BRAZILIAN CINEMA
side, Babenco shows active, diverse indigenous people, who
debate how to react to the incursions by outsiders. Aeore, as
leader of the Niaruna, sees through Moon's constructed identity
as a cultural transvestite. The apparently ‘pacified’ Tiro people,
meanwhile, use a kind of ‘sly civility’ to outwit the conquerors.
They merely pretend to pray, acting out white expectations of
them, in order to gain food and presents. They interpret
Protestant Christianity through their own cosmological filter, and
finally refuse to give up their own practices and beliefs. 1 4
U l t i m a t e l y, however, Babenco's vision is elegiac, rooted in the
trope of the inevitably vanishing Indian. The natives fight, but for
a cause that is doomed in advance. Indian arrows cannot compete
with the bombs of the invaders.
With the ‘renaissance’ of Brazilian cinema after the mid-
1990s, the Indian theme re-surfaces. Aurélio Michile's O cineasta
da selva (The Jungle Filmmaker, 1997), tells the story of Luso-
Brazilian filmmaker Silvino Santos (1886-1970). Santos made
hundreds of films in the Amazon after he settled in Manaus at the
height of the rubber boom. In 1912, he was invited by the
Peruvian Consul to do a photographic study of the Indians living
in the lands held by the Peruvian rubber baron Julio Cesar Arana.
Unlike filmmakers like Major Tomás Luiz Reis, who were linked
to the paternalist positivism of the Rondon Commission, Santos
was linked to famously brutal rubber companies. Indeed, some of
Santos’ early films were made in order to counter accusations of
exploitation against the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company,
accusations made by the English Society for the Protection of
Aboriginal Peoples and the Abolition of Slavery.
Santos, and his Amazônia Cine-Film, became especially famous
after screenings of No país das amazonas at the 1922 Centennial
Celebrations in Rio. The film was subsequently screened around
the world in Portuguese, English, French and German versions. O
cineasta da selva i n t e rweaves footage from Silvino Santos’ films
about the Amazon with a staged biography (in flashbacks) based
on Silvino Santos Memoirs, O romance da minha vida (The Romance
of My Life). Michiles alternates black-and-white and colour
footages, clips from Santos with present-day interviews, archival
material and staged sequences, with José de Abreu playing Santos,
representing high points of Santos’ life. We see astonishing footage
of Trans-Atlantic ocean liners in the Amazon, of the mass destruction
of Amazonia fauna, and of native celebrations. The image is