Film: Embrace of the Serpent-caucasians in the jungle

Embrace of the Serpent, a 2015 film by Colombian director Ciro Guerra, was featured at Cannes and nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars last year. It tells the story of an Amazonian shaman, who is followed over 40 years as he interacts with western anthropologists and society, striving to maintain his isolation, authenticity, and traditions. I enjoyed its locale (filmed on site), attempts at authenticity, non-exploitative tone and pace, and balanced view of cultural interactions. It was more earnest than compelling, though, and made me think about how the Amazon (and the remote tropics) have been depicted over the years. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and the Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation Apocalypse Now (1979) both use the jungle as both a metaphor for darkness in western society and as a backdrop for Kurtz, the white protagonist. In both, Kurtz is transformed and driven mad in and by his jungle journey. While both authors strive to depict the jungle denizens sympathetically, they really provide just a backdrop for a western tragedy. German director Werner Herzog takes another white protagonist (the mad Klaus Kinski) to the Amazon jungle in Fitzcarraldo (1982). Here, he tries to use the natives to drag a steamship over a high ridge, with predictable chaotic results. The aims here are similar to the earlier works...feature a crazy white character struggling to cope in the landscape, with the landscape both a main character and a metaphoric backdrop for chaos, darkness, and the primitive. Side note: A Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's 1982 documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, is just as entertaining, and shows director Werner Herzog himself as a mad western interloper in the wild (My favorite Herzog quote: "The parrots are not singing, they are screaming in pain").

While it would have benefited from better pacing and a little pruning, Embrace of the Serpent is quite different in that a native character (and actor) supersedes the westerners as the focal point of the film. This is an encouraging non-colonial take on this time-honored interaction of West-meets-the-jungle. The jungle is no longer just a metaphor, or a backdrop for a mad white protagonist. It is an actual place, inhabited by actual people, who themselves have both stories to tell and feelings to share.  I hope to see more of this in theater and cinema, especially without Hollywood's patronizing deification of indigenous peoples seen in guilt-ridden extravaganzas like Dances with Wolves.