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ABSTRACT
This article analyses the politics and aesthetics of the depiction of the encounter between the West and the non-West in Ciro Guerra’s film El abrazo de la serpiente, examining how the film deconstructs colonialist imagery and discourses, and engages with the notion and cinematic representation of indigeneity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article identifies and discusses the strategies employed in the film to decolonise the category of the ‘Indian’: challenging the colonial linguistic of domination and undermining the tropes of imperialist representations; staging and re-enacting colonial encounters; and subverting the power relations embedded in colonialist ethnography. The article argues that El abrazo de la serpiente acts as an instrument of political and cultural inquiry into the past and the present, and that it both proposes and enacts interculturalidad and intercultural dialogue as a cinematic approach to native culture. While the notion of indigeneity at play is not unproblematic, the film succeeds in foregrounding Indigenous points of view and ‘points of hearing’, challenging a Eurocentric politics of recognition and evolutionary epistemology in favour of a ‘coevalness’ of the native.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Maria Chiara D’Argenio is a Teaching Fellow in Hispanic Studies at University College London where she teaches Latin American Cinemas and Literatures. She specialises in the representation of indigeneity in contemporary Latin American cinema and in Peruvian visual culture in relation to issues of modernity, race and nation. Her articles have appeared in journals such as BHS, LACES, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas and JLACS.
Notes
1. King John, López Ana M and Alvarado Manuel (eds), Mediating Two Worlds. Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, London: BFI Publishing, 1993.
2. Jean Franco, ‘High-tech Primitivism. The representation of Tribal Societies in Feature Films’, in Mediating Two Worlds. Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, J King, A M López and M Alvarado (eds), London: BFI Publishing, 1993, pp 81–94, p 82.
3. Franco, ‘High-tech Primitivism. The representation of Tribal Societies in Feature Films’, p 83.
4. Gilbert Helen and Gleghorn Charlotte (eds), Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas, London: Institute for Advanced Study, 2014, p 4.
5. Marisol De la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics”’, Cultural Anthropology 25(2), 2010, pp 334–370, p 336.
6. Marisol De la Cadena and Orin Starn (eds), Indigenous Experience Today, Oxford & NY: Berg, 2007, p 3.
7. Charlotte Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking in Latin America’, in A Companion to Latin American Cinema, M Delgado, S Hart and R Johnson (eds), Hoboken, NJ: John Wylie & Sons, 2017, pp 167–186, p 167.
8. In the description of an exhibition of indigenous art from Australia at Harvard Art Museums in 2016 for example, we read that:
Indigenous art is no longer positioned as ‘other,’ but as another form of contemporary art that demands our critical attention. This exhibition presents an opportunity to introduce audiences to the central role that Indigenous art plays in the global narrative of contemporary art.
9. This exhibition was held at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.
10. Randall Halle, ‘Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism’, in Global art cinema: new theories and histories, R Galt and K Schoonover (eds), NY: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp 303–319.
11. Proimágenes Colombia is a Colombian funding body, which administrates state funds such as the Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfico aiming at fostering and consolidating Colombian cinematic production. It provided part of the initial funding for the making of El abrazo. See the documentary ‘El abrazo de la serpiente: una historia para el mundo’, Bogotá: Caracol Televisión, 2016.
12. This and all translations are mine unless otherwise noted. The quotes from the film are from the English subtitles included in the DVD Embrace of the Serpent, (2015) [DVD] Colombia: Ciudad Lunar, Peccadillo Pictures, Caracol Televisión.
13. The young Karamakate is played by Nilbio Torres while the old Karamakate is played by Tafillama (Antonio Bolívar Salvador). The character of Manduca is played by Yauenkü Miguee (Miguel Dionisio Ramos).
14. Karamakate’s position re-enacts the pose of an indigenous subject from one of the early twentieth-century photographs shown during the end credits.
15. The film’s press notes include translations of the original text followed by the author’s name and the date. The one in English reads:
In this moment, it is not possible for me to know, dear reader, if the infinite jungle has started on me the process that has taken many others that have ventured into these lands, to complete and irremediable insanity. If this is the case, I can only apologize and ask for your understanding, for the display I witnessed in those enchanted hours was such, that I find it impossible to describe in a language that allows others to understand its beauty and splendor; all I know is that, like all those who have shed the thick veil that blinded them, when I came back to my senses, I had become another man’. (Theodor Koch-Grünberg, 1907)
16. See, for example, Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters. Europe and the Native Caribbean. 1492–1797, London & New York: Methuen, 1986.
17. Quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World, Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, p 132.
18. Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, London: Reaktion Books, 2001.
19. Wylie Lesley, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks. Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2009.
20. Some of these works, such as Rivera’s The Vortex, were used by Guerra in preparing the film, as the filmmaker has stated in interviews.
21. Alejo Carpentier, ‘Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso’, in Los pasos recobrados: ensayos de teoría y crítica literaria, A Carpentier (ed.), Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2003, pp 83–84.
22. Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, p 9.
23. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature.
24. Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, Mexico DF: Iberoamericana de publicaciones, 1949.
25. Beatriz Pastor, Discursos narrativos de la conquista: Mitificación y emergencia, Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1988, p 26.
26. On the topic of the ‘invention of Latin America’, see also O’Gorman Edmundo, The Invention of America, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961.
27. Among the sources used by Columbus to construct his narrative discourse about the ‘new’ territories were: Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, Pliny’s Historia Natural, Eneas Silvio’s Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum and a Latin version of 1485 Marco Polo’s The Travels.
28. Evelina Guzauskyte, Christopher Columbus’s Naming in the ‘Diarios’ of the Four Voyages (1492–1504), Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014, p 4.
29. Guzauskyte, Christopher Columbus’s Naming in the ‘Diarios’ , p 4.
30. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p 57.
31. Johan Galtung (1967) quoted in Diane Lewis, ‘Anthropology and Colonialism’, Current Anthropology 14(5), 1973, pp 581–602, p 584.
32. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, p 6.
33. Lewis, ‘Anthropology and Colonialism’, p 582.
34. See Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from the South 1(3), 2000, pp 533–580.
35. Shohat Ella and Stam Robert, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media, NY: Routledge, 1994, p 23.
36. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
37. Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, p 9.
38. Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media, pp 214–215.
39. The full exchange is ‘Can the plant cure me?’/‘Do my people still exist?’
40. See De la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics”’.
41. Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, 1991, pp 33–40, p 34.
42. Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media, pp 189–190.
43. Tafillama (Antonio Bolívar) played a crucial role in the translation and rewriting of the screenplay. He was the translator of the crew and taught the native languages to the foreign actors. See also http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/cultura/el-diccionario-de-lenguas-no-escritas-articulo-618566
44. See http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/cultura/el-diccionario-de-lenguas-no-escritas-articulo-618566
45. Quoted in Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking in Latin America’, p 182.
46. See Antonio Cornejo Polar, Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
47. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
48. See Bataille Gretchen and Silet Charles, ‘The Entertaining Anachronism: Indians in American Film’, in The Kaleidoscopic Lens: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups, R Miller (ed), Englewood, NJ: Jerome S. Ozer, 1980.
49. See Guerra’s interview at http://screenprism.com/insights/article/in-embrace-of-the-serpent-what-is-the-concept-of-the-chullachaqui
50. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking in Latin America’, p 167.
51. Christopher Carter, ‘Material Correspondences in Icíar Bollaín’s Even the Rain: Ambiguities of Substance’, KB Journal 11(2), 2016, w/p. Available at http://www.kbjournal.org/carter (accessed 15May 2017).
52. Oscar M Ardila, La imposibilidad de la naturaleza. Arte y naturaleza en el arte colombiano, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá 95.
53. Quoted in José Roca, ‘Alberto Baraya. Colombia, botany and classification; fake flowers and post-colonialism’. Available at https://frieze.com/article/alberto-baraya
54. Amada Carolina Pérez Benavides, ‘Fotografía y misiones. Los informes de misión como performance civilizatorio’, Maguaré 30(1), 2016, pp 103–139, p 107.
55. Pérez Benavides, ‘Fotografía y misiones. Los informes de misión como performance civilizatorio’, p 108.
56. Pérez Benavides, ‘Fotografía y misiones. Los informes de misión como performance civilizatorio’, p 110.
57. In Brazil, a ‘Caboclo’ is a person of mixed white and indigenous ancestry. The term refers also to culturally assimilated native subjects.
58. These words return in the end credits when we read that the film is dedicated to the people ‘whose song we will not know’.
59. Pedro A Zuluaga, ‘El abrazo de la serpiente, de Ciro Guerra: el texto de la selva’. Available http://pajareradelmedio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/el-abrazo-de-la-serpiente-de-ciro.html
60. See Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Taussig’s work examines the culture of terror that informed the practices of rubber collection and trade in the Amazonian region and the role played by shamanism and shamans in the process and practices of healing (of colonists and indigenous people). It is worth noting that the link between terror and healing as well as the centrality of the shaman are two important elements of the film narrative too. In this film, as arguably in Taussig’s books and many others, the shaman represents the ‘voice’ of the indigenous world.
61. Franco, ‘High-tech Primitivism. The representation of Tribal Societies in Feature Films’, p 85.
62. The film presents chronological and geographical inconsistencies, yet I maintain that they do not undermine the historiographic value of the fiction told.
63. De la Cadena (eds), Indigenous Experience Today, p 11.
64. See Fabian, Time and the Other.
65. See Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’.
66. Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, p 534.
67. Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, p 542:
That perspective imagined modernity and rationality as exclusively European products and experiences. From this point of view, intersubjective and cultural relations between Western Europe and the rest of the world were codified in a strong play of new categories: East-West, primitive-civilized, magic/mythic-scientific, irrational-rational, traditional-modern - Europe and not Europe.
68. Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, p 533.
69. Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media, p 3.
70. This is explained by the director Ciro Guerra in an interview. See http://www.aarp.org/espanol/entretenimiento/expertos/anne-hoyt/info-2016/ciro-guerra-director-el-abrazo-de-la-serpiente-oscar-2016.1.html
71. See James Clifford, ‘Varieties of Indigenous Experience: Diasporas, Homelands, Sovereignties’, in Indigenous Experience Today, M De la Cadena and O Starn (eds), Oxford & NY: Berg, pp 197–224, p 198.
72. Robert Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad Is not Interculturality. Colonial Remains and Paradoxes in Translation Between Indigenous Social Movements and Supranational Bodies’, Cultural Studies 29(2), 2015, pp 205–228, p 207.
73. Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad is not Interculturality’, p 207.
74. Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad is not Interculturality’, p 208.
75. Aman, ‘Why Interculturalidad is not Interculturality’, p 216.
76. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, p 6.
77. Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, p 9.
78. A contemporary representation of the aesthetics of the sublime associated with the Amazonian landscape and the notion of genesis can be found in the work Genesis (2013) by Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.
79. Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 129–150.
80. Walter Mignolo, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis’. Available at: https://blackeuropebodypolitics.wordpress.com/decolonial/. See also Walter Mignolo, ‘Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings’, SocialText online. Available at: https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/
81. In addition, the film’s marketing campaign and advertising (which addressed a global audience) used images expressing the above-mentioned aesthetics of the sublime without the anti/decolonial element.
82. Clifford, ‘Varieties of Indigenous Experience’, p 198.
83. De la Cadena (eds), Indigenous Experience Today, p 11.
84. Gleghorn, ‘Indigenous Filmmaking in Latin America’, p 167.
85. See, for example, Franco and Shohat, Stam.
86. Michelle H Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty and Representations of Native Americans in Film, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010, p xiii.
87. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, p xiii.
88. Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media.
89. Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media.
90. De la Cadena (eds), Indigenous Experience Today, p 6.
91. Clifford, ‘Varieties of Indigenous Experience’.
92. Michelle H Raheja, ‘“Will making movies do the sheep any good?” The afterlife of Native American images’, in Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas, H Gilbert and C Gleghorn (eds), p 20.
93. Ilana D Luna, ‘También la lluvia: Of coproductions and re-encounters, a re-vision of the colonial’, in Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico: Literary and Cultural Inquiries, O Estradaand Nogar Anna (eds), Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014, pp 190–210, p 192.
94. Pedro A Zuluaga, ‘¿Ciro, por qué no te callas?’, blog entry on Pajarera del medio. Available at: https://pajareradelmedio.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=el+abrazo+de+la+serpiente
95. Zuluaga, ‘El abrazo de la serpiente, de Ciro Guerra: el texto de la selva’.
96. Sara C Motta, ‘21st Century Emancipation: Pedagogies in and from the Margins’, in Power and Education: Contexts of Oppression and Opportunity, A Kupfer (ed), New York: Palgrave, 2015, pp 169–193, p 172.
97. Robert JC Young, ‘Cultural Translation as Hybridisation’, Trans-Humanities Journal 5(1), 2012, pp 155–175, p 156.
98. Laura U Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000.