Lost for nearly a century, some of the earliest footage of the Amazon River and Rainforest has resurfaced in the Czech Republic. Over 100 years ago, the Portuguese-born photographer and filmmaker Silvino Santos completed his three-year project Amazonas, o Maior Rio do Mundo (1918) documenting the economic potential of the world’s longest river and its surroundings — only for the film’s international marketing associate to steal it, rename it, and assume the directorial credit.
The 66-minute documentary was largely forgotten about by the 1930s, but a mislabeled copy of the footage was uncovered in the capital city of Prague at the Národní Filmový Archiv (National Film Archive/NFA) last year. The NFA returned the ownership of the documentary to the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo, Brazil, following the confirmation of the film’s attribution to Santos. Celebrating the rediscovery of a quintessential piece of early South American documentary film, the Brazilian media preservation group coordinated the screening of Amazonas, o Maior Rio do Mundo at the Silent Film Festival in Pordenone, Italy, last October and showcased the work in its own theater late last November.
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The documentary has since screened in various locations across major cities in Brazil, and is slated for an event later this year at the Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema in Lisbon, Portugal.
Santos captured footage across stretches of the forest and river within Peru and Brazil, focusing his lens on close-up shots of the flora and fauna and documenting the life of the Indigenous Witoto people. At the Cinemateca Brasileira, the film was presented in the context of its colonial-capitalist origins. Santos exoticized the Witoto people by referring to them as “savages” in title cards and fixated on the extractive industries that relied on the control and depletion of the landscape’s natural resources.
The Witoto people and many other Amazon inhabitants were either forcibly evicted and killed or enslaved and tortured to work in rubber production during the industry boom in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Rubber baron Julio Cesár Arana of the Peruvian Amazon Company commissioned Santos for a sponsored film and photography project that would reflect positively on the industry and the company after reports alleging vicious torture, enslavement, and murder of the Amazon’s Indigenous people went public.
“These age-old images of the Amazon in 1918 will provoke lively and welcome debates, and rekindle awareness of the fight for nature,” said Gabriela Sousa de Queiroz, technical director of Cinemateca Brasileira, in an interview with French newspaper Le Monde.
The film’s rediscovery is especially timely as the tropical landscape faces irreversible depletion from excessive deforestation, pollution, and unchecked land-clearing for cattle ranching — all of which continuously threaten the sovereignty and livelihood of the area’s stewarding Indigenous inhabitants as well its critically important biodiversity. Though the re-election of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva significantly curbed the Amazon’s deforestation figures in 2023, concerns are mounting as Brazilian lawmakers recently greenlit the construction of a cross-landscape highway that could give way to a major spike in illegal logging throughout the rainforest.
Source: Hyperallergic.com