2.1
– BATHED IN LIGHT –
Silvino Santos, a Portuguese immigrant trained as a photographer that lived in the Manaus of the Rubber Boom decadence is the author of the film that gave the Teatro Amazonas the opportunity to transform, and allow cinema to become the space, like Opera did previously, where individual expressions perform as one, gaining that shared form of intelligence. The film was funded by a wealthy Peruvian rubber baron, Julio Cesar Araña, and it was shot with a Pathé camera imported from Paris. The film had a very rough quality, filled with over-exposed images of the river and its fishes, trees full of flocks of birds, that once put on flight they covered the whole of the skies. He travelled the river, up and down to make this film, an arduous job due to the conditions found in the Amazon. In order to process the celluloid strips, this wild filmmaker of the Amazon had to wake up at 4am where he could find the perfect mild temperatures and relative darkness suitable for the processing of what he had filmed. Cinema had to adapt to Nature here. Once finalized, in 1922, it was projected, using a Thomas Edison Vitascope projector imported by by the Edna & Wood Miscellany Company, inside the Teatro Amazonas. The name of the film was ‘In the Land of the Amazonas’ (No Paiz das Amazonas). This, like I said before, was the very first projection of 21
a moving picture regarding the Amazon. However, the way it shocked the audience was not in the same childishly innocent way the moving train of the Lumiere Brothers did, here, the immensity of the jungle was pictured with a crude brutality. If when an Opera played inside the Teatro all the ornamentation came alive, now, in 1922, those jungle motifs complemented what the beam of light was showing on the surface of the white wall or cloth. Even if the show was disliked, it set a precedent for another film that will help to define the formal intelligence of the Amazon in man as an accessible and valuable way of seeing the world, particularly, this specific world.
We would have to wait sixty years for Werner Herzog
to go and shoot in Iquitos, Manaus, the
22
Camisea River,… in order to revive the real harshness and beauty of a product bounded to this landscapes of hostility and lack of harmony. ‘Fitzcarraldo’ , filmed between 1979 and 1981 is where I 23
will conclude this work. In many ways this film can be considered as the total and final reconciliation between Nature and Opera in film. Every single aspect that I have commented while on the writing of this essay is brilliantly depicted frame by frame. The struggle of making this film shows the real character of the Amazonian World, and the thin line that separates dream from facts. This film illustrates this more than anything, even if it exists as fiction, it was a fever dream that turned into reality in the jungle, and it was then returned back into pure jungle fantasy in order to be revived some other time.
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