SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 130 - Embrace of the Serpent

[europe1]

NOTE to NON-MEMBERS: Interested in joining the SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB? Shoot me a PM for more info!

Here's a quick list of all movies watched by the SMC. Or if you prefer, here's a more detailed examination.

Shouldn't it be called, Embrace of the Anaconda? But... isn't that how they kill?

Our Director

Ciro Guerra

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Ciro Guerra was born on February 6, 1981 in Río de Oro, Cesar, Colombia. He is a director and writer, known for Embrace of the Serpent (2015), Los viajes del viento (2009) and La sombra del caminante (2004).​

​

Our Stars
Nilbio Torres

Jan Bijvoet

Premise: The story of the relationship between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his people, and two scientists who work together over the course of forty years to search the Amazon for a sacred healing plant.

Budget: $1.4 Million

Box Office: $3.4 Million
​

Trivia
(Courtesy of the IMDB)
​

* First Colombian film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

* The scene where a man is praised to be the Messiah is based on an actual event.

* Based on diaries by scientists Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evan Schultes.

* The music Evan plays on the gramophone is Haydn's "The Creation".

* In an interview with actor Tiapuyama (Antonio Bolivar), he listed the indigenous languages featured in the film: Ocaina (which is most frequently spoken), Ticuna, Bora, Andoque, Yucuna (Jukuna), and Muinane.


Members: @europe1 @MusterX @Scott Parker 27 @the muntjac @Cubo de Sangre @sickc0d3r @FrontNakedChoke @AndersonsFoot @Tufts @Coolthulu @Yotsuya @jei @LHWBelt @moreorless87 @ArtemV @Bullitt68 @GSPSAKU @HenryFlower @Nailgun @Rimbaud82 @Deus Ex Machina

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

While not the type of film I'd go looking to be entertained by, it was a Helluva flick. Well done. Thought provoking. Acting seemed good. Memorable overall. Two thumbs up.

Got a little dark there when faux-Jesus got cannibalized.

 

[MusterX]

I'll check in later tonight or tomorrow. Its Halloween and I have to go steal candy from my daughter.

 

[Tufts]

I really enjoyed this movie. It was beautifully shot and acted. It forced me to confront my own shortcomings when I realized that the main protagonist in the film was Karamakate and not the white actors. It was a real moment for me when I finally understood that the young man in the first scenes was the old man in the later ones. Prior to this, I thought that we were dealing with flashbacks, and that both of the bearded white men were the same man. I was being Eurocentric in my viewing about a film of the Amazon. It was a big fail on my part. And I wasn’t under the influence of anything, except conditioning of who has traditionally been the main character in a film. This was a powerful moment for me. I consider myself to be very open minded and woke. I sure wasn’t when I was watching the first half of this film. If this self-awareness was all I got out of it, it would have been enough to make the film worth watching.

If only there had been a clue that they were the same person!

I do believe that we were supposed to experience a little confusion regarding Theo and Evan. They looked fairly similar, and Karamakate does say you are two men to Evan several times.

I interpret this being both Theo and Evan, and perhaps also as the embodiment of the good scientific white guy who is there to learn and the evil white colonialist who is there to destroy. There is also a scene where you first see Theo in the canoe and then it cuts to the canoe going in the opposite direction, and you see Evan. This shot reenforced my interpretation that these white men were essentially the same character, separated by 40 years. Yes they were different men, with different nationalities, but it didn’t matter.

 

[Tufts]

Cultural studies were always challenging for me and I have struggled with many of the ideas that were brought up in the movie. I enjoyed the exploration of these ideas in the movie because the subject matter was treated with sensitivity and respect. For example, I appreciated that indigenous nudity was kept to a minimum. I have always noticed and hated the sub-humanization of indigenous or African (or any other group of non-white) people by showing them naked. I remember as a child seeing a cover of National Geographic with naked women from the African continent. It felt terribly wrong to me. Saying that it isn’t considered pornographic because it is naturalistic, is just another way of seeing these folks as animals and not people, and classifying their nudity as bestial and not sexual. It seems obvious that they deserve the same respect as everyone else. And hey! I am not opposed to nudity, I grew up on the Southern Coast of Spain! I think everyone could be a little less puritanical. There should be all sorts of naked people on the cover of NatGeo. Just treat everyone with the same respect or lack of respect.

This image was not even blocked at my high school yet I can't look up a gossip site.

 

[Tufts]

I appreciated the evolution of Karamakate’s character throughout the film. As a young man he is angry and resentful.

His village had almost been annihilated by either the rubber barons or the Peruvians, and he was forced to flee and live by himself. He is resentful towards white men because he has seen the destruction they have wrought. The clash of beliefs between cultures was evident to the young shaman, and he struggled with the importance of educating the white man about indigenous culture. He intuited that understanding would help prevent continued destruction. Yet he also seemed to realize this was all based on hope. Reality at that point had not given him much to look forward to. He tries to teach the explorers to listen. It was particularly poignant when he says: Listen. The river will tell you how to row. He lectures both explorers about how possessions have no value to the point where he throws Evan’s trunks overboard. He laughs at money. It is nothing but soggy paper. He is belligerent and difficult, yet he agrees to help Theo if it means finding remaining members of his tribe. It would have been easy, and traditional, to paint Karamakate as a one-dimensional figure, the cartoonish angry native, so it was truly gratifying to see his character fleshed out with a sense of humor. There are several scenes where he is in stitches over Theo, whether it be his rowing or his sentimentality in the letter to his wife.

We see his youth driving him to reject compliance when he tells the boys at the mission: Don’t let our song fade away. We see the impact isolation had on him when 40 years later he describes himself as a chullachaqui, a hollow man. He has lost his memories, his identity, his past. It is absolutely heartwrenching when he asks himself: What have I become? By helping Evan search for the yakruna, he is able to find himself and his past again. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be the last of your people, and I simply couldn’t. The emotional river of loss that runs under this movie is tremendously deep.

And memory is certainly a theme in this movie. We hear Theo say about his possessions “They are not just things. They are my bond to Germany. They are the proof of my studies. Nobody will believe me without them.” It is ironic that it was his diaries that allowed this movie to be made as he died in the jungle. Karamakate tried to keep his memories alive by recording images on the wall, and it wasn’t enough. He had to journey back to remember.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

I really enjoyed this movie. It was beautifully shot and acted. It forced me to confront my own shortcomings when I realized that the main protagonist in the film was Karamakate and not the white actors. It was a real moment for me when I finally understood that the young man in the first scenes was the old man in the later ones. Prior to this, I thought that we were dealign with flashbacks, and that both of the bearded white men were the same man. I was being Eurocentric in my viewing about a film of the Amazon. It was a big fail on my part. And I wasn’t under the influence of anything, expect conditioning of who has traditionally been the main character in a film. This was a powerful moment for me. I consider myself to be very open minded and woke. I sure wasn’t when I was watching the first half of this film. If this self-awareness was all I got out of it, it would have been enough to make the film worth watching.

 

[Tufts]

In a movie about colonialism, you can expect some criticism of dominant forces for behaving badly. In this movie we see judgement of the church twice. First with the mission where the children are taught not to speak their native “devil” language and are whipped for listening to Karamakate’s lesson on herbs that would help build their immunity. Second, when they come back to the same mission, except now the mission is being run by a white man who calls himself Jesus and is married to a sick indigenous woman. Karamakate is able to save her. He then drugs everybody at the mission and leaves them to actually consume the body of their Christ. There are so many layers to this scene from the stereotypical cannibalism the indigenous folks were accused of, to the accepted Christian consumption of the body of Christ, to an indigenous man manipulating theoretically religiously enlightened people into behaving in a completely barbaric way. The scene ends with a couple of brutal quotes by Karamakate. “They are now the worse of both worlds” seems accurate and heartbreaking, followed by a comment that shows prejudice is prevalent everywhere “I gave them something to think better. They were not born from the anaconda. They are less than human.” The important thing to remember though is that while prejudice exists, it is to a degree powerless. It is when you have systemic racism backed by an accepted power structure that true lasting damage happens in the world. We see this in the existence of the one armed man who just wanted to be put out of his misery. We see this in the eradication of the Coiuhano. We see this in the erasing of indigenous culture, beliefs and language by the Church. Karamakate messed with that particular group of people at that particular moment, but in general, he was not a threat to that tribe’s existence.

 

[Rimbaud82]

Oooooooo no I am out tonight, I shall post tomorrow! Look forward to reading other thoughts

 

[Tufts]

I found the moment with the compass and the tribe to be interesting. The compass represented progress, and the tribe wanted to keep it, not because it represented progress, but probably because it was something knew and different that they say Theo valuing. Theo felt helpless and afraid without it. I felt he disguised this fear behind rhetoric when he said that keeping the compass would hurt the tribe as they would loose their traditional way of navigating. That in itself is a very condescending statement and harkens back to that main cultural study question: How do you study other cultures without changing them? I always ascribed to the belief that you can’t.

I also loved that some tropes were turned on their side. Instead a bunch of white people being entertained by indigenous culture (think of the spectacle of a luau), we had the tribes being entertained by the goofy behavior of Theo and Manduca. Instead of the indigenous people engaging in cannibalism, we see the enlightened and brainwashed converted indigenous people eating their white god. Instead of the white man helping the indigenous man, we see Theo drop to his knows like a child and open up his nostrils to the medicine Karamakate is blowing up his nose. I would have enjoyed a few more of these.

Theo was childishly trusting every time he got blown. Here he looks like he is looking up at his savior. María Magdalena couldn't have done it any better.

 

[Tufts]

I liked the transposition of cultures as Karamakate and Evan listened to the Haydn’s “Creation” in the jungle. I found it interesting that while Evan says he is a botanist, the real reason he wants the yakruna is that it grows on rubber trees and makes them stronger. If the first segment was in 09, the second was in the 40s. Evan was American. I wonder what was going on at this time to increase the US demand for rubber. Who was the precious supplier and why would that fruitful partnership have ended?

Spoiler

Question 1

Question 2

As Karamakate wisely said early on (in reference to guns but applicable to so much more): “All your science only leads to violence.”

 

[Tufts]

A couple of comments on language. 9 languages were spoken in this film. Manduca, while an interesting and learned character, takes a backseat to Karamakate in the entire film. He has some interesting moments as he is truly a man caught between cultures. Admirably, he spoke several indigenous languages, as well as Spanish and German. I have some issues with the Spanish he spoke, because it was perfect. The structures he produced, however, were considerably far beyond what I would expect someone to pick up orally. I would expect him to be fully communicative, but not so accurate. He used the subjunctive with a time expression for the love of God. The concept of time is essential to produce that structure accurately, and since the linearity of time is explored in this film, I don’t find this to be a realistic assumption. He also had writing knowledge of German, again something I find hard to believe. When did those two have time to focus on writing in German?

 

[Tufts]

I did wonder why the film was filmed in black and white. It would have been incredibly green otherwise. Was it to make the hallucinations stand out at the end? Was it to give that sense that our realities are limited by our perceptions? It made me think of a Joe Rogan podcast where he interviewed Michael Pollan about hallucinogens and how they open our brains up to experiences and connections we cannot have otherwise.



I am personally not a fan. Mushrooms at the age of 21 while there was a scary Karen Black (with those spooky eyes!) film on the TV ruined them for me for good. I do see how they can expand your perception though. Because the river has 1000 sides. You just have to be able to see them.

 

[Tufts]

I broke my long commentary down into individual posts so that I can move up in belts and also not to task anyone's attention span!

Looking at you @FrontNakedChoke

 

[FrontNakedChoke]

I broke my long commentary down into individual posts so that I can move up in belts and also not to task anyone's attention span!

Looking at you @FrontNakedChoke

I just assume no one reads my rambles, so I compartmentalize my disorganized thoughts into one shitty post that's easily skipped over.

 

[Tufts]

I just assume no one reads my rambles, so I compartmentalize my disorganized thoughts into one shitty post that's easily skipped over.

LOL. It wasn't a criticism of your posts friend. It was referencing your self mocking gifs and comments on your attention span. .

 

[FrontNakedChoke]

LOL. It wasn't a criticism of your posts friend. It was referencing your self mocking gifs and comments on your attention span. .

You'll be a blue belt in no time

Spoiler

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Theo was childishly trusting every time he got blown.

As men that's just a leap of faith we've learned we have to take.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

I just assume no one reads my rambles,

If it helps, I at least give 'em a good skimming.

 

[FrontNakedChoke]

If it helps, I at least give 'em a good skimming.

<{monica}>