«Why do the Portuguese people always look for rocks and stones that they left scattered all over the world?» asks director José Barahona as his crew’s cameras reach the ruins of a fort amid the Amazonian forest. After a few pans over the impressive stone arches covered with lush vegetation, he adds, «It’s tiring. This will disappear and won’t leave any trace.» His latest documentary feature, which opened this year’s DocLisboa festival, is about the search for these traces. Though not left in stones, these traces are there to stay.
Colonial superpower
Portugal, a small European country, was a major colonial superpower. The Portuguese were the first Europeans that colonised Africa below the Sahara and, for almost one century, maintained a near-monopoly over European relations with it. From there, they expanded to Latin America. By the end of the 16th Century, Portuguese imperial interests covered half the globe, from Brasil to The Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia. No wonder when Barahona’s crew reaches the Brazilian borders with Venezuela and Colombia, they find communities that still speak the Nheengatu, a mixed language imposed by Brazilian colonial powers to indigenous communities, even if in Venezuela and Colombia the official language is Spanish, not Portuguese.
Nheengatu is the main subject of this film and it is only logical that a film about the language follows the traces of a book. Actually, says the director, two books were his references: Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s Two years among the Indians. Travels in North-West Brazil 1903-1905 and a recently published collection of works in Portuguese by Curt Nimuendajú on the indigenous peoples of the Rio Negro region with photographs the celebrated ethnologists took during his trip in 1927, Reconhecimento dos Rios Içána, Ayarí e Uaupés. Barahona follows Nimuendajú’s path through the Amazonian forest with, literally, the book in his hands. At a certain point, he shows it to one of the indigenous men he interviews and the man recognises the building on the photo published in it. This is a particularly powerful moment because it reminds us that we are seeing an important addition to our knowledge, something that is left out of books, which are the standard source of what we know. That is, we see the lived experience of the book’s subjects, the concrete people, in flesh and blood.
We learn that the Nheengatu didn’t exist before 1500 and when the Portuguese arrived in the Amazon, they first learned the language of the Tupi people living on the coast. As they entered the Brazilian territory they started mixing this language with other indigenous languages and with Portuguese words. Gradually, this mix developed into a language, with a proper name, Nheengatu, and with proper rules that were transmitted in schools. It was the language of the conquerors. Today, however, the great majority of indigenous languages have disappeared and the only «traditional» language indigenous people speak is Nheengatu, although Portuguese is the official language. Nheengatu is, we hear, «a language of resistance». We learn this directly from those who speak it, and besides definitions, we get to know about their doubts. A father, who doesn’t want to teach it to his daughter. And the children who prefer to speak the language of white men when they go to the city, Portuguese. As a result, Nheengatu is disappearing.
By the end of the 16th Century, Portuguese imperial interests covered half the globe
Film language
Another important language is the way the film is made. The cinematic language. This one, too, is a constructed language, and here too we can observe the process of its’ making. In one of the very rare moments with voiceover, we hear the director distributing smartphones among the indigenous collaborators and inviting them to film «what they consider important in their lives, their community, and their daily lives» and he will put this in the film. A young man, Edmundo, turns the smartphone camera towards the film crew and starts filming them, saying, «I am learning with them what I don’t know and they learn from me what they don’t know». The film frame is determined by this collaboration too – on the one hand, the landscape portrait of the professional film, on the other the portrait format of the smartphone screen.
The film is a collaborative work in terms of traditional film crew too. The DOP Mário Franca deserves particular credits for exceptional images of water and the music producer Clower Curtis for his electronica. Mandala-like symmetrical compositions that resemble the polished aesthetics of screensavers, but this seems completely natural as the glittering surfaces of water and sky blend into each other on the electronic world music soundtrack. The centrally placed narrow vertical images of smartphone recordings fit very well into this structure, while the heavy black frame directs attention to the undertones of this «amateur» stories. Through reflections on their language, indigenous people narrate about their lives, politics, fundamentals such as what it means being poor or what civilisation is, but also about white men who want to make money selling their recordings.
Nheengatu didn’t exist before 1500 and when the Portuguese arrived in the Amazon
An unresolved presence
The absence of one central point of narration and the constantly shifting point of view, the most distinctive features of the documentary cinema of the 21st Century, work to viewers’ advantage. We get the possibility to see backstage. The director explains what he can not show, be it his illness or the procedures in contacting indigenous communities. The members of these communities discuss the presence of white men, and about how it feels to be seen through their eyes. But among several contrasts that organise the narration, the division between the indigenous and white men remains fixed, and unresolved. That’s the lesson of the Nheengatu, a former language of the conquerors: the indigenous have left nothing but what they got from the white men. The ruins of colonial buildings might eventually turn into dust, but the colonial heritage will remain.
