The Best Thing I've Seen All Year

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Every now and then in Cambridge, I like to curl up on my bed with my laptop, usually wet hair, my pillow propped up behind my back, and watch a movie. Once I tried to make a blanket fort, but it definitely didn't work. Other times, I treat myself by cycling down to the Picturehouse to watch a movie there.

In my last week in Cambridge, I went to watch the first screening of Embrace of the Serpent. Directed by Ciro Guerra, who was present at the screening, the film blends fact and fiction to create an incredible, dreamscape of the adventures of Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, and two scientists (Theodore Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes) and their search for the sacred Yakruna plant. It is the first Colombian film to feature an indigenous protagonist and one of the few fiction films to be shot in the Amazon itself.

When asked why he shot the entire film (apart from a short dream sequence near the end) in black and white, Guerra said: 'All the cinematographic elements, we used them to create an altered perspective on life ... another way of understanding the world. So you see a world that you can recognize, but everything is slightly off. Everything is slightly different. From the sound design to the black-and-white to … the way the film is told and structured, everything is taking you to a different logic. It's a way of bringing an audience into a different perspective on the world...The explorers' photographs were the principal influence, images in black and white, plate photography, almost daguerreotypes that they took. What you see is an Amazon that's completely different from the one now. You can see all the exoticism, all the exuberance. It feels like another world, another time. Being there I realized it wasn't possible to reproduce with any fidelity the color of the Amazon. There's no filter or camera or oil that lets you reproduce its significance. I felt that to do it in black and white, to get rid of colors, would activate the audience's imagination. Viewers would add the colors in their mind and these imagined colors would be more real than whatever we could reproduce. This imagined Amazon is more real than the actual Amazon."

In Cambridge, he also said the black and white erases the differences between man and nature, which was so clear in the first scene, where Karamakate crouches beside the river, quiet and blending into the jungle behind him.

On other sites, I read that the decision to use 35mm film, in black-and-white also harks back to the photographs that the journals of Koch-Grünberg and Schultes would have used. In this way, Guerra meddles with time, taking us away from the psychedelic colour and vivid sound of modern film to the black-and-white of older films. Time itself is one of the films central concerns, since the 'time period' of the film is split between the younger Karamakate's journey with Koch-Grünberg and the older Karamakate's journey with Schultes. This, in part, was because Guerra sought to highlight how modern perspectives of time as linear is different to indigenous perspectives of time.

“Time to them is not a line, as we see it in the West, but a series of multiple universes happening simultaneously... It is a concept that has been referred to as ‘time without time’ or ‘space without space.’ I thought it connected with the stories of the explorers, who wrote about how one of them came to the Amazon following the footsteps of another explorer before him, and when he would encounter the same indigenous tribe, he would find that the previous explorer had been turned into myth. To the natives, it was always the same man, the same spirit, visiting them over and over again. This idea of a single life, a single experience, lived through the bodies of several men... gave us a perspective of the indigenous way of thinking, but also connected with the viewer who could understand these men who come from our world, and through them, we could slowly begin to see the vision of the world of Karamakate.”

Another concept in the film that intrigued me was the idea of the Chullachaqui. A Chullachaqui is a person who as lost himself, an Amazonian version of the German myth of the Doppelganger, a ghost of yourself. Chullachaqui becomes a metaphor for the erosion of Amazonian culture, and in the film Karamakate says “Hear the song of your ancestors...Don’t let our song fade away.” Every person has a Chullachaqui, a hollow, empty copy of yourself. I've seen Chullachaqui in my life and I wish I didn't have to and I wish these people were fixed.