By Cíntia Gil
Originally published in the first issue of Outskirts Film Magazine.
‘Why are we uncomfortable with the sensation of falling? We haven’t done anything more lately than plummet. Fall, fall, fall. So why are we now uneasy about the fall? Let’s use all our critical and creative capacity to build colourful parachutes.’ – Ailton Krenak, in ‘Ideas to Postpone the End of the World’ (2020)
In April 2022, Brazilian indigenist, activist, and filmmaker Vincent Carelli released Goodbye Captain (Adeus Capitão), co-directed by Tatiana Almeida (Tita). This latest film is the closing piece of a trilogy that had started in 2009 with Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They?, followed by Martyrdom (Martírio, 2017), co-directed with Almeida and Ernesto de Carvalho. With material from 1987 to 2019, Carelli and his collaborators shot among different peoples, places, and contexts, always with a common aspect – the desire to bear witness and to stand by those who live with a collective, tragic history with the weight of centuries.
I am Portuguese: my privileges in accessing these films are my mother tongue and the fact that there is a common past between us. I come from the country that invaded Brazil five centuries ago and began a slow genocide of the indigenous people. After discovering Carelli’s work in 2017 in the festival Fronteira, in Goiânia, I have been closely following it and learning from it. It was the door for encountering the incredibly rich and multifarious cinematography produced by numerous filmmakers originating and often working in indigenous communities. This text is an attempt to provide some context for the films, to spark curiosity in those who do not speak Portuguese and do not yet know this work. I should stress that my text on Carelli’s films is certainly lacking detail as well as historical and cultural nuances. These films are a part of an extensive and highly complex body of work that deserves our collective attention.
Carelli started his career as an indigenist at FUNAI (the National Foundation for the Indian) in the 1970s. In 1979 he founded the CTI (Centre for Indigenist Work), an independent non-profit NGO, with a group of anthropologists; and in 1986 he founded, together with his partner – the anthropologist Virgínia Valadão – Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages). As Carelli himself explains in the opening of Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They?, the first steps of the project consisted in filming people in the Nambiquara community and immediately returning their images to them – ‘to return’ is, here, a key verb. This immediate encounter with images of themselves produced a fundamental shock in the populations of these communities; they immediately understood the power available to them – to control their representation, as we can see, as an example, in the fascinating The Spirit of TV (O Espirito da TV, 1990).
‘For a warrior people, the first contact is always a surrender’
In Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They?, we meet Marcelo Santos – an indigenist working at FUNAI – who had found traces of a massacre against isolated Indians in Glebe Corumbiara, in the South of Rondonia. Facing the contempt with which such traces had long been treated and needing to gather more effective evidence, Santos contacted Carelli who, by 1987, had just started working with video as a tool for action and change – of ‘militancy’, as he himself put it. Carelli immediately understood the importance of such a request: in a system based on the complicity between government institutions, regional authorities and landowners (fazendeiros) who ruthlessly expand the borders of their lands, shooting these processes seemed the most efficient way to gather irrefutable proof. (The idea of filming as proof returns again, years later, in the second part of the trilogy, Martyrdom, in which Carelli gifts cameras to the Guarani-Kaiowá people so that they can directly document the violence of landowners and their goons.)
During the filming that took place in 1987, the team was chased away by the lawyers of the farm at which the massacre took place, and production was interrupted. Twenty years later, in 2006, the two friends – Santos and Carelli – reunited to finish it. The whole trilogy exists within this apparent dichotomy between revisiting and resignifying images to reconstruct the past. Each of the films constructs its own space for resistance and alliance, both in the present and for the future. In Goodbye Captain, the last of the three, we meet Captain Krohokrenhum, from the Gavião people, who persistently works to reclaim his world (‘to reclaim’ will become an important verb): reunifying his people, reclaiming their language, reconnecting the younger generations with their collective history and heritage. At some point, after we learn about the way in which the Captain’s community was dispersed following first contact with the whites, we catch an almost throwaway phrase: ‘for a warrior people, the first contact is always a form of surrender’.
After the first twenty minutes of Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They?, Carelli captures the moment of a first contact: Marcelo is in the centre of the shot, walking down a forest trail, when he realises that two of the people they had been looking for are close. Purá and Txinamanty, brother and sister from the Kanoe people, come from the back of the shot, while the camera shifts into the best position to capture it. Here is the question: How to shoot a first encounter? How to frame such a moment, caught between the imperative to document the existence of those people, to secure their rights through the image, and to act – create images – with an awareness of their asymmetrical position as participants?
After hesitations and attempts, the almost embarrassed-seeming camera behind Marcelo takes its place, adjusting to frame the extraordinary faces of this man and woman. Together, they experiment with sounds, gestures, attempts to exchange words – trust among everyone is what is at stake here. Eventually, the siblings invite the crew to follow them. Some minutes later, at the camp where Purá and Txinamanty live, they study the objects brought by the team, exchanging smiles and gestures: between the objects and each’s body language, we understand that we are watching a game of possibilities. Txinamanty explains something, stands up, places some tools under her armpit. Clearly, she is impersonating someone. Carelli’s voiceover explains: ‘the woman spoke with such vehemence that we began to feel she was describing a tragedy. I recorded everything. Much later we understood that in fact she was interpreting our own approach to them, that she had followed it all from the start.’ The woman was performing a description of the ‘first contact’ a moment ago – the one we saw in that shot with Marcelo. Those images were both the document of a surrender, and the proof of the very existence of Purá and Txinamanty – their civil strength facing the state itself. From this moment on, the abyssal aspect in those images is an enduring presence in the whole film. Seemingly it will return, as a ghost, throughout the whole trilogy. What is an alliance in cinema? How do we forge such a place of redistribution of power?
‘The key to understanding this historical moment was translated 25 years later.’
In Goodbye Captain, Captain Krohokrenhum works at and fights to reclaim his people’s common language, a language that many have forgotten, unlearned, or simply never used. The idea of ‘reclaiming the language’ is connected to the idea of ‘reclaiming the land’: a question of survival and autonomy, identity and community, a shared continuity between past and potential future. Both are vital questions: as the Captain says, ‘it is important for your safety’, explaining how an Indian who has lost their language lives as if they had no ancestry – separated from a fundamental part of their political and spiritual being, exposed to invasion and submission, colonised. In the film we see a movement taking shape: one mostly made of women born in diaspora, affirming the ‘Movement for Reclaiming Language’ and organising their communities through teaching, oral transmission of memory, or the recuperation of collective traditions.
In Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They?, Purá and Txinamanty speak a language that the team of indigenists and anthropologists cannot recognise. Yet, they do understand that it is a language belonging to a specific linguistic group – spoken by another man they know, who had also been separated from his community during the landowners’ attack years ago. When they meet, it becomes clear that they are from the same community. Translation is therefore possible. Only from then on does Carelli subtitle the siblings’ dialogues – now we can understand what they say. In a film marked by the imminent disappearance of a people, Carelli’s style is haunted by the ongoing search for glimpses of possible continuity – translating the siblings’ language is one. The first scene of Martyrdom, shot in 1988 during Carelli’s first trip to South Mato Grosso, depicts an assembly of community leaders from villages situated throughout Brazil and Paraguay. The film tells the extraordinary history of the struggle of the Guarani-Kaiowá people to take back their lands after centuries of dispossession and violence. Viewers who cannot speak the language heard in the film cannot understand the words spoken in this public assembly –the scene is not subtitled. As we watch, we can perhaps only make out the word ‘capitalism’ at some point in the stew of voices.
In the second half of Martyrdom, we see the scene again – now subtitled. In the intervening 25 years, the filmmakers had recovered a translation of the dialogue of this assembly. Now we understand what we were watching and listening to: a discussion of the so-called ‘acculturation’ of the indigenous peoples, of their ‘integration’ through specific public policies aimed at seizing their lands to make way for the expansion of agribusiness. In other words, for the annihilation of indigenous culture from the political, cultural, and social map of Brazil. The word ‘capitalism’ now appears in a new light – with the help of the subtitles, we understand that the indigenous speaker had been saying, ‘We are also involved in capitalism – that’s why they speak of acculturation. We are not acculturated.’ In voiceover, Carelli then adds a comment: ‘The key to understanding this specific historical moment was translated 25 years later. At that moment, the Guarani- Kaiowá understood very well the strategy of the Brazilian government to disintegrate the indigenous peoples.’
This game between materials from the past, translation (through subtitling), and voiceover puts us, as viewers, exactly where we cannot control the interpretation of these same materials, where we do not always have a complete understanding of what we see and what we listen to. This is often the place of the filmmaker. The films do this through the construction of possibilities: the possibilities brought by translation, by an effort to listen, and by valuing collective and individual memories. If there is a pedagogical dimension to Carelli’s films, one that is certainly far from any useless didacticism, it is precisely in this process of encounter between the filmic space and the spectator. Translation is an action that transforms the reading of the past and sets out possible actions for the future; it is a labour of attention and transmission, and it is also itself cinematic and narrative matter in Carelli’s hands.
In another way, this documentary form emphasises that patience and listening are cinematic, ethical and political questions. In contrast to the tendency to reduce documentary cinema to the ‘explanation’ of the world through fetishes like ‘access’ (to the other), the ‘hero’ (an individual), or even the illusion of a certain kind of direct justice achieved through the act of making documentaries, these films stress the necessity of a real individual and collective effort for rethinking these categories: ‘access’ to these indigenous peoples was one of the foundational principles for the genocide they have been victims of for the last 500 years. Contrary to the illusion of an individual will that chooses to act by ‘choosing good over evil’, here we are faced with a collective and trans-generational choice that must, for these peoples, be actively taken together: to exist and persist. At one point in Martyrdom, a policeman threatens to arrest the leader of the community. They respond together: ‘We are all leaders.’
In such a context, cinema can only exist, simultaneously, as ‘archive’, ‘ally’, and ‘return’. In 2022, I ask Carelli about the abiding sense of time that permeates the first and last images that were shot for the trilogy. He talks about showing the various films and materials to the communities he shot with: ‘Vídeo nas Aldeias is closing a trajectory that started with the immediate return of the images to the people and now ends with one final return to the new generations’. The same as with the word ‘reclaim’, ‘to return’ the images is not a mere figure of speech. It is not about ‘showing’ the images to the protagonists, but rather to restitute, to those who are now alive, the images and the shadows of the living and the dead who belong to them. Again, it is a question of survival: of the images, the memories, and the people. To speak of a film’s image in this context, means really to speak explicitly of ‘alliance’ and ‘filmmaking’ as concepts. The camera, all throughout the trilogy, is operated by Carelli, Ernesto de Carvalho, and others, passed among indigenist friends and friends from within the communities where the films are made. The camera takes on different roles, from the more traditional ones of an observer or a contemplative friend, to roles that question cinema more directly. No film exists fully outside a complex of relations and times; this is precisely where, in Carelli’s work, the films find their cinematic form.
In Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They?, the filmmakers search for the ‘Indian of the hole’, a man whose presence had been traced several times through a hole on the floor of the huts he had lived in. But still he is isolated, most probably scared of being massacred, and has not yet been identified. It is urgent to produce images of him; his life will only be protected by proving his presence in the region, and therefore putting limitations on the territories of the ‘landowner’. Totally shut off from the world, he refuses any contact with all strangers, and even more so with whites. The camera tries to steal an image of his face through the cracks of the walls. ‘To steal’ is the right word – here, to give visibility through the camera is simultaneously to protect as well as to invade and as well as to make vulnerable; it is in this tense and difficult place that these films also put us. This scene in Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They? detaches us from the illusion of a morally pure cinema, one indifferent to complexity.
In Martyrdom, the family of the Cacique (chief) Damiana lives next to the road that passes through a farm, one built on lands that were stolen from their people. They manage to occupy its main house, and need protection from the gunmen sent by the farmer. The filmmakers visit them and give them cameras, so that they can shoot the attacks. In a sense, the camera too can protect them by filming the gunmen and keeping them accountable. We see silhouettes of men by the fence, ruthlessly shooting at the family, in an open shot, made by someone who is both seeking protection and confronting violence, paying witness and mapping a path to real accountability. This scene in Martyrdom is eloquent in its way of giving visibility also to the aggressor, and in doing so it brings him too back to the civil, collective sphere.
‘I had the honour and joy of being your soldier.’
Setting out an historical frame from the 18th century to today, the three films in the Martyrdom trilogy document and unfurl the historical processes of a forced transformation of indigenous peoples into an exploited workforce – a people stripped of their basic economic, social, and cultural structures. In Martyrdom, a community leader speaks to his people, justifying their collective decision to fight for their lands until the bitter end: ‘We didn’t depend on anyone to survive. And then the non-Indian came and took everything from us and now we are the layabouts? We are the invaders?’ Carelli’s trilogy reveals the intimate association between the actions of the state and the crafting of narratives about indigenous identity – the idea of the ‘emancipated indian’ or the ‘acultured indian’ comes to signify those who, apparently integrated into white society (often perceived as such only because they are seen wearing clothes associated with whites), have therefore lost their ancestral right to land; the smear, ‘invader’, that agribusiness lobbyists associate with the Indians who are returning to their lands; the idea of ‘resistance’ appropriated by the major landowners as a narrative for the defence of property values (‘property is the most sacred thing the human has’, says one of the members of the National Congress). Martyrdom dedicates long stretches to archive footage of the discussions and interventions of politicians in the National Congress, and specifically to ruralist and conservative politicians. Carelli gives these voices and faces the benefit of time, insisting on their presence within and throughout the film in an almost obsessive way. As such, the unfolding of it all becomes a way to dismantle these narratives and the identification of a ‘combat’ between the indigenous and the landowners and politicians.
Simultaneously, we witness the different ways in which this war has been juridically framed by legislation, new laws approved and constantly revised – we watch as these diametrically opposed ideas of society are drawn before our eyes. Representing the political and financial arena in all of these affairs is another of the films’ structural throughlines. Following a disturbing chronology of progress and retrogression in the recognition of indigenous rights (among them, the right to land as a principle of subsistence, historical and spiritual identity), Carelli’s films present a polyhedral portrait of a country hijacked by latifundiary interests. It is particularly shocking to see that in 2014 there was a proposal of a new law in Congress, PEC215, that reverted the power of land demarcation from FUNAI to the Congress itself – an organism highly dominated by the ruralist parties. In the face of such a threat – with indigenous deaths mounting, with people murdered in the lands where their relatives were born and buried – a group of Indians yells out in halls of the Congress: ‘We want Dilma! Murderer!’ It is shocking to realise that this specific, murderous politics stems not from Bolsonaro’s regime, but is a continuum, of which he is a tragic and extreme consequence. Such an image of the world, and of Brazil, does not fit the vision promoted by the business of good intentions happening today in many of the spaces for funding documentary cinema: the world is far more complex than what we are willing to pay to see. The clichés of the tensions and struggles between left and right in Brazil, and also between democratic and anti-democratic forces, are questioned throughout these films: somehow, across history, that equation has been insufficient – these peoples’ existence proves it, as they are the permanent obstacle to an idea of progress built by the conquerors and based on private property and capital growth. Seeing the world and history play out through this alliance is, above all, to accept disappointments about the ways we conceptually organise it.
Goodbye Captain, the third part in Carelli’s trilogy, is again a double movement towards the past and an interrogation of a possible future. Yet it has a tone that sets it apart from the other films, coming from the titular farewell given to Captain Krohokrehum and to the explicit acknowledgement of unstoppable historical processes. The indigenous peoples’ relationship with capital and their entrance into the capitalistic system is one such process. Again, the ‘negotiations’ and tensions in the zone of contact between the indigenous world and the white world’s institutions are key. Telling the history of the reunification of the Gavião people, the film also tells the history of their transition from slavery – exploited in the picking of chestnusts in a region in the South of Pará – to a situation where they are the new landlords: the community becomes the collective owner of these rich lands, employing members of other communities.
Following a long negotiation about the dislocation of their village for the installation of a hydroelectric complex, Eletronorte, the Gavião people agreed on a settlement of compensation. Facing their potential disappearance, they were forced in this way to assimilate capitalistic power, represented by the power plant, while also carefully rebuilding and reconstituting their identitary space as an indigenous people. Goodbye Captain, then, is somewhere between an almost universal allegory about the history of capitalism and a farewell to a specific world and its people. It is also, in a way, Carelli’s farewell to the history of over three decades of work encapsulated and embedded in three films, his Martyrdom trilogy.
Constantly returning to the past and its constituent materials, and coming back to the here and now and to the encounter with the Captain and his relatives, Goodbye Captain again develops and sustains a contradiction at its core. It follows the reconstruction of the fragile Gavião world while acknowledging that this will be a world forever dependent on industrial corporations active in the region. Indeed, the shot of Captain Krohokrenhum’s burial is eloquent in addressing a world pierced by impossibility: in a low-angle shot with the camera close to the ground, we see the burial ground excavated in an open plain, dominated visually by a pole from the hydroelectric plant. After a life searching for autonomy, this was the only autonomy possible: the building of an odd space for coexistence – a grave – where the common element remains the trade of capital and value. We are back at the beginning of this history. Years after the ‘hecatomb of contact’ with whites, the struggle of the indigenous for their autonomy has finally forced them to the negotiation table under the colonisers’ terms. As Carelli says of the Captain, ‘with your departure the era of the wild Indian is closed, as you always said. I had the honour and joy of being your soldier.’
In the same vein as the work of filmmakers like Rithy Panh, Patrizio Guzman, or Marcel Ophuls, Carelli’s trilogy is among the work that can be associated with a unique historical-cinematic breath. It is a cinema of alliance, taking the task of building alliances with its protagonists to its maximal conclusions – not only in the films, but also in the modes of returning and circulating the images after the act of shooting, creating the contexts to continue to make, show, and watch. The work of Vincent Carelli the indigenist would not exist without the work of Vincent Carelli the filmmaker, and vice versa. His films exist precisely at that crossroads between the collective space to which stories and people are returned, and the intimate space of the small gesture, the friendship built over the years, the common learning, the experimentation with language, freedom, and protection. The aporias in Carelli’s work give it its unique force, and the fact that the films refuse to offer a resolution is what allows them to effectively act in reality. No one leaves these films intact.
