Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Embrace of the Serpent
2015 · Ciro Guerra · Embrace of the Serpent on Sightlines
The water is silver.
Not green. Every other film shot in the Amazon has sold the forest as postcard green; David Gallego shot this one on 35mm black-and-white stock, and the river arrives looking like a plate in an old expedition album. That isn't a mood choice. The film is assembled from the journals of two real explorers, Theodor Koch-Grünberg in 1909 and Richard Evans Schultes in 1940, and it looks like the photographs that came home with them. We are being shown the forest in the exact form in which the West took possession of it: as a document.
Then a man inside the document turns and looks back.
His name is Karamakate. He is a shaman, the last of his people, and he appears twice, young and old, guiding each of the two white men upriver a lifetime apart. Antonio Bolívar plays the older one. He is a non-professional and one of the few remaining speakers of Ocaina, and he gives Karamakate a wounded, sardonic authority with nothing of the noble remnant in it. He is not grateful and not impressed, and his suspicion of both visitors turns out to be the correctly calibrated response.
Deleuze has a phrase for what that man carries, and it is the least abstract thing in his books on film. Writing about political cinema he borrowed a line from Paul Klee: the people are missing. The point was historical. Eisenstein could make films addressed to a people, because the masses were the protagonist and the cutting welded them into one body. A filmmaker working out of a colonized situation has no such addressee. The people the film should speak for were killed, scattered, or never permitted to cohere. So the film cannot represent a people. It has to take part in inventing one. That sounds like a consolation prize. In practice it reorganizes everything: who narrates, what counts as knowledge, where the camera sits.
Embrace of the Serpent gives that condition a face. Karamakate is what the rubber boom left of a nation, and the boom is the atrocity Colombian history books had softened before this film put it in front of the world. But the concept describes the production as much as the story. Guerra cast Indigenous non-professionals in the central roles, and the older Karamakate is played by one of the last speakers of Ocaina. A people that is missing gets, for two hours, a face and a voice on 35mm, and that is not a metaphor for anything.
Deleuze built a second concept on the first: fabulation, or legending. He took it from Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault, who stopped filming cultures as fixed objects to be documented and started filming people in the act of telling themselves into existence. Guerra's version is structural. He takes the colonizers' journals, the only written record and therefore the only account the archive holds, and restages them from the guide's side of the canoe. The result is what Deleuze calls free indirect discourse: not the author speaking about the character, not the character speaking alone, but a vision the two share and neither owns. The white travelers become the enigmas, and the forest's knowledge is what is at stake.
This is where the film's craft debts turn into an argument. The upriver movie is a well-built genre with known parts. Aguirre, the Wrath of God set them in 1972: Amazon expedition, punishing real locations, Indigenous non-professionals, conquest curdling into delirium. Apocalypse Now codified the river as a moral spine where each bend deepens the derangement. Fitzcarraldo supplied the economics, rubber barons and missions and extraction, that Guerra stages from underneath. In all three the forest is an instrument for measuring a white man's mind. Guerra keeps the apparatus and moves to the other seat in the boat. Dead Man and Black Robe had started the turn, one with an Indigenous companion who reorients the whole cosmology, the other by making a first-contact expedition a subtitled clash of belief systems instead of an adventure. Embrace completes it. The guide no longer reorients the story. He holds its time.
Holds it literally. The film's boldest move is the braid: 1909 and 1940 running alongside each other, the same river, a different Karamakate, neither journey subordinated to the other. A flashback is a dated insert. It says earlier, and it exists to explain the present. Deleuze's sheets of past are something else, regions of time that coexist, which a film can move through the way you move between rooms. The 1940 trip does not explain the 1909 one. It sits beside it, and Guerra cuts so that the two rhyme. That rhyme is the real subject: not history repeating, but one man carrying both journeys at once, the older Karamakate making a trip that already has another trip inside it. Where his two images reflect each other and you stop being able to say which is the original, the braid becomes what Deleuze calls a crystal-image.
Watch what this does to action. In the movement-image, Deleuze's name for the classical cinema of purpose, someone perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. The river picture is that form at full throttle: go upstream, find the thing, be transformed or destroyed. Here the machinery runs and yields nothing. The scientists map, collect and treat; the forest does not answer to any of it. Karamakate guides and cannot restore what was taken. What is left is looking. Deleuze's seer is a character who has stopped being an agent and become a witness, and Bolívar's Karamakate is one of the least sentimental in recent cinema. He endures the second journey the way you endure weather.
Which lands the film on the oldest problem in the tradition it descends from. Nanook of the North founded the ethnographic drama, Indigenous non-professionals re-enacting their own lifeways on location, and founded its scandal in the same gesture, since re-enactment is not record. Documentary's contract says that what you see happened. Deleuze's powers of the false is not a way of calling that a lie. It is the recognition that when truth stops being given in advance, cinema starts producing truths, and a film can carry two incompatible ones without collapsing. Embrace holds botanical knowledge and shamanic knowledge side by side and declines to arbitrate, and it builds its history out of an unreliable narrator, the explorer's notebook. The landscape does the other half of that work. Deleuze, writing about Straub and Huillet, called it the stratigraphic image: ground read like an archive, spoken over by a past that is not visible in it. The forest here is full, and it has also been emptied. Gallego's silver keeps returning the image to the condition of evidence.
Guerra's invention is easy to state and hard to do. He gave the colonial adventure film's time to the guide, then made the guide's memory the editing logic. Everything else follows from that one relocation, including the fact that the first Colombian film to reach the Oscars got there with an Indigenous non-professional sizing up the visitors.
So on a rewatch, stop tracking the plant and track the cuts. Ask whose memory the film is in, who is remembering 1909 while 1940 is on the screen, and what it costs him to be the only one who can. Then the harder question, the one Guerra leaves open: when the last person who knows something agrees to be filmed knowing it, is that a rescue or one more kind of extraction? The film does not answer. It puts you in the other seat in the boat and lets you feel how the boat was built.
Concepts in play
- people are missing — Karamakate is a shaman who is the last of his people, the remainder of a nation destroyed in the rubber boom the film puts on screen; and the condition extends to the production, which cast Indigenous non-professionals in the central roles, including Antonio Bolívar, one of the few remaining speakers of Ocaina, as the older Karamakate.
- fabulation / legending — The film takes the journals of Koch-Grünberg and Schultes — the only written record the archive holds — and restages them from the guide's side, so Indigenous knowledge appears as living speech and judgment rather than as documented artifact.
- free indirect discourse (political) — Guerra inverts the Aguirre/Apocalypse Now template by handing narration to the native side: the white travelers become the enigmas and the forest's knowledge is what's at stake, with the camera's vision fused to Karamakate's rather than the explorer's.
- sheets of past (order of time) — The braid of the 1909 and 1940 journeys down the same river with a different Karamakate, cut to rhyme rather than introduced as dated flashback — the second trip sits beside the first instead of explaining it.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — One man appears twice, young and old, across four decades of the same river, each image reflecting the other until the older Karamakate's journey is inseparable from the one it carries inside it.
- the seer (voyant) — The older Karamakate guides a journey he cannot make restore anything, giving it the wounded, sardonic authority Antonio Bolívar brings — enduring and watching while the scientists' mapping, collecting and curing fail to change the situation.
- powers of the false — The film builds its history from the colonizers' notebooks (the 'unreliable narrator' at its source) and holds botanical and shamanic knowledge side by side without arbitrating, inheriting the staged-truth problem founded by Nanook of the North's re-enacted ethnography.
- stratigraphic (archaeological) image — Gallego's luminous 35mm black and white, made to recall the expedition photographs the film is built on, turns the jungle into silvered ground read like an archive — a forest that is full and has also been emptied of its people by atrocities Colombian history books had softened.