Documentary
Los invencibles shuaras del Alto Amazonas
Carlos Crespi Croci · 1927
Synopsis
The film, which is silent, follows in four parts the Salesian mission among the Shuars of Santiago de Méndez. The first goes from the sea off Genoa to views of Guayaquil and Cuenca, then to the arrival in the Amazon; the second shows the customs of the village and hunting; the third, the tzantza feast, the ritual shrinking of heads, is its most striking sequence; the fourth shows the work of the missionaries and of the ladies' committee that supported them.
Context
Shooting took place in 1926 at Santiago de Méndez, in Morona Santiago, with the cameraman Carlo Bocaccio and the Ecuadorian photographer Rodrigo Bucheli; of the two thousand five hundred metres of film, the editing kept half. The screening took place on 26 February 1927 at the Edén theatre in Guayaquil. The negative wore out over the course of the screenings, and the fire at the Cornelio Merchán institute in Cuenca scattered in 1962 what remained: seven minutes have survived. A reconstruction carried out in 1995 by Ulises Estrella for the national film archive, with the support of UNESCO and the University of Mexico, completes these fragments with period images and follows the original screenplay.
Who it is for
Seventeen minutes in the reconstructed version, silent, viewable online. Only seven minutes come from the 1926 shoot; the tzantza sequence may be disturbing.
Prizes and reception
The first Ecuadorian ethnographic documentary and one of the first in Latin America, a precursor of the country's cinema along with Le Trésor d'Atahualpa.