Regional Depiction in Contemporary Film

Abstract

GEOGRAPHERS, long interested in documenting history of cultural landscapes, increasingly explore subjective and ideological origins of environmental images. Recent studies in cultural geography, influenced by critical literary theory, thrust issues such as class, race, values, language, gender, and sexuality into forefront of geographical debate (Tuan 1974; Jackson 1989). Although geographers have studied literary and other texts in landscape representation, so far popular film has attracted little serious geographical study. Yet film and filmmakers provide a rich artistic medium for regional analysis. As with other texts, films are best not treated as transparent realist documents; instead, a director's auteuristic vision, circumstances of film production, and cultural preoccupations of time inevitably filter and even distort empirical regional realities. With this essential caveat in mind, I seek to demonstrate geographical utility of film analysis by critically examining relationship of and culture in three contemporary popular movies about Amazonia. The immense, luxuriantly verdant, yet imperiled Amazon Basin has inspired filmmakers to grapple with problematic interrelationships of society and environment. If film reflects preoccupations of director, along with cinematic genre and cultural moment, Amazonia has served as an especially pliable medium for filmmaker's artistic and political viewpoints. Views on rain forest are polarized. For John Boorman, director of The Emerald Forest (1985), encroachment of modern civilization on the most exuberant celebration of life ever to have existed on earth is another metaphor for our insensitivity to nature (Holdstock 1985, 205). Werner Herzog has a more jaundiced view. He laments rain forest's growth and overwhelming lack of order (Blank and Bogan 1984, 243). Herzog's attitude mirrors his own personal struggles to complete two films, Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), in midst of political intrigue, logistical disaster, and even death of crew members in remote areas of Peruvian Amazonia. Boorman and Herzog are only two of many directors to depict, in their own distinctive fashions, Amazonian rain forest and its peoples in an overarching conflict between culture and nature. Other contemporary films on Amazonia with environment-society themes include Armando Robles Godoy's The Green Wall (1970); Jorge Bodansky's Iracema (1980); Hector Babenco's At Play in Fields of Lord (1991); and John McTiernan's The Medicine Man (1992). The seemingly dominant role of directors in conceptualizing and realizing Amazonian films lends credence to auteurism, a theory of film interpretation that first emerged in France in 1950s. The auteur approach assumes that film directors, guided by their own singular artistic visions, are primary creators of works of art rather than mere technicians transferring a story to screen. Auteuristic vision, however, is not an entirely sufficient criterion for deciphering cinematic meaning. Additional forces affect film ideology: general cultural concerns of historical period; specific studio and production circumstances, such as financing, relative autonomy of director, and logistical conditions on set; and broad tradition or genre of a film (Mast and Kawin 1992). AGUIRRE Director Werner Herzog, a major force in postwar German cinema, filmed Aguirre, Wrath of God along Urubamba, Huallaga, and Nanay rivers of eastern Peru in early 1972 (Magill 1985, 47). The visually stunning film about an ill-fated Spanish expedition into Amazon Basin portrays a historical figure, Basque renegade Lope de Aguirre, who rebelled against Spanish rule in New World (Keen 1991, 66-69). Herzog actually combines and dramatizes aspects of two separate sixteenth-century journeys. …

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