XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

From Ethnographic to Self-Performing Indian: Tizuka Yamasaki and the Challenges of Adapting the Female Pajé to the Screen

• In Event: Underrepresented voices in Brazilian Cinema: Presence, Tensions and Representations

Abstract

Robert Stam first explored Brazil’s cinematic European/indigenous encounter in his seminal Tropical Multiculturalism (1997), later categorizing the representation of Brazilian native peoples on screen during the twentieth century through a series of evolving tropes: the romantic/noble savage, the documented, the modernist, the patriotic, and the tropicalist Indian (2003). While in his most recent monograph, Indigeneity and the Decolonial Gaze (2023), Stam explores the “indigenization of social theory” vis-à-vis the surge in indigenous media and self-representation in the Americas after centuries of biased ethnographic misrepresentations, he nonetheless admits that recent instances of agency highlighted by the Yamomami community are exceptions within the history of dominant paradigms both mediating and mediatizing non-western or other knowledges.

This presentation analyzes Tizuka Yamasaki’s Encantados (2017) as emblematic of the challenge of rationalizing the presentation of indigenous knowledges and dominant cultural conventions. An adaptation of cabocla pajé Zeneida Lima’s autobiography, O Mundo Místico dos Caruanas e a Revolta de Sua Ave (1992, later retitled and rereleased), the “didactic” film not only features Lima in a cameo role, but its fraught production and distribution history—which led to the truncated movie being released only eight years after filming wrapped—illustrates the continued challenges faced by ethnographic representations of marginalized cultural production, in this case Lima’s shamanism and communion with natural spirits in Pará. Despite being produced by Globo Filmes and winning multiple awards, the feature length received little publicity and was watched by less than 50,000 spectactors. Dialoguing with Stam’s recent theorizations of revisionist adaptation and self-representation, I not only explore the production process, but also comparatively analyze the success of adaptive decisions that Yamasaki and screen writer Victor Navas took in order to bring the book to life. Indeed, the story of how Yamasaki came to choose to read and pursue the autobiography, dedicating a year to research and pre-production on the island of Marajó became central to paratextual marketing campaigns. I conclude by evaluating the compromises that Yamasaki, who has sought to address feminist and indigenous Brazilian themes in previous works, is forced to make in her final product.

Author

• Frans Weiser, University of Georgia