Shifting Territories: The Amazonian Moving Image

• In Event: Diáspora, exilio y trayectorias internacionales: el rol del cine en la construcción y contemplación de “Nuestra América”

Abstract

Although exile and diaspora refer primarily to the movement of people across fixed borders, territories themselves can undergo geopolitical and symbolic shifts that compound human experiences of displacement. A multi-cultural region that has resisted appropriation by imperial and national projects and that has undergone successive waves of colonization, the Amazon is a site where the movement of populations occurs in conjunction with territorial reconfigurations that result from contending world-views, practices, and projects. There are multiple Amazons—and multiple images of the Amazon that are (re)constructed through cultural forms such as cinema. Films have an affinity with cartography insofar as they construct relationships between spaces and can function as “graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world,” to borrow an influential definition of the map. Films, however, can enable forms of relating to space that, far from cartographic mastery, promote sensorial and affective immersions and the engagement with multiple embodied perspectives—making the medium an ideal means for spatial thinking and critique. By examining governmental newsreels made in the Amazon during the 1970s in dialogue with the Amazonian segment of Carlos Diegues’ classic 1979 film, Bye bye Brasil (a segment that is aptly bookended by the visual inclusion of national maps in the mise-en-scene and that is punctuated with sensations of exilic displacement in a rapidly changing landscape), this paper proposes an inclusive and comparative research agenda for the audiovisual rendering of shifting territorial imaginings—the Amazonian moving images.

Author

• Gustavo P Furtado, Duke University