The award-winning film "Snake's Embrace" in the director's biweekly unit of the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 is such a pure and exploratory film. In other words, this is a very magical and magical movie. The film is adapted from two diaries of expeditions: the first is the 1909 diary of the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grunberg, and the other is the American Richard Evan Schultes, known as the father of modern botany, in 1941. Diary.
Through time and space, the film connects what the two great explorers have seen and gained in the virgin Amazon jungle with a local indigenous priest, showing the beauty and evil in this jungle, and those in the jungle to audiences all over the world. The living conditions of an unknown civilization.
The magical and magical thing is that only the black and gray images are left in the movie, the bright sky, the black and gray earth and jungle, and the endless flowing Amazon river. In addition to the poetic black and white images of the Amazon rainforest, the director also intends to have a dialogue between humans and gods. In the process of responding to the erosion and invasion of Amazon civilization by modern civilization, I lamented the sorrow and insignificance of human beings, and sought the upper limit of the spiritual world.
The whole film is full of magical realism. At the end of the film, the male protagonist stands on the shore after standing by his side. The "miraculous" scene of a group of white butterflies flying around is the culmination of the naturalism that the film promotes and promotes the whole film. It is like an Amazon elegy, full of wild sacredness, sentimental and romantic.
For my personal viewing experience, this movie also has a unique sense of mystery. Because many languages such as Spanish, German, Portuguese, Catalan and Latin appeared in the movie, and the subtitles of the version I watched were translated from English subtitles, it seemed that the translation was not ideal in many places. The obscure dialogue brings the mysterious color to this movie, and there are a lot of words that need to be comprehended by oneself or cannot be understood at all. Therefore, the black-and-white texture of the picture, the impact of the long lens is even more violent.
The first story of the movie takes place in the early 20th century. A Kovano witch doctor desperately believes that his tribe has been slaughtered by the whites, and that he is the last survivor of the tribe. Therefore, he lived alone in the depths of the Amazon jungle, isolated from the world.
Until one day, a German explorer arrived and told him that there were many of his people on the other side of the river. The reason for this explorer's arrival was that he was suffering from a strange disease, and countless witch doctors were helpless, saying that only the mysterious herbs in the legend of the Kovano tribe could heal him.
Although, as an indigenous witch doctor, he did not want to believe in white people or help them, but he hoped to find his own people through German explorers, so he promised to take German explorers to find the legendary mysterious herbal medicine. . The first story of the movie also begins from this point.
Another story in the movie is in 1941, nearly half a century later, when the witch doctor was already an old man, still living alone in the deep jungle. He said that he hadn't heard the stone speak to him for a long time, and he could no longer hear the sound of everything, and his memory was getting worse and worse, and he even forgot his daily life skills.
At this time, another American explorer set foot in the jungle again, and once again came to search for the mysterious herbal medicine. After hesitating, he finally agreed to his request and took him on the road. The witch doctor once again set foot on the path that the young one had walked half a century ago. Many years ago, the memories and disasters left in this jungle were once again awakened.
The two stories in the movie are aimed at finding this mysterious herbal medicine, but in fact, this herbal medicine does not exist in reality. pain. The two stories are staggered, and the magnificent Amazon River and the mysterious Amazon jungle are slowly unfolding before us along with these two journeys.
As the movie progresses, we slowly discover that this is not a simple and easy adventure movie. Behind the story of the movie is the cruelest history of disasters in this primitive jungle. The keywords of disasters are rubber wars and Christ. Missionary.
From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, rubber was in urgent need of industrial development, especially the automobile industry. The natural rubber in the Amazon River Basin suddenly became "black gold", and the price soared. At that time, "black gold diggers" from all over the world poured into the Amazon River basin to develop rubber plantations, and everyone wanted to become a rich man because of this. Therefore, Manaus, a city in the hinterland of the Amazon River Basin, turned out to be one of the richest cities in the world.
In the era of rubber fever, a large number of industrial civilization machinery and weapons poured into the primitive forest of the Amazon, and the persecution of local indigenous people is self-evident. With the backward civilization and weapons of the local residents, they are completely unable to resist the guns and artillery after the industrial revolution. The group of witch doctors was also killed by the white men who came to look for rubber.
As they went ashore to supply supplies, they even saw a mess left after the whites killed the local natives. The last remaining person was seriously injured, begging them to kill himself.
With the rubber fever pouring into the Amazon, the white people brought not only cruel massacres, but also persecution of local civilization. As we all know, following the Industrial Revolution, Christians began to spread their culture around the world. To a certain extent, it can be said that this is the solidification of their rule by the rulers and slave owners, and the method of preaching is not as gentle as imagined.
In the movie, they met a Christian missionary in the jungle in 1909. He violently forced the local children to learn Spanish and believe in God. He called the local cultural beliefs the evil spirits and devils, and brutally flogged them. There are unhappy children. These children are the orphans whose parents died in the rubber war.
In 1940, this same place was ruled by a brutal ruler. He was supposed to be a member of the Mission of Christ, but after entering this barren land, his ambitions of desire continued to swell. Not only did he enslave the aborigines, he finally became crazy enough to claim that he was the Messiah Savior.
As they traveled farther and farther, all the conflicts and fusions between the wildness of the Amazon jungle and the violence brought by the civilized world were revealed to everyone. The civilized world brought bloody disasters to them, and it also brought irreversible changes to the local culture.
There is an interesting detail in the movie. After the German explorer took his compass by the Turkish chief, he insisted on taking it back. Because he felt that the local people's culture should be based on the stars and the sun to judge the direction, and the compass will only make the local aborigines who do not have the ability to preserve history lose their own history.
But the whole movie has no tendency, but a documentary-like format that shows what happened in this land one by one. As for whether the collision and mutual influence between the civilized world and this wild world will ultimately produce good or bad results, the movie does not give an answer.
Perhaps no one can give the answer to this question. In terms of the historical process, the entry of the civilized world has indeed allowed the wild World Cup to be integrated into the global culture, and it has also brought the process of industrialization to the local Tu people; but on the other hand, the countless blood and tears on the road of this kind of progress are also to the local people. A persecution of indigenous people.
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