Journeys of Redemption: Discoveries, Re-Discoveries and Cinematic Representations of the Americas
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: JOURNEYS OF REDEMPTION: DISCOVERIES, RE-DISCOVERIES AND CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE AMERICAS Claudia Barbosa Nogueira, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Associate Professor Phyllis A. Peres School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures/Latin American Studies Center Journeys of Redemption utilizes the concept of redemption to consider how the Americas are contextualized topologically and chronologically, and, as such, how these spaces are given narrative meaning. By relying upon a definition of redemption that simultaneously considers spiritual deliverance with material recovery, the Americas become, at once, interpretable as contested grounds and promised destinations. Following Chapter One, the “Introduction” to this project, Chapter Two provides the methodological foundation, describing theoretical approaches towards a definition of redemption that will serve as the underlying basis for my argument. The following chapters all apply redemption in readings of films that may be categorized as captivity narratives. Chapter Three considers how Bruce Beresford’s 1991 film, Black Robe, utilizes redemption in its depiction of a Jesuit priest’s interactions with Indigenous groups (such as the Huron and Iroquois) in seventeenth-century French Canada. Chapter Four examines redemption in the Brazilian film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971). This film about a nameless Frenchman’s captivity among the sixteenth-century Tupinambás, illustrates the ways in which redemption has functioned, and continues to function, as a foundational contributor to colonial and nationalist projects. Chapter Five focuses on Cabeza de Vaca (Echevarría, 1991), a Mexican film recounting Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s historic sixteenth-century trek across much of North America. The spiritual focus of this film is studied in terms of how it both challenges and corroborates the historical Cabeza de Vaca’s own accounts of redemption. Chapter Six considers filmic representations of borders and border crossings, thereby examining how the Americas become shaped by distinction and congruence, how the terrain of this hemisphere becomes, at once, the ever receding Promised Land and a space in dire need of redemption and exorcism. The French film Le Salaire de la peur (Clouzot, 1953) is here compared to the German film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Herzog, 1973) in an attempt to elucidate how both of these texts create senses of displacement through their associations of the Americas with perdition. Finally, Chapter Seven attempts to juxtapose my readings of redemption in the contexts of pilgrimage, the Americas, and film. JOURNEYS OF REDEMPTION: DISCOVERIES, RE-DISCOVERIES, AND CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE AMERICAS by Claudia Barbosa Nogueira Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 Advisory Committee: Professor Phyllis Peres, Chair Professor John Fuegi Professor Regina Harrison Professor Eyda Merediz Professor Carla Peterson © Copyright by Claudia Barbosa Nogueira 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………...………1 Chapter Two: Promised Lands: Redemption and Colonial Encodings of the Americas…………………………………………………14 Chapter Three: Redemption, History, and the Fragmented Body in Black Robe……………………………………………………...61 Chapter Four: Redemption and History in Como era gostoso o meu francês…………………………………………………...95 Chapter Five: Redemption, History, and the Indigenous in Cabeza de Vaca………………………………………………..149 Chapter Six: Borders and Redemption in Le Salaire de la peur and Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes………………………………….191 Chapter Seven: Vanishing Points: A Journey Home…………………………..227 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..238 ii Chapter One: Introduction One of the most famous anecdotes concerning film history recounts the reaction of spectators to the first public screening of a film, the Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat in 1895. According to legend, the recorded image of a train pulling into a station so shocked the viewers, that they jumped up from their seats and ran away from the café where the film was being screened. Supposedly, these first viewers could not distinguish the recorded space of the film from the space they inhabited, and the movement of the train disrupted their understandings of distance and representation. Although there is speculation as to the veracity of this anecdote, it is still highly significant that, from the onset of filmic reproductions and projections, the medium has defined itself not just through its ability to realistically depict motion, but through its implicit challenge to spectatorial assumptions of space and time. Film, then, has historically been understood to be both a depiction of movement as well as a moving force in and of itself. The recordings of foreign lands and peoples, a definitive feature of film throughout its history, and the transportation of these recordings to all corners of the world, made of film an industry and art form intricately connected to the production and consumption of “otherness.” The film spectator, as the early viewers of L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat, has been, and still is, a mediator of place and time, engaged in a transaction that demands the distinction between a “here” and a “there,” a “them” and an “us,” a “past” and a “now.” 1 Therefore, watching a film is both an interpretative and a performative project, wherein one subsumes the motions of others and assumes a vantage of distinction. Journeys of Redemption has, as its basis, an understanding that film, like any other cultural production, both shapes and is shaped by the social, political, and economic contexts from which it is produced. This project, then, is an analysis of film through informative systems of identification as well as an analysis of cultural foundations and assumptions through the filmic medium. Also, because of my focus on the ways in which filmed movement translates into identificatory movement, Journeys of Redemption considers how representations of journeys into “foreign” terrain demand a specific engagement from the viewer that, quite literally, places and re-places understood origins and destinations. The represented journeys that comprise the material of my investigation, then, all share the trait of enacting a narrative discourse of belonging and dis-belonging. In addition to my concentration on film and its subsequent encodings of place, time, and subjectivity, I am also concerned with the ways in which colonial travel discourses in general routinely engage in similar demands from readers. Of course, film occupies an important place within colonialist traditions – not only did films bring images of the colonies to colonial seats of power and, likewise, bring images of metropoli to those colonized who bore the brunt of colonial oppression, the medium also historically promoted a viewing practice that replicated the systems of power that, in large part, fueled it. This is to say that the film-viewing public learned to “place” itself against what was being represented, granting the public’s positionality a power derived from distance and distinction. In this way, even those oppressed by 2 colonialist and capitalist regimes, can derive pleasure through identification with the camera’s supposedly objective position1. This dissertation also, therefore, explores the ways in which colonialist representations of the “other,” specifically the American “other,” operate through a mechanism much like that which I have attributed to film. Journeys to America during the early colonial period were depicted as travel to the borders of the European imagination, relegating all that was encountered in this hemisphere beyond understood places and times. In this way, one can imagine readers of Walter Ralegh’s descriptions of headless savages in the Guyanas in his The Discoverie of the Large Rich, and Beautifull Empire of Guiana as being similarly shocked as those French viewers of the first screening of L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat. Descriptions of the Americas, such as those by Sir Walter Ralegh, Stephen Greenblatt argues, created a sort of “rift,… [a] cracking apart of contextual understanding in an elusive and ambiguous experience of wonder, [that] is a central recurring feature in the early discourse of the New World” (19). Similar to the wonders of cinematic movement, the wonders elicited by travel to the New World necessitated both an inclusion of the “other” within a colonial context and, more significantly, a reassertion of the place of the European within this newly formed contextualization. Finally, Journeys of Redemption explores another representative movement, through which to position and compare the movements evident in cinema and 1 I should note that resistant film and viewing practices have existed throughout the history of cinema. However, these practices have consistently been relegated as divergent and not, therefore, as the established traditions. Also, I need to make clear that not all “established” practices equally represented that which was foreign. I am addressing hegemonic production and consumption practices (to be found in cinemas around the world, from the silent films of Brazil’s Golden Age of Cinema, to Hollywood’s monopoly on distribution, ensuring a globally recognized U.S. nationalist identification) that depend on “primacy” and “authority”