Embrace of the Serpent: The Amazonian Monochrome Odyssey

The river film has a fixed shape. A white man goes upstream, the jungle works on him, and he comes back changed or he does not come back. Conrad wrote it, Coppola filmed it, Herzog filmed it twice, and every version of it has the same structural flaw baked in: the forest exists to happen to a European. Embrace of the Serpent (2015) takes that machine apart by the simple, devastating expedient of putting the boatman at the centre and making the white men luggage.

Ciro Guerra’s third feature runs around two hours, is shot in luminous black and white by David Gallego, and was the first Colombian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It took the Art Cinema Award at Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2015. It is spoken in a stack of Amazonian languages alongside Spanish, Portuguese, German, Catalan and Latin, and the multiplicity is load-bearing; the film is about what happens to knowledge when the language holding it is exterminated.

I caught up with it on disc a couple of years after release, expecting a worthy prestige item. It is a horror film. Nobody sells it that way, and by the last twenty minutes it is running the same engines as anything in the cannibal cycle, with the ethics inverted. The Italians went to the Amazon to film atrocity and invented the atrocity. Guerra went to the Amazon and found the atrocity in the archive, already written down, by the men who caused it.

Two rivers

The structure is a double journey, roughly forty years apart, cut against each other throughout.

In the earlier strand, around 1909, a German ethnographer, Theodor (Jan Bijvoet), is dying and is brought to Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a young shaman living alone in the forest, who is described as the last of his people. Theodor needs the yakruna, a sacred plant that can save him. Karamakate agrees to guide him and Theodor’s Indigenous companion Manduca upriver.

In the later strand, around 1940, an American botanist, Evan (Brionne Davis), arrives with Theodor’s journals and finds Karamakate old (Antonio Bolívar), living alone, hollowed out. This Karamakate calls himself a chullachaqui — an empty husk that walks around looking like a person. He has forgotten what he knew. He agrees to guide Evan to the yakruna because he wants his own memory back.

The two characters are based on real people: Theodor Koch-Grünberg, the German ethnologist, and Richard Evans Schultes, the American ethnobotanist, whose published diaries of Amazonian travel Guerra used as source material. Karamakate is invented, and the invention is the whole argument. Guerra takes two real records written by outsiders and hands the film to the man those records could only ever describe from outside.

Why it works: the monochrome and the cross-cut

Two craft decisions carry the picture.

The black and white is the first, and Guerra has been explicit that it comes from the photographic archive — the early expedition plates are how these places entered the European record, and the only images of that world that survive from 1909 are monochrome. Shooting in colour would have been a lie about what we have. Gallego’s photography exploits the choice ruthlessly: the river becomes a black mirror, the canopy becomes a wall of silver, and skin, water and leaf all render in the same tonal register, which quietly dissolves the visual apartheid that colour jungle films always enforce.

The cross-cut is the second. Guerra matches the two journeys shot for shot in places, so that a canoe in 1909 rhymes with a canoe in 1940 and you begin reading the two rivers as one river. Because the later strand is a return, every location arrives pre-haunted. You see a mission, and then you see what the mission became. The film builds its dread out of editorial adjacency rather than out of anything in the frame, which is the mechanism the long take as an instrument of dread inverts and the twist ending and the economy of the reveal formalises. Here it is used for grief.

There is a third decision worth naming, which is the film’s refusal to subtitle its own respect. Karamakate speaks his languages; the Europeans speak theirs; and Guerra never once has a character explain a belief to a visitor for the audience’s benefit. When Karamakate tells Theodor to throw his luggage in the river because the load is offending the water, the film does not adjudicate. Theodor is furious, and the film’s sympathies are visibly with the man who wants the crates gone, and no line of dialogue arrives to soften it. That withholding is what makes the last act possible.

Antonio Bolívar deserves the credit the awards circuit gave to the film in general. He was an Ocaina elder, one of a handful of remaining speakers of his language, and he plays old Karamakate with a terrible flat calm — a man performing being a person because there is no one left who would know the difference. He died in 2020.

The real ancestor

Everyone says Herzog, and they say Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo. The sharper cross-reference is Fata Morgana (1971), Herzog’s desert film, in which a landscape is filmed as though it were another planet and a creation myth is read over the top — see Herzog’s desert science fiction. Guerra is doing the same thing to the Amazon: treating it as a coherent cosmology with its own physics that the visitors are too stupid to read.

The other ancestor is Heart of Glass, for what happens to a community when a specific piece of knowledge dies with the man who held it. Guerra’s yakruna and Herzog’s ruby glass are the same MacGuffin: a formula that a culture organised itself around, now irrecoverable, and the film watches people go mad trying to get it back.

For the visual lineage specifically, November is the other 2010s film that used silver monochrome to make a folk cosmology feel documented rather than imagined.

The case against

The film’s second half accelerates into a series of set pieces that are more legible as allegory than as event, and the movement from anthropology to nightmare is abrupt enough that some viewers read it as a change of author. There is a fair charge that Guerra reaches for shock in the last act after two hours of restraint, and that the escalation flatters the audience by making the colonial horror unmistakable at exactly the point where the film had been trusting us to see it unaided.

The more serious objection is one Guerra has faced directly: this is still a Colombian mestizo director making a film about Indigenous knowledge for a festival audience, with white-led financing and a structure built out of two European travel diaries. He worked with the Ocaina, Cubeo, Huitoto, Tikuna and Wanano communities, cast from them, took the film back to them, and let them speak their own languages on screen, which is more than almost any comparable production has done. Whether that resolves the problem is a genuine argument rather than a settled one, and the film is stronger for the fact that it cannot pretend otherwise.

Where to find it, and what next

Boutique physical media, and it circulates on arthouse platforms. The monochrome rewards a good screen enormously; the river sequences turn to sludge on anything cheap.

Then watch I Am Not a Witch, shot by the same cinematographer two years later and applying the same eye to a completely different continent and register. After that, cannibal cinema and the ethics of the fake documentary is the necessary companion piece, covering what the exploitation tradition did with the same jungle, the same camera and none of the conscience — the two traditions are closer than either would like.

The verdict: this is the river film that finally survives its own genre, and it does it by making the man who knows the water the only person in the story with a soul. The last act is where it gets loose, and it earns the looseness. Very few films arrive with a thesis this sharp and remain this beautiful.

Spoilers below

The mission is the hinge, and the film hits it twice.

In 1909, Theodor and Karamakate reach a Capuchin mission run by a Spanish friar who has taken in orphaned Indigenous boys, beats them for speaking their own language, and calls their beliefs devil worship. Manduca, himself a survivor of the rubber plantations, nearly kills the friar. The scene is horrifying in an entirely realistic register: a room, some children, a whip, and a man convinced he is saving them.

In 1940, Evan and old Karamakate arrive at the same mission. The friar is long dead. The boys, grown, have built a cult around a Brazilian who calls himself the Messiah, and they have made him a god, and the whole compound is running a mangled hybrid of Catholic ritual and half-remembered ceremony. It ends in a communal frenzy and, in effect, a eucharist that is also cannibalism. Guerra films it as a horror sequence and it deserves the label.

That double visit is the film’s argument delivered in structure. Kill a people’s knowledge and something grows in the space, wearing the shape of the thing that killed it, and it is worse than either original.

The rubber strand is the other wound. Manduca’s scars and the mutilated men Karamakate encounters on the river are the caucheros, the rubber-boom atrocities, and the film puts them on screen without a lecture.

The ending: Karamakate and Evan reach the last yakruna, which has been cultivated and degraded by the rubber men into a crop. Karamakate burns it. Then he prepares the plant for Evan anyway, and the film moves, for the first and only time, into colour — a torrent of abstraction, geometric and impossible, running for a long minute. Evan comes back. Karamakate is gone. There is only a butterfly, and a very old drawing on a rock face, and the film ends.

The reading I hold to is this. The chullachaqui — the hollow copy — is the film’s central figure and it applies to everyone. Old Karamakate is one. The mission’s Messiah is one. Evan, carrying another man’s diaries upriver, is a copy of Theodor. Guerra’s proposal is that colonialism kills and then leaves husks that walk around performing the people who used to be there. And the last thing Karamakate does before dissolving is hand a white man the knowledge anyway, and burn the source so that it can never be farmed. He gives away the memory and destroys the supply. It is the most generous and most final gesture available to a man who is already gone.