Reenactment and A-filiation in Serras da Desordem

Abstract

This chapter discusses Serras da Desordem (Hills of Chaos) (Andrea Tonacci, 2007), which concerns an isolated Indian who reenacts atrocities that happened thirty years earlier, including his displacement and wandering until making contact with a rancher’s family and eventually rejoining the remainder of his group. The chapter analyzes the film’s hybrid texture, its mix of reenacted scenes with archival and TV and media images and the implication of cinema in the record of multiple instances of exploitation throughout Brazilian history. It also studies two long-span films returning to events that happened twenty years earlier—Twenty Years Later: A Man Marked to Die (Eduardo Coutinho, 1964–1984) and Corumbiara (Vincent Carelli, 2006) on first contact with isolated indigenous groups as a comparison with Tonacci’s approach to return and to Brazilian history. The chapter considers Tonacci’s self-ethnographic early projects and his experimental films in relation to this ambitious allegory on Brazilian exploitation in the 1970s; it reads Tonacci’s untranslated communications by Carapiru as a willed form of opacity, an enforced, enacted process of dislocation and alienation and an indictment of Brazilian politics, a process termed “a-filiation.”