The films in the following section deal with the invasion of the rain forest by outsiders in search of land or wealth or Eden. They span 40 years of film making, and show changing perceptions of the rain forest and its inhabitants. Separately or together, the films represent the great vastness of the forest, and its vulnerability.
Green Mansions 1959
Green Mansions was an early rain forest film. It is a magnificent film, with beautiful cinematography of the vast green blanket and dramatic cascades. The actors, Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins, are excellent. The film is dated, however, and shows a North American view of the rain forest and the Forest People which is passé. Anthony Perkins is seeking gold to avenge the murder of his father. Audrey Hepburn is the daughter of a North American hermit and his adored forest wife. The local tribe believes her to be a witch, and barters with Perkins, gold for her capture. He, in fact, is captivated by her and learns the story of her parents. Unwilling to give the natives what they demand, Perkins becomes the unwitting agent of destruction. Sad, as only 1950’s romances can be. The forests of Venezuela, Colombia and Guano are fabulous, but the actors who play the inhabitants are not Amazonian, but North American Indian and Japanese.
La Muralla Verde (The Green Wall) 19 70
La Muralla Verde, written and directed by Armando Robles Godoy in 1970, is a bold statement about the vanity and power of the political military government, the incompetence of its bureaucracy and its inability to meet the basics of survival. The story is Godoy’s own, written from his experience as a homesteader in the Peruvian rain forest. A biting criticism of the administration,
La Muralla Verde
was banned in Peru for many years. The result was increased attention elsewhere in the world. It won numerous awards for artistic merit and was hailed as the beginning of a new genre in Latin American film.
A business man tires of city life- the economy is preventing him from achieving financial security. He marries and decides to go to the rain forest to farm. It takes years to achieve his objective, but finally he takes his wife and baby to the forest, walking several miles into his land from the river. Bureaucracy follows him to the forest; government surveyors cut down his coffee plants. He goes to the city to try to untangle this bureaucratic mess, just as the president decides to visit rain forest Peru, causing all traffic to be halted. In the forest the child, now four, is bitten by a snake. The rush to the hospital for anti-venom is an agony of barriers: the long walk to the river, the infrequency of busses or trucks to carry them due to the presidential visit, the search for a doctor, and finally the search for the man who has the keys to the lock up where the anti-venom is kept. The boy dies just as the anti-venom is injected. The funeral is a silent ordeal of pickup and canoe. The parents return to the forest.
As in
Green Mansions
we see a position taken by the makers of
The Green Wall
that is now not PC. Only a decade after
Green Mansions
, the rain forest is a romantic return to nature for the city dweller. In the films to follow, the encroachment of settlers into the rain forest is seen as a problem, a threat to the forest.
The Emerald Forest 1985
Reportedly taken from an actual incident, the story is the disappearance of a boy into the rain forest. The father is an engineer on a dam in the forest, and brings his young family to live with him in the adjacent city. His son, perhaps five or six, is fascinated by the forest. He watches the animals and follows leaf cutter ants. He sees the people of the forest, and reports this to his father. Arrows fly and the boy suddenly disappears. His parents look for him for the ten years it takes to complete the dam. After many excursions up stream, the father learns the indigenous language, and finally finds someone who recognizes the arrow as coming from the Invisible People. Meanwhile, the boy has grown up with the Invisible People and married. He goes off to find the Sacred Stones, despite danger from the cannibal Fierce People who are invading the territory of the Invisible People as they are pushed out of their lands by the shrinking forest. Father and son find and rescue each other from the Fierce People. Daddee, as the boy remembers him is wounded, and spends time in the village recuperating. He comes to appreciate this life and to understand that his son is no longer a child of the city, or the Dead World as the villagers call the treeless land, and that he will not come home with him. He returns to the city to tell his wife that the boy is alive, but lost forever. Then the village is attacked and the young women, including the boy’s wife, are taken to be prostitute-slaves in a back woods rubber settlement. The boy goes to Daddee for help against a civilization he cannot penetrate with stone age tools. In his journey he realizes that the dam is bringing the Dead World closer. They rescue the women, and escape back into the forest to discover the village has been burned by the Fierce People and everyone is dead. The boy becomes the leader of the new people. He prays to the frogs to bring enough rain to destroy the dam. Daddee agrees with the analysis if not the method, and blows up the dam. The child who is a man slides his canoe into the river to begin again.
Rain forest habitat is well represented in
The Emerald Forest
. We see numerous animals: leaf cutter ants, green river snakes, deer, sloth, porcupine, jaguar, eagles, toucans and parrots. The forest people look fight; they carry armadillo pouches and sleep in hammocks. They wear loin cloths. The machinations of the film do not detract from its beauty or its ability to help students visualize forest life, and understand the conflict between the Forest People and the Dead World.
Mosquito Coast 1986
Harrison Ford is a man fed up with the bureaucracy of society, not unlike the character in
The Green Wall
. He is less sane, however, possessed by a manic drive to create Utopia in the forest, beginning with ice. This jungle is The Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. There are indigenous forest people who are suspicious and curious about their new neighbor, bearing an attitude we see in many of these later rain forest films: a tolerant acceptance of the white man’s way evaporates when his ideas collapse.
This jungle is muddy and uncomfortable, much like
The Green Wall
. It is no romantic escape from the Dead World. Ford’s early successes and later catastrophe’s repeat themes from other films. The rain forest is more powerful that the man. The rain forest cannot be forced into acceptance; it bides its time and destroys all. This is in contrast to other films which depict the rain forest as vulnerable, no match for man and machines.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord 1992
Peter Mattheison’s 1965 novel from which the film derives is a classic work of fiction with themes of timeless power: man versus man; man versus nature- religious hypocrisy; I religious symbols without depth; uncivilized civilization. Filmed in Amazonia, the story takes place at a jungle outpost which contains a Brazilian Catholic Priest and church, a bar with brothel and a North American Christian missionary couple. Darryl Hannah, after whom everybody lusts, is a woman of generous and simple faith and her husband John Lithgow, the confident founder of this mission in the jungle. To this setting come two no-count drifters: half Comanche Louis Moon and his ne’er do well partner on the lam. They appear not to have the right papers for their plane and are marooned. Also come missionaries in training, Kathy Bates, a doubtful and judgmental Christian, her long suffering husband, who is the most faithful of the group, and their ten year old son who is ready to explore. Recently a Catholic mission deep in the forest has been attacked by the forest people, and all the missionaries killed. The local military wants the natives pacified, by what ever means. He wants the plane to bomb them if the new Christians are not successful. Moon becomes full Amazonian Indian in order to help them avoid the immanent threat of expansion into the jungle. The people believe Moon is a god of vengeance. Off to the jungle go the missionaries. They establish a functioning missionary village, with armed guards and recently converted Christian natives. Lithgow and Hannah leave the new missionary family at the village. The boy is accepted by the local children and plays all day with them, naked in the jungle. The man takes his work seriously, recognizes the native Christian conversion as a shallow level commitment, and seeks to attract the Wild Ones with metal instruments and food. Kathy Bates spirals down toward madness, each day more fearful. The boy dies of Black Water Fever, much lamented by the Indians. Kathy Bates loses all touch with reality and is returned to the town. John Lithgow pales in his wife’s eyes in contrast to the earnest faith of the other missionary. Moon steals a kiss from Darryl Hannah, which becomes a flu that devastates the Indians. Against all the white people’s protest the missionary gives Moon medicines to help them. He goes to the village to do what he can and arrives at the decimated village as the planes fly over, dropping bombs to “pacify the natives.” He lies dead, on his back with his arms spread wide in a cross, wife insane, son dead, his mission destroyed and the Indians dead or scattered. But he understands that any contact, whatever its intention, with the outside world will destroy the rain forest people. He understands that he has not understood, and has brought about the destruction of the very people he wanted to help.
The Burning Season 1995
The Burning Season is the story of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian defender of the forest. Born the son of a rubber tapper, and witness to the brutality of the rubber barons, Mendes was determined to become educated so that he might protect his people. He became a lawyer and a charismatic leader in the non-violent struggle to defend the rain forest. He won international acclaim from environmentalists, although he proclaimed that he was not an environmentalist, but a protector of the rubber trees, and thereby the survival of his people who depended on them for their livelihood. He fought off cruel rubber traders, land hungry ranchers, big business and governmental policy. At the peak of his success he was assassinated. But like other heroes, his message was not diminished by death.
The Burning Season
is an important movie to teach rain forest politics.
The film shows a new alliance of forest people, rubber tappers and public figures united to protect it, as well as interested ecologists on an international level. The forest dwellers are not dangerous nor naive. The focus is on united non-violent means to problem resolution, as typical of this decade as each of the other films were of theirs.