When we started collectively reading[1] The falling sky: Words of a Yanomami shaman, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert[2], in the context of the research network “Cosmoaesthetics of the South”, I was coming from dedicating the last years to develop the hypothesis of cinema as a footprint -trace, recreation- of the ritual crossing of worlds. Despite the resistance, it was difficult to limit the intrusion of this research into reading, not only by the temporal proximity of both studies, but, above all, by their points of contact -especially what concerns shamanic ceremonies, the ecstasy of ritual ingestion of hallucinogenic plants and visions produced by it. Confronted with the overflowing territories of The falling sky, of images, senses and unabated sensations, perhaps the dialogue with recent research has appeared as the possible way, although undesired, of finding a relatively firm ground, in the vertigo of the fall.

As I entered the text and its collective discussion, the initial hypothesis of cinema as a crossing of worlds started losing the specificity of the medium. The understanding of cinema as a trace of the passage between worlds started shifting to an understanding of cinema as a crossing itself, therefore putting in relation, not without friction, the shamanic visions provoked by the ritualistic ingestion of the yãkoana powder, the dream, and the cinematic experience. It is not a question of finding patterns or promoting equivalences among those experiences, but of opening (or keeping open) pathways of discussion that arise at/from the intersection of them. This paper seeks to map the questions that were raised in this interval zone and, paraphrasing the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-Ha[3], this text is not so much a gesture of thinking about, but of thinking nearby The falling sky.

I will begin by addressing the magical dimension of the image, starting from the studies of Palaeolithic parietal art, establishing a dialogue with the cinematic images, understood as survivals of the ecstasy of the ritual crossing worlds. I start mainly from archaeological studies[4] that understand parietal art as essentially shamanic. Secondly, I aim at putting the hypothesis of cinema as a ritual crossing of worlds into dialogue with the so-called “cinema of the forest”[5], a formulation that established a relationship between the visions instigated by the hallucinogenic plant consumption and the overall experience of cinema. I problematize this utterance starting from Kopenawa’s statement that cinema is a dream, as well as the conceptualization of imagein The falling sky -much more complex and embracing movements that the “cinema of the forest” does not allow to glimpse. In a third moment, the shaman and the camera are approached as borderline vehicles passing between worlds, in conjunction with the notion of ciné-trance.[6] In the final part of this paper, which is certainly more of a beginning than a conclusion, I introduce the conception of the cosmos as a cinematographer, pointing to a terrain where the reflection about the image, cinema, and the shamanic experience, in the time of dream orof yãkoana, can continue to be complexified.

The magical dimension of the image

Palaeolithic art is a vast field that is subject to constant scientific updates based on new discoveries or subject to new interpretative hypotheses of the materials already available.[7] David Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes proposed a new framework for the images of this period, understanding Palaeolithic art as resulting from shamanic ceremonies, performed under the effect of trance. These archaeologists concluded on the existence of a Palaeolithic society organized around shamanic ritual practices, based on the development, control and exploitation of states of consciousness. On the one hand, they analysed the altered states of consciousness, presented in neuropsychological studies, having identified “three phases” of figures, which means they verified that each phase corresponded to three types of visions/figures.^[8] On the other hand, they analysed the parietal art in various parts of the world and concluded that the paintings related to the three phases of altered consciousness, identified in the neuropsychological studies.

The figures painted on the surface of the cave walls would therefore be traces of ecstatic visions, but also ways of penetrating “the hidden spiritual world behind the veil of stone” and of “opening the rock on which they were engraved”[9], as the philosopher José Gil[10] points out, following Clottes and Lewis-Williams. The paintings start from the rock’s own surface and its reliefs to drawing animal faces or heads that seem to look at those who face them, their bodies hiding behind the rock, as if they were coming out of it. This use of space leads the above mentioned archaeologists, and Gil after them, to conclude that such images would not be mere “representations” of the shaman’s visions –they do not imitate them-, rather implying a “reciprocal action between its creator and the natural contours to the surface of the wall”, so the shaman-artist recreated his visions and fixed them on the wall, “considered a membrane they had to cross to materialize.”[11]

This interaction was above all done through touching and through the movement of light, the images being born from a “clear-obscure oscillation” that “suggest reciprocal dependencies”[12], as Clottes and Lewis-Williams put it. The images that appeared through the game of lights floated before the shaman who struggled to touch and materialize them. This projection concerned not only the images created by a moving flame but also refers to mental visions, the luminous impressions in the shaman projected on the walls, whose shape he sought to fix through painting. Image creation worked literally by projection. The game of light-obscurity acquired a significant role, as it does in film.

Although the materialization of visions occurred mostly during an altered state of consciousness, Clottes and Lewis-Williams report that most of the time it happened after the trance state. In these cases, the shamans used the traces previously engraved and painted on the walls to “awaken and rediscover the visions (…) and recreate their hallucinatory experiences.”[13] The trace appears simultaneously as the initiator and as a registry of the process. For Gil, these conclusions contribute to characterizing image as having a magical character, since its appearance:

The first man-made images of which there is news (Upper Palaeolithic, 40,000 years B.P.) were perceived as situated in a space they both created and integrated themselves in, but which defined a spatio-temporal world different from the common profane world. (…) This magical feature of the image was born with it.[14]

This magical dimension, associated with the crossing of worlds, survives in the present of the cinematographic images, always in different ways, according to the hypothesis I developed at another opportunity, in dialogue with the filmography of filmmakers such as Raymonde Carasco or Yvonne Rainer.[15] The ecstasy pathos, and certain formulas associated with it, cross times, and return in various ways, in the singular present of the gaze. Since the cinematic image carries and recreates the ecstasy of the ritual crossing of worlds, it is repositioned as a sensory grave of a contact, following Didi-Huberman[16], while presenting itself as the possibility of opening and crossing worlds. The cinema images appear as traces on the surface of the cave -(immemorial) memory of the ritual of crossing- and, on the other hand, are also a gesture that seeks to recreate the crossing itself. 

The cinema of the forest

Anthropologist Peter Gow developed a “phenomenological ethnology of cinema” in Upper Ucayali, Peruvian Amazonia, identifying an analogy between cinema[17] and ayahuasca.^[18] Ayahuasca is both the name of a liana (Banisteriopsis caapi) and the name of the preparation of this plant (a fermented beverage), with hallucinogenic properties, its consumption being common in the Amazon. Its use is mainly spiritual and medicinal, made in the context of a ceremony conducted by the shaman, understood as a healing ritual. For the population of Upper Ucayali, the central property of the plant is to allow seeing what cannot otherwise be seen. Only drinking ayahuasca allows “direct visual access to the true nature of visible appearance, such as the cities and bodies of powerful beings”.[19] Visual hallucinations are therefore one of the most relevant dimensions of the plant and it is because of this point that an analogy between cinema and ayahuasca is established.

For the population of Upper Ucayali, Gow says, ayahuasca is the “cinema of the forest” given the proximity between the overall experience of cinema and the visions suggested by the ritual ingestion of the plant. This approach takes place on three main domains, according to the anthropologist: 1) Both the images of film and the images of ayahuasca allow seeing what would not otherwise be possible to be seen. Ayahuasca permits access to the true visual identity of the forest, and film allows visual access to different and distant places and temporalities; 2) Images or visions, in both cases, are understood as external, having an autonomous origin, and it is not possible to determine or manage their emergence, disappearance or intensification. The shaman, and only him, has the power to conduct the flow of images with songs, but not to produce such images; 3) Both visions of cinema and those of ayahuasca are close in what distinguishes them from the images of dream since the latter would not be created in a conscious state. Anyone who drinks ayahuasca is always conscious, even if consciousness is clearly different while watching a movie or with ayahuasca.

I take these three topics raised by Gow as starting points to reflect on the relationship between visions in a shamanic ritual context and cinema images. Gow’s formulation seems to be based on a gist conception of ayahuasca, falling short comparing the dynamics of production and movement of the visions and images described in other contexts of ritual use of hallucinogens. I am referring specifically to Yanomami shamans’ understanding of images and visions, as presented by Kopenawa and Albert.[20]

Due to its complexity, the understanding of image in The falling sky requires a development that the space in this text does not allow; however, it is not possible to give up approaching it, even if tangentially. Briefly stated, in Yanomami cosmology, all beings have an image (utupë[21]) considered their “corporeal image/vital essence”, an internal image that refers to the form-image that beings had at the time of their mythical creation. Only shamanic vision allows access to these image-beings (by definition, infinite), which the shaman “calls”, “makes go down” and “makes dance”, as well as to the auxiliary spirits, the xapiri.[22] Xapiri’spresentation, and the knowledge brought with them, has a strong aesthetic dimension: xapiri introduce themselves through dance, by melodiously and magnificently singing, “[s]hining with a blinding light” (p.197); they are always “covered in fresh vermillion annatto dye and decorated with shiny black waves, lines, and spots” (p.56-57). Not all xapiri are magnificent and beautiful, “some have eyes behind their head” (p.57) and can be monstrous or evil. Kopenawa continues describing the xapiri:

Their arms are decorated with a profusion of bunches of parrot feathers and macaw tail feathers stuck in armbands made of beautifully bright, smooth beads. A multitude of toucan tails and colourful wisawisama si feathered skins hang from them too. They really cut a fine figure! Omama taught them to dress like this. He wanted them to be magnificent when they come to do their presentation dance for us. (p.57)

The shaman himself becomes a “spirit person” (xapiri th ë), acting and moving as spirit (xapirimuu and xapiri huu), then seeing what xapiri see (p.540). It entails seeing through the invisible. In the words of André Brasil, “shamans not only see the spirits, but are also seen by them, and then see through their eyes; images, therefore, they see and that allow them to see.”[23] After their presentation dances, the xapiri “make us learn the pattern of the forest so that we can see it like they do and protect it” (p.84). Therefore, we can say that this knowledge implies a shared ethical mission, in addition to the accentuated aesthetic dimension. The image is considered active and non-representational; it interprets before being interpreted, it sees us so we can see it, is “empirically non-iconic and non-visible”[24], unfolding “fractally in constant becoming and metamorphisms that have the power to speculate”.[25] To access the image of the “terra-floresta / forest-land” (Urihinari) (p.388), the shaman’s eyes must first die, that is, a certain form of seeing must disappear, to give way to another visuality. The experience of vision involves, as such, the removal of a certain modality of seeing: it is a vision between the sensitive and the intelligible, the corporeal and the spiritual -as we could say of the images in the territory of dreams, to which I will return.

“Devir Outro / Becoming another”, the title of the first part of The falling sky, makes not only reference to this process of becoming a shaman, but, above all, to becoming another[26] in the Yanomami relational ontology. Like other Amerindian cosmologies, the Yanomami people consider that several species primarily shared a human essence that, after certain events, became the species that exist today, with distinct bodies, but maintaining the human perspective. The world is hence understood as being inhabited by diverse types of entities, human and non-human, who apprehend it from different points of view, but always maintain the view of themselves as human. In this sense, the original condition common to humans and animals is not animality, but humanity. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains that, under usual conditions, in Amerindian perspectivism humans see themselves as humans, animals as animals and spirits as spirits, if they can see spirits at all. On the other hand, predatory animals (such as jaguars) see themselves as humans and see humans as prey animals (indigenous animals they hunt), while these prey animals see humans as predatory animals.[27]

As Rodrigo Lacerda sums up, in the context of his research on animism and Mbya-Guarani cinema, an important consequence of Amerindian perspectivism is the relational conception of everything that exists, and that people and things cannot be known by their appearance; their bodies are constantly produced through relationships and actions: “the identities of persons and things cannot be known from their appearance; bodies and things must be constantly produced through actions and relationships.”[28] Shamans are the only ones capable of travelling through different positions or agencies that inhabit the cosmos, being able to see the other’s point of view; only they are capable of doing this “without losing their point of view”.[29] They, therefore, assume a role of “cosmic diplomacy, dedicated to the translation among ontologically heterogeneous points of view”.[30]

Cinema as a (collective) dream

Another significant difference between the descriptions developed by Gow, on the one hand, and by Kopenawa and Albert, on the other, is related to the images of dreams. Gow identifies a clear opposition between ayahuasca and film images, and the images of a dream, while this opposition acquires other hues in the Yanomami ritual context. Although there is no direct reference to film in The falling sky, we can get to know Kopenawa’s perspective on A Última Floresta / The Last Forest (2021), a feature film directed by Luiz Bolognesi and written in collaboration with Kopenawa, which combines documentary observation and staging of relevant events in the Yanomami cosmology. Kopenawa says: “Luiz, cinema is dreaming, right? So, you must come to my village and sleep a few nights here. We have to talk about our dreams to find these stories together.”[31] Cinema is not simply compared to dreaming; cinema is dreaming. To make a film about the Yanomami village, Luiz must sleep there, he must dream, and he has to talk about his dreams, in order to collectively find the stories.

Cinema is understood as dreaming but also extended to the discussion of dreams, it being a process of montage of oneiric content, sharing and collective discussion. In this sense, cinema appears as a shared dream. It refers to dreams that are collectively discussed, but we can also think of this dream in its desire and mission dimensions, as for some authors in the origins of cinema and its theorization. Cinema aspired to be the new language of a new world, “universal, common, understood by all”, as Béla Balázs[32] puts it, presenting itself as a dream -collective aspiration- of a modern world in which all movements would be considered equal, common, filmable. Cinema was expected to permit access to knowledge until then hidden from the human eye, and to awaken energy, unveiling the ambiguities of the world and the ways of behaving towards it.[33] Indigenous cinemas, a designation that acquires a plurality of meanings, seem to insist on and reconfigure the political ambition of cinema, extending it to the cosmopolitics, as several studies have been problematizing.[34]

Kopenawa does not ask Luiz to go to the village to dream, but to dream and talk about dreams, to find the stories. “Finding stories” makes it clear that it is not a matter of creating, but of accessing what is already given. Moreover, the Yanomami shaman does not invite Luiz to the village to drink yãkoana, as we might think of, following Gow and the definition of ayahuasca as the cinema of the forest. In this regard, we could wonder wether dreaming does not prefigure as the yãkoana of the “ordinary people” (p.29), accessible beyond the shamanic hierarchy. In this case, instead of a cinema of the forest, could we speak of cinema as the yãkoana of white people? However, it is not any dream that can be considered cinema, since there are various kinds of dreams, depending on who dreams; ordinary people, for example, “sleep in a ghost state and their images leave them, like that of shamans. Yet it never goes very far away. Only the very good hunters among them can dream a little farther” (p.377). The white people “sleep a lot but only dream of themselves. Their thought remains blocked, and they slumber like tapirs or turtles.” (p.313). They can even sleep without dreams, “[t]hey sleep without dreams, like axes abandoned on a house’s floor” (p.24).

It is not always clear throughout The falling sky what exactly the place of dreaming is in relation to yãkoana. There are times when dreams appear as a kind of antechamber or rehearsal of the visions of yãkoana, others when they are placed alongside, although both are always described as two terrains of knowledge. In terms of its rehearsal quality, the dream may precede, but also follow, the visions elicited by the yãkoana. As a child, Kopenawa was already visited by the xapiri at the time of dream, but dreams were seen as an antechamber to the true power and knowledge allowed by the yãkoana. Before he became a shaman, Kopenawa was already beginning to see in dreams what later materialized with the ritual drinking of yãkoana. As he was told by his stepfather, a shaman and a warrior:

“The xapiri are starting to want you [because he dreams a lot]. Later, when you are a teenager, if you want to acquire the power of the yãkoana, I will truly open their paths to you.” (p.38-39)

Despite already dreaming a lot, the paths of the xapiri can only be truly opened by the yãkoana. In this regard, dreaming seems to be less powerful than drinking yãkoana, constituting an antechamber of knowledge that is not yet full, but partial. On the other hand, the dream also appears as the territory where visions roused by yãkoana are prolonged, continuing “in the time of dream” (p.259), as Kopenawa states. Nevertheless, other passages reinforce the dream as the home of the visions of yãkoana, the temporal territory of their happening, from which I highlight the following passages:

(…) we shamans drink the powder of the yãkoana hi trees, which is the xapiri spirits’ food. Then they take our image into the time of dream. This is why we can hear their songs and contemplate their presentation dances during our sleep. This is our school to really know things. (p.24)

When we truly want to know things, we people of the forest try to see them [xapiri] in dream. This is our way of studying; I have said so. I also learned to see by following these ways. My elders did not merely make me repeat their words! They made me drink the yãkoana and allowed me to admire the dance of the spirits during the time of dream with my own eyes. They gave me their own xapiri and said: “Look! Contemplate the spirits’ beauty! When we are dead, you will continue to make them come down after us. Without them, your thought would go on trying to understand things in vain. It will stay in darkness and oblivion.” (p.379-380)

Drinking yãkoana allows the appearance of visions (and knowledge) which needs, in turn, a specific temporality to happen: the time of dream. In these passages, certain contiguity, and contamination of the territories of dreams and visions of yãkoana are underlined. Although they are not the same, dream and yãkoana drinking are contiguous experiences that overlap at certain moments, mutually prolong, or reconfigure each other. The effort to entirely separate one experience from another is perhaps not just unnecessary, but also contradictory to the ways of thinking, feeling, and doing that The falling sky unfolds to us. Like the dream territory itself, the boundaries between the visions of the yãkoana and those of the dream are also blurred: they extend in trails of light that do not allow the clear identification of a beginning nor the end of something; contiguous spaces can be crossed just by thinking about it; there are mutual affectations and contaminations between the body sleeping in the hammock and its image flying; multiple temporalities, glows, light and darkness erupt, etc.

The shaman and cinema: borderline vehicles

By crossing and being crossed by multiple modes of existence and worlds, the shaman shares what he hears, sees, touches and smells, above all, through songs and bodily movement. The shaman functions as a medium of worlds; his body goes out of itself to become a gesture[35], that is, pure mediality, in this case, of the songs and shines of the xapiri. As he crosses worlds, the shaman simultaneously makes those worlds seen and heard, thus making them accessible to others who can access those worlds through the shaman’s body. A sort of link and vehicle between worlds (because he is between them and because he also instigates this crossing in those who accompany him): so is the shaman and so is the film camera. Both appear as relational devices, with a diplomatic mission: of interspecific articulation, translation, or communication of multiple temporalities, geographies, and perspectives.

The shaman puts different perspectives into relation, in his body in panoramic flight across the chest of the sky; he changes angle, accelerates, or decelerates, approaches and distances himself, moves among games of light, brightness, colour, and focus; he accesses, transits, and makes unknown worlds accessible; his visions proceed by fragments. Can we say that these shamanic modes are close to cinematographic procedures, with all that separates them? That the shaman assumes different (interspecific) perspectives, just as the camera has the power to constantly change its point of view and “look at the environment from the eyes of a different figure at every instant”, as Balázs[36] wrote -at a time when the technical capacities of the cinema were still a novelty?

The intersection between the shamanistic skills and the film camera was also pointed out by Indigenous people, as Ana Carolina Estrela da Costa[37] mentions in her study on Maxakali indigenous cinema. The author states that for some members of that community, with whom she worked in video workshops, the camera was seen as having the capacity to provide continuity between the seen and the unseen, “in a shamanic way”.[38] This continuity, pointed out by the members of the Maxakali community, is both in act and in consequence; in act, since this is what is happening to the shaman, he is between planes, between shots; in consequence, insofar as it allows others to see the continuity of the worlds, in the body of the shaman. This video workshop was named “shaman course”.[39]  When I read the title, I thought it was a course to learn the shaman’s craft, rather than designating the workshop recipients. This misunderstanding allows us to associate in an anecdotal, but, above all, symptomatic way, the relationship between video and shamanism.

Let us now consider the ethnographic and cinematographic work developed by Jean Rouch in the context of his research of over 30 years with the Songhay-Zarma of Niger. The author found several intersections, at various levels, between the experience of cinema and the “public art of possession”[40]. In possession ceremonies, as described by the filmmaker and anthropologist, people in trance are referred to as “spirit horses”, available to be “ridden” by various divine spirits, with whom they communicate. These spirits (sometimes called gods) can be seen by others, since they appear on the body of the possessed, in the provisional forms that their dance acquires, this being their form of visuality. Dance and music are the very happening of trance itself, the ephemeral trace of the crossing of worlds -through gestures, movements, corporality-, while it performs and instigates it. It seems a parallel could be established between Kopenawa’s and Albert’s accounts, and those of Rouch, as far as the body as mediality concerns.

Having filmed the ceremonies, Rouch projected the images to the Songhay-Zarma people. For those who had been filmed as “spirit horses”, these images were enough to stimulate possession again. The author even states that people filmed as spirit horses “react to this art of visual and sound projection in exactly the same way as they react to the public art of possession or the private art of magic and sorcery”.[41] The images had the power to initiate possession, thus cinema appearing as a way of entering (re-entering) the crossing. In other cases, the presence of the camera was enough to initiate possession. The film appears both as the register of the crossing and as a way of initiating the crossing for those who watch the film. The dynamics of the cinema (of filming, but also of projection) and the dynamics of the ritual thus seem to converge.

This intersection between cinema and ritual, the shaman and the camera, the visible and the non-visible, the world of humans and that of spirits, is also addressed by Bernard Belisário in the context of his analysis of Hipermulheres (2011), a film by the Kuikuro collective that shows the preparations of the Kuikuro Ipatse village for the female ritual Jamugikumalu, of the Upper Xingu. By identifying a similarity between the modulation of the women’s bodies and the modulation of the camera, Belisário argues that the ritual functions as a system of cosmic resonances that puts visibilities and invisibilities, distinct spaces, and times into relation:

The staged modulation of the bodies (and the camera) is the visible and audible trace of the field of intensities and affections at play in the ritual. What was invisible and inscrutable to ordinary human beings is allowed to be seen and heard in these performances. That does not mean that the invisible becomes visible in a way that we would start seeing the souls, the dead, the spirits, and the animals. Instead, by a kind of doubling, what we see and hear in the field is also what happens out-of-field.[42]

The dance (of the bodies and of the camera) is, in this context, the gestural appearance of the crossing. Just as the hand of the shaman registers the crossing and simultaneously tries to open the rock on the surface of which he paints, as described by Clottes and Lewis-Williams in relation to Upper Palaeolithic ceremonies, so dance or singing consists in being “between” worlds, in the ceremonies filmed by Rouch or in the Kuikuro rituals. Trace and process, trail and succession seem to be indistinguishable. Rouch gives a paradigmatic example of this relationship between ritual and cinema, based on the experience originating his film Tourou et Bitti. Les Tambours d’Avant (1971). The filmmaker was invited to film a ceremony that had been going on for three days without anyone going into trance. On the fourth day, after several hours without the possession start, he decided to film anyway, in the company of the sound assistant Moussa Amidou. Walking, with camera in hand as a mark of his direct cinema, Rouch filmed a single shot that began with the filming of the animals that might be sacrificed, and then followed by filming the ceremonial orchestra, until the music stopped. Despite considering that the others had given up waiting for the possession to occur, he nevertheless decided to continue filming and it was precisely at this point that the possession occured:

Looking back at this film now, I think that the shooting itself was what unlatched and sped up the possession process. And I would not be surprised if upon showing the film to the priests of Simiri, I learned that it was my own ciné-trance that played the role of catalyst that night.[43]

Ciné-trance would be the name given to that almost religious instant of possession, in which the filmmaker, the crew and the cast become “horses of the spirit” of cinema, allowing their senses to be mediated by the cinematographic devices. João Mário Grilo qualifies as “magical” the moment when the filmmaker decides not to stop filming, “a moment of trance that allows Rouch to organize his movements -his ‘ballet’- as if he were in complete articulation with a superior force, as if he were one of the horses upon which the gods chose to descend for the ritual”.[44] Starting from this notion of Ciné-trance and the experience underlying it, Grilo claims that cinema positions itself as “a borderline vehicle between different worlds that also offers itself as an opportunity to pass between them.”[45]

Robert Flaherty’s direct cinema (cinéma-direct) and Dziga Vertov’s cinema-verité (kinopravda) greatly contributed to Rouch’s understanding of cinema. Of Flaherty, Rouch highlights the invention of a “participative camera” -the main actor. From Vertov, he focuses on the power of the camera -the mechanical eye-, and that of the montage -the organizer of moments in the structure of life- to articulate a truth otherwise inaccessible to the human eye.[46] The cinema of the future is, for Rouch, the one that “brings together the dream of Vertov and Flaherty”, a “cinema-eye-ear” and a camera so participative that it passes “automatically into the hands of those who until then had always been in front of the lens”.[47] Through the camera that sees everything, as well as through the editing that reveals everything, cinema appears, therefore, like the one capable of creating a new way of seeing that constructs its “peculiar truth” or a “filmic truth” (cine-verité)[48]. This implies another articulation between the describable and the visible that depends on cinema and on the gesture of filming.

The Vídeo nas Aldeias / Video in the Villages project, coordinated by Vincent Carelli, fulfils this political dream in the territory of the forest-land[49], by promoting audio-visual training for indigenous people, by providing equipment for their own production, and by creating distribution networks:

Rather than simply appropriating the Image of these people for research purposes or large-scale dissemination, this project aims to promote the appropriation and manipulation of their image by the Indians (sic) themselves. This experience, essential for the communities that live it, also represents a field of research that reveals the processes of identities construction, knowledge transformation and transmission, and new forms of self-representation.[50]

Indigenous cinemas seem to both insist on and reinvent the political mission of cinema. The role displacement between who films and who is filmed radically changes cinema itself, reinventing modes of filming, editing and storytelling, also implying the reconfiguration of the grammar of cinema.[51] A study that aims at reflecting on the intersections between cinema and shamanic visions finds in indigenous cinemas an unavoidable terrain to address. It will certainly be a path for continuity opened by the reading of The Falling sky, in its relationship with cinema.

Cosmic cinematograph

Having arrived here, we could draw attention to three intersections among the shamanic visions provoked by the ritual drinking of yãkoana, dreaming, and the cinematographic experience. These intersections concern i) access to an otherwise unattainable truth, ii) mediation between worlds, with a diplomatic function, and iii) the modes of shamanic experience as cinematographic modes of experience that occur through other means. These axes bring with them various questions -which are certainly not exhausted in the ones I have formulated here-, from which I would like to highlight the following.

We could ask ourselves whether the peculiar truth (of which especially earlier film theorists and filmmakers speak) echoes, in its own tone, in the yãkoana and in the access to the visuality of the forest-land it allows. If cinema grants access to otherwise unattainable truths, can we identify an intersection between this experience and the ritual drinking of yãkoana powder of the yãkoana hi trees? If in order to make a film it is necessary to collectively dream and assemble the oneiric content, and if Kopenawa calls cinema a dream and not yãkoana, we may wonder if the dream is prefigured as the yãkoana of “ordinary people”, accessible beyond the shamanic hierarchy. Furthermore, instead of a cinema of the forest, could we speak of a cinema as the yãkoana of white people?

By moving through distinct positions and perspectives of the various modes of existence, the shaman has the possibility of seeing and translating the point of view of others. The body of the shaman becomes a gesture, a pure mediality of the crossing of worlds, allowing the ones who accompany him to access the continuity between the visible and the non-visible, the human and the more-than-human worlds. He crosses, is crossed, and offers the possibility of crossing worlds: so does the shaman, and also cinema? If both the film camera and the shaman share -with considerable distances-, the possibility of offering themselves as a gesture of crossing worlds, can we also find an interval between cinema and shamanism there? Meaning a cinema that seeks to establish itself as a common language that would allow access to and place different beings and agents of the cosmos on the “same level”?

With these questions, which have appeared in dialogue with the collective reading and discussion of The falling sky, cinema is freed from the specificity of a medium -the film, the movie theatre, the celluloid, the cave walls. The whole cosmos becomes a cinematograph, or a metacine, as Sebastian Wiedemann suggests drawing on Henri Bergson’s and Gilles Deleuze’s work. A cosmos that, like cinema, is composed of images in itself and for themselves, in a perpetual movement of action and reaction, made of light and shadows, which neither expect nor depend on a human gaze to exist. The cosmos is accordingly understood as an immense projection machine of luminous images that propagate themselves everywhere, independently of the appearance of a look or a screen, only requiring an opacity that can reflect and reveal them.

Images can therefore be understood not as something that can be seen, but as something that moves perpetually and independently of the existence of a consciousness. The light resides in things themselves; a subject’s look or a consciousness that illuminates things is not needed. As Bergson states, “photography, if it exists, is already taken inside things”, the eye is inside things.[52] In The falling sky, an association between interiority and photography also emerges. The utupë image is described precisely as the photograph of beings, their interior: “Every being of the forest has an utupë image” that “shamans call and bring down. These are the images that become xapiri and do their presentation dance for us. They are like photographs.” (p.116). To reveal itself, this inner photograph needs a screen (or a shaman?), an obstacle to the light that reflects it. The “living images” are those that function precisely as opacities that reflect the light. These living images are, for Bergson, centres of indetermination, gap zones that discontinue the action-reaction of some images on others, introducing a delay that obstructs the prediction of actions (precisely because they imply selection and execution).

Consequently, may we wonder about this cinema that, in Wiedemann’s words, is always willing “to happen by other means, to multiply itself by countless and unthought of surfaces, to be spirit and spiritual by possessing too many bodies that overflow any form, until it almost explodes and makes the level of the audible and visible collapse?”.[53] May we consider a cinema that is always available to happen by other means that demonstrate its efficacy by making “more potent the cosmopolitical performance that makes the world an incessant birth and the image something always to come?[54] Instead of thinking about intersections among the general experience of cinema, the visions generated by the ritual consumption of hallucinogenic plants, and the recreation of these visions, perhaps we may continue to wonder how the modes of shamanic experience can be understood as cinematographic modes of experience that occur by other means, in the time of the dream or the yãkoana, but insistently as a gesture of crossing worlds.

Salomé Lopes Coelho

References

Ana Carolina Estrela da Costa, “Continuidades, rupturas, desdobramentos: conexões entre cinema indígena, pensamento e xamanismo”, Iluminuras, V19, N.46, 2018.

__________, Cosmopolíticas, olhar e escuta: experiências cine-xamânicas entre os Maxakali, MA dissertation in Anthropology, Federal University of Minas Gerais, 2015.

André Brasil and Bernard Belisário, “Desmanchar o cinema: variações do fora-de-campo em filmes indígenas”, Sociologia & Antropologia, 6(3), 2016.

André Brasil, “Ver por meio do invisível. O cinema como tradução xamânica”, Revista Novos Estudos, V35.03, 2016.

Béla Balázs, “Der Sichtbaremensch (O homem invisível)”, Translated by João Luiz Vieira, In Ismail Xavier (Ed.), A experiência do cinema, Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1983.

__________, “A subjetividade do objeto”, Translated by João Luiz Vieira, In Ismail Xavier (Ed.), A experiência do cinema, Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1983.

__________, “Nós estamos no filme”, Translated by João Luiz In Ismail Xavier (Ed.), A experiência do cinema, Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1983.

Bernard Belisário, “Os Itseke e o fora-de-campo no cinema Kuikuro”, Devires, V.11, N.2, 2014.

Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Tranlated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013.

Dominique Gallois and Vincent Carelli, “Vídeo e diálogo cultural: experiência do Projeto Vídeo nas Aldeias”, Horizontes Antropológicos, N.2, 1995.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “La selva de cristal: notas sobre la ontología de los espíritus amazónicos”, Amazonía Peruana, Tomo XV, N.30, 2007.

__________, “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio”, Mana, Vol.2, N.2, 1996.

Evelyn Schuler and Alfredo Zea “El inicio de la iniciación y el movimiento de las partes”, ClimaCom Cultura Científica – pesquisa, jornalismo e arte Ι, N.10, 2017.

Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna. Essai sur le drapé tombé, Gallimard, Paris, 2002.

Giorgio Agamben, Means without end. Notes on politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2000.

Henri Bergson, Materia y Memoria. Ensayo sobre la relación del cuerpo con el espíritu, Cactus, Buenos Aires, 2006.

Jacques Rancière, Os Intervalos do cinema, Translated by Luís Lima, Orfeu Negro, Lisbon, 2012.

Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, Los chamanes de la prehistoria, Translated by Javier López Cachero, Ariel, Barcelona, 2010.

Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer” In Steven Feld (Ed.), Ciné-Ethnography, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003.

João Mário Grilo, “Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On ‘Ciné-Trances’ and Jean Rouch’s Ritual Documentaries” In Henrik Gustafsson e Asbjørn Grønstad (Eds.), Cinema and Agamben. Ethics, biopolitics and the moving image, Bloomsbury, London and New York, 2014.

José Gil, Caos e Ritmo, Relógio D’Água, Lisbon, 2018.

Luiz Bolognesi, “O cineasta e o xamã”, Piauí – Folha de S.Paulo, 5th July 2021, online https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/o-cineasta-e-o-xama

Peter Gow, “Cinema da Floresta. Filme, Alucinação e Sonho na Amazônia Peruana”, Revista de Antropologia, Vol.38, N.2, 1995.

Rodrigo Lacerda, Animism and the Mbya-Guarani Cinema, Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021.

Ruben Caixeta de Queiroz, “Cineastas indígenas e pensamento selvagem”, Devires, V.5, N.2, 2008.

Salomé Lopes Coelho, O gesto da travessia e o contacto com o ritmo vital. Sobrevivências do ekstasis no cinema, PhD thesis in Art Studies, NOVA University of Lisbon, 2021.

Sebastian Wiedemann, “Em direção a uma cosmopolítica da imagem: notas para uma possível ecologia das práticas cinematográficas, Revista Arteriais, V.6, N.10, 2020.

[1] This text is the result of the collective reading of The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, published in English in 2013. The reading took place during 2020 and 2021, in the context of the research network “Cosmoaesthetics of the South”, composed by Carla Milani Damião, Gabriela Milone, Guadalupe Lucero, Noelia Billi, Paula Fleisner, Pedro Hussak, and me (Universities of Argentina and Brazil). In November 2021, we shared our readings at the Colloquium Dream, commodity, world: three hypotheses to think “The falling sky” that gives rise to the dossier in which this article is included. I would like to thank Alice Barthelemy for reviewing the English translation of this text.

[2] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013.

[3] In the movie Reassemblage (1982).

[4] Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, Los chamanes de la prehistoria. Translated by Javier López Cachero, Ariel, Barcelona, 2010.

[5] Peter Gow, “Cinema da Floresta. Filme, Alucinação e Sonho na Amazônia Peruana”, Revista de Antropologia, Vol.38, N.2, 1995.

[6] Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer” In Steven Feld (Ed.), Ciné-Ethnography, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003.

[7] Due to the plausibility and broad recognition of their arguments, some of the authors who stood out in this context are Salomon Reinach, Count Bégouen, André Leroi-Gourhan and Annette Laming-Emperaire.

^[8] We can summarize the different phases as follows, according to Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, op. cit., p.17-21. The first phase corresponds to geometric figures such as dots, zigzags, grids, wavy lines, and, less often, parallel curves. These shapes have bright colors that flicker, move, widen, contract, shudder, etc. Since the eyes open, the figures acquire a luminous appearance and project themselves onto any surface. In the second state of altered consciousness, there is an effort to rationalize the geometric perceptions of the first state, transforming them into objects with meaning (for example, zigzags become scales of a snake, the serpent being the object with meaning). It passes to the third state crossing a whirlwind whose sides are made of grids that derive from the first state, and at the end of it, there is a light. These geometric figures are present throughout all the three states, but mainly in the periphery of the figures. It is also in the whirlwind that the shaman begins to hallucinate the first human forms, animals, or other elements, but it is at the end of this kind of tunnel that the shaman “finds himself in the strange world of trance: monsters, humans, and surroundings are intensely real” (p.20). These phases are not completely separable from each other; as they are in a continuum, some phases may be overlapped or skipped, for example.

[9] Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, Los chamanes…, op. cit., p.94.

[10] José Gil, Caos e Ritmo, Relógio D’Água, Lisbon, 2018, p.395.

[11] Ibid. p.396.

[12] Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, Los chamanes…, op. cit., p.89.

[13] Ibid., p. 91.

[14] José Gil, op. cit., p.396.

[15] Salomé Lopes Coelho, O gesto da travessia e o contacto com o ritmo vital. Sobrevivências do ekstasis no cinema, PhD thesis in Artistic Studies, Nova University of Lisbon, 2021.

[16] Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna. Essai sur le drapé tombé, Gallimard, Paris.

[17] Peter Gow op. cit., 2002.

^[18] Ayahuasca is not a univocal theme, it can take on different names depending on the Amazon region, different grammatical gender, different combinations with other plants, and variable cosmological frameworks (shamanic, Catholic, etc.). Here we follow the reading of Gow.

[19] Peter Gow op. cit., p.46.

[20] Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2013. From now on, all quotes refer to this edition. I will use only the page number in parentheses.

Although not the most significant, Gow refers to cinema and shamanic visions as a movement of approximation of distant images; The falling sky suggests a movement of making the worlds present in the shaman’s body, but also mentions taking the shaman’s image away: “When we die by the power of the yãkoana, our spirits travel very high into the sky’s chest. Then their gaze sweeps over the forest as if from an airplane.” (p.293).

[21] As Sebastian Wiedemann points out, “the notion of Utupë presents itself as a concept because it asserts itself as a hyper-conglomerate of relationships that dynamically condense a quality of vortex and vector for thought”. See Sebastian Wiedemann, “Em direção a uma cosmopolítica da imagem: notas para uma possível ecologia das práticas cinematográficas”, Revista Arterials, V.6, n.10, 2020, p.112.

[22] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains that Xapiri does not refer to a type of being or a stable category, instead, it points to “the disjunctive synthesis between human and non-human”, to a “region or moment of indiscernibility between human and non-human”. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “La selva de cristal: notas sobre la ontología de los espíritus amazónicos”, Amazonía Peruana, Tomo XV, N.30, 2007, p.319-321.

[23]André Brasil, “Ver por meio do invisível. O cinema como tradução xamânica”, Revista Novos Estudos, V35.03, 2016, p.144.

[24] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “La selva de cristal…”, op. cit., p.93.

[25] Marco António Valentim cited by Sebastian Wiedemann, “Em direção a uma cosmopolítica…”, op. cit., p.111.

[26] This initiation process is not without effort, attention, suffering, and terror, as chapter 5 – The initiation shows. Evelyn Schuler and Alfredo Zea distinguish an “initiation” of the initiation process, prior to the appearance of xapiri, and characterized by the successive destabilization of the assumptions of belonging, knowledge, and relationship. See Evelyn Schuler and Alfredo Zea, “El inicio de la iniciación y el movimiento de las partes”, ClimaCom Cultura Científica – pesquisa, jornalismo e arte Ι, N.10, 2017.

[27] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio”, Mana, Vol.2, N.2, 1996.

[28] Rodrigo Lacerda, Animism and the Mbya-Guarani Cinema, Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021, p.4.

[29] Ibid., p.3.

[30] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “La selva de cristal…”, op. cit., p.320.

[31] Quoted by Luiz Bolognesi in “The filmmaker and the shaman”, Piauí – Folha de S. Paulo, July 5, 2021, online, https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/o-cineasta-e-o-xama

[32] Béla Balázs, “Der Sichtbaremensch (O homem invisível)”, Translated by João Luiz Vieira, In Ismail Xavier (Ed.), A experiência do cinema, Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1983, p.82.

[33] Cf. Jacques Rancière, Os Intervalos do cinema, Translated by Luís Lima, Orfeu Negro, Lisbon, 2012, p.24.

[34] See, for instance, Ana Carolina Estrela da Costa, Cosmopolíticas, olhar e escuta: experiências cine-xamânicas entre os Maxakali, MA dissertation in Anthropology, Federal University of Minas Gerais, 2015; André Brasil and Bernard Belisário, “Desmanchar o cinema: variações do fora-de-campo em filmes indígenas”, Sociologia & Antropologia, 6(3), 2016; Rodrigo Lacerda, op. cit.; Ruben Caixeta de Queiroz, “Cineastas indígenas e pensamento selvagem”, Devires, V.5, N.2, 2008.

[35] In the sense conferred by Agamben. See Giorgio Agamben, Means without end. Notes on politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2000.

[36] Béla Balázs, “A subjetividade do objeto”, Translated by João Luiz Vieira, In Ismail Xavier (Ed.), op. cit., p.97.

[37] Ana Carolina Estrela da Costa, “Continuidades, ruturas, desdobramentos: conexões entre cinema indígena, pensamento e xamanismo”, Iluminuras, V19, N.46, 2018.

[38] Ibid., p.107.

[39] Ana Carolina Estrela da Costa, Cosmopolíticas…, op.cit.,5, p.146.

[40] Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes…”, op. cit., p.99.

[41] Idem.

[42]  Bernard Belisário, “Os Itseke e o fora-de-campo no cinema Kuikuro”, Devires, V.11, N.2, 2014, p.115.

[43] Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes…”, op. cit., p.101.

[44] João Mário Grilo, “Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On ‘Ciné-Trances’ and Jean Rouch’s Ritual Documentaries” In Henrik Gustafsson e Asbjørn Grønstad (Eds.), Cinema and Agamben. Ethics, biopolitics and the moving image, Bloomsbury, London and New York, 2014, p.133.

[45] Ibid., p.128.

[46] Attributing to cinema the power to show the truth, the reality, life itself is something that several authors have done since the origins of cinema and its theorization. Béla Balázs, for example, understands that the camera “revealed new worlds hitherto hidden” (p.84), allowing access to the “hidden forces of a life we thought we knew so well” (p.89). See Balázs, “Nós estamos no filme”, Translated by João Luiz Vieira In Ismail Xavier (Ed.), A experiência do cinema, op. cit.

[47] Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes…”, op. cit., p.46.

[48] Ibid., p.13.

[49] Not without contradictions, as Ruben Caixeta de Queiroz problematizes in “Cineastas …”, op. cit.

[50] Dominique Gallois and Vincent Carelli, “Vídeo e diálogo cultural: experiência do projecto Vídeo nas Aldeias”, Horizontes Antropológicos, N.2, 1995, p.67.

[51] See research mentioned in the 34th footnote.

[52] Henri Bergson, Materia y Memoria. Ensayo sobre la relación del cuerpo con el espíritu, Cactus, Buenos Aires, 2006, p.52.

[53] Sebastian Wiedemann, op. cit., p.112.

[54] Ibid., p.116.