Archives to come. Dreams and memory in Yanomami cinema

Abstract

The artistic and literary production of the indigenous peoples of Latin America has acquired great visibility in recent years. The films of indigenous artists of the region have been the protagonists of exhibitions and festivals around the world, as well as part of circuits and exchanges between different indigenous peoples, which have had concrete effects on the recovery of cultural practices and ancestral memory processes. These images have an archival vocation that seeks to challenge both the white world and the younger generations of their peoples.

These filmmakers, from the reuse of a technology of the white world, forge their own images and propose another type of production and circulation logics. In this way, ancestral ways of making are present as devices and not only as content.

Considering the discussions around the “archival turn” of the last decades, this paper seeks to analyze the epistemological shifts on the idea of the archive that indigenous cinema poses, and what these films propose to theories and film studies. Starting with the film Mari Hi (A árvore do sonho, 2023) by Morzaniel Iramari Yanomami, we inquire into the role of film in the processes of archiving, memory and knowledge through the dreams of the Yanomami people and the dialogues with their prolific and important intellectual and cultural production, specifically with the books A queda do céu (2016) and O espíritu da floresta (2023), both by the shaman and intellectual Davi Kopenawa and the French ethnologist Bruce Albert.