Authenticity and Anthropophagy in Kayapó Film Production

Abstract

Over the past three decades, films made by the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó people of Brazil have shown a distinctive and remarkably stable cinematic aesthetic, manifest in a set of filming, framing, and editing conventions first documented by Terence Turner. These films diverge significantly from Indigenous film productions documented elsewhere in Latin America, which tend to borrow more heavily from commercial cinematic codes and film genres. This contrast raises important issues about the personal, social, cultural, and political motivations behind such aesthetic and genre choices among different Indigenous peoples while posing the more fundamental question as to what exactly makes Indigenous media “Indigenous.” In this article, we describe what we identify as a Kayapó film aesthetic and discuss reasons for its continuity over time. We also consider the influence of hybridity, widely discussed by Indigenous media scholars elsewhere, but turn instead to the notion of anthropophagy as a more powerful root metaphor for understanding Kayapó film production. Although anthropophagy as an actual cultural practice and cosmological metaphor is generally associated with Tupi-speaking peoples of Brazil, culturally and linguistically distinctive from the Kayapó, the concept as applied by scholars of subaltern cultural productions helps us better understand the maintenance of Indigenous authenticity in Kayapó film production as the group navigates technological and sociocultural transformations.