ABSTRACT
Amazonia has provided the setting for, and crucial elements and themes of, a number of feature films of varying ambition and quality. They draw on the same historical documents as those that form the backdrop for anthropological investigation. The Lost World has considerable form as a tropical ur-text and the Henry Hoyt movie version projects elemental features that continue to find expression in public sphere representations. Im Thurn himself embodied a number of colonial ambitions: exploration, natural history, ethnography. The anthropology from which Conan Doyle's Lost World was drawn was a transitional form, Victorian anthropology at the edge of scientific or modern anthropology. International especially European and North American interest in the region was simultaneously undergoing a shift as the region's long-standing role as near-unique supplier of rubber to foreign industry abruptly disappeared. Cinematic depictions of Amazonia draws upon a familiar repertoire of themes and elements that, while having undoubted accuracy in various respects, also systematically distort through objectification.
