ABSTRACT
Catherine Russell picks up a thread from her groundbreaking Experimental Ethnography to return to her favorite avant-garde mode of filmmaking to learn how to navigate Amazonia in sounds and images by offering a reading of Lothar Baumgartner’s film Origin of the Night (Amazon Cosmos) (1978) and Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015). Russell investigates how Amazon cinema is not only a primal scene of first contact narratives but also a visual spectacle, a physical and technical challenge, and a spatially disorienting experience for filmmakers and spectators alike.
