Ficção e fricção: imagens da Amazónia no cinema internacional

Explored by foreign travellers in different periods, the Amazon rainforest has long dwelt in the imagery of western countries. This trend is naturally extended to its numerous representations in cinema, often in a stereotyped perspective, full of clichés that respond to entertainment demands or to superficial foreign curiosity. This paper proposes to analyse its presence in some feature films produced mostly (but not only) in Hollywood along the last five decades. It aims at investigating how, in mainstream cinema, the features and characteristics that are supposedly typical of the region are shown, along with the demands of the respective film narratives, and at pinpointing the inevitable mismatches that emerge when facing the complexity of the ‘continent’ that effectively constitutes the region. In genres that run from adventure to comedy, fantasy or horror, film productions have set their plots there – partially, at least, and artificially or effectively – with varying approaches and degrees of depth to the region’s peculiarities. The choice of productions with so-called commercial appeal is due to such films having greater reach and international circulation. Thus their features are interesting for their capacity of spreading such imaginary, often with a shallow or distorted bias. The present is not a precise, socio-anthropological comparison between the ‘real’ Amazon region and that which is shown on the screens as a lost tropical paradise or a ‘green inferno’, for instance, but rather to point out how the logics of entertaining may assimilate a complex and multifaceted imaginary and present it in a simplistic, schematic, one-dimensional way.