Marquis de Wavrin, du manoir à la jungle (2017)

Directed by: Grace Winter, Luc Plantier | 85 minutes | documentary

‘Marquis de Wavrin, du manoir à la jungle’ is a portrait of the Belgian ethnographer Robert de Wavrin, who wrote special Belgian film history between 1913 and 1936. From 1913, aristocrat De Wavrin undertook several trips to South America, where he met the continent’s diverse indigenous peoples. Much of his images, photographs and writings were forgotten or damaged. With this film, Belgian film archivist Grace Winter, together with Luc Plantier, ensures that De Wavrin and the many people he captured on film do not fade into oblivion.

“Leaving is nothing, not dying a little, I assure you. It is intense living, escaping bourgeois existence, wonderfully diving into adventure and the unknown. The ship’s horn is calling us.” A French voice-over puts the viewer in the right mood right at the beginning of the documentary ‘Marquis de Wavrin, du manoir à la jungle’. The fragment we hear comes from the many notes made by Marquis Robert de Wavrin during his long travels through South America in the first half of the twentieth century. The film simultaneously tells the life story of this adventurous marquis as well as the stories from an unexposed part of the history of the overseas continent.

De Wavrin, a young marquis, lives on the family estate in Ronsele, Flanders, when he shoots two intruders in the yard. They survive, but De Wavrin faces a prison sentence. To escape, he took the next train to Holland and boarded a ship to Buenos Aires in 1913. There he travels for three years along the Paraná River through Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. He temporarily returns to Europe to serve at the front in World War I, but then quickly departs for South America, where he travels further north through the jungles of Paraguay and over the Gran Chaco through Bolivia. He visits many indigenous communities, in the Amazon of Peru, Brazil and Venezuela, in the Andes and on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.

Armed with a photo and film camera, he traverses inhospitable areas, where until then hardly any Europeans came. He develops into a pioneer of ethnographic cinema. In the end, 2000 of his negatives were preserved, which were dusted off by the Musée du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. The makers compiled this film on the basis of these negatives and found and archived film material. Dozens of the beautiful photos in silver gray black and white can be seen in the documentary. The visual material – all by De Wavrin – is supplemented by the male voice that reads fragments of De Wavrin’s notes, and a female voice-over that provides historical context.

Although he initially travels mainly for his own adventure, De Wavrin seems to become more aware over the years of the fate of the sauvages he meets. Aren’t they just as ‘civilized’ or even more civilized than the Europeans who fought two bloodthirsty wars in the same decades? Yet exoticism also plays a major role in his work; certainly in the films that are shown in cinemas in Latin America and Europe. In 1931 his first film ‘Au Pays du Scalp’ is premiered, featuring a scene in which the Shuar Indians perform a so-called Tzantza ritual, in which heads of their enemies are reduced to the size of grapefruit, which are then carried as trophies. These images shocked Europe and gave the Shuar a reputation as bloodthirsty headhunters.

Exoticism? Colonial look? Sure, explains the voice-over; that gave De Wavrin the curiosity he needed. But filming also very daily, ordinary activities shows that he was interested in more than just the sensational. Women with small children, young people who are joking, fooling around or lounging in a hut; it is precisely with these universal matters that De Wavrin shows that all the indigenous inhabitants he meets are just people, just like everyone else. It is precisely this ‘anti-exotic’ look that makes the images so special. Besides the people, he also filmed the endless procession of animals he encountered during his travels: toucans, tapirs, snakes, monkeys, jaguars, llamas, pumas, deer, alligators, fish, and of course thousands of plants and trees. Here too, his self-interest (initially he still enjoys the hunt) gives way to a more empathetic attitude.

When De Wavrin tries to collect the funds for his next expedition back in Belgium in 1937, and it fails, the Second World War breaks out. When he also meets his future wife and marries her in 1944, he becomes more and more glued to Belgium. After the war, interest in his films dwindled and attention for him as a person also disappeared. But more importantly, many of the tribes and peoples he filmed lose their habitat in the decades that follow to rampant exploitation, agriculture, logging, and oil. Some tribes have even completely disappeared. That realization, in combination with the beautiful images, really get the message across.

“Despite the fact that many of the natives I met had never seen a white person before, we shared a certain confidence. You have to show mutual understanding and make it clear that you are not there to steal from them or take advantage of them.” With these special words for an aristocrat from the 1920s, De Wavrin can teach us another important lesson.