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[闲聊话题] 派拉蒙冒险新电影即将上映:Lost City of Z  [复制链接]

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Hollywood treatment: Charlie Hunnam as Colonel Percival Fawcett in The Lost City of Z

New movie The Lost City of Z celebrates the life and particularly the death of British explorer Colonel Percival Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s.

Watch the movie and you might come away impressed by the dedication and perseverance of Fawcett.  He is portrayed as a misty-eyed and misty-voiced romantic, inspired by Kipling’s poem to ‘Go and look behind the ranges - Something lost behind the ranges.  Lost and waiting for you.  Go!’  The movie is played out as one long elegy, with accompanying strings.

But the reality is rather different. The distinguished historian of the Amazon, John Hemming, has described Fawcett as having ‘ugly racist notions about the Native Americans’.  Fawcett described one tribe he encountered as ‘large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with forehead sloping back from pronounced eye ridges – men of a very primitive kind… villainous savages… great apelike brutes who looked as if they had scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts.’

Nor is the argument that he was just ‘of his time’ admissible. There were plenty of contemporary explorers of the Amazon who recognised the qualities of the indigenous people. Theodore Roosevelt , no less, before he became president, had been impressed by precisely the same Indian tribe of Nambiquara.

Hemming has described Fawcett as a Nietzchean explorer, who sprouted ‘eugenic gibberish’ and was obsessed with the exotic and the occult. Later explorers have found him something of an embarrassment. He is not listed in most of the official anthologies of exploration. If anything, he is thought of as the Lord Lucan of the exploring world, whose most dramatic achievement was to get himself lost.

For he never found anything of particular value. First sent to Bolivia and Brazil to do map surveying work  in 1906, seconded from his duties as a British officer, he returned in 1914 after having heard stories about a huge ruined city ‘said to have been seen by Portuguese bandits north of Minas Gerais in 1743’.  Even by the standards of South America, that is old and second-hand information, from an unreliable source.  


But his potential sponsors at the Royal Geographical Society lapped it up. This was an age of heroic exploration, when the poles had just been reached and Machu Picchu discovered.  Fawcett received the financial backing to pursue the glory that he had never found in his military career.  He talked evocatively of ‘ruins incomparably older than those in Egypt’.  Naming it as ‘the lost city of Z’ showed his flair for publicity – and no wonder Hollywood has finally come calling, even if they have taken a century to do so.

After a series of inconclusive expeditions - one lasted just a few days before his horse died and he turned back - he set off in 1925 with his 21-year-old son, Jack, who was desperate to accompany his father.  Fawcett himself was now 58 and aware that he might only have one last shot left at the main chance.

He disappeared in the Xingu, together with his young son and another companion.  It caused a public outcry and journalistic sensation.  A series of expeditions were mounted to try to find him. As with Lord Lucan, occasional sightings of a lone white man somewhere in the jungle - even if thousands of miles from where Fawcett had last been seen - were enough of an excuse for editors of the day to raise the story again.

What most likely happened to Fawcett - not something you will learn from the movie - has been painstakingly recreated by John Hemming and the documentary maker Adrian Cowell.  It seems that Fawcett’s racism led him into ‘dangerous attitudes to the Indians’, risking both his own life and that of his son.  He recognised that tribes could be naturally hospitable; but failed to recognise that they also expected any visitors to be equally liberal.  

Previous and current expeditions to the Amazon would always take quantities of presents. Fawcett did not, while still availing himself of anything the Indians could give him.  Moreover George Dyott, the leader of one of the expeditions sent to find Fawcett after his disappearance, was told by Indians that Fawcett had broken an unwritten rule of forest travel.  He had seen two canoes moored up on the back and simply taken them.  Naturally the Nahukwá, whose canoes had been stolen, did not react well.



The Lost City of Z clip - He Got Us Here

Likewise when Fawcett shot a duck - and much is made in the movie of his prowess as a marksman - he refused to share it with his Indian helpers.  He also struck a young Indian boy who was playing with his knife. As Hemming remarks, ‘striking an Indian in anger is a deep insult.  The Xingu Indians are infuriated by any aggression against a child, since they are deeply affectionate parents… And native hunters invariably share out their game.’

Brazilian anthropologists the Villas Boa brothers - legendary in Amazonia for their longstanding work protecting the Indians - commented that ‘Fawcett was the victim, as anyone else would have been, of the harshness and lack of tact that all recognised in him.’

So why is none of this in the movie?  The original book, by David Grann, was much more intelligent and nuanced, as one would expect from a staff writer on the New Yorker. But everything has gone wrong in its clumsy adaptation for the screen by director James Gray, who has written his own script and then filmed it with great reverence - almost always a mistake.  There are some real clunkers in the dialogue:

‘We are thinking of sending you to Bolivia.’

‘In South America?’

  • READ MORE

The Lost City of Z, film review: Snoozesome journey into the jungle

Well, yes, of course, it’s the Bolivia in South America, which other one did you think he was talking about!  This is comic book stuff. Every line is either signposted or signalled. Guffaws erupted around me in the preview theatre when for the very first shot of Fawcett in the jungle we see a snake slithering between his legs.  Nor does Charlie Hunnam’s leaden depiction of Fawcett help.  He plays the character as if everything he says are his last words - which over a lengthy 140 minute movie, makes the whole experience feel like the longest dying pause in history.

The only virtue of this lumpen behemoth of a film is if it draws attention to the unfolding discoveries in the Amazon at the moment.  For although Fawcett may have done so for all the wrong grandstanding reasons, his suspicion that there may have been earlier civilisations in the Amazon has proved to be correct.

The problem in the past was that, for obvious reasons, while great Andean civilisations like the Incas could build in stone - and so Machu Picchu, for instance, has been magnificently preserved - in the Amazon, the only available material was wood;  however grandiose the civilisation, it naturally rotted away.  Yet recent archaeological techniques have revealed how pre-Columbian tribes successfully converted the shallow topsoil of the rainforest into rich black earth - and has given credence to the early accounts by conquistadors of great civilisations they glimpsed when floating down the Amazon.

There is a fascinating movie to be made about exploration in the Amazon. This isn’t it. Anyone wanting more illumination should see the Oscar-nominated Embrace Of The Serpent which came out last year, made by South Americans and with  a silverine, elegant charm to which Lost City of Z can only aspire.

And anyone heading out to a Londondinner-party this evening should perhaps remember to take a reciprocal bottle or face the consequences.  While those going to see the movie in its opening week may need sleeping tablets, resilient buttocks - and a healthy dose of scepticism.

Hugh Thomson has led many expeditions to Peru, as recounted in his book The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland. He won the inaugural Wainwright Prize for The Green Road into the Trees.  A sequel, One Man and a Mule, is published by Preface Random House this June. @Hugh_Author


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