‘Embrace of the Serpent’ (2016)
In the frantic dark, a canoe carrying a shaman and an explorer makes its way across the Amazon River. Rounding one bend, the canoe re-emerges a moment later, carrying still the shaman but this time with another explorer, decades later.
Time and space appear to collapse in “Embrace of the Serpent,” a film about cycles, souls, memory and the revolving door of human violence. It is one of five movies this month that wind their ways through history and reveal the horrors — also the hilarity and absurdity — of ideology and power. Within these stories are people straining to escape from under the thumb of forces larger than them.
The story at the center of the Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s film — explorers entering the heart of a jungle and reckoning with the waste colonial violence has wrought — will bring to mind the seminal works of Conrad and Coppola.
That lineage casts a big shadow, but “Embrace of the Serpent” is a masterwork in its own right. That’s not only because it considers colonialism from an Indigenous perspective, via Karamakate, an isolated shaman aiding two different white researchers 40 years apart. The film also serves as a kind of hypnotic elegy about the sweep of power across time, along with the peoples and cultures, the songs and stories, that are lost in its grasp.
