Invitation to Embrace of the Serpent

Abstract

The following text was written in 2015, right after I left the exhibition of Embrace of the serpent at the 39^th São Paulo International Film Festival, in 2015. The canon for the literary genre ‘academic article’ is not squarely fitted for what follows, nonetheless, this article is not so arbitrary that it cannot be qualified as scientific; in fact, I think its scientific qualifications have only become more evident since then. If that does not totally prevent my text to qualify as a sort of film criticism, at least it brings it closer to a criticism of gaze, by trying to explain some assumptions of the film’s gaze. Chronologically, from 2015 to now, not so many years have passed. However, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, once-ordinary acts like going to the movies seem to belong to an increasingly distant reality. Perhaps the more correct to say would be that these years of pandemic have exposed the reality and falsity of certain simulacra that previously went unnoticed. True, the hegemony of new, less collective, and more privatized ways of seeing was already announced before the pandemic, but nothing compares to what we have seen happening since 2020. The film destructive exacerbation of the colonizing process to which the planet's ecosystems are subjected enhances the experience of transmutation or estrangement that the film can arouse. If this pace continues, soon the only flow that post-humanity will come to know will be that of artificial blood transfusions to feed vegetative brains.