Caçando capivara: com o cinema-morcego dos Tikmũ’ũn

Abstract

Following my research on Amerindian cinema in Brazil, the article approaches the film Hunting Capybara (Caçando capivara, 2009), by the Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali) community of the village of Vila Nova, in Minas Gerais (Brazil), focusing on the modes in which traces of the tikmũ’ũn shamanism are inscribed in the images. The film follows a group of hunters (hunter-filmmakers, filmmaker-hunters) that, in alliance with the yãmĩyxop (human-animal spirits), seeks the capybara (animal turned rare in a region erstwhile rich in its biodiversity). To transform into possibility the “almost impossibility” of the hunting, the film phenomenology will shelter a cosmological dimension: the desolate landscape will be then populated by a multiplicity of affects, agencies and beings (existent or extinct, visible or invisible ones). Borrowing its dynamics from the Tikmũ’ũn shamanic chants, Hunting Capybara suggests the possibility of a “bat-cinema” that would demand another modality of vision.