Slightly fuzzy picture above. But there are no good-looking portrait photos of this man. He never posed for the school photographer in his life. He didn’t have himself immortalized at his wedding – if ever he married. There are no photos of him on his first day at work, no passport pictures or house-garden and kitchen snapshots. The man had no social media accounts, he did not take selfies. No doubt he didn’t even own a telephone.
The only images in which he can be seen are from a documentary from 2009. There is also a YouTube video from 2018 in which he cuts a tree in the Brazilian jungle. That is it. That is the only proof that the man was there, in the eyes of modern man at least, who linked ‘existence’ to the amount of (online) image with which life is propped up today. Fortunately, it was just enough to ensure that he was allowed to live in the place where he roamed alone for 26 years and where he died of natural causes last week at the age of 60.
The ‘man of the caves’
The death of the “man of the caves,” as he, the last member of an indigenous Amazonian tribe, was called because of the deep pits he dug in his habitat, was world news. Each message featured the same footage: stills from the film Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don’t They? by filmmaker/anthropologist Vincent Carelli (available in full on the internet) and the YouTube video, made by members of Funai, a Brazilian organization for the protection of indigenous peoples.
Because there is simply no more image. But also because it is precisely these vague, moving images that literally gave the man and his habitat the right to exist in recent years.
In Corumbara Carelli makes that painfully clear. His two-hour documentary about the search for the members of an indigenous people who were almost completely wiped out because their territory was forced to give way to farm plantations, turns halfway through. The anthropological view, focused on the customs, the clothing and the wonderfully lilting language of the natives, makes way for an activist one. It turns out that there is another person living in another part of the forest that the Brazilian farmers have their sights on, someone who is only ‘visible’ through the huts he leaves behind and the holes he digs.
Voyeurism and discomfort
That doesn’t count, according to the farmers. They want proof: the resident in the picture, otherwise they will flatten the jungle. Carelli and a crew of Funai then see it as their mission to capture the suspected man and verify his existence, so his house won’t be cut down and burned to the ground. That does mean – and that is both the great strength and the great inconvenience of the documentary – that Carelli has to shoot a picture of someone who does not want to be caught by the camera, but has become dependent on it.
When they finally find him, the man points his spear at Carelli and his camera, which he sees as a threat. ‘Ironically, it’s the camera that makes him legally visible,’ says the anthropologist, who later explains how embarrassed he felt about the ‘violence’ with which he hunted the native man, as if he were on safari. Still, the film helped ensure that the ‘man of the caves’ could remain in the woods until his death.
Looking at the stills out Corumbara i feel the same. Discomfort because of my voyeurism, but also satisfaction. The man has been seen, his existence has not gone unnoticed, the forest has remained standing. That’s why I’d like to know if the man doesn’t secretly have a few invisible relatives. And whether they are willing to pose for a group photo despite themselves.