Cinematic Journeys in Latin America: Geography Through the Lens of Exploration and Discovery Films by Richard Francaviglia (review)

Reviewed by: Cinematic Journeys in Latin America: Geography Through the Lens of Exploration and Discovery Films by Richard Francaviglia Darlene J. Sadlier Richard Francaviglia Cinematic Journeys in Latin America: Geography Through the Lens of Exploration and Discovery Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland 39. 99 e-book (978-1-476-64967-2). Author of numerous volumes about various geographic subjects, including the acclaimed Believing in Place: A Spiritual Geography of the Great Basin (2003), in his new book historical geographer Richard Francaviglia turns his attention to images of place in films about exploration and discovery in Latin America, from pre-Columbian times to the present day. The regional range of his 19 movie selections is broad, with four films about Mexico and Central America and 15 on different areas in South America, some of them by well-known directors such as Werner Herzog, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg. The works discussed cover more than50years offilmmaking, from Mel Ferrer's romantic fantasy Green Mansions (1954), and Jerry Hopper's archeological adventure The Secret of the Incas (1954), to Lucrecia Martel's impressive Zama (2016), about a frustrated colonial administrator stuck in a backwater town, and James Bobin's Dora and the City of Gold (2019), a children's adventure film replete with cartoon sequences. Herzog is the only director with two chapters: one on Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and another on Fitzcarraldo (1982). Lesser-known or neglected films under study include Alex Cox's Walker (1987), about an invasion of Nicaragua by a ragtag band led by Tennessee-born William Walker; and Luis Armando Roche's Aire libre (1997), on the scientific expedition by Alexander Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland to Nueva Granada (in today's Venezuela). Ideal for teaching purposes, the self-contained chapters make reading about a specific film or group of films possible without affecting the book's overall content. Most chapters focus on film adaptation, or the relationship between movies and their source texts. These texts include historiographies on the order of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal's sixteenth-century account of Francisco de Orellana's expedition to the Amazon, which was influential to Herzog's Aguirre and Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) ; and novels such as Henry Hudson's Green Mansions (1904) and Antonio di Benedetto's Zama (1956), which were adapted by Ferrer and Martel, respectively. Francaviglia calls attention to the embossed dust jacket of Peter W. Rainier's 1942 popular memoir, Six Years in Bolivia: The Adventures of a Mining Engineer, with its artful images of a mine and Andean topography, positing its role in attracting readers, possibly even Andrew Martin, who adapted it for his film Green Fire (1954). One of the book's best chapters discusses Nicolás Echevarrías's Cabeza de Vaca (1991), based on the Spanish explorer's account of an ill-fated expedition, which took nine years and the deaths of all but four of its 300 men to reach Mexico from the Florida coast. Francaviglia provides additional End Page 199 historical information about the objective of the expedition sent by the Spanish king Charles V, placing Cabeza de Vaca's account within the context of Spain's imperial designs on conquest and colonization of the New World. According to Francaviglia, geography plays a central cinematic role in compressing the years-long journey in the film, which abruptly shifts from Cabeza de Vaca's capture by Native Americans in Florida to his wanderings across Texas's dusty desert interior. Francaviglia adds an interesting note that the prickly pear cacti repeatedly mentioned in Cabeza de Vaca's account as the source of nourishment for his survival never physically appear or are even referenced in the film. Geography takes center stage in the chapter on the Atacama Desert, the location of a few contemporary films, such as Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky's surreal The Dance of Reality (2014) and Patricio Guzmán's documentary Nostalgia of the Light (2011), about the search for traces of individuals who "disappeared" in the desert during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. . .