Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas (review)

Film Review Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas BBC/Arena Films, 1986. Martin Chambi, arguably the most important documentary still photographer of the early 20th century in Latin America, was also the only major photographer in the continent of Indian birth. This provides the linkage between the two parts of the film's title. Not only did Chambi record life in highland Peru in terms of the contrast between modern/ affluent (European) and primitive/impoverished (Indian) culture, but his own life bridged the gap between the two. Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas deftly intersperses Chambi's haunting black and white images, mostly taken in the interwar period, and live color footage of community life in and around Cuzco, Chambi's adopted city. Chambi was born in 1891 to a highland campesino family, apprenticed himself to a professional photographer as a youth-photographers in Latin America were invariably Europeans or local citizens of European descent-and somehow established himself at the age of twenty-nine as an independent studio photographer in Cuzco, the old Incan capital. He did both commercial and portrait work, observing the conservative rules of his trade but exceeding them as well. He was intensely aware of his environment: the rugged mountains, the contrast between the paternalistic, feudal local elite and the sullen Indian labor force, the descendants of the Incas. Chambi's genius lay in his ability to show what the film's narrator calls "the native underneath the Spanish," and to chronicle the awkward coexistence between rich and poor without jeopardizing his own livelihood. Chambi belonged to the "indigenistas," a group of intellectuals in Cuzco who met regularly to discuss Incan culture and to seek ways to commemorate it. Its visual chronicler, ironically he was the only member of the circle of indigenous origin. His work as a photographer brilliantly documents the survivals of pre-modern life but also the harsh reality of a society dominated by an arrogant landed gentry. Chambi, whose career wound down in the 1950s and who died in 1973, left nearly 20,000 negatives and glass plates, many of which were reprinted for use in this film. He was "discovered" in the 1970s: in 1978 his works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and subsequently exhibited and published across the world. The film, which is narrated in terse, BBC-accented English, partially succeeds but is handicapped by a lack of clear focus. Not exactly a biography of Chambi, although it follows his career chronologically, neither does it analyze 69 the content of his photographs in any detail. More than anything else it attempts to discuss the legacy of European subordination of Incan life, which it romanticizes much in the same way as the "Indigenista" intellectuals, partisans of the Aprisia movement of the 1920s in Peru, paid lipservice to Indian culture without doing much about real living conditions. The impact of Chambi's sharp, often visually stunning images, is severely limited by the relentless quick editing of the medium. There is one major weakness imposed by the VHS format-the screen is too small to permit the viewer to appreciate the sweep of Chambi's images, whose strength lies in their minute detail-and another by the film director, who relentlessly orders quick cuts and rapid camera movement, preventing most of the time the eyes from focusing on the still images. Film documentaries of still photographic images force viewers to rely on too-rapid glimpses and impressions. There is no time to consider the content of the images, to think about them. The success of rock video and deft technical effects in commercial television has gone to the heads even to television producers in educational stations and even at the august BBC. So the film is partially successful. It is really two films: a biography of Chambi and an essay about the negative legacy of the Spanish conquest on the Andean altiplano. The subject is important and the treatment leaves too much to be desired to be recommended with enthusiasm. Robert M. Levine University of Miami 70 ...