Fragments of encounters: The filmic chronicles of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Dina Dreyfus in indigenous villages in Brazil

In 1934, the young Claude Lévi-Strauss and his then wife, Dina Dreyfus, departed from Marseille bound for Brazil. It was in Brazil that they had their first experiences as ethnologists. At the invitation of Mário de Andrade, a central figure in Brazilian literary modernism and then head of the municipality’s cultural division, Dreyfus was tasked with offering a course in ethnography aimed at providing “a general method immediately applicable in the field”. In her course, Dreyfus classified film as the ideal medium for obtaining “perfect notes” in ethnographic research. The aim of this article is to analyse the filmic records captured by the couple during their missions, in light of the multimodal nature of the research, which includes articles, photographs, lectures, notes, and letters. It is possible that the images produced on these missions not only represent a seminal point in ethnographic film but also the beginning of an experience that reinvented anthropology and placed Amerindian thought at the scientific forefront of its time. Our analysis of the film material produced in the indigenous villages integrates reflections on the legacy of Lévi-Strauss and Dina Dreyfus to the Lowland South American Amerindians.