Die Abenteuer des Cabeza de Vaca

For the time this film is set, which is 1528, that's a very early era of western exploration (only 36 years after Columbus). I personally would love to see the Americas (North and South) before the full arrival of Europeans. Not because Europeans were "bad" but simply to see something before it's changed dramatically. Unfortunately for many of the early explorers and visitors -- English and Spanish -- a trip to the New World didn't give a feeling of wonder but of life in hell. I'm also aware of the fact that most extant written history of exploration of the New World was written by English authors so it's probably: bad Spanish explorers, good English explorers. But apparently not for this particular story.

As for this film I can only recommend its first hour, which is its best.

The first hour of this film does an excellent job of showing the problems these early explorers faced and how something so promising could turn so bad. Once Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (a copy and paste on that name!) leaves Florida it loses its sense of adventure and mystery (well a good part of it) and the film moves too quickly from Florida to the western shore of Mexico. So quickly you'd think Florida had mountains or terrain that looks like Colorado. The lead character also spends the rest of the time walking about like he fried his brain on drugs. For me, I'm more interested in and want to see and know about the journey and the people on the way.

I would love to talk to these early explorers or see what they saw and I admire them for their courage and sense of adventure, and if they still exist somewhere, how funny it all must seem to them now. Just wait 400+ years and you've got an area with beaches people flock to and Disney World. Does one man's hell eventually becomes another man's vacation spot ?!?!

This film's first hour does surpass all of "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" (1972) but loses something when it turns into a Conquistador "Apocalypse Now" (1979).

If anyone out there knows of any other good films about early exploration of the New World then e-mail me. Thanks.

"Cabeza de Vaca" may be viewed as a surrealistic rumination on the nature of early contact between Europeans and North American Indians, but it has very little to do with the actual narrative of events as presented to Charles V by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in his 1542 report.

Viewers who may wonder about the rapid transition from Florida to the Southwest in the movie should realize that the opening scene depicting the separation of the rafts of Captain Narvaez and Cabeza de Vaca took place off the coast of Louisiana WEST of the Mississippi more than a year after their first landfall in Florida, despite the meager information provided in the opening credits. Cabeza de Vaca is also presented as Treasurer to the King of Spain, when in fact he was merely treasurer of that particular expedition.

And although the long sequence early in the movie showing Cabeza de Vaca's period of slavery to the Indian sorcerer and the armless dwarf is quite interesting to see, there is no corresponding incident in the explorer's writings. C de V did report on a brief period of enslavement, but that is all. No sorcerer, no dwarf.

Similarly, the bond created between C de V and the young Indian who he cures by removing an arrowhead is not in the original narrative, but rather a conflation of several different episodes from the journey.

The key scenes of capture and near-murder by the blue-painted Indians are wholly the creation of the screenwriter.

The movie has an inconsistent approach to nudity. Most of the Indian tribes encountered by C de V went entirely naked during the warm season, but are almost always shown with at least some kind of loincloth. However, during the "blue Indian" sequence and later, when the survivors are taken in by friendly Indians for a while, full nudity is present among the females, and even full-frontal on the part of an Indian girl who offers herself to one of C de V's men. Meant to be tittilating? I don't know. It wasn't. In C de V's report, he notes a number of times that he and his Spanish companions were, for a long period, "naked as the day we were born," but there is no male nudity whatsoever in the film.

So what is accurate? The suffering endured, for sure, and the apparent success of the Spaniards in "curing" Indians through the power of God. The arrival in Mexico toward the end, and the capture of the Indians there as slaves. That's about it.

Nevertheless, the film holds the attention throughout, and the final scene of Indians bearing the enormous silver cross through the desert is quite arresting.

6 out of 10 for me.

There are many historical inaccuracies in this film if one considers it based on de Vaca's letter to the King of Spain detailing his ordeals and adventures. Having read Haniel Long's amazing little book on the subject in which he imagines another letter from de Vaca to the king after de Vaca has been back in Spain for some time in which he tries to convey the sense of what is "civilized" and what is "savage," I not only appreciate what the makers of this film were trying to say, but consider it a masterpiece.

Another source is the famous Lord Buckley beat monologue of the 1950's called "The Gasser" about Cabeza de Vaca. That great old hipster also homes in on the essential truth about de Vaca's letter to the King: that there is a power, for healing and compassion, which is suppressed in civilized society and which, if not used, "recedes from us." This is the message of the film, and if some characters and situations and even whole tribes were invented, it is dramatic license in the service of a great theme.

One chapter of the conquista - the subjugation of the Native American peoples by Europeans. We follow Alvaro Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's adventures and misadventures in the New World from a crash landing of his ship through his saving and capture by the Indians, his forced immersion into the Indian culture, his almost mystical pilgrimage from Florida through the American Southwest to California (or was it Mexico?), up to the bitter end at the hands of his European compatriots. Spectacular visuals lend the film the power of myth, but this is still more realistic depiction of the tragic clash of the cultures in the 16th century America than all the Hollywood productions, including Roland Joffe's "The Mission (1986)" (which, by the way, I do like). The only feature film with this topic that I consider equal, or perhaps even superior, is "Jerico (1988)" made by a Venezuelan ethnography professor Luis Alberto Lamata.

In a strange and fantastic film, the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca interacts with American Indians before any other Europeans and becomes integrated into their world before he his torn out of it by the arrival of more Spanish.

To answer a common question . . . Why does Florida look like Arizona in this film? Because it's not Florida. It's not even supposed to be Florida.

The makers of this film (and the makers of this film's packaging) have their facts wrong but their scenery right. Cabeza de Vaca landed in Texas, probably at the site of today's Galveston. That explains the slow-moving, brown water streams and the thick vegetation and mosquitoes. He then walked west or southwest. West Texas and northern Mexico do have semi-desert conditions and modest sized mountains and mesas and some canyons. The real Cabeza de Vaca left Florida on a flimsy raft -- depicted in the film -- hoping to make it to Cuba. Instead, he landed on the Texas gulf coast. I don't know why the filmmakers labeled the landscape as Florida.

This film is odd. It is exceptionally slow paced. There is little intelligible dialogue: lots of grunts or dialogue in indigenous languages (but no subtitles). We are as lost as Cabeza de Vaca. This film is from his point of view, and no explanation for his healing powers is offered. Nor do we receive an explanation of the tribal dynamics (some accept him, some enslave him, another seems to wish to execute him).