Cabeça de Vaca

The conquest of a new world on behalf of the Spanish crown in the 16th century was built on atrocity and deceit, fueled by lies and rumours, greed and ambition. But also failure and anguish. Cabeza de Vaca is one such tale of failure and anguish. Cabeza, acting as the treasurer for Captain Narvaez's expedition, is shipwrecked off the Florida coast and picked on by natives. The historical details of his journey and gruelling subsequent life under capture are skewed though, the movie does not make attempts at historical realism, it goes for the primitive and spiritual. Or this is how it would be if the soldiers on the raft got rid of Aguirre and drifted further downstream to wash up in Herzog's Cobra Verde and become slaves to a shaman and his armless midget helper.

The world we're shown is at once horrible and wonderful and director Etchevveria photographs it as both. For big swathes of time the movie is without dialogue and we're crouching on the dirt as the natives perform elaborate rituals that mean nothing to us. The words are lost in the translation but the ceremonial aspect remains. Bodies covered in mud, painted blue and ghastly white, adorned with feathered headpieces, witch doctors making voices and calling out to something, Cabeza de Vaca, both movie and protagonist, observes it all with a half-mad stare and twitching hands.

When the survivors of the expedition reach Spanish hands again, one of them exalts the audience with tales of golden cities in the north and shaman potions that give the drinker the sexual prowess of 20 mules. Coronado traveled as far north to New Mexico to discover the 7 Cities of Gold probably on one such impossible tale recounted around the fire by drunken conquistadors desperate to believe. The will to empire is not only the pursuit of the mad and the hopeless, the ambitious and the greedy, but also in itself the result of myth and poetic fabrication, a self-fulfilling prophecy that becomes true by the simple fact it has been pursued.

The biggest flaw in the movie is the protagonist. Every time Juan Diego opens his mouth or gesticulates the results are cringeworthy. Manic ferocity came natural to Kinski because he was manic, Diego on the other hand chews scenery like he's playing this for the theater. When he's lost in his own thoughts and acts mad, the results are significantly better.

A filthy gaunt figure dressed in rags is climbing on ragged redrock terrain, walls of rock rising on all sides, he can barely traces his steps but there's nowhere to trace them to, he's a strange man lost in a strange violent world that makes no sense - the movie is his anguished cry in the wilderness echoed all around him like the wilderness is crying back at him. The final image is an ecstatic metaphor, like something Herzog would have improvised, and it's a stunning way to close the film.

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.

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.

Very interesting and visually stunning movie, which paints a unique portrait of pre-European life in this region.

However, most of the story is fabrication, as other reviewers have pointed out, which is a shame and takes much away from the 'insight' that this film seems to give.

On the point of geography- This film joins the expedition part way through their journey after they have left the Florida peninsula and just before they land in the Galveston region. It is worth pointing out that at this time THE WHOLE OF THE REGION FROM THE Florida PENINSULA TO NORTHERN 'NEW SPAIN' (MEXICO) WAS REGARDED AS Florida, and so film characters talking about the land as Florida is historically accurate.

Very good film though and definitely worth a watch.

"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.