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The opening scene of the Brazilian film Coma era gostoso o meufrancês [How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, 1971] directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, begins with an announcement: "Latest news from Terra Firme," suggesting that we are about to witness a tragic event; and to the extent that Terra Firme was one of the colonial names of Brazil, it might also indicate that this story of the colonial past has implications for the present. What follows is the reading of a letter sent to the Protestant reformer John Calvin, by the French Protestant Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon who led an expedition to Brazil, in the Guanabara Bay region, between 1555 and 1559.' The letter, dated March 1557, describes how Villegaignon learned of a conspiracy against his life and how he imprisoned the four principal instigators: "The next day we released one of them from his chains, so that he might plead his case in greater liberty; but breaking into a run, he threw himself into the sea, and drowned." The verbal account however, is undermined by the visual images that portray a completely different event. Rather than seeing the soldier escaping and drowning, we are shown the man captured while enjoying a meal with native women. He is subsequently chained, blessed by a priest and thrown into the sea from a cliff, all actions portrayed with jubilant orchestral music.
Both texts, the visual and the oral, are referring to the exact same event. As spectators we must draw our own conclusions. On the one hand, this first scene is parodie, and clearly sets out to ridicule and undermine the carefully selected "documented" materials that the film includes. It is impossible not to feel at odds with the contradictions embedded in what we are presented. At the same time the film reproduces and affirms its historical anchor in the documents, letters and illustrations of the colonial period. Hence, from the beginning of the film we are confronted with an "official" version of conquest and the existence of other silenced "versions." The tension between narratives and understandings of events will be even more apparent once we enter the world of the cannibal. By constantly superimposing a multiplicity of discourses embedded within a "historical" reconstruction, the film...