Film und Fang am Amazonas

This work investigates the 1925 German film Urwelt im Urwald, directed by Adolf Freiherr von Dungern and produced during a Ufa-funded expedition to Brazil’s Amazon region to document the local fauna. At the time, the film was a critical and commercial success, hailed as a masterpiece of the Tierfilm and Kulturfilm genres; today, however, it is considered a lost film. The work reconstructs the film’s narrative and production context, analyzes its reception in Germany, and discusses its visual and ideological portrayals of the Amazon and Brazil. Special attention is given to the film’s colonial dimensions, including the exoticization of nature, the racialized depictions of Brazilian society by members of the expedition, and the associated practices of hunting and animal collecting. The study is structured around two parallel levels: first, the cinematic work, through a possible reconstruction of the film, based on available textual and visual sources, and its immediate reception through the analysis of reviews in specialized magazines and daily newspapers; and second, the expedition’s history and its material outcomes, i.e., the animal specimens brought back to Germany. This work contributes to the fields of film history and film heritage, postcolonial studies, history of science and natural history and transnational cultural exchange between Germany and Brazil in the early 20th century.