Revisiting El Viento del Ayahuasca (1983): Gender representation in a pioneer female director’s film about the Amazon

Abstract

ABSTRACT El Viento del Ayahuasca (1983) is a film by Nora de Izcue (born 1934), considered the first woman director of Peruvian cinema. Despite her importance and the implications of this film for gender and Amazonian studies, the film has received little attention. Thus, revisiting this film provides refreshing insights to understand the prevailing unconscious patriarchal thinking of a pioneering female director in Peru, as her perspective is closer to the male colonizer’s than to the Amazonian woman’s. Although there are moments in the film that show female agency through an “oppositional gaze,” the narrator’s voice and representation of the white, male, urban, and educated character affirms the notions of patriarchy and colonizer superiority. This film introduces a new type of masculine colonizer, the “failed but hopeful ethnographer.” His lack of success to help the feminine, mixed-race, Amazonian, and poor character does not mean that the film dismantles historical representations of the Amazon as an idealized space for the foreigner. The failure of the male character, in fact, entitles him to a legitimate authority as the experienced ethnographer who can speak about the Amazon at the cost of the female protagonist disappearance somewhere in the rainforest.