THE AMAZON, CINEMA AND THE GREAT MOTHER: TEACHING BETWEEN ARCHETYPES AND SYMBOLS

Abstract

This article sought to bring to the teacher possible action strategies to face some controversial points of the history and narrative productions about the hyleia in South America through the seventh art, presenting itself as a challenge for a more in-depth reading of five films about the Amazon region in the classroom. From the principle of ignorance of the archetypal and symbolic forces that move man within the forest, the films studied – The Bare Jungle (1954), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Anaconda (1997), Z – The Lost City (2016) and In the Jungle (2017) – in the light of Neumann's (2021) understanding of the Great Mother, in dialogue with Bachelard's (1988 and 2003) phenomenology of imagination (1988 and 2003) and Durand's symbolic hermeneutics (1992 and 2004),  They promote an approximation of fundamental points that relate man and wild nature in an ambiguous and at the same time extreme relationship, through violence and deprivation, experiencing the possibility of nothingness as a phenomenon of risk and recognition to rediscover meaning in living with the whole, forcing us to respect the limits that the civilizational process itself proposes in the face of the unknown.