La súpay-lancha de <i>Fitzcarraldo</i> (Herzog y las mitologías amazónicas)

Abstract

In his book The Conquest of the Useless, related to the filming of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog records the details of his experience in a several years working in a wide area of the Peruvian Amazon. It is not, as he himself declares, the diary of a film but a text marked by a rare poetic intensity –a vision– and hallucination. My research explores the relations of the “steamer’s imagination” with the mythologies of the Shipibo Indians in the banks of the Ucayali: the mythical demonic visions of the súpay-lancha or the steamboat of Fitzcarrald. This phantasmagorical genealogy culminates with the revision of a myth of the Piro Indians –the history of Sangama– that articulates the vision of the mythological steamer with what might be called the performance or the mise-en-scène of a shamanic hallucinatory audition.