迷失Z城

The Lost City of Z is a very long way from a true story — and I should know
A new Hollywood film hypes Percy Fawcett as a great explorer. In fact, he was a racist incompetent who achieved very little

The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. It is about Lt-Col Percy Fawcett. Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a five-week disaster. Calling him one of our greatest explorers is like calling Eddie the Eagle one of our greatest sportsmen. It is an insult to the huge roster of true explorers. Had the advertisement been about a soap powder, it would fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act.

Percy Fawcett joined the army immediately after school, with a commission in the artillery in 1886. The next 20 years involved garrison duty in Ceylon and postings in Malta and England. The only significant events were getting married and becoming a devotee (like many others) of the charlatan psychic Madame Blavatsky. Fawcett’s game-changer came in 1906, when he was 40. The army let him take the Royal Geographical Society’s course on frontier surveying. Far away in South America, Bolivia had just sold its rubber-rich province of Acre to Brazil, so it needed its new north-western boundary mapped. The Bolivians approached the RGS for a mature surveyor to do this. The society’s secretary asked the newly qualified Fawcett whether he wanted to go; he accepted, reported for duty in La Paz and was at work on the new Amazonian frontier by the end of the year. This survey was the best thing Fawcett did. But he described it as boring, because the new frontier was all along rivers. This was the height of the great Amazon rubber boom, so he and his team cruised from one comfortable rubber barraca to the next, taking their regular measurements.

Fawcett’s only publications were a series of papers in the Geographical Journal about his mapping work. But he kept a journal, and in 1953 his son Brian edited this and other papers into a book called Exploration Fawcett. He emerges from it as a typical Edwardian colonial officer — friendly with South Americans but looking down on them, appalled by the cruelty at some rubber stations, full of gossip about life on this remote but boom-rich backwater, and uninterested in nature apart from banalities about dangerous snakes and irritating insects.

In 1908, the Bolivians asked Fawcett to survey another of their frontiers with Brazil: a small river called Verde, far away at the north-eastern corner of the large landlocked country. The preparations were appalling. Fawcett took minimal supplies, since he was accustomed to being fed by rubber stations. This was the end of the dry season with the river at its lowest. So they soon had to abandon their boat and continue on foot. After only a week, all food was exhausted and they were really starving. Fawcett casually remarked that five out of his six peons died from the effects of this five-week disaster. This was the only expedition he led into unexplored territory.

The Bolivians invited Fawcett back in 1910, this time to map part of their boundary with Peru. It involved paddling up a frontier river called Heath and two meetings with indigenous peoples on the banks. The first group fired arrows and guns over their heads. But Fawcett waded ashore with presents and shouting a few words of ‘Chuncho’ (the Peruvian word for all forest peoples) that he had memorised but did not understand. That was the only time that Fawcett attempted any language other than Spanish. Further up the Heath river, Fawcett met a tribe he called Ecocha (now Ese Eja) whom he really liked. They were ‘embarrassingly hospitable’ with their food, so Fawcett spent a few days with them and recorded something of their ethnography. He returned for a second visit in 1911.

After a final survey for the Bolivian government in 1913, of the upper Beni river in the Andes, Fawcett went sightseeing in central Bolivia. He and two companions were paddled down the big Guaporé river. They stopped at Mequens on its Brazilian bank to visit the Swedish anthropologist Baron Erland Nordenskiöld and his attractive wife, who provided guides to take them on a walk inland to visit a people they called Maxubi (now Makurap). The Maxubi were friendly and hospitable, but continuing on a forest trail Fawcett met another tribe (probably Sakurabiat) to whom he took a violent dislike. When one aimed a drawn bow at him, Fawcett shot the man with a Mauser revolver — absolutely forbidden by Brazil’s Indian Service. He described them as he imagined Neanderthals or Piltdown Man to have looked: ‘large hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges… villainous savages, hideous ape men with pig-like eyes.’ No Amazonian Indian has body hair or looks remotely like this — I know, because I have spent time with over 40 different peoples. These two groups, and the two on the Heath, were the only tribal people seen by Fawcett. He liked two of them. So it was strange that he wrote racist gibberish that ‘there are three kinds of Indians. The first are docile and miserable people, easily tamed; the second, dangerous, repulsive cannibals very rarely seen; the third, a robust and fair people, who must have a civilised origin.’

When Fawcett was in the cattle country of central Bolivia in September 1914, news came of the outbreak of war. So he hurried home and by January 1915 was back in the artillery. In his late forties, he was too old for frontline service; but he fought a good war, ending as Lieutenant-Colonel.

In one of his pre-war lectures to the RGS, Fawcett had spoken of possible ancient ruins in the Amazon forests. He was now told about a scrap of paper dated 1743 in which bandeirantes imagined that they had seen a deserted city in the jungles. (The bandeirantes were slavers who scoured the interior of Brazil for Indians to capture. Although most of these thugs were illiterate, others did write reports about their travels — none of which said a word about seeing ruins.) Fawcett gave this imaginary ‘lost city’ the codename Z, and finding it became an obsession.

The easiest forest tribes to visit in Brazil were on the headwaters of one of the Amazon’s southern tributaries, the Xingu. A German anthropologist had contacted a dozen amiable peoples there in 1884; and since then they had been visited by seven groups of anthropologists or Indian Service officials. All had walked in by the same trail. So in 1920 Fawcett tried to follow this route — even though it was nowhere near where the chimera city might have been. His plans went wrong, so he got no further than a ranch halfway along the trail. In 1921 he searched for the mythical city down on the Atlantic coast, by train inland from Salvador da Bahia; but, hardly surprisingly, the miners there knew nothing.

In 1925, by now penniless but desperate, Fawcett tried again to reach the upper Xingu tribes. He now took two inexperienced ex-public schoolboys, his son Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimmel. The old surveyor made two suicidal pronouncements. One was that the trio should travel light, with nothing more than small packs. Everyone in Amazonia knew that you could not cut trails and keep your team fed with fewer than eight men. (I can confirm this, having done months of such cutting and carrying.) But Fawcett sent their pack animals and porters back, and continued with only his two novices. His other dictum was that Indians would look after them. This was equally dangerous. The Xingu tribes pride themselves on generosity; but they expect visitors to reciprocate. All expeditions in the past four decades had brought plenty of presents such as machetes, knives and beads. Fawcett had none. He committed other blunders that antagonised their hosts. So it was only a matter of days before they were all dead.

Twenty years later, Chief Comatsi of the Kalapalo tribe gave a very detailed account of Fawcett’s visit, reminding his assembled people of exactly how they had killed the unwelcome strangers. But the German anthropologist Max Schmidt, who was there in 1926, thought that they had plunged into the forests, got lost and starved to death; this was also the view of a missionary couple called Young who were on another Xingu headwater. The Brazilian Indian Service regretted that Fawcett, who was obsessively secretive, had not asked for their help in dealing with the Indians. They felt he was killed because of the harshness and lack of tact that all recognised in him.

Such was the sad tale of this incompetent, whose only skill was in surveying. But the disappearance of an English colonel while searching for a mythical ancient city in tropical rain forests was a media sensation. Two expeditions went to try to learn more. There was revived interest in the 1950s with the publication of Exploration Fawcett and the Kalapalo chief’s account of how they killed the Englishmen. Then it was forgotten until 2009 when David Grann, a talented writer, published The Lost City of Z. Unfortunately, Grann hyped the story out of all proportion and wrongly depicted Fawcett as a great explorer.

As he cheerfully admitted, Grann had no experience of rainforests. But he let his imagination run riot, with pages about ferocious piranhas, huge anacondas, electric eels (actually a fish that has never killed a man), frogs ‘with enough toxins to kill 100 people’, ‘predator’ pig-like peccary, ‘sauba ants that could reduce the men’s clothes to threads in a single night, ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness…’ and so on. Everyone who know tropical forests, including me, knows that almost every word of this is nonsense.

Fawcett himself gave a simple account of his four surveying journeys for the Bolivian government. But for Grann, ‘in expedition after expedition… he explored thousands of square miles of the Amazon and helped redraw the map of South America’. Fawcett admitted that he was ‘a greenhorn in the jungle’ and knew nothing about nature. But Grann wrote that he moved ‘inch by inch through the jungle, tracing rivers and mountains, cataloguing exotic species… [until] he had explored as much of the region as anyone’.

For Grann, Fawcett was competing against other explorers ‘who were racing into the interior of South America’. The only study that Fawcett made after leaving school in 1886 was his RGS surveying course. He never mentioned any library research. But for Grann he was ‘almost unique’ in viewing 16th- and 17th-century chronicles ignored by other scholars; he re–evaluated El Dorado chronicles and consulted ‘archival records’ and ‘tribesmen’ in ‘piecing together his theory of Z’. Not a word of this was true, either.

Grann wrote that, as an author, he would have been lost without my three-volume, 2,100-page history of Brazilian Indians and five centuries of exploration. He quotes quite often from my books. So he had no excuse for describing Fawcett’s brief visits to three indigenous villages as the ‘discovery of so many previously unknown Indians’, from whom ‘he learned to speak myriad indigenous languages’, and adopted ‘herbal medicines and native methods of hunting [so that he] was better able to survive off the land’. Equally absurd was his rubbish about cannibalistic tribes, blow guns with poisoned darts, or Kuikuro menacing him with ‘gleaming spears flickering’ from the undergrowth (they never used spears, or had metal even, before their contact 130 years ago).

When the colonel vanished, Grann writes that ‘scores’ of explorers tried to find him, and that ‘one recent estimate put the death toll from these expeditions as high as 100.’ Actually, only one search expedition reached the Xingu, led by George Dyott in 1928. (It found that the three Englishmen had been killed by Indians.) The only other expedition was in 1932, but it got only as far as the Araguaia river far to the east. The death toll from these two attempts was zero. In 1935 a ridiculous actor called Albert de Winton went by himself to the Xingu and was killed by Indians who wanted his gun. So if we count him, the death toll is one — well short of Grann’s 100.

These and a great many other passages are artistic licence and hype of an absurd order. Hollywood believed everything Grann wrote, and then hyped it up more. People wishing to learn about the maverick colonel should consult his own fairly modest memoir — not the recent fantasy book and film about him. But I could recommend scores of writings by real explorers.

John Hemming is a Canadian explorer; the three volumes of his history of Brazilian Indians are Red Gold (1978), Amazon Frontier (1985) and Die If You Must (2004)

探险家Percy Fawcett生于1867年，深入亚马逊河谷5次直至最后一次消失在密林之中。影片改编自他的故事。
        佛斯特的父亲生于印度殖民地，哥哥是登山家与冒险小说家。佛斯特自己一心想从事更加冒险有趣的职业，所以佛斯特几乎不假思索地就接受了去南美画地图这样的使命，也开始了他的冒险人生。
       看到一张冒险家本人1911年的照片，那时候他已经成功地完成了几次亚马逊河域的旅程，照片上的他紧蹙眉头，神情严肃，并没有那种轻松喜悦的神色。
       影片中的福斯特梳着一丝不苟的油头，绅士气十足。他在途中读妻子写下的歌颂英雄主义的诗歌。佛斯特第一次探险归来的时候得到了热烈的欢迎。他与怀抱幼子的妻子在人群中拥吻。英格兰歌舞升平，生活惬意，波澜不惊，与密林丛生，四处是未知的野兽以及印第安部落的亚马逊形成了鲜明的对比。可是佛斯特坚信自己发现了失落的文明，执意要再次踏上旅途。妻子看着佛斯特在高堂上神色坚定地号召人们去寻找Z文明，又骄傲又担心。终于他和妻子爆发了争吵。可是争吵后，他还是和同伴踏上了九死一生的旅途。不过这次他们铩羽而归，并没能到达Z。
     时光到了一战，年近50的佛斯特自愿到前线服役。在战场，一个女巫对佛斯特说，你所发现的，远比你想象的更加伟大，你要再去寻找他们，这就是你的命运。佛斯特与曾经一同探险的伙伴在同一军营服役，在一场战斗中，几乎命丧德军毒气战。在病床上，佛斯特说自己梦到了亚马逊的从林，可是医生说介于身体状况佛斯特不可能再踏上那样的征途了。佛斯特的长子Jake看着在病榻上痛哭流涕的父亲，却默默与这位缺席家庭生活多年的父亲和解了。
     最后，Jake鼓励父亲再次踏上征途，也许是战争与缺乏父爱的童年让Jake对人生的意义充满质疑，Jake坚持要与父亲同去。他们一路上都受到高度关注，在火车站为他们喝彩的人不计其数。可是这次终究是一次致命之旅，父子俩在丛林里走过之前的那些路，发现曾经人烟兴盛的城市已荒废，终将父子俩也成了迷失的一部分，都没能再回来。
     维基百科上提供了福斯特父子结局的很多说法，但没有一个说法能够被证实。有一个说法是佛斯特丧失了记忆，在一个食人部落里生活并成为了首领。又有很多其他的说法表示父子已被杀害。
     影片并没有英雄主义式的煽情。全片色彩古典，更像是流畅的叙事。里面间或的南美片段，也让人想起马尔克斯的小说。
     不管是探险，还是一战，佛斯特度过了那样危险重重的一生。在那些濒死时刻，他想起的都是恍如隔世般的英格兰，可这些却是他放弃的生活。他曾经幸运地找到过Z的一些遗迹，却终其一生再没能踏上Z。
      但是你能说，佛斯特的一生都是无用功吗？用佛斯特自己的话说，这就是他的命运，他们完成了别人无法想象的旅程。

      看完电影出来，里昂正是暮色降至的时刻，看着平静美好的街道与河流，想想有人能够放弃这样的生活，坚持去完成那件十分危险的使命，又觉得其实世界是属于有勇气的人的，我们今天对世界的很多认知，都是由这些勇敢的古典旅行者缔造出来的。

烂番茄88%好评《迷失Z城》为啥是“夺宝奇兵”前身？


                           文 和运超





       2017年6月2日，精心酝酿近十年的好莱坞探险大片《迷失Z城》终于要与中国观众见面了，影片改编自同名纪实小说，以20世纪初期英国探险家福塞特的真实冒险事迹为原型，讲述他和家人在南美亚马逊丛林寻找传说中的黄金之国的故事。当年斯皮尔伯格联手乔治·卢卡斯制造的经典系列“夺宝奇兵”灵感就来源这个真实的冒险故事，只不过“夺宝奇兵”主角印第安纳·琼斯这个名字用来自卢卡斯家里游艇和小狗的结合。后来《夺宝奇兵4》就以南美丛林中的神秘古城为线索，算是对失落的Z城来了一次致敬。

       《迷失Z城》今年初在柏林电影节率先亮相，获得称赞，4月份北美上映后在烂番茄的新鲜好评度高达88%。影片班底堪称豪华，由布拉德·皮特的B计划公司出品，他还出任监制。导演詹姆士·格雷1994年的处女作《小奥德萨》就拿下了威尼斯电影节最佳导演银狮奖，他的作品还四次入围戛纳电影节主竞赛单元，编导实力无可挑剔，据说他深受《现代启示录》影响，本片同样有那种惊艳与敬意。




       片中主要演员都为本片而大改形象，作为演艺生涯的一次重大突破。饰演男一号冒险家福塞特的是刚与内地观众见面的“亚瑟王”查理·汉纳姆。他因《环太平洋》而受中国影迷广泛关注，原本以健美的身形和俊朗外表著称，但为了这个角色，他在9周内瘦了约60磅，以真实的形象诠释福赛特坚强的意志。影片的成功和好评离不开他对人物精神与意志的塑造，最终凭借他的信念获得家人和朋友的理解支持，“寻找”的意义值得观众深思。

       因《暮光之城》而大受欢迎的罗伯特·帕丁森也收起俊俏脸庞，扮演福塞特的好友亨利·克斯汀，不仅衣衫不整，还蓄起大胡子，他的造型和表现十分抢镜。而在漫威宇宙担任新版“蜘蛛侠”的汤姆·赫兰德饰演福塞特的儿子杰克，一改小蜘蛛的话唠特色，挑战父子矛盾和文明偏见冲突等人文主题，令人十分好奇他的“画风”转变。片中女主角福塞特的妻子是因《特种部队》中“男爵夫人”享有一定知名度的西耶娜·米勒，她富有激情的表演，让人赞叹。如此星光熠熠的阵容令《迷失Z城》具备相当的吸引力。




        这一探险类影片看似并不多见，但观众也熟悉好莱坞电影一向对未知世界和蛮荒主题有着好奇心，这与美国的诞生背景离不开，美国本就是书写了一部在未知大陆不断探险和开拓的历史。因此，早年率先走红的类型中就有西部冒险片。随着技术提升，不断变形和包装，后来在其他故事类型中进一步拓展。所以，《好莱坞报道者》评价《迷失Z城》的叙事方法、传统风格与痴迷主题，从上世纪30年代到70年代中的任何一个时期都会广受好评。

       当然，《迷失Z城》并非呆板地主打“怀旧”，好莱坞吸引全球观众的核心法宝是视觉盛宴。本片画面上追求探险环境的栩栩如生，20世纪初期的南美亚马逊雨林，各种野生动物，如丛林狂蟒，如美洲黑豹，河流中的怪鱼，野生植物、野人部落和怪异莫测的恶劣天气都十分考验视觉效果的细节。导演詹姆士·格雷突出的是写实，并不刻意追求夸张离奇，所以，本片以真实可感的观影感受，让所有观众体验一把身临其境的神秘与惊悚，显然，《迷失Z城》有向奥斯卡继续冲击的勃勃野心。

         我们知道，布拉德·皮特领衔的B计划公司相继推出过《为奴十二年》、《大空头》、《月光男孩》等多部奥斯卡经典，而本片导演詹姆士·格雷也是各类A级国际影展的常客，《迷失Z城》是由格雷亲自操刀剧本改编，这个故事不仅有种种探险的心理历程，冒险者的坚定信念与勇敢的心，更有文明进步所带来的傲慢和反思。




        早在2008年他就找到布拉德·皮特，当时还说服他亲自出演主角福塞特，到2013年，布拉德·皮特退出仅作为监制，另外物色了一批优秀演员加盟，显然也是希望精心打磨，再为影迷奉献一部佳作。

       通观布拉德·皮特的演绎历史，阶级、殖民和种族主义一向是他的“恶趣”，不论当年的《燃情岁月》《搏击俱乐部》《通天塔》，还是他的公司推出的《为奴十二年》《月光男孩》，今天的《迷失Z城》也不例外，毫无疑问这不是单纯的冒险片，而是渴望成为又一次冲击颁奖季的带着人文深度的野心之作。而4K摄影拍摄匠心独具，传达了好莱坞电影的精髓。

       这部真实的“夺宝奇兵”会带给中国观众怎样的神秘之旅，片方公司十分看重中国市场，亲自剪去冗长部分，提供了一个新版本，6月2日全国上映，让我们一起探索《迷失Z城》。