Cabeza de Vaca (1991) User Reviews (18)

"To know what it means to have nothing, you must have nothing."

[michael-2490 · 8/10 · 20 April 2012]

This dramatization of the true story of an odyssey that was as amazing in some respects as Homer's account of the voyage of Ulysses. The film puts the European invasion of the continent into more appropriate perspective, revealing the veil of lies about slavery and genocide that are common in histories of events in this place during this time. Although this film is politically compromised, it should be promoted to at least open the door on reality for those who don't know what this story is about.

Unfortunately, the result of this compromise is that most products of U.S. public education and other provincial audiences, who generally don't know the story of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and what he had to say, will miss the significance his "report" to the Spanish monarchy but it may inspire those who do see the film to examine Nuñez' account of his journey in relation to the vast ignorance, greed and stupidity of the Spanish monarchy and the hierarchy of the Catholic church to whom he addressed his comments when he wrote what turns out to be the only accurate portrait of indigenous people of this continent, in which he showed the "conquered" victims of the invasion.

Missed in this film is the greatest irony of ironies: that the church responded to Cabeza de Vaca's report to Isabella and Ferdinand & Co. by creditng the myth of the fountain of youth to reinterpret Cabeza de Vaca's statement about personal transformation and the humanity of the indigenous people. De Vaca's revelations exposed the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic pretense that Christian idealism and not individual and collective greed motivated the conquest, the brutality, the slavery, the genocide. Ponce de Leon was sent out ostensibly to find the fountain of youth, while in the process, robbing, enslaving and killing indigenous people. Cabeza de Vaca died in poverty and is unknown to most students of the period.

A movie uses visual and aural spectacle, music and narrative to hypnotize viewers to tell a story, which means evoking experience and emotions associated with events, places and people. With movies, language, custom, commerce, politics and the attention span of viewers limit possibilities. From the perspective of indigenous North American people, this film is too compromised but it's a step in the right direction, which explains comparisons to Dances With Wolves.

After films are made, we may examine the ways films fail and we see why and this is valuable. In this film, the failure was not in execution but in the vision of the script. It conveys something important but does it leave out the part that makes it really relevant to our lives and contemporary practices that mirror the attitude of Isabella and the Vatican in the 16th century? Perhaps, it is better for a review to say nothing about this to avoid prejudicing viewers but the box office shows the opposite. It doesn't matter what we write in our reviews. You can't spoil a really good movie with a review.

The location is right- Florida at this time referred to all this area.

[tooplanx · 8/10 · 2 May 2010]

Very interesting and visually stunning movie, which paints a unique portrait of pre-European life in this region.

However, most of the story is fabrication, as other reviewers have pointed out, which is a shame and takes much away from the 'insight' that this film seems to give.

On the point of geography- This film joins the expedition part way through their journey after they have left the Florida peninsula and just before they land in the Galveston region. It is worth pointing out that at this time THE WHOLE OF THE REGION FROM THE Florida PENINSULA TO NORTHERN 'NEW SPAIN' (MEXICO) WAS REGARDED AS Florida, and so film characters talking about the land as Florida is historically accurate.

Very good film though and definitely worth a watch.

Welcome to Hell? Nope, it's just Florida !

[z_crito2001 · 7/10 · 22 September 2001]

For the time this film is set, which is 1528, that's a very early era of western exploration (only 36 years after Columbus). I personally would love to see the Americas (North and South) before the full arrival of Europeans. Not because Europeans were "bad" but simply to see something before it's changed dramatically. Unfortunately for many of the early explorers and visitors -- English and Spanish -- a trip to the New World didn't give a feeling of wonder but of life in hell. I'm also aware of the fact that most extant written history of exploration of the New World was written by English authors so it's probably: bad Spanish explorers, good English explorers. But apparently not for this particular story.

As for this film I can only recommend its first hour, which is its best.

The first hour of this film does an excellent job of showing the problems these early explorers faced and how something so promising could turn so bad. Once Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (a copy and paste on that name!) leaves Florida it loses its sense of adventure and mystery (well a good part of it) and the film moves too quickly from Florida to the western shore of Mexico. So quickly you'd think Florida had mountains or terrain that looks like Colorado. The lead character also spends the rest of the time walking about like he fried his brain on drugs. For me, I'm more interested in and want to see and know about the journey and the people on the way.

I would love to talk to these early explorers or see what they saw and I admire them for their courage and sense of adventure, and if they still exist somewhere, how funny it all must seem to them now. Just wait 400+ years and you've got an area with beaches people flock to and Disney World. Does one man's hell eventually becomes another man's vacation spot ?!?!

This film's first hour does surpass all of "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" (1972) but loses something when it turns into a Conquistador "Apocalypse Now" (1979).

If anyone out there knows of any other good films about early exploration of the New World then e-mail me. Thanks.

the power that recedes

[jimi99 · 8 August 2003]

There are many historical inaccuracies in this film if one considers it based on de Vaca's letter to the King of Spain detailing his ordeals and adventures. Having read Haniel Long's amazing little book on the subject in which he imagines another letter from de Vaca to the king after de Vaca has been back in Spain for some time in which he tries to convey the sense of what is "civilized" and what is "savage," I not only appreciate what the makers of this film were trying to say, but consider it a masterpiece.

Another source is the famous Lord Buckley beat monologue of the 1950's called "The Gasser" about Cabeza de Vaca. That great old hipster also homes in on the essential truth about de Vaca's letter to the King: that there is a power, for healing and compassion, which is suppressed in civilized society and which, if not used, "recedes from us." This is the message of the film, and if some characters and situations and even whole tribes were invented, it is dramatic license in the service of a great theme.

Spectacular visuals lend the film the power of myth

[peter-209 · 9/10 · 6 August 1999]

One chapter of the conquista - the subjugation of the Native American peoples by Europeans. We follow Alvaro Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's adventures and misadventures in the New World from a crash landing of his ship through his saving and capture by the Indians, his forced immersion into the Indian culture, his almost mystical pilgrimage from Florida through the American Southwest to California (or was it Mexico?), up to the bitter end at the hands of his European compatriots. Spectacular visuals lend the film the power of myth, but this is still more realistic depiction of the tragic clash of the cultures in the 16th century America than all the Hollywood productions, including Roland Joffe's "The Mission (1986)" (which, by the way, I do like). The only feature film with this topic that I consider equal, or perhaps even superior, is "Jerico (1988)" made by a Venezuelan ethnography professor Luis Alberto Lamata.

This is NOT the original, however...

[michelle-21946 · 6/10 · 19 March 2022]

The original celluloid version has either deteriorated, lost, or caught and captured (by who knows who) so no one can view it now.

It Aired some time back (on one of those public television stations), in a mid night viewing.

It was a 1930's black and white true account based on the diary of a defected, tortured and conflicted soul losing faith in a murderous mission landing gone awry.

The comments about it here are fascinating conjecture, except those who researched some. Frustrated, as the trail was also ''disappeared'' with that 1930's film. I won't validate any book, novel or film after.

Unless one wishes to read his original account.

My guess is it was all edited to please the very Church that ordered the execution of every Native child, woman and man (the Doctrine of Discovery In 1452, Pope Nicholas declared war against all non-Christians in the world and authorized the seizure of their nations and territories.).

~The same that hides their priests when they still go for the children today.

Imagine the shock for the 84,217,138 Catholics to absorb. 82% of Mexico would NOT like this history AT ALL.

Governments are notorious for killing any unseemly inconvenient truth.

For example, bills are being discussed and passed with educators threatened today, for teaching unredacted history. Search engines are clogged with intentional misinformation.

Dances with Wolves goes Mexican

[susansweb · 10/10 · 23 August 2001]

Utterly fascinating movie that doesn't go for the Hollywood ending (ala "Dances with Wolves"). Purportedly from the diaries of Cabeza de Vaca, a treasurer for Charles the Fifth of Spain, the film goes from the brutal realism of war to a mystical tour of Indian life to the sad reality of Spanish conquest. This film is a must-see.

Powerful meditation about Mexico's birth

[mvaldez · 9/10 · 26 May 2008]

This is a really interesting 1991 Mexican drama concerning the eight-year long journey (1528 - 1536) of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked in Florida and enslaved by Indians, but who found a career as an itinerant Indian shaman, and eventually, after an endless journey through swamp and desert, ultimately found his way back to Spanish civilization. Cabeza de Vaca's few traveling companions, most notably the Moor Estebanico, helped fuel rumors of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, which led directly to the 1540 Coronado expedition and the first Spanish encounters with the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca's story is one the greatest personal survival tales in world history, and it made him one of the very, very few people who could fully appreciate the tragedy of Spain's conquest of the peoples of the Americas. The movie is in Spanish with English subtitles, but there is actually little Spanish at all, since Cabeza de Vaca is often alone or isolated, with no one to speak to. He is just as lost as the audience, in a world of Indian dialects.

The director Nicolás Echevarría greatly simplified, even over-simplified, Cabeza de Vaca's journey. The movie suggests the shipwreck was in Florida, but that was actually the journey's first bloody stopping point. The final shipwreck occurred somewhere west of the Mississippi Delta, and Cabeza de Vaca's enslavement likely occurred somewhere near Galveston, Texas. Why leave that part out? Well, it's complicated, and ultimately for director Nicolás Echevarría may have been unimportant. Echevarría had something else in mind. The important part was that Cabeza de Vaca was thrown into a hallucinatory world of abasement and privation. Cabeza de Vaca carried a Christian cross, and his initial captors decided he should be sent to a shaman who also wore a cross, and be put to work tending the needs of a spoiled armless gnome. What a horrible existence! The hallucinatory quality is reminiscent of the magical realism pioneered by author Gabriel García Márquez and subsequently used by directors like Mel Gibson in "Apocalypto". Cabeza de Vaca's real existence may have been as a turtle-egg collector on the Texas beach, but instead the movie shows him apprenticing the shaman craft with his captors. Cabeza de Vaca's vision-laden emergence as a successful healer is the movie's best moment.

The transition from swamp to desert is very abrupt, indicating that Echevarría wasn't much bothered by notions of continuity. Indeed, he had only two Mexican filming locations: the desert (in Coahuila) and the swamp (in Nayarit). As far as I could tell, the Indians were less like the real Indians of the northern Gulf of Mexico coast, and more like the Indians of Mexico. Then I remembered my history of Mexico ("Mexico" by Michael D. Coe, third edition, p. 146):

"Into this uneasy political situation stepped the last barbaric tribe to arrive in the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs, the 'people whose face nobody knows'. They said that they came from a place called 'Aztlan' in the west of Mexico, believed by some authorities to be the state of Nayarit, and had wandered about guided by the image of their tribal god, Huitzilopochtli ('Hummingbird-on-the left'), who was borne on the shoulders of four priests. .... We next see the Aztecs following a hand-to-mouth existence in the marshes of the great lake, or 'Lake of the Moon'. On they wandered, loved by none, until they reached some swampy, unoccupied islands, covered by rushes, near the western shore; it was claimed that there the tribal prophecy, to build a city where an eagle was sitting on a cactus, holding a snake in its mouth, was fulfilled.

The director suggests discreetly, by his choice of filming location in the Nayarit swamps, through simplification and also perhaps by conflation of the Texas Indians with Aztecs, and by using a dash of magical realism, that Cabeza de Vaca's real story is about the tragedy of Mexico's conquest by Spain. And Cabeza de Vaca's story is about that, partly at any rate. The film is a meditation about Mexico's tortured birth as a Spanish colony. A powerful film and well-worth watching!

Sorcerers and dwarfs in Mexico

[film-critic · 5/10 · 25 September 2004]

After watching this movie, I had to do some research on it. I had learned that this was a true story, but I didn't know anything about what it may be about or who the major players were. What I did discover was that this film was somewhat factually wrong. I hated to read that because this was a very powerful film. This was one of the only films that I have ever watched that used less "known" words, and more violence to carry the message. Perhaps violence isn't the best word, but this film was filled with violent images countered with images of faith and healing. Apparently when Vaca returned to Spain, he wrote some letters to the King describing what he had seen during the eight years on the uncharted land. This was the basis for this film, but according to most, this film left out too much, and took rights to other parts of Vaca's adventure. For example, although the long sequence early in the movie showing Cabeza de Vaca's period of slavery to the Indian sorcerer and the armless dwarf is quite interesting to see, there is no corresponding incident in the explorer's writings. Vaca did report on a brief period of enslavement, but that is all. No sorcerer, no dwarf (...damn...).

This film is a transitional movie. At first, we are to feel sorry for Vaca and what is happening to him. Watching the dwarf and sorcerer make fun of him and force him to do painful duties. We are made to feel sympathetic for this man that seemingly is loosing strength and mental power daily. Then, we hit the big moment. When Vaca becomes the healer and befriends the Indian, we feel less sympathetic, and for me, more confused. Did Vaca want to leave this place? Near the end, the answer becomes even more shaded. I would think that someone that feels so strongly about a community that he has spent eight years of his life with would do more than just go back and hope that his new 'family' is not captured. Vaca, in this film, took the cheap route. The final scene is a very gripping moment in our history. Vaca is forced to help bring Christianity to this natives. To demolish their world and form of religion and bring in Western civilization. Vaca sees this and cries, but then STILL does nothing. He apparently has the power to bring people to life, but destroy a church is well out of his grasp.

The last scene is of enslaved Indians carrying a Christian cross across the desert. This represent the beginning of the end of most of the Indian's beliefs that have been them for thousands of years. The beginning of the corruption and the force to bring certain beliefs to everyone. Very sad ending.

Overall, a decent film that still carries a strong message even today. While the cinematography seems choppy at times, it is worth the wait to witness the human destruction near the end. I suggest this to anyone that needs a moment to see the path of 'our' people.

Grade: *** out of *****

Rare

[starkro-82300 · 10/10 · 25 September 2015]

To say that Cabeza de Vaca is about the Spanish conquest of the New World is like saying that The Wizard of Oz is about life in Kansas.

Reviewer chaos-rampant's last paragraph comes closer to capturing the essence of the movie. It's an extraordinary taste of primal existence. What is it like to be at the extremes of alienation, exhaustion, deprivation, isolation, even enslavement--and still know wonder? And still express generosity? And still have the impulse to heal?

If you are interested in such matters, it doesn't matter whether you enjoy history or can speak Spanish or even are able to read the subtitles. This film may affect you like few others.

Missed opportunity

[Aristides-2 · 5/10 · 8 November 2011]

Director/co-writer Nicolás Echevarría profoundly missed an opportunity to make this otherwise flawed film memorable by failing to let the sub-titles (in English for this viewer) mirror de Vaca's gradual understanding of the language he learned as an 8 year captive. The indigenous people were shown to be of a different-than-Western civilization; extremely different in cultural day to day living. But he learned how to speak and hear them, understand them. By sharing his gradual ability to think like them, with us the audience, we too could have seen their being 'foreign' gradually change into kinship . This would make the ending of the movie, as the Spanish conquistadors force the people into slavery, misery and premature death, much more effecting. As it is it's solely de Vaca's humanity that cries from the screen instead of the humanity of the people we should have learned to know as individuals, as well as his.

Powerful film

[Cheyenne-3 · 12 November 2000]

I was still up at 12 in the morning, and just happened to come across this movie in the storage room. I was expecting this film to make me fall asleep, but the exact opposite occurred! This film reminds me of Tolstoy's Resurrection. It's about a man who finally realizes that the Indians were not savages and did not need to be Christianized. It's about a man, who finally sees the light.Although there is nudity in the film, it makes the picture more realistic, as back then, the idea of clothes for the Indians were different than those of the Spanish. The image that affected me the most was the huge, gleaming silver cross, carried by hundreds of spanish soldados across Old World land. There are many interpretations of what this may mean, but for sure, it definitely represents the loss of innocence for the Indians and the final victory for the Spanish. Go and see this film! It is absolutely fantastic!

Beautiful and weird odyssey through Central America 1582.

[cynandtie · 8/10 · 3 May 2001]

Amazingly weird (or weirdly amazing?) movie of an odyssey of Spanish conquistadores through Central America 1582. Beautiful images, unseen collection of freaks and outcasts, strong and sometimes disturbing episodes. The plot has a few flaws, but this is a visual movie:

Werner Herzog meets Fellini in the Mexican jungle, definitely worth seeing.

old Florida

[lee_eisenberg · 5/10 · 29 June 2020]

If you've spent your life in the United States, you might not know that Florida used to be a Spanish colony. In the 1520s, an explorer led an expedition into the peninsula and ended up traversing thousands of miles (or kilometers) over the next few years, covering what became the southeast US.

Nicolás Echevarría's "Cabeza de Vaca" focuses on this expedition, although it sounds as though the movie adds a lot of stuff that didn't happen. Sounds as though "based on a true story" should usually raise a red flag.

Aside from that, the movie does introduce the viewer to this impressive part of history. It's a real pity that we tend to learn so little about history, even US history (never mind that we don't learn the history of the indigenous peoples).

Worth seeing as a historical reference.

Encounters at the Ends of the World

[chaos-rampant · 3 August 2010]

The conquest of a new world on behalf of the Spanish crown in the 16th century was built on atrocity and deceit, fueled by lies and rumours, greed and ambition. But also failure and anguish. Cabeza de Vaca is one such tale of failure and anguish. Cabeza, acting as the treasurer for Captain Narvaez's expedition, is shipwrecked off the Florida coast and picked on by natives. The historical details of his journey and gruelling subsequent life under capture are skewed though, the movie does not make attempts at historical realism, it goes for the primitive and spiritual. Or this is how it would be if the soldiers on the raft got rid of Aguirre and drifted further downstream to wash up in Herzog's Cobra Verde and become slaves to a shaman and his armless midget helper.

The world we're shown is at once horrible and wonderful and director Etchevveria photographs it as both. For big swathes of time the movie is without dialogue and we're crouching on the dirt as the natives perform elaborate rituals that mean nothing to us. The words are lost in the translation but the ceremonial aspect remains. Bodies covered in mud, painted blue and ghastly white, adorned with feathered headpieces, witch doctors making voices and calling out to something, Cabeza de Vaca, both movie and protagonist, observes it all with a half-mad stare and twitching hands.

When the survivors of the expedition reach Spanish hands again, one of them exalts the audience with tales of golden cities in the north and shaman potions that give the drinker the sexual prowess of 20 mules. Coronado traveled as far north to New Mexico to discover the 7 Cities of Gold probably on one such impossible tale recounted around the fire by drunken conquistadors desperate to believe. The will to empire is not only the pursuit of the mad and the hopeless, the ambitious and the greedy, but also in itself the result of myth and poetic fabrication, a self-fulfilling prophecy that becomes true by the simple fact it has been pursued.

The biggest flaw in the movie is the protagonist. Every time Juan Diego opens his mouth or gesticulates the results are cringeworthy. Manic ferocity came natural to Kinski because he was manic, Diego on the other hand chews scenery like he's playing this for the theater. When he's lost in his own thoughts and acts mad, the results are significantly better.

A filthy gaunt figure dressed in rags is climbing on ragged redrock terrain, walls of rock rising on all sides, he can barely traces his steps but there's nowhere to trace them to, he's a strange man lost in a strange violent world that makes no sense - the movie is his anguished cry in the wilderness echoed all around him like the wilderness is crying back at him. The final image is an ecstatic metaphor, like something Herzog would have improvised, and it's a stunning way to close the film.

Interesting, but not historical

[ms94801 · 27 July 2002]

"Cabeza de Vaca" may be viewed as a surrealistic rumination on the nature of early contact between Europeans and North American Indians, but it has very little to do with the actual narrative of events as presented to Charles V by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in his 1542 report.

Viewers who may wonder about the rapid transition from Florida to the Southwest in the movie should realize that the opening scene depicting the separation of the rafts of Captain Narvaez and Cabeza de Vaca took place off the coast of Louisiana WEST of the Mississippi more than a year after their first landfall in Florida, despite the meager information provided in the opening credits. Cabeza de Vaca is also presented as Treasurer to the King of Spain, when in fact he was merely treasurer of that particular expedition.

And although the long sequence early in the movie showing Cabeza de Vaca's period of slavery to the Indian sorcerer and the armless dwarf is quite interesting to see, there is no corresponding incident in the explorer's writings. C de V did report on a brief period of enslavement, but that is all. No sorcerer, no dwarf.

Similarly, the bond created between C de V and the young Indian who he cures by removing an arrowhead is not in the original narrative, but rather a conflation of several different episodes from the journey.

The key scenes of capture and near-murder by the blue-painted Indians are wholly the creation of the screenwriter.

The movie has an inconsistent approach to nudity. Most of the Indian tribes encountered by C de V went entirely naked during the warm season, but are almost always shown with at least some kind of loincloth. However, during the "blue Indian" sequence and later, when the survivors are taken in by friendly Indians for a while, full nudity is present among the females, and even full-frontal on the part of an Indian girl who offers herself to one of C de V's men. Meant to be tittilating? I don't know. It wasn't. In C de V's report, he notes a number of times that he and his Spanish companions were, for a long period, "naked as the day we were born," but there is no male nudity whatsoever in the film.

So what is accurate? The suffering endured, for sure, and the apparent success of the Spaniards in "curing" Indians through the power of God. The arrival in Mexico toward the end, and the capture of the Indians there as slaves. That's about it.

Nevertheless, the film holds the attention throughout, and the final scene of Indians bearing the enormous silver cross through the desert is quite arresting.

6 out of 10 for me.

a journey through the Southwest

[jg1972 · 11 December 2003]

In a strange and fantastic film, the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca interacts with American Indians before any other Europeans and becomes integrated into their world before he his torn out of it by the arrival of more Spanish.

To answer a common question . . . Why does Florida look like Arizona in this film? Because it's not Florida. It's not even supposed to be Florida.

The makers of this film (and the makers of this film's packaging) have their facts wrong but their scenery right. Cabeza de Vaca landed in Texas, probably at the site of today's Galveston. That explains the slow-moving, brown water streams and the thick vegetation and mosquitoes. He then walked west or southwest. West Texas and northern Mexico do have semi-desert conditions and modest sized mountains and mesas and some canyons. The real Cabeza de Vaca left Florida on a flimsy raft -- depicted in the film -- hoping to make it to Cuba. Instead, he landed on the Texas gulf coast. I don't know why the filmmakers labeled the landscape as Florida.

This film is odd. It is exceptionally slow paced. There is little intelligible dialogue: lots of grunts or dialogue in indigenous languages (but no subtitles). We are as lost as Cabeza de Vaca. This film is from his point of view, and no explanation for his healing powers is offered. Nor do we receive an explanation of the tribal dynamics (some accept him, some enslave him, another seems to wish to execute him).

Great Sumnation

[paullyons-1 · 14 November 2008]

The first review is right-on. Read the original text and one comes away with a different story. The actual name of the book is "La Relation", meaning The Relation and is but a report to the King of Spain. Hunger was so much a part of the story, which is represented well, but more interesting is probably the concept that a mixed racial group of people, three Catholics and and African, were interacting with the locals and they were in some respects taken in. I wonder more about the relation between these four surviving members. I just think that it is ironic, considering present day politics, the make up of the Cabeza de Vaca party.

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