Monday | March 6, 2000 9:00 pm

Kautschuk

Screening on Film

Directed by Eduard von Borsody.
With René Deltgen, Gustav Diessl, Roman Bahn.
Germany, 1938, 35mm, black & white, 104 min.
German with English subtitles.

An adventure film produced by the Ufa studio, Kautschuk was released in the United States as Green Hell. It blends elaborate location footage from an Amazon expedition (including tableaux of voracious crocodiles and greedy piranhas as well as a ferocious tropical storm) and interiors shot in the Babelsberg studio to create the historical drama of an English entrepreneur. Henry Wickham, a heroic forerunner of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, travels to Brazil in 1876, posing as a butterfly collector as he seeks to elude Portuguese officials and procure rubber seeds for the British colonies.