8/13/2023 0 Comments Lost city of zed location“Pots and pans!” replies another heckler, leading the entire crowd in that chant. “Consider my evidence,” says Fawcett, holding up archeological pottery he found in the jungle. “Are you insisting that these savages are our equals? Savages in Westminster Abbey?” protests a member of the audience. “Especially one created by a race the white man has so brutally condemned to slavery and death!” We, who have been steeped in the bigotry of the church for so long cannot give much credence to an older civilization,” he continues to boos. “Perhaps it is too difficult for some of you to admit. “Amazonia is far more than the green desert which many of us had supposed,” he argues. This is an arena where the loudest voice wins.Īs his wife Nina (Sienna Miller) looks on from the balcony (“It’s men only, I’m afraid,” she’s told when she asks to sit in the audience), Fawcett makes his case. He also has to put on a confident display of male ego. Fawcett knows he doesn’t just need scientific evidence or research papers to convince the Royal Geographers (who can fund his next trip into the Amazon) of his theories. His movies, like The Yards or We Own the Night, are often about cops and gangsters perhaps that understanding of his characters’ street spirit is what makes The Lost City of Z so distinct from other period pieces. James Gray, a Russian Jew who grew up in Flushing, Queens, had until The Lost City of Z never made a film set outside the Big Apple (even his sumptuous The Immigrant is set in Manhattan in the 1920s). But even though his audience is dressed in black tie, they aren’t far removed from a soccer crowd, yelling and jeering at each of Fawcett’s most controversial arguments, and then stomping their feet in approval whenever he holds his own and shoots back an insulting rejoinder. The Royal Geographical Society is the toast of British high culture in 1911 when Fawcett stands up and makes his pitch to lead a new expedition back up the Amazon River. One thing overlooked by so many tony period biopics of Britain is just how ridiculous and rambunctious the country’s people could be-far from the genteel, tea-sipping upper-class folk of Masterpiece Theatre episodes. But in one pivotal scene where Fawcett (a real-life explorer whose multiple odysseys into the Amazon are dramatized in the film) takes the stage at the Royal Geographical Society, his beliefs are treated as heresy. What Fawcett was saying is commonly accepted now-of course the Roman and Greek empires were not the only ones with advanced technology (pottery, roadbuilding, irrigation) in ancient times. The explorer wants hard evidence of a hunch he’s had ever since his first trip to the Bolivian jungle: that there was a world there uncharted by his superiors in the British Army. That song is why Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) keeps coming back to the Amazon rainforest in James Gray’s swooning, sweltering epic. The Lost City of Z is a film about the siren song of the unknown-the chance that just around every bend of the Amazon River could be evidence of a forgotten civilization, or even better, its ancient capital, a place of art and industry that flourished long before European colonists had ever dreamed of invading South America and draining its resources. Next up is James Gray’s The Lost City of Z. Over the next month, The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy moment and unpacking what it says about 2017.
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