Curious intersections last week, watching Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972), both of which are set in the Amazon Jungle, and both of which deal with ideas about the notion of 'the savage' and colonialist arrogance. Cannibal Holocaust was less enjoyable for its unrelenting shock-value tactics and hammering home of its ideas like repeated blows of a sledge hammer to the back of the head. Even when watching a version overdubbed in French and no subtitles these aspects were ham-fistedly apparent.
There is a scene in Aguirre: Wrath of God when, floating down the river on a raft, the party observes a burning village which is almost indescernible from a burning village set alight by the main characters of Cannibal Holocaust. A directional nod from Deodato? Meanwhile, as Aguirre: Wrath of God was being shot, a few rivers away, a plane had crashed during a night time storm and a teenage girl named Juliana was making her way out of the jungle, the only survivor. Juliana's walk out of the jungle later became the subject of Herzog's Wings of Hope.

‘Culturally, white Australians have constructed their own representation as “other” to Europe, while at the same time perceiving Aborigines as “other” to their own Europeanness. This contradiction has prompted the continual inscription and re-inscription of the landscape, remaking representations in accord with the shifting demands of a (white) national self.’
Ian Burn, “The Metropolis is only Half the Horizon” in Butler, 1996, p. 240