Filmmaker Peter Thompson and anthropologist William Hanks met each other swimming in Lakeview’s Gill Park pool in 1986. Four years and thousands of laps later, they ended up in side-by-side hammocks on the edge of the jungle in Mexico’s Yucatan. Their quarters, an eight-by-ten-foot mud hut shared with a Maya family of ten, required some good coping skills. “I think it was our years swimming together,” Hanks says, “that helped us get along so well there. By swimming over a long period with someone, you really get attuned to a person, when he needs more space and when he needs you to shut up.” Thankfully Thompson, a professor of photography at Columbia College, and Hanks, a professor at the University of Chicago, rarely felt the need to shut up. Their discussions in the pool led to a three-year–and counting–collaboration on an extraordinary documentary film exploring the life and work of an 84-year-old Yucatec Mayan shaman named Don Chabo.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Hanks, one of the world’s leading authorities on Mayan languages and shamanism, began studying Don Chabo in 1977. The shaman, who lives outside the city of Merida, is regularly called on by neighbors to perform healings and exorcisms. Other local shamans tout their skills in the market, but Don Chabo insists on absolute poverty, which he believes keeps him in touch with the spirits who empower him. Though Hanks never calls himself a shaman, Don Chabo has enlisted the anthropologist as his sole apprentice. In 1984, when Don Chabo was hospitalized with what doctors said was terminal liver disease, Hanks borrowed money to fly to Mexico to be at his side. There he performed a healing ritual on his teacher, and Don Chabo recovered.
As a means of persuasion Thompson presented the anthropologist a copy of his film Universal Hotel, a documentary about victims of medical experiments in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. The work began as a straight historical documentary, but evolved into an exploration of the uncertainty of historical knowledge, as Thompson discovered that his archival sources were unreliable; even information as simple as the dates on photographs could be enormously misleading. Much of the film concerns Thompson’s difficulties reconstructing the facts. (His film is now part of the Dachau archives and is frequently shown at the camp to visiting scholars.)
Monday evening, February 15, at 6 PM, Peter Thompson and Jno Cook will discuss the movie, Views From the Altar of the Jaguar Spokesman, and show some clips from the three-hour film at the Arts Club, 109 E. Ontario. The talk is free, but reservations are required. For more information call 787-3997.
