the quick and the dead: surrealism and the found ethnographic footage films of bontoc eulogy and...

8/13/2019 The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao

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When he was on the other side of the bridge, the phantoms

came to meet him.

intertitle, F. W. Murnaus Nosferatu

You are standing alone on an endless road. The sun is

blinding hot. The only sound is that of the wind. All of a

sudden your beloved grandmother appears, seemingly out

of nowhere. She pulls you towards her.

There you are! Ive been looking all over for you. The

bus is leaving.

You run with her to a huge bus that is just about to

pull out. Your grandmother climbs the steps first as she yells

to the bus driver, See I told you I would find my

grandchild. She turns around expectantly.

The Quick and the Dead:

Surrealism and the Found

Ethnographic Footage Films of

Bontoc Eulogyand Mother Dao:

The Turtlelike

Fatimah Tobing Rony

Copyright 2003 by Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura 52, Volume 18, Number 1

Published by Duke University Press

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You havent boarded yet.

Cmon.

For some reason you cant move. Your feet are glued

to the ground. Its not your time yet. You shake your head

no. The eyes of all the other bus passengers burn holes into

you.

Your grandmother cries out: Stop dilly dallying.

Look, the bus is leaving. Lets go! She is so angry that

she throws her shoe at you. You watch as the bus leaves and

becomes smaller and smaller. Then all of a sudden it

vanishes.

You are again alone on an endless road with no

beginning and no end.

When you wake up, you remember that your

grandmother is dead.

When the phantoms choose to cross the bridge, to paraphrase an

intertitle from F. W. Murnaus silent film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie

des Grauens[Nosferatu: A symphony of horror] (Germany, 1922),sometimes it is because they long for you. Watching the found

ethnographic footage films Bontoc Eulogy(dir. Marlon Fuentes,

US, 1995) and Moeder Dao: De schildpadgelijkende[Mother Dao:

The turtlelike] (dir. Vincent Monnikendam, Netherlands, 1995)

is akin to coming face-to-face with such phantoms. What quality

do these contemporary found footage films have that allow us to

come face-to-face with the quick and the dead? Many film histori-ans point to Surrealist artist Joseph Cornells Rose Hobart(US,

1935), a blue-tinted meditation on a little-known actress, as the

beginning of the genre of found footage film. However, although

it was made by a Surrealist, neither Rose Hobartnor the dozens of

short films made by Salvador Dali, Luis Buuel, Man Ray, and the

like truly exploit to the fullest what many theorists have called the

photographic principle of Surrealism. This principle contends

that only photography embodies the Surrealist notions of the cou-

pling of two realitiesa principle noted by critics as diverse as

Hal Foster, Susan Sontag, Phil Rosen, and Andr Bazin. I would

like to examine the ways in which the faux documentary Bontoc

Eulogy, a film about the narrators search to solve the mystery

of his Igorot grandfather, who performed at the 1904 St. Louis

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Worlds Fair, and the fantastic dream voyage Mother Dao, made

from documentary Dutch colonial archival footage of the country

now known as Indonesia, actually transform the genre of found

footage film and achieve cinemas truly surrealist potential. The

disjunctions between the surrealist found footage film Rose Hobart

and the ethnographic found footage films Bontoc Eulogyand Mother

Daocall up two interrelated areas of inquiry: (1) What is Surreal-

ism? How is it manifest differently across disparate media, specifi-

cally photography and cinema? How can film be surreal in ways

that cannot be accounted for under the existing theoretical

framework of Surrealism? (2) What is found footage film? Whatare the possibilities of restaging and reframing found footage?

How do we know how to recognize found footage as such on the

surface of projected images?

Before Joseph Cornell made Rose Hobartin 1935, the sur-

realists were already creating found footage films in their heads.

Andr Breton writes about the strange method he and his wild

friend Jacques Vach had one year of movie hopping from onetheater to another in the town of Nantes: never seeing an entire

film, they left whenever they were bored to rush off to another

cinema.1 The key elements of chance, disruption, and disloca-

tion, and the refusal to accept the passive status of the spectator

by actively creating their own montage in their heads, already

enacted certain Surrealist characteristics of found footage film.2

All of these elements may be seen in Joseph Cornells Rose Hobart.

An obsessive collector, Cornell made Rose Hobartby reorder-

ing the found object of a bad Hollywood movie from Universal

Pictures,East of Borneo(dir. George Melford, US, 1931). The film

itself was already a pastiche in some ways, with a funny-looking

volcano and stock footage of jungle animals. P. Adams Sitney

describes the changes that Cornell makes: The editing of Rose

Hobart creates a double impression: it presents the aspect of a

randomly broken, oddly scrambled, and hastily repaired featurefilm that no longer makes sense; yet at the same time, each of its

curiously reset features astonishes us with new meaning.3 In its

emphasis on the close-ups and gestures of its star, Rose Hobart,

Cornells film hearkens back to the silent era. Cornell transforms

the jungle schlock narrative of the original filmEast of Borneoa

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beautiful white woman is lusted after by a native princeinto an

homage to the androgynous beauty of the actress Rose Hobart.

He does this by manipulating time. The film is slowed down to

silent speed and, through reediting, dismantles classical Hollywood

language: there are jump cuts, repeated shots, shot-reaction shots

with missing reactions, and jumps in time and space. Moreover,

dialogue is eliminated, with only Brazilian music as a soundtrack,

transforming the film into a silent film.4

Rose Hobartis thus a meditation on time and loss, on the

close-up and the gesture, focused here on the actress of the same

name. Like the boxes for which Cornell was so famous, the filmsframed object becomes not onlyEast of Borneoand the actress Rose

Hobart, but silent film and time itself. The actress wanders through

a nighttime dreamscape: so many unexplained events, the sublime

mystery of an eclipse, the concentrated look of the exotic Prince;

but nothing ever gets going. All meanings are thwarted, and all

linear narrative and causality is deliberately defied.

But in its premise and obsessions, Rose Hobartis as conser-vative in its representation of race and gender as other classic sur-

realist films. It embodies a kind of infatuation, or amour fou(crazy

love), on the part of Cornell for Rose Hobart, and its qualities

of disruption, disjunction, and the oneiric are still focused on

the pursuit of an ideal woman. It is itself a metalanguage about

another metalanguage. As Jodi Hauptman writes in her breath-

taking study on Cornell and the cinema, Cornell not only identi-

fies with Rose Hobart, he also very aggressively masters her

through the cutting and splicing of her body.5 Yet if Cornells

Rose Hobart purports a historical indifference or an apolitical,

eccentric obsession about the original found film that it reorders,

the same cannot be said about the recent ethnographic found

footage films of Fuentes and Monnikendam, which willfully raid

the colonial archive. The difference begs the question about the

specificity of film as a Surrealist medium: although many criticsvalorize photography over film as the Surrealist medium par excel-

lence, howcan film be Surrealist? In order to answer this question,

let us turn now to a discussion of the photographic principle of

Surrealism.

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Recent critics have expanded Surrealism beyond its defi-

nition as a French avant-garde art and literary movement of the

1920s and early 1930s. Historian James Clifford refers to Surreal-

ism as a praxis, a way of thinking, a modernist aesthetic.6 But the

how of Surrealism that I will be concerned with here refers to

the realm of photography. Hal Foster declares the how of Surreal-

ism to be the uncanny, that is, a concern with events in which

repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity,

aesthetic norms, and social order.7 Beauty is therefore not only

convulsive, but compulsivethat is, linked to the return of the

repressed (23). What informs so much of Surrealist practice,according to Foster, is the photographic principle, which vio-

lently arrests the vital and suddenly suspends the animate: Auto-

matically as it were, photography produces both the veiled-erotic,

nature configured as a sign, and the fixedexplosive, nature

arrested in motion (27).

There issomething unique to photography, for it, above

all other media, has the capacity to shock with subjective mean-ing. As Phil Rosen explains, photography has a pathos and an

embedded desire, a quality of the private moment, of which cin-

ema is deprived, serviced as it usually is to narrative, that is to edit-

ing, and to other socially ideological meanings.8 Film has a differ-

ent relationship to time than photography, because it unravels in

time. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes has described photogra-

phy as being akin to a prick or a wound, in his words thepunctum.9

Andr Bazin, the champion of anti-Hollywood realism and one of

the founders of the Cahiers du cinmain the 1950s, describes the

relationship of the photograph and the object photographed as

sharing a common being,

after the fashion of a fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actually

contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of

providing a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inkling of this whenthey looked to the photographic plate to provide them with their

monstrosities and for this reason: the surrealist does not consider his

aesthetic purpose and the mechanical effect of the image on our

imaginations as things apart. For him, the logical distinction between

what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be



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seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography ranks

high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image

that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact.10

Photography is closer to Surrealism because it is an index, like a

fingerprint, and hence destroys the boundaries between the real

and the imaginary, the object depicted and the representation. It

is a trace, like Veronicas veil, and Bazin argues that it liberates

painting from mans desire to embalm time. Bazin explains that

mans great desire is for a mummy complex, for an art that would

serve as a defense against the passage of time. . . . To preserve,

artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of

time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life (9).

This control over time is part of the shock that photography brings.

Hence the charm, Bazin notes, of family albums: Those grey or

sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no

longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing pres-

ence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed fromtheir destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power

of an impassive mechanical process: for photography does not

create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply

from its proper corruption (14).

Cultural critic Susan Sontag also writes eloquently on the

Surrealism of photography. Ironically, she declares it is not the

rayographs of Man Ray, or the photomontages of John Heartfieldthat exploited this principle, but photography itself:

Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very

creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower

but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less

doctored, the less patently crafted, the more navethe more

authoritative the photograph was likely to be.

Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed theuninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more surreal

than an object which virtually produces itself, and with a minimum of

effort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight

are likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it?

It is photography that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing

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machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by a

great Surrealist poet as an epitome of the beautiful.11

Sontag argues that it is not the photograph typically seen as Surre-

alistthose abstract photos using superimposition, underprint-

ing, solarizationthat are the most Surreal, but street photo-

graphs from the 1850s of unposed slices of life. The most Surreal

photographs are those that, to use Bazins expression, embalm

time, photographs that depict the local, the regional, the particu-

lar, and that usually involve the issue of particularities of class.

The most Surreal is that which is the most brutally moving, irra-

tional, unassimilable, mysterioustime itself. What renders a

photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from

time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social

class (54).

I would like to add another category to the local, the

regional, and the particular involving class: the Ethnographic.

The theme of vanishing exotic worlds, the topos of the South Seasas the site of fantasy for both anthropology and cinema, the time

machine of ethnography and cinema: these are areas of study

with which I deal in my book, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethno-

graphic Spectacle.12 The Surrealist use of the Ethnographicthat

image of native people of color who are always seen as without

writing, without technology, without archives, there to be collected,

not to collectwas just as racializing as that of anthropology:often counterracist but reactionary in its assumptions of the Ethno-

graphic as infantile or regressive.13 Thus, for example, Cornell

did not think of the politics of the fictional Marudu and its real-

life counterpoint Bali, exotic site for Margaret Mead, Walter Spies,

and Miguel Covarrubias, all of whom ignored the actual anticolo-

nialist resistance active among the natives.14

Nothing could be farther from the private oneiric moment

of the family photograph than ethnographic photography and

ethnographic film. Anthropologists, in their zeal to discover the

mystery of race, used calipers, photography, and then film as tools

of inscription. Ethnographic film was seen by anthropologists like

Margaret Mead as the scientific mode of inscription par excel-



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lence. After all, her ideal for capturing history was a camera run-

ning on its own steam.15 Film was an inscription, and as such

was necessarily accompanied by the words of the Ethnographer/

Scientist; there was a fear that the image of the Ethnographic

might not be easily contained, and thus the scientist must always

speak for what was represented. The problem that Mead and

other anthropologists faced was what to do with the boxes and

boxes of footage. Without editing, and the concurrent voice-over

of the narrator, nobody watches.

Ethnographic footage is often incredibly tedious to watch,

even when edited. Even the most beautiful and classic ethno-graphic films still shown on clackety 16 mm projectors in uni-

versities across the country, such as John Marshalls The Hunters

(US, 1956) or Robert GardnersDead Birds(US, 1963), would

never be accused of being action films. These films often rely on

the shock of the Savage: a man ripping off a live chickens head

with his teeth, the mandatory animal slaughter, the frisson of bare-

breasted women. Debates between anthropologists over the ethicsof showing practices that would be conceived of as bizarre by non-

natives have gone on for decades. Some claim that these films

promote intercultural understanding; others argue that they only

promote repugnance. In early films, the taller white anthropolo-

gist with his notebook, his tent, his camera, and his pith helmet,

could often be seenin later films that image was eliminated

because it suggested a lack of objectivity (or true voyeurism).

Authoritative voice-over, and a map at the beginning of the film

following the titles, could address the problem of fixing meaning.

Both Bontoc Eulogyand Mother Daoare found ethnographic

footage films that transform the possibilities of found footage

cinema, ushering in a kind of film that embraces the photo-

graphic principle of Surrealism itself, as well as demanding a

reconsideration of the cinematic archive in Eurocentric film stud-

ies. They allow for the Surrealist ideal of the fabled dissecting tableof Lautramonts, as beautiful as the chance meeting upon an

operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.16 The cou-

pled realities that these black-and-white films expose reflect how

cinema can be the site for subjective private moments that spill

over into the boundaries of the oneiric and the subjective.

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Bontoc Eulogy

Bontoc Eulogybegins with the silent figure of the filmmaker, Mar-

lon Fuentes, listening to a gramophone recording of what we

later surmise is the voice of his grandfather Markod, an Igorot

warrior from the mountains of northern Luzon, one of hundreds

of Filipino natives who performed at the Philippino Village in

the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair. The conflict of sound versus

silence, and not only sound but sound raided from the archive, is

set up at the very beginning of the film. The filmmaker describes

his grandfather Emiliano, who was killed during the Spanish-

American War, and whose body was never found. However, thebulk of the film is about the mystery of Markods disappearance,

the grandfather who never returned. It is the body of Markod on

which the narrative turns, a body that because it is primitive is

necessarily part of a narrative seen as authentic. Bontoc Eulogy,

like King Kong(dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack,

US, 1933), is a travel narrative, but from the point of view not of

the white filmmaker but of the native performer brought to theWest for exhibition.

In one sequence, we see Fuentes sitting outside on bleach-

ers, accompanied by the following voice-over: In the beginning I

lived in two worlds, the sights and sounds of my new life and then

the flickering afterimages of the place I once called home.

The film then cuts to travelogue footage from the Philip-

pinesstreet, canal, and riverall easily read as Authentic, obvi-

ously old, scratchy archival black-and-white footage. What marks

this section as radical is the voice-over, which is neither clinical

nor uninterested. The flickering afterimages of the place I once

called home may be at once the Philippines, reflected in archival

cinema fragments, but it may also be the land of the living as

described by the dead Markod. Later a travelogue footage shot of

self-flagellators in the Philippines is paired with the following

voice-over: We Filipinos wear this stroke of silence to render usinvisible from one another. Yet it is the very thing that makes us

recognize each other. After all, in this act of hiding we are united.

We are invisible except to one another. The act of being a Fil-

ipino Americana colonized national who is also immigrant

is already one of silence, according to Fuentes.



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Since the 1870s, the native village or ethnographic expo-

sition has provided a popular entertainment at the US and Euro-

pean universal expositions. Living in reconstructed habitats, the

native peoples from all corners of the world often never returned

home, but died of influenza and other diseases, their bodies

becoming specimens for the voracious industries of biology,

anthropology, and the museum. Bontoc Eulogyis also haunted by

the silences of all those who came before, specifically the Fil-ipinos who came to the US and were exhibited in worlds fairs,

only to become bone displays for the ever-omnivorous natural

history museum industry.

But perhaps the most startling thing about Bontoc Eulogy is

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Bontoc Eulogy. This image appears in Fuentess film

as a half of a stereopticon.


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us back to the mediums very origins. Fuentes includes photo-

graphs, archival footage, and present-day live-action scenes includ-

ing magic act performances by his children with a top hat and a

white rabbit; we the viewer are forced to reflect on an archeology

of cinema that has historically been described as poised between

the magic of Georges Mlis and the documentary power of the

Lumire brothers. In Fuentess film, cinema lies somewhere in

between. The opening clip is reminiscent of the well-known

scene from Robert Flahertys Nanook of the North(US, 1922), in

which the character Nanook (though credited as played by him-

self was actually played by Allakariallak) is shown as amazed bythe technology of the gramophone. Nanook is shown biting the

record three times while laughing at the camera. This conceit of

the indigenous person who does not understand Western tech-

nology allows for voyeuristic pleasure and reassures the viewer of

the contrast between the Primitive and the Modern: it ingrains

the notion that the people are not really acting, which becomes a

sign of authenticity, an essential discourse of early anthropologi-cal visualism. In Bontoc Eulogy, Fuentes is shown winding the

gramophone three times; a repetition that destabilizes the author-

ity of the scene, becoming a sign of something else. Unlike Nanook

of the North, the filmmaker himself is seen in the film, thus destroy-

ing the polarized roles of observed native and observing film-

maker. Moreover, Fuentes is not using the image to underline the

authenticity of the scene, but to parody our desire to seeauthentic-

ity in such a scene.

Instead of feeling deceived, one is invited to walk away

from the film with the feeling that it could be a real experience,

savoring what is fiction in fact and what is fact in fiction. Fuentess

film is intended for both a general audience, in particular the

cineast, and a Filipino American audience. Fuentes explains that

he did not reveal the fictional construct of his film mainly so as

not to betray his Filipino audience:

I opted for a solution that implicated the viewer more in the

bi-directionality of the act of observing. Breaking the ethnographic

surface by disclosing the fictional device within the film would have

dissipated the emotional momentum generated by the historical gravity

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of the actual story. It could have been an aesthetically satisfying direction

to take, but it would have trivialized and deflated the tragedy of the nine

Filipinos who died during the exposition, and the hundreds who

endured the ordeal.18

Fuentes tells us that Markod never returned home, paral-

leling the historical deaths of others such as Saartje Baartman,

the Hottentot Venus, Minik Wallaces family, and Ishi. We are

reminded of Stuart Halls explanation that there is no simple

return to the past that is not expressed in the terms of the pres-

ent.19 In essence, Fuentes brilliantly deploys what I have called

the third eye, by forcing the viewer to reconsider the subjectivity

of the people who performed and who were filmed in ethno-

graphic spectacles like that of the St. Louis Worlds Fair. Deploy-

ing performance, parody, irony, recontextualization, and disqui-

eting silence, Fuentes, in bricoleurfashion, structures the film as

an archeology of memory and history.

The fragmentation of the film is continually displayed, asis true of the found footage genre itself. Fuentes explains, In one

way the film functions as an autoethnographic document that

reconstructs an internal reality based on the flotsam and jetsam

of cultural history. The film is really a Frankensteinian creation,

with its sutures and distinct gait. . . . I believe that history is really

an art of memory. The gaps and ellipses are just as important as

the material we have in our hands.20 Fuentes turns the archive on

its head by raiding it. In other words, for both Fuentes and Mon-

nikendam, there is an active and invested sense of raiding from

the archive that should be distinguished from the purportedly

passive and accidental designation of the found footage film.

The notion of the collection, so important to Surrealismthink

for example of Cornells collection of films and film stillsis

revealed here to be linked to questions of power and privilege:

Who gets to collect? And who collects what? The 1904 St. Louis

Worlds Fair, with its native villages (the Philippine Village alone

took up forty-two acres) was intended to be an elaborate scaf-

folding whose aim was to prove the thesis of racial difference

(77). Johannes Fabian notes that archives are not just innocent



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depositories, but institutions which make possible the [politi-

cally charged] circulation of information.21While the ethno-

graphic film archive purports to be nothing more than a collec-

tion of visual documents from a diverse array of cultures

compiled by the anthropologist-filmmakerwho merely goes

out into the world, objectively captures life on celluloid, and

brings it home for storagethe circulation of images presup-

posed by the archive implicates social, historical, and political

relations of dominance.

Put another way, the colonial camera objectifies the native

in two ways: (1) by the conversion of these filmed bodies into filmfootage; (2) by having the meaning and value of the footage appear

to be about the bodies on display, thus masking the identity, spe-

cial agency, and subjective desires of the colonial person wielding

the camera. The camera is represented as a mechanical recorder,

and there is thus no sense of accountability to explain why these

persons and scenes were filmed in the first place. Moreover, there

is a second layer of colonialist hubris: not only were colonialistcameras able to exercise this first-order cinematic conversion of

native, exploited bodies to the level of spectacular filmed images

but the footage was then stored and archived in colonial metropo-

les. The arrogance underlying a coordinated institutional effort to

enshrine and entomb colonial footage is obfuscated by the ways in

which these films serve as a kind of record or witness to crimes

against humanity. This further bespeaks a refusal to see that this

footage could later serve as film that could be raided and re-

edited to remember and highlight the savagery of colonialism.

Fuentes turns the table on these relations of dominance

by having the Displayed look back at the Observer. This return

gaze literally occurs during the section in which Fuentes describes

how his grandfather was a northern Luzon warrior. A young dark-

skinned boy wearing only a G-string dances around and around.

All of a sudden, Fuentes manipulates time in the most obviousmanner. The archival footage is slowed down, step-printed into a

stutter as the narrator comments: I often wondered how my life

would be different had my grandfather Markod returned home

to the mountains. As a child, when I shared my interest about the

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Igorots at school, they would ask me if I ever wore a G-string or if I

danced around a blazing fire at night beating a brass gong, or if

my mother ever served dog meat at home. The sad thing was I

never even met an Igorot in my whole life. Then to the ambient

sounds of presumably Igorot music and water rushing by, a white

photographer shoots with a camera at a river as a young Filipino

boy emerges from off-screen left and passes behind him. All of

a sudden the film cuts to a closer shot of this boy looking back

at the film camera recording the whole scene. The gaze of the

Observed, the Displayed, is returned back and held in a freeze

frame, while the narrator continues: I wanted to find out whatreally happened to him. We are forced to recognize the boy as

one of us. Invisible to others, he is made visible by the filmmaker.

At the end of Bontoc Eulogy, there are a series of ethno-

graphic photographs that were shown before but now seem famil-

iar to us, almost like family. If at first one is invited to view ethno-

graphic photography and ethnographic footage as objective,

scientific records of anonymous natives, by the end of the filmthese images become invested with the charge of the disturbing

presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, because

they appear only at the end of a film that has tried to allow the

viewer to identify with the Native.22 The filmmaker is seen look-

ing at skulls and the pickled brains of anonymous ethnographic

subjects in bell jars lined up on a museum shelf. In voice-over he

muses: So many objects, identities unknown, labeled but name-

less, anonymous stories permanently preserved in a language that

can never be understood.

It is in this moment of the film that we truly get a sense of

the photographic principle of Surrealism. What haunts us in these

photographs is the sense of what Barthes has termed the that has

been.23 The people in these photographs remind us of the

evanescence of time, with their ghostly testimony that they once

existed. Barthes explains the position of being photographed:

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I

want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the

one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action:

I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am



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(or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation

of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain

nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I

intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am

neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an

object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am

truly becoming a specter. (1314)

Bontoc Eulogy questions the long-established tradition of ethno-

graphic spectacle in which indigenous peoples are exhibited and

dissected both visually and literallya tradition carried forward incinematic pastiche in Cooper and Schoedsacks King Kongbut it

also speaks to possible forms of resistance. Fuentes, like other

artists of color, upsets the structure of fascinating cannibalism, the

Wests obsessive visualizing of the bodies of the native in cinema,

the museum, and the like, by imagining (or perhaps listening to)

the silenced Native. Moreover, as both object of the gaze and film-

maker, he operates as one who is both Observer and Observed. Thefilmmaker gives subjectivity to the voiceless, yet at the same time he

denies the possibility of complete access to that subjectivity.

Despite these moments of subjective, oneiric possibility in

which the past is halted into the present, Bontoc Eulogystill relies

on voice-over narration as a skeleton for the film. Although we

later learn that the narration is unreliable, it is the mystery of

Markod and the poignancy of having such a grandfather that sus-

tains the films structure even as it is fragmented. The filmmaker

is still there to give a sense of order, and, as Fuentes explains, nar-

rativizing discrete yet incomplete fragments of our memories

becomes a vital way of knowing where we fit in the grander

scheme of things. Film has the power to impose a sense of order,

purpose, and interconnectedness amidst this vortex of events.24

With Mother Daowe turn to another kind of structure.

Mother Dao: The Turtlelike

If with Rose Hobartwe remain firmly within the narrative film ver-

sion of Surrealismone that does not choose to exploit the pho-

144 Camera Obscura


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tographic principle of surrealismand if with Bontoc Eulogywe

begin to get closer to the photographic principle, although still

yoked to a narrative (albeit one that is unreliable and contradic-

tory), it is Mother Daothat best exploits the photographic princi-

ple of surrealism. Raiding the Dutch Colonial Institute, the

Tobacco Bureau of Amsterdam, the Dutch sugar industry, and the

Catholic church archives for films shot between 1912 and 1933

of the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia, Mother Dao

reveals to us an aspect of cinema that Barthes and Rosen attribute

more to photography: its oneiric quality, itspunctum. Unlike in

Bontoc Eulogy, there is no narrator. The footage is divided intothree criterianatural decor such as ethnic groups, dance, sacri-

fice; colonial exploitation such as harvest, factories, machines;

and the colonial European presence such as education and medi-

cinebut each, although not explicitly linked to the others, flows

imperceptibly into them.25 The film is one of the greatest dream

voyages ever made.

Like Rose Hobartand Bontoc Eulogy, Mother Daohas the classicproperties of interruption of a found footage film outlined by

William Wees: It lifts the original travelogue and colonial documen-

tary out of its original context, thus exposing its ideological mean-

ings, and it interrupts the narrative flow visually, aurally, and in

terms of film speed.26As Wees explains about found footage films,

Whether they preserve the footage in its original form or present it

in new and different ways, they invite us to recognize it asfound

footage, asrecycled images, and due to that self-referentiality, they

encourage a more analytical reading (which does not necessarily

exclude a greater aesthetic appreciation) than the footage origi-

nally received (11; emphasis in original). Monnikendam goes fur-

ther: he transcends all of the collage aspects of found footage film

by bringing thepunctum, the prick, the private moment, the wound

back into film, a medium that has traditionally been yoked to

socially mediated meaning. The film is fragmented, but it is a frag-mented phantom that achieves the startling juxtapositions of life

and death, the umbrella and the dissecting table, through sound

and editing. Unexpectedly for a film using documentary archival

footage, Mother Daodoes not use an authoritative voice-over, which



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would have ordered the film into a historical survey. Nor does

Monnikendam use gamelan music, which he felt would be too

stereotypical, exploiting our preconceived notions of Java, Bali,

and the other Indonesian islands.27

Instead he chooses to use a mix of unexpected sounds.

Monnikendam layers sound that is diegetic, that is, the sounds of

synchronous reality: the ambient sounds of water, a train, a fac-

tory pounding out metal boxesan effect that gives to the

footage a sense of immediacy and present-day-ness. But he also

uses the sounds of poetry: the origin story for the Nias, contempo-

rary Indonesian protest poetry by authors such as Rendra, andstartlingly revolutionary Javanese songs called tembang, tradition-

ally associated with picturesque dance but here shown to have

tremendous revolutionary potential. This is truly the coupling of

two realities, a Lautramont moment, and it is present even in the

opening poem, which describes how the world was formed by

Mother Dao, the turtlelike. This mixture of reality and dream,

poetry and atmospheric effects, takes us on a voyage into the past,certainly embalmed in time, in which we see to a scale never before

shown how much colonialism exploited the bodies of native peo-

ples for capitalist gain: toddlers collect caterpillars from tobacco

plants, men become human mules to a mill, women winnow kapok

(cotton stuffing) by hurling their bodies into the suffocating air

of cotton to provide beds for their colonial masters. This is a film

about what is most Surreal, according to Sontag: labor, class, and

time.

What is so compelling about the images is the mixture of

the obscure and the precise. The often scratchy texture of the

film and the horrific deep focus that orthochromatic film pro-

vides, accompanied with foleyed sound and ambience, create a

ghostlike world from the past. The camera movements and cam-

era framings are as architectural and well composed as one would

expect of filmmakers from the land of Vermeer and Rembrandt.Moreover, Monnikendams transitions act like an undertow: they

do not state the obvious, but lurk just below the surface. Nothing

is ever explained. Mother Daohas the most exquisite order wrought

out of the logical flow of a dream and the visual shock of the

146 Camera Obscura


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nightmare. It is worth describing a few scenes at length in order

to illustrate this strange order. In one section, we are at a river

where a man is paddling a canoe, accompanied by the foley sound

of paddling: as if we were on a journey to another dimension. As

the paddling fades, the sound of crickets gets louder as a womans

voice explains from a poem by contemporary poet Sitor Sito-

morang:

I am the fish from the primeval sea

stranded on the rocks of Parangtritus

gasping for water.

I am the poet

all but bereft of language who can discern no sens

Inner wind which can make stone sing.

I am the mystical bird

feathered with the wind.

The fish from the worlds beginningwhose fins are the sea.

After a few street scenes, we find ourselves in a factory where men

are cutting metal rectangles, and then we realize that they are mak-

ing shiny tin boxes, probably for oil. A man in a coolie hat cuts a

sheet and looks up for a moment. Noncommittal, his regard is

that of a ghost: to paraphrase Barthes, he is becoming a specter.And then one realizes that not only is this scene about tin box

making, but also about bodies, about human hands and human

feet that operate machines through sheer human power.

The presence of the colonialist at first seems harmless, if

not comic. First we see a Dutch man in a pith helmet followed by a

coolie, slam cut to a shot in which hes fallen in the water of a river

and three Indonesian men have to rescue him while holding his

bags at the same time. The sound lulls; it is that of crickets, river

water, and bird calls.

Slowly Monnikendam then pulls us into deeper waters. A

Colonizer in a pith helmet and white suit climbs a menhiror huge

stone sarcophagus to talk to a dukun(wise man) in a head wrap.


I am the fish from the primeval sea

stranded on the rocks of Parangtritus

gasping for water.

I am the poet

all but bereft of language who can discern no sense.

Inner wind which can make stone sing.

I am the mystical bird

feathered with the wind.

The fish from the worlds beginningwhose fins are the sea.


21/28

We hear birds and then the eerie sound of Muslim and Christian

religious chanting. A European Priest with a beard and long robe

sits with dark-skinned children and women, natives from one of

the Eastern islands. He is teaching them to pray and gesture the

sign of the cross. Water is poured on their upturned faces, blend-

ing with the scratches of the film. Nobody smiles. It is a pure

moment of conversion: the Indonesians convert to Christianity,

and they also convert into an image for the white man, as they are

blessed by the Priest. They convert into spectrality.

The next two scenes are still in the realm of religion. A

white man in a pith helmet paints a large Jesus icon, and a priest

teaches an orchestra of Indonesian children how to play music.

For one of the first things that Christianity in this part of the

world must do is destroy indigenous music (the fear of the drums

that invoke the dead) and destroy their religious art, to be replacedby Christian music and art. Here the film is silent, and one is left

to imagine what kind of oompah music the children are being

taught with the tuba and cymbals. Again nobody, except for the

Priest, who is clearly mugging for the camera, smiles. What jars is

148 Camera Obscura

Mother Dao: The Turtlelike(dir. Vincent Monnikendam,

Netherlands, 1995). Courtesy Zeitgeist Films


22/28

how often the Priest stops the children and tries to correct the per-

formance of the child pounding the band drum. The Priest is the

only one laughing.

But the most horrific footage has yet to occur. To the sound

of belabored breathing and the ambient track of something high-

pitched like birds or crickets, we dolly down an outside corridor

where doctors and nurses wrapped in gowns wearing masks are

pounding the open body of an Indonesian on an operating table

with a hammer. We then cut to shots of children with smallpox

wounds, naked children who are so sick that their eyes are shut

from the pustules covering them, a young boy whose body is totallycovered with sores, a leper who stares into the camera.

It is then we realize that this is a film about perishing and

death. These babies and children are dying even as their images

are being taken. This is not the that has been. This is the that is

being done. The Indonesians filmed are not just rendered into

specters because they are being photographed, as Barthes sug-

gests, but because their bodies are being colonized. Again weexperience another lull. What follows is the bathing of a body for

a funeral. It is raining. A woman sings a tembangfrom the mid-

nineteenth century, as the body is laid out:

The bats hang under the branches

Fluttering their wings

The bats are likewise sorrowful

If they could, they would have said:But why do Pandhoes sons not journey

with him, asking for their realm?

The blossom of the Tanjung trees

Lies scattered over the ground

The tanjungs are likewise sorrowful

The animals and the flora are sorrowful, but the Colonizer is not.We then cut to an astonishing scene. A lone woman stands in pro-

file in a sea of white clouds. There is no perspective, no more

achingly deep space here. The cloud of white looks like sky, as we

see many men and women tossing up kapok cotton that hangs in

their hair and mouths. They use their bodies to pound the cotton,


The bats hang under the branches

Fluttering their wings

The bats are likewise sorrowful

If they could, they would have said:But why do Pandhoes sons not journey

with him, asking for their realm?

The blossom of the Tanjung trees

Lies scattered over the ground

The tanjungs are likewise sorrowful


23/28

jumping up and then disappearing as they sink down. Four men

walk around and around on a platform of cotton that looks like a

gallows, the light from above illuminating this theater of torture.

When we see the footage that follows of a Dutch colonial

family, a colluding Javanese official, and the Dutch men who mug

to the camera as they try to dance like Javanese women, what we

realize is this: the beautiful white linen, the crisp bows in a Dutch

daughters hair, the tennis whites, the white shoes, the lawns, the

tea sets, the horse races, the goblets of wine, the gorgeous hats and

gowns and gloves, the beautiful colonial verandas and houses,

and the enormous expanse of servants come at a great cost. TheColonizers no longer look nostalgic, picturesque, or glamorous;

they look like cruel crows. That is because through the edited

structure, and the subtle use of ambient sounds, sound effects,

and haunting music, Monnikendam has led us into the world of

those Colonized, and their gaze pricks us with their pain.

However, it is not colonialism itself that is Surrealinstead,

it is a kind of unfathomable realbut the existing cinematictraces of these particular sites and moments. The filming itself

decontextualizes bodies and locations, unmoors them from their

immediate meaning and reality, and then makes these images

available for their later juxtaposition through re-editing, inviting

multiple interpretations. In the moment in which Indonesian

natives are swallowed up by cotton kapok, black-and-white images

convert extreme labor exploitation into an odd dreamscape. It is

only through the fact that this footage is juxtaposed to images of

children dying from smallpox that the aesthetic beauty of the

kapokfootage is revealed as horrific.

Film and photography were intended as tools to measure

time, but it is precisely their closeness to time that accounts for

their closeness to the oneiric. As Barthes says upon looking at a

photograph of a man about to be hanged: He is dead and he is

going to die.28When we look at Monnikendams film, the gazeback of the factory tin cutter, the smallpox boy who will not live

another day, the coal miners, the converted, and countless oth-

ers, we are looking at the eyes of those who are condemned to

eternal hell. The horror slowly dawns that this is a world in which

humans are the slaves of a nightmarish assortment of machines,

150 Camera Obscura


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25/28


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1. Andr Breton, Nadja(Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 40; and Breton,

As in a Wood, Lage du cinma45 (1951): 26 30, as reprinted

in The Shadow and Its Shadows, ed. Paul Hammond (London: The

British Film Institute, 1991), 43.

2. Linda Williams,Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist

Film(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 46.

3. P. Adams Sitney, The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell, in

Joseph Cornell, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of

Modern Art, 1980), 75.

4. The montage becomes what we imagine it to mean. As Annette

Michelson explains, We are constantly offered a set of actions or

signs without referents, and the expectation of the referents

provides a tension, a special sort of suspensethat of the

expectation of intelligibility. See Annette Michelson, Rose

Hobart and Monsieur Phot: Early Films from Utopia Parkway,

Artforum11.10 (1973): 56.

5. Jodi Hauptman,Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema(New

Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1999), 111.6. James Clifford, On Ethnographic Surrealism, Comparative

Studies in Society and History23.4 (1981): 540. Cliffords article

opened up a debate on what he called ethnographic

surrealism. He points to the connections between ethnography

and Surrealism in France of the 1920s and 1930s. Both, he

argues, are interested in exotic worlds, in making the familiar

strange, in cultural reality as composed of artificial codes, and in

culture as something to be collected, hence putting allhierarchies into question. Clifford proposes a different kind of

ethnography, one which uses the metaphor of collage, to see the

constructedness of the writing.

7. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),

xvii.

8. One of the best essays I have read on the difference between the

subjective qualities of photography versus film is Phil RosensDetail, Document, and Diegesis in Mainstream Film, in his

Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory(Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 147200.

9. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.

Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.



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10. Andr Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, What Is

Cinema?vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1967), 1516.

11. Susan Sontag, Melancholy Objects, in On Photography(New

York: Doubleday, 1977), 5253.

12. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and

Ethnographic Spectacle(Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

1996).

13. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, xvii, 218.

14. If they loved Robert Flahertys film about Samoa, Moana(US,1926), it was because it was an example of a place of free love,

and not for its exotic locale per se, according to Steven Kovcs

(The Poets Dream of Movies, in Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art,

ed. Sandra Stich [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990],

228).

15. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race(New York:

J. B. Lippincott, 1971), 203.

16. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting(New York: Wittenborn, Schultz,

1948), 10.

17. Mia Blumentritt, Bontoc Eulogy, History and Craft of Memory: An

Extended Conversation with Marlon E. Fuentes, Amerasia

Journal24.3 (1998): 81. See also Jesse Lerner and Lisa Muskats

excellent review, Bontoc Eulogy, Blimp Film Magazine, 1997,

5356. A more famous example of a film that cast African

American actors as the colonized native other is King Kong. Inthat instance, the natives are supposed to be from an island off of

Sumatra, in what is now Indonesia.

18. Qtd. in Blumentritt, Bontoc Eulogy, 81.

19. Stuart Hall, New Ethnicities, in Race, Culture, and Difference,

ed. James Donald and Ali Rattansi (London: Sage, 1992), 258.


21. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its

Object(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 92.

22. Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, 9.

23. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 94.


154 Camera Obscura


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25. Hubert Niogret, Regards dautrefois et daujourdhui, Positif

428 (1996): 8687; my translation.

26. William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of FoundFootage Films(New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 5455.

Wees has a very interesting taxonomy for found footage films: the

compilation, the collage, and the appropriation film, all of which

he feels have different ideological purposes.

27. Niogret, Regards, 87.

28. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 95.

29. Qtd. in Niogret, Regards, 88; my translation.

Fatimah Tobing Rony is assistant professor in film studies at the

University of California, Irvine.


Mother Dao . Courtesy Zeitgeist Films

the quick and the dead: surrealism and the found ethnographic footage films of bontoc eulogy and...

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