***** Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video by Peter X. Feng Duke University Press Copyright © 2002 Number of pages: 304 Publication date: November, 2002 ISBN: 0822329964
. . . The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis in 1904, celebrated U.S. economic power at the dawn of the twentieth century. As at most World's Fairs, the latest in technological innovations were displayed, and the history of U.S. westward expansion was commemorated. The fair was also a museum and laboratory for the study of anthropology, with many "primitive" peoples on display, including the Ainu of Japan and American Indians. By far the largest exhibit was the Philippine Reservation, forty-seven acres set off from the rest of the fairgrounds by a small stream; visitors crossed the Bridge of Spain to enter the compound. More than eleven hundred Filipinos representing a variety of ethnicities lived in dwellings they had built using materials imported from home. They performed their rituals for the fair's visitors, sometimes charging fairgoers for the privilege of using their cameras. It is reported that some visitors sold dogs to the Igorrotes, tribal Filipinos from the northern Cordillera mountains, who then killed, cooked, and feasted on the dogmeat. Tribes who had never seen each other lived in close proximity; their juxtaposition was intended in part to prove that more evolved Filipinos were worthy of the White Man's Burden--a contention supported by the loyal Philippine Scouts (veterans of the U.S. war in the Philippines) who guarded the reservation.
Movies were some ten years old at the time of the World's Fair. Film exhibition had been boosted greatly by the Spanish-American War; the demand for images of the war was met with genuine news footage (or "actualities") as well as scenes staged for the camera ("reenactments"). One extremely popular film consisted of a Spanish flag flying in front of a painting of a castle; the flag was lowered and the Stars and Stripes hoisted in its place (the whole film lasting approximately forty-one seconds). Cinema participated in creating popular support for U.S. imperialism, which was justified scientifically by the inferiority of America's "little brown brothers," itself documented on film by ethnographers. From its conception, cinema has been thoroughly implicated in discourses of science and U.S. imperialism; these various discourses intersected in the Philippines, and later in St. Louis.
One hundred years after the birth of cinema, how far have we come? _Bontoc Eulogy_ (Marlon Fuentes, 1995) and _On Cannibalism_ (Fatimah Tobing Rony, 1994) each interrogate cinema's role in shaping the "science" of racial difference. Fuentes's film tells the story of a contemporary Filipino American's search to find out what happened to his grandfather, a Bontoc Igorrote who disappeared after the World's Fair. Rony's video interrogates ethnographic research films--and Hollywood's King Kong--from the perspective of a second-generation Sumatran American. Both movies deal with people of color who were brought to the West--not as laborers in support of Western economies, but as "others" who helped define Western superiority through scientific discourses which themselves legitimated Western imperialism. By deconstructing cinema's role in Western ethnographic practices, both films turn the camera's gaze back on the West. More than that, both movies are about our cinematic forebears, that is the way the cinema's racial discourses have shaped the way we are seen and the way we see ourselves--indeed, the way cinema has created us, representationally speaking. It is appropriate, then, that an elusive ancestor occupies the center of both movies: the narrator's imagined grandfather Markod in _Bontoc Eulogy_, the Ompung of my Ompung (grandparent of my grandparent) invoked in _On Cannibalism_.
Both movies signify on ethnographic film conventions. All of the ethnographic footage quoted in _Bontoc Eulogy_ is shot with a stationary camera, whose stability supposedly guaranteed the scientific objectivity of the Western camera operators documenting the primitive movements of the Filipinos. Fuentes's staged 16mm footage is likewise shot from a stationary camera, and its evident artifice is an implicit critique of the supposedly unstaged ethnographic film. For if _Bontoc Eulogy_ is itself a re-creation inspired by the filmmaker's imagination, isn't ethnographic footage ultimately indicative of similar falsehoods? The ethnographer does not chance upon customs and rituals, but indeed compels them to be performed for his or her (typically his) camera. _On Cannibalism_ features extreme close-ups of Rony's mouth as she narrates; this emphasis on the physicality of the production of speech recalls the precise documentation of movement by ethnographers like Félix-Louis Regnault. The early commercial cinema was likewise fascinated with the motion picture's ability to focus attention on mundane physical actions such as sneezes. If early cinema audiences were fascinated by the way cinema made their everyday actions seem strange, Asian American filmmakers a century later are equally fascinated by the ways cinema transformed our everyday actions into ethnographic spectacle.
_Bontoc Eulogy_
Marion Fuentes was born in Manila in 1954. A self-taught photographer, he studied behavioral science and anthropology at De La Salle University in Manila, graduating summa cum laude in 1974. His employer sent him to the Wharton School, where he received his MBA in 1977. In 1981 he enrolled in Mark Power's photography course at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.; soon thereafter, he began the Circle of Fear series. Fuentes may be best known for his Face Fusion series (1986-1989), which are assembled from photographs of himself and his then-wife (who is white). According to curator Margo Machida, Fuentes uses photography as "a ritual to relive ... memories," transforming himself into a shaman (1994, 105); Fuentes comments that his "photography was being generated by an increasingly narrative subtext," leading him naturally to filmmaking (Blumentritt, 1998, 76). In 1991 he was awarded a Presidential Fellowship by Temple University so that he could pursue an MFA in the Film and Video Program. Fuentes's other films include _Sleep with Open Eyes_, _Tantalus_, _Arm_, and _Crikee_.
Starting in 1992, Fuentes conducted research on the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 (also known as the St. Louis World's Fair) and on ethnographic footage of Bontocs and other Filipino groups; the vast majority of still photos used in _Bontoc Eulogy_ (1995) came from the Library of Congress, but additional photos and film footage were held by the National Archives, the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian, and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. (Fuentes received a grant from the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in 1993 or 1994; the project was also funded by NAATA. These grants permitted him to hire a research assistant.) He drew music from the Grafias recordings held at the University of Washington's ethnomusicological collection and from musical re-creations performed by the Ramon Obuson Folkloric Group (Obuson's brother Enrico portrays Markod in the film); additional musical material, including adaptations of ethnographic transcriptions, was created by Douglas Quin. Fuentes shot 16mm footage in San Diego's Balboa Park, the site of the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition, and in the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Philadelphia. He completed _Bontoc Eulogy_ in 1995; the following year, it screened at Asian American film festivals in New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., and also at the American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center's New America/New Americans series.
_Bontoc Eulogy_ is premised as a search for ancestors; the central conceit of the film is that the narrator is able to trace his ancestry back to a grandfather who was a Bontoc Igorrote who disappeared soon after being exhibited at the St. Louis World's Fair. The film's narrator is ultimately unreliable, however: there are times when he tells us what Markod thought without telling us if his speculations have any basis. It seems that every event the narrator describes is documented on film, suggesting that the narrator's musings are inspired by screening this footage.
_Bontoc Eulogy_'s opening scenes, seemingly straightforward yet highly contrived, set the tone for the rest of the film. A crank phonograph (commonly known as a Victrola, after one of the most popular brand names) sits on a mat on an uneven brick floor. A figure who we assume is also the narrator--although we only hear him in voice-over and never see him speak--enters the frame and sits before the Victrola. Although we hear some ambient sound, we do not hear any footfalls or the sound of the Victrola being cranked; the cinematography is an arty, high-contrast black-and-white. This footage is clearly stylized; the room does not evoke any associations with work or domestic space. When the figure (for simplicity's sake, I will refer to him as Marlon) puts the needle on the disk, we hear a few seconds of surface noise--hisses and pops--and then what sounds like an ethnographic field recording of a dance and percussion performance. We do not hear these sounds from the cone of the Victrola, with the reverberation and narrow frequency range that we would expect to hear in that space; rather, the sound has a presence that suggests it was added in the editing room. After a few moments, the image fades to black while the sound fades out. Twice more we see Marlon put the needle down: the second time we hear more music, the third time we hear a man's voice speaking Bontoc.
What are we to make of this opening? Marion does not present himself as an ethnographic researcher--we might expect to see him wearing headphones, seated at a desk, taking notes--nor as a man sorting through a collection of family artifacts (compare this scene with the beginning of _The Way to My Father's Village_, where Richard Fung sorts through a box of his father's papers in what appears to be the dining room of his parents' house). The film does not establish a premise for the investigation (as does Felicia Lowe at the beginning of _China: Land of My Father_). In this opening, if Fuentes does not explain the artificiality of what is to follow, neither does he deliberately mislead us. Instead, he relies on our habit of associating sound and image to create meaning, as he does when he shows us images of Marlon looking at medical displays in a museum while the soundtrack describes research conducted at the Smithsonian: we may jump to the conclusion that we are looking at Marlon in the Smithsonian, but the voice-over nowhere implies this is the case. Indeed, certain disjunctions between the voice-over and the image-track, combined with a brooding quality to Marion's on-screen behavior that bespeaks a performance for the camera (rather than a candidly captured image), lead us to the conclusion that the narrator is unreliable. Early in the film, a girl and a boy, whom the narrator has identified as "my children," conjure a rabbit out of a hat: an obvious jumpcut precedes a puff of smoke. With this brief sequence, Fuentes reminds us of the ways cinema exploits our cognitive processes; by refusing to disguise the manipulation that produces the trick, he puts us on guard. (He also alludes to the trick photography tradition of George Méliès, whose earliest films date from the same era as many of the pseudo-documentary films excerpted in Bontoc Eulogy; Méliès himself called some of his films actualités reconstituées, or "reconstructed news films.")
The narrator goes on to tell us that he has not been back to the Philippines since arriving in the United States, and that his children were born here: "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 narration is deliberately ambiguous: Is it describing memories or movies? The narrator eventually tells us of his two grandfathers: Emiliano, who fought the Spaniards in 1896, and Markod, a Bontoc warrior who traveled to St. Louis, leaving his pregnant wife behind. The story of Emiliano is illustrated with representations of U.S. soldiers putting down the Philippine insurrection (an 1899 reenactment entitled Filipinos Retreat from Trenches) and a sequence depicting the Battle of Manila Bay (constructed by intercutting footage of a toy boat re-creation at the St. Louis Fair with "actuality" footage of ships firing their cannons). As for Markod, we are told that he was a Bontoc chieftain, and we hear what sounds like a period recording of a man speaking Bontoc, which the narrator translates for us; this is the same recording we heard in the film's opening sequence. In truth, this soundtrack is a fabrication: the source of the text is an account of Chief Fomoaley, the leader of Bontoc Igorrotes who performed at Coney Island a few years after the St. Louis World's Fair. Fomoaley spoke via an interpreter to _The Independent_ in 1905; originally an abolitionist magazine (edited for many years by Henry Ward Beecher), _The Independent_ began publishing first-person accounts of "undistinguished American men and women" (Holt, 1990, xxix) in 1902, collecting sixteen of them in a book entitled _The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans As Told by Themselves_. Fomoaley's account was published in _The Independent_ in October 1905, then reprinted in the 1906 collection (Life Stories was reprinted by Routledge in 1990). Fuentes commissioned Fermina Bagwan; a retired teacher from the Cordilleras, to translate the English-language text into idiomatic Bontoc; she also recited the account for Fuentes's microphone. Fuentes then took the recordings, altered the pitch "to make it more androgynous sounding," and added a "synthetic patina" of digital noise (Fuentes, telephone interview, 15 July 1999).
Who, then, is Markod? Fuentes derived the name from a narrator invoked by Bontoc storytellers. _The First Grammar of the Language Spoken by the Bontoc Igorot_, developed by C. W. Seidenadel (1909) with the assistance of several Bontoc men and women who resided in Chicago in 1906-1907, includes an appendix with a dozen tales related to Seidenadel in 1907. Some of the tales conclude with the narrator identifying himself or herself, but several of them end with words to the effect: "Thus ends the tale told by Malkod." Seidenadel explains: "The narrator must be named; if he is unknown, `Malkod' must be named as the imaginary inventor of the tale; for ... `if "Malkod" is the narrator, you do not dream (of the story)'" (561). Fuentes has interpeted this to mean that the tellers of fictions will be haunted in their dreams unless they attribute the story to Malkod. The name Markod, then, is an obscure clue that reveals that the film's narrator has invented the stories attributed to Markod.
In the second half of _Bontoc Eulogy_, we see Markod (played by Enrico Obuson) in the act of recording his voice on a wax cylinder. Before and after this sequence, we see him slowly rotating on a turntable, standing proudly with his head thrown back. These images are intercut with ethnographic "mugshots" (front and profile), suggesting that Markod's posture is attributable perhaps not to pride but to an ethnographer's instruction to stand so that his features are clearly visible. The rotation also evokes the Victrola: Markod is metaphorically spinning on a platter (later, we see him playing the flute while rotating on the turntable). This circular movement is also a metaphor for the narrator's investigation: turning in circles, never advancing. Whereas Fatimah Rony has argued that all ethnographic film tells an implicit narrative of evolution (1996, 25), of forward progress, Fuentes's film makes no headway in understanding Markod, the Bontoc, or the narrator's own estrangement from the Philippines. . . .
<http://print.google.com/print/doc?isbn=0822329964> *****
Peter X Feng, _Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video_ (Duke University Press, 2002: <http://dukeupress.edu/index.shtml>
Peter X Feng: <http://www.english.udel.edu/feng/>
Fatimah Tobing Rony, "The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of _Bontoc Eulogy_ and _Mother Dao: The Turtlelike_," _Camera Obscura_ 18.1 (2003) 129-155: <http://muse.uq.edu.au/journals/camera_obscura/v018/18.1rony.pdf> or <http://muse.uq.edu.au/journals/camera_obscura/v018/18.1rony.html>
"The Philippine Reservation at the 1904 World's Fair": <http://www.boondocksnet.com/expos/louisiana_filipinos.html>
"Sentenaryo/Centennial: The Philippine Revolution and Philippine-American War": <http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/contents.html> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>