The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and

Mother Dao: The Turtlelike

Rony, Fatimah Tobing.
Camera Obscura, 52 (Volume 18, Number 1), 2003, pp. 129-155 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/co/summary/v018/18.1rony.html

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Bontoc Eulogy (dir. Marlon Fuentes, US, 1995)

The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: The Turtlelike
Fatimah Tobing Rony

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 rst as she yells to the bus driver, See I told you I would nd my grandchild. She turns around expectantly.

Copyright 2003 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 52, Volume 18, Number 1 Published by Duke University Press 129

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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 lm 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 lms 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 lms have that allow us to come face-to-face with the quick and the dead? Many lm historians 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 lm. However, although it was made by a Surrealist, neither Rose Hobart nor the dozens of short lms 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 coupling of two realities a 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 lm 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 lm and achieve cinemas truly surrealist potential. The disjunctions between the surrealist found footage lm Rose Hobart and the ethnographic found footage lms Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao call up two interrelated areas of inquiry: (1) What is Surrealism? How is it manifest differently across disparate media, specically photography and cinema? How can lm be surreal in ways that cannot be accounted for under the existing theoretical framework of Surrealism? (2) What is found footage lm? What are 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 Hobart in 1935, the surrealists were already creating found footage lms in their heads. Andr Breton writes about the strange method he and his wild friend Jacques Vach had one year of movie hopping from one theater to another in the town of Nantes: never seeing an entire lm, they left whenever they were bored to rush off to another cinema.1 The key elements of chance, disruption, and dislocation, 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 lm.2 All of these elements may be seen in Joseph Cornells Rose Hobart. An obsessive collector, Cornell made Rose Hobart by reordering the found object of a bad Hollywood movie from Universal Pictures, East of Borneo (dir. George Melford, US, 1931). The lm 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 feature lm 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 lm hearkens back to the silent era. Cornell transforms the jungle schlock narrative of the original lm East of Borneo a

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beautiful white woman is lusted after by a native prince into an homage to the androgynous beauty of the actress Rose Hobart. He does this by manipulating time. The lm 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 lm into a silent lm.4 Rose Hobart is 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 lms framed object becomes not only East of Borneo and the actress Rose Hobart, but silent lm 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 deed. But in its premise and obsessions, Rose Hobart is as conservative in its representation of race and gender as other classic surrealist lms. 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 breathtaking study on Cornell and the cinema, Cornell not only identies 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 lm that it reorders, the same cannot be said about the recent ethnographic found footage lms of Fuentes and Monnikendam, which willfully raid the colonial archive. The difference begs the question about the specicity of lm as a Surrealist medium: although many critics valorize photography over lm as the Surrealist medium par excellence, how can lm 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 denition as a French avant-garde art and literary movement of the 1920s and early 1930s. Historian James Clifford refers to Surrealism 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 Surrealism 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 compulsive that is, linked to the return of the repressed (23). What informs so much of Surrealist practice, according to Foster, is the photographic principle, which violently arrests the vital and suddenly suspends the animate: Automatically as it were, photography produces both the veiled-erotic, nature congured as a sign, and the xed explosive, nature arrested in motion (27). There is something unique to photography, for it, above all other media, has the capacity to shock with subjective meaning. As Phil Rosen explains, photography has a pathos and an embedded desire, a quality of the private moment, of which cinema is deprived, serviced as it usually is to narrative, that is to editing, and to other socially ideological meanings.8 Film has a different relationship to time than photography, because it unravels in time. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes has described photography as being akin to a prick or a wound, in his words the punctum.9 Andr Bazin, the champion of anti-Hollywood realism and one of the founders of the Cahiers du cinma in the 1950s, describes the relationship of the photograph and the object photographed as sharing a common being,
after the fashion of a ngerprint. 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 when they 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 ngerprint, 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, articially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the ow 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 presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their 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 Hearteld that 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 nave the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be. Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, attered 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 Surrealist those abstract photos using superimposition, underprinting, solarization that are the most Surreal, but street photographs 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 particular, and that usually involve the issue of particularities of class. The most Surreal is that which is the most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious time 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 Seas as 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 Ethnographic Spectacle.12 The Surrealist use of the Ethnographic that image of native people of color who are always seen as without writing, without technology, without archives, there to be collected, not to collect was just as racializing as that of anthropology: often counterracist but reactionary in its assumptions of the Ethnographic as infantile or regressive.13 Thus, for example, Cornell did not think of the politics of the ctional Marudu and its reallife counterpoint Bali, exotic site for Margaret Mead, Walter Spies, and Miguel Covarrubias, all of whom ignored the actual anticolonialist resistance active among the natives.14 Nothing could be farther from the private oneiric moment of the family photograph than ethnographic photography and ethnographic lm. Anthropologists, in their zeal to discover the mystery of race, used calipers, photography, and then lm as tools of inscription. Ethnographic lm was seen by anthropologists like Margaret Mead as the scientic mode of inscription par excel-

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lence. After all, her ideal for capturing history was a camera running 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 ethnographic lms still shown on clackety 16 mm projectors in universities across the country, such as John Marshalls The Hunters (US, 1956) or Robert Gardners Dead Birds (US, 1963), would never be accused of being action lms. These lms 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 barebreasted women. Debates between anthropologists over the ethics of showing practices that would be conceived of as bizarre by nonnatives have gone on for decades. Some claim that these lms promote intercultural understanding; others argue that they only promote repugnance. In early lms, the taller white anthropologist with his notebook, his tent, his camera, and his pith helmet, could often be seen in later lms 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 lm following the titles, could address the problem of xing meaning. Both Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao are found ethnographic footage lms that transform the possibilities of found footage cinema, ushering in a kind of lm that embraces the photographic principle of Surrealism itself, as well as demanding a reconsideration of the cinematic archive in Eurocentric lm studies. They allow for the Surrealist ideal of the fabled dissecting table of Lautramonts, as beautiful as the chance meeting upon an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.16 The coupled realities that these black-and-white lms expose reect 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 Eulogy begins with the silent gure of the lmmaker, Marlon 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 conict of sound versus silence, and not only sound but sound raided from the archive, is set up at the very beginning of the lm. The lmmaker describes his grandfather Emiliano, who was killed during the SpanishAmerican War, and whose body was never found. However, the bulk of the lm 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 lmmaker but of the native performer brought to the West for exhibition. In one sequence, we see Fuentes sitting outside on bleachers, 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 ickering afterimages of the place I once called home. The lm then cuts to travelogue footage from the Philippines street, canal, and river all easily read as Authentic, obviously old, scratchy archival black-and-white footage. What marks this section as radical is the voice-over, which is neither clinical nor uninterested. The ickering afterimages of the place I once called home may be at once the Philippines, reected 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-agellators in the Philippines is paired with the following voice-over: We Filipinos wear this stroke of silence to render us invisible 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 Filipino American a 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 exposition has provided a popular entertainment at the US and European universal expositions. Living in reconstructed habitats, the native peoples from all corners of the world often never returned home, but died of inuenza and other diseases, their bodies becoming specimens for the voracious industries of biology, anthropology, and the museum. Bontoc Eulogy is also haunted by

Bontoc Eulogy. This image appears in Fuentess lm as a half of a stereopticon.

the silences of all those who came before, specically the Filipinos 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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its greatest silence: that it is a ction lm. Only during the end credits does one read: This story is inspired by actual events. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely accidental. In other words, we learn that the narrator of this documentary, so often used as the voice of authority in ethnographic and documentary lms, is unreliable. We have been lulled into believing the teleology of the tale. The brilliance of this strategy of reticence is that the viewer, seduced by the mystery narrative of Markods disappearance was he murdered? Do his bones indeed lie on a musty shelf in the Smithsonian? Did he commit suicide? is forced to rethink his or her assumptions about authoritarian narration and his or her belief in the truth value of ethnographic and newsreel footage. We must question how we know and learn how to tell time on and through the material form of lm. Even without knowing the exact date of production, we sense the age of lm footage. And when it comes to black-and-white footage of colonized, native bodies, framed iconographically as Ethnographic, viewers rarely consider how time and scientic status are ascribed to footage from the colonial archive. On closer inspection, Fuentes has provided us with clues to his Brechtian strategy along the way. Some of the found footage that he uses was made by the Edison Biograph Company, including one of trench shots of Filipinos retreating from advancing US soldiers. The Filipinos are played, however, by African American soldiers, and the US Soldiers are played by Caucasian soldiers, all from the New Jersey National Guard, even though in reality African American soldiers were sent to ght in the Philippines.17 In other words, these were not professional actors but rather enlisted soldiers reenacting battles that actually happened in the Philippines. Because Bontoc Eulogy looks like a documentary, because it is a personal narrative, we assume that it is real. Like the spectators at the worlds fair whom Fuentes describes as always wanting to see the natives as untouched, as authentic displays of barbaric savagery, the viewer also desires to believe in the authenticity of Fuentess tale to believe in the immutability of history to relate to us the past as it really happened. Moreover, Bontoc Eulogy is an archeology of cinema, taking

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us back to the mediums very origins. Fuentes includes photographs, archival footage, and present-day live-action scenes including magic act performances by his children with a top hat and a white rabbit; we the viewer are forced to reect 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 lm, 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 himself was actually played by Allakariallak) is shown as amazed by the 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 technology 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 anthropological visualism. In Bontoc Eulogy, Fuentes is shown winding the gramophone three times; a repetition that destabilizes the authority of the scene, becoming a sign of something else. Unlike Nanook of the North, the lmmaker himself is seen in the lm, thus destroying the polarized roles of observed native and observing lmmaker. Moreover, Fuentes is not using the image to underline the authenticity of the scene, but to parody our desire to see authenticity in such a scene. Instead of feeling deceived, one is invited to walk away from the lm with the feeling that it could be a real experience, savoring what is ction in fact and what is fact in ction. Fuentess lm is intended for both a general audience, in particular the cineast, and a Filipino American audience. Fuentes explains that he did not reveal the ctional construct of his lm 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 ctional device within the lm 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 deated 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, paralleling 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 present.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 lmed in ethnographic spectacles like that of the St. Louis Worlds Fair. Deploying performance, parody, irony, recontextualization, and disquieting silence, Fuentes, in bricoleur fashion, structures the lm as an archeology of memory and history. The fragmentation of the lm is continually displayed, as is true of the found footage genre itself. Fuentes explains, In one way the lm functions as an autoethnographic document that reconstructs an internal reality based on the otsam and jetsam of cultural history. The lm 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 Monnikendam, 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 lm. The notion of the collection, so important to Surrealism think for example of Cornells collection of lms and lm stills is 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 scaffolding 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 [politically charged] circulation of information.21 While the ethnographic lm archive purports to be nothing more than a collection of visual documents from a diverse array of cultures compiled by the anthropologist-lmmaker who merely goes out into the world, objectively captures life on celluloid, and brings it home for storage the circulation of images presupposed by the archive implicates social, historical, and political relations of dominance. Put another way, the colonial camera objecties the native in two ways: (1) by the conversion of these lmed bodies into lm footage; (2) by having the meaning and value of the footage appear to be about the bodies on display, thus masking the identity, special 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 lmed in the rst place. Moreover, there is a second layer of colonialist hubris: not only were colonialist cameras able to exercise this rst-order cinematic conversion of native, exploited bodies to the level of spectacular lmed images but the footage was then stored and archived in colonial metropoles. The arrogance underlying a coordinated institutional effort to enshrine and entomb colonial footage is obfuscated by the ways in which these lms 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 lm that could be raided and reedited 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 darkskinned boy wearing only a G-string dances around and around. All of a sudden, Fuentes manipulates time in the most obvious manner. 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 re 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 lm cuts to a closer shot of this boy looking back at the lm 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 nd out what really happened to him. We are forced to recognize the boy as one of us. Invisible to others, he is made visible by the lmmaker. At the end of Bontoc Eulogy, there are a series of ethnographic photographs that were shown before but now seem familiar to us, almost like family. If at rst one is invited to view ethnographic photography and ethnographic footage as objective, scientic records of anonymous natives, by the end of the lm these 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 lm that has tried to allow the viewer to identify with the Native.22 The lmmaker is seen looking 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 nameless, anonymous stories permanently preserved in a language that can never be understood. It is in this moment of the lm 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. (13 14)

Bontoc Eulogy questions the long-established tradition of ethnographic spectacle in which indigenous peoples are exhibited and dissected both visually and literally a tradition carried forward in cinematic pastiche in Cooper and Schoedsacks King Kong but 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 lmmaker, he operates as one who is both Observer and Observed. The lmmaker 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 Eulogy still relies on voice-over narration as a skeleton for the lm. Although we later learn that the narration is unreliable, it is the mystery of Markod and the poignancy of having such a grandfather that sustains the lms structure even as it is fragmented. The lmmaker is still there to give a sense of order, and, as Fuentes explains, narrativizing discrete yet incomplete fragments of our memories becomes a vital way of knowing where we t 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 Dao we turn to another kind of structure.

Mother Dao: The Turtlelike

If with Rose Hobart we remain rmly within the narrative lm version of Surrealism one that does not choose to exploit the pho-

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tographic principle of surrealism and if with Bontoc Eulogy we begin to get closer to the photographic principle, although still yoked to a narrative (albeit one that is unreliable and contradictory), it is Mother Dao that best exploits the photographic principle of surrealism. Raiding the Dutch Colonial Institute, the Tobacco Bureau of Amsterdam, the Dutch sugar industry, and the Catholic church archives for lms 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, its punctum. Unlike in Bontoc Eulogy, there is no narrator. The footage is divided into three criteria natural decor such as ethnic groups, dance, sacrice; colonial exploitation such as harvest, factories, machines; and the colonial European presence such as education and medicine but each, although not explicitly linked to the others, ows imperceptibly into them.25 The lm is one of the greatest dream voyages ever made. Like Rose Hobart and Bontoc Eulogy, Mother Dao has the classic properties of interruption of a found footage lm outlined by William Wees: It lifts the original travelogue and colonial documentary out of its original context, thus exposing its ideological meanings, and it interrupts the narrative ow visually, aurally, and in terms of lm speed.26 As Wees explains about found footage lms, Whether they preserve the footage in its original form or present it in new and different ways, they invite us to recognize it as found footage, as recycled 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 originally received (11; emphasis in original). Monnikendam goes further: he transcends all of the collage aspects of found footage lm by bringing the punctum, the prick, the private moment, the wound back into lm, a medium that has traditionally been yoked to socially mediated meaning. The lm is fragmented, but it is a fragmented phantom that achieves the startling juxtapositions of life and death, the umbrella and the dissecting table, through sound and editing. Unexpectedly for a lm using documentary archival footage, Mother Dao does not use an authoritative voice-over, which

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would have ordered the lm 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 factory pounding out metal boxes an 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, contemporary Indonesian protest poetry by authors such as Rendra, and startlingly revolutionary Javanese songs called tembang, traditionally 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 peoples for capitalist gain: toddlers collect caterpillars from tobacco plants, men become human mules to a mill, women winnow kapok (cotton stufng) by hurling their bodies into the suffocating air of cotton to provide beds for their colonial masters. This is a lm 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 lm and the horric deep focus that orthochromatic lm provides, accompanied with foleyed sound and ambience, create a ghostlike world from the past. The camera movements and camera framings are as architectural and well composed as one would expect of lmmakers 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 Dao has the most exquisite order wrought out of the logical ow of a dream and the visual shock of the

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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 Sitomorang:
amfrom the sh the primeval sea I am the I sh thefrom primeval sea stranded on the rocks of Parangtritus stranded on the rocks of Parangtritus gasping for water. gasping for water. I am the poet I am the poet sense. all but bereft of language who can discern no sens Inner wind which canstone makesing. stone sing. Inner wind which can make I am the mystical bird I am the mystical bird feathered feathered with the wind.with the wind. sh from thebeginning worlds beginning The shThe from the worlds whose whose ns are the sea.ns are the sea.

After a few street scenes, we nd ourselves in a factory where men are cutting metal rectangles, and then we realize that they are making 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 rst 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 menhir or huge stone sarcophagus to talk to a dukun (wise man) in a head wrap.

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Mother Dao: The Turtlelike (dir. Vincent Monnikendam, Netherlands, 1995). Courtesy Zeitgeist Films

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, blending with the scratches of the lm. 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 rst 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 replaced by Christian music and art. Here the lm 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

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how often the Priest stops the children and tries to correct the performance of the child pounding the band drum. The Priest is the only one laughing. But the most horric footage has yet to occur. To the sound of belabored breathing and the ambient track of something highpitched 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 totally covered with sores, a leper who stares into the camera. It is then we realize that this is a lm 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 lmed are not just rendered into specters because they are being photographed, as Barthes suggests, but because their bodies are being colonized. Again we experience another lull. What follows is the bathing of a body for a funeral. It is raining. A woman sings a tembang from the midnineteenth century, as the body is laid out:
The bats hang under branches The bats hang under thethe branches Fluttering their wings Fluttering their wings The are bats are likewise sorrowful The bats likewise sorrowful If they could, they would have said: If they could, they would have said: But why do Pandhoes sons not journey with him, asking their realm? with him, asking for for their realm? The blossom of the Tanjung trees The blossom of the Tanjung trees Lies scattered over the ground Lies scattered over the ground The tanjungs are likewise sorrowful The tanjungs are likewise sorrowful

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

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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 ofcial, 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. The Colonizers 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 real but the existing cinematic traces of these particular sites and moments. The lming 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 kapok footage is revealed as horric. 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.28 When we look at Monnikendams lm, the gaze back of the factory tin cutter, the smallpox boy who will not live another day, the coal miners, the converted, and countless others, 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,

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factories, plantations, and mines that use human bodies as their fuel. The life moments of birth, marriage, and death so beloved by anthropologists and travelogues take on a new meaning. The birth of children who smoke while suckling at their mothers nipple, of men and women who marry but who break their backs cutting stone, the deaths of those disgured by smallpox, all point to a fact that Sontag understood: Surrealism lies not in Surrealist photography, but in the eyes of the poor. In these lms, the horror of reality is an unreal prick. It is like a hot desert wind slicing the nape of your neck. The silence of the subjects deafens into a roar. The lm evokes the voices and the presence of the dead. Monnikendam reveals the clash of, on the one hand, a society in which the spirits of the Ancestors are notably present, and on the other hand, a society that strongly disbelieves in spirits. In order to show the gap between the Indonesian and the Dutch, Monnikendam explains that he used the poem and the song implicitly to critique the relentless objectivity of the Dutch camera gaze. He adds: Its not explicit, but implicit, I thought that the effect on the viewer would be more strong if they said nothing. One feels an emotion. That works better.29 At the end of the lm, the origin myth of Mother Dao continues:
There came a time when hence from our Mother Dao The ever-rejuvenating, the turtlelike The ever-rejuvenating, the turtlelike Fled her life spirit, hence the wind Fled her life spirit, hence like the like wind Herlike soul receded like mist Her soul receded mist She was died and was turned She died and turned into earthinto earth Dead she became dust Dead she became dust Herremains earthly remains lled the chasms Her earthly lled the chasms Her ashes lled the earth where was cleft. Her ashes lled the earth where it was it cleft. progeny on earth Her progeny onHer earth issue in the world Her issue in the Her world as abundant as dust and sand Became Became as abundant as dust and sand Became myriad as dust and grains of sand Became myriad as dust and grains of sand Butwere they not were not aware thatare they are family But they aware that they family That they are brothers and sisters. That they are brothers and sisters.

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Mother Dao. Courtesy Zeitgeist Films

A girl glances into the camera. A coolie looks into the camera. An older man looks into the camera. And then a little boy, who we saw in the very opening of the lm, looks shyly into the camera: and suddenly the viewer is quite naked. We realize that this is a lm in which the relations of viewer and viewed are reversed. We are being watched with the eyes of those who are now dead. Cinema has achieved its true status as time machine in perhaps its most sublime moment of surrealism. Do we have the strength to resist?

Notes

This article was originally given as a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum of Art and later as a paper at the New Asian Pacic Cinemas conference at the University of California, Irvine, in 1999. I would like to thank John Hanhardt for inviting me to give a paper on surrealism and lm at the Guggenheim; Tracey Bashkoff, Kyung Hyun Kim, and Esther Yau; Erica Cho and Abdul Kohar Rony for their library assistance; and Billy Woodberry and Jodi Hauptman for their kind suggestions. I would also like to thank Gabrielle Foreman, Anne Friedberg, Alex Juhasz, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Rachel Lee, and Cynthia Young for their comments on an early draft.

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1.

Andr Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 40; and Breton, As in a Wood, Lage du cinma 4 5 (1951): 26 30, as reprinted in The Shadow and Its Shadows, ed. Paul Hammond (London: The British Film Institute, 1991), 43. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 46. P. Adams Sitney, The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell, in Joseph Cornell, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 75. 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 suspense that of the expectation of intelligibility. See Annette Michelson, Rose Hobart and Monsieur Phot: Early Films from Utopia Parkway, Artforum 11.10 (1973): 56. Jodi Hauptman, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1999), 111. James Clifford, On Ethnographic Surrealism, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23.4 (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 articial codes, and in culture as something to be collected, hence putting all hierarchies into question. Clifford proposes a different kind of ethnography, one which uses the metaphor of collage, to see the constructedness of the writing. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), xvii. One of the best essays I have read on the difference between the subjective qualities of photography versus lm is Phil Rosens Detail, Document, and Diegesis in Mainstream Film, in his Change Mummied: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 147 200. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

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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), 15 16. 11. Susan Sontag, Melancholy Objects, in On Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 52 53. 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 lm 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 Journal 24.3 (1998): 81. See also Jesse Lerner and Lisa Muskats excellent review, Bontoc Eulogy, Blimp Film Magazine, 1997, 53 56. A more famous example of a lm that cast African American actors as the colonized native other is King Kong. In that 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. 20. Qtd. in Blumentritt, Bontoc Eulogy, 84. 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. 24. Qtd. in Blumentritt, Bontoc Eulogy, 76.

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25. Hubert Niogret, Regards dautrefois et daujourdhui, Positif 428 (1996): 86 87; my translation. 26. William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 54 55. Wees has a very interesting taxonomy for found footage lms: the compilation, the collage, and the appropriation lm, 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 lm studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Mother Dao . Courtesy Zeitgeist Films