Rony, Fatimah Tobing-Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage

The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found EthnographicFootage 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

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

When he was on the other side of the bridge, the phantomscame to meet him.—intertitle, F. W. Murnau’s 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! I’ve 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 Eulogy and Mother Dao:

The Turtlelike

Fatimah Tobing Rony

Copyright © 2003 by Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura 52, Volume 18, Number 1

Published by Duke University Press

129

public.press.jhu.edu

You haven’t boarded yet.“C’mon.”For some reason you can’t move. Your feet are glued

to the ground. It’s not your time yet. You shake your head no. The eyes of all the other bus passengers burn holes intoyou.

Your grandmother cries out: “Stop dilly dallying.Look, the bus is leaving. Let’s go!” She is so angry that she throws her shoe at you. You watch as the bus leaves andbecomes 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 anintertitle from F. W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu: Eine Symphoniedes Grauens [Nosferatu: A symphony of horror] (Germany, 1922),sometimes it is because they long for you. Watching the foundethnographic 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 qualitydo these contemporary found footage films have that allow us tocome face-to-face with the quick and the dead? Many film histori-ans point to Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (US,1935), a blue-tinted meditation on a little-known actress, as thebeginning of the genre of found footage film. However, althoughit was made by a Surrealist, neither Rose Hobart nor the dozens ofshort films made by Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and thelike truly exploit to the fullest what many theorists have called thephotographic principle of Surrealism. This principle contendsthat only photography embodies the Surrealist notions of the cou-pling of two realities—a principle noted by critics as diverse asHal Foster, Susan Sontag, Phil Rosen, and André Bazin. I wouldlike to examine the ways in which the faux documentary BontocEulogy, a film about the narrator’s search to solve the mystery of his Igorot grandfather, who performed at the 1904 St. Louis

130 • Camera Obscura

World’s Fair, and the fantastic dream voyage Mother Dao, madefrom documentary Dutch colonial archival footage of the countrynow known as Indonesia, actually transform the genre of foundfootage film and achieve cinema’s truly surrealist potential. Thedisjunctions between the surrealist found footage film Rose Hobartand the ethnographic found footage films Bontoc Eulogy and MotherDao call 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 waysthat cannot be accounted for under the existing theoreticalframework 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 thesurface of projected images?

Before Joseph Cornell made Rose Hobart in 1935, the sur-realists were already creating found footage films in their heads.André Breton writes about the strange method he and his wildfriend Jacques Vaché had one year of movie hopping from onetheater to another in the town of Nantes: never seeing an entirefilm, they left whenever they were bored to rush off to anothercinema.1 The key elements of chance, disruption, and disloca-tion, and the refusal to accept the passive status of the spectatorby actively creating their own montage in their heads, alreadyenacted certain Surrealist characteristics of found footage film.2

All of these elements may be seen in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart.An obsessive collector, Cornell made Rose Hobart by reorder-

ing the found object of a “bad” Hollywood movie from UniversalPictures, East of Borneo (dir. George Melford, US, 1931). The filmitself was already a pastiche in some ways, with a funny-lookingvolcano and stock footage of jungle animals. P. Adams Sitneydescribes the changes that Cornell makes: “The editing of RoseHobart creates a double impression: it presents the aspect of arandomly broken, oddly scrambled, and hastily repaired featurefilm that no longer makes sense; yet at the same time, each of itscuriously reset features astonishes us with new meaning.”3 In itsemphasis on the close-ups and gestures of its star, Rose Hobart,Cornell’s film hearkens back to the silent era. Cornell transformsthe jungle schlock narrative of the original film East of Borneo —a

The Quick and the Dead • 131

beautiful white woman is lusted after by a native prince—into anhomage to the androgynous beauty of the actress Rose Hobart.He does this by manipulating time. The film is slowed down tosilent speed and, through reediting, dismantles classical Hollywoodlanguage: there are jump cuts, repeated shots, shot-reaction shotswith 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 Hobart is thus a meditation on time and loss, on theclose-up and the gesture, focused here on the actress of the samename. Like the boxes for which Cornell was so famous, the film’sframed object becomes not only East of Borneo and the actress RoseHobart, but silent film and time itself. The actress wanders througha nighttime dreamscape: so many unexplained events, the sublimemystery of an eclipse, the concentrated look of the exotic Prince;but nothing ever gets going. All meanings are thwarted, and alllinear narrative and causality is deliberately defied.

But in its premise and obsessions, Rose Hobart is 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 (crazylove), 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 aboutanother 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’ herthrough the cutting and splicing of her body.”5 Yet if Cornell’sRose 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 foundfootage films of Fuentes and Monnikendam, which willfully raidthe colonial archive. The difference begs the question about thespecificity of film as a Surrealist medium: although many criticsvalorize photography over film as the Surrealist medium par excel-lence, how can film be Surrealist? In order to answer this question,let us turn now to a discussion of the photographic principle ofSurrealism.


Recent critics have expanded Surrealism beyond its defi-nition as a French avant-garde art and literary movement of the1920s 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 tothe realm of photography. Hal Foster declares the how of Surreal-ism to be the uncanny, that is, “a concern with events in whichrepressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity,aesthetic norms, and social order.”7 Beauty is therefore not onlyconvulsive, but compulsive—that is, linked to the return of therepressed (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 fixed—explosive, naturearrested in motion” (27).

There is something unique to photography, for it, aboveall other media, has the capacity to shock with subjective mean-ing. As Phil Rosen explains, photography has a pathos and anembedded 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 intime. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes has described photogra-phy as being akin to a prick or a wound, in his words the punctum.9

André Bazin, the champion of anti-Hollywood realism and one ofthe founders of the Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, describes therelationship of the photograph and the object photographed assharing a common being,

after the fashion of a fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actuallycontributes something to the order of natural creation instead ofproviding a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inkling of this whenthey looked to the photographic plate to provide them with theirmonstrosities and for this reason: the surrealist does not consider hisaesthetic purpose and the mechanical effect of the image on ourimaginations as things apart. For him, the logical distinction betweenwhat is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be


seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography rankshigh in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an imagethat 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 afingerprint, and hence destroys the boundaries between the realand the imaginary, the object depicted and the representation. Itis a trace, like Veronica’s veil, and Bazin argues that it liberatespainting from man’s desire to embalm time. Bazin explains thatman’s great desire is for a mummy complex, for an art that wouldserve as “a defense against the passage of time. . . . To preserve,artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow oftime, 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 orsepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are nolonger 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 powerof an impassive mechanical process: for photography does notcreate eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simplyfrom its proper corruption” (14).

Cultural critic Susan Sontag also writes eloquently on theSurrealism of photography. Ironically, she declares it is not therayographs 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 verycreation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrowerbut more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The lessdoctored, the less patently crafted, the more naïve—the moreauthoritative the photograph was likely to be.

Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed theuninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more surrealthan an object which virtually produces itself, and with a minimum ofeffort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weightare likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it? It is photography that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing


machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by agreat Surrealist poet as an epitome of the beautiful.11

Sontag argues that it is not the photograph typically seen as Surre-alist—those abstract photos using superimposition, underprint-ing, solarization—that are the most Surreal, but street photo-graphs from the 1850s of unposed slices of life. The most Surrealphotographs are those that, to use Bazin’s expression, embalmtime, 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, mysterious—time itself. What renders aphotograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message fromtime past, and the concreteness of its intimations about socialclass” (54).

I would like to add another category to the local, theregional, 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 timemachine of ethnography and cinema: these are areas of studywith which I deal in my book, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethno-graphic Spectacle.12 The Surrealist use of the Ethnographic—thatimage of native people of color who are always seen as withoutwriting, 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 Ethno-graphic as infantile or regressive.13 Thus, for example, Cornelldid 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 momentof the family photograph than ethnographic photography andethnographic film. Anthropologists, in their zeal to discover themystery of race, used calipers, photography, and then film as toolsof inscription. Ethnographic film was seen by anthropologists likeMargaret Mead as the scientific mode of inscription par excel-


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 Ethnographicmight not be easily contained, and thus the scientist must alwaysspeak for what was represented. The problem that Mead andother anthropologists faced was what to do with the boxes andboxes of footage. Without editing, and the concurrent voice-overof 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 Marshall’s The Hunters(US, 1956) or Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (US, 1963), wouldnever be accused of being action films. These films often rely onthe shock of the Savage: a man ripping off a live chicken’s headwith 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 filmspromote intercultural understanding; others argue that they onlypromote repugnance. In early films, the taller white anthropolo-gist with his notebook, his tent, his camera, and his pith helmet,could often be seen—in later films that image was eliminatedbecause it suggested a lack of objectivity (or true voyeurism).Authoritative voice-over, and a map at the beginning of the filmfollowing the titles, could address the problem of fixing meaning.

Both Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao are found ethnographicfootage 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 areconsideration of the cinematic archive in Eurocentric film stud-ies. They allow for the Surrealist ideal of the fabled dissecting tableof Lautréamont’s, “as beautiful as the chance meeting upon anoperating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”16 The cou-pled realities that these black-and-white films expose reflect howcinema can be the site for subjective private moments that spillover into the boundaries of the oneiric and the subjective.


Bontoc EulogyBontoc Eulogy begins with the silent figure of the filmmaker, Mar-lon Fuentes, listening to a gramophone recording of what welater surmise is the voice of his grandfather Markod, an Igorotwarrior from the mountains of northern Luzon, one of hundredsof Filipino natives who performed at the Philippino Village inthe 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The conflict of sound versussilence, and not only sound but sound raided from the archive, isset up at the very beginning of the film. The filmmaker describeshis 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 Markod’s disappearance,the grandfather who never returned. It is the body of Markod onwhich the narrative turns, a body that because it is primitive isnecessarily 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 ofthe 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 Ilived in two worlds, the sights and sounds of my new life and thenthe flickering afterimages of the place I once called home.”

The film then cuts to travelogue footage from the Philip-pines—street, canal, and river—all easily read as Authentic, obvi-ously old, scratchy archival black-and-white footage. What marksthis section as radical is the voice-over, which is neither clinicalnor uninterested. “The flickering afterimages of the place I oncecalled home” may be at once the Philippines, reflected in archivalcinema fragments, but it may also be the land of the living asdescribed by the dead Markod. Later a travelogue footage shot ofself-flagellators in the Philippines is paired with the followingvoice-over: “We Filipinos wear this stroke of silence to render usinvisible from one another. Yet it is the very thing that makes usrecognize 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 American—a colonized national who is also immigrant—is already one of silence, according to Fuentes.


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, thenative peoples from all corners of the world often never returnedhome, but died of influenza and other diseases, their bodiesbecoming specimens for the voracious industries of biology,anthropology, and the museum. Bontoc Eulogy is also haunted by

the silences of all those who came before, specifically the Fil-ipinos who came to the US and were exhibited in world’s fairs,only to become bone displays for the ever-omnivorous naturalhistory museum industry.

But perhaps the most startling thing about Bontoc Eulogy is


Bontoc Eulogy. This image appears in Fuentes’s film as a half of a stereopticon.

its greatest silence: that it is a fiction film. Only during the endcredits does one read: “This story is inspired by actual events. Anysimilarities to persons living or dead are purely accidental.” Inother words, we learn that the narrator of this documentary, sooften used as the voice of authority in ethnographic and docu-mentary films, is unreliable. We have been lulled into believingthe teleology of the tale. The brilliance of this strategy of reticenceis that the viewer, seduced by the mystery narrative of Markod’sdisappearance—was he murdered? Do his bones indeed lie on amusty shelf in the Smithsonian? Did he commit suicide?—isforced to rethink his or her assumptions about authoritarian nar-ration and his or her belief in the “truth” value of ethnographicand newsreel footage. We must question how we know and learnhow to tell time on and through the material form of film. Evenwithout knowing the exact date of production, we sense the ageof film footage. And when it comes to black-and-white footage ofcolonized, native bodies, framed iconographically as Ethnographic,viewers rarely consider how time and scientific status are ascribedto footage from the colonial archive.

On closer inspection, Fuentes has provided us with cluesto his Brechtian strategy along the way. Some of the found footagethat he uses was made by the Edison Biograph Company, includ-ing one of trench shots of “Filipinos” retreating from advancingUS soldiers. The Filipinos are played, however, by African Ameri-can soldiers, and the “US Soldiers” are played by Caucasian soldiers, all from the New Jersey National Guard, even though inreality African American soldiers were sent to fight in the Philip-pines.17 In other words, these were not professional actors butrather enlisted soldiers reenacting battles that actually happenedin the Philippines. Because Bontoc Eulogy looks like a documen-tary, because it is a personal narrative, we assume that it is real.Like the spectators at the world’s fair whom Fuentes describes asalways wanting to see the natives as untouched, as “authentic dis-plays of barbaric savagery,” the viewer also desires to believe in theauthenticity of Fuentes’s tale—to believe in the immutability ofhistory to relate to us the past as it really happened.

Moreover, Bontoc Eulogy is an archeology of cinema, taking


us back to the medium’s 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 awhite rabbit; we the viewer are forced to reflect on an archeologyof cinema that has historically been described as poised betweenthe magic of Georges Méliès and the documentary power of theLumière brothers. In Fuentes’s film, cinema lies somewhere inbetween. The opening clip is reminiscent of the well-knownscene from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (US, 1922), inwhich 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 therecord three times while laughing at the camera. This conceit ofthe indigenous person who does not understand Western tech-nology allows for voyeuristic pleasure and reassures the viewer ofthe contrast between the Primitive and the Modern: it ingrainsthe notion that the people are not really acting, which becomes asign of authenticity, an essential discourse of early anthropologi-cal visualism. In Bontoc Eulogy, Fuentes is shown winding thegramophone three times; a repetition that destabilizes the author-ity of the scene, becoming a sign of something else. Unlike Nanookof 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 theauthenticity of the scene, but to parody our desire to see authentic-ity in such a scene.

Instead of feeling deceived, one is invited to walk awayfrom the film with the feeling that “it could be a real” experience,savoring what is fiction in fact and what is fact in fiction. Fuentes’sfilm is intended for both a general audience, in particular thecineast, and a Filipino American audience. Fuentes explains thathe did not reveal the fictional construct of his film mainly so asnot 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 havedissipated the emotional momentum generated by the historical gravity


of the actual story. It could have been an aesthetically satisfying directionto take, but it would have trivialized and deflated the tragedy of the nineFilipinos who died during the exposition, and the hundreds whoendured 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 Wallace’s family, and Ishi. We arereminded of Stuart Hall’s explanation that there is no simplereturn to the past that is not expressed in the terms of the pres-ent.19 In essence, Fuentes brilliantly deploys what I have calledthe third eye, by forcing the viewer to reconsider the subjectivityof the people who performed and who were filmed in ethno-graphic spectacles like that of the St. Louis World’s Fair. Deploy-ing performance, parody, irony, recontextualization, and disqui-eting silence, Fuentes, in bricoleur fashion, structures the film asan archeology of memory and history.

The fragmentation of the film is continually displayed, asis true of the found footage genre itself. Fuentes explains, “In oneway the film functions as an autoethnographic document thatreconstructs an internal reality based on the flotsam and jetsamof cultural history. The film is really a Frankensteinian creation,with its sutures and distinct gait. . . . I believe that history is reallyan art of memory. The gaps and ellipses are just as important asthe material we have in our hands.”20 Fuentes turns the archive onits head by raiding it. In other words, for both Fuentes and Mon-nikendam, there is an active and invested sense of raiding fromthe archive that should be distinguished from the purportedlypassive and accidental designation of the “found” footage film.The notion of the collection, so important to Surrealism—thinkfor example of Cornell’s collection of films and film stills—isrevealed here to be linked to questions of power and privilege:Who gets to collect? And who collects what? The 1904 St. LouisWorld’s Fair, with its native villages (the Philippine Village alonetook 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


depositories, but “institutions which make possible the [politi-cally charged] circulation of information.”21 While the ethno-graphic film archive purports to be nothing more than a collec-tion of visual documents from a diverse array of culturescompiled by the anthropologist-filmmaker—who merely goesout into the world, objectively captures life on celluloid, andbrings it home for storage—the circulation of images presup-posed by the archive implicates social, historical, and politicalrelations of dominance.

Put another way, the colonial camera objectifies the nativein two ways: (1) by the conversion of these filmed bodies into filmfootage; (2) by having the meaning and value of the footage appearto be about the bodies on display, thus masking the identity, spe-cial agency, and subjective desires of the colonial person wieldingthe camera. The camera is represented as a mechanical recorder,and there is thus no sense of accountability to explain why thesepersons and scenes were filmed in the first place. Moreover, thereis a second layer of colonialist hubris: not only were colonialistcameras able to exercise this first-order cinematic conversion ofnative, exploited bodies to the level of spectacular filmed imagesbut the footage was then stored and archived in colonial metropo-les. The arrogance underlying a coordinated institutional effort toenshrine and entomb colonial footage is obfuscated by the ways inwhich these films serve as a kind of record or witness to crimesagainst 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 dominanceby having the Displayed look back at the Observer. This returngaze literally occurs during the section in which Fuentes describeshow 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 astutter as the narrator comments: “I often wondered how my lifewould be different had my grandfather Markod returned hometo the mountains. As a child, when I shared my interest about the


Igorots at school, they would ask me if I ever wore a G-string or if Idanced around a blazing fire at night beating a brass gong, or ifmy mother ever served dog meat at home. The sad thing was Inever even met an Igorot in my whole life.” Then to the ambientsounds of presumably Igorot music and water rushing by, a whitephotographer shoots with a camera at a river as a young Filipinoboy 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 theObserved, the Displayed, is returned back and held in a freezeframe, while the narrator continues: “I wanted to find out whatreally happened to him.” We are forced to recognize the boy asone 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 disturbingpresence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration,” becausethey appear only at the end of a film that has tried to allow theviewer to identify with the Native.22 The filmmaker is seen look-ing at skulls and the pickled brains of anonymous ethnographicsubjects in bell jars lined up on a museum shelf. In voice-over hemuses: “So many objects, identities unknown, labeled but name-less, anonymous stories permanently preserved in a language thatcan never be understood.”

It is in this moment of the film that we truly get a sense ofthe photographic principle of Surrealism. What haunts us in thesephotographs is the sense of what Barthes has termed “the that hasbeen.”23 The people in these photographs remind us of theevanescence of time, with their ghostly testimony that they onceexisted. 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 Iwant others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and theone 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


(or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certainnightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one Iintend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I amneither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming anobject: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I amtruly becoming a specter. (13–14)

Bontoc Eulogy questions the long-established tradition of ethno-graphic spectacle in which indigenous peoples are exhibited anddissected both visually and literally—a tradition carried forward incinematic pastiche in Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong—but italso speaks to possible forms of resistance. Fuentes, like otherartists of color, upsets the structure of fascinating cannibalism, theWest’s 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 hedenies the possibility of complete access to that subjectivity.

Despite these moments of subjective, oneiric possibility inwhich the past is halted into the present, Bontoc Eulogy still relieson voice-over narration as a skeleton for the film. Although welater learn that the narration is unreliable, it is the mystery ofMarkod and the poignancy of having such a grandfather that sus-tains the film’s structure even as it is fragmented. The filmmakeris still there to give a sense of order, and, as Fuentes explains, “nar-rativizing discrete yet incomplete fragments of our memoriesbecomes a vital way of knowing where we fit in the granderscheme 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 TurtlelikeIf with Rose Hobart we remain firmly within the narrative film ver-sion of Surrealism—one that does not choose to exploit the pho-


tographic principle of surrealism—and if with Bontoc Eulogy webegin to get closer to the photographic principle, although stillyoked to a narrative (albeit one that is unreliable and contradic-tory), it is Mother Dao that best exploits the photographic princi-ple of surrealism. Raiding the Dutch Colonial Institute, theTobacco Bureau of Amsterdam, the Dutch sugar industry, and theCatholic church archives for films shot between 1912 and 1933of the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia, Mother Daoreveals to us an aspect of cinema that Barthes and Rosen attributemore to photography: its oneiric quality, its punctum. Unlike inBontoc Eulogy, there is no narrator. The footage is divided intothree criteria—natural 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-cine—but each, although not explicitly linked to the others, flowsimperceptibly into them.25 The film is one of the greatest dreamvoyages ever made.

Like Rose Hobart and Bontoc Eulogy, Mother Dao has the classicproperties of interruption of a found footage film outlined byWilliam 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 interms of film speed.26 As Wees explains about found footage films,“Whether they preserve the footage in its original form or present itin new and different ways, they invite us to recognize it as foundfootage, as recycled images, and due to that self-referentiality, theyencourage a more analytical reading (which does not necessarilyexclude 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 filmby bringing the punctum, the prick, the private moment, the woundback into film, a medium that has traditionally been yoked tosocially mediated meaning. The film is fragmented, but it is a frag-mented phantom that achieves the startling juxtapositions of lifeand death, the umbrella and the dissecting table, through soundand editing. Unexpectedly for a film using documentary archivalfootage, Mother Dao does not use an authoritative voice-over, which


would have ordered the film into a historical survey. Nor doesMonnikendam use gamelan music, which he felt would be toostereotypical, 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 ofsynchronous reality: the ambient sounds of water, a train, a fac-tory pounding out metal boxes—an effect that gives to thefootage a sense of immediacy and present-day-ness. But he alsouses 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 havetremendous revolutionary potential. This is truly the coupling oftwo realities, a Lautréamont moment, and it is present even in theopening poem, which describes how the world was formed byMother 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 beforeshown how much colonialism exploited the bodies of native peo-ples for capitalist gain: toddlers collect caterpillars from tobaccoplants, men become human mules to a mill, women winnow kapok(cotton stuffing) by hurling their bodies into the suffocating airof cotton to provide beds for their colonial masters. This is a filmabout what is most Surreal, according to Sontag: labor, class, andtime.

What is so compelling about the images is the mixture ofthe obscure and the precise. The often scratchy texture of thefilm and the horrific deep focus that orthochromatic film pro-vides, accompanied with foleyed sound and ambience, create aghostlike world from the past. The camera movements and cam-era framings are as architectural and well composed as one wouldexpect of filmmakers from the land of Vermeer and Rembrandt.Moreover, Monnikendam’s transitions act like an undertow: theydo not state the obvious, but lurk just below the surface. Nothingis ever explained. Mother Dao has the most exquisite order wroughtout of the logical flow of a dream and the visual shock of the


nightmare. It is worth describing a few scenes at length in orderto illustrate this strange order. In one section, we are at a riverwhere a man is paddling a canoe, accompanied by the foley soundof paddling: as if we were on a journey to another dimension. Asthe paddling fades, the sound of crickets gets louder as a woman’svoice explains from a poem by contemporary poet Sitor Sito-morang:

I am the fish from the primeval seastranded on the rocks of Parangtritusgasping for water.

I am the poetall but bereft of language who can discern no sensInner wind which can make stone sing.

I am the mystical birdfeathered with the wind.The fish from the world’s beginningwhose fins are the sea.

After a few street scenes, we find ourselves in a factory where menare 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 asheet and looks up for a moment. Noncommittal, his regard isthat of a ghost: to paraphrase Barthes, he is becoming a specter.And then one realizes that not only is this scene about tin boxmaking, but also about bodies, about human hands and humanfeet that operate machines through sheer human power.

The presence of the colonialist at first seems harmless, ifnot comic. First we see a Dutch man in a pith helmet followed by acoolie, slam cut to a shot in which he’s fallen in the water of a riverand three Indonesian men have to rescue him while holding hisbags at the same time. The sound lulls; it is that of crickets, riverwater, and bird calls.

Slowly Monnikendam then pulls us into deeper waters. AColonizer in a pith helmet and white suit climbs a menhir or hugestone sarcophagus to talk to a dukun (wise man) in a head wrap.


I am the fish from the primeval seastranded on the rocks of Parangtritus

gasping for water.

I am the poetall but bereft of language who can discern no sense.

Inner wind which can make stone sing.

I am the mystical birdfeathered with the wind.

The fish from the world’s beginningwhose fins are the sea.

We hear birds and then the eerie sound of Muslim and Christianreligious chanting. A European Priest with a beard and long robesits with dark-skinned children and women, natives from one ofthe Eastern islands. He is teaching them to pray and gesture thesign of the cross. Water is poured on their upturned faces, blend-ing with the scratches of the film. Nobody smiles. It is a puremoment of conversion: the Indonesians convert to Christianity,and they also convert into an image for the white man, as they areblessed by the Priest. They convert into spectrality.

The next two scenes are still in the realm of religion. Awhite man in a pith helmet paints a large Jesus icon, and a priestteaches an orchestra of Indonesian children how to play music.For one of the first things that Christianity in this part of theworld must do is destroy indigenous music (the fear of the drumsthat invoke the dead) and destroy their religious art, to be replacedby Christian music and art. Here the film is silent, and one is leftto imagine what kind of oompah music the children are beingtaught with the tuba and cymbals. Again nobody, except for thePriest, who is clearly mugging for the camera, smiles. What jars is


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

how often the Priest stops the children and tries to correct the per-formance of the child pounding the band drum. The Priest is theonly one laughing.

But the most horrific footage has yet to occur. To the soundof belabored breathing and the ambient track of something high-pitched like birds or crickets, we dolly down an outside corridorwhere doctors and nurses wrapped in gowns wearing masks arepounding the open body of an Indonesian on an operating tablewith a hammer. We then cut to shots of children with smallpoxwounds, naked children who are so sick that their eyes are shutfrom 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 anddeath. These babies and children are dying even as their imagesare being taken. This is not the “that has been.” This is the “that isbeing done.” The Indonesians filmed are not just rendered intospecters 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 fora funeral. It is raining. A woman sings a tembang from the mid-nineteenth century, as the body is laid out:

The bats hang under the branchesFluttering their wingsThe bats are likewise sorrowfulIf they could, they would have said:“But why do Pandhoe’s sons not journeywith him, asking for their realm?”The blossom of the Tanjung treesLies scattered over the groundThe 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 moreachingly deep space here. The cloud of white looks like sky, as wesee many men and women tossing up kapok cotton that hangs intheir hair and mouths. They use their bodies to pound the cotton,


The bats hang under the branchesFluttering their wings

The bats are likewise sorrowfulIf they could, they would have said:

“But why do Pandhoe’s sons not journeywith him, asking for their realm?”The blossom of the Tanjung trees

Lies scattered over the groundThe tanjungs are likewise sorrowful

jumping up and then disappearing as they sink down. Four menwalk around and around on a platform of cotton that looks like agallows, the light from above illuminating this theater of torture.

When we see the footage that follows of a Dutch colonialfamily, a colluding Javanese official, and the Dutch men who mugto the camera as they try to dance like Javanese women, what werealize is this: the beautiful white linen, the crisp bows in a Dutchdaughter’s hair, the tennis whites, the white shoes, the lawns, thetea sets, the horse races, the goblets of wine, the gorgeous hats andgowns 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 editedstructure, and the subtle use of ambient sounds, sound effects,and haunting music, Monnikendam has led us into the world ofthose Colonized, and their gaze pricks us with their pain.

However, it is not colonialism itself that is Surreal—instead,it is a kind of unfathomable real—but the existing cinematictraces of these particular sites and moments. The filming itselfdecontextualizes bodies and locations, unmoors them from theirimmediate meaning and reality, and then makes these imagesavailable for their later juxtaposition through re-editing, invitingmultiple interpretations. In the moment in which Indonesiannatives are swallowed up by cotton kapok, black-and-white imagesconvert extreme labor exploitation into an odd dreamscape. It isonly through the fact that this footage is juxtaposed to images ofchildren dying from smallpox that the aesthetic beauty of thekapok footage is revealed as horrific.

Film and photography were intended as tools to measuretime, but it is precisely their closeness to time that accounts fortheir closeness to the oneiric. As Barthes says upon looking at aphotograph of a man about to be hanged: “He is dead and he isgoing to die.”28 When we look at Monnikendam’s film, the gazeback of the factory tin cutter, the smallpox boy who will not liveanother day, the coal miners, the converted, and countless oth-ers, we are looking at the eyes of those who are condemned toeternal hell. The horror slowly dawns that this is a world in whichhumans are the slaves of a nightmarish assortment of machines,


factories, plantations, and mines that use human bodies as theirfuel. The life moments of birth, marriage, and death—so belovedby anthropologists and travelogues—take on a new meaning.The birth of children who smoke while suckling at their mother’snipple, of men and women who marry but who break their backscutting stone, the deaths of those disfigured by smallpox, all pointto a fact that Sontag understood: Surrealism lies not in Surrealistphotography, but in the eyes of the poor. In these films, the hor-ror of reality is an unreal prick. It is like a hot desert wind slicingthe nape of your neck. The silence of the subjects deafens into aroar.

The film evokes the voices and the presence of the dead.Monnikendam reveals the clash of, on the one hand, a society inwhich the spirits of the Ancestors are notably present, and on theother hand, a society that strongly disbelieves in spirits. In orderto show the gap between the Indonesian and the Dutch, Mon-nikendam explains that he used the poem and the song implicitlyto critique the relentless objectivity of the Dutch camera gaze. Headds: “It’s not explicit, but implicit, I thought that the effect onthe viewer would be more strong if they said nothing. One feelsan emotion. That works better.”29

At the end of the film, the origin myth of Mother Dao con-tinues:

There came a time when hence from our Mother DaoThe ever-rejuvenating, the turtlelikeFled her life spirit, hence like the windHer soul receded like mistShe died and was turned into earthDead she became dustHer earthly remains filled the chasmsHer ashes filled the earth where it was cleft.

Her progeny on earthHer issue in the worldBecame as abundant as dust and sandBecame myriad as dust and grains of sandBut they were not aware that they are familyThat they are brothers and sisters.


There came a time when hence from our Mother DaoThe ever-rejuvenating, the turtlelike

Fled her life spirit, hence like the windHer soul receded like mist

She died and was turned into earthDead she became dust

Her earthly remains filled the chasmsHer ashes filled the earth where it was cleft.

Her progeny on earthHer issue in the world

Became as abundant as dust and sandBecame myriad as dust and grains of sand

But they were not aware that they are familyThat they are brothers and sisters.

A girl glances into the camera. A coolie looks into the camera. Anolder man looks into the camera. And then a little boy, who wesaw in the very opening of the film, looks shyly into the camera:and suddenly the viewer is quite naked. We realize that this is afilm in which the relations of viewer and viewed are reversed. Weare being watched with the eyes of those who are now dead. Cin-ema has achieved its true status as time machine in perhaps itsmost sublime moment of surrealism.

Do we have the strength to resist?

Notes

This article was originally given as a lecture at the GuggenheimMuseum of Art and later as a paper at the “New Asian Pacific Cinemas”conference at the University of California, Irvine, in 1999. I would liketo thank John Hanhardt for inviting me to give a paper on surrealismand film at the Guggenheim; Tracey Bashkoff, Kyung Hyun Kim, andEsther Yau; Erica Cho and Abdul Kohar Rony for their libraryassistance; and Billy Woodberry and Jodi Hauptman for their kindsuggestions. I would also like to thank Gabrielle Foreman, AnneFriedberg, Alex Juhasz, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Rachel Lee, and CynthiaYoung for their comments on an early draft.


Mother Dao. Courtesy Zeitgeist Films

1. André Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 40; and Breton,“As in a Wood,” L’age du cinéma 4–5 (1951): 26–30, as reprintedin The Shadow and Its Shadows, ed. Paul Hammond (London: TheBritish Film Institute, 1991), 43.

2. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of SurrealistFilm (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 46.

3. P. Adams Sitney, “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” inJoseph Cornell, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum ofModern Art, 1980), 75.

4. The montage becomes what we imagine it to mean. As AnnetteMichelson explains, “We are constantly offered a set of actions orsigns without referents, and the expectation of the referentsprovides a tension, a special sort of suspense—that of theexpectation of intelligibility.” See Annette Michelson, “RoseHobart and Monsieur Phot: Early Films from Utopia Parkway,”Artforum 11.10 (1973): 56.

5. Jodi Hauptman, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (NewHaven, CN: Yale University Press, 1999), 111.

6. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” ComparativeStudies in Society and History 23.4 (1981): 540. Clifford’s articleopened up a debate on what he called “ethnographicsurrealism.” He points to the connections between ethnographyand Surrealism in France of the 1920s and 1930s. Both, heargues, are interested in exotic worlds, in making the familiarstrange, in cultural reality as composed of artificial codes, and inculture as something to be collected, hence putting allhierarchies into question. Clifford proposes a different kind ofethnography, one which uses the metaphor of collage, to see theconstructedness 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 thesubjective qualities of photography versus film is Phil Rosen’s“Detail, Document, and Diegesis in Mainstream Film,” in hisChange Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 147–200.

9. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.


10. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What IsCinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1967), 15–16.

11. Susan Sontag, “Melancholy Objects,” in On Photography (NewYork: Doubleday, 1977), 52–53.

12. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, andEthnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,1996).

13. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, xvii, 218.

14. If they loved Robert Flaherty’s 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 Kovács(“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: AnExtended Conversation with Marlon E. Fuentes,” AmerasiaJournal 24.3 (1998): 81. See also Jesse Lerner and Lisa Muskat’sexcellent review, “Bontoc Eulogy,” Blimp Film Magazine, 1997,53–56. A more famous example of a film that cast AfricanAmerican actors as the colonized native other is King Kong. Inthat instance, the natives are supposed to be from an island off ofSumatra, 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 ItsObject (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 92.

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

23. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 94.



25. Hubert Niogret, “Regards d’autrefois et d’aujourd’hui,” Positif428 (1996): 86–87; my translation.

26. William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of FoundFootage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 54–55.Wees has a very interesting taxonomy for found footage films: thecompilation, the collage, and the appropriation film, all of whichhe 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 theUniversity of California, Irvine.


Mother Dao . Courtesy Zeitgeist Films

Rony, Fatimah Tobing-Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage

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