“Bontoc Eulogy” is a 1995 film directed by Marlon Fuentes.

The film describes the

search for the person’s identity and heritage through the story of an unnamed narrator who is an
immigrant from the Philippines. The narrator tries to trace what happened to his grandfather, a
Bontoc Igorot warrior, who was brought from the Philippines to be displayed at the St. Louis fair
and never returned to his village. Filipino people were brought to the World’s Fair as an exhibit,
like circus animals. Visitors of the exhibit were entertained by their strange rituals, while the
Filipino people were in fact mourning their dead and did not aim at amusing the public. Many
Americans considered Filipinos as savages just because the Igorot slaughtered a dog for food.
They also required Filipinos to perform ritual dances. They were just making fun of the Filipinos
then and making them look like prisoners. The exposition had capitalized on our indigenous
groups creating a portrayal of a lack of civilization and culture. The world fair led many people to
perceive that the Philippines is an uncivilized nation in needs to be tamed by the Americans.
The exhibit wanted to show how barbaric and undeveloped the Filipinos were in comparison
with the civilized Western world. The film portrays what lies behind the World’s Fair to prove that
it is in fact the Western civilization that is barbaric. All in all, the film portrays the hardships and
struggles of Filipino immigrants in search of their identity and place in the world and the barbaric
state of Western civilization.
Bontoc eulogy exploits What Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as the “art of mimesis”, the
means by which ethnographic objects are “displayed” and “re-presented”. It is the imitation of
the reality or the real world by representing the same experiences and ideas about races,
cultures, and customs of the Filipinos. The film presents footage and photographs that depict
tribal and lowland members of the Philippines. It uses sonic representational techniques like the
sounds of the birds chirping, the insects buzzing, the crackle of a spinning records, etc. to help
the viewer to have a connection to the Film. Bontoc Eulogy brings together the sonic, visual and
bodily. You will notice that the music used is somewhat traditional music and it emphasized the
sound of the surroundings. Even the sounds of the things that they use, you can really hear it
just like the sound that the fire produces when they were roasting the dog that they slaughtered.
It draws viewer’s relationship between sonic and visual, and between the personal and
historical. It makes the viewers aware of the fictive and constructed nature of memory, history,
and narrative. Through the interplays between historical documents and a personal narrative,
between the visual and the sonic, Marlon Fuentes was able to retell a straight historical story.