The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found

Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao:

The Turtlelike

Fatimah Tobing Rony

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

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/42078

[ Access provided at 30 Jan 2022 13:04 GMT from University of Groningen ]

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. 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.

Copyright © 2003 by Camera Obscura

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

129
130 • Camera Obscura

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 into
you.
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 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. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie
des Grauens [Nosferatu: A symphony of horror] (Germany, 1922),
sometimes it is because they long for you. Watching the found
ethnographic footage films Bontoc Eulogy (dir. Marlon Fuentes,
US, 1995) and Moeder Dao: De schildpadgelijkende [Mother Dao:
The turtlelike] (dir. Vincent Monnikendam, Netherlands, 1995)
is akin to coming face-to-face with such phantoms. What quality
do these contemporary found footage films have that allow us to
come face-to-face with the quick and the dead? Many film histori-
ans point to Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (US,
1935), a blue-tinted meditation on a little-known actress, as the
beginning of the genre of found footage film. However, although
it was made by a Surrealist, neither Rose Hobart nor the dozens of
short films made by Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and the
like truly exploit to the fullest what many theorists have called the
photographic principle of Surrealism. This principle contends
that only photography embodies the Surrealist notions of the cou-
pling of two realities — a principle noted by critics as diverse as
Hal Foster, Susan Sontag, Phil Rosen, and André Bazin. I would
like to examine the ways in which the faux documentary Bontoc
Eulogy, a film about the narrator’s search to solve the mystery
of his Igorot grandfather, who performed at the 1904 St. Louis
 The Quick and the Dead • 131

World’s Fair, and the fantastic dream voyage Mother Dao, made
from documentary Dutch colonial archival footage of the country
now known as Indonesia, actually transform the genre of found
footage film and achieve cinema’s truly surrealist potential. The
disjunctions between the surrealist found footage film Rose Hobart
and the ethnographic found footage films Bontoc Eulogy and Mother
Dao 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 ways
that cannot be accounted for under the existing theoretical
framework of Surrealism? (2) What is found footage film? 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 sur-
realists were already creating found footage films in their heads.
André Breton writes about the strange method he and his wild
friend Jacques Vaché had one year of movie hopping from one
theater to another in the town of Nantes: never seeing an entire
film, they left whenever they were bored to rush off to another
cinema.1 The key elements of chance, disruption, and disloca-
tion, and the refusal to accept the passive status of the spectator
by actively creating their own montage in their heads, already
enacted certain Surrealist characteristics of found footage film.2
All of these elements may be seen in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart.
An obsessive collector, Cornell made Rose Hobart by reorder-
ing the found object of a “bad” Hollywood movie from Universal
Pictures, East of Borneo (dir. George Melford, US, 1931). The film
itself was already a pastiche in some ways, with a funny-looking
volcano and stock footage of jungle animals. P. Adams Sitney
describes the changes that Cornell makes: “The editing of Rose
Hobart creates a double impression: it presents the aspect of a
randomly broken, oddly scrambled, and hastily repaired feature
film 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,
Cornell’s film hearkens back to the silent era. Cornell transforms
the jungle schlock narrative of the original film East of Borneo — a
132 • Camera Obscura

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 film is slowed down to
silent speed and, through reediting, dismantles classical Hollywood
language: there are jump cuts, repeated shots, shot-reaction shots
with missing reactions, and jumps in time and space. Moreover,
dialogue is eliminated, with only Brazilian music as a soundtrack,
transforming the film into a “silent” film.4
Rose 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 film’s
framed object becomes not only East of Borneo and the actress Rose
Hobart, but silent film and time itself. The actress wanders through
a nighttime dreamscape: so many unexplained events, the sublime
mystery of an eclipse, the concentrated look of the exotic Prince;
but nothing ever gets going. All meanings are thwarted, and all
linear narrative and causality is deliberately defied.
But in its premise and obsessions, Rose 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 (crazy
love), on the part of Cornell for Rose Hobart, and its qualities
of disruption, disjunction, and the oneiric are still focused on
the pursuit of an ideal woman. It is itself a metalanguage about
another metalanguage. As Jodi Hauptman writes in her breath-
taking study on Cornell and the cinema, Cornell not only identi-
fies with Rose Hobart, “he also very aggressively ‘masters’ her
through the cutting and splicing of her body.”5 Yet if Cornell’s
Rose Hobart purports a historical indifference or an apolitical,
eccentric obsession about the “original” found film that it reorders,
the same cannot be said about the recent ethnographic found
footage films of Fuentes and Monnikendam, which willfully raid
the colonial archive. The difference begs the question about the
specificity of film as a Surrealist medium: although many critics
valorize 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 of
Surrealism.
 The Quick and the Dead • 133

Recent critics have expanded Surrealism beyond its defi-

nition as a French avant-garde art and literary movement of the
1920s and early 1930s. Historian James Clifford refers to Surreal-
ism as a praxis, a way of thinking, a modernist aesthetic.6 But the
“how” of Surrealism that I will be concerned with here refers to
the realm of photography. Hal Foster declares the how of Surreal-
ism to be the uncanny, that is, “a concern with events in which
repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity,
aesthetic norms, and social order.”7 Beauty is therefore not only
convulsive, but 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 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, nature
arrested in motion” (27).
There is something unique to photography, for it, above
all other media, has the capacity to shock with subjective mean-
ing. As Phil Rosen explains, photography has a pathos and an
embedded desire, a quality of the private moment, of which cin-
ema is deprived, serviced as it usually is to narrative, that is to edit-
ing, and to other socially ideological meanings.8 Film has a differ-
ent relationship to time than photography, because it unravels in
time. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes has described photogra-
phy as being akin to a prick or a wound, in his words the punctum.9
André Bazin, the champion of anti-Hollywood realism and one of
the founders of the Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, describes the
relationship of the photograph and the object photographed as
sharing a common being,

after the fashion of a fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actually

contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of
providing a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inkling of this 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
134 • Camera Obscura

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

high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image
that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact.10

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

fingerprint, and hence destroys the boundaries between the real
and the imaginary, the object depicted and the representation. It
is a trace, like Veronica’s veil, and Bazin argues that it liberates
painting from man’s desire to embalm time. Bazin explains that
man’s great desire is for a mummy complex, for an art that would
serve as “a defense against the passage of time. . . . To preserve,
artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of
time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life” (9).
This control over time is part of the shock that photography brings.
Hence the charm, Bazin notes, of family albums: “Those grey or
sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no
longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing pres-
ence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed 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 Heartfield
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 naïve — the more
authoritative the photograph was likely to be.
Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the
uninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more surreal
than an object which virtually produces itself, and with a minimum of
effort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight
are likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it?
It is photography that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing
 The Quick and the Dead • 135

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

great Surrealist poet as an epitome of the beautiful.11

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

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 Surreal
photographs are those that, to use Bazin’s expression, embalm
time, photographs that depict the local, the regional, the particu-
lar, and that usually involve the issue of particularities of class.
The most Surreal is that which is the “most brutally moving, irra-
tional, unassimilable, 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 Ethno-
graphic 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 Ethno-
graphic as infantile or regressive.13 Thus, for example, Cornell
did not think of the politics of the fictional Marudu and its real-
life counterpoint Bali, exotic site for Margaret Mead, Walter Spies,
and Miguel Covarrubias, all of whom ignored the actual anticolo-
nialist resistance active among the natives.14
Nothing could be farther from the private oneiric moment
of the family photograph than ethnographic photography and
ethnographic film. Anthropologists, in their zeal to discover the
mystery of race, used calipers, photography, and then film as tools
of inscription. Ethnographic film was seen by anthropologists like
Margaret Mead as the scientific mode of inscription par excel-
136 • Camera Obscura

lence. After all, her ideal for capturing history was “a camera run-
ning on its own steam.”15 Film was an inscription, and as such
was necessarily accompanied by the words of the Ethnographer/
Scientist; there was a fear that the image of the Ethnographic
might not be easily contained, and thus the scientist must always
speak for what was represented. The problem that Mead and
other anthropologists faced was what to do with the boxes and
boxes of footage. Without editing, and the concurrent voice-over
of the narrator, nobody watches.
Ethnographic footage is often incredibly tedious to watch,
even when edited. Even the most beautiful and classic ethno-
graphic films still shown on clackety 16 mm projectors in uni-
versities across the country, such as John Marshall’s The Hunters
(US, 1956) or Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (US, 1963), would
never be accused of being action films. These films often rely on
the shock of the Savage: a man ripping off a live chicken’s head
with his teeth, the mandatory animal slaughter, the frisson of bare-
breasted women. Debates between anthropologists over the ethics
of showing practices that would be conceived of as bizarre by non-
natives have gone on for decades. Some claim that these films
promote intercultural understanding; others argue that they only
promote repugnance. In early films, the taller white anthropolo-
gist with his notebook, his tent, his camera, and his pith helmet,
could often be seen — in later films that image was eliminated
because it suggested a lack of objectivity (or true voyeurism).
Authoritative voice-over, and a map at the beginning of the film
following the titles, could address the problem of fixing meaning.
Both Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao are found ethnographic
footage films that transform the possibilities of found footage
cinema, ushering in a kind of film that embraces the photo-
graphic principle of Surrealism itself, as well as demanding a
reconsideration of the cinematic archive in Eurocentric film stud-
ies. They allow for the Surrealist ideal of the fabled dissecting table
of Lautréamont’s, “as beautiful as the chance meeting upon an
operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”16 The cou-
pled realities that these black-and-white films expose reflect how
cinema can be the site for subjective private moments that spill
over into the boundaries of the oneiric and the subjective.
 The Quick and the Dead • 137

Bontoc Eulogy
Bontoc Eulogy begins with the silent figure of the filmmaker, Mar-
lon Fuentes, listening to a gramophone recording of what we
later surmise is the voice of his grandfather Markod, an Igorot
warrior from the mountains of northern Luzon, one of hundreds
of Filipino natives who performed at the Philippino Village in
the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The conflict of sound versus
silence, and not only sound but sound raided from the archive, is
set up at the very beginning of the film. The filmmaker describes
his grandfather Emiliano, who was killed during the Spanish-
American War, and whose body was never found. However, the
bulk of the film is about the mystery of Markod’s disappearance,
the grandfather who never returned. It is the body of Markod on
which the narrative turns, a body that because it is primitive is
necessarily part of a narrative seen as authentic. Bontoc Eulogy,
like King Kong (dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack,
US, 1933), is a travel narrative, but from the point of view not of
the white filmmaker but of the native performer brought to the
West for exhibition.
In one sequence, we see Fuentes sitting outside on bleach-
ers, accompanied by the following voice-over: “In the beginning I
lived in two worlds, the sights and sounds of my new life and then
the flickering afterimages of the place I once called home.”
The film then cuts to travelogue footage from the Philip-
pines — street, canal, and river — all easily read as Authentic, obvi-
ously old, scratchy archival black-and-white footage. What marks
this section as radical is the voice-over, which is neither clinical
nor uninterested. “The flickering afterimages of the place I once
called home” may be at once the Philippines, reflected in archival
cinema fragments, but it may also be the land of the living as
described by the dead Markod. Later a travelogue footage shot of
self-flagellators in the Philippines is paired with the following
voice-over: “We Filipinos wear this stroke of silence to render 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 Fil-
ipino American — a colonized national who is also immigrant —
is already one of silence, according to Fuentes.
138 • Camera Obscura

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

sition has provided a popular entertainment at the US and Euro-
pean universal expositions. Living in reconstructed habitats, the
native peoples from all corners of the world often never returned
home, but died of influenza and other diseases, their bodies
becoming specimens for the voracious industries of biology,
anthropology, and the museum. Bontoc Eulogy is also haunted by

Bontoc Eulogy. This image appears in Fuentes’s film

as a half of a stereopticon.

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 natural
history museum industry.
But perhaps the most startling thing about Bontoc Eulogy is
 The Quick and the Dead • 139

its greatest silence: that it is a fiction film. 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 docu-
mentary films, 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 Markod’s
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 nar-
ration 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 film. Even
without knowing the exact date of production, we sense the age
of film footage. And when it comes to black-and-white footage of
colonized, native bodies, framed iconographically as Ethnographic,
viewers rarely consider how time and scientific 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, includ-
ing one of trench shots of “Filipinos” retreating from advancing
US 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 in
reality African American soldiers were sent to fight in the Philip-
pines.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 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 as
always wanting to see the natives as untouched, as “authentic dis-
plays of barbaric savagery,” the viewer also desires to believe in the
authenticity of Fuentes’s 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
140 • Camera Obscura

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 a
white rabbit; we the viewer are forced to reflect on an archeology
of cinema that has historically been described as poised between
the magic of Georges Méliès and the documentary power of the
Lumière brothers. In Fuentes’s film, cinema lies somewhere in
between. The opening clip is reminiscent of the well-known
scene from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (US, 1922), in
which the character Nanook (though credited as played by “him-
self” was actually played by Allakariallak) is shown as amazed 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 tech-
nology allows for voyeuristic pleasure and reassures the viewer of
the contrast between the Primitive and the Modern: it ingrains
the notion that the people are not really acting, which becomes a
sign of authenticity, an essential discourse of early anthropologi-
cal visualism. In Bontoc Eulogy, Fuentes is shown winding the
gramophone three times; a repetition that destabilizes the author-
ity of the scene, becoming a sign of something else. Unlike Nanook
of the North, the filmmaker himself is seen in the film, thus destroy-
ing the polarized roles of observed native and observing film-
maker. Moreover, Fuentes is not using the image to underline the
authenticity of the scene, but to parody our desire to see authentic-
ity in such a scene.
Instead of feeling deceived, one is invited to walk away
from the film with the feeling that “it could be a real” experience,
savoring what is fiction in fact and what is fact in fiction. Fuentes’s
film is intended for both a general audience, in particular the
cineast, and a Filipino American audience. Fuentes explains that
he did not reveal the fictional construct of his film mainly so as
not to betray his Filipino audience:

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

bi-directionality of the act of observing. Breaking the “ethnographic”
surface by disclosing the fictional device within the film would have
dissipated the emotional momentum generated by the historical gravity
 The Quick and the Dead • 141

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

to take, but it would have trivialized and deflated the tragedy of the nine
Filipinos who died during the exposition, and the hundreds who
endured the ordeal.18

Fuentes tells us that Markod never returned home, paral-

leling the historical deaths of others such as Saartje Baartman,
the Hottentot Venus, Minik Wallace’s family, and Ishi. We are
reminded of Stuart Hall’s explanation that there is no simple
return to the past that is not expressed in the terms of the pres-
ent.19 In essence, Fuentes brilliantly deploys what I have called
the third eye, by forcing the viewer to reconsider the subjectivity
of the people who performed and who were filmed in ethno-
graphic spectacles like that of the St. Louis World’s Fair. Deploy-
ing performance, parody, irony, recontextualization, and disqui-
eting silence, Fuentes, in bricoleur fashion, structures the film as
an archeology of memory and history.
The fragmentation of the film is continually displayed, as
is true of the found footage genre itself. Fuentes explains, “In one
way the film functions as an autoethnographic document that
reconstructs an internal reality based on the flotsam and jetsam
of cultural history. The film is really a Frankensteinian creation,
with its sutures and distinct gait. . . . I believe that history is really
an art of memory. The gaps and ellipses are just as important as
the material we have in our hands.”20 Fuentes turns the archive on
its head by raiding it. In other words, for both Fuentes and Mon-
nikendam, there is an active and invested sense of raiding from
the archive that should be distinguished from the purportedly
passive and accidental designation of the “found” footage film.
The notion of the collection, so important to Surrealism — think
for example of Cornell’s collection of films and film 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
World’s Fair, with its native villages (the Philippine Village alone
took up forty-two acres) was intended to be “an elaborate scaf-
folding whose aim was to prove the thesis of racial difference”
(77). Johannes Fabian notes that archives are not just innocent
142 • Camera Obscura

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 cultures
compiled by the anthropologist-filmmaker — who merely goes
out into the world, objectively captures life on celluloid, and
brings it home for storage — the circulation of images presup-
posed by the archive implicates social, historical, and political
relations of dominance.
Put another way, the colonial camera objectifies the native
in two ways: (1) by the conversion of these filmed bodies into film
footage; (2) by having the meaning and value of the footage appear
to be about the bodies on display, thus masking the identity, spe-
cial agency, and subjective desires of the colonial person wielding
the camera. The camera is represented as a mechanical recorder,
and there is thus no sense of accountability to explain why these
persons and scenes were filmed in the first place. Moreover, there
is a second layer of colonialist hubris: not only were colonialist
cameras able to exercise this first-order cinematic conversion of
native, exploited bodies to the level of spectacular filmed images
but the footage was then stored and archived in colonial metropo-
les. The arrogance underlying a coordinated institutional effort to
enshrine and entomb colonial footage is obfuscated by the ways in
which these films serve as a kind of record or witness to crimes
against humanity. This further bespeaks a refusal to see that this
“footage” could later serve as film that could be raided and re-
edited to remember and highlight the savagery of colonialism.
Fuentes turns the table on these relations of dominance
by having the Displayed look back at the Observer. This return
gaze literally occurs during the section in which Fuentes describes
how his grandfather was a northern Luzon warrior. A young dark-
skinned boy wearing only a G-string dances around and around.
All of a sudden, Fuentes manipulates time in the most 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
 The Quick and the Dead • 143

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

danced around a blazing fire at night beating a brass gong, or if
my mother ever served dog meat at home. The sad thing was I
never even met an Igorot in my whole life.” Then to the ambient
sounds of presumably Igorot music and water rushing by, a white
photographer shoots with a camera at a river as a young Filipino
boy emerges from off-screen left and passes behind him. All of
a sudden the film cuts to a closer shot of this boy looking back
at the film camera recording the whole scene. The gaze of the
Observed, the Displayed, is returned back and held in a freeze
frame, while the narrator continues: “I wanted to find out 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 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 film
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 film that has tried to allow the
viewer to identify with the Native.22 The filmmaker is seen look-
ing at skulls and the pickled brains of anonymous ethnographic
subjects in bell jars lined up on a museum shelf. In voice-over he
muses: “So many objects, identities unknown, labeled but name-
less, anonymous stories permanently preserved in a language that
can never be understood.”
It is in this moment of the film that we truly get a sense of
the photographic principle of Surrealism. What haunts us in these
photographs is the sense of what Barthes has termed “the that has
been.”23 The people in these photographs remind us of the
evanescence of time, with their ghostly testimony that they once
existed. Barthes explains the position of being photographed:

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I
want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the
one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action:
I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am
144 • Camera Obscura

(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 ethno-

graphic spectacle in which indigenous peoples are exhibited and
dissected both visually and literally — a tradition carried forward in
cinematic pastiche in Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong — but it
also speaks to possible forms of resistance. Fuentes, like other
artists of color, upsets the structure of fascinating cannibalism, the
West’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. The
filmmaker 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 film. Although we
later learn that the narration is unreliable, it is the mystery of
Markod and the poignancy of having such a grandfather that sus-
tains the film’s structure even as it is fragmented. The filmmaker
is still there to give a sense of order, and, as Fuentes explains, “nar-
rativizing discrete yet incomplete fragments of our memories
becomes a vital way of knowing where we fit in the grander
scheme of things. Film has the power to impose a sense of order,
purpose, and interconnectedness amidst this vortex of events.”24
With Mother Dao we turn to another kind of structure.

Mother Dao: The Turtlelike

If with Rose Hobart we remain firmly within the narrative film ver-
sion of Surrealism — one that does not choose to exploit the pho-
 The Quick and the Dead • 145

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 contradic-
tory), it is Mother Dao that best exploits the photographic princi-
ple of surrealism. Raiding the Dutch Colonial Institute, the
Tobacco Bureau of Amsterdam, the Dutch sugar industry, and the
Catholic church archives for films shot between 1912 and 1933
of the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia, Mother Dao
reveals to us an aspect of cinema that Barthes and Rosen attribute
more to photography: its oneiric quality, its punctum. Unlike in
Bontoc Eulogy, there is no narrator. The footage is divided into
three 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, flows
imperceptibly into them.25 The film 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 film outlined by
William Wees: It lifts the original travelogue and colonial documen-
tary out of its original context, thus exposing its ideological mean-
ings, and it interrupts the narrative flow visually, aurally, and in
terms of film speed.26 As Wees explains about found footage films,
“Whether they preserve the footage in its original form or present it
in new and different ways, they invite us to recognize it 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 origi-
nally received” (11; emphasis in original). Monnikendam goes fur-
ther: he transcends all of the collage aspects of found footage film
by bringing the punctum, the prick, the private moment, the wound
back into film, a medium that has traditionally been yoked to
socially mediated meaning. The film is fragmented, but it is a frag-
mented phantom that achieves the startling juxtapositions of life
and death, the umbrella and the dissecting table, through sound
and editing. Unexpectedly for a film using documentary archival
footage, Mother Dao does not use an authoritative voice-over, which
146 • Camera Obscura

would have ordered the film into a historical survey. Nor does
Monnikendam use gamelan music, which he felt would be too
stereotypical, exploiting our preconceived notions of Java, Bali,
and the other Indonesian islands.27
Instead he chooses to use a mix of unexpected sounds.
Monnikendam layers sound that is diegetic, that is, the sounds of
synchronous reality: the ambient sounds of water, a train, a fac-
tory pounding out metal 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, contempo-
rary Indonesian protest poetry by authors such as Rendra, and
startlingly revolutionary Javanese songs called tembang, tradition-
ally associated with picturesque dance but here shown to have
tremendous revolutionary potential. This is truly the coupling of
two realities, a Lautréamont moment, and it is present even in the
opening poem, which describes how the world was formed by
Mother Dao, the turtlelike. This mixture of reality and dream,
poetry and atmospheric effects, takes us on a voyage into the past,
certainly embalmed in time, in which we see to a scale never before
shown how much colonialism exploited the bodies of native peo-
ples for capitalist gain: toddlers collect caterpillars from tobacco
plants, men become human mules to a mill, women winnow kapok
(cotton stuffing) by hurling their bodies into the suffocating air
of cotton to provide beds for their colonial masters. This is a film
about what is most Surreal, according to Sontag: labor, class, and
time.
What is so compelling about the images is the mixture of
the obscure and the precise. The often scratchy texture of the
film and the horrific deep focus that orthochromatic film pro-
vides, accompanied with foleyed sound and ambience, create a
ghostlike world from the past. The camera movements and cam-
era framings are as architectural and well composed as one would
expect of filmmakers from the land of Vermeer and Rembrandt.
Moreover, Monnikendam’s 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 flow of a dream and the visual shock of the
 The Quick and the Dead • 147

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 woman’s
voice explains from a poem by contemporary poet Sitor Sito-
morang:

I am the Ifish
amfrom
the fish
thefrom the primeval
primeval sea sea
stranded
stranded on theofrocks
on the rocks of Parangtritus
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
Innerwhich
Inner wind wind which canstone
can make makesing.
stone sing.

I am the mysticalI am the mystical bird

bird
feathered with the wind.with the wind.
feathered
The fishThe
fromfish
thefrom thebeginning
world’s world’s beginning
whose
whose fins are the sea.fins are the sea.

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

are cutting metal rectangles, and then we realize that they are mak-
ing shiny tin boxes, probably for oil. A man in a coolie hat cuts a
sheet and looks up for a moment. Noncommittal, his regard is
that of a ghost: to paraphrase Barthes, he is becoming a specter.
And then one realizes that not only is this scene about tin box
making, but also about bodies, about human hands and human
feet that operate machines through sheer human power.
The presence of the colonialist at first seems harmless, if
not comic. First we see a Dutch man in a pith helmet followed by a
coolie, slam cut to a shot in which he’s 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.
148 • Camera Obscura

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, blend-
ing with the scratches of the film. Nobody smiles. It is a pure
moment of conversion: the Indonesians convert to Christianity,
and they also convert into an image for the white man, as they are
blessed by the Priest. They convert into spectrality.
The next two scenes are still in the realm of religion. A
white man in a pith helmet paints a large Jesus icon, and a priest
teaches an orchestra of Indonesian children how to play music.
For one of the first things that Christianity in this part of the
world must do is destroy indigenous music (the fear of the drums
that invoke the dead) and destroy their religious art, to be replaced
by Christian music and art. Here the film is silent, and one is left
to imagine what kind of oompah music the children are being
taught with the tuba and cymbals. Again nobody, except for the
Priest, who is clearly mugging for the camera, smiles. What jars is
 The Quick and the Dead • 149

how often the Priest stops the children and tries to correct the per-
formance of the child pounding the band drum. The Priest is the
only one laughing.
But the most horrific footage has yet to occur. To the sound
of belabored breathing and the ambient track of something high-
pitched like birds or crickets, we dolly down an outside corridor
where doctors and nurses wrapped in gowns wearing masks are
pounding the open body of an Indonesian on an operating table
with a hammer. We then cut to shots of children with smallpox
wounds, naked children who are so sick that their eyes are shut
from the pustules covering them, a young boy whose body is totally
covered with sores, a leper who stares into the camera.
It is then we realize that this is a film about perishing and
death. These babies and children are dying even as their images
are being taken. This is not the “that has been.” This is the “that is
being done.” The Indonesians filmed are not just rendered into
specters because they are being photographed, as Barthes sug-
gests, but because their bodies are being colonized. Again 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 mid-
nineteenth century, as the body is laid out:

The Thebatsbats hang

hang under
under thethe branches
branches
FlutteringFluttering
their wings their wings
The are
The bats batslikewise
are likewise sorrowful
sorrowful
If they
If they could,
could, theythey would
would havehave said:
said:
“But why do Pandhoe’s sons not journey
withwith
him, him, asking
asking for for their
their realm?”
realm?”
TheThe blossom
blossom of the
of the Tanjung
Tanjung trees
trees
Lies scattered
Lies scattered overground
over the the ground
The The tanjungs
tanjungs areare likewise
likewise sorrowful
sorrowful

The animals and the flora are sorrowful, but the Colonizer is not.
We then cut to an astonishing scene. A lone woman stands in pro-
file in a sea of white clouds. There is no perspective, no more
achingly deep space here. The cloud of white looks like sky, as we
see many men and women tossing up kapok cotton that hangs in
their hair and mouths. They use their bodies to pound the cotton,
150 • Camera Obscura

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

walk around and around on a platform of cotton that looks like a
gallows, the light from above illuminating this theater of torture.
When we see the footage that follows of a Dutch colonial
family, a colluding Javanese official, and the Dutch men who mug
to the camera as they try to dance like Javanese women, what we
realize is this: the beautiful white linen, the crisp bows in a Dutch
daughter’s 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 Surreal—instead,
it is a kind of unfathomable real — but the existing cinematic
traces of these particular sites and moments. The filming itself
decontextualizes bodies and locations, unmoors them from their
immediate meaning and reality, and then makes these images
available for their later juxtaposition through re-editing, inviting
multiple interpretations. In the moment in which Indonesian
natives are swallowed up by cotton kapok, black-and-white images
convert extreme labor exploitation into an odd dreamscape. It is
only through the fact that this footage is juxtaposed to images of
children dying from smallpox that the aesthetic beauty of the
kapok footage is revealed as horrific.
Film and photography were intended as tools to measure
time, but it is precisely their closeness to time that accounts for
their closeness to the oneiric. As Barthes says upon looking at a
photograph of a man about to be hanged: “He is dead and he is
going to die.”28 When we look at Monnikendam’s film, the gaze
back of the factory tin cutter, the smallpox boy who will not live
another day, the coal miners, the converted, and countless oth-
ers, we are looking at the eyes of those who are condemned to
eternal hell. The horror slowly dawns that this is a world in which
humans are the slaves of a nightmarish assortment of machines,
 The Quick and the Dead • 151

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 mother’s
nipple, of men and women who marry but who break their backs
cutting stone, the deaths of those disfigured 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 films, the hor-
ror 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 film 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, Mon-
nikendam explains that he used the poem and the song implicitly
to critique the relentless objectivity of the Dutch camera gaze. He
adds: “It’s 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 film, the origin myth of Mother Dao con-
tinues:

There came a time when hence from our Mother Dao

The ever-rejuvenating,
The ever-rejuvenating, the turtlelike
the turtlelike
Fled herFled her lifehence
life spirit, spirit,like
hence
the like
windthe wind
Herlike
Her soul receded soulmist
receded like mist
She was
She died and diedturned
and was turned
into earthinto earth
Dead she became Dead
dustshe became dust
Herremains
Her earthly earthly remains
filled thefilled
chasmsthe chasms
Her ashes filled the earth where it was itcleft.
Her ashes filled the earth where was cleft.

Her progeny onHer progeny on earth

earth
Her issue in the Her issue in the world
world
Became Became as abundant
as abundant as dust
as dust and sandand sand
Became myriad as dust and grainsgrains
Became myriad as dust and of sandof sand
Butwere
But they they not
wereaware
not aware thatare
that they they are family
family
That
That they are they areand
brothers brothers
sisters.and sisters.
152 • Camera Obscura

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 film, looks shyly into the camera:
and suddenly the viewer is quite naked. We realize that this is a
film in which the relations of viewer and viewed are reversed. We
are being watched with the eyes of those who are now dead. Cin-
ema 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 Pacific 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 film 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.
 The Quick and the Dead • 153

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

“As in a Wood,” L’age du cinéma 4 – 5 (1951): 26 – 30, as reprinted
in The Shadow and Its Shadows, ed. Paul Hammond (London: The
British Film Institute, 1991), 43.

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

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

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

Joseph Cornell, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1980), 75.

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

Michelson explains, “We are constantly offered a set of actions or
signs without referents, and the expectation of the referents
provides a tension, a special sort of 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.

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

Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1999), 111.

6. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” Comparative

Studies in Society and History 23.4 (1981): 540. Clifford’s article
opened up a debate on what he called “ethnographic
surrealism.” He points to the connections between ethnography
and Surrealism in France of the 1920s and 1930s. Both, he
argues, are interested in exotic worlds, in making the familiar
strange, in cultural reality as composed of artificial codes, and in
culture as something to be collected, hence putting 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.

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

xvii.

8. One of the best essays I have read on the difference between the
subjective qualities of photography versus film is Phil Rosen’s
“Detail, Document, and Diegesis in Mainstream Film,” in his
Change 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.
154 • Camera Obscura

10. André 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 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: An

Extended Conversation with Marlon E. Fuentes,” Amerasia
Journal 24.3 (1998): 81. See also Jesse Lerner and Lisa Muskat’s
excellent review, “Bontoc Eulogy,” Blimp Film Magazine, 1997,
53 – 56. A more famous example of a film 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.

 The Quick and the Dead • 155

25. Hubert Niogret, “Regards d’autrefois et d’aujourd’hui,” 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 films: the
compilation, the collage, and the appropriation film, all of which
he feels have different ideological purposes.

27. Niogret, “Regards,” 87.

28. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 95.

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

Fatimah Tobing Rony is assistant professor in film studies at the

University of California, Irvine.

Mother Dao . Courtesy Zeitgeist Films