The quick and the dead: Surrealism and the found ethnographic footage films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: The Turtlelike

Camera Obscura

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 129-155

  Rony, Fatimah Tobing ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950097230     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-18-1_52-129     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. André Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 40;
2. Breton, "As in a Wood," L'age du cinéma 4-5 (1951): 26-30,
3. as reprinted in The Shadow and Its Shadows, ed. Paul Hammond (London: The British Film Institute, 1991), 43.
4. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 46.
5. P. Adams Sitney, "The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell," in Joseph Cornell, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 75.
6. 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.
7. Jodi Hauptman, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1999), 111.
8. 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 constractedness of the writing.
9. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), xvii.
10. 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.
11. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.
12. André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 15-16.
13. Susan Sontag, "Melancholy Objects," in On Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 52-53.
14. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
15. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, xvii, 218.
16. If they loved Robert Flaherty's film about Samoa, Moana (US, 1926)
17. 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).
18. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1971), 203.
19. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), 10.
20. Mia Blumentritt, "Bontoc Eulogy, History and Craft of Memory: An Extended Conversation with Marlon E. Fuentes," Amerasia Journal 24.3 (1998): 81.
21. 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.
22. Qtd. in Blumentritt, "Bontoc Eulogy," 81.
23. Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities," in "Race," Culture, and Difference, ed. James Donald and Ali Rattansi (London: Sage, 1992), 258.
24. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 92.
25. Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," 9.
26. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 91.
27. Hubert Niogret, "Regards d'autrefois et d'aujourd'hui," Positif 428 (1996): 86-87; my translation.
28. 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.
29. Niogret, "Regards," 87.
30. 2g. Qtd. in Niogret, "Regards," 88; my translation.