Some of the best independent films can be accessed only with subscriptions to specialty streaming services, such as OVID.tv. That platform is calling August its “doc month,” and the provocatively wide-ranging program includes such treasures as the two short films by Fronza Woods, “Killing Time” and “Fannie’s Film,” and the only feature to date by Marlon Fuentes, “Bontoc Eulogy,” from 1995, which is very rarely shown. Available to stream as of Thursday, Fuentes’s film is an extraordinarily accomplished and moving fusion of documentary and fiction, in a genre unto itself: the personal mockumentary. In it, Fuentes portrays himself, a Filipino man who, as a young adult, twenty years earlier, emigrated from Manila to the United States. He hasn’t returned to his home country since, and finds that he is losing his memory of it. The film embodies his quest to recover his past; it’s a blend of personal exploration and passionate historiography that exposes and challenges two different forms of colonialism, or, rather, three—and it’s the third kind that is most ubiquitous and insidious, and which “Bontoc Eulogy” most radically reveals and, moreover, resists.
Fuentes’s film is a furious convergence of family lore and the public record—of mighty historical events, their intimate implications, and the long-unchallenged mythologies and silences that have unjustly and dangerously accreted around them. To recover his memories of his youth in the Philippines, the character played by Fuentes (let’s call him Marlon) leapfrogs back in time and explores the stories of his two grandfathers—and their mysterious, unsolved disappearances. Fuentes uses a trove of archival footage and still photographs, quasi-documentary views of his own life in the United States, and ingeniously dramatized facsimiles of the unfilmed past to bring their stories back to life, and he chronicles them in his own richly researched, candidly declarative, sharply analytical, and gracefully insightful voice-over. “Now my memories of life back home have faded to the point where it is sometimes difficult to know where reality ends and imagination begins,” he declares, and then displays the power—and the necessity—of imagination to restore hidden realities.
One of Marlon’s grandfathers, Emiliano, was a freedom fighter. He fought against the Spanish occupiers in 1896 and then, in 1899, in the Philippine-American War, after the United States took control of the country. He never made it home, and his body was never found. (Marlon speculates that he died in battle and was buried in a mass grave.) Emiliano died resisting the most overt kind of colonialism, military conquest. The story of Marlon’s other grandfather, Markod, takes up most of the film and summons Fuentes’s most ingenious historical reconstructions, to dramatize long-standing, endemic, and even foundational practices of cultural imperialism. Markod, a member of the Bontoc Igorot people, was lured by American explorers from his home in the remote Mountain Province to travel to the United States—where he, along with more than a thousand other Filipinos from various regions, were put on display in a “reservation” as part of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
Fuentes’s reconstruction of Markod’s experiences, through subtle cinematic replicas, brings his artistry and analytical sensibility to heights of ironic audacity. He emphasizes the fair organizers’ cavalierly racist indifference to the realities and the distinctions of Filipino cultures that are represented by the many diverse peoples put on display. He also engages in his own impassioned cinematic anthropology, gathering archival images of those very peoples and displaying them along with his own incisive and informed discussions and a montage that honors the depth and range of the personal experiences that they embody. (One exemplary sequence involves the ceremonial mourning of a newborn who died during the fair, a ritual that the reservation’s American spectators ignorantly enjoyed as an exotically picturesque delight.) Markod’s indignation at the exploitative and oppressive treatment that the captive Filipinos endured at the fair (including brutal policing) merges, in Fuentes’s telling, with Markod’s own independent-minded adventures, in a dramatic revenge plot that makes clear Markod, too, was a freedom fighter, though unsung and unrecognized.
Yet the third form of colonialism, the one that seems to pervade the film’s entire substance, is the insidious and ongoing campaign of cultural oblivion, the evaporation of memory and dissolution of history in the daily American media onslaught and the officialized miseducation that accompanies it. “After all this, I have once again gone back into the hiding places of everyday life,” Fuentes says. “This story has ended, but my search has just begun.” He imagines his young children (who are seen playing cheerfully at home) taking up the quest—and wonders whether, if they find traces of Markod, they will recognize him. The reinvigoration of collective memory and the restoration of distinctive traditions and age-old knowledge of families and ethnicities are more than the subject of “Bontoc Eulogy”; they’re also its objective. Fuentes evokes the urgency of an ongoing artistic and political project of personal exploration and cultural reclamation, of doing justice to the silenced past—without which, he suggests, there’s little hope for justice in the present tense. The film is the trace by which it might start—and by which the disappearances may become presences, the severed threads of history may be reconnected to the future.
