Bontoc Eulogy Film: Marlon Fuentes And His Version Of Reality
Surely, it is challenging to apprehend the underlying meaning of the text stated above for people’s abrupt response could be an imperative question of how asking for further elaboration of the what and why’s. Marlon Fuentes’ works of art have a vivid representation of text though some may not be perspicuous or transparently clear to be easily understood by its audience. Often, it requires critical observation, and a handful of research information to have a grasp on what he wants to express.
Marlon Fuentes is a Filipino photographer and filmmaker who left his homeland for America as he pursues his studies particularly in the field of photography. He was born in the era/decade where the Philippines have attained its official freedom from its colonizers. This fact has an immense reflection on his photographs and films. An example on his photographs would be the image of a pig’s head with stitched eyes and mouth that depicts the silence as a result of cultural supremacy of the Spaniards for three centuries. On the later years, he also indulges himself into films that led to the creation of the Bontoc Eulogy, a film with such a deep context.
Bontoc Eulogy is a film that was manipulated by drawing bits of clips from different sources and putting them together with narration. With this technique, Marlon Fuentes has created his version of reality that is different from what Western Archives believe to be real. In this essay, the analysis will focus on the opening scene of the film with the argument that “Fuentes’ use of black and white palette portrays a feeling of genuine ethnography and the scene is a harbinger of the erroneous ethnographic beliefs imposed by Western Archives. ”
Bontoc Eulogy started with a black image that slowly fades into a black and white stationary shot of a closed room by a 16 mm camera. At the left side of the frame, a gramophone was lying in a possible mattress. Then moments later a man entered the screen and sat on the right frame just in front of the gramophone. He then operated the machine with such confidence by winding the needle to the surface of the spinning disc then adjusting the long horn of the device. This frame could be seen thrice in the film with the difference of the sounds produced from the gramophone wherein the second was a tribal music and the third was a voice of a male speaking in a foreign language. A close-up shot of the gramophone’s spinning disc followed by the fading of the sound ended the prologue.
Fuentes’ use of black and white palette and the gramophone portrays a sense of ethnographic credibility/authenticity. The scene where he sat in front of the gramophone is somewhat similar to photographs of the “Bushman Speaking into the Phonograph” by Rudolph Poch an anthropologist who was exploring the Kalahari Desert for the discovery of the lives of “Bushmen” as primitive people. Here a man was filmed. The phonograph was a device for the mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. In its later forms, it is also called a gramophone or, since the 1940s, a record player.
