Conversing with Specters in Bontoc Eulogy: A Ghostly (Re)Telling of History

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In his film, Bontoc Eulogy (1995), Filipino-American filmmaker Marlon Fuentes tells the story of Markod, a young Bontoc chief and warrior from the Igorot tribe, by using such historical material as archival footage, photographs, and reenactments. As the film progresses, it is gradually revealed that this story about the filmmaker’s “grandfather” is not based on biographical fact but a fictional tale, despite the film’s visual and narrative similarities to ethnographic documentaries. Fuentes offers in this experimental documentary an alternative mode of telling history that deviates from the traditional ethnographic documentary, even as he re-appropriates archival footage that is filtered through ethnocentric perspectives and steeped in colonial desires. Fuentes deploys the productive power of fabulation to wrest open an imaginative space in his film where ghosts materialize and articulate their stories. This essay proposes an analysis of Bontoc Eulogy as a ghost story. The relationship between Fuentes and Markod is suggestive of the relationship between Hamlet and his father’s ghost, as discussed by Jacques Derrida, in that the spectral presences point to the necessity of justice. As Hamlet is haunted by the injunctions of his father to “set it right,” so Fuentes is haunted by the memories of his grandfather, or rather, lack thereof. As a liminal figure that hovers somewhere in-between different realms of presence and absence, the specter transcends the supposed impossibility of bringing together a multiplicity of temporal and spatial layers. In his film, Fuentes presents a new kind of language to converse with specters and to make them discernible, legible, and audible. To articulate their histories, Bontoc Eulogy combines archival footage, sound recordings, letters narrated by the filmmaker, and fragments of the human anatomy, such as skulls, skeletons, and a pickled brain in a glass jar, which are stored and displayed as anthropological artifacts in a national museum. In this essay, I discuss how an experimental documentary film can deploy spectral methods and disjunctive devices to give form and legibility to forgotten figures in history.

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