Bontoc Eulogy is a 1995 docudrama directed by Marlon Fuentes and distributed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It was produced, written, directed, edited by, and stars Marlon Fuentes in the main role of a screen narrator going through an excruciating internal conflict regarding his heritage and following his thoughts as he recounts his grandfather's journey to the St. Louis World's Fair. It is the fifth film produced by Marlon Fuentes, following Arm in 1994.
Despite a limited audience view worldwide, this experimental documentary offered a deep and critical insight into Filipino history, and is considered a pioneering work in autoethnography. As a photographer, filmmaker, and conceptual artist, Marlon Fuentes' work has been shown in over 60 separate exhibitions in the past 20+ years alone and has been represented in collections such as Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American History, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Library of Congress, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Furthermore, his work has been nominated for the International Documentary Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award and has received many awards from the international community.
Controversy surrounds the film even decades after its release. Some questioned the film for making audiences believe that this seemingly personal account was "real," because the piece combined fictional and factual content as a seamless historically based personal narrative. However, it can be soundly argued that the film's meaning would have been altered had this cinematic device been revealed in the beginning. Some critics have argued that the declaration of its fictional conceit via the film credits is actually the meta-denouement of the film, part of the multiple layers of interrogation conducted by the filmmaker/narrator in trying to ascertain the relationship between form and narrative. The location of the filmmaker (as "narrator") within the commingled streams of fiction and historical facts raises critical questions about the porosity of diegetic, extra-diegetic, and non-diegetic space in cinematic representations of culture and identity formation/s. The film balances its multi-layered critical objectives and formal devices without sacrificing accessibility to an audience. As an experimental, post-ethnographic film that uses/extends (albeit in stealth) the devices of structuralist/materialist cinematic conventions, the film still passes the test of "eminent watchability" despite its rigorous art-historical/theoretical agendas and lineage.
Plot
The unnamed narrator, a serious Filipino-American immigrant, muses about his days in the Philippines and continues on to speculate on the mysterious disappearance of both of his grandfathers. His curiosity leads him to research his past and urges him to discover the whereabouts of his kin. He offers the audience an inside look to his internal conflict regarding his family history by narrating throughout the film. Much of the movie consists of snapshots and footage of the World's Fair and some of the "real" footage has been, in fact, just a reenactment of what is thought to be the past.
The film begins with the narrator thinking of his children and subsequently thinking of his days as a child in the Philippines. He expresses his sadness of belonging to neither country (America or Philippines) and his desire to gain a foundation for his personal history. With this said, the narrator recounts the story of both of his grandfathers' lives. One of the grandfathers' (Emiliano) had fought in the revolution against Spain in 1896 and the Philippine–American War in 1899, only to be killed in the trenches and never have his body found. The narrator speculates that his grandfather is probably buried in one of the several mass graves on the outskirts of Manila.
While Emiliano had an interesting death by fighting in the war, the other's story was far more interesting. The other grandfather, named Markod, had been an Igorot warrior in the Philippines. When the Americans had first came to the village, the tribal members were afraid. But, they soon realized that the Americans wanted to become friends and take them to America to showcase their culture. Markod was, at first, hesitant since his wife was expecting a child. In 1904, Markod and several families of his village decided to go America as participants in the St. Louis World's Fair. At the time, Markod had been a young chief, known for his skills as a hunter and warrior.