Director's Statement

The history of the Philippines, a colonial and post-colonial subject, is by default a history of a continuous attempt at self-definition. The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is a critical historical juncture (i.e, the end of the Spanish colonial era, the end of the Philippine American War, the formal enunciation of American Manifest Destiny on the Filipino subject) where the underlying grid of colonial politics becomes visible on a scale never seen before. It was the sublime syncretic landscape, a living diorama that played out the Other's role in a master narrative of Progress and Civilization. Here, spectacle meets ideology and science: from savage Bontoc Igorot to "assimilatable" Tagalog lowlander, the Philippine specimen was displayed as malleable raw material for the inevitable project of Empire.

The unexpected conflict between what we expect and what we see can sometimes bring us back to the consciousness of our own act of perceiving. In Bontoc Eulogy, I want to foreground the oscillation between history and imagination, between the patina of ethnographic nostalgia and the Brechtian disruptions to this surface, between illusion and anti-illusion.