AMBIENT IMAGES II – Press Release
IIn celebration of National Indigenous Peoples Month, the UP Center for Ethnomusicology, in an inaugural partnership with the UP Film Institute and with the support of the Office of the UP Diliman Chancellor, presents the film festival “Ambient Images II.” Now in its second iteration, the event continues the Center’s advocacy of representing the people and musical cultures of the Philippines, Asia, and other regions of the Global South. The festival will feature short and full-length films, supplemented by musical performances as well as commentaries and live discussions with filmmakers, that explore dynamic identities mediated through history and geographic movements, sound, technology, the imperial gaze, and self-reflection. Ambient Images II will run on October 21, 22, 24, and 25 at various venues of the UP Film Center Complex in Diliman, Quezon City.
DAY 1, October 21, 2024: Trance and Dance in Bali (1952) is an ethnographic film by canonical anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, scored with arrangements of Balinese gamelan by Canadian American modernist composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee. Critiqued by many, it problematically captures intractable sacred experiences in linear, ethnographic closures, and offers glaring depictions of Otherness. Tellurian Drama (2020), an experimental short written and directed by Riar Rizaldi, which won top prizes at the Busan International Film Festival and the Berlin Revolution Film Festival, examines the conflicting forces that connect key moments in the history of Radio Malabar in West Java’s Mount Puntang—its feted 1923 opening by the Dutch East Indies government, its anti-colonial destruction by Indonesian fighters in 1945, and its prospective revival as a historical tourist site in 2020. Looming through Tellurian and Trance and Dance are the many guises of empire that inhabit technologies of communication.
DAY 2, October 22, 2024: The short silent film Last of the Line (1914), directed by Jay Hunt, is a work about the devastating impact of white-world integration among Native Americans. Through a kind of narrative inverse, Gono Tmutul: Building a House of Stories (2023), directed by Jovi Juan, recounts the repatriation of T’boli material culture from the possession of an elderly British woman to a village in Lake Sebu. Encounters with these objects would prompt T’boli children to imagine their past, creating a conduit of ancestral stories for the younger generation. Together, these works offer polar trajectories of Indigenous experience, one on the brink of moral erasure, the other promising redemption through self-rediscovery. For Last of the Line, Mikhail Lastrilla, a pianist, UP College of Music alumnus, and Fulbright scholar, has provided a musical score, which he will play live.
DAY 3, October 24, 2024: Zamboanga (1937), a US colonial Hollywood film by Eduardo de Castro, orientalizes Southern Philippines through romanticized narration, a rebuke of traditional Islamic values, stereotypes of the “Muslim run amock,” and diegetic and non-diegetic musics that are at times brash and misleading, if not simplistic in their representations—these are observations from a 2013 essay written by seasoned Filipino ethnomusicologist and UP Professor Jose S. Buenconsejo, who wrote and directed Water of the Mountains: Traditional Music among the Manobo Dulangan (2023), and who will appear at the festival for a talkback. An antidote to films like Zamboanga, Buenconsejo’s visual anthropology celebrates musical cultures shared by various Indigenous communities, cutting through discourses that privilege neat categorizations arbitrarily determined by difference and geopolitics among Indigenous people in the Philippines.
DAY 5, October 25, 2024: In Bontoc Eulogy (1995), an experimental mockumentary that won awards at the San Francisco Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Filipino American writer and director Marlon Fuentes reflects on his ancestry. Fuentes weaves together historical data and archival footage on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, a glorified yet disturbingly arrogant display of US-led imperial progress, as he recounts the tragedy of Bontoc Igorot Markod. Ang Lakaran ni Kabunyan: Kabunyan’s Journey to Liwanag (2020), directed by National Artist for Film and Broadcast Arts Kidlat Tahimik, is a road-trip movie-cum-documentary that chronicles Kabunyan, Kidlat’s son, and his search for an elusive sense of enlightenment—termed “liwanag.” Within a broad realm of autoethnography, both films portray pursuits of existential meaning across space and time. Just as Tahimik’s oeuvre may be seen to culminate the festival’s discourses, so will the National Artist attend the film-screening for a talkback and witness, along with the audience, a community dance to be led by practitioners of Cordillera traditional music.
Screenings for Ambient Images II will be held at the Ishmael Bernal Gallery, Videotheque, and Perfume Garden. Seats are limited, though the event is free and open to the public. Register here bit.ly/ambientimages2.
-Lisa Decenteceo
Do you have inquiries? Send your questions to:
ambientimages.upd@up.edu.ph
#AmbientImages2