Burden of Representation: 1996 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival

passing as real. The most didactic among the fakes was Shashwati Talukdar's eight minute video My Life as a Poster (1995). The firstperson narration, about a girl whose family moves from India to the States after her sister is killed by her husband, is accompanied by images of Hindi film stars and overly-stylized, misty fades in and out of windows, gates, roads, and trees. After the screening, Talukdar explained the film as an ironic response to the pressure she feels as an Indian film maker to represent India. Several people then asked her to compare Indian and American judicial systems and to comment on Indian wife-killings. No further illustration of the distance between academic film theory and popular interpretation was needed (suggesting that people trained to read films might not always be trained to communicate). Similar problems confronted Marlon Fuentes, whose Bontoc Eulogy (1995), a seductive 57 minute black and white fl1m combining archival footage and short dramatic recreations, offers a first person account of the narrator's grandfather , who was featured in the 1904 World's Fair Filipino display. Though basic premise about the grandfather is true, Fuentes invented details and made creative use archival footage from many sources. For those who benefit from Fuentes' theoretical explanation of his work (offered at the symposium co-sponsored by the festival, the Center for Media Culture and History, and the Anthropology department at NYU), the film could be appreciated as an illustration of the "space ofoscillation" between the authenticity of history and the weakness of the film maker and the film process. But again, others take the film at face value, as straight documentary. Both of these ftlm makers suggested that their motives were to question documentary authority, but that authority often proves strong enough to cancel out their messages. The message was made more clearly by the least self conscious of the fakes, Pieter Kramer's 30 minute video Born in the Wrong Body (1995). Described in the program as "Offensive? Perhaps;' it tells ofa Dutch farmer who has an identity crisis and realizes, after many sessions with his psychiatrist, that he is a black African living in the body of a white Dutchman. Interspersed with interviews with the parents (who blame themselves) and wife (whose patience and love are being tested), the ftlm follows the farmer's attempts to becofu.e trans-raced: pigment treatments, lip broadening and nose-widening operations, hunting with a home-made spear in the backyard and cooking food in the garage, culminating in a move to a "reserve" in Africa where, we are told in a textual postscript, he was rejected as an outsider and sent back to Holland. Is it an inverted colonial fantasy, a sinister comment on assimilation, or a jab at identity politics? The premise of racial alteration is far from mBJournal of Contemporary African Art· Summer/Fall 1997 new, but the deadpan presentation of the subject as what, for the first eight minutes, seems like a somewhat odd but basically believable documentary, jolts viewers with the shock of surpassing the suspension of disbelief. The fl1m could be dismissed as a tasteless joke (the characters are base parodies all round) or lauded as a critique of modern conceptions of identity. Either way, it was effective, and . American reactions are likely to be strong. Though many important ethnographic films have been made in Africa (by Jean Rouch, John Marshall, David and Judith MacDougall), the continent featured in few of this year's films (and Born in the Wrong Body does not count). There were two shorts by Senegalese film maker Ahmed Diop: Le Pirogue de rna Memoire (1994) and Abraham If Gorin aims to shock with his subject's frank statements about killing and death, the authentidty effect is lessened by the fictionalized scenes. As in many of et les Petits Metiers (1996), both U.S. premieres . The first is an autobiographical revery on Dakar's fishermen and their place in the film maker's childhood. The second is a portrait of a young man named Abraham who wants to be a classical opera singer. He says that he is mocked in Dakar, and must sell tissue packets to...