Mother Dao the Turtlelike

A promising title for a supposedly ethnographic film. I would recommend watching Mother Dao without any background or context as I did, if only out of respect for the one thing that is clear of the filmmaker's desires; Vincent Monnikekendham withholds the informative portion of the film until the very end.

However, in order to save you I would say 90 minutes of your life, I'll go ahead and tell you what this film is. You will have to excuse my terseness, I was told the film would be 58 minutes upon viewing, and vividly remember checking the clock every two minutes or so once I felt that a solid hour had indeed gone by. Now, had I been talking about a good film just now, I would have said slipped by, a great film this discussion would be moot. Unfortunately, these days, that mootness is few and far in between.

As this is my first real entry in this film journal, and given the medium by which my verse is being delivered, I should probably be reflexive (I'm an anthropologist in 2010 after all) and say outright how I feel about film and time in general. Now, the following is explicitly my opinion, it is not based in any scientific or evidentiary data. I believe the medium of film is very special, in that it has an almost magical quality that allows for complete consummation of the viewer by the art form. A viewer can become enveloped by a film there in the darkness of the screening room. It is a very powerful thing of which I speak, and therefore, should not be taken lightly. This is why I believe a filmmaker has a responsibility to the audience, because life is so precious, time is not something one needs to waste on being consumed in a bad way, or worse and more to the point, longer than necessary. Because film can affect so greatly, every moment counts, and I do not want to spend any time consumed in a film that does not measure up to the way I value my time. Although that sounds utterly pretentious, I want to make it clear that I do not value my time unreasonably higher than the next schmuck. How often does one hear, "yeah, that movie could have been great, but it was just too long?" Even the "bad films" that I have come across in my time as a visual anthropologist that were under twenty minutes were really not "bad" at all; I probably just didn't appreciate the content, which is purely subjective. However, a "bad" LONG film is not just a subjective matter.

Sorry for the tangent. Back to Mother Dao the Turtlelike. The film, at first, is a brilliant compilation of images set in what appears to be the East-Asian islands. It is beautiful black and white footage of different groups of people going about there daily lives. The sound is what I noticed began to have a pattern. First is chanting (non-sync), then there is a narration (non-sync) then there is natural sound that slowly gets louder (sync) making these images appear to be at last telling a story, one which the audience should know at this point needs to be anticipated. The sound has been building, so anxiety should be felt, etc. Then, just when you think a narrative is going to be constructed, the cycle of sound starts over again, with the images staying at a kind of random pace. People in the jungle, people in the village, etc. This reminded me of Reassemblage, only without the meta-narrative calling attention to the structure of ethnographic film-making in general, the thing that makes Reassemblage what it is (to be fair, I even thought Reassemblage could have been twenty minutes shorter and achieved the same brilliance).

Then the images start to show a pattern of sorts, and you think "Aha, this film is about the evils of colonization and imperialism." Which is a perfectly reasonably post-colonialistic point to be making. Then the images just get repetitive. Again, this is not about the content, at this point, I'm speaking of time management. After all, we are not discussing a complex issue here, there is no other point I'm gleaning from this "assemblage" of pictures other than, "what happened to the natives is bad." After about an hour of this, out of nowhere, there is a series of images doing quite the opposite, showing the natives being brutal and at times "savage." This goes on for the rest of the film, but at this point I have completely lost interest in gleaning any other message from the film, feeling utterly taken advantage of for the past 40 minutes of my life.

Once the screen goes black, the message of what this film was illuminates the blank screen. The film was put together from over 200 propaganistic films from that period. The filmmakers indeed wanted to "resignify colonialist imagery" (Griffiths) something that crossed my mind, but did not stay there once I felt the film was dragging on and on. I even thought perhaps that it was the opposite point, perhaps calling us all savages. As far as a meta-commentary "on the politics of cross-cultural representation" (Griffiths) a very important theme to explore in Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Film in general, the intellectualism and the cultural critique was lost once the film became repetitive, random and exceedingly unnecessary. This film could have been great if the images and sound were carefully chosen. Bigger is not always better, more sometimes is just more, and in this case, more was just excess.

cheers

Griffiths, Alison. 2001. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn of the Century Visual Culture. Columbia University Press.

Mother Dao the Turtlelike ( Vincent Monnikekendham, 1995).

Reassemblage (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982).