Artist in Person Narrated by a Filipino who left Manila for America more than twenty years ago, never to return, but now in search of "the stories that define us as a people," Bontoc Eulogy recounts his quest to retrace the life of his grandfather. Markod was a headhunter from the highlands who, in 1904, traveled to St. Louis for the World's Fair-he too, by all accounts, never to return. The narrator himself knows little about Philippine tribal customs, and the film is cast as an investigation into Markod's American sojourn-his days as an ethnographic curiosity, endlessly repeating rituals of the "little brown people" before a wide-eyed American public. Interweaving archival footage with stylized reenactments, the film lambasts the manner of exhibiting both culture and nature, alive and dead, that was standard museological and anthropological practice at the time, in particular their "anonymous stories permanently preserved in a language that can never be understood." The film also, in the end (and to some degree against the grain of its form), raises questions about its own truth-claims, as well as about the relation of the authentic to the actual, and the general to the particular, in all historical storytelling, Just-So or otherwise.-Lucien Taylor