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IN JUNE 1971, the same month that The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, Manuel “Manda” Elizalde, a Filipino businessman and head of the Philippines’s Presidential Assistant on National Minorities (PANAMIN), announced the discovery of the Tasaday, a previously uncontacted tribe living in a secluded area of the Philippines just 1,000 miles east of Vietnam. The US-allied Marcos regime was facing criticism for human rights abuses — warrantless arrests, torture, and murder — when news of the peaceful “Stone Age tribe” caught the sympathy of people around the world. Filmmakers traveled to the rainforests to film the Tasaday’s prehistoric way of life for prurient, Western audiences. The tribe’s existence provided a sensational public relations opportunity for the tottering Marcos regime, who undoubtedly knew the longstanding appeal of putting Indigenous Filipinos on display and were eager to reap the benefits.
Fifteen years later, after Marcos was driven from power and the United States had withdrawn from Vietnam, a new “truth” emerged and new documentaries were filmed. After seeing the Tasaday people wearing modern clothing and using modern tools, journalists proclaimed the tribe a hoax — the filmed people were merely natives from nearby, non-isolated tribes who were paid and coached by a corrupt Marcos regime to perform an imagined pre-modernity in order to sequester natural resources and raise money for the Tasaday’s “protection.” After Elizalde fled the Philippines with $35 million dollars gleaned through PANAMIN, the media built a new narrative around the tribe — a post-Vietnam story of a duplicitous Philippine government and a naïvely complicit American public.
Today it remains unknown whether the Tasaday were a Stone Age tribe, an elaborate PR hoax, or a media frenzy eager to create a narrative for its own commercial purposes, or perhaps all three. In The Book of Paradise Has No Author, director Ross Lipman doesn’t try to solve the mystery so much as reveal its inner workings and entanglements. In the age of fake news and countervailing appeals to an impossible objectivity, Lipman makes documentary film more personal, and equivocal, with performances that settle into the ambiguity of lived experience.
In what is essentially a documentary about documentaries, The Book of Paradise Has No Author blends media criticism and historical scholarship to tell the splintered story of the Tasaday. Lipman reads an essay over archival footage from degraded videotapes he acquired in the 1980s, along with paid programming of the time, clips of tribal tourism (or “first contact for cash”), and slides of art and books in an ethereal sound and light environment. Through this fractured form, he consolidates the din of voices that attempted to define the Tasaday and pares them down to one essential story of exploitation: “All who approached [the Tasaday] recast them in their own image: Marcos, Elizalde, the loggers, Lozano, neighboring groups, anthropologists, the networks, myself.” Spanning the arc of the Tasaday’s fame during and after the Vietnam War, the film’s footage shows the capacity of media, and documentary in particular, to shape popular perception of a people through the camera’s claim to objectivity.
In particular, Lipman juxtaposes two documentaries that attempt to either tell the story of the Tasaday for them or coax a story out of them. The first documentary, made by NBC in 1972, is titled “The Cave People of the Philippines.” We learn that the lives of this gentle, leaf-clad people revolve between the caves, the forest, and a stream, and that they have no words for weapons, hostility, or war. Jumping “rapidly between the historical, the lyrical, and the speculative,” as Lipman puts it, the NBC program pictures the Tasaday as noble savages, romantic figures that allow viewers to identify with an imagined, blissful past. Lipman juxtaposes clips of Tasaday children playing in the stream with a commercial for Glade air freshener that played alongside the TV documentary — “Glade erases odors, leaves a rose scent as light and fresh as my garden of roses” — drawing together two toxic pursuits of contrived purity. By portraying the Tasaday as the ideal Other — an emblem of processes opposed to capitalism, industrialization, and modernization — the NBC documentary provided a redemptive salve for the racist rhetoric against the Vietnamese, the unideal Other, coursing through American homes, let alone the racial violence occurring in the United States during the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
The second documentary Lipman examines is ABC’s 20/20 segment from 1986, “The Tribe That Never Was.” ABC countered NBC’s footage, casting the Tasaday’s Eden as too good to be true. A journalist asks a member of the tribe, “Why did you go to the caves and take off your clothing and appear to be primitive cave men?” A translator responds, “Elizalde said if we went naked we’d get aid because we’d look poor.” When the journalist asks, “Were they rewarded? Did they get help?” the translator responds, “None. We’re poorer now than we were before.” Confounding matters further, Lipman shares that this correspondence itself may have been the product of bribes. Today, long after the media spectacle, it is difficult to find updated information on the tribe’s well-being.
Lipman’s tape of 20/20 has no commercials, so we do not know what paid programming went alongside it, helping to shape it. However, we do know that this documentary was created on the heels of the Vietnam War, and just months after the People Power Revolution overthrew the Marcos regime. American media were newly hungry to expose the deceptions of government. “NBC and ABC both hold a patronizing air, but of different flavors,” Lipman observes. “NBC conquers with naïveté, ABC with cynicism. Both views are wonderfully romantic — in their own way.” Speculating on the lost commercials, Lipman adds, “In the end, they may not be all that different. For what is cynicism, but an inverted desire for purity?”
Lipman urges viewers to consider what audiences were looking for in the Tasaday, and how that affected what they saw and said about them. Careful to follow Dziga Vertov’s dictum that a documentarian should never substitute “the appearance of truth for truth itself,” he shuttles between the familiar and the unexpected, questions and revelations, leaving viewers with a poeticized, but not romanticized, view of history.
Sylvia Gindick is a writer based in New York.
Banner image from The Book of Paradise Has No Author.
Fifteen years later, after Marcos was driven from power and the United States had withdrawn from Vietnam, a new “truth” emerged and new documentaries were filmed. After seeing the Tasaday people wearing modern clothing and using modern tools, journalists proclaimed the tribe a hoax — the filmed people were merely natives from nearby, non-isolated tribes who were paid and coached by a corrupt Marcos regime to perform an imagined pre-modernity in order to sequester natural resources and raise money for the Tasaday’s “protection.” After Elizalde fled the Philippines with $35 million dollars gleaned through PANAMIN, the media built a new narrative around the tribe — a post-Vietnam story of a duplicitous Philippine government and a naïvely complicit American public.
Today it remains unknown whether the Tasaday were a Stone Age tribe, an elaborate PR hoax, or a media frenzy eager to create a narrative for its own commercial purposes, or perhaps all three. In The Book of Paradise Has No Author, director Ross Lipman doesn’t try to solve the mystery so much as reveal its inner workings and entanglements. In the age of fake news and countervailing appeals to an impossible objectivity, Lipman makes documentary film more personal, and equivocal, with performances that settle into the ambiguity of lived experience.
In what is essentially a documentary about documentaries, The Book of Paradise Has No Author blends media criticism and historical scholarship to tell the splintered story of the Tasaday. Lipman reads an essay over archival footage from degraded videotapes he acquired in the 1980s, along with paid programming of the time, clips of tribal tourism (or “first contact for cash”), and slides of art and books in an ethereal sound and light environment. Through this fractured form, he consolidates the din of voices that attempted to define the Tasaday and pares them down to one essential story of exploitation: “All who approached [the Tasaday] recast them in their own image: Marcos, Elizalde, the loggers, Lozano, neighboring groups, anthropologists, the networks, myself.” Spanning the arc of the Tasaday’s fame during and after the Vietnam War, the film’s footage shows the capacity of media, and documentary in particular, to shape popular perception of a people through the camera’s claim to objectivity.
In particular, Lipman juxtaposes two documentaries that attempt to either tell the story of the Tasaday for them or coax a story out of them. The first documentary, made by NBC in 1972, is titled “The Cave People of the Philippines.” We learn that the lives of this gentle, leaf-clad people revolve between the caves, the forest, and a stream, and that they have no words for weapons, hostility, or war. Jumping “rapidly between the historical, the lyrical, and the speculative,” as Lipman puts it, the NBC program pictures the Tasaday as noble savages, romantic figures that allow viewers to identify with an imagined, blissful past. Lipman juxtaposes clips of Tasaday children playing in the stream with a commercial for Glade air freshener that played alongside the TV documentary — “Glade erases odors, leaves a rose scent as light and fresh as my garden of roses” — drawing together two toxic pursuits of contrived purity. By portraying the Tasaday as the ideal Other — an emblem of processes opposed to capitalism, industrialization, and modernization — the NBC documentary provided a redemptive salve for the racist rhetoric against the Vietnamese, the unideal Other, coursing through American homes, let alone the racial violence occurring in the United States during the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
The second documentary Lipman examines is ABC’s 20/20 segment from 1986, “The Tribe That Never Was.” ABC countered NBC’s footage, casting the Tasaday’s Eden as too good to be true. A journalist asks a member of the tribe, “Why did you go to the caves and take off your clothing and appear to be primitive cave men?” A translator responds, “Elizalde said if we went naked we’d get aid because we’d look poor.” When the journalist asks, “Were they rewarded? Did they get help?” the translator responds, “None. We’re poorer now than we were before.” Confounding matters further, Lipman shares that this correspondence itself may have been the product of bribes. Today, long after the media spectacle, it is difficult to find updated information on the tribe’s well-being.
Lipman’s tape of 20/20 has no commercials, so we do not know what paid programming went alongside it, helping to shape it. However, we do know that this documentary was created on the heels of the Vietnam War, and just months after the People Power Revolution overthrew the Marcos regime. American media were newly hungry to expose the deceptions of government. “NBC and ABC both hold a patronizing air, but of different flavors,” Lipman observes. “NBC conquers with naïveté, ABC with cynicism. Both views are wonderfully romantic — in their own way.” Speculating on the lost commercials, Lipman adds, “In the end, they may not be all that different. For what is cynicism, but an inverted desire for purity?”
Lipman urges viewers to consider what audiences were looking for in the Tasaday, and how that affected what they saw and said about them. Careful to follow Dziga Vertov’s dictum that a documentarian should never substitute “the appearance of truth for truth itself,” he shuttles between the familiar and the unexpected, questions and revelations, leaving viewers with a poeticized, but not romanticized, view of history.
¤
Sylvia Gindick is a writer based in New York.
¤
Banner image from The Book of Paradise Has No Author.
LARB Contributor
Sylvia Gindick is a writer based in New York.
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