The artist as ethnographer

Kidlat Tahimik is the filmmaker who has developped the diary film most extensively within a discourse of postcolonial cultural critique. His distinctive filmmaking technique pries apart the various levels of self-representation so that the primitive, the native, and the premoderne are ironically constructed within a discursive bricolage centered on his own subjectivity. (…) Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow ? (1981-1993), three-hours diary, incorporates history of Philippines, Tahimik’s own family, found footage, newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts, home movies, travel footage, and documentation of public event and political demonstrations.  Documentary footage is mixed with scripted perfomances, and he continually reverses expectations of First and Thirld World cultural scenes.  His movement between cultures casts him as an exemplary Inappropriate Other.  (Catherine Russell, Experimental ethnography, 1999)