first contact
film material nº 4 Film Material No. 4 is published on
information
on ‘the fourth wall’
January 2010 Edited by Paolo Caffoni & Clemens von Wedemeyer
The Story
of the Tasaday
The Tasaday were a group of 26 people
found living in the rain forest of Mindanao, a
southern island in the Philippines. Before they
were found in 1971, their lives had purported-
ly been untouched by contact with other civi-
lisations, and unchanged since the Stone Age.
Cave dwellers who wore only leaves and used
stone tools, they immediately became a sen-
sational subject for photographers, reporters
and anthropologists. The eccentric and con-
troversial millionaire Manuel Elizalde Jun-
ior, head of an agency for the protection of mi-
norities in the Philippines called the PANAM IN
Foundation, was instrumental in negotiating
the group’s exposure to and protection from
the outside world. He created a reserve to pre-
vent exploitation of the tract of rainforest that
was the Tasaday’s natural habitat, and set con-
trols on the media attention and scientific in-
vestigation of their lifestyle, language and
diet. In 1972 the Marcos regime declared the
preserve a restricted area. The declaration of
martial law in the Philippines that same year
made it difficult to access Mindanao for many
years to come.
In 1986, 15 years after the Tasaday’s dis-
covery, a journalist searching for the group
managed to reach their now abandoned dwell-
ing caves. He found the Tasaday nearby, now
inhabiting houses, smoking cigarettes and
wearing blue jeans. The Tasaday made the
headlines again, but now their history was
unclear. Had the isolated group in the forest
changed so radically in 15 years, or had skilled
actors deceived the world earlier?
the occasion of the exhibition
The Fourth Wall  at
Koch Oberhuber Wolff , Brunnenstraße 9, Berlin
Published by Spector Books Leipzig 
and Archive Books, Berlin / Turin 
— spector @spectormag.net 
— info@archivebooks.org
www. kow-berlin.com, www.filmmaterial.net
Decentering
Anthropological
Authority
by Anne M. Lovell
THE Tasaday controversy reflects both the
post-independence crisis of anthropology in
the 1950s and 1960s and the subsequent shift
in its paradigms and methods. In a reversal of
the earlier colonial anthropologist’s impor-
tance, a ‘native’ Filipino from the politically
and economically powerful elite controls ac-
cess to the people he will bill as untouched
by civilization, at least before their encounter
with him, in 1971. Films and photographs pro-
jecting a gentle, unrepressed, loving people
find receptive Western audiences during an
era of sexual liberation, the hippie revival of
the noble savage myth, emerging ecological
consciousness and pacifist desires in the wake
of the brutal Vietnam War. Simultaneously,
anthropologists are embracing new interpre-
tations of the culture of hunters and gatherers,
the category of societies to which the Tasaday
belong. Hunters and gatherers are now seen
as cooperative and inter-dependent, rather
than caught up in a Hobbesian state of per-
petual competition. And by 1972, Marshall
Sahlins will have published his famous study,
Stone-Age Economics, which posits‘primitive’
societies as affluent, rather than struggling for
survival.
Elements of truth claims under colonialism
never lay solely in the hands of anthropolo-
gists; colonial administrators, explorers and
Picture by Claude Levi Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955
missionaries were often anthropologists them-
selves, or at least produced literature about the
people they studied. But the Tasaday contro-
versy emerges at a time when these figures
multiply. The Journalist, the Filmmaker (docu-
mentary and docu-drama), the Human Rights
Activist, the Adventurer and the Writer con-
tribute their efforts to the construction of facts.
The revival of the Tasaday controversy in the
mid 1980s re-assembles these figures in aca-
demic attempts to establish, once and for all,
whether the Tasaday story is a hoax. In the end,
such long-accepted anthropological methods
like ethno-botany, archeology and linguistics
meet with a skeptical audience among anthro-
pologists, by then wary of how styles of cul-
tural description contribute to truth claims and
BY wearing masks, painting the skin or attuned to invisible mediations – the Fourth
tattooing it, people indicate that human
beings distinguish themselves from nature.
Wall – that obfuscate ethnographic authority.
Anne M. Lovell is an anthropologist at
The mask, like art in general, separates
us from nature. It creates a tangible identity,
a culture. The limits of one’s own culture
CESAMES , Université Paris Descartes.
are often transcended in order to investigate
other lives and other cultural settings. The paper you are looking at …
Excerpt from ‘Found Footage’, see p. 2.
… combines research material and com-
International conferences of anthropolo- mentaries as a guide for the exhibition The
gists were anxious to learn the truth. The pre- Fourth Wall . It was edited in such a way
vailing opinion of those conducting follow-up to help you understand what links disparate
investigations held that contact with the Tas- events since 1971, when the Tasaday were
aday were at least in part a directed event, but discovered, until now. These facts and
controversy and inconsistency accompany their echoes were the starting points for an
most arguments. inquiry on that imaginary boundary between
Even after the Philippine parliament is- reality and representation, which created
sued a statement declaring the authentici- the ‘fourth wall’.
ty of the Tasaday, many people today remain You can read more about found footage
unconvinced that they were any more than (p.2), brutalist architecture (p.3), explorers,
one of the biggest hoaxes in the history of an- cannibalism (p.4) and well-known actors (p.6).
thropology. C.W.
 First Contact / January 2010
Tasaday looking out of their cave into the
rain forest in 1972 when they were visited
by a team of anthropologists and reporters by
helicopter. Photo: John Nance.
2009, Digital video, 4:3, 31 min.
found footage
A selection of found footage ranging from
news reports and feature films to anthro-
pological documentaries are arranged in
mutual commentary, drawing relations be-
tween separate regions of the world and
differing eras of interpretation and trans-
lation. Misinterpretation appears to be in-
herent to all cases of media attention to pre-
viously isolated groups. Sections cover
‘Exploration’, ‘The Uncontacted’, ‘Expec-
tations’, ‘First Contact’, ‘Reporting’, and
‘Examination’, and, while remaining open-
ended, the film also touches on the Tasaday
controversy and possible hoax. The com-
mentary proposes the thesis that the cam-
era and the mask are related devices which
generate ‘culture’ through concealment
and division.
Thanks to Craig Baldwin in San Francisco,
where Clemens von Wedemeyer gathered archival
footage for this video.
Editors: Janina Herhoffer,
Clemens von Wedemeyer
Speaker: Stephen Jacob
Sound Editor: Thomas Wallman
2009, 2 channel installation, HD video loop, as well as animations, newsreels, TV commer-
16 :9, 6:30 min.
wood
Shot from a helicopter, the front projection ers, both emerging and well established.
simulates the gaze of an observer pursuing The unusual thing about Baldwin’s praxis
someone hiding in a forest, while the rear
screen shows a view inside the forest.
Camera: Frank Meyer
Editor: Janina Herhoffer
Production Manager: Fabienne Bideau
Produced in collaboration with Utopics,
11 t h Swiss Sculpture Exhibition ,
Biel/Bienne, Simon Lamuniere
Tasaday watch themselves. The Tasaday watch the television program 20/20 (ABC news) in which they are being accused of performing a
stone age life for strangers. Photo: John Nance, 1988
Media ‘disembowel’, and ‘devour’pre-existing films bricolage that alludes to both the represented
in order to make new works of – possibly – art. material, as well as metaphorical or expres-
Cannibalism
But why tear apart films to make new ones? sionistic uses, opening up new spaces for re-
There are at least three incentives for this kind flection and storytelling. The information that
of activity: recycling, repurposing, and recon- is embedded in the source material (true to the
textualizing.The acceleration of technological format of the period in which it was created)
inventions for the moving image art rapidly offers a way of bringing its own particular his-
shortens the lifetime of a medium, creating tory back in its own terms. Using the form of
an ever-growing graveyard of ‘dead’ formats the montage, the images are ‘detoured’ into a
and their images. It is the creative mind that new context, for political, essayistic, documen-
turns the industry’s scrap field into a play- tary, or narrative purposes, creating new cin-
ground, a laboratory for experimentation.The ematic phrases and dialogues between the dif-
by Sylvia Schedelbauer work process can be compared to that of a ‘mad ferent contexts, times, and narratives, similar
scientist’, who builds a ‘Frankenstein’ out of to the concept of hyper-linking.
In the expanding commercialization of the bits and pieces of ‘cannibalized’ films, while Finally, found footage films interrogate new,
homogenized media-landscape of the West- surfing the waves of enhanced media obsoles- playful ways to subvert mainstream media,
ern world, found footage film practice has be- cence. beating it with its own language, all the while
come one way of negotiating many contem- Rather than using pre-existing material to examining the body and flesh of it. A perfect way
porary issues: Public domain, intellectual illustrate something in an indexical way (as to exploit a mountain of bones: orphaned films,
property rights, Open Source, Fair Use, dé- was often practiced in the early compilation rescued films, stolen films, and forgotten films.
tournement, Appropriation Art, film essays, documentary of the 1930s and 1940s), the con- Silvia Schedelbauer is a filmmaker who
as well as documentary and narration. One temporary experimental maker may create a lives in Berlin and San Francisco
such nexus of the found footage practice is
San Francisco, which has a vibrant and ener-
gized community of filmmakers, media and
anti-copyright activists, pioneering thinkers
on the electronic frontier, and archivists. In
the face of disappearing public space and in-
creasing corporatization of public and private
images, one unique archive is that of Ameri-
can filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Comprising a
collection of about 2500 educational, propa-
ganda, industrial, narrative, and amateur films,
cials, and early kinescopes, Baldwin not only
uses his archive to create his own films, but
makes this treasure trove, developed over
three decades of dedicated collecting, availa-
ble to an international community of filmmak-
is that – unlike other archives that offer cop-
ies of the source material ( leaving the origi-
nal film intact) – filmmakers sit down at one
of Baldwin’s basement editing benches and
physically cut out shots of 16mm films, taking
home with them a purchased reel containing
Photo by Wayne Miller, 1955
a myriad of sequences that they wish to use.
In this way, the source films are not preserved
in their archived condition, but get torn apart,
disassembled, and are provisionally spliced
together again until, over the course of time,
they dwindle down to their core. This practice
can metaphorically be describedas ‘media can-
nibalism’, a strategy in which artists ‘rip apart’,
 First Contact / January 2010
A Fortified
Island in the
City of
London
by Francesco Manacorda
The brutalist architecture of the Barbican
Estate was the outcome of a commission to
architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon who
were briefed to rebuild a whole area of the city
that had been bombed during World War II.
Covering more than 40 acres, its design was
indebted to Le Corbusier’s innovative archi-
tectural solutions, including the redirection
of all motorised circulation underground to
obtain a vast pedestrianised zone. The whole
complex was constructed with defensive ar-
chitecture from middle ages to recent bunkers
as an architectural motif – to which its name
is also associated: a barbican is the defensive
gate outside fortified medieval castles. The es-
tate has more than 2,000 flats and an Art Cen-
tre that includes a theatre, a concert hall, three
cinemas, two art galleries and a conservato-
ry. The nature of the architectural project and
its details have made this complex a tempo-
ral oxymoron: on the one side it represents the
biggest modernist intervention in the UK, em-
bracing the future and the technological ad-
vantages of concrete; on the other hand, its
vast hand hammered concrete surfaces are
similar to cave walls and rely on handcraft la-
bour, thereby neutralising the economic ad-
vantages of brutalism’s signature material ‘bé-
ton brut’(untreated cement). The design of the
theatre overlaps the cave-like elements with a
science fictional atmosphere coming straight
out of 1950s space invasion movies. The con-
servatory is another such paradox: to hide the
theatre’s fly tower, the architects built a space
for tropical plants to grow in the middle of the
concrete island. With a result reminiscent of a
J.G. Ballard story and Robert Smithson’s fas-
cination for ruins in reverse, the windowless
The Family of Man. Edward Steichen mo-
ves a scaled spectator through the exhibition
model.  intro
The photography exhibition ‘The Family
of Man’, curated in 1955 by Edward Steichen
for the Museum of Modern Art of New York,
aimed to show ‘the essential oneness of man-
kind throughout the world’. Steichen selected
503 pictures by 273 photographers from 68
countries, and grouped them around themes
relevant to all cultures, such as love, children,
and death. The show was criticised for a naive
view on  mankind, neglecting material condi-
tions; photographs were made to submit to the
theme. Steichens disregard for the individua-
lity of a photograph was compounded by Paul
Marvin Rudolph’s exhibition design. The  ar-
chitect, known for his spatially complex Bru-
talist concrete structure, displayed to mural
size some prints while others were free han-
ging or overlapped with different pictures. At
the close of the exhibition’s highly successful
American tour, the show travelled abroad to
37 countries under the auspices of the United
States Information Agency. In the words of the
historian Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Rather than cras-
sly presenting America to the world, America
presented the world to the world, and gained
credit thereby’.
barbican
tower has been built with fake balconies lus-
ciously invaded by different species of plants
that now cover it completely. The Barbican
Estate can be seen as symptomatic of Britain’s
attitude towards modernity and change: em-
bracing the future while blatantly indulging in
the stratified past.
Francesco Manacorda is a freelance
curator based in London.
2009, 16 mm film loop, B/W, 3 min.
Shot in black and white 16 mm, the film
features an actress who later appears in the
installation’s final film The Gentle Ones,
a record of a play inspired by the Tasaday
and staged in the Barbican Theatre. The
actress looks directly into the camera, as
in an ethnographic portrait or a screen test.
Hands enter the frame, making up her face
or checking the lighting for the camera.
Cast: Laura Eagland
Camera: Clemens von Wedemeyer, Frank Meyer
Producers: Tracy Bass, Pinky Ghundale
Production Manager: Mark Gibbons localization, the surrender to the brain’s power er moves through space as rather than with-
1st Assistant Director: David Dickson
Art Director: Emma Landolt
Photographer: Sheila Burnett
Costume Designer: Heather MacVean
Hair/Make-up: Danielle Hooker
Barbican Centre Drawing. Described by the Queen as ‘one of the wonders of the modern
world’, the Barbican Centre is an imposing collection of the finest in British arts. The building
itself is a labyrinth and finding your route from the station or car park is an adventure in itself.
Staircases twist around each other, directing lost patrons into mysteriously empty mezzanines,
where odd snatches of music are the only guide back to the main lobby. One of the pleasures of
such a huge venue is to arrive early for whatever you plan to see and go exploring.
Film Time a fresh one in the next. The narration in film is
linear, but filmic time is reversible. Film can
in fact grant immortality. If imagining this ut-
ter unlikelihood is too far-fetched for the me-
dium, then it is utopian, unfounded.
A camera circles above a forest, with only
the tops of the trees in view, yet our eyes are
captivated in expectation. It is film’s very
bearings in time that arouse the expectations.
When these are sustained, the viewer forgets
him / herself in return.
by Angelika Stepken In ‘The Fourth Wall’ the fiction of the film
is fragmentary. Real time thrusts itself be-
Film time replaces real time. Only film tween elements of film time, as if there were
time counts in cinema. This is due to our in- continuity between the one and the other. Is
stinctively sensory orientation in time. As the exhibition like an epic film? Or like an ex-
soon as the passage of time is implied, we en- ternalized organ, that wants to fool us with the
ter into a story. Whereas in the 19th century, foretelling of lived time?
the photographic image was understood as an The film time is located here in space, dur-
objective ‘pencil of nature’, film doesn’t simu- ing the experience of walking through the dis-
late the tangible, but instead the regularities ofplay. An alternation transpires between exhi-
lived time. Real time slips away in film.Where bition display and film time, real space and
does this loss occur? filmic narration. During this alternation the
Once films are no longer exclusively viewer becomes aware of different states of
shown in the black box and dream factory of the art work, of different levels of ‘fictionali-
cinema – now having entered the object-ori- zation’.
ented, lighted exhibition rooms – their dis- The various thresholds to fiction trans-
play becomes problematic: whereas exhibi- form the exhibition space into an editing room.
tion spaces are designed as dialectical tours of Just as film time is made credible through
works, screening rooms must support aban- montage of the images, here the viewer finds
donment to film time. It’s not the dialogue be- a wealth of connecting points among the sev-
tween physical positions that matters, but de- en filmic sites of the work. However, the view-
to synthesize and experience sequences of im- in a film, relationships fail to develop in time,
ages as an ‘interminable’ time. or in a (film) story, remaining disparate and
Film aspires to credibility, not in its ca- questionable. Upon leaving the editing room,
pacity as a recording medium, but as a time one recalls one’s self as a possible protagonist
simulator. Film can wind time forwards and who has roamed on location through the vari-
backwards, show simultaneity in succession ous chapters of a DVD, with no way of finding
and show sequences simultaneously, and make the film’s end.
the impossible probable. We follow the mon-
tage of the images: lapsed time becomes plau- Angelika Stepken is a curator and writer,
sible history. The research scientist in ‘Against currently director of the Villa Romana, 
Death’ who has supposedly been made immor- Florence. 
tal through a shamanic ritual is able, thanks
to a filmic loop, to slit his own throat in one
scene and change out of his bloody shirt into
 First Contact / January 2010
Elizalde embracing Kuletaw during a July,
1971 meeting at the edge of the forest with
Bilangan, Balayam and Mahayag watching.
Photo: John Nance
1983, 16 mm film transferred to video, 15 min.
a message from
the stone age
Directed by John Nance — A Message from
the Stone Age is a film made solely from
photographic stills which John Nance took
of the Tasaday in the early 1970s. It relates
the story of their contact with Manuel
Elizalde Jr. and the Panamin Foundation,
sometimes posturing in the point of view of
the group ‘members’, and strongly conveys
Nance’s belief in their humanistic rele-
vance, as in his final voice-over statement:
‘The Tasaday are us and we are them; all
members of the human family’.
This film can be seen on Youtube.
© Oregon Historical Society Motion Picture
Collection
2008, HD video, 55 min.
How to Re-establish the
Truth About the Tasaday?
INTERVIEW WITH JOHN NANCE
Columbus, Ohio, November 2008
In this interview with Clemens von
Wedemeyer, reporter and photojournalist
John Nance recounts his experiences as
one of the first people to visit the Tasaday in
1971 and to bring this small cave-dwelling
community to the attention of the wider
world.
Nance is best known for his books The
Gentle Tasaday, the children’s book Lobo of
the Tasaday, and the picture book Discovery
of the Tasaday.
Clemens von Wedemeyer met John
Nance in his home in Columbus, Ohio.
The interview begins with Nance recalling
his experience of the Vietnam war, and in
particular the differences between the atmos-
phere of the jungle there and in the Philip-
pines, where Nance spent most of the
First Contact
by Anne M. Lovell
‘their history as a people begins with our
visit on June 7, 1971’. This is Manuel Elizalde,
the wealthy Filipino businessman, notorious
playboy, sometime politician and Presidential
Adviser on National Minorities to Ferdinand
Marcos, speaking. The citation opens Robin
Hemley’s book, Invented Eden. The Elusive,
Disputed History of the Tasaday. In the book’s
the interviews
subsequent years as the head of the AP office
in Manila.
It was meeting the Tasaday that most
distinguished the island jungle from that of
Vietnam: Here was a community Nance
describes as peaceful and living in full har-
mony with nature – in great contrast to most
global inhabitants at the time. His books
most likely inspired flower people in the U.S.,
and Nance knows of people who named
their children ‘Tasaday’after his book. The
Tasaday and their way of life had a huge
impact on the ideology of the 1970s.
He recounts the first meeting of this group
with the helicopter of Manuel Elizalde in
June 1971. The Tasaday were well aware that
this contact would change their way of life:
‘Ubus Tasaday, Ubus’, which means
‘The end of the Tasaday, the end’. Much
of the interview centres on the Tasaday hoax
theory, first put forth by both a Swiss and
a Filipino journalist in 1986, which Nance de-
nounces as the real hoax and a conspiracy
against the Tasaday. The following resulting
shift in public opinion about the Tasaday cost
Nance his membership in Magnum among
other things, as he was forced to bear the
stigma of being the person who had
photographed ‘a living zoo’. Nance claims
that even after official institutions vouched
for the authenticity of the Tasaday, the hoax
theory continues to persist, and therefore
he is trying to reestablish the truth about the
Tasaday through new platforms like the
internet. Von Wedemeyer asks whether the
Tasaday weren’t exploited by different forc-
es, and Nance explains that part of the income
from the sale of his books still helps the
Tasaday and other minorities in the Philip-
pines.
final pages, Hemley mythologizes this mo-
ment, when the Tasaday travel to the place be-
yond the forest, ‘where the eyes see too far’, to
meet this bringer of good fortune prophesied
by their ancestors.
Two vantage points, two views: the
dense forest carpet below, the strange giant
bird above. Two narrative structures as well,
through which ‘First Contact’ is refracted.
The now recognized European myth that a
non-Western and/or subaltern people’s histo-
ry begins at the moment they encounter West-
ern civilization had yet to be questioned by an-
thropologists when the Tasaday controversy
began. At the other end of the Filipino archi-
pelago, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo would
soon lay the groundwork for this critique. His
2009, HD video, 35 min.
How to Deal With the
Uncontacted?
INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY FRAND
London, UK, April 2009
Clemens von Wedemeyer interviews lecturer, discuss who has the right to determine the
ethnographer and actor Geoffrey Frand
following a lecture he gave at the Barbican
Centre at the invitation of an investment
banking firm.
Frand discusses the diverse consequences a minimum of 500 years. This is to be done,
of making first contact with isolated groups,
like those living deep in the rainforests
of Brazil. He explains that today’s society
has a responsibility to preserve such groups
and that the best possible means of doing
so is to prevent all contact with them. While
recognising the immediate scientific signifi-
cance of studying the means of their exist-
ence and survival, he argues that prolonging
their isolation is of greater importance and an
invaluable resource for society in the future.
Von Wedemeyer points to the similarity with
1980 ethnography attempts to capture the dis-
tinct history and narrative of Ilongot head-
hunters. Similarly, in First Time, his fellow
anthropologist Richard Price pieces togeth-
er from myths, songs, and contemporary en-
gravings a sense of how Saramaka maroons
– escaped slaves who settled in the rainfor-
ests of Surinam – view their place and identity
within a larger historical process.
The numerous genres of borrowed film,
from newsreels to ethnographic documenta-
ry, projected in ‘The Fourth Wall’ installation,
constitute just as many distancing devices that
displace coevalness, or the juxtaposition of
temporalities.They leave us caught between a
supposedly timeless present of their subjects
and the present time of the film-maker.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which
natives are fenced off in reservations.
Agreeing, Frand states that just such reser-
vations are the only hope for the future, since
they would prevent the active destruction
of what he considers to be the ‘living past’.
This idea is of particular interest to von
Wedemeyer and he is prompted to suggest
that we are the ones the so-called savages
must be protected from. Frand concurs, stat-
ing that opportunities for future anthropolog-
ical and scientific research can only be
guaranteed through isolation. He also refers
to the cautionary tale of a fellow explorer,
who in his quest to fully understand the way
of life of a Brazilian tribe, partook in a ritual
that had a lasting adverse affect. In inter-
acting in ways in which the consequences are
unknown and possibly fatal, both for the
individual and for the group, Frand continues,
explorers themselves contribute to the prob-
lem of what he terms cultural contamination.
Von Wedemeyer and Frand go on to
liberty and future of secluded ethnic groups.
Frand insists that society today should reject
the idea of such global contact and exchange
and enforce their continued isolation for
he maintains, through the creation of
new borders, including physical, illusory,
and psychological ones.
 First Contact / January 2010
National
Geographic
and the
Lost Inspiration
by Ruggero Deodato
I shot Last Cannibal World in 1976 and
Cannibal Holocaust in 1979. After twenty
years in quarantine and several difficult proc-
esses involving both censors and the legal sys-
tem, a group of young American people made
a film similar to Cannibal Holocaust : The
Blair Witch Project. The authors, the actors in-
volved in Cannibal Holocaust, and I had rest-
ed easy, and then when this movie premiered,
its undeserved success woke us up from our
lethargy. The emergence of this ‘young talent’
provoked much debate and the mass media
began to examine reasons behind the film’s
success. The unanimous response across the
globe from young people was that The Blair
Witch Project is just a copy of the movie Can-
nibal Holocaust which was shot by someone
named Deodato in late 1979.
I was inundated with attention from jour-
nalists, television crews from around the
world, and young fans. From that point on I re-
ceived many invitations to festivals and con-
ferences, many questions were raised about
the animals there were killed; about the Indig-
enous people we employed, the way we creat-
ed the special effects, the truth about some of
the scenes and about the way of shooting. An-
other point was that important directors such
as Quentin Tarantino, Joe Dante, Oliver Stone,
Eli Roth, Stuart Gordon and several other
2008, HD video, 35 min.
How to Create an
Unbelievable Fiction?
INTERVIEW With RUGGERO DEODATO
Rome, Italy, October 2008
Director of the 1979 cult film Cannibal
Holocaust and Last Cannibal World (1976),
Ruggero Deodato talks with Clemens
von Wedemeyer about the making of his films
and his experiences of working with actors Cannibal in his house in Rome. Deodato
and extras in the jungles of Malaysia and displays the August 1972 issue of National
elsewhere. During the interview, von Wede- Geographic featuring the Tasaday story.
meyer shows Deodato the August 1972
issue of National Geographic featuring the
Tasaday story. The director is surprised
and explains that he was inspired for the film
Last Cannibal World directly and openly
from pictures he saw in this magazine and
turned it a cannibal story.
English Translation: Barbara Mattei
Thanks to Elisabeth Giers and
Gabriele Gaspari
young unknowns, have all watched Cannibal
Holocaust, and found inspiration from it for
their own films.
Several horrible movie ‘copies’ followed
the making of Cannibal Holocaust but also
there were well made tributes to the movie
and to my movie direction and stage-manag-
ing, which were innovative for their time. In
the best possible way, it completely changed
my life, which was already eventful enough,
and dulcis in fundo, I also started to receive re-
quests to appear as an actor in cameo roles. In
the middle of all this chaos, I felt the loss of a
precious piece which marked the start of my
cannibal film production.
Precisely 32 years after the first cannibal
movie, Last Cannibal World, that made me
well known worldwide, an anthropologist from
Germany came to interview me, Clemens. This
Teutonic Clemens – anthropologist, producer,
director, editor, and everything else – was the
only one among many other interviewers who
brought me something which I had lost and
by then forgotten: National Geographic, Vol.
142, No. 2, August 1972.
A find! A real find. After 32 years, up
popped the magazine which first led me into
the cannibal world.
I would like to thank the photo journal-
ist John Launois, who recently passed away.
I was so inspired by his photos and from them
I constructed the whole path that lead to Last
Cannibal World. His documentation was so
necessary for me to convince the actors to im-
itate some of the rituals and to persuade them
of the accuracy of my research and inspiration.
They were also invaluably useful in making
the costumes, the location-scouting and the
special effects.
That edition of National Geographic was
at the end of the filming so worn out that
somehow it didn’t make it back to my house
in Rome.
I should have always told the journalists
who interviewed me about this precious docu-
mentation that was so very helpful to me. But
who knows if anyone would have believed me.
I want to repay Clemens his kindness with a
signed copy of the film, although it doesn’t
seem to me to be enough to balance the delight
I felt to have this magazine back. Thanks Cle-
mens and thanks to John Launois.
Originally published in the magazine
Nocturno, Rome, 2009, after Clemens von
Wedemeyer’s visit to Rome.
Clemens von Wedemeyer meets Mister
I don’t believe —
An Interview with
Benedict Allen
Benedict Allen is
an author, explorer, TV
filmmaker-presenter
and international mo-
tivational speaker who
is best known for his
arduous expeditions
to remote corners of
the globe. These jour-
neys are realized not with a satellite phone,
GPS or any of the usual ‘backups’ but by un-
dertaking a test journey after a period of train-
ing alone with a remote indigenous commu-
nity. These and other ventures are depicted
in his ten books – including two best sellers
– and six BBC television series. Clemens von
Wedemeyer interviewed him during his visits
to London.
Excerpt :
Benedict Allen – I think I have a clear idea of
where I come from. In Britain and in Europe,
I mean British culture within Europe. And I
think that gives me the confidence to go. And
if you loose that sense of where you come
from, and who you are, then you go mad.
Clemens von Wedemeyer – Does that include
religion? Do you believe?
BA – I don’t believe. And it‘s a problem. I’ve
heard people say that when you are going
to die, everyone becomes religious. Every-
one believes in God, everybody prays, when
Harvard students
and Amazon Indians
help identify the
brain’s lie detector
by Steve Connor, Science Editor
A ‘cheating centre’ in the brain has been
identified by scientists with the help of Har-
vard students, a tribe of Amazonian Indians
and a man who cannot handle money. The
findings suggest two million years of human
evolution have led to a specialised set of brain
cells devoted to the critically important social
task of detecting whether someone is a cheat
or a liar. Discovering that the centre functions
just as well in members of a remote Amazon
tribe as in the minds of well-educated Harvard
undergraduates demonstrated its basic role in
human biology, the scientists said.
Two studies published yesterday in the Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Scienc-
es have shown that cheat-detection is a uni-
versal feature of human nature and that it is
performed quite separately from the other
tasks of the brain. Anthropologists and evo-
lutionary psychologists have long suspected
that humans must be gifted in detecting cheats
because of the importance of reciprocal coop-
eration in social behaviour.
‘For social exchange to evolve in a species,
individuals must be able to detect cheaters’,
say the researchers, led by Leda Cosmides
and John Tooby, of the University of Califor-
nia at Santa Barbara. The scientists studied a
brain-damaged patient, known only by the ini-
tials RM, who was quite normal in all respects
except that he was naive when it came to in-
teracting with other people and had difficul-
ty with money. ‘RM’s differential impairment
indicates that being able to detect potential
cheaters may be a separable component of the
human mind’, say the researchers. They sug-
gest the cheating centre is in the limbic sys-
tem of the brain. A separate series of tests of
Harvard undergraduates and the Shiwiar tribe
found even people living the simplest exist-
ence were just as good at detecting cheating.
The Independent,
Tuesday, 13 Aug. 2002
he dies … not in my case, because I found I
couldn’t believe. I lost total confidence in my-
self, when I was robbed in the Amazonian. I
just felt like a total failure. I thought: Why did
I allow myself to be here? I’ve let down my
mother, my father, I’ve let down myself, be-
cause I made a mess of my plans. So believ-
ing in something that I couldn’t even see, what
I didn’t have any evidence for would be im-
possible. So I lost belief totally in myself –
the only thing that made me survive were the
things I knew about, certainly my girlfriend
and my mum. I just walked out of the forest
for their sake. I think I have to make an effort
even if I don’t want to, because I’ve been so
selfish. Do you know what I mean?
CvW – Did you feel you have to punish your-
self?
BA – No, no, no. I thought I had to withstand
whatever the environment or the forest would
give me. Even if I didn’t want to, because I had
been so stupid, and I had to get home. So it was
not about punishment. That is an even more
complicated thought (laughs). No, I just had to
get out. And I have never believed in God, but
maybe that is another motive for an explorer.
Livingstone lost his faith in God more and more.
Certainly not in my case. Maybe there is an emp-
tiness there, that’s why explorers have a lot of
demons usually. Some of them were beaten by
their fathers when they were little, so they want
to prove themselves to the world. Otherwise ex-
plorers have struggled about their lives and they
want to show or do something important. In my
case I don’t know what it is.
CvW – Somebody else has to find out.
BA – Yes! – CvW – I mean that is what the an-
thropologist says: You need a view from out-
side to understand.
BA – Yes, yes I need to get an anthropologist to
study me! (laughs).
2009, 35 mm film transferred to HD video loop,
16:9 /1.85:1, 9 min.
against death
Shot in 35mm film in a Barbican flat in
London, an explorer tells his anthropolo-
gist friend about an experience with a pre-
viously uncontacted group in the jungle
and a ritual he underwent which he claims
granted him immortality. When his friend
fails to believe him, the explorer demon-
strates his inability to die, and the scene
seamlessly loops back to its beginning.
Like the endlessly repeating film, the ex-
plorer is frozen in a loop outside real time
due to his immortal status.
Explorer: James Rochfort
Friend: Geoffrey Burton
Producers: Tracy Bass, Pinky Ghundale
Production Manager: Mark Gibbons
1st Assistant Director: David Dickson
Editor: Janina Herhoffer
Director of Photography: Frank Meyer
Focus Puller: Oliver Ledworth
Camera Assistant: Pearce Crowley
Grip: Alex Coverley
Steady Cam Operator: Barney Davies
Gaffer: Mathias Beier
Sound Recordist: Nigel Batting
Sound Editor: Thomas Wallmann
Foley artist: Foley Studio Berlin
Production Designer: Imogen Hammond
Art Director: Emma Landolt
Art Department Assistant: Charlotte McEwan
Costume Designer, Stylist: Heather MacVean
Hair/Make-up: Danielle Hooker
Special Effects: Artem
Digital Effects: Andreas Tröger
 First Contact / January 2010
2009, 3 channel video installation, 4:3, 13 min.
reception
Reception is a three-screen projection and
documents the celebrations at the Barbican version and the debate that it brought about
Conservatory following the theatrical
premiere there of The Gentle Ones. ‘First
contact’ takes place between members of
the audience and the actors who had per-
formed roles as cave-dwellers based on the of a performance? If it was real, was it ma-
Tasaday. Significantly, this interaction be- nipulated by the media reporting it or by the
tween observed and observing reflects the
point at which the ‘fourth wall’ is broken.
Cast: Drew Calden, Karl Brown. Josh Hart,
Kae Yukawa, Kesty Morrison, Brett Curry, Lewis
Goody, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Elisa Lombardi,
Natalie Codsi, Parinay Mehra, Tony Maskell,
Ryan Finch and Lois Graham
Writers: Leis Bagdach, Clemens von Wedemeyer
Producers: Tracy Bass, Pinky Ghundale
Production Manager: Mark Gibbons
1st Assistant Director: David Dickson
Director of Photography: Frank Meyer
Gaffer: Wayne King
Sound Recordist: Nigel Batting
Sound Editor: Thomas Wallmann
Production Designer: Imogen Hammond
Art Director: Emma Landolt
Costume Designer: Heather MacVean
Hair/Make Up: Gina Anderson, Danielle Hooker
Stills Photographers: Joachim Mueller-Ruchholtz, tion of the spectators of such reported events
Sheila Burnett
Crush:
Belayem Tasaday
by Clemens von Wedemeyer
When a group of 26 people in the rainfor-
est of Mindanao, Philippines showed their
dwelling caves to visitors from the West for
the first time in the summer of 1971, it seemed
an immense coincidence that in the 20th cen-
tury people could be living a Stone Age exist-
ence although a settlement was located only
30 miles away. Reportedly it was the dense,
mountainous jungle that had sheltered the
Tasaday people from ‘discovery’ for so long.
The Tasaday themselves exclaimed that the
forest was their world, and that they were fear-
ful of flat land ‘where the eye sees too far’. As
NBC, National Geographic and NDR began
with filming the following year, one member
of the group frequently stood out in front of
the camera: Belayem, an unmarried man who
was in his mid-twenties at the time. Due to his
talent for mimicry and ability to recount ex-
periences with startlingly accurate gestures,
journalists from NBC dubbed him the ‘Mar-
cel Marceau of the Stone Age’. Soon he was
imitating the photographers and cameramen,
who felt they had rediscovered paradise and
spectacle
From Fiction to
Reality:
Staging Truth
by Francesco Manacorda
The story of the Tasaday discovery repre-
sents the quintessential example of multiple
truths attached to a single event. Narrated by
different individuals, the contact, its televised
are texts that need decoding and whose con-
tradictions put their genuineness in question.
What is verifiable in the representations we
have been shown, and what is staged and part
public’s projections? If it was a performance,
what was the author’s intention in terms of
public reception and social and political con-
sequences?
The news of an uncontacted tribe living sim-
ilarly to the way historians established that
humans were living in the Stone Age is what
instantly fired the imagination of remote TV
spectators from all over the world. It even
prompted a visit by Gina Lollobrigida in pos-
sible attempt to re-enact the myth of the beau-
ty and the beast. The possibility of time travel-
ling to what romantically could be conceived
as the golden age of genuine humanity, re-
motely relegated to the past made suddenly
present and unadulterated by civilisation is,
even today, too tempting to resist. Even if the
original discovery was genuine, the projec-
created a demarcation of territory similar to
the one separating stage and stalls. If in tra-
The irrepressible Balayam imitating
a photographer. Picture: John Nance
now presented a human zoo to the world. Be-
layem mimicked the helicopter pilot, the jour-
nalist smoking a pipe, and – as pictured here –
the photographers. On the older video footage
he appears ready to clown around at any mo-
ment. Soon Belayem was so adept at posing
for the cameras, that he perhaps knew which
gestures were most likely to please and which
actions might most impress his viewers. The
journalists observing also knew which takes
to broadcast for an American audience in the
era of the Vietnam War and the Hippie move-
ment. Anthropologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt
I have taken these photographs of the
Tasaday over more than 30 years, starting
when they were living in caves in the South-
ern Mindanao Philippine rainforest in 1971.
As time passes, the photos show the Tasaday
as their lifestyle changes and they acquire
spouses from a tribe outside the forest,
and then develop new  ways of living – ac-
quire clothing, houses, gardening, farming,
schools for their children, regular medical
ditional theatre the fourth wall is an imag-
inary barrier that the actors need in order to
pretend that their actions are real and the au-
dience is not there, in the Tasaday story there
are as many invisible walls as versions of the
event. From one point of view, the wall seems
necessary to the spectators who needed to be-
lieve that the action was real to satisfy their
own desires, or it could have been staged by
the discoverers (Elizalde) for political or self-
aggrandising reasons, or else another fourth
wall could be the transparent lens of the cam-
eras that framed and defined their subject.
hoped to avoid the charades by putting a 90-
degree mirror behind his camera lens, and
pretending to be testing the camera. The 12-
year-old boy Lobo, acrobatically swinging on
liana vines in front of the caves, provided an-
other fascinating motif, but eventually inter-
est in an all-natural lifestyle waned, and the
Tasaday were left in peace.
It wasn’t until many years later that cam-
eras from the West returned their attention to
these talented mime artists. In 1986, after 12
years of isolation in a protected reservation
under the state of emergency declared during
the Marcos’ dictatorship, the Tasaday were re-
visited by a Swiss journalist who claimed that
they had only acted out their Stone Age exist-
ence in the 1970s, and had been pawns of an
external power seeking attention and political
gain. This was confirmed by Lobo and other
Tasaday in interviews on camera. Indeed an
interesting possibility: 26 local farmers strip
themselves of their clothes and begin to live
in caves, feed themselves from the forest and
let their hair grow long, and act as if they had
always done so. Their act had so impressed
the western media that deforestation had been
halted and a reservation erected for their pro-
tection. A battle broke out among anthropolo-
gists, and in an effort to end the controversy,
the government of the Philippines issued an
official statement confirming the authenticity
of the Tasaday.
The hoax theory has, however, prevailed:
today the majority of Wikipedians on the In-
ternet believe that the Tasaday were some
kind of a staged act. This might be the lega-
cy of Belayem: how logical that his ingenious
games and poses in the perfect mise-en-scène
of the jungle would be judged as ‘bigger than
life’ and therefore untrue. The implausibility
of such a lifestyle being reenacted so success-
fully as to deceive experts and the media is in
assistance, training in forest-friendly agri-
culture, trade, and conduct a major effort to
secure titles to their land by government Cer-
tification of an Ancestral Domain, which will
make the land fully their own. The final stages
of the land acquisition process are continu-
ing. Most of these efforts were supported with
money and administrative help from Friends
of the Tasaday, an orgnization based in
the U.S. John Nance
A family scene . Foyer of the Barbican Art
Centre, 2008. Photo: C. von Wedemeyer
fact more sensational and impressive than the
mere romantic idea of so-called ‘primitives’
remaining uncontacted into the 20th centu-
ry. Charles Darwin, exploring the Tierra del
Fuego from the Beagle in 1833, commented
on the natives’ talented use of body language:
‘All savages appear to possess, to an uncom-
mon degree, this power of mimicry’. This skill
seems much more developed in them than in
the so-called civilized. While Darwin attrib-
uted this to their more highly developed sen-
sory perception, one could rather cite the evo-
lutionary necessity of oral transmission, also
aided by gesticulation during narration.
During first contacts between ethnologists
and isolated groups, it would seem necessary
to begin by using familiar gestures so as to de-
velop a common sign language. Perhaps Dar-
win should have included mime artists along
with the painters and writers he took on his
journeys to aid in communication. In the case
of Belayem, might the high art of pantomime
testify not to willful duplicity, but rather give
proof of the authenticity of isolated ‘savages’
existing in the 20th century? When viewing
the original footage of the Tasaday, I find it
hard to believe that a group of peasants might
have convincingly imitated a Stone Age peo-
ple. Would an actor, already playing a role in
which he builds stone tools, weave in a second
theatrical layer of pantomime into the simple
act of natural survival in the jungle? Perhaps.
Either way Belayem was an accomplished ac-
tor, even more so in the case of a fraudulent
play!
A german version of this text was previously
published in Cargo Film Medien Kultur,
Issue 4, December 2009
 First Contact / January 2010
2009, HD video, 16:9, 28 min.
the gentle ones
The Gentle Ones was initially inspired
by the Tasaday, who were secretly au-
diotaped in their caves. The transcrip-
tions of the tapes, which were published
in John Nance’s book, The Gentle Tasa-
day: A Stone Age People in the Philippine
Rain Forest (1975), give one the impres-
sion that the recordings had been script-
ed and staged, whether or not one believes
in the authenticity of the original material.
The probable isolation of the Tasaday can
be compared to the training technique of
actors who detach themselves from the out-
side world for the duration of rehearsals.
The intention was to show actors employ-
ing just such a technique, in preparation
for a play that was inspired by the Tasaday,
on stage. They could even live on the stage
– isolated yet fully immersed in the sub-
ject matter – in an effort to make their play
more ‘real’.
Cast: Natasha Baria, Shalini Baria, Kingsley
Ben-Adir, Karl Brown, Drew Caiden, Natalie
Codsi, Andrew Duffus, Iana Eastmond, Tyrone
Eastmond, Ryan Finch, Annabel Foley, Tess
Foley, Lewis Goody, Lois Graham, Rebecca
Hallam, Ellen Jennings, Elisa Lom bardi,
Tony Maskell, Mirella McGee, Parinay Mehra,
Kesty Morrison and Emily Page
Writer: Leis Bagdach
Editor: Janina Herhoffer
Producers: Tracy Bass, Pinky Ghundale
Production Manager: Mark Gibbons
1st Assistant Director: David Dickson
Director of Photography: Frank Meyer
Focus Puller: Oliver Ledworth
Grip: Alex Coverley
Sound Recordist: Nigel Batting
Boom Operator: Brendan Crehan
Sound Editor: Thomas Wallmann
Production Designer: Imogen Hammond
Art Director: Emma Landolt
Art Department Assistant: Charlotte McEwan
Costume Designer: Heather MacVean
Costume Assistants: Katie Hill,
Emma Heath, Holly Freeman
Hair/Make Up: Gina Anderson, Danielle Hooker
Set-Specificity
by Francesco Manacorda
As the starting point for research or as a
situation to respond to, Clemens von Wede-
meyer used the Barbican Estate as a film lo-
cation to which a narrative was matched and
adapted. The theatre was used as a cave, sim-
ilar to that in which the Tasaday were living,
which actors inhabited pretending not to be
on stage; the conservatory featuring a cement
clad tropical forest was used to stage a meet-
ing between actors and audience to allude to
meetings between explorers and undiscov-
ered groups; the walkways served as an urban
jungle set for a screen test of an actor clear-
ly dressed up as an untamed ‘savage’; a flat
in the Cromwell tower was used as the house
of an explorer decorated with trophies of real
and intellectual travels. The whole Barbican
utopian project was used as a framework to
ask questions relating to the consequences of
first contacts in anthropology and to the fabri-
cation of truth in theatre, television, explora-
tions and scientific research.
The Fourth Wall
and
the Production
of Otherness
by Paolo Caffoni
At the beginning of the Modern era there
was a journey. During the 15th century Euro-
pean culture, then ‘Western’ culture, discov-
ered its own identity – albeit partially uni-
fied – through the attainment of a symbolic
elsewhere. Across the ocean the West was no
longer the all-encompassing representation
of a reality, but the partialization of a partic-
ular historical moment, of a specific reality
and cultural construction. Contact with in-
digenous peoples from different genealogies,
in a part of the world until then unknown, al-
lowed for the acknowledgment by Europe-
an explorers of a certain differential identity,
through the discovery of a wholly other iden-
tity. A journey that began as an exploration of
the eastern borders of the known world thus
became the much deeper discovery of com-
mon cultural roots.
After this first contact with difference,
and seeing its mirror image in it, the Western
world acquired strength, invigorating its roots
and beliefs to the point of exorcising the end
that would naturally come after the course of
events. After exorcising death, the West con-
tinued to dramatically expand over several
centuries reaching a global dimension, until
the era of globalization, in which it ultimate-
ly swallowed its own horizon. What we now
need to question is how its institution has sur-
vived the ultimate limit to this expansion, how
– once free of horizons – the West has man-
aged to produce an otherness to reflect its mir-
ror image in, and hence legitimate itself.
The use of myth in Western culture has
always served to justify a rationally inexpli-
cable dimension. Ancient Greece resorted to
myth to explain the existence of gods without
giving material evidence, the myth of Aryan
racial superiority served to justify a scientifi-
cally unsupported biological claim. In times
of famine, to explain why food such as hu-
man flesh was morally objectionable, Catho-
lic anthropology resorted to the myth of canni-
bal populations living at the boundaries of the
known world, who ate those missionaries try-
ing to export religious salvation, and a whole
new way of life.
At the beginning of another era – after the
crisis of the modern age – when the Western
world is on the verge of swallowing its last ho-
rizon, the nascent industry of mass entertain-
ment in Los Angeles, gives birth to the myth of
Hollywood actors. What ‘distinguished’ Hol-
lywood stars from the rest of the world popula-
tion was the unconditional belief that the char-
acters and heroes they exemplified in movies,
coincided with the real individuals who play
them. And so a mythic aura began to devel-
op around the profession of acting, which had
previously been considered quite ordinary.
Hollywood stars gave rise to a new genealogy
of myths built on the overlapping of real life
and entertainment, and by consecrating them
the world of film voraciously irrupted within
the boundaries of real life.
The function of myth, in its entertain-
ment-related aspects, allows the viewer sit-
ting in a dark room to cross that psychological
threshold of disbelief after which the repre-
sentation becomes identical to the object pre-
sented. That mythical boundary, described by
Cartesian materialism as a physical threshold
in one’s brain where the order of presentation
corresponds to the order of perception, now
appears to be nothing more than a pricey cul-
tural sophistication. Such cultural sophisti-
cation – we might call it ‘fourth wall’ – is the
tool that grants the entertainment industry its
key role in the future developments of Amer-
ican society and, by extension, the rest of the
world.
In the poster for Last Action Hero, Arnold
Schwarzenegger jumps towards the audience
and bursts with a kick out of the screen. The
movie is a parody of the action genre, popular
since the early eighties. It tells the story of Jack
Slater/Schwarzenegger – the main character
in a string of genre movies – and of his magi-
cal passage from the world of fiction to reali-
ty. That occurs through an encounter between
character Slater and actor Schwarzenegger
at the premier of ‘their’ new film. Last Ac-
tion Hero is director John McTiernan’s sec-
ond consecutive flop: the year before, in 1992,
McTiernan’s Medicine Man had told the sto-
ry of a scientist (Sean Connery) researching
a cure for cancer in the Brazilian rain forest,
and living in close contact with a local popu-
lation threatened by the invasion of bulldoz-
ers of their pristine natural habitat. The movie
poster reads: ‘He turned his back on civili-
zation. Only to discover he had the power to
save it’. The same rain forest was also the set
of McTiernan’s first hit: his 1987 blockbust-
er Predator had grossed sixty million dollars
in the United States alone, spurring a series of
Joseph Mazilier as Jocko .
Two dancing figures depicted in their paral-
lel roles in the sentimental drama Jocko or the
Brazilian Ape. Their pas de deux is choreo-
graphed as a sequence of mirror images: the
child prays and the ape copies the attitudes.
[…] Through this symmetrical and sentimen-
tal plot, Jocko emphasises a fundamental
equivalence between ape and human; through
its balletic and pantomimic interludes, it high-
lights physical and behavioural similarity.
Originally published in: Jane R. Goodall, Per-
formance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin:
Out of the Natural Order, London & New York,
Routledge, 2002: p. 50.
sequels and remakes that eventually lead to
the 1993 parody. In the movie, Schwarzeneg-
ger is Dutch, the commander of a special forc-
es team whose mission is the recovery of a
crashed helicopter in the region of Val Verde.
He encounters a mysterious invisible alien,
whose sole purpose seems to be to collect hu-
man heads. Schwarzenegger, as an actor of in-
ternational fame, was recognized as the hero
of a series of films that focused on the defeat
of a ‘monstrously different’ foe, a classical
Cold War-age Hollywood theme. The ‘pred-
ator’ was played by former basketball player
Kevin Peter Hall, whose sheer size brought
him to interpret ‘monstrous’ physical roles in
movies by wearing a mask.
As foreshadowed in Last Action Hero’s
promotional image, on October 7th, 2003, ten
years after the film’s release, Schwarzenegger
overcame the barrier between reality and fic-
tion: he exploited his movie fame to get elect-
ed as thirty-eighth Governor of California.
As the self-appointed Western hero in doz-
ens of films, the task could not have prov-
en difficult for him. Two other actors from
Predator’s cast have been candidates in vari-
ous elections, but with mixed results. The road
travelled by Schwarzenegger had already
been opened by another Hollywood charac-
ter: Ronald Reagan, the American president
of the Cold War era, had previously been
both Governor of California and a Hollywood
actor, although not with the same success.
FROM fiction to reality : President
Reagan having a photo taken with Arnold
Schwarzenegger at the Republican National
Convention in Dallas, Texas, 1984.
Source: www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/photo-
graphs/vips.html. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library.
The journey undertaken by a generation
of movie characters into a lost forest, where
something completely ‘other’ lies awaiting, is
the continual re-enactment of the voyage of
the first explorers to the pristine land, beyond
an imaginary horizon, in an endless drift from
the imaginary to the real.
‘The Fourth Wall’ is not the classical piece
of architecture, it is the attempt to re-design
something different, an otherness. It is the de-
sire to connect a physiological border with a
system of interests, like the inner surface of a
triangle. It is a cultural system able to preserve
the actual order of things. The Western world,
in search of its long-lost otherness, wears a
mask and plays a different role on stage. In an
endless alternation of roles, it recreates that
horizon where it can once again find its own
reflection and survive.
Paolo Caffoni is editor of Archive books,
Berlin.
 First Contact / January 2010

forest exhibition

utopic romantic
no no no

decisive romantic utopic decisive

Uncontacted Raw Material

mimetic playful mimetic playful

FIRST OPENING
CONTACT RECEPTION
yes yes yes

Hybridisation don’t know

Mixed Footage

no no no
REFUSAL DISBELIEF

utopic decisive utopic decisive

Isolation Fiction / Theatre

playful mimetic
SECOND PRESS
CONTACT MEETING
yes yes yes

Correction
François Clouet, Porträt
der Elisabeth von Österreich, 1571 .
Oil on wood, 36 × 26 cm. Musée du Louvre,
Paris.—This Portrait inspired Lévi-Strauss’
no theory of the ‘modèle réduit’, or works of art
REFUSAL as ‘miniature models’ and other theories of
artworks in his book The Savage Mind.

decisive utopic

Disconnection

utopic
yes

Colophon The project ‘The Fourth Wall’was commissioned by For the project we would like to thank:
Barbican Art Gallery and first exhibited from May 28th to August 30th, Sarah Aguilar; Craig Baldwin, ATA San Francisco; Yvonne Brandl;
2009 at The Curve, Barbican Art Centre, London.  Kate Bush; Köken Ergun; Anselm Franke; Christian Burgess and
Additional funding was provided by Medienboard Berlin-Branden- Lisa Evans at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama;
burg, IFA, and the British Arts Council. Curated by Francesco Daniel McClean; Nanna Heidenreich; Alexander Koch; Teresa
Manacorda. Assistant Curator: Corinna Gardner; Film Producers: Hoefert de Turegano; Simon Lamuniere; Anne M. Lovell; Rosalind
Tracy Bass, Pinky Ghundale Nashashibi; Sam Clark, Kodak; Len Thornton, Soho Film Lab;
Production Company: Intensive Care Productions Ltd, Nikolaus Oberhuber; Susanne Pfeffer; Mark Sladen and Garrick
David Dickson Video installation equipment: Eidotech, Berlin Jones; Panalux London; Toni Racklin, Barbican Theatre;
Joachim Reck; Stagecoach Chorleywood; Maya Schweizer;
Manuel Segade; Holm Taddiken; Take Two; Arnold von Wedemeyer;
UT Architects: Tim Bauerfeind & Henning von Wedemeyer;
Andrew Wilson; Jocelyn Wolff.
Film Material No. 4 – First Contact (The Fourth Wall).
Edited by Paolo Caffoni & Clemens von Wedemeyer.
Designed by Till Gathmann Translated by: Anamarie Michnevich,
Vincenzo Latronico. Copy edited by: Michèle Faguet.
Thanks to Chiara Figone, Carsten Humme. 
Photo credits as mentioned; please contact us, if we could not reach
the author. Film Material No. 4 / The Fourth Wall is produced by
KOCH OBERHUBER WOLFF, Berlin and published by Spector
Books, Leipzig & Archive Books, Berlin / Turin on occasion of
the exhibition ‘The Fourth Wall’ at KOCH OBERHUBER WOLFF
in Berlin from Jan. 22 to Mar.10th 2010. www.filmmaterial.net
Email: gallery@kow-berlin.com, spector@spectormag.net, 
info@archivebooks.org