Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper
2009 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
11:39 minutes
Miljohn Ruperto
Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts. The video’s title figure, a Filipina actress, vaudeville dancer and singer who played racialized, peripheral roles in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, flits in and out of a montage of scenes. Ruperto digitally modified the 16mm film by blurring the background and all of the figures in each scene except for Cooper herself. She is the only crisply delineated figure in an ocean of blurred faces and bodies, often hovering on the sidelines. She is a caretaker, a nurse, a nanny, a maid, a backup dancer, a woman in the shadows. After only a few minutes, it becomes immediately apparent that her appearances are brief and that she usually plays a peripheral character, overshadowed by white characters, particularly male leads. In 2007, Ruperto began working on a five-part project that sought to resuscitate and foreground a figure lost to the periphery of history, the actress Isabel Rosario Cooper. Born in Manila in 1914, Cooper had begun to develop her career as a dancer, singer and actress when she met U. S. General Douglas MacArthur in 1930. At the time, MacArthur was the commander of the U. S. troops in the Philippines, and she became his mistress. She was sixteen years old; he was fifty. When he returned to the U. S. five months later, he brought Cooper with him, arranging to keep her hidden in a secret residence at the Chastleton Hotel in Washington, D. C., which she supposedly was unable to leave for four years. In 1933, when a journalist threatened to break the news of their affair, MacArthur attempted to buy Cooper’s silence with $15,000 and a ticket back to the Philippines, which she did not use. Instead, she stayed in the United States, where she attempted to find film roles in Hollywood. She found no more than thirteen roles, which amounted to a total of sixteen and a half known onscreen minutes, and was largely cast in stereotyped and orientalized bit roles, such as a geisha, a Thai concubine or a Filipina nurse. She committed suicide in 1960, at the age of forty-six. Working frequently to reconfigure historical archives while investigating the circumstances through which they are constructed, Ruperto uses Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper to investigate the archive’s possibilities for a reworking of history and truth. The work acts as a re-contextualized actor’s reel, serving as both a memorial to a woman’s life and a glimmer of digital afterlife. It is a reminder of the existence of a woman who became both a historical and a cinematic Other, but it is also a reminder of the ways in which screen images can take on a life of their own, vehicles for visual reincarnation, rehabilitation, and resuscitation.
Miljohn Ruperto is a cross-disciplinary artist working across photography, cinema, performance, and digital animation. His work refers to historical and anecdotal occurrences, and speculates on the nature of assumed facts and the construction of truth. Often involving replicas, modified versions, and enactments—including Chinese-made reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea ; modified images based on the 15th century Voynich Manuscript; or reworked footage of Filipino actress Isabel Rosario Cooper—Ruperto takes cultural and historical references and untethers them from their original context to challenge our perception and generate something altogether new. Ruperto’s work is often informed by his collaborations with experts from other disciplines including Dutch animator Aimée de Jongh, neuroscientist and engineer Rajan Bhattacharyya, photographer Ulrik Heltoft among others. Through a richness and diversity of lenses, and preferencing the obscure, mysterious and the magical, his work challenges fixed conceptions of truth and history, and instead speaks of an indeterminacy and subjectivity of experience that renders truth and fiction near indistinguishable.
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