Purchase: [ Ссылка ] Every morning at dawn, Ida Pedanda, a Balinese Hindu priest, sets out to gather flowers that he will use in religious ceremonies throughtout the day. His daily journey takes him by the houses of people he has lived near all his life. He walks by the ocean he has fished in for nearly as long. And, on his way home, he passes by the establishment of his newest neighbor from Kentucky--Colonel Sanders.

In Sight Unseen, this touristic urge to classify and contrast the traditional and the modern is addressed with a montage of visual juxtapositions: a line of women in pakian adat (traditional clothing) parade before a Pizza Hut sign, a weathered stone statue grimaces in front of a bowling alley, and Ida Pedanda, a priest, is shown to bear an uncanny resemblance to the bespectacled and bearded Colonel Sanders. These are the sort of visual contrasts that intrigue any tourist on Bali, but they overemphasize superficial attributes of culture. The narrator of Sight Unseen questions the relevance of pointing out such contrasts by suggesting that it focuses attention on cultural products rather than cultural processes.

a film by Nicholas Kurzon
distributed by Documentary Educational Resources

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