For Duke Film/Video/Digital professor Josh Gibson, a mother's eBay obsession led to five years of dedicated documentary work.
While making a documentary in India, Gibson had a conversation with his mother about a figurine of two Siamese twins she found on eBay. A few days later, Gibson found a version of the same figurine, and the coincidence sparked an enduring interest in the twins.
The conjoined twins were Cheng and Eng Bunker, the siblings from which the term "Siamese twins" is derived. Gibson quickly turned this interest into a new experimental documentary I and I.
Chang and Eng Bunker were born in 1811 in Siam (modern day Thailand) and are considered to be the original Siamese twins. American explorer Robert Hunter bought Chang and Eng as children from their mother and toured them in Europe and America where they quickly became stars.
"This was. a time when there was an interest in displays of the extraordinary body and the Orient and the East," Gibson said. "They became at that time more well-known than Abraham Lincoln."
Although they were exploited, the twins managed to take control of their own business affairs and, using their newly acquired wealth, settled into a tobacco plantation in Mount Airy, N.C. where they employed 28 slaves. Both men married local women and together had a total of 21 children.
Gibson's documentary focuses on the twins, but the film's distinguishing character is its experimental structure. Gibson's film combines a variety of film media such as Super 8, high definition and 16 mm, as well as a variety of narrative styles. Gibson calls this a "collage" effect.
"It's experimental in the sense. that it uses a lot of different formats," Gibson said. "It's not going to be something that's going to be completely obscure. It's not a PBS documentary. There's a clear story that evolves. It takes a more sort of lyrical approach."
The experimental techniques are a direct result of two factors in Gibson's life, the first being his evolving interests over the years since his trip to India in 2002. Gibson never structured the film and spent most of his vacations working on it.
"In a period of five years, your interests change considerably," he said. "It's been this sort of epic journey that wouldn't have been practical to do in a short period of time. It's been this sort of organic process a little bit and it's been good for the film as it exists now."
Specific events in the film also correspond to budding interests in Gibson's life. A reenactment scene, for example, features the twins' wives during their first pregnancy, which parallels Gibson's life (his wife is about to have a baby).
Gibson's second reason for the experimental nature of the film is the difficulty of telling the story of the Bunker twins. Most of the information on the Bunker twins concerns what Gibson calls their "mythology and mystique," but there is almost no information on the day-to-day affairs of the twins. Because of this, Gibson has focused elements of the film on the creative representation of the twins.
"I've been sort of trying to document a living history of Cheng and Eng because there's a lack of primary information about people," Gibson said. "I'm focusing [on] how they existed in the contemporary imagination and in the various [historical] periods of imagination. It's a film about trying to unravel the history and complexity of these primary documents which were geared toward entertainment."
Gibson has done copious amounts of research on the film, visiting everything from an exhibit featuring the Bunker twin's shared liver and molds of their corpses to visiting their family reunions year after year. Gibson said that the family has not been the easiest group to talk to, and only in the past ten years have they begun to talk about this "dark secret."
The film also deals with the complexity of the twin's lives. Among other topics, I and I tackles the racial complexity of the twins' interracial marriage, Chang and Eng's role as immigrants and the parallel between their enslavement as performers and their enslaving of plantation workers, all of which are themes that still resonate with modern audiences.
The sum effect of the experimental methods in the film is a challenge to the lines of narrative and documentary. Because the film blurs these lines of filmmaking, it is characterized as a docudrama.
"The distinction between documentary and narrative is kind of an arbitrary one," Gibson said. "There's always this sort of construction to the way you approach something."
Gibson is finishing the film at the end of the month and submitting it to the Full Frame Documentary Festival, aiming for an April premiere. When it premieres, it will offer a new perspective on the story of Cheng and Eng.
"It's a fascinating story that hasn't been documented properly," Gibson said. "There hasn't been anything that has really been done that has tried to. hint at not just them as men but them as a phenomenon. I don't think anything like this has been made about them for sure."
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