Once Upon a Time Sinehan

We Found Love (Melina Matsoukas, 2011)

2012-02-13T17:03:00.000-08:00

Bursting with the energy of an unapologetic rebellion, the music video for Rihanna's "We Found Love" is a worthy counterpoint to the controversies that plagued her last year, as a victim of a domestic abuse drama that also featured Chris Brown. Although the fall out of the incident was more severe towards Brown who was (justly) crucified for his violence, Rihanna was relegated to the role of the hapless victim thrown into a circumstance she neither created nor wanted.

But I have friends who believed her complicity. "You know she must have said something..." And to an extent, the role Rihanna was painted into was an unfortunate one: the inactive participant, victim of circumstances she did not will to control. If domestic violence is about power, she definitely did not have it. But the video turned powerlessness on its head: she was a willing participant who went down the rabbit hole hand in hand with her abuser. It was a path of self-destruction both took, but she ultimately left. Comparisons have apparently been made about this video and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, but I think the characters' agency makes the difference. The sex, drugs and filth of Boyle's film was the circumstance that sucked everyone in, while the music video focused on the universe being created by two people madly and irresponsibly in love. Instead of the clean narratives of protagonists and antagonists that made Rihanna's story such a sensation in the media, her video was about a woman both in and out of control, but nevertheless making her own decisions.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part 2 (David Yates, 2011)

2011-07-24T02:51:00.000-07:00

So I take this very long hiatus on watching movies (life, it gets in the way sometimes) and what do I see? Damn right...Harry motha Potter! I don't really know if I feel satisfied for finally ending the series or for elbowing some obnoxious teenager in line for the tickets, but it is undeniable that the satisfaction is real. The movie itself does nothing but toe the line of fear and violence that has been the hallmark of Hollywood and American cinema for the ten or so years--one could argue that the series itself is a byproduct of the pervading fear that has defined the 2000s--but it is satisfying in a sense that the last Matrix movie or the second Lord of the Rings was satisfying. The makers know that the series is done, and whatever thing that needs to be expunged was already elaborated many times over in previous films. The last film then becomes just a way to get things blasted into space with a very big explosion. Two hours of destructive money shot, ending in the catastrophic (yet unsurprisingly, bloodless) death of villains and anyone else we didn't like before. There was some effort to make the characters more conscious of their existence within this magical milieu, but it failed because it was either weak or insincere, especially when presented in context of relentless dichotomies between good and bad with no areas for ambiguity. In the end, it sated the desire for closure, for completing, and for wholeness, and that is really what a movie should be all about.

Sa Aking Pagkakagising Mula Sa Kamulatan (Ato Bautista, 2005)

2011-01-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

I'm never one to suggest that progress necessarily implies that the present is inherently better or more “advanced” than the past, but Sa Aking Pagkakagising Mula Sa Kamulatan illustrates the great strides that the current Filipino digital filmmaking scene has taken. The film works best as an extended dream sequence, where it is always night but we never see anyone really sleep. Bodies and characters move through space like zombies, as if the proper solution is not deep sleep but complete escape. But it never happens, and the one moment it seems to have happened, it may as well be just the dreams of a man who is dying for revenge. No one dies; everyone just suffers continuously. Wide lens and telephotos are used in abundance, skewing perspectives and distorting shapes and producing the effect of a drug-induced hallucination. The darkness punctured by the golden glow of street lamps and naked light bulbs made eery by the constant billow of cigarette smoke exaggerate the sense of being interrogated in a dark room, a session of truth telling largely limited by the listless confessor and the interrogator in denial. Regardless of the title, the film is one long nightmare, and the characters merely wake into it. However, as a critique or illustration of society, the film is problematic. A dream at least does not have to make sense, an unintelligible soup of symbols and Freudian allusions that mean nothing. It is enough that we walk through this landscape without necessarily knowing what is going on around us—only, that it is hell.

Once the film tries to make sense of everything—and it wants us to make sense of everything—it falls into the same tried cliché of blaming “moral corruption” for the mess. For Bautista, hopelessness is a product of laziness, unrequited libido, shady authoritarian figures, and conniving homosexuals ready to prey on the trodden masculine ideal. Any explanation of how these contribute to social degradation does not come. The viewer, who is supposed to be “Filipino”, is assumed knowledgeable of the rights and wrongs that make these “issues” the source of the problem. In short, it relies on cliches and social norms to understand the very system that makes these “norms”. Paired with the way the movie was edited—disrupting actions to focus on exposition—scenes become incoherent, like Angel's father who kills one of her lovers really for no good reason, or the evil policeman Lakay who proceeds to sodomize Jopet while trying to convince him to be one of his drug runners. The accompanying yelps, screams, and tears point to a cinema, then, still unshackled from melodrama. Although films such as the flawed but good Endo ultimately succumbed to melodrama (albeit more subdued), it was still in hindsight a signpost to how films were to become: more complex, accepting the truth of the situation rather than the easy explanations that wish it away. Whereas the disillusioned youth of Sa Aking Pagkakagising Mula Sa Kamulatan were more products of a middle-class third world fantasy/dream/nightmare, Endo struck closer by depicting people as they are, desperate but taking each day as it comes.

Pepot Artista (Clodualdo del Mundo, 2005)

2008-10-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

Philippine Cinema has always been very introspective. Not in a sense that the entertainment industry is as much a spectacle as its products, as seen in American Cinema, or even the deliberate self-examination of the art as seen in many European Cinematic movements. In the Philippines, self-reflection tends to be extremely personal, the film or entertainment industry as an extension of individual Filipinos' experiences, charting their hopes, dreams, and sad settling into the mundane life of being mere spectators. It's not just a spectacle, or an art, but life itself. Compare for example Singin in the Rain, which valorized Hollywood's artifice to Bernal's Pagdating sa Dulo, which charted the creation of a movie through the ups and downs of the bit players that create and are shaped by the movie. Or, a filmmaker's relationship with his craft in 8 ½ to the actors and filmmakers' relationship with their dreams in Babae sa Bubungang Lata. From Stardoom, to Kastilyong Buhangin, to Bomba Star, to Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit, Filipino movies about movies never really focus on the movies, but on the lore, myth, and sad reality of the people that make them.

Pepot Artista follows this tradition. Pepot is a young boy in the 70s, growing up during the limbo when the old Filipino cinema is about to die and the new, Third Golden Age of cinema is about to be born. Of course, it's already been born: Pagdating sa Dulo was made in 1970/71, many of Brocka’s early films have already been made, and Celso is already an active filmmaker. But it still hasn't asserted itself: Nora is still the female half of Guy and Pip and is yet to threaten to throw her baby under the bridge, and Boyet is still yet to condemn that small Nueva Ecija town. In a world of komiks featuring local movie stars, flash-bang shootouts with FPJ, and impersonators (that artform that Filipinos have mastered) at the local fair, Pepot is dazzled and sets about becoming a famous actor himself. The kid, of course can't act, can't sing, and has no redeeming features that could make him bankable. He could however dream. This world of celebrity deification however is built upon the crushed hopes and dreams of a nation, whose fortunes it saw dwindle and its future equally dim with the intensifying grip Marcos has on them. Nothing discourages Pepot to pursue his dream, other than the dire reality in which he finds himself. Yet, like Leolo, he dreams because he is.

Del Mundo does a very good job of capturing the film's milieu, especially knowing the kind of restrictions he must have had. (Forget the budget, how did he manage to get cell phones out of every single scene!? In a camera-crazy populace, how did he manage to keep regular passerbys from waving at his camera!?) His world isn't mired in the filth and sin of Brocka, Bernal, or O'Hara's Manila. Which makes sense, coming from a child's point of view where filthy squatters turn to impossible mazes and boring classes with physically abusive teachers (yeah, that teacher, it's Tado, a heterosexual drag queen of sorts who specializes in weirdly masculine women who would probably be clutching whips and wearing leather during their free time) turn to games that involve play on the teacher's favorite one liners. His children go to school, make money on the side selling gum and comics on the streets, and go to the movies or to the fair at night. They laugh, they play, they cry, and they dream. His adults as usual try their best and meet real world hardships with little luck, such as Pepot's father who is scammed by a recruiter promising a job in Saudi, or his mother who shamefully buys everyday goods on credit, or the his miserable teachers who must entertain their failed dreams through their favorite students.

But beyond their challenges is their consciousness of popular entertainment as an escape, as a way to make life more entertaining and more “real.” The mother especially likes to wail and weep like any on-screen suffering mother would do, and for the most part it's sincere with a bit of self-conscious irony added. The teachers, too, are over-dramatic and over-expressive, like any over-bearing teacher should be. In a sense, they dreamed, and they realize that they have failed, but that nevertheless does not suggest that they tire of entering the world that could have been. This to an extent is more palpable than those tired movie cliches where the mother would shout, “does acting put food on the table!?” Well, it doesn't, but in a culture so saturated by movies, it's impossible that anybody actually manages to escape the reality of celebrities, popular songs, popular komiks, and popular movies by being a miser. By suggesting a constant shifting but never ceasing relationship between movies and its spectators, del Mundo gives us probably the most accurate portrayal of just the kind of personal relationship Filipinos have with their movies.

It would be criminal of course not to mention del Mundo's almost Godardian slips of the fourth wall as his characters talk to the camera, meet older versions of the young stars that they adore, act out their fantasies, and point out the complicated identities of actors (imagine, an actor playing an actor playing himself acting, as Joel Torre's cab driver demonstrates). The actions are never left unadulterated. The characters once in a while make comments to the camera. And as a movie about dreams, del Mundo indulges some of the characters in having their dreams filmed: the Guy and Pip impersonators sing with Nora and Tirso's voices, the mother gets her own melodramatic background music, and the students act out their heroic characters in the school play. But unlike the special lights and fans in Singin in the Rain, del Mundo never films them in glamour. Instead, he indulges them during the height of their banal everydayness. Sure, it puts an emphasis on the broken dreams to come, the unfulfilled promises, and the disgusting normalcy of the everyday compared to the fabulous life of an entertainer, but not necessarily. Del Mundo does underline the reality of his characters, but instead of dwelling in their misery, he gives their reality decency by demonstrating the glory of their dreams dreamed in their context. Del Mundo points out that these characters do not dream of otherworldly experiences, only a better life and a life with a certain purpose.

It's quite disappointing that many of Del Mundo's filmic references wouldn't have worked if he didn't overdo them. References to Biyaya ng Lupa would not have made any sense if the film didn't rapidly cut back and forth between the reference and the referred. Tirso Cruz III literally had to put his face next to a younger version on an old komiks to make the connection click. Only Joel Torre's appearance really made sense without the heavy hand, but it's because he still works, and his face is still familiar. It didn't quite work because it deprived the viewer of the thrill of seeing something new but not really, but therein lies the complexity of Filipinos' relationship with their own cinema: we love it, it sticks in our minds, but how can a memory be memorialized by an amnesiac? The movie directed its audiences a little too forcefully, but tell me, who the hell remembers those wooden coin banks?

Despite the need for such obviousness excusing the presence of it, it does point out one thing: that despite the film's “passion” for Filipino cinema, the result is along the lines of Tarantino. You can tell that del Mundo is a fan of the local cinema, and he reflects the Filipino craze for their own movies, but he doesn't really go into trying to understand that craze. Like Tarantino, he goes nuts trying to recreate the scenes from movies he love, poking fun at some of them, even (lovingly, of course). But he stops there. He could have broken down the Nora's very politically charged image—something that O'Hara first recognized when he cast her for his Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, and something that he almost realized when a Nora impersonator declared she too can be a superstar, with her “shimmering brown skin”—or the business of image saturation, with actors' faces appearing in notebook covers, komiks, cinema, banners, and as a result, in dreams, aspirations, and broken promises. Most especially, he doesn't really examine the fleeting nature of movies, especially Filipino movies, which are more ephemera rather than enduring works of art. Again, how can a memory be memorialized by an amnesiac? Del Mundo is content with a vague answer: we do, but we don't. He doesn't address that very painful love for the indigenous cinema, much like loving an older woman, of feeling intense passion but cognizant that love and beauty have already been claimed by time. We settle for their contemporary selves—although beautiful, only a meager reminder of what they were.

Peopot Artista suffers from the same problem that other valiant efforts of this contemporary Filipino independent movie scene suffer, which is good try but with the crappy means to make it good cinema. I've said it before and it needs to be said again, that digital images do not have the depth of chemically-produced images, and bodies in digital movies always look and feel like they are moving in a two-dimensional world. Now, with a little bit of effort this does not have to be the case, like the images in Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, but del Mundo I believe does not have the chops of Aurelius to really make the means that he has work for him. His scenes are extremely flatly lit and composed, which really emphasizes the limited gradience of digital colors. His colors—in the clothes, the komiks, the small alleys—pop, but not in a good way. Garish and monochromatic, the electronic colors are sad but without the dignity of running make-up.

Peopot Artista is a respectable effort that displays one’s loves cut short by the lack of means to make it good. The camera and the story settles into a languid study of life, but that study is cut short by the frustrating plastic effects of video—which, like 8mm films, emphasizes the movie as a video, as a capture in time and nothing more. The movie wasn’t painted using light and shadow. Rather, it was a product of a point-and-shoot camera that brought no dignity to its characters. Pepot Artista offered us a glimpse of our cinematic selves, but like a deteriorating VHS copy of a really good movie, it’s just irritatingly not enough.

The Sad State OF Filipino Cinema

2008-09-20T03:03:00.000-07:00

What's worse than not having copies of movies? That we forget what movies our auteurs made, maybe simply becuase they made so many or we areally are that forgetful. See here Piknik by Joey Gosiengfiao. Made in 1976, around the same time that Gosiengfiao made Paloma, Babae, Ngayon at Kailanman, Lulubog Lilitaw sa Ilalim ng Tulay. This movie must be fabulous, kind of like the Regal Films-produced movies he made later in the 80s but edgier and a lot sexier. And with four "men" and two "girls," Gosiengfiao might have also had a lot of fun with the concept...a "picnic" by the beach. It kills me that I don't have a way to see this movie.

- Picture from Video 48

Also from the same Video 48 post, the best tagline from a bomba: "Sa wakas...naririto na ang pelikulang Pilipino na maghahatid sa pinilakang tabing sa kanyang ginintuang tugatog!"

Lumapit, Lumayo Ang Umaga (Ishmael Bernal, 1975)

2008-08-23T05:53:00.000-07:00

I finally decided to write about this movie when I was listening to a Rilo Kiley song titled “Never,” which starts out -

I'm only a woman,
Of flesh and bones.
And I wept too much,
We all do.
I thought I might die alone.
...
I have nothing to give you, you see
Except everything, everything, everything
All the good and the bad

I don't really know why. The song is about giving up everything to be with the person that made you better. The movie is about dislocation, dehistorization, and a woman's role/place in history. Maybe there's a confluence in both song and movie, and maybe I'll understand it in the future if there is ever an opportunity to sit down again to figure it out.

This movie is especially dear to my heart because of many reasons, but especially because it introduced me to “old” Filipino movies. Digging through the “for sale” bin of a Filipino video store in Los Angeles one day, I found this old and aging cassette with the title taped on it—obviously, somebody took a Beta tape and transferred it to a VHS tape, seeing that the label was way too big for the cassette. The title was way too poetic to be just any regular old movie...”Lumapit, Lumayo ang Umaga,” literally “The Morning Comes and Goes.” Later I find that it was one of Ishmael Bernal's films, but only after the tape has wreaked havoc on three VHS players and one TV (it was a painful lesson in video deterioration). But after much cleaning, the tape finally did clear up, and the awful white noise gave way to a semi-decent Beta transfer (which means, the quality is crap, but not unbearable). The 35MM copy of the film doesn't exist anymore (deteriorated, along with other LEA films), so it makes this tape more important to me, at the very least.

The story, much like other Bernal's films with Elizabeth Oropeza, is about a woman who lives in the boundary that separates history and its subaltern. Amy meets Vic at the market where she works. They fall in love, they marry despite her mother's disapproval, she dies, they move to the city. We find out Vic is wanted by the police. When the police closes on him, he tries to escape, but did not. He pretends that he found work somewhere far while he is in jail, so Amy waits for him. After nine years he does not show up, so she starts to work at a large store where he meets Mr. Yap. Mr. Yap is the rich Chinese who owns the grocery store, and he immediately falls in love with Amy. Amy hesitates, but finally gives in and marries the wealthy man. When Vic returns, conflict ensues. Amy must choose between the two men, but could not: she loves Vic, but Yap provides for her. She is torn, until the situation is decided for her.

The plot, in all earnestness is rote and ripe for melodrama—and seemingly, nothing else. But Bernal achieves something great: through minute details, he layers the drama with meaning, emotion, and conflicts. It's his signature for the films he made during this time: small gestures and details that reveal a world. Very little flourish very little theatrics, very little drama. Through the use of deep focus and brilliantly placed pauses and glances, he reveals reality and society and the people that must exist within it, outside of it, but mostly in the boundaries of it.

Like his other movies made during the same time, this most obviously is a movie about a woman. Or better yet, a movie about woman. The desperate yet servile mother, the vulgar neighbor, and Amy who tries to situate herself between the two, the film spans the wide range of reality the Filipina encounters. The film doesn't judge her position in society; only observe the rock and the hard place in which she finds herself. Amy loves and believes in the fantasies of her naïve youth, but she is also cognizant of the reality of dire poverty and living in a difficult world an abandoned, single mother. Bernal takes great pain not only in memorializing the pain of forgetting her first husband to provide for her father-less child, but also the necessity of doing so. Most importantly though, he also shows that a woman can love a man with money, not the money the man has. Amy learns to love Yap for his kindness and willingness to accept her for what she is. Instead of focusing on the ideal of “true love” as opposed to the “reality” of “necessity” and “exploitation,” Bernal understands the fluidity of the “female virtue” of loving and caring. It is not an opposition, but rather a contiguous human decision made day by day, situation by situation, most commonly recognized as “existence.”

The same also applies for the men. Instead of opposing both as either villain or hero, rich or poor, virile or impotent, the men aren't just man, but creatures who, like Amy, Amy's mother, or her neighbor, must exist in and balance the line that divides social expectations and social reality. My first interpretation of both male characters is that of entrapment: in a masculine, macho, and manly world, the man provides and the woman chooses who can do it better. Worse yet, that they condone such standards and as such, the sexist attitudes that come with it. But after multiple viewings, I realize that this is not necessarily so. Bernal's genius comes from his capacity to demonstrate not only the social structure that restricts woman, but also man into a certain “role.” The need to provide and the devastation of not being able to provide is not only rhetoric—emphasized in other films by the use of such cliches as “head of the family,” “breadwinner”--but also demonstrated by its dehumanizing effects. Like Amy, Vic and Yap's lives are determined by the unceasing process of choosing between alternatives recognized as existing.

Most shocking however is the interpretation of this film as allegory of the Marcos regime. It's so simple, yet the lack of necessity for each telling detail to call attention upon itself makes the symbolism more potent. Unlike other films, which make the somewhat trite argument that the Marcos regime is oppressive, Bernal argues in this film that more so than that, the Marcos regime is the point where the Philippines break with its history. Through the use of newspapers, slyly thrown-in factoids and caveats, and pop songs, I realize that the film does not begin with an undetermined now, and ends with the cinematic version of a now-future two hours later. Instead, by reading the headlines in the newspapers that Bernal scatters throughout (and he takes great pains to show them, even if it's just in one corner of the screen—when he scans Yap's opened gifts to Amy, in one corner of the screen a Life magazine with Marcos' face in the cover, presumably victorious), I realize the film began around the early to mid-60s (Amy and Vic's house are covered with advertisement for Osmena's candidacy) and ends right around the start of the Martial Law (unlike the boisterous night scenes prior, the last scene in the film—where Vic walks away and into the darkness—was of a deserted street, probably right after curfew). Vic's disappearance and Yap's introduction happened around the election, when Marcos was running for president (the “trouble” began with a newspaper advertising Marcos' candidacy and ends with, again, Marcos' victorious face on the cover of a magazine).

The opposition between Vic and Yap is one defined by the opposition between history and escape. Vic, a Filipino, arrives with scenes of almost Filipino idyll: fishermen selling their catch to women bartering prices, small coastal villages where everybody knows everybody and everyone knows everything about everybody else, marital bliss and the start of a Filipino family, tough times, but not desperate times. It's people still rooted in their land, in their history, and in their people, where the ominous presence of the government is present but does not linger. But something changes: the big brother manifests itself through a radio announcement announcing the discovery of a criminal involved in a “murder mystery” and Bernal shows Vic's face slashed in half by a newspaper bearing political adverts. More and more the headlines appear, both tracing the growth of martial law and the progress of space exploration. Finally, Yap arrives. His store is a symbol of consumerist escape: aisles and aisles of goods, background music of American pop songs badly rendered by Filipino singers. Yap is a successful Chinese entrepreneur, and Bernal makes full use of his foreign identity. When Bernal pans through gifts that Yap gives Amy in efforts to win her over, a tacky yet effective Chinese music plays. When Amy finally realizes that Yap is willing to give his all to her, it was during a date at a Chinese restaurant. Although the Marcos regime valorized “Filipino identity,” Bernal makes the innovative argument that in fact, this political option is more about a break with history than embracing one's true self. Just as Amy reinvents herself through the escape that Yap provides, so too does the Marcos regime provide an “escape” from the everyday realities of hunger and poverty by disassociating ethnic identity from the harsh reality of history, and instead attaching to it false notions of timelessness and physical boundlessness. Identity has been ostracized from reality and becomes discussed through quotations—I became “Filipino,” Manila became “the city.”

The sophistication of the film's story however does not merely dichotomize reality and fantasy, facts and myths. Instead, it skirts that line between the id and the ego and recognizes that the world is formed by a constant compromise between what one wants and what one is. Amy does not reject Vic, nor does she reject the fantasies that Yap represents. Although Bernal cleaves fantasy and reality through Vic and Yap's representations, Bernal personalizes that cleave through Amy and the hard choices that she makes. She moves in and out of Vic and Yap's lives, conscious of her movement and the changes that occur around her when such moves happen. The morning may come and go, but Amy represents that present through which the morning comes and goes. Although the story moves through a span of years and decades, Amy becomes a sort of guide, the ever present presence that was constant through out the story's changes. It's almost like in the frenetic move through and out of history, Amy is the Filipino people, who were, will be present, and will live through the changes that happen around them.

Speaking of movement, Lumapit Lumayo ang Umaga is one of Bernal's great studies in space. His camera and actors move within spaces, and their movements define stories, conflicts, and resolutions. Admittedly, the canvas in this case is much smaller than in Manila After Dark, where he explores the slums of Manila through the cover of darkness, or in Himala where faith and doubt are played out in the solemn aridity of a desolate sandy island. In Lumapit Lumayo, he focuses on rooms, houses, cars, and moves his cameras within the confines of walls and doorways. But every movement, be it by a character storming out or a camera moving restrictedly back and forth within rooms, becomes a declaration or a narrative exclamation mark. See for example the tiny houses occupied by Amy and her mother, and later by Amy and Vic, and how the wobbly exposed frames and simply constructed window frames put four sides around faces, bodies, and actions, delineating social norms and expectations. The department store, with its wide aisles giving a false sense of expanse as the camera dollies through endless aisles divided by stacks of goods. See, too, the division between the outside of Vic and Amy's houses, and how dreams are told outside but realities are realized inside. But most admirably however is his scenes inside Yap's mansion. The succession of rooms, partitions, balconies, and spaces are well realized by Bernal's use of deep focus and a mobile camera. Most noteworthy are the “confrontation” between Vic, Yap, and Amy. In Yap's spacious living room, Vic and Yap are in different areas of the space divided by arches and different floor elevations. As the characters argue, Amy walks in and out of each man's spaces as the camera moves around them. Amy ends the argument by declaring her separation, and walks out the door. Later, during the night that Yap suffers a heart attack, Amy and Yap speak of Amy's previous life while Amy stands in the foreground on a balcony while Yap stands in the background, inside a room separated by a door frame. Bernal underlines Amy's distance as well as her independence through the telescoping effect of the doorway. When Yap collapses, Amy runs along the telescopic doorway, putting an emphasis on the decision she already made.

Sindak! (Mario O'Hara, 1999)

2008-03-31T15:22:00.000-07:00

In watching this movie, one imagines O'Hara being approached by a bunch of executives, a few thousand pesos in hand, and ordered to make a movie that would best represent their company, MetalDog Productions. (Of course, risking no confusion, they named themselves MetalDog.) This is because no other explanation would suffice for the movie that Sindak! is: tits, guns, and blood, it is absolutely and completely an exploitation movie aimed at blood-hungry males and little else. It is a movie about four guys, security guards by night, sex maniacs by day, and in weekends, regular dudes who like to shoot the shit with gin and pulutan (gleaned from their weekend monkey-hunting trips). Unbeknownst to them, they live in a world of sin and extraordinary inexplicable weirdness (inexplicable because the movie doesn't put any effort in explaining a lot of things), made apparent when a man they killed—whom they suspect of being a serial murderer—comes back to haunt them one by one. Once they start dying, they start seeing the infidelity, the incest, and the debauchery around them, and soon they disintegrate under the pressure of the seedy world around them.

Compared to many of his other movies, Sindak! Really has very little to offer. What little of the story that one can understand is thin and the action flows merely from one sec scene to one boxing match to another. The acting is wooden, consisting mainly of guys acting angry and women being slutty or vulnerable. But of the few things it does well, it does very well. The way the film is shot is nothing short of extraordinary, giving us the fear and foreboding that the story fails to give (the script isn't really bad, only that with the ubiquitous sex scenes and fight scenes peppered in every direction possible, following no logic or even imaginative coherence, the story isn't really allowed to structure the entire mess). The film presents two opposing atmospheres: that of the almost edenic green of nature, and the chilly and distance ray of light that pierces utter darkness. Our four protagonists are introduced to us through a window that looks out into distant green mountains covered with fog. As they go through their hunt, we get the sense of guys in their nature, masculinity being played out in a game of hunt.

As the hunt goes into the night, we enter into the realm of masculinity in excess: of a bunch of guys sitting around drinking until one passes out. The same location is where they murder their victim, who offended one of the guys by committing his crime on the man's watch. The night introduces us to the darkness that permeates the rest of the movie. Simply, the film is almost unwatchable because it is so dark. Even in daylight, faces are usually cast in shadow. When light is introduced, it is blinding, cutting the shadow like knives. Along with the blue of the strong rays of light, red is strongly counterposed to emphasize if not the blood of the scenes, definitely the evil that exists or is about to manifest itself. In one scene, O'Hara makes full use of the darkness, having his antagonist appear and reapparear in random corners of a dark warehouse filled with drums and tires that predictable make loud noises when disturbed. It is very hokey, but the darkness so pervasive one cannot help but be affected. Even if the running around and the chasing about of the characters seem silly sometimes (such as when one tries to run around a car multiple times to try to find their antagonist who was peeping into two people in the act), the darkness and the brilliant flashes of red that breaks the icy blues of what little light there is makes the unknown that the film thrusts its characters upon more foreboding, more threatening, and more vast.

In a twist that one-ups the American slasher films of the late 90s in which Sindak! is based, O'Hara turns the antagonist's revenge political. Whereas the traditional American killer existed outside the bounds of humanity, dignity, and law, O'Hara makes existence within the bounds of law to be the ultimate revenge. The four friends are forced to exist within the control of the police, asking for their help in time of crime. But the inept police turns the table at them, blaming them for the crimes committed upon them. The ultimate twist comes at the end, when it is revealed that the killer is in fact part of the police force. Just how this ends up happening I have absolutely no clue. Or, it is still quite unclear as to why the mayor of the city himself would be concerned about this particular policeman. Every logic and detail has been eliminated to press the singular fact of betrayal, of an overarching power ultimately bent in destroying these four men. The unknown—the fear that the title suggests—is revealed, but based on the final image of the fixed and well-healed killer/policeman, we know that the unknown is in fact not revealed, that the truth of betrayal and fear of betrayal is a self-perpetuating fact, the end of which is not in sight and the number of victims countless and boundless. Sindak! Is an exploitation of the audience's basest fears and desires sure, but it reveals that our basest and darkest fears and desires reveals a system of control as dark and as boundless.

Cadena de Amor (Lino Brocka, 1971)

2008-01-08T21:33:00.000-08:00

OK, this is kinda rough. I just decided to start typing and whatever I typed--unedited and all--you see here now.

Brocka's Cadena de Amor is a very hard movie to describe. Unlike Santiago before it and Tinimbang Kan Ngunit Kulang after it, it is very straightforwardly a melodrama, a dramatic entanglement between three people trying to wrestle with a bitter past. It exhibits no external politics, no forceful discourse, no obvious movement towards a “revelation.” Simply, Brocka had three people work their way out of the mess they are in, and the film ends when they do just that. The film opens with a betrayed bride: Sonya (Rosemarie Sonora) is cruelly abandoned by a confused groom (here nameless, a brief appearance by Mario O'Hara, who also wrote the film's screenplay; possibly a reference to O'Hara's gay character in Tubog sa Ginto?) and suffers a mental breakdown. She puts a coffin(!) in her family's living room and forbids the servants to use any form of lighting brighter (and cheerier) than candlelight. This culminates when Reigdor (Dante Rivero), an insistent suitor, after witnessing Sonya's decrepitude, proposes that he rapes her to get her out of her funk. Sonya's mother agrees, and so does he. Of course, she struggles, and Brocka uses a prolonged scene in slow-motion and stolen music from Psycho to illustrate what a repugnant act this is, but at the same time shockingly why Sonya badly needs Regidor's violation. (It's a sickening notion really, that raping a woman will somehow lead to a revelation of herself to herself, but the film is what it is.)

Unfortunately (or fortunately), Sonya rejects Regidor. When Sonya finally falls in love with him, it is too late and Regidor flies to the US to start anew. However, his plane crashes into the sea and he survives, washed into a wealthy family's beach-front property. In comes Rossannna (Hilda Koronel), a cripple who falls in love with Regidor as she nurses him back to health. Rossannna of course has issues of her own: when her boyfriend is killed fighting in Viet Nam, she tried to kill herself. Failing in doing so, she ends a cripple, but only in her mind: the doctor repeatedly tells her that she can walk if she only thinks she can. When Regidor (now called Dante, because he couldn't remember anything, and Rossanna chooses to name her after an absent older brother) wakes up, he falls in love with her and becomes an inspiration for Sonya to walk again. One afternoon, after the couple gets off a boat after an escapade to god knows where, Regidor/Dante trips and hits his head onto a rock (again; the doctor points out: “why of all places do you always injure your head?”). He wakes up, but a changed man: he remembers Sonya, knows also Rossanna, and finds that he loves them both. By this time, his love for Rossanna strengthens when he finds out that she learned to walk in the effort to save him.

Rossanna's family and Regidor (he now tells them his real name) now travels back to Manila. Summer is over, and the escapade makes way to the congested streets of the big city, and the complications of people—baggage and all—must deal with each other and each other's realities. Regidor for a time goes back and forth between Rossanna and Sonya, under his mother's disapproval. Seeing how much her son is suffering, Regidor's mother finally calls in both women and tells them about the situation. Of course they are both shocked, and Sonya threatens to fall apart again, but Rossanna decides that it is Sonya and not her who needs Regidor the most. She concocts a plan where a family driver poses as her former love back from the death, and informs Regidor that she will marry her long lost lover. When Regidor finds out, he leaves Rossanna's life and marries Sonya.

Now that I've got that out of my system, we can see the parallels between this movie and what seems to be one of the main themes of some of his more notable films: from Santiago to Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, Maynila to Gumising ka Maruja, Ina, Kapatid, Anak to Angela Markado, we see that one of the driving force behind actions and motivations is the weight of the past lived and relived through memory. And the past isn't just an ordinary subjective reality that repeats itself like a Freudian trick, but rather something that has become expressed not only through the characters' subjective realities, but also manifested in the systematic conditions that normalizes certain forms of reality. In short, the pain isn't just coming from one point (a certain event that occurred in the past, a person that has caused grief at one point), but rather weaved into reality to the point where pain becomes the very essence of reality. There is not anymore “identity,” only beings trying to muck through a world of pain, dictated by the horrors of their past. Of course, one could argue that “identity” is just that, an individual trying to find the boundary between the self and the world, where the earth ends and being begins. But for Brocka, the main tension happens when the being finds the very shape that she must differentiate out of the world, amorphous that shape may be. The end result may be tragic: in Maynila, Julio (Bembol Roco), in the process of finding himself amidst the systems of human interaction that define the concrete jungle of Manila he is swallowed back into the shadows of the city. In Cadena de Amor, it is Rossanna's character that successfully defined itself amidst the pain of the past manifesting itself in the present. Like Santiago (Fernando Poe, Jr.), Rossanna, ever the Heideggerian character, bravely pushes the past to the forefront and faces the future with full acknowledgment of the magnanimity of the past and the inevitability and promise of the future. Sonya proved to be too frail; Regidor too impulsive and obsessed.

Unlike the neorealistic style he used for much of his earlier as well as later career, Brocka's style for Cadena de Amor is downright expressive. He often interchages between extreme close-ups and long-shots with cameras tilted either at an extreme high angle or extreme low angle. In Sonya's house right after her failed marriage, telephoto lens and baricades in the foreground emphasizes Sonya's distance, as if she is removed from reality. Add to that Brocka's slow motion during the rape scene, we realize that Brocka's main concern centers around the correlation between space and time, between spatial distanciation and the the progress of the past as it incurs towards the present. During the rape scene, the movie's close ups emphasized the act as it occurs now as it fills the screen, and the slow motion correlatively slowly bringing the time to halt until Sonya is brought to this present, and the horrors it presents.

The editing and camera style for Rossanna on the other hand is completely different. While editing made time stand still for Sonya, Rossanna on the other hand sees time fleet away, to the point where single acts are edited to show changes in time and space. But the act, however, of breaking out of time, remains constant. Even in Brocka's romantic montages of Rossanna and Regidor running or walking along the coast shows a constance in movement and direction despite cuts that clearly demonstrate changes in time and place. When Rossanna is trying to walk again, she would always be shot in extreme close-up, and when she falls, the camera cuts to the opposite angle, this time Rossanna in different clothing and sometimes hairstyles to denote change in time and space. In essence, Rossanna represents the transcendence of space and time, breaking free from the constraints that made Sonya weak and feeble to shape her own being. Even the film's final image suggests this: Rossanna's disembodied head against a black background, following the floating image of a bouquet (presumably thrown by Sonya, after her wedding (wearing one heinous looking dress) with Regidor, which Rossanna watches from a distance) as it flies across the screen.

Regidor on the other hand is just downright clueless. He's essentially the agent of the story's time: the narrative travels with him, totally ignoring Sonya when she and Regidor separates, and treating Rossanna the same way. The cinematic time has trapped him. He doesn't move beyond what the film dictates, his fate decided by the whims of the two female protagonists on whose decisions and flutters in emotion the narrative turns.

Of course, one could argue that rationalizing Cadena de Amor through its basest opposition is a little simplistic. But we also have to remember that some of Brocka's best films are centered around this idea of two central forces—concepts, beings, entities, whatever—opposing each other and creating dramatic tension in opposing each other. See for example the tension between the two rebels in Santiago; between parent and child in Tinimbang Kan Ngunit Kulang, Insiang, Ina Ka ng Anak Mo, and Tatay Kong Nanay; sibligs in Cain at Abel and Ina Kapatid Anak; lovers in Nakaw na Pag Ibig, Hello Young Lovers, and Binata si Mister Dalaga si Misis; and of course, between the state and the individual in Maynila and Oropranobis. These oppositions are very simple and basic, but that is where Brocka gets his power. By whittling the conflict down to its barest, the resulting drama is raw and unfiltered. Yet, in reducing drama to its minimum, Brocka also manages to reveal the simplest roots of “issues,” giving larger concerns immediacy. In Cadena de Amor, by building an aesthetic around Sonya and Rossanna's opposition, he not only made their concerns relatable, watchable, and consumable (admittedly, the purpose of mainstream film), but also transcendent and existential. I guess that is the central conceit behind Brocka, and why he still beguiles: that he is given the most rudimentary of tools, making the most rudimentary of scenarios, but with simple and unubiquitous strokes makes these scenarios statements in human existence. Brocka has been so central in discussing Filipino/Tagalog cinema that many--including myself--see it fit that we slowly move away from the usual Brocka-Bernal centric discourse and move to other filmmakers. But in all honesty, how--and why--could we move away from such deep and affecting sincerity, done in such a competent manner?

Notable DVD Releases

2007-12-27T14:13:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time, and to those I promised a review of Brocka's Cadena de Amor (1971), that's coming soon. But for now, look at all of these very, very notable Tagalog DVD releases from this year. 2007 was a great year for Tagalog DVD releases, and these prove just why.

1. Celso ad Castillo's Tag Ulan sa Tag Araw (1976)
2. Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (1974), Insiang (1976), Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa (1974), and Tatay Kong Nanay (1978)
3. Ishmael Bernal's Himala (1982) and Broken Marriage (1983)
4. Elwood Perez's Silip (1986)
5. Joey Gosiengfiao's Temptation Island (1981)

This is not exactly an expansive release of the most significant Filipino films on DVD (until Gosiengfiao's Babae, Ngayonat Kailanman (1977) gets a DVD release, I don't think the best of Filipino cinema has been as of yet released on DVD), nor are they as celebrated as the releases for the early films by Burnett or Davies, but the release of these films are still important steps towards wider recognition of Filipino cinema. And most of these are English-subtitled, so buy, buy buy!

Endo (Jade Castro, 2007)

2007-11-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

A film about the transience of contemporary Filipino life, Endo is yet another indie-digital film to come out of the recent digital new wave that is taking over the country and some would argue, the third (fourth, maybe? But the pre-war years don’t really count, simply because no one has seen the most significant movies from the era, thus no one can really argue for that period’s greatness) golden age in Philippine cinema. Having not seen some of the most significant films since the inception of this new wave, I can’t really make a judgment of the quality of the films of this new movement, nor can I compare Endo to its contemporaries. However, if Endo is an indication of the things to come, we can definitely say that the future both looks bright, and has a very, very long way to go.

Endo is one of those rare movies that never wore its ideology (too) flamboyantly. The film never brazenly displayed any indication of what it is “about,” only that it is a film “of.” Sure, it is a film about capitalism, rootlessness, and poverty, but it has the great qualities of a Mike Leigh film, where the politics and ideologies are so imbued into the character and action that these “issues” never demanded to be called or named to be felt. In Endo, Leo (Jason Abalos) deals with the impermanence of family, love, relationship, and home made fleeting by capitalism, poverty, and the lack of an “identity” brought forth by a history defined by conquest and depersonalization. “Endo” stands for “end of contract,” or a temporary worker whose brief contractual job (usually in the service sector) is about to come to an end. These workers usually jump from one meager job to another, and Leo’s relationships follow the pattern of his career changes. Girlfriends change as jobs change, family dynamics change with the amount of money coming in, and friendships formed revolve around the drinking parties thrown by “endos” about to enter another job.

Leo’s habit of changing women like he changes shoes is complicated with the arrival of Tanya (Ina Feleo), who is a bit more conscious of the weariness of a life of a contract worker, but is still incapable of escaping the allure of having a “comfortable life.” The connection between Leo and Tanya is defined by its compartmentalization into categories, which stand as meeting points through which the two are allowed to interact. Not only are their lives drowned by the jobs that define them—their everyday flirtation involves looking out of their respective storefronts to look at the other across the mall, at another store—even their private moments are defined by the painful realization that nothing in their state could ever be permanent. Their most tender moment occur after work, when they listen to Leo’s bootleg CDs in his CD player that always threatens to fall apart at the most crucial moments. In one scene, they listen to music as they dance in the streets at night (who says Manila nights look bad in digital films; it is not a matter of making Manila look beautiful at night, it is a matter of redefining the beauty of a city by night), after realizing that the cover fee for a trendy bar is too expensive for them. Leo and Tanya become two lonely souls right out of a Wong Kar-Wai milieu, but instead of being merely wandering souls looking to belong, the scene is most heartbreaking because these two simply do not belong. Whereas Kar-Wai’s sensual lighting and color palette romanticizes loneliness, Castro’s separation of his two characters through his color palette (two blue characters amidst a warm, sepia city) is downright damning.

One scene however that exemplifies the film’s entire theme is Leo and Tanya’s meeting a hotel, blasting the room’s air conditioning and sleeping under sheets, naked after making love. The two have met at a hotel to have sex before this scene, and the room’s impersonality is merely underlined by the scene and not established. But when their conversation turns to their dreams, what is most shocking is the revelation of their incapability of discussing a future rooted in a certain place. Instead of a house, a family, and pets, their dreams turn to meager jobs somewhere else, in Canada or Australia. They happily discuss a comfortable life of dustless existence (“Dust in Canada is probably different compared to dust in here”) without a place to define them. The inevitability of foreigness emphasizes a context that has already ousted them, a context that rejects its people as much as the people reject it. This one simple scene filled with innocence and the imminence of the painful awakening is a more sophisticated treatment of the issue of Filipino immigration than a more recent film, La Visa Loca, or the 1984 Gil Portes classic, ‘Merika. Whereas these two latter films were too fixated on the capability of a racial and/or ethnic identity to define people, Castro chose the more complicated approach of questioning the systematic identities that defines people.

Like its French 60s counterpart, or even its 80s Regal Films-conceived older siblings, Endo brims with the energy and exciting possibilities of youth. Leo, Tanya, and everybody else’s awakening, although painful, nevertheless comes with the force of promise and the surprise of things learned (sometimes anew, like the love for a father). However, although the film’s script is fun and insightful, the visuals are ultimately the movie’s downfall. To the point, the movie looks like crap. The entire time I sat to watch the film, my constant reaction was, “this would be great with my eyes closed.” Not to sound like the cinematic version of Joseph II, Castro employs far too many cuts. Unlike the elegance of the long takes in Jeturian’s Kubrador or Keith Sicat and Sari Raissa Lluch Dalena’s Rigodon (2005), Castro chose to mangle his already suffering camerawork by cutting for angle-changes and other visual flourishes that really amount to nothing. True, it may be limiting to suggest that the long take is video/digital’s primary function, but freedom to cut should come with it the intent of creating meaningful montage rather than just creating “flow” and “dynamism,” effects that the engaging story did not need in the first place.

Castro’s ADD-inflected editing seems to me points to his inherent mistrust of his incredibly talented actors. See, John Cassavetes already demonstrated that mediocre photography could be more than salvaged by deeply-felt sincerity and the effort made to translate this sincerity on-screen. Cassavetes had the sense to stay on his actors long enough until they register those subtle, Cassavetes-trademark acting that reveal the world in small gestures. When he cuts, he cuts to expand this world. In other words, he cuts—or moves his camera—to his actors to reveal meaning. But Castro does the exact opposite: just when Feleo’s face becomes most expressive, he cuts to Abalos’ face or some other actor’s face to see their reaction to Feleo’s undisplayed flutters. In one damning scene, when Tanya waits for the results of a pregnancy test, Castro shoots the scene through a mirror, showing Tanya’s reflection—and a co-worker next to her—rather than her face itself. When the unease—and relative inaction—of the wait begins, he pans sideways, preferring to show an unflattering and unrevealing profile of the co-worker looking at Tanya. Instead of finally adding a bold underline to the idea of transitory identities and the pain of the wait, we get…well, nothing but an underlit and meaningless medium shot of a character who in turn is never fully fleshed-out because of her unremarkable position in relation to the camera. It’s a preposterous camera movement that ultimately added nothing to the story, and criminally kept Feleo’s acting from elevating the movie’s core emotions.

At this point, I would have liked to argue that I finally decided to shut my eyes and just listen to the film. But in reality, by this time the story has so devolved into yet another love triangle that one cannot help but be sorely disappointed at the downturn the film took in its last half hour. When Candy (Karla Pace), Leo’s former girlfriend who left him when her contract expired, returns, her character is portrayed as materialistic, as if her aspirations for a “comfortable life” is any different to those of Tanya and Leo’s. It was an easy choice to degrade her character as a fallen woman made bad by her attempts to reclaim Leo, but it is condescending and out of touch with the film’s earlier premise of understanding people’s private experiences in a public context. But I guess it only makes sense because by this time, Leo’s (overdramatized) attempts to get Tanya back are played for drama and seemingly nothing else. The movie’s final third is so disconnected that it managed to pull down the genius of the first hour and turn its conflicts asinine. The film could have easily ended when Leo’s old cell phone started ringing again, suggesting circularity as well as yet another transition, but the ending is so odious that it managed to degrade what could have easily been an instant classic to yet another mediocre and forgettable production.

Santiago! (Lino Brocka, 1970)

2007-10-08T02:46:00.000-07:00

*Apparently, like other films produced under LEA Films, this one is presumably lost except for the bad video copies made of it. Yay for film preservation.

Lino Brocka’s Santiago is, if anything else, Philippine Cinema’s Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (1958): it signaled the arrival of a new cinematic consciousness that soon took over an entire nation’s cinematic tradition without actually being mired in the very techniques that it announced. Santiago bears the themes that will later become Brocka’s preoccupations—mainly, an individual observing society from the outside and the depiction of the diverse and sophisticated ways people respond to oppression and suffering—but is still made with what seems to be techniques of a studio-based First Golden Age Cinema: overbearing music that isn’t so much a counterpoint to the image as much as a melodramatic underline to the image; a by and large straightforward narrative with a by and large clear resolution to the conflict (by and large because although the narrative and the conclusion are clear and predictable, Brocka never really just lets them be without tinkering with them); and by and large a stagey feel that lacks the raw realism that Brocka later perfects in films such as Insiang (1976) an Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag (1975). But throughout Santiago, one senses Brocka’s dislike of the conventions he is working through, and he makes it loudly known that this indeed is his film.

If Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taon Walang Diyos (1975) is worthy of being seen (among other reasons) for its willingness to reconsider the Japanese enemy during WWII (the hatred of whom is something that should never be underestimated, especially in Asia), Santiago is worthy of being seen for its willingness to reconsider the Filipino resistance during the war. Through Gonzalo’s (Fernando Poe, Jr.) conscience, Brocka reassess the tactics used by the Filipino guerillas during the war, and the macho admiration of men who give up family and life to fight through whatever means, even if it is killing fellow countrymen. See, Gonzalo was ordered to blow up a building which was suspected of being a Japanese cache. But after he installs the dynamite, he finds that the building also housed a number of Filipino civilians, including numerous women and children. He ends up killing all except one, a girl who he brings to a nearby small village after he turns his back to the resistance in shame.

However, his idleness and willingness to work but not fight was understood by the villagers as cowardice, especially by the families who have fathers and sons who are fighting the Japanese. Worse still is that he is compared to Dante Romero’s character, who, despite killing a family of Japanese informants and is seen as a hero, is revealed to a be a cold-blooded killer who kills not just out of duty, but out of pleasure. Things come to a head when Romero’s character, jealous of the attention his former girlfriend (Boots Anson-Roa) is Giving Gonzalo, reveals to the villagers that Gonzalo did indeed blew up the building that killed many civilians in the nearby town and not the Japanese. Angered, they storm Gonzalo and drive him out of the village. He returns later when the Japanese invades the town to save the villagers from the Japanese.

As an outsider, Gonzalo’s character is the person through which Brocka measures the town’s morals and values. Far from the fight themselves, the town is free to discuss issues of violence, war, and guilt while Gonzalo, having gone through the follies of war, internalizes these same issues. Through horrific flashbacks and what looks like dream sequences, Brocka allows us inside Gonzalo’s head and experience the war as it is to this one man. But from the way he cuts the scenes in the village, one can tell that in this place, it is all about the reaction to war rather than war itself. Although reaction-based editing (where a depiction of an action precedes a cut that leads to a reaction to the action; forgive me for not knowing the technical term for them) is standard in studio-made productions, here Brocka uses them to show that in this case, it’s all about the reaction, not the action the produces them. Also, it doesn’t help that when the townies speak, they speak with a very literary tone (again, standard fare in pre-70s Filipino cinema). That is, they speak with the tone of someone who hasn’t experienced the horror of the thing they speak of.

Gonzalo however isn’t exactly the perfect hero who later forgets the town’s hatred when it is his turn to save it. The film’s last scene harks back to the first scene, but this time Gonzalo knows full well what he is doing. In the last scene, Gonzalo is faced with the same dilemma: they finally crossed the bridge connecting the town across river, and they must now blow-up the bridge to prevent the Japanese from following them. But problem is that some of the other villagers are still crossing the bridge, so Gonzalo must now choose between the people already across the bridge and the other villagers still across the river. Ultimately, he chooses to sacrifice the people still crossing the bridge, giving the signal to blow-up the bridge with a large degree of certainty. Was Gonzalo sacrificing them in retaliation? Was he finally free of guilt? Or did he do it out of necessity, understanding that his mission’s importance ultimately outweighs the lives of a few? We don’t really know Gonzalo’s motivations for his actions, but if there is anything that we are sure it is that this act solidifies Gonzalo’s loss of innocence and sense of right and wrong. From the non in, a life is just yet another thing that will be eliminated if it comes down to it.

Jay Ilagan’s character underlines this loss of innocence by representing that childhood that is ravaged in the process of knowing the cruelties of life. Ilagan is introduced as a young boatman who helps Gonzalo cross the river to the nearby village, and he is also the local who showed the rebels the tunnels under the church which helped them enter the church without being spotted by the Japanese. From the character that led Gonzalo to the peaceful paradise of the town, Ilagan became the person who led him back to the harsh truths of war and death. Throughout the film, he becomes witness to the changes that Gonzalo goes through, and he himself goes through changes that reflect the demands of the small town of a man. He isn’t an innocent bystander, but the film’s Junior (Brocka’s other young witness in his epic Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kuling (“Weighed But Found Wanting,” 1974). As an insider, he grows up defined by the ways and traditions of the town. But unlike Junior, Ilagan’s character doesn’t grow to transcend and ultimately judge the town, but rather grow to reflect the town itself.

If there is anything that the film exceeds in exceptionally well, it is the significant flashbacks that were shot and edited as if inspired by the Russian silent avante gardes. These flashbacks pierce through the relative serenity of the village by revealing the horror that the village seems to be hiding from itself. When Anson-Roa’s character embraces Dante’s character in reconciliation, he is reminded of the past: the sweet and mellow past of parades, beauty pageants, and fireworks, but also the violent past of Dante killing a family. The most significant however is Caridad Sanchez’s character’s flashbacks. Sanchez’s character is the town’s madwoman, and her flashback reveals why: raped by a gang of Japanese soldiers, her husband’s groin pierced by a bayonet, her husband leaves her to join the resistance. Later she bears the child of one of the Japanese soldiers that raped her. In a fit of rage, her husband kills the child. Mind you, these images are sensually shot in sepia as if Dovzhenko himself rose from the dead to shoot them, and cut together as if Eisenstein directed Brocka what to do. Close ups of hands, groins, and knives are interspersed along with shots of pained faces and faces in pleasure, thus abstracting the action into the objects and people’s reaction to their use. These images are coupled with Caridad Sanchez and Mario O’Hara’s great performances as husband and wife. And there are not enough words to describe how courageous their portrayals are: O’Hara having his groin pierced and bloodied in close-up, Sanchez in a very brief but very powerful topless shot.

Santiago will probably never be considered amongst other Brocka masterpieces. It is far too compromised, lacking the power of a film if Brocka is allowed full helm of the project, as seen in films such as Bona (1980) or Insiang. But nevertheless, this film is worth looking at if not for the way it dealt with WWII, for the way it shows how Brocka dealt with the limitations of studio-filmmaking before the new wave that he and a few others led, and how he harnessed his power as an artist to create equally powerful films later on in his career.

Curios and He Haws from Video 48

2007-10-07T14:28:00.001-07:00

Here's something of interest from Video 48's newly-established blog: Lino Brocka's membership card, detailing films he borrowed a few days before his very untimely death. I can't really read much of the scribble, but it seems some fo the titles he borrowed were Mata Hari, The Snake Pit, Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, The Year of Living Dangerously, Salaam Bombay, Bad and the Beautiful, Seventeenth Bride, I Vitelloni, Angel of Vengeance, and The Hunter. Great stuff.

For those who do not know, Video 48 is probably as instrumental as those Quiapo sidewalks in creating what is becoming Philippines' new [digital] wave. With past customers such as Brocka, and new customers such as Jeturian, it seems it is not necessarily giving birth to a new order, but merely continuing a tradition. In terms of influence, it 's like Philippines' Criterion Collection and NYU-Tisch rolled into one lowly street corner in Quezon City. I've never bee to the place (I was still young when I left the country), but its reputation is well known amongst cinephiles who make their presences known online.

The Video Store of the Damned

2007-10-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hey, anybody wanna go hit Quiapo with me?

Inay ("Mother," Lino Brocka, 1977)

2007-10-05T01:37:00.000-07:00

Brocka’s Inay starts appropriately enough with a sad song: the mother (Alicia Vergel), a retiring teacher, is serenaded by her colleagues while her son Maning (Dindo Fernando) looks on, half-sad, half-exasperated, and half-dubious. The loss of an apparently great and well-loved teacher mirrors the loss of traditional values as represented by the mother, and the loss of childhood from the provider’s perspective. It is Brocka’s take on Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 Tokyo monogatari, where selfish and ungrateful children turn their back on their aging parents and equally, to the history and culture that is slowly being replaced by the then rapidly changing Japanese society. Brocka gave his own twist on the story, making explicit the economic basis of the conflict, the resistance of tradition against the creeping mores of urbanity, and the power struggle between child/present and parent/past.

Unlike Ozu, Brocka did not make his parental figure as tragically innocent or simple as Ozu’s mother and father, whose willingness to flow with the changes represented by their children heightened the sense of the children’s betrayal. Brocka’s mother isn’t exactly the most endearing person in the world (immediately after her retirement, she wakes up Maning’s entire family on a Sunday and calls him and his doting wife (Connie Reyes) irresponsible and lazy for letting their children stay in bed so late), nor is she the most self-sacrificing, selfishly starting drama with every woman she thinks is replacing her role as provider for her children. It isn’t just a past that is criminally being swept aside for the forward drive of the present, but a past that is stubbornly reasserting itself the hindering the necessity of adapting to change. The final image of the mother wittily conveys this stubbornness both in the mother’s assertion of power and the child’s impulse to resist: finding out that Maning’s third child is finally born after hearing it cry, the mother runs to the baby, carries it and wags her finger in an attempt to impose herself onto the baby to make it stop crying. The freeze-frame of her waging her finger and the baby crying is comparable to the final fight scene between Lucia (Adela Legra) and Tomas (Adolfo Llaurado) in Lucia (Humberto Solas, 1968), where the frozen emotion isn’t that of conclusion, but a sense that the struggle, although somewhat tragic, will indeed comically continue. Unlike however the beaming face that ends Tokyo monogatari, the vagueness isn’t couched on philosophy, but rooted on social context.

The mother’s differing relationships with her children reveals that the children’s slight rejection (because their rejection isn’t as obviously contemptuous as Tokyo monogatari’s) isn’t merely out of selfishness and ingratitude. With Maning, the mother self-righteousness is borne out of Maning’s poverty because he chose to teach at a public school like his mother instead of going for the corporate jobs that his siblings went for. The brunt of the past strikes most viciously against the people that the present has left behind, and the mother’s vindictiveness is a reminder of a history defined by colonial and postcolonial oppression. The mother’s communication with her Romy (Orestes Ojeda) on the other hand reveals that very Filipino-Hispanic tradition of maharlika, or a society that is ruled over by the very rich few. Not only does the maharlika rule over the society, it demands respect from the minions it rules over. Romy became rich after he marries a woman from a rich family. The mother’s interaction with Romy and Daisy is one of reverence, as if age matters very little in the face of inequality. Laid side by side with her treatment of Maning, it seems the mother cannot possibly lecture Romy and his family because the society that he represents is exactly the society that defines the past.

The mother’s relationship with her only daughter Daisy (Chanda Romero) is predictable in that she treats her as society treats women: as bearer of a culture’s very identity. The relationship here isn’t merely one of an oppressor and the oppressed. Repeatedly, the mother reveals how proud she is of her daughter, and how she is the most responsible and reliable of the siblings. Unlike the conflict-laden first meetings between the mother and the other three siblings, the mother’s first interaction with Daisy is very calm, and the daughter—unlike the daughter-in-laws in Ozu’s film—is neither ecstatic nor unhappy about her mother’s visit. It seems that Daisy is merely resigned to the fact that that is the way things work, the mother visits her children. However, it is also Daisy who causes the most trouble. After the mother finds out that Daisy is having an affair with a married man (a fact delivered with such simplicity and giveness as Bernal’s films about infidelity, many made around the same time), and is bearing his child without any intent of marrying him, the mother declares Daisy a whore and causes a scare after she collapses of anger. Compared with the innocence of the young Daisy, represented by the photograph that the mother carries around of Daisy’s first communion, this version of that child represents a totally different value system, a totally different outlook on life—that is, a bearer that brings a cultural identity that is alien from the identity that the mother represented. The conflicts between the mother and daughter were the most explosive and devastating because the depiction of two clashing value systems isn’t merely ideological, but a display of two women whose very being—womanhood, if you wanna go in that direction—is threatened by each other’s presence.

Finally, there’s Alex (Ace Vergel, appropriately enough the mother’s son in real life), the youngest of the four siblings who also inhabits the oddest position of all of them. He is a rich, self-made executive, but he doesn’t seem to have the economic baggage that defines Maning or Romy. He is also “liberated,” but doesn’t have Daisy’s sexual baggage. He is clearly the mother’s favorite, but it is palpable how confused the mother is in dealing with him. He brings his sexual conquests back home for his mother to see, but his conscience more than weighs on him as he painfully admits to his mother his promiscuity. His apartment is atop a supposedly very high building overlooking Manila, and Brocka takes great pains to show the mother’s suffering everytime she ascends to stairs to his apartment (she doesn’t want to take the elevator in fear of getting stuck midway to the apartment), even framing her Vertigo-style without the accompanying disorienting Vertigo shot. Looking at his relationship with his maid (who acts as a surrogate mother to him, a relationship the mother finds extremely displeasing), Alex does live the lifestyle of a big spender, but is almost apologetic in the way he subsequently must treat the people below him. Unlike Romy, he is unafraid to bring his poor brother’s family to Manila as guests. Unlike his siblings, he isn’t necessarily stuck in reliving the injustices of the past, nor is he so adamant in his push for the future that he alienates his family, especially his mother. It is as if he represents the indefinable yet concrete nature of the present, found balancing itself with the backwards-trajectory of history and past, and the forward march of the future. Like his apartment, he is afforded the bird’s-eye view of human progress afforded the future, but also finds his feet planted in the ground below.

It is in this setting that the mother finally realizes that her children have indeed grown up. Although earlier she insists that the mother may stop caring for her children, but the children will never stop needing their mother, the Christmas dinner in Alex’s house, where Romy, his wife, Daisy, and Alex come for dinner but leaves for other engagements reveals that the situation is actually reversed: it is the mother who will always be in need of children to care for. Her realization’s tragedy is recognizably a Filipino one: it’s Christmas, and there’s no family (and extended family) to celebrate it. But her move back to Maning’s house the next day reveals that Brocka isn’t necessarily just suggesting mere abandonment. The mother is revealed to be free all along, moving from one house to another not out of necessity, but of the sheer pleasure of changing allegiances and relationships. This sketch of familial relationship complicates blood ties by suggesting that rather than a rigidly defined connection, a family’s relationship itself is negotiable, fluid, and shifting, just as people’s position within history and social change is equally a balance between forward and backward, stops and gos. In the end, when the film harks back to the first scene when her colleagues celebrate the mother’s retirement from teaching, we aren’t reminded of the sad song but of Maning’s face, dubious of such displays of certainty of the linearity of history, and the happy rendition of “For (S)he’s a Jolly Good Fellow” that follows the teachers’ sad song, where her coworkers form a circle around her and dances back and forth around the mother.

Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930)

2007-09-30T20:50:00.001-07:00

First off, I have to express how much I love this poster (from the film's own Wikipedia page). The hand is reminiscent of that omniscient hand at the end of Lang's M, which was released a year after Murder! This time around, the hand isn't the the hand that connects the mind to the heart, but society's hand that punishes the guilty, even if wrongly.

Unlike the slew of film musicals that were popular during the advent of sound, which focused mainly on the intrigues of backstage life, Murder! incorporates theatre itself, specifically theatricality and how "art criticizes life," according to Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), a leading actor and playwright who, after being ridden with guilt after sitting in a jury that prosecuted and condemned innocent Diana Baring (Norah Baring) of murder, sought to prove her innocence with the help of fellow actor Ted Markham (Edward Chapman). Menier proves actress/character Baring's innocence by going back to his art and understanding the psychology of guilt that one of the jury members elucidated before being bullied into changing her verdict and justifying what gravitated him to her in the first place: her dainty look of purity, and fragility, a view justified by Menier's stature as an intellectual. (Another jury member that didn't think Baring was guilty came to the same conclusion, only that he wasn't able to justify his connection between innocence and a pretty face other than by invoking his sexual bias.) How Menier exactly makes the connection between theatre/theatricality/acting/artifice and reality/innocence/guilt is not clear to me because the scenes that elucidated the connections were far too talky. They lack Hitchcock's visual flair. Being only the third sound film of a still young Hitchcock, the awkwardness of the plainly straightforward dialog-driven scenes is forgivable, if only because the film's true core is when Hitchcock's visual style flies.

These scenes truly are remarkable. The opening scene contains much promise: a tracking shot of windows, with lights turning on and heads poking out as the camera passes to check the disturbance downstairs. The disturbance of course is a woman's scream, following the murder that sets off the film. From the beginning, Hitchcock already gives us an impression that this isn't a simple crime that involves only a murderer, the murdered, and a few witnesses. Rather, it's a murder that could only be solved if one goes back to the theatrical community that brought it about. When the police--and justice, presumably--got closest to the true killer, they are backstage, interviewing the theater company in which Baring belongs. The scene is an amazing sketch of performed reality, as the interviewed "witnesses," who presumably are being their genuine selves as they tell the police (who are themselves in costume, like th theatrical polices that they are interviewing) what they think really happened, change their dispositions as they get ready to enter the stage. The camera the switches back and forth between the interrogation scene and the play being performed (and presumably the scene that is more real to the filmic audience because it is the scene that they can see and thus prove the existence), critiques the scene that comes before, where a camera travels back and forth between two rooms (obviously studio sets) as two characters discuss the murder as they walk back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room. The performance at the theater emphasizes the performance of the two actresses as they realistically perform their roles for the film.

Just like his experiments with sound in Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock also makes use of sound well, even if they are drowned out by the middle chunk of the film where the film is all talk. The film is driven to action by a shriek. Later, when the dead body is discovered, reality is sucked back in by a loud sigh. In what is known to be one of the first example of an internal monologue, Menier's face deftly registers his guilt and his consciousness, even if his voice is threatened to be drowned out by the orchestral piece (which apparently was being recorded simultaneously from an orchestra playing in the back) that heightens the emotion he conveys with his face. Some of his filmed dialogs aren't necessarily bad either: during the jury deliberation scene, the camera smoothly travels back and forth as the power struggle between the jurors, culminating in a montage of faces as the jurors bully Menier into convicting Baring. Also, when it is Menier's turn to bully the real killer, the scene turns into one of stares and hand gestures, specifically Handel Fane (Esmy Percy) conveying his shock of being found-out with his hands as he simultaneously douses a cigarette butt.

Fane/Esmy is the pivotal character of the film because he is the very definition of performativity. A multiracial man who is also possibly gay, Fane is an actor who specializes in that very English role of a woman--really, a woman who has lost her feminine fragility which to a large extent desexualizes her--played by an effeminate man. His first "appearance" as the murderer has him running down the streets in police costume, which he later substitutes for a dress, and later again for the police costume, and finally for a dress for his final trapeze act. His final scene atop the circus tent is incredible, a portrait of a man who, in front of everybody, is finally laid bare and removed of his disguises. Acting himself finally becomes overbearing, and he enacts the hanging that was reserved for Baring. His act reveals the truth and brings the loop back to the closing scene behind the proscenium arch, where the victorious couple--Menier and Baring, with Menier finally satisfying the sexual attraction that led him to help Baring in the first place--enacts their celebratory kiss.

The Lost and Found Box: Rediscovering a Cinematic Tradition

2007-09-25T17:52:00.000-07:00

*NOTE: don’t be offended if you think some archivists are already doing the things I outline here: this is mostly me just brainstorming to myself about the ways of discovering Filipino films.

A discovery: Lamberto Avellana’s Sarjan Hassan (1955), a Malaysian film co-directed with filmmaker P. Ramlee, is available on VCD in Malaysia (with English subtitles!). (Sarjan Hassan of course is not only worthy of watching because it was made by Avellana, but also because it was co-directed by one of Malaysia’s greatest filmmakers.) Also, a number of Ramon Estrella’s films in Singapore and Malaysia are available on video as well. They were remnants of a time when Filipino filmmakers, along with Indian filmmakers, traveled all over Asia to develop the art in other countries. Apparently, many of their movies did not resonate as well with the local audience as those made by local filmmakers, possibly because they were more “Filipino” than Malaysian (although I wouldn’t really know what that means). Tinged with American influences, these films reflected a colonial past that was foreign to Malaysia, and an industry that displays affections for Western filmmaking through the numerous co-productions and exploitations that have existed between Hollywood and Philippine movie industry since its inception. I argue that because of this, it is worthy to consider and study these films as part of the Filipino film heritage despite the use of a foreign language.

Of course, finding Filipino movies in foreign places isn’t exactly big news. Many of Lino Brocka’s great works (including Bona) are stashed in Paris, where failed screenings planned for foreign festivals (many due to political reasons) stranded the reels in these archives and ironically, ensured their preservation. In Howie Severino’s search for lost Filipino movies, he documents the discovery of movies in Hong Kong (Gerardo de Leon’s Sanda Wong, in the Shaw Brothers vault I believe) and Thailand (a lost Darna movie and Gerardo de Leon’s Banga ni Zimadar, both dubbed for theatrical release in Thailand), as well as discovery of contemporary (as late as the 70s!) movies in the Anthology Film Archives in New York (I knew I should have tried to work in that damn place).

This should lead us to conceptualize new ways of looking for these films. In truth, missing films could be anywhere and everywhere: Ray Carney did find John Cassavetes’ long lost extended-version of Shadows in, of all places, a box somebody forgot at a New York subway and stashed at the New York Metro’s lost-and-found office. And if there’s any chance of ever finding all three hours of Orson Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons, it would be in some dilapidated old hut in the middle of the Amazon. But in truth, the sources for Filipino movies are probably more straightforward.

Note however, that Avellana may have longer versions of this or Silos has a shorter version of that, but Filipinos really do not have the time or the energy to be preoccupied with looking for director’s versions of their films. Simply, if we use Magnificent Ambersons as a metaphor, were’ still too busy looking for the 88-minute version to be concerned with the three-hour masterpiece. We aren’t concerned with establishing the defining aspects of our auteurs (as the West is), but in having the evidence for their existence in the first place.

First, many Filipino films were shown all over the world in major film festivals. Venice has been thrown about more than a few times, as well as film festivals throughout Asia. Could films have been stashed in those cities as well? Sure, major metropolitan cities such as New York and Paris which also contain very active movie-going audiences may—and do—have Filipino movies, but smaller cities in Europe (such as Nantes), India, China, Japan, even Singapore which may have had film festivals in the past may also have archives of film stocks, dilapidated those archives may be. Tracing the origins of these films, and the way the films changed hands until they landed on the organizers of these smaller film festivals, may be as fruitful as, if not more so than, following the same trail for larger film festivals.

Second, as the Malaysian example show, Filipino films and filmmakers were largely bandied about in Asia during the country’s first cinematic Golden Age, and major studios abroad such as the Shaw Brothers were very influential in buying, dubbing, and distributing Filipino movies abroad. Although there is great preoccupation in trying to force major studios in the Philippines to open their vaults, why not divert some of the attention to foreign studios? One could assume that foreign studios may be no different, but as film preservation in Hong Kong, India, China, and Malaysia show, this may not be the case. (Of course, one could argue that the Indians are probably worse at saving their movies than we are: apparently the government’s archives only contain 4,000 films, out of the 900 or so made every year in Mumbai alone for the past 70 or 80 years. But unlike in the Philippines, the family dynasties that rule over the film industry are more than willing to preserve movies connected to their name, especially the Dutts and the Kapoors.)

Third, with the political content of our films, is it possible that they might have been sent to Latin America, especially with the rise of the influence of ICAIC in the region during the 70s? If the newly aroused political consciousness of European critics led to the “discovery” of the likes of Pasolini, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Lino Brocka and their films, couldn’t some of the filmmakers and critics who attended the European film festivals that showcased the movies by these auteurs brought back copies to their respective countries? Latin America was (and is) a hotbed of international leftist and Third World defiance as represented in film. Especially for the Cubans, film took centrality in the new political revolutions taking place all over the continent. Have anybody checked the ICAIC archives? The Mexican archives? And to that extent, have anybody checked the former Soviet archives? If Soy Cuba (1964) was unearthed from the depths of Russian archives despite being long buried in memory, can we possibly do the same for such films as Moises Padilla Story (1961) or even Daigdig ng Mga Api (1965)?

The other extreme of Philippine cinema could be of help as well. On the one hand there’s the political consciousness of the films of the 60s through the 80s. On the other there’s the exploitation films not only of the 70s and the 80s where Cleopatra Wong and Weng Weng reigned, or the 60s where Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero slummed it with Roger Corman’s exploitation film outfits, but also the “Golden Age of Exploitation,” the 30s and the 40s when films from other countries, especially the “Orient,” were brought to American shores, cut, re-cut, scenes added, even multiple movies merged, and shown in seedy theatres as shocking views of an alien world.

One particular character is Lloyd Friedgen. As an enterprising producer, he traveled to Asia’s more active filmmaking industries—that is, the studios of the Philippines and India—to take films that could possibly attract an audience in the US. Two films he “discovered” that are now known amongst cult film enthusiasts are Forbidden Women (1948) by Eduardo Castro, the mind behind Zamboanga (1937; the print was discovered of all places in Finland) and Outrages of the Orient (1948) by Carlos Vander Tolosa, the man who made Bilanggong Birhen (1960) and Giliw Ko (1939). Of course, these movies were manhandled by Friedgen, cutting dialogue and action continuity and flow, reinserting scenes from other movies or scenes newly filmed by Friedgen to “spice-up” the story. If anything, if not re-done and re-transformed to at least remove scenes that are known to be Friedgen’s and not Castro’s/Tolosa’s, these movies are great windows to what would otherwise remain lost, hidden, and forgotten. Tracking Friedgen’s history, his dealings with other producers like him (especially another producer, Ray Friedgen, although I’m thinking they are the same person or possibly he is Lloyd’s father), and possibly any existing archive of his movies could uncover an interesting goldmine of unseen—but unfortunately molested—Filipino films.

Finally, for a people so defined by emigration as the Filipinos (it is important to note that OCWs, or Overseas Contract Workers, drive the country’s economy, Filipinos are fast becoming the largest Asian group in the US, and the Filipino immigration to Australia is one of the country’s largest), it could be possible that films followed Filipinos wherever there was a large concentration of them. Bollywood for example spread throughout much of Africa and Asia not simply because their simplicity and mindlessness (two elements which are not present in many a good Bollywood film) appealed universally, but because Indians brought their films with them to wherever they went. It’s no surprise that Bollywood is perpetually popular in African countries when one also points out that South Asians—called simply Asians in some countries—migrated in large numbers to the continent, especially during the era of European domination during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and established communities that retained contact with the motherland until today.

For Filipinos, for film, one area that might be worth studying is Hawaii (since I know more about Filipino immigration to the US than anywhere else, I’m going to talk about that). Unlike early Chinese migration to the mainland, early Filipino communities in continental US, especially in the West, were defined by their impermanence. Like the displaced Midwestern poor and the Mexican workers of the teens and 20s, Filipinos were by and large migrant workers, and they moved along with the crops and the available farm jobs. Wherever Filipinos rested, there was a community. This is far from being an ideal situation for establishing a cinema. (More permanent Filipino communities in places such as Stockton near san Francisco, and Southern California did not come about until the late 50s. And even then, it was still under the control of the constantly changing California cityscape. Philippinetown in Downtown Los Angeles for example is not really the historic home of the Filipino community in Los Angeles. The original Philippinetown was first located around Bunker Hill, which was displaced by the development of the Financial District, then later around Union Station, which was later displaced by the construction of the station. In San Francisco, the tenuous nature of the Filipino community is of course most prominently symbolized by the I-Hotel, a building that housed a significant Filipino community until the city government decided to demolish it to make way for urban development.)

Hawaii, on the other hand, had a much more stationary Filipino community. When immigration began in the 20s, Filipinos moved to Hawaii not only to work then move back to the Philippines (like the migrant workers in California then and the OCWs now), but rather to really establish a life in Hawaii. Although the bulk of the Filipino immigration to the US later drifted further east to the US mainland, and the Filipino immigration to Hawaii was not as significant as the second wave of immigration to places such as California and Virginia that took place in the 80s (only a few thousands, compared to hundreds of thousands), their rootedness and permanence nevertheless gives rise to speculation that cinemas catering to a Tagalog-speaking clientele may have existed in Hawaii. Although these films may have been destroyed and disposed as easily as they were back in Manila, it might still be worth seeking Hawaii’s archives to see if Filipino entrepreneurs did indeed bring their films to people who craved a taste of home, and if they did if those films survived at all.

Although the conditions of early migration to California discounts the possibility of films from the era to exist here (outside of private collections, that is), the conditions of the great wave of migration of the 80s did however made possible the spread of film in another format: through video. Whereas film depended on expensive and immobile equipment, video encased the film in a portable plastic box that could be played using another, but only slightly larger, box. Video diminished the quality of the image it displays, but it nevertheless allowed that image to be easily transferred out of the country, viewed thousands of miles away, and keep in a small compartment all the subtle mannerisms and idioms that define the culture where it came from, the culture which the displaced immigrant understands. It allowed the immigrant to keep contact with the land she left, something that is very important for the uber-patriotic Filipino. This is probably why the establishment of a Filipino video store, alongside a glorified sari-sari stores (stores that sold pretty much everything under the sun) and a turo-turo (literally “point-point,” cheap Filipino food a la carte), is enough to announce the establishment of a Filipino community.

The Filipinos who became Americans in the 80s didn’t stay in the Filipino epicenters of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Hawaii. They moved to Virginia, Florida, Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, Las Vegas, Chicago, and even New Orleans, like their 18th century predecessors. And with them came the video collections culled from back home, by the then classic and contemporary masters: Avellana, de Leon, Romero, Bernal, and Brocka. Not only this, film companies from the Philippines followed them too and catered to the community. Regal and Video films transferred many films to video and sold them to individual collectors and video stores. The irony is that since the conditions in the states were more conducive to preservation than back home (where the constant humidity and heat hastened the deterioration of both electronic and film sources), many videos that are scarce in the Philippines outside of Video 48 in Manila are common in more established Filipino communities (Oro, Plata, Mata for example, a film that is scarce in the Philippines, is available in all four of the video stores I frequent in Southern California. But that’s a subject for another post).

The end result of having such an active video scene within the immigrant community is the availability of films that would otherwise be absent. As already mentioned, video stores stock some titles that are rare anywhere else. In other times, the end result could even be the discovery of a film that exists in no other form: Brocka’s Tubog sa Ginto, for example, could now only be viewed because a beta tape was discovered in New York. Of course, I’m sure, like any video, the image quality is far behind of the image that could have been viewed if the actual film stock existed. But as I’ve said before, you take what you can. It’s better to have it in deteriorated state than not have it at all. This beta tape at least proves to us that there is indeed a film called Tubog sa Ginto, and that indeed we can view it for ourselves.

Philippine Racehorse

2007-09-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

The Philippines' entry to the Oscars this year is Donsol, a 2006 film by Adolfo Alix, Jr. about the popular diving site where whalesharks are frequently sighted. Unfortunately, no DVD or VCD of it could be seen anywhere. Maybe this Oscars business could spur a company or another to release it, along with other deserving indie films, in a respectable DVD package.

Here is the Inquirer article about it.

Here is the film's official site. Click "Enter Site"...it's a fucking Twilight Zone.

Here is what Oggs' Movie Thoughts thought about the film. Essentially, it's a pretty picture. He compares it to Jeffrey Jeturian's Minsan Pa (2004) which, fortunately, is on video with subtitles to boot.

Here's a trailer:

Inang Yaya (Pablo Biglangawa & Veronica Velasco, 2006)

2007-09-25T01:16:00.001-07:00

A digital film about the ubiquitous Filipina domestic worker, Inang Yaya is a Filipino reworking of James L. Brooks’ brilliant 2004 melodrama Spanglish, where a recent Mexican immigrant brings her daughter along when she stays with a rich West LA family in Malibu for the summer. In Inang Yaya, Norma (Maricel Soriano), a domestic worker in Manila brings her daughter Ruby (Tala Santos) with her after her mother (Marita Zobel), who was caring for her daughter while she stays in the city to take care of a wealthy couple’s daughter, Louise (Erika Oreta), suddenly dies. Just like in Brooks’ film, drama ensues after class tension forces Norma and Ruby to compromise their relationship for the sake of the family they serve. Directors Biglangawa and Velasco do a great job of translating the story into a new context, despite compromising some of Brooks’ insights for the sake of dramatic tesion.

First, the DVD. I have to say, I feel bad dinging Unico Home Entertainment for their DVD releases for they might just be one of the leading companies when it comes to releasing Filipino movies, both contemporary and classic. They started the trend in transferring Filipino films into digital medium with their Cinefilipino line, and now they are pushing the limits by releasing great but largely unknown classics from Lino Brocka. But the problem is their transfers suck. As I’ve said before, they pretty much botched up the DVD for Ina Kapatid Anak (and I’m not talking about the lengthy, complicated, and expensive process of restoration, but rather the simple and relatively inexpensive act of properly masking the film that is going to be digitized). Manila By Night is a mess. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros is riddled with combing (which can be fixed by merely removing some of the extra crap they have on the DVD so that there will be more space for the film itself). And judging from the stock they will use for the Insiang DVD (the one used for the New York Film Festival screening, which had the subtitles burned-in), they will probably apply some weird and previously non-existent masking to cover up the burned subtitles. I wish to be proved wrong, but I doubt that that will be the case.

For Inang Yaya, the image looks like it was an internet video stretched out to DVD-sized image. The degree of pixelation makes it look like it was from a bootleg DVD (no, I wasn’t watching bootleg video). The colors were right-on—really, how can you mess up the colors in a digital feature?—but the pixelation was a major enough problem that it distracted from the viewing experience. Some would say that I should just be thankful, but personally this degree of carelessness is a reflection of just how much movies really are undervalued in Filipino society. Looking to make a quick buck, Unico’s DVDs look like something they wiped their ass with. Knowing the demand, they want nothing more but to satisfy the demand without giving anybody quality products.

Translating Spanglish to Tagalog seems to be a surefire way into making a blockbuster. Unlike Americans who cannot relate to the Spanglish’s wealthy families because domestic workers and personal helps remain a privilege of the wealthy, Filipinos in general know the experience of either being served by domestic servants or serving as a domestic help. Filipinos either carry fond memories of their yayas—which, unlike in the West, does not merely translate to “maid,” but rather something more endearing, like a governess who acts as a second mother—or the children they literally raise because of the absence of working parents. I personally was attracted to both Spanglish and Inang Yaya because of my own fond memories of my yaya, whose personal life I was never privy to, and who became a part of the family about the life of whom no one knows. She died of cancer a few years back, but I was not able to be there because we moved to the US. In her absence she became an enigma, much as Norma’s life unfolds before Louise’s eyes as if this woman who is practically her mother is just now introducing herself to Louise.

Inang Yaya and Spanglish’s triumph is in articulating what I have always found odd in having a yaya: the class difference that drives such relationships to exist and the class envy that drives people to enter such relationships fully knowing that they will be in the lower, serving end. What is fully extrapolated in Spanglish but subtly hinted upon in Inang Yaya is the economic gap that keeps the master and the servant from ever fully understanding each other. Inang Yaya’s publicity touts it as a film that explores the nature of motherhood and the ability of a woman to be a mother to a child that is not her own. Thankfully, it never actually does this, instead focusing on the perpetual difference of the servant from the master. The film’s preoccupation with slightly opened doors and windows and frames within frames does not connote a space through which people could meet each other, but rather the frames and entities that separate and prevent. When Ruby slowly forms a friendship with Louise, fade-ins have her move from one door frame to another, until she is sitting next to Louise. But when this connection is made, it is shot so as to revela Norma afar, ironing clothes, framed and separated by multiple door frames. Seeing her separation, we are reminded that Ruby is lured not simply by Louise, but by her toys. It is a companionship formed through class envy. But the most poignant use of these frames within frames is when Norma is helping Ruby and Louise get ready for school. Teased by her classmates for being poor, Ruby runs to the school bus so the other girls in the bus do not see her mother. When she sees that the girls forgot their lunch boxes, Norma runs to the bus to give them their lunch. She barely makes it, and when the door to the bus is closed, Nora’s face is framed by the door window, while in the foreground Ruby ducks her head in shame as the other girls laugh at her. The window emphasizes Norma slowly drifting away from her daughter, and Ruby’s slow destruction due to her difference.

Many viewers complain that the film lacks any sort of dramatic tension, but I think the tension comes in the details, specifically the clothes and the toys that define Louise and Ruby’s relationship. One of Louise’s first interaction with Ruby is when she recognizes Ruby’s shirt as one of her throw-aways that Norma took for her daughter. While Ruby looks on as an observer (behind doors, windows, and thin walls), Norma repeatedly keeps telling Louise to clean up her toys. In one scene, Louise hits Norma with her stuffed toy after Norma scolds her for being messy. As Ruby looks on, Norma looks ashamed, but continues her work simply because she has to. When Ruby asks for something—stationery stickers—what is revealed isn’t merely Ruby’s growing materialistic desire but Norma’s inability to provide for it. When her mistress May (Sunshine Cruz) asks her what’s wrong as she was about to tell Norma to change the sheets in the guest room, the connection is made between May and husband Noel’s (Zoren Legaspi) kindness and Norma’s role as a servant. When May buys Ruby the stickers she wanted, the couple’s “kindness” is laid bare: it isn’t merely kindness, but rather a payment for Norma giving up her role as a mother to her daughter.

It is however in the portrayal of Louise’s family that Inang Yaya failed, and miserably. Whereas it cleanly lifted the class tension and human dynamic in the domestic worker’s perspective from Spanglish, it failed to take that film’s humanist look at the lives of the wealthy. Whereas Brooks’ film delved deep into the damages privilege does to a family’s psyche, May, Noel, Lola/Grandma Toots (Liza Lorena) and Louise are mere witnesses—wooden witnesses, at that—to the drama that is Norma’s life. In its approach to the family’s desire to move to Singapore, we never understand it as anything more than a change in lifestyle, as if the family is just moving down the street. When the family pressures Norma to leave her daughter to move to Singapore with them, we are supposed to understand why exactly the family would do this. But the whole time, my reaction is, “who cares?” The film doesn’t establish this family’s concerns as weighing more than taking care of one’s own child. One could mention Louise’s attachment to Norma, but as the film’s preoccupation with the half-closed windows and doors show, her attachment is at best tenuous, one that remains between a servant and the master-child.

This oversight is also what causes the film’s most dramatic scene to fall flat. When Norma buys Ruby new shoes that look like Louise’s expensive shows only to find that the shoes are “Skeetchers,” not “Sketchers,” Ruby rejects the shoes, and ultimately her mother. The scene is witnessed by Louise, whose presence weighs heavily on the scene even if the camera relegates her to one small corner of the frame. The scene could have been as powerful as Flor (Paz Vega) quitting her job in Spanglish, and Cristina (Shelbie Bruce) voicing out her hatred and rejection of her mother for turning her back to luxury and comfort. In that scene, the resignation is witnessed by the members of the family, whose awakening is charted by the film. But in Inang Yaya, the witness isn’t awakened. Her complications as a character only extend as far as having an emotional attachment to her servant, but never her relationship to a servant. She isn’t awakened as much as she witnesses yet another teary scene between the mother and the daughter. Which is why her effort to reconcile the mother and the daughter (which Lola Toots crassly made explicit later on in the film) seems a little odd. It’s not for the sake of acceptance of self along with the acceptance of the mother, but merely for dramatic reconciliation.

This about face the film took—from a film that chronicles economic difference to one that just wants a smoothly dramatic tying of all elements—is redeemed by the ending that rejected the motherhood theme that its publicity touted over a critical look at salaried-motherhood. When Norma plays with the girls in what seems to be a dream-like, paradise-like setting, she asks if she could ever divide her heart over her daughter by blood and adopted daughter. Ironically, she wears a servant’s uniform. When the maid and her child-master are separated, Louise and her family leaves on a van, while Norma and Ruby leaves through a lowly tricycle. Louise may see her as a mother, but even in their separation are portrayed to be not in equal footing. These elements underline the film’s main tension, even if it still leaves the wealthy family inexplicably wooden.

Digital Goldmine

2007-09-24T03:06:00.000-07:00

Bored and sleepless, I did what any self-respecting person does during times like these: go online and watch random videos from YouTube. Here I present you a slew of Ludacris videos I thought were pretty well made.

"Roll Out" (Jeremy Rall, 2001)

With an oversized head matching his oversize ego, oversized rims, and oversized pockets, Ludacris parodies his personality and the media and watchers that admire and loathe the image he peddles. He switches back and forth between pushing back busy bodies while parading the things these curious onlookers are asking about. It's a complicated relationship, underlined by the emphasis on the CGI fakeness of Ludacris' blown-up head. What is lost in the transaction Ludacris points out, as he flashes words on screen reenacting the rhymes coming out of him. It's genius: while tabloid headlines are boringly static, his lyrics jump across the screen, runs around, goes around him, etc. He also makes a counterpoint between the imagery of the words and the images of the words, as the poetic nature of the words battle the baseness of the lifestyle they portray.

"Money Maker" (Melina, 2006)

Although it looks very identical, this video has nothing on Kanye West's "Gold Digger", with its use of pin ups in lieu of stereotypical hip hop images of pretty women and a Kanye West with his back turned towards the camera to emphasize both the women (we only see the back of his head) and the "personal advice" like tone of the song. But its use of lighting, rich colors, and rhythmic editing is I believe equally competent. The relationship may even be intentional: with alternating flashes of booty and money, one can't help but be reminded of West's ode to women and the costly measures he is willing to take to keep them. West's admiration of the Gold Digger and Ludacris' of the said female's Money Maker (admitting both the exploitation of her ass and the ability of that ass to exploit back) presents a less vapid relationship between colored man and colored woman. It's not just between a bitch and a dog, but between two people using each other, both to pay for bills and to please themselves. In addition, the (pseudo) retro touches of frame growing within frames historicizes the sexual struggle as well as West's (inappropriate, to some extent) incorporation of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman".

"Act a Fool" (Bryan Barber, 2003)

With candy colors whizzing by, Ludacris gives praise to the pop phenomena that are the racing culture and the gaming culture. Coupled with lyrics about materialist rebellion, the anatomy of a racing car, and the pleasures of sitting back and smoking up with your buddies, this video tries to capture and explain the spirit of underground and separatist cultures. The video starts with a motley crew of carts on wheels, be they brightly colored or dilapidated ice cream trucks, giving rise to nostalgic memories of those Twisted Metal games (yes, in existence mere ten years ago, yet that is the nature of the contemporary media landscape). As they race through the streets of Los Angeles (the city never looked so ugly yet so exciting), Ludacris touches upon every ridiculous details put on a lowly racing car: tv sets on the steering wheel, grills, NOS tanks, gigantic speakers...it's funny, yet affirms deep-seated capitalist fantasies. He gives a shout out to these cultures and pays his respect to the extent they have changed culture at large, especially hip hop and the influence hip hop has to American/Western culture.

Nights of Serafina (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1996)

2007-09-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

Out of the five Joey Gosiengfiao films I have seen—Secrets of Pura (1989), Iskandalo! (1980), Exploitation, Nights of Serafina (1996), and Babae…Ngayon at Kailanman (1978)—Nights of Serafina is probably the closest to camp-filmmaker as Gosiengfiao got. (I have not seen Temptation Island (1981), so do not fault me for not considering that title.) Not just campy as in Secrets of Pura was, but made with camp aesthetic, with its preoccupation with the decorative and the aesthetic, and the documentation of cultural references through which these decorative elements are given importance. Instead of a focus on the story, Gosiengfiao’s preoccupation is the performance of the narrative and the narrative’s intents, the display of bodies and things rather than the exploration of the world in which bodies and things exist. It’s an ingenious rearranging, since it filters Gosiengfiao’s focus on Filipino provincialism and machismo, bypassing “storytelling” for the sake of getting to the narrative's core.

Nights of Serafina concerns Anton, a wealthy logger and his wife Serafina, a woman from the slums of Manila. They move to Anton’s house in a tropical island where they live with Anton’s domineering and disapproving mother (a staple in Filipino movies), his rebellious brother, his brother’s horny girlfriend (who lives with them so the family can curry favors from her powerful father), a mess of maids and servants, and a group of unhappy loggers working for the family. The workers’ unhappiness, the girlfriend’s dissatisfaction, and a servant girl’s longing for a more fast-paced life are shown parallel to Serafina's, whose unhappiness with Anton is exacerbated when she finds that he is impotent due to a childhood accident where a cut tree fell on his pelvic area. She finds happiness through a strike breaker, who she fell in love with after he forcibly made love with her during a ferry crossing. After the whole clan finds out, things come to a head when Serafina and her new lover try to hide the affair from Anton’s family and the town they control.

The film does have its faults, some major enough to ruin the narrative thrust. First, the soundtrack is too overbearing. The film uses two different tracks to illustrate all of the scenes in the film: a calypso track and an electronic track that sounds too much like porn music. Both do not really work because both promise mere titillation, which the film doesn’t really give. The calypso track I presume was used because Gosiengfiao used a lot of panoramic shot of the tropical island and shots of its aquamarine beaches. But far from merely depicting the beauty of the island, Gosiengfiao meant these shots to be more sinister. I wish I can say that the music emphasized the irony, but it was overused to the point of annoyance. The porn music was there essentially because by and large this movie is a skin flick, but the music made the film merely that, instead of a film that explored the very nature of sex.

Also, this might seem tedious and asinine, but there’s something wrong about the hair. First, continuity-wise, the men’s hairdos change from short to long unexpectedly from scene to scene. It was distracting and made their hair less of a component in a film where hair seems to be such a big symbol. Whereas Serafina’s hair is composed to be wild and seductive (there’s a direct reference to Rita Hayworth, with the way she flings it about), the mother’s was tightly wrapped in an updo and the girlfriend’s hair is free and let down but looks more contrived than Serafina’s. The way the women’s hair fell on their heads and the way their hair looked on close-ups was as important to Gosiengfiao’s framing as the face itself, and it’s a shame that for the men the same was not the case.

The constant image is that of the phallic being torn down, cut off, or useless. Anton's failing logging business lies parallel to his equally failing penis. His brother on the other hand could perform just fine, but his prowess is taxed by his efforts to adhere to tradition, constantly trying to force his promiscuous girlfriend to settle down and start a family. Apparently, the trait runs in the family: the father’s inability to perform also caused his wife to be unfaithful, thus driving the father to commit suicide. One could say that this problematic situation is formulaic and typical of femmes fatales: a woman who, unhappy with what she has, chooses to betray the people around her and cause their demise. But Gosiengfiao portrays it differently: the women are not merely dissatisfied, they are downright deprived. Serafina has nothing to be dissatisfied of. The women, who constantly strike glamour poses (as fetishistic phallic substitutes)—Serafina is introduced as a model standing atop a column—as men around them stare in awe, are collected as if to compensate for what the men lack.

Although Gosiengfiao makes use of the forests and the beaches that dot the island in which the film is based, his intent is neither to make the story more beautiful nor to make sex/love more natural. Whereas a hack filmmaker would have portrayed the jungle as a place where man and woman could be liberated from inhibitions and culture and just do whatever they damn well please, Gosiengfiao takes it a step back and portrayed the jungle and beach scenes as places where culture and morals are more at play than anywhere else. In the jungle—at a place called Forbidden Place—the sex isn’t al fresco, but takes place at a centrally located hut that makes all the sexual conflicts that happen there look like plays on domestic life. Even the very idea of “a place where forbidden things happen” suggests the very mores and laws that make certain things forbidden and not the unspecified “forbidden thing” itself. Even if this is not the case, the attention given to the prying eyes hidden amongst the foliage that watch the forbidden things as they happen—and at the beach, hidden by sunglasses and rocks—underlines less the forbidden act (which, in being performed, liberates) than the act of watching, of safely participating in things forbidden through the protection of the fourth wall.

Opposed to the jungle, the man-as-animal exists in the house and within social functions when man interacts with fellow humans. In a brilliant sequence, when Serafina arrives at Anton’s house, Anton’s mother plans a wedding party for them by bringing in a slew of animals to be killed and eaten. When Anton’s mother finally sees Serafina and rejects her, her rejection is juxtaposed with cuts of animals being slaughtered. The juxtaposition is bridged by Anton’s mother smoothly transitioning between managing the slaughter and managing her rejection of Serafina. Using close ups of the mother and the slaughter, Gosiengfiao emphasizes the barbarism and inhumanity of the mother’s actions. In another sequence, after Anton discovers Serafina’s infidelity and orders his workers to kill her lover and rape her, her rapists are shown hovering over her not as men but as hyenas ready to kill and eat a prey they have pinned. It would have been less effective if it just invoked the image of hyenas eating. Instead, the men literally looked like a gang of cannibals about to mercilessly tear into a prey.

This sounds all too academic, but Nights of Serafina is anything but. The sex isn’t merely metaphorical; it is as erotic as anything that could be shown in theatres. The centrality of the “glamour pose” is made erotic by focusing on the sleekness of the female body as seen from a lower angle, as if looking up at a towering statue. However, it is also made to be funny due to its mere existence. The women kind of just strike poses randomly, as if to constantly remind the men of what the ydo not have. Being a gay filmmaker, Gosiengfiao catches the male body at times when it is half clothed: after taking a shower or right after sex (the woman isn’t treated to the same disrobing. The women are always covered up after sex, and when their clothes are being torn off, strategically placed objects always cover the naughty bits at the expense of revealing their partner’s private areas.) When they cannot be placed in the same context, Gosienfiao makes sure that they are. During a fight scene, after Anton slaps the hell out of his brother’s girlfriend, he proceeds to wrestle with his brother wearing only speedos. It’s Gosiengfiao’s personal paradise, and a commentary on traditional Filipino machismo: man disrobed and fetishized, man deprived of his phallo-ceintric power. But the way he makes his point is so cheeky despite being so destabilizing that one cannot help but take Gosiengfiao's challenge to the very foundation of Filipino society in stride.

Kubrador (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2006)

2007-09-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

Jueteng, as Kubrador reminds us, is a numbers game that is as common and popular in the Philippines as lotto is to the Americans. Everybody plays it and a kubrador (bet collector) talking up potential customers is a common sight in villages and neighborhoods across the country. Its ubiquity would have been reason for avoiding it as a movie’s focal point, if not for the fact that it is also illegal in the country and the irony that results creates much tragedy or an illustration thereof. But unlike things illegal in the West, jueteng isn’t sexy. There’s no edgy appeal to playing jueteng. It’s associated less with celebrities than it is with bored grandmothers and corrupt politicians. This lack of mystique allows Jeturian to bare the game naked and use it as an allegory to the contemporary Filipino condition. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but by and large it does well in injecting new blood into the art of Tagalog filmmaking.

Gina Pareño is Amy, a cautious yet bet collector whose desperation drives her to push her luck despite the chances of getting caught by the police. Everyone knows her—everyone calls out her name as she passes by, gives her the latest gossip, and of course, gives her their numbers (and money). As an agent of the popular jueteng, her character traverses the different levels of the hierarchy of Filipino society, from the slums to the local jueteng bosses to the regional cashier, and to the police, who gives her their bets right in their station. She gets very little for her work, and she suffers through long days and stubborn customers unwilling to part with their money. But she still does it, from desperation or some illogical sense of adventure we are never really sure (she’s poor, yes, that in itself never seem to be the only reason for being a bet collector; simply manning their house-front store and devoting her life only on that seems like a boring life relegated to daytime TV and disintegration).

The film is most effective when it “merely” observes. As a digital production, the resulting image could not help but have a very deep depth of focus. However, this is not to the movie’s detriment, as it lends a depth of meaning in allowing the eyes to wander through the milieu that Jeturian records. By avoiding close-ups and blurred backgrounds—and thus shot counter shots and heavy action-reaction editing—Kubrador successfully becomes never a “mere story,” but rather a depiction of a condition and a reality. In addition, the movie’s numerous long takes, especially the opening scene (which felt like a journey to the depths of hell guided by our Virgil-kubrador, appropriately followed by a chase scene filmed atop the tin roofs of the shantytown as if Dante just dug himself out of Hell only to be kicked back into it) and the last scene, adds to the sense of reality merely recorded, and thus the expectant complications that comes therewith. Instead of an “issue”—as it has been treated in popular Filipino media especially during the last seven or eight years—jueteng becomes a tool in sketching experiences and realities, and the intersecting motives and rationales that drive these experiences and realities to come about.

The movie however fails when Jeturian moves away from neorealism to moralism. Amy works because she has a lazy husband. Jeturian never expands the husband’s character to allow us an insight in why he does not work. Simply, he is a Juan Tamad (Lazy John) archetype, and the invocation of that is enough for his marginalization. Worse off, he watches Filipino television. Never mind that he must have reasons for watching this mindless piece of diversion. But all we see is of him in extreme close-up, obviously enjoying the stupid game shows and gyrating half-clad women on “Wowowee” (a local noon-time game show, which recently got involved in a cheating “scandal”). Only that for Jeturian, he abhorrently does. Also, in two potentially effective scenes, Kubrador merely becomes polemic. In one, Amy, busy writing numbers down, wanders off into unknown alleys and becomes lost. Instead of increasing Amy’s—and our—confusion, we are instead reminded of the hopelessness of the slums: “confusion” in air quotes. In another, when Amy goes to a gambling cashier’s house to collect winnings, the cashier (played by Johnny Manahan) goes off into a rant about buwayas (literally alligators, corrupt politicians) and the church, and how they hypocritically benefit from jueteng while they condemn it. The cashier’s speech could have been easily inserted into the narrative, but is instead turned into a lecture on the inner workings of illegal gambling and political corruption. True as these concerns may be, the movie becomes issue-oriented, thus losing the complexity of reality.

I think this same issue is what ultimately made Jeturian’s Tuhog (2001) equally unsatisfying despite being compelling. In Tuhog, where two filmmakers adapt a rape victim’s story only to turn it into a skin flick, Jeturian explores the “divide” between fiction and reality and how maintaining and transgressing this divide fuel Filipino cinephilia. The movie could have been effective, if only Jeturian could have kept himself from being too excited. Once he gets worked up, he acts just like anyone who gets a pulpit. In Tuhog, even though he balances “reality” and the two filmmakers’ rendition of this “reality” quite well, he slips into a condemnation of “fiction,” over-dramatizing the filmmakers’ version of reality to over-emphasize its falsity. The movie thus went from an exploration of the Filipino film industry to a didactic piece about the evils of it.

Despite all these, Tuhog and Kubrador are not bad movies. They are very thoughtful films, and made with an original and irrepressible vision of truth and reality. But if Jeturian doesn't watch it, he might just become the new Gil M. Portes, another Filipino movie maker who makes great films hampered by an inability to resist grandstanding. (His Homecoming (2003), for example, was a great film crippled in the last minute by Portes’ main character’s need to “educate” her fellow Filipinos.) However, unlike Portes, Jeturian at least shows an ability to grow, to develop a trust in his audience’s ability to perceive the reality he submits. In a recent “Maalaala mo kaya?” (Would you remember?) Jeturian-directed episode (which aired on TFC here in Los Angeles on 01 SEP 2007), issues of poverty, family, and international identity are treated to a rendition that both kept the gravity of these issues intact, while at the same time keeping the rendition squarely populist (but not condescending either, using melodrama but not histrionics). This goes to show that Jeturian has the makings of a Vidor or de Sica if only he realizes the inherent intelligence of his “masa.”

Fuck Cinema: the poseur and the artist

2007-09-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

The praise for Guy Maddin in general and Cowards Bend The Knee (2003) in particular is both mind-boggling and m/saddening. It is always disappointing and heartbreaking when the term "avante-garde" becomes tainted by usage of critics to praise people like Maddin. It looses its almost mythic aura when you have video amateurs being praised because somehow they come close to how Brakhage, Deren, Jean Epstein, or Claire are in atmosphere but not in spirit. Funny reading many reviews of this movie, one realizes that most critics are actually at a loss for explanation of what exactly is so avante-garde about Maddin's works. In Hoberman's reviews, it is the intertitles, the shaky (also "nervous" and "unstable") camera, and the decaying look of sepia that makes it avante-garde. For Matt Zoller Seitz, it's the Lang-inspired lighting and the use of two-way mirrors which also act as irises. But these are not at all avante-garde. True, Maddin is alone in his eclectic pursuits. But this eclecticism does not qualify as artistic experimentation. It's just that, eclecticism. More than not, Maddin just apes what silent and early sound cinemas have already innovated for camp. The dream-like feel of his movies are less about him doing anything dream-like (applying vaseline on camera lenses to create hazy images does not a dream make) than the invocation of memories of an unexperienced past as told through the ancient history of cinema, now ironically available through videotapes and DVDs. Compare the "dream" of Maddin's ADD jump-cuts and unstill cameras to Tarkovsky's evocative nature scenes and interplay of color and monochromatic film stocks and one discovers how Maddin truly lags behind true artists who understand the closeness of dream, nightmare, and cinema. Compare Eisenstein's montage sequences for Strike or Dovzhenko's editing in Arsenal, and look at Maddin's supposedly comparable editing in Heart of the World and one would understand why anyone would feel like poking their eyes out everyone calls this guy a "master". Wheras Dovzhenko created rhythm, emotion, and energy through the simple act of cutting images together, Maddin merely creates a barage of images that jumble into an incoherent mess, weakly supported by a quasi-Freudian message that imitates Lang's Metropolis (1927) for cheap snigger. I agree with Rosenbaum on one thing: "there's nothing remotely normal about any of the Maddin films." But only in a strictly conformist society does abnormality ever becomes a sign of distinction.

In terms of its exploration of sex, Cowards Bend the Knee is boringly and routinely Freudian. Penises aren't penises but phallic structures. Sex is power struggle. The woman is the mother and the man is the father/son (sorry, there are no daughters). It's not erotic, it's academic. Some artists such as Antonioni and Almodovar manage to make auterist touches seem sexy instead of mechanic; Maddin unfortunately does not have their talent. An uplifted hand, instead of oozing the sexiness of power and the power of sex, manages to convey sex and power separately. A kinky woman dipping her finger in sugar and proceeding to suck the hell out of it is documented without care. No, this isn't a means of conveying sex in a new way. Simply, this is a result of someone conveying sex who couldn't really care any less about it.

Compare this to Laurice Guillen's 1992 Tagalog blockbuster Dahil Mahal Kita ("Because I love you") and Maddin is exposed for the coward filmmaker that he is. Guillen doesn't settle for the Freudian hegemony. Instead, she delves into the very humane urge to fuck. Profanely, Guillen's movie is about a promiscuous woman who is infected with HIV and develops AIDS. Instead of giving up, her will to live and to live on puts her at odds with her caretakers and a country in denial of the truth about AIDS when she becomes the first person to come out with her illness. The movie lacks Maddin's different-ness, focusing instead on rote realism underlined by heavy-handed melodrama. But Guillen's movie makes use of melodrama to give the story emotional credibility, but not to the point of losing its dignity. The best scene has Dolzura describing what she longs after developing AIDS, verbally describing sex without really going into anything blatantly sexual. With her descriptions of ears, legs, hands, and eyes, the scene deftly explores the nature of erotica rather than merely putting it on display. It's simplicity and sincerity lends the scene the eroticism a full-blown sex scene may not have provided. With a filmmaking style more interested in being profound and sincere, Guillen ultimately makes a movie more interesting and interested in sex than Maddin's handjob of a movie.

Dalaga si Misis Binata si Mister (Lino Brocka, 1981)

2007-09-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

Is Dalaga si Misis Binata si Mister a complete failure? Not at all. I don’t think masters such as Brocka are ever capable of making anything that is a complete ham, but maybe this is a reflection of the leeway given to Brocka as per his role as the most influential filmmaker in the Philippines, and it may be proven wrong by simply pointing out that I have not seen all, not even most, of Brocka’s pictures. However, even if the technical reality of a certain film project makes it impossible for a movie to be a success, the qualities that define an auteur could nevertheless be taken into account and be used to interpret the movie beyond its technical failures.

In this movie however, it is the other way around: the technical gloss masks Brocka’s perpetual preoccupation with class and social transgression to deliver an entertaining vehicle for Nora Aunor and Christopher De Leon and nothing more. And the movie is entertaining: as a comedy, both actors play the traditional (stereotypical?) battle of the sexes scenario to a hilt, and do not fail to give a sense of dignity in their roles despite the need to make it funny in a conventional and inoffensive manner. In addition, the lengthy opening sequence and the number of scenes here and there within the movie displays Aunor’s singing, a diversion the inclusion of which to the narrative will be discussed later on.

But as portrait of domestic dysfunction, this is a second-rate attempt by Brocka to do something in which Bernal specializes. Not just marital discord, but rather in dramatizing social, political, and emotional distress as revealed through the breakdown of the family, the base of the Filipino’s (mythical) sense of self. In Bernal’s films however, the use of marriage as social metaphor is taken further by never really focusing on the destruction of the heterosexual relationship (unlike Brocka, queer reality was never a concern for Bernal, who I guess found enough solidarity in the equally marginalized image of the woman and also found that focusing on the relationship between a man and a woman to be more bankable), but rather on the ravages this destruction wreaks on the woman, both bearer and protector of patriarchal values and the primary victim of it. Bernal’s female image is Vilma Santos, whose (despite being known for her histrionics) use of a brand of subtle acting (one of small flutters of mannerisms that would fit well in a John Cassavetes flick) made the damage less ideological and more personal, and thus more devastating.

Aunor on the other hand isn’t meant for such a role. Whereas Santos specializes in personifying internalized and normalized social mores and the damages done thereof, Aunor’s image isn’t as “everyday woman.” Her very being is one of defiance: short, dark, and very strong eyes, Aunor cannot do “damaged woman” because of the passivity it implies in part of the woman. Although Santos’ characters, although suffering the havoc of patriarchy, never becomes a mere victim, Aunor’s image already assumes liberation, one whose defiance is not a product of oppression but of the character’s innate rebellion (ironically, since she is always portrayed as being more “traditional”). Even in a movie such as Brocka’s Nakaw na Pag-Ibig (“Stolen Love,” 1980), where Aunor played the role of a poor woman whose lover’s class envy caused him to leave her for a richer woman, Aunor’s oppressed wife never seems so “oppressed.” Even if her lover left her, her small efforts to win him back still betrays a sense of dignity, of a woman who wasn’t going to take anything lying down in the first place. (Which also made her character’s demise a little predictable, but not in a bad way.)

In the case of Dalaga si Misis Binata si Mister, this image of liberation translated into irresponsibility. The notion of “play” that is associated with love, sex, and youth that Bernal complicated in Dalawang Pugad Isang Ibon (“A bird and two nests,” 1977) in here is literally just play: when Aunor tells de Leon that they need to separate so they can be singles again without having to think of each other, it literally sounded as just that. There is no sense of a complicated relationship one has to marriage (freedom vs. companionship; the freedom in companionship and the oppression of loneliness). When Aunor gives de Leon the limitations on his “visits,” there’s no sense of a woman in control. Rather, it sounds like a couple of kids just messing around. Mind you, “a couple of kids messing around” itself could mean a million of things, as we’ve seen in Peter Pan (PJ Hogan, 2003). But in this case, Brocka never decides to treat play as anything more than messing around (as opposed to "messing around").

De Leon’s character could have been one of those pathetic yet pitiable male characters who, despite their execrable behavior (Dado in Insiang), were forgivable for their destructive imperfection. Or, even if we’re not willing to go that far (Dado we should remember was a rapist who fucked the mother to get to the daughter, de Leon a mere boy who couldn't keep his pants on), he could have been like Jay Ilagan’s character in Maging Akin Ka Lamang (1987), pitifully bound to his lust for a woman (in De Leon’s case, women). But played for pure comedy, De Leon was a buffoon. The sleeping around, the regretting it, the sleeping around some more…it was a little tiring.

The one narrative strand that I thought Brocka could have exploited well was the one that opened the movie: Nora Aunor as character-actress. Mid-way through the movie, we see De Leon spying on Nora through a telescope from across the street. Later we find that De Leon’s new girlfriend who was a model at his advertising agency. The movie ends with Aunor returning the gaze, looking at a sleeping De Leon. There’s all these layers of competing gazes—of alternating looking and being looked-at—that could have been the basis for the film’s battle of the sexes, and something that could have given this film a credible link to Brocka’s other works, with his preoccupation with having/lacking power and oppressing/being oppressed by others. As it is, this movie’s only link to Brocka’s ouvre is the clunky way it incorporated the “battle” part without looking at how it complicated the “of the sexes” part.

I know I know: “Filipinos are simpler, our stories simpler, our attack simpler.” But as the best filmmakers have demonstrated, “simplicity” is relative. As Brocka already demonstrated in Hello, Young Lovers, there’s a lot of ways to subvert the conventional story one is forced to tell. But I guess for a master filmmaker like him, it’s excusable. Maybe he was just tired…he did have three years prior where he churned out multiple masterpieces every year, three just in 1980 (Bona, Angela Markado, Nakaw na Pag-Ibig). Maybe he was just tired. In that case a little trip like this movie is forgivable.

May Lalaki sa Ilalim ng Kama Ko ("There's a man under my bed," Fely Crisostomo, 1978)

2007-09-10T04:45:00.000-07:00

Just look at the framing for the title frame: balanced, with the bedroom (with one side of the bed empty) framed by a round wall on the foreground as if the film is a "peek" into her world. Unfortunately, the promise of the film's first images never amounted to much. Oh, and the title doesn't really make any sense either. Most of the men were on top of her bed, not under. On top of her even.

There have been very few movies where its concept just goes nowhere. Not just a limpid ending, an effort to dramatic tension that doesn't work, character development that didn't seem believable, or a turn of events that is too improbable. No. Simply, that the movie literally went nowhere. Things happened and the characters went through whatever happened, but the characters didn't change nor did their situation evolved. It's a stillness that carries with it no crises, drama, or meaning. It's a stillness that betrays nothing but the sincerest meaninglessness and vapidity. May Lalaki sa Ilalim ng Kama Ko carries with it a story, but a story only in a sense that a bunch of things go on. But nothing more.

The movie's concept is interesting: a philandering husband sleeps around while his wife stays home and takes care of their five children. When his wife gets tired of him, she reveals that none of their five children are his. Out of spite and jealousy, he hires somebody to make have sex with his wife (I don’t really know why). It fails. He goes blind. He realizes the evil of his ways. Wife and husband reconcile, not before the husband reveals that his illness is just a hoax. Movie ends with a dance party (literally). In the myriad ways Filipinos have twisted the concept of marital discord and extramarital affairs around, it's a little surprising that this movie is literally just about the extramarital affair. Even if the concept fails, such as in Dalaga si Misis Binata si Mister, the mad attempt to fix something impossible to mend is in itself more than not a fascinating thing to watch. And for a female filmmaker such as Crisostomo, it's a little odd that she gives no new or fresh way of looking at infidelity. (It doesn't mean that women have a different view of it, only that the industry, one would expect, would have been male-dominated enough that a woman's perspective would seem--even if it just sounds--fresh, even if it is truly the same.)

To salvage the whole thing, Crisostomo throws in everything and anything she could to make the whole thing seem interesting: eye candy in the form of half naked women, especially Amalia Fuentes; a singing Nino Mulach (!); fist fights; slap-stick comedy; annoyingly high-pitched maid who hits on the handsome hired help; and the handsome help's fat boyfriend. And Crisostomo, by and large, is a competent filmmaker. One could see that she is an editor and not a director by trade, utilizing more daring juxtapositions to represent the husband's horniness, and use shot-counter shots, which oddly enough I don't see much of in Filipino cinema (it's a very Hollywood technique, and Crisostomo did edit a Hollywood film directed by Monte Hellman). She also uses wild colors and lighting in certain scenes, especially in the scene where the husband goes to a Mrs. Robinson's house to...well, what else does a horny and philandering married man do in a house owned by a woman named "Mrs. Robinson"? She also has a lot of interesting framings, such as when the husband returns to his wife and he sees her waiting for him at the top of the stairs smoking, that if allowed to take flight would have been interesting. Maybe if left to her own devices, she would have made a movie that if not totally successful, at the very least not genuinely pointless. The movie would have been the sophisticated comedy of errors that it could have been, if she wasn't forced to essentially make a skin flick-child star-family picture-slapstick-melodrama-action hybrid (see, the last four categories would have worked. But with the first two...ay...).

In terms of acting, there are two basic emotions: resignation and surprise. Amalia Fuentes is basically just tired and has given up trying to change her husband. Her husband on the other hand is always surprised of the women around him. His trademark is a look of stun, almost as if slapped by the reality of female sexuality as power. The maid is always surprised by her boss, and the hired help is resigned of his role as paid seducer. This being the limitation of the film’s emotional pendulum, my reaction becomes limited as well: resigned that this shit movie will never do anything more than plod along, surprised that I am still watching. It’s like being back in school, where my eyes move but my brain, recognizing the vapidity, turns off. Other than the film’s complete pointlessness, this is its other achievement: making a film about sex unsexy, unexciting, and unengaging.

Tatlong Bulaklak ("Three flowers," Danny Zialcita, 1979)

2007-09-08T03:50:00.000-07:00

Tatlong Bulaklak is Danny Zialcita’s take on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, a film about the awakening of a bourgeois family and their maid after a stranger invades their home and makes love with all of them. Through sexual provocation, Pasolini examines the nature of the bourgeoisie and exposes its rotten core, revealed when it comes in contact with the purity of carnal desire. Whereas the maid, a poor woman from the countryside who goes back home after her epiphanic interaction with the strange seducer, literally becomes a saint, the bourgeois family self-destructs. The father’s combustion is especially portrayed in the apocalyptic isolation of a volcanic landscape, a scene that is now one of the most iconic scenes of Italian cinema, fitting for the very embodiment of the patriarchal system and values that the “family” represents.

Zialcita’s version however is much “lighter” and thus more deceptive. Being a popular filmmaker whose oeuvre tends to skew towards women’s weepies and melodramas, the flowers to which the title refers are women with relatable issues that are portrayed and exploited to the fullest melodramatic effect. Never aspiring to “art,” Zialcita strips the story of its Freudian and Marxist roots, the issues being “mere issues,” with no adjectives to academically describe them. But as it were, Zialcita’s simplicity lends it the complexity and political ambiguity that Pasolini’s work lacked due to its diatribe.

The film opens with Tony Carreon*, a motorcyclist who lies unconscious by the side of the road after a presumed accident threw him off the road. A lawyer and his secretary save him and refer him to a crippled rich man, who then hires him as a chauffeur. Through many plot twist and turns, Carreon becomes involved with Pinky de Leon, the crippled man’s trophy wife; Lorna Tolentino, de Leon’s sister and an actress forced by her mother and director to progressively “lose her top” on screen; and Gloria Romero, a country lass who patiently waits for her jealous husband’s release from jail, despite the village—including her mother-in-law—accusing her of being unfaithful. Carreon challenges the assumptions these three women have of their roles in society: de Leon as a faithful trophy wife, Tolentino as a sex symbol, and Romero as the self-sacrificing wife. In the process these women also break down Carreon’s image as a macho savior, revealing that indeed the change the occurs are of their own growth as human beings, and that Carreon remains still a being whose agency is reliant upon the women his libido desires.

Zialcita depicts all the characters’ entrapment visually as well as thematically. Whereas de Leon often struts around with as little clothing as possible, her first few scenes (frames 1 & 3) also depict her as either a framed image of herself (an image that is followed by a zoom-in into her husband’s reflection in the same mirror, suggesting that he only lives with her image and not with her) or sitting aside a framed photograph of herself. Romero is portrayed as either a cut-up body (frame 6 shows her as a headless tits-and-ass woman) or a woman trapped behind bars (frame 7). Tolentino is literally a whore, her director, producer, and mother/manager her pimps. In her “filming” scenes she is always hounded by her pimp and customers/audience. In one scene (frame 8), the director even crosses the third wall and sells his actress to us/audience himself. This transgression not only emphasizes the theatricality of the film-within-the-film and Zialcita’s film itself, but also Tolentino’s disembodied-ness, of her lack of existence outside the four sides of the movie frame.

Unlike the women, the men are deemed by Zialcita as unworthy of transcending their on-screen frame-prisons. De Leon’s husband, although thematically castrated by his wheelchair, is further imprisoned by Zialcita’s tight close-ups and frame-within-frames (frame 2). Romero’s husband is, except for the last scene, is always associated with being a prison and being imprisoned, and one scene with his mother where he promises to leave Romero to come back home with his parents reveals him an oedipal case. Carreon however has the worst of luck. Most of the time, he just looks tired and disheveled, as if exhausted from being the middleman in helping these women find themselves. In one climactic scene, all three women show up in his place one right after the other to tell him that he—the strongman, the hero—is indeed not part of their future. The scene is heightened by the film’s score, and Zialcita plays the whole scene into full effect by making Carreon out to be a total loser, both to be laughed at and be pitied. One right after another the women reveal themselves, with one right about to knock at Tony’s door just before the other opens it.

This being a Filipino movie, there is of course a happy ending. The women find themselves, and the men get what they want, which is fulfillment sexual or otherwise. Zialcita is a popular filmmaker. He cannot afford the brazen political effrontery that the likes of Pasolini or Godard may have been allowed. But being a populist auteur, he nevertheless subtly sneaks in a point or two. Although the end is happy, the women nevertheless seem unsatisfied. Romero’s face as she walks away with her husband could only be compared with Beauty’s face when she finds Beast’s true identity in Cocteau’s version of the fairy tale. Tolentino becomes pure and innocent, but despite her efforts her mother is still making money off of her name by blackmailing her producer and director. de Leon ends-up with Tony, but not only does she lose her spunk which made her appealing, her acceptance of Tony is just that. She kind of just…takes him.

To some extent, it is Zialcita’s—and Gosiengfiao’s, and Bernal’s, and Brocka’s, and the old Celso ad. Castillo’s—irreverence that is lacking in the industry today. Of course, irreverence isn’t lacking in Filipino filmmaking. In how it looks like, much of the indie scene contains these voices and maintains a monopoly on them. As of right now, O’Hara is silenced and the most irreverent movies made in the past few years were Crying Ladies and La Visa Loca which, despite being fun and different, lacked the social consciousness of the aforementioned auteurs (in La Visa Loca, the movie’s “epiphany” was that immigration was a result of lack of national identity, never examining if it is the nation itself that is pushing its citizens out of its borders). Heck, one cannot even make the bourgeois and elitist argument that it is the “increasing” catering to the “Bakya” crowd that’s leading to the degradation of Filipino movies. Let us remember that even the lowly FPJ action films and in our case, weepies, had some sort of a finger in character—that is Filipino character—development and growth. Even Nora’s very image as “the little brown girl” had so much social and political connotations. Seeing Hollywood domination, Filipinos couldn’t see any choice other than to acquiesce. In addition, since Hollywood has a tendency of shipping out only the most banal and formulaic of its movies, Filipinos are thus not even acquiescing to the best of American cinema. Thus, not only did Filipinos absorbed the worse exploitation of the most American of all methods of filmmaking—that is, genre filmmaking—we also absorbed the worse of how it conducts business—that is, see the profit and the numbers as the only indication of a cinema’s health.

I must stop before this rant turns into a deadly spark of outrage. Watching Zialcita’s film—or any other Filipino movie made before the 90s, for that matter—right after watching O’Hara’s Babae sa Bubungang Lata (“Woman on the Tin Roof”) will never result in optimism or hope…

*NOTE: I use actors' names because it is a pain in the ass to get character names. Having to either remember them or listen through the faded audio track on the tape, I decided to say fuck it and just use actors' names.

Ina, Kapatid, Anak ("Mother, sister, daughter," Lino Brocka, 1979)

2007-09-02T01:54:00.000-07:00

The movie starts with scenes of a Filipino small town from inside a car, with a woman riding inside and slowly taking everything in through the automobile’s dirty lenses, as if back from a long absence. Later, we find that the woman is Pura, a woman coming back to her town after twenty years living in the US, but unhappily welcomed by her sister Emilia. Pura's return brings back old baggage, from past love affairs to sibling rivalry. All this in a backdrop defined by their father's impending death and the stagnation and hopelessness that define small town provincialism.

First off, something really needs to be said of the Cinefilipino DVD quality and the movie/video's image quality in general. Although I am very glad that Cinefilipino has taken the time to put many Filipino classics on DVD so that everyone can enjoy them, they really need to spend a little bit more time transferring their movies. In this particular one for example, although the image is surprisingly crystal clear, heads are constantly cut off. I suspect it is because they have a print where the subtitles are burned into the stock, and the only way to hide them is to apply masks where none existed before. For a movie so heavily invested on framing and portraiture, it really ruins much of it. The movie's color too suggests something is incredibly off: the color has a sepia tone, giving an antique feel to the movie, thus giving much importance and centrality to the family's old house and the aging patriarch that lives in it. Now, Brocka may have intended things to be this way, or this color may be as a result of neglect, but it is quite shocking how that seemingly minor change could change the whole film's outlook.

In the center of the movie is a family feud coupled with the slowness and futility of life in the small town. Emilia's anger and Pura's detachment are both products of how these women responded to the stunting grip the town has on them. Emilia, played with such gusto by Charito Solis, lashes out for being stuck with a husband, daughter, and father that do not love her. It is irritating and grating to watch, yet also very heartbreaking. Her desperation is shown in a face that, if not angry and shouting, is half hidden, a depiction of seething rage waiting but unable to get out I last saw done well in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Pura on the other hand, played with icy reserve by Lolita Rodriguez, is disassociated, her connection to the town reduced to numbers and facts, the town only of importance to her in how it could serve her needs as a capitalist. It is not only a competition between two very different human beings, but two very different strains of Filipino acting: Nora’s restraint and Vilma’s histrionics. (To an extent, one can argue that in film, human beings and the systems of portraying them are one and the same.) The movie could only come to a head, between a woman desperate for an escape and another whose escape has left her empty and cold.

Ina, Kapatid, Anak demonstrates Brocka's skill with the camera, giving us enigmatic portraits of Pura and Emilia and depictions of actions taking place in multiple planes tied together by a soft shallow focus that both blurs the world around the characters and ultimately grounds the characters—their idiosyncrasies and dilemmas—to this world. Brocka again quotes Bergman by turning heads in a 3/4-1/4 angle from each other, ready to either turn away from or turn towards each other. This set-up gives an impression of an impending reconciliation, which only makes the conflict more heartbreaking. He also seemed to have taken queue from Dreyer vis a vis Godard, Especially with Pura's head shot in medium shot and off-center, against a solid background (usually black), looking out to the distance with extreme either to her left or right. Although the aforementioned masking kept many of the shots from giving their full effect due to cut-off chins or cut-off heads, more than not they are still powerful enough to convey the desperation for a connection and the loneliness of disconnection and detachment brought upon by displacement, economic, social or emotional. Ina, Kapatid, Anak is a powerful application of European modes of humanism in a Filipino context that does justice to both the mode and the context. For a lesser filmmaker, this balancing act would have resulted in a work of schizophrenia, the film being reduced to “art vs. pop” clichés that ruin much of the “indie” films made by Filipinos today. For Brocka, pop is art and vice versa. To argue for abandoning the “bakya and tsinelas” crowd for sophistication and intelligence could only lead to a Pura syndrome.

Here's the entire film online