Ámauteurish!

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Ámauteurish! is the open-access repository of the collected work of and/or by Joel David, set up and maintained as a single-source personal archival website. It includes out-of-print publications and links to still-available articles, with occasional relevant public-domain material. For a comprehensive list of posts uploaded since 2014 up to the preceding year, also in reverse chronological order, please click here (July to the present also remains below). In case the top-page menu is inaccessible, here are the sections and their features:

♦ Abouts – provides extensive descriptions of the rationale as well as of the author;
♦ Books – contains my out-of-print books and links to published books, as well as edited volumes, chapters in anthologies, and papers in proceedings;
♦ Articles – a landing page that leads to listings of all materials published in journals and all other types of periodicals;
♦ Reviews – contains my commentaries on films as well as occasional books and plays, arranged according to title of production (Auteurs & Authors reorders this same list according to each work’s creator);
♦ Remarks – contains my articles and statements published since 2016, opening with “Mega-Meta: A FilmCrit Folio”;
♦ Extras – would be mostly my non-written output, plus selected ephemera and juvenilia, opening with a “Special Folio on Manila by Night (1980)”; and
♦ Queries – provides a means by which I can be reached, as well as answers to some questions asked here and in other venues.
♦ Not included in the menu but a compilation of several sections above would be this Chronologically Arranged Listing of Publications, with its own accompanying Empiricals page.

First-time readers: This current section serves as the home (or front) page of the blog. Buttons for sharing on Facebook or Twitter, or by email, will appear at the bottom of each page of the browser version, along with copyright and other essential notices. In general, when an entry’s permanent listing in this blog is unspecified, it will be found in its appropriate subcategory in the Extras section.

Researchers: Endnote numbers provide same-page two-way jumps – from any endnote number in the body text to the endnote itself, and from the latter’s numerical indicator back to the endnote’s position in the body text. As a demonstration, kindly click on the endnote number at the end of this paragraph.[1]

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April 2024

April 22 – “Chaotic Waters and Well-Tempered Specters: The Philippines as Source of Overseas Labor” (DOI:10.13185/KK2024.004311) is my latest journal publication and my last as tenured professor at Inha University in Korea. Two 2022 releases, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness and Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo, among a few other film titles, are discussed. It’s in the March 2024 issue of Kritika Kultura, which shifted to a triannual publication schedule late last year, and closes the special forum on Mobility in Islandic Geographies and Textual Representations in Literature, Culture, and Media Forms (Part 1). Registration required.

March 2024

March 17 – “Bold in Heaven” is my tribute to the late Jaclyn Jose, originally published March 9 in The FilAm (see previous entry).

March 9 – A tribute I wrote (published in The FilAm) to Jaclyn Jose, one of our all-time film greats, who died at age 60, from an accident that occurred March 2.

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January 2024

January 27 – Just a note that’s pointless, though not useless, to let folks know I’ve been at work on some longform projects, not all of them requiring writing. All this amid ironing out the complex and voluminous process of retirement in an East Asian setting. I’m not really surprised, having lived here for two decades, but I sure feel exhausted. It all should eventually end, as everything else does, but the prospect of rest doesn’t seem to be in sight yet. And I typically planned nothing for the future, so a holding pattern is what I’ll try to maintain for the meantime.

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November 2023

November 6 – The Filipino Arts & Cinema International (FACINE) announced on social media the full-length film winners for its 30th edition. Amid the usual generous distribution of tiered awards, Lawrence Fajardo’s Erotica Manila: Foursome (hereafter EMF) enjoyed the rare triumph of being the sole Gold Prize winner for best film. Not having seen any of the other entries so far, I’d nevertheless venture to point out how left-field this result was: not only is the film’s production outfit regularly denounced by moralistic commentators in social media, the film itself observes an episodic storytelling pattern. (I provided a review that dissented with the expected responses to the film after the director mentioned that he wanted to compile what was originally a series into a singular feature presentation.)

11011The more significant triumph, in terms of Pinas film criticism, lies in the fact that the film skirted the usual “prestige” circuits of subsidized film-festival exhibitions, opting to operate in the streaming mode that has now become what used to be considered mainstream everywhere. Certain elderly critical practitioners, not to mention their awards-dispensing organizations, would have considered it their duty to shunt aside works like EMF, with the double whammy of commercial intent and sexual content hovering over it. Those inclined to muckrake would point out that this year’s FACINE jurors are too progressive, as if that were a wrong thing in critical discourse.

11011The lead jury member, Julia Lesage, is a legendary figure in feminist circles. I remember how, as an earnest graduate student, I was sure that feminism needed to be a standard political recourse, but I was just as sure that sex-negativity, proceeding from its association with patriarchal repression, should also be critically regarded, if not dismissed, by feminists. The moment we were assigned to read the back issue of Jump Cut devoted to sexual representation in cinema, edited by Julia and her late husband Chuck Kleinhans, was a hallelujah occasion more impactful for me than stumbling on the several milestones of classical film theory. In an essential historical sense, then, the FACINE prize is all that EMF will ever need to secure its significance.

11011The full story of how a select circle of critics and practitioners arrived at this reconfiguration of basic premises in Pinas film criticism will take much longer than a blog post can accommodate, going back a few decades and across a few countries. In my case, an intersection with FACINE provided the key. When the event gave me life-achievement recognition in 2016, the festival founder and chair, Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., left me with a behest: that we take stock of the disturbing turns that Philippine critical thinking was taking, and figure out ways to nudge the practice in a more productive direction. With FACINE 2023, my realization is that we may already be getting there, though the leading acad sector’s typically several steps behind. I feel I’m getting too old for this, but might it be time for another round of deconstruction? Drop me a line for any suggestions about possible new directions.

November 1 – Teddy Co’s a name you’ll encounter at unusual junctures in my writing. Whenever we touched base, he’d proffer some essential info about an article or book I just published or on a topic I’d been looking up. We were acquaintances since freshman year at the national university, but I knew we shared a significant interest when we found ourselves enrolled in a film subject, years before our institute (later a college) offered its own program. He and his Chinoy batch mates entertained the rest of the class by making fun of the teacher’s artsy pretensions – something I’ll always remember about him, this willingness to laugh at sacred cows. During a serious moment, when we asked said teacher when the university would be making a full program available, she responded by saying that she didn’t believe just anyone should be able to study the field. Only the best ones she could find would be rewarded by her with scholarships to France. So when a program did become available, offered by a rival unit, and she kept insisting that only she had the right to offer it, you can imagine what Teddy had to say about that.

11011Teddy was one of those “difficult” friends from whom you could keep some distance, especially when your differences in ideologies or career choices proved irresolvable. But as if to make up for his absence, he’d provide some unusual collectible, stamped with his brand of impish humor. Along the way, you’d learn about how he’d been cultivating options in some neglected area of film practice – disappointing some other people you’d wish he’d been more considerate in handling. Then again he was always busy, juggling several concerns at any given time, and always on the mark about his participation in each one of them.

11011During our last extensive face to face, he mentioned two legacy projects he was working on, and right at that moment I knew no one else could pull it off like he could. One would have been an online website of the entire Filipino filmography, eliminating the necessity for the Western-favoring Internet Movie Database; the other would have been his memoir, an even greater contribution to world film lore, had he been able to complete it. But he moved too fast, even in his illness, where again I had to keep my peace when he made clear to me a few years ago that he intended to seek alt-medical cures. His last message mentioned how he realized I was the one friend he had the longest. That may be so, but I would have been a better one if I’d picked another round of our epic quarrels to argue about his treatment. He’s one of the very few who leave unfillable gaps when they go.

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October 2023

October 13 – One of the entries in my years-old posts of corrigenda and problematics for my book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017), by which I can commemorate, so to speak, the first anniversary of the election of the current Philippine President:

Several elements in this pair of pictures [from page 38] are capable of generating discussions in themselves, but would detract significantly from the concerns of the book text. To bring up a novel example: one figure is common to both – Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., only son of the Marcos couple and latter-day frustrated vice presidential aspirant. This detail would alter most people’s impression that the first presidential offspring to perform in movies was Corazon Aquino’s daughter Kris. (At one point, Lino Brocka was considering casting Imee Marcos in the title role of his Cannes breakout entry Insiang, but fortunately managed in time to cast aside that phantasmagoria; see pp. 125-26 of Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon’s “The Brocka Battles,” in Lino Brocka: The Artist and His Times, ed. Mario A. Hernando, Manila: Sentrong Pangkultura ng Pilipinas, 1993, pp. 118-54.) During the euphoric period that followed the 1986 “people-power” revolt that deposed the Marcoses and installed Cory Aquino, playwright Bienvenido M. Noriega Jr. (formerly with Imee Marcos’s Experimental Cinema of the Philippines) wrote a popular stage comedy premised on a speculative Romeo & Juliet-inspired romance titled Bongbong at Kris (1987).

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September 2023

September 25 – And just because I get tired of railing against ratings-based awards-oriented criticism, an example of a decent recent one, on the travails of the country’s top noontime program: “Legit Bulaga.” Notice, basic film fans, how a definitive evaluation can be formulated without affixing a rating or suggesting an award or nomination. I’m more inclined myself to appreciate the carnivalesque elements of (what used to be) Eat Bulaga – more conceptual creativity in their casual variety presentations than what equivalent shows in other countries proffer; all this is based on semi-distracted viewing, which is after all what their creators strive not to counter, but to complement. Katrina Stuart Santiago brings up the only possible objection to the show’s central comic trio: the Opus Dei-adjacent antics of its oldest member’s lawmaking efforts. As for anyone who might raise that hoarily unfair argument that the other two members had violated a promising young actress who subsequently committed suicide, here’s how I was able to arrive at what to me’s the most sensible conclusion.

September 22 – Strange how some readers prefer to engage with endnotes, but I’m not complaining, since that was also a guilty pleasure of mine as a graduate student not so long … all right, several decades ago. Tibák, pogi (dehin goli), To-chi-qui vs. Pidol, chokaran – all examples of verlanisms that maybe only your grandparents will recognize, all movie-related.

September 14 – Pinklawan alert: the top viral Filipino film critic on the social network associated himself with the Leni Robredo presidential campaign. These are what I hope will be the very last words I’ll ever write about him (in “Corrosive Criticism”):

More deplorable than [his mathematical] weakness is the reviewer’s moral failure in posting insulting or abusive comments against the films he regards as unworthy of his high scores. Not surprisingly, his followers find this behavior delightful, thus further inciting their pseudo-expert’s immature conduct. Yet again, the educational training of a school population encouraged (even by purportedly progressive educators) to regard pop-culture artifacts as deserving of dismissive treatment results in such lumpenbourgeois spectacles. Lost in this cheap grasping for maximum virality is the reality that any industrial undertaking in a developing country will always be under threat of collapse, with any number of breadwinners facing the possibility of resorting to more desperate forms of fund-raising as a result. In short, regardless of the ranking that any critic assigns to any completed film, the recuperation of its investment will mean, first and foremost, that its workers can continue to hope in the prospect of a follow-up project. From this perspective, any critic who aims to impede this drive for productivity deserves to be regarded as no better than an antiproletarian henchperson.

September 8 – I wish I could cease being the unofficial troll of most Pinas critic-academics, but I derive too much fun sometimes. Especially with how this latest salvo worked out, since it has nothing to do with anything I did. My colleague Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., who spearheaded alternate critics’ groups (that I made sure to join) after he resigned from the Filipino Film Critics Circle in the late 1980s, migrated to the US around the same time I undertook graduate studies. He stayed on the coast opposite from where I was based and founded the Filipino Arts & Cinema International or FACINE, now about to hold its 30th edition.

11011His struggle was long and real, making the all-time suckiness of my studies seem like a theme-park visit in comparison. It would be apropos to disclose that FACINE provided me with the first life-achievement recognition for a film critic given by a film festival, and not just in or from the Philippines; several other films and personalities were honored in a justly acclaimed tiered system that we first innovated during one of the annual awards our alternate critics group provided.

11011I learned about the lengthening list of prospective Pinas film entries whose FACINE participation was refused by their producer or director; the local bodies that honored overseas-festival winners similarly snubbed the FACINE choices. I told Mau that the only institution that could recognize his achievement at this stage was FACINE itself, which of course made it an impossible objective. Irony of ironies, an unknown (so far) nominator forwarded his name to the selection committee of the Jefferson Awards for Public Service, which is the highest recognition of its kind given by a foundation based in Washington, DC.

11011As far as I know, Mau’s the first Pinas-born recipient, but then I only perused the foundation’s website cursorily. What’s definite is that he’s the first filmfest-organizer awardee – who in effect reconfigured the notion of a potentially profit-oriented undertaking into a commitment to community service. And sure, many other Pinas institutions can make the same claim, but until they venture overseas to make foreign audiences more aware of the films and artists they acclaim, they may as well be yesterday’s news. The selection of Mau was prominently reported in The FilAm, among other publications. It’s the kind of honor that makes winners of everyone who strove to better the conditions of film and criticism in the Philippines.

September 2 – What exactly does this value signify? (Free answer: pretentious confusion.) More seriously, why is the community of Pinas publicists protecting a certain anonymous reviewer’s identity, and why are the artists complaining about his scoring system not seeing anything anomalous about this? “Corrosive Criticism,” the blog version of “Film Critico Incognito” (published last August 31 in The FilAm), is my attempt at providing an answer.

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August 2023

August 31 – Now that the storm just passed and other disturbances have been brewing, my piece on the Facebook anonymous critic who makes himself viral by passing judgment on contemporary releases as his idea of consumer service. Titled “Film Critico Incognito,” in The FilAm.

August 17 – On his increasingly helpful “Baul ni Juan” Facebook page (see June 6 entry below), James de la Rosa posted the newspaper layout (plus supplemental pics) of Gerardo de Leon’s The Gold Bikini, a 1967 release that seemed to foreshadow Jerry Hopper’s Maharlika (1970): it featured, in Elizabeth Thompson, what period slang would have described as a “white-leghorn” actress; the lead actor’s code name was Agent 777 (the numerologically obsessed Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s favorite number); and the lead actor’s family name was … Marcos. No serious connection can be made between this and the Dovie Beams project, except for the (still-distant) possibility that Marcos or one of the film producers may have been inspired by it.

11011Pending further though unlikely disclosures, we can chalk this up to one of those serendipitous coincidences that a thriving popular culture occasionally offers up. Where TGB departs from Maharlika is in its high-caliber team of creatives: aside from having been directed by then-future National Artist de Leon, the screenplay was written by Cesar Amigo, and cinematography was handled by Mike Accion. It moreover featured pentjak, “an Indonesian art of self-defense … which is said to be a fight to the finish” that (according to the trainer) “originated during the days of the Dutch occupation in Indonesia when freedom fighters had to learn the art for lack of modern combat equipment” (Screen Stardom 4.7, 1967, qtd. in “Baul ni Juan”). This information has been added, for what it’s worth (not much, admittedly), to the end of “Mystique of the Past,” the update to my Dovie Beams article.

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July 2023

July 25 – Karmic panic is possibly my only metaphysical weakness, since after all I come from and live in the global hemisphere that believes in it. So I decided to delete the latest query I uploaded (which I labeled “abusive,” and I guess I’m now entitled to add “idiotic”) along with my contentious answer, roughly for the same reason I left Facebook: it’s not much of a victory to be able to score against the feeble-minded. Not that I’d judge my friends if they do the same thing – I just can’t allow myself to be distracted all over again. I give all I’ve got just to come up with anything I decide to publish, but once it’s out there, I won’t need to keep defending it against those who’re unable to get it. Precisely because I already made sure it can hold its own, and the next ones I’m working on will need the same undivided focus and labor. The world will never run out of intellectually and emotionally stunted folks … but why keep pointing that out if I don’t even get paid to fix it, right? Meaning it’s not what I do best, so I’d rather leave that up to the several concerned educators we’re fortunate to have.

July 22 – While I generally endorse certain cultural products by explicating my appreciative responses, here’s one instance where I could not review the material, ironically because I already did: ShoutOut Pinas 2022, an omnibus film comprising works compiled from prizewinning entries in a short-film competition held September last year. As chair of the board of jurors, I wrote citations for tiered sets of winners – which, in a manner of speaking, can be read as my capsule reviews for the selections. The film, premiering at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival on August 10, may be the most successful Pinas sample of its kind, entirely understandable when you consider the intensive process of writing, filming, and critiquing that each project underwent. Strictly from an entertainment perspective, here’s why you can’t really lose: if you don’t like what’s currently being shown, it ends in a far shorter while than any regular-length film; if you’re enjoying what you’re watching, another sample will presently be on offer, that promises a comparable level of care for material and concern for the viewer.

11011Speaking of short entries, here’s one review I could – and did – write, of Lawrence Fajardo’s compilation of his four-episode Vivamax series, titled Erotica Manila: Foursome. The upload’s the blog version of a review that was previously published in The FilAm, mentioned in the next (actually the preceding) entry.

July 20 – A review in The FilAm of the Vivamax compilation film: “Carnal Fireworks in Erotica Manila.” With indecent screen caps and a hidden naughty word, so make sure to douse yourself in holy water after reading.

Sample Endnote

[1] Endnotes will be located at the end of an article’s body text, before any list of works cited. To return to the position of the endnote indicator in the body text, please click on the number immediately preceding this note.

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