Warning: contains text-heavy uploads as well as occasional analytic discourse, adult content, polysyllabic words, and dry humor. Click here to go to the latest listings. For easier reading on a mobile device, click here.
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. 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]
May 2023
May 21 – “I do take celebrity and stardom as seriously as the other cinema-studies issues I strive to comprehend.” I wondered why some social-media attention seemed to be building up, and realized that the query on my latest review was part of the contained excitement. I still maintain that if a retablo were to be erected comprising the recipients of the Order of the National Artist of the Philippines, the central niche would be occupied by Nora Aunor, the only one who qualifies as triumphantly national and artistic in the same instance. She celebrates today the 70th year of a lifetime that she entirely dedicated to this superhuman pursuit, where even her missteps and excesses counted as lessons she managed to draw from, providing future generations with a model they can aspire toward. Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal each used the word “genius” in describing her, as I also once did in passing. She’d been recently revived from a terrifying medical emergency, so she’s in the second phase of a lifetime that most of us, Bernal and Brocka included, rarely have the opportunity to acquire. Which only means a few more treasures to look forward to. Give it up for a true Philippine hero.
May 11 – So much new material has surfaced on Dovie Beams since I uploaded my report on her over two years ago that I decided to post a separate update. (For one thing, the original article’s Notes section was already almost as long as the body text itself.) I don’t think we’ve heard the last of her yet, given Imelda Marcos’s bald-faced and downright batty claim last year that l’affaire Ferdie-Dovie never happened. Way to restoke some dying embers, Madame; more denials, if you please.
April 2023
April 26 – Never imagined I’ll be reviewing an audiovisual event that runs for little over a minute long, but here it is: “Pop for All Seasons,” originally published as “Sharon Torch Song Used in Absurd Soda Ad” in The FilAm. I prefer to think of it as the biggest millennial Noypi hit I ever covered, with way over 7 million views in standard social-media platforms during the first four days alone. [Update: An English-subtitled version of “Balot,” the ad I reviewed, is posted at the Notes section of the article I uploaded.]
April 24 – My latest review, for The FilAm, is about “Balot,” an advertising short made by the Gigil Agency for Royal Crown Cola. Here’s an embedded link to the item I wrote on (apologies in advance to non-Filipino speakers; will upload an English-subtitled version once it becomes available):
April 6 – If Jasmine Lee had migrated to the US instead of Korea, she’d be showered with acclaim and recognition from here to Baba Burnu. Instead, unbeknown to most Noypis, she acquired a long list of distinctions from her host country, hosting a hit TV program, headlining a movie blockbuster (Punch, which I reviewed), and joining the national assembly as its first foreign-born elected representative. All this was over a decade ago, which means she was just getting started then. She deserves far better than a blog update, of course. I’m admittedly name-dropping her here to mark how on this date, I guested on her long-running Diverse Voices radio program at Seoul’s TBS studio – an ironic occurrence because she’s the one I should have been interviewing. Time and effort permitting, I might be able to work something out eventually.
Jaz Lee, flanked by the late Bangy Dioquino (founding president of the Association of Filipino Educators in Korea) and a fan.
March 2023
March 30 – A return to that youthful academic pursuit called conferencing (actually colloquiuming, if our denominals can be further stretched), as well as that part of Korea that turned into an incredibly charming destination over a decade since I first visited for a faculty seminar. Titled “Mobility in Islandic Geographies and Textual Representations in Literature, Culture, and Media Forms,” the event was organized by the Academy of Mobility Humanities, the Colloquium of Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Kritika Kultura and UNITAS journals (where I participate as editorial board member). It was held at Jeju Island and was the first time the text I read for presentation departed significantly from the one I submitted to the proceedings, since I undertook a re-viewing of the films under study: Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, both 2022 releases that featured Overseas Working Filipinas (portrayed by Chai Fonacier and Dolly de Leon respectively). Faculty from various universities in Korea, Indonesia, and Las Islas Pinas all came together to provide diverse and utterly fascinating material that linked media, history, demographics, and education, with the discussion of issues continuing through unforgettable tours of the island’s ravishing meals and views. I could be living only for this kind of endeavor, as I’m realizing nearly too late in my career trajectory.
March 28 – Personsplaining! Dashing (to conclusions)! Three-Worldism! All these and a bit more in the latest Queries entry.
March 20 – The latest journal section I edited, for Kritika Kultura’s 40th issue, has been uploaded. Starting at page 272, it’s titled Genders and Sexualities in Asian Cinema, and includes an entry I wrote, “From Hostesses to Working Girls: Sex Workers in Late 1970s Philippine Cinema,” on pages 276-310. (Note to readers: the journal now requires registration for those who wish to access its articles; it’s the standard process of providing an email address and awaiting confirmation.) An excerpt from my intro: “Awkward as it may be to start on a defensive tone, I must clarify that the [call for papers] yielded a great handful of responses; but the inordinate lead time of over two years, the longest I ever had among the journal issues I handled, probably resulted in contributory fatigue, loss of interest, and (definitely in a number of cases) decisions to publish elsewhere.”
February 2023
February 14 – A sample of a can’t-win predicament: while my revision of Pinas political film history was mostly a solo effort that took years of mulling, re-watching, and consulting with selected experts, my selections for the trickier “category e” titles of Cahiers du Cinéma’s “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” editorial derived from more intensive interactions and sometimes outright recommendations. (I imagine most of our historical notions evolve in the same way.) So in response to a few gentle snides that I couldn’t have been that attentive to the entirety of Philippine film complexities, I appended (to the Appendix) a Note on Sources. After which a colleague teased that I should have just written up a report of my friends’ film preferences. Happy Valentine’s Day anyways.
February 9 – Policing activity of any kind is anathema to my constitution, as anyone who knows me will confirm. But colleagues and mentees insist on asking me to intervene when the matter involves Pinas film criticism. Their latest gripe concerns anonymous film reviewers on the social network. Months after considering the situation, and telling organized friends that this should in fact be their call, I drafted a short piece and posted it: “Anonymity & Its Discontents.” Not a battle I’m determined to win, for reasons I spelled out in the article, but the situation does incite some annoyance on my end. I only managed to start writing after I was able to figure out why.
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.
ORCID ID 
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