A Foreword to Post-Dilawan Cinema and the Pandemic (Revised Edition)
Difficult truths have always been the unspecified challenge for Philippine critics. The complications have concrete manifestations in film, with its industrial nature, institutional interests, and global networks. This is why the arrival of any new practitioner has to be regarded with caution, especially since the emergence of social media has democratized the activity. What ought to have been a welcome development turned into a debilitating stricture owing to the romantic-humanist siren call of the Western film-as-art movement, compounded by the avant-gardist presumptions of local educators of all kinds of ideological orientations.
11011Epoy Deyto would have had the warning marks of the type of young critic that I quickly learned to be wary of. He could be abrasive (as I used to be, and still occasionally am), bent on sampling as much product as he could absorb, and alert to fine distinctions in theory. What became a source of wonder for me was how he managed to have the orientation that took me decades to finesse: a valuation of the mass audience that proceeded from an identification with them, in recognition of the progressive critic’s call to measure the success of works that bear the descriptor “Filipino” with how effectively they correspond with their intended viewers’ demands and desires, in effect reconfiguring media literacy to a kind “that arms the population to make use of technology to their own advantage.”
11011For this reason, Deyto’s the only Philippine-based film critic I could approach with the combination that I applied to the best film-studies material I have read: confidence that the author is carefully working out a progressive critical project as he goes along, and trepidation that I or some people I hope to uphold might find ourselves in his crosshairs. Then again, critical thinking is a constant process of reflexive development. In writing out a single-volume critique of Manila by Night, I realized that the monographic format is what might be missing in Pinoy film criticism. Not surprisingly, Deyto arrived at the same conclusion on his own and, while I fumbled with a monograph-length layperson’s manual on film criticism, he published the first edition of Post-Dilawan Cinema and the Pandemic (henceforth PDCP) and made it an open-access text.
11011One might realize, from past observation of Deyto’s Missing Codec blog, that the contents of PDCP originally appeared on it as stand-alone uploads. I might be accused of defensive motives in defending what is essentially a compilation title, since the two-volume book I published in 2019, with a deliberately overelaborated title that starts with Millennial Traversals, similarly constituted material that I had first posted on my Amauteurish! blog. Yet properly trained graduate students will be (or ought to be) familiar with the process of selecting courses related to their final research project, writing papers that could ideally serve as drafts of chapters, and gathering, organizing, and reframing each one in order to submit a cohesive and defensible thesis or dissertation.
11011Obviously Deyto’s instincts are sharp enough to have figured out the higher potentials of blogging, even without local grad-school advisers informing him of this academic survival strategy. He’d engaged in zine publication, an activity that, more than blogging, is directly linkable to Shonenbat Collective, his publishing proprietorship. He is bilingually capable as well, and has been regularly producing films throughout the preceding decade. In a fuller sense than most millennials can claim, language – the imperative to connect with readers and audiences – is both his vocation and advocation.
11011The radical, borderline-anarchic reworking of Philippine cinema that Deyto presents in PDCP proceeds from a disappointment with the self-identified progressive sector’s notion of the “independence” in local cinema that they champion: “ironic for a nation that has a very long history of struggle for independence … [this notion] comes from a very loose sense of freedom that does not struggle – a freedom that acts with impunity and never faces adversaries” and that sees “‘mainstream’ as its discursive enemy, that later became negotiated with it so that even the very figures of cinematic independence … failed to dodge the interpellation of the state apparatus.”
11011Toward this discursive purpose, Deyto trains his observational and analytic skills on the Philippine industry’s political economy, roping in the occasional auteur or film-text that helps to further exemplify the points he raises. Always, he remains anchored by and with the sector for whom he writes – thus recognizing, contrary to conventional wisdom, the usefulness of sex-themed output as a means of challenging censorship. This perspective enables him to regard the shift from liberal-democratic to authoritarian leaderships as “just a change of face and guards but still elitism.” The critique he formulates between the former (dilawan) camp’s hugot or emo-obsessiveness and the latter (post-dilawan) camp’s tokhang or punitive attitudinizing uncovers more disturbing similarities than we have been led by either camp to presuppose.
11011His investigation leads him down pathways too dark and scary for most of us to traverse without anyone leading the way. In contrast, my own practice mainly consisted of pointing out the futility and irrelevance of the critical activities of my colleagues and their followers, yet I could not resist demonstrating how to do these activities properly to begin with. I may have been hoping that by correctly performing (to cite examples) award-giving or canon formation or higher education, they could be induced to move on to more productive stages afterward. In the first edition of PDCP, Deyto skipped these admittedly quotidian concerns and presumed a circle of readers ready for long-overdue change.
11011He takes no prisoners even through the present edition. Be ready to duck as you read, but make sure to go through everything at the pace you require. Deyto has been singularly enduring the material consequences of fearlessly and favorlessly assessing where his peers and predecessors are going wrong – and he’s just getting started. If I expire in the next moment, my anxiety about the future of the field to which I devoted a lifetime will no longer be part of my final-shutdown drama.
Á!
ORCID ID 
Ámauteurish! 