Last month’s just-concluded Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, the first after a full year of the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., yielded a few controversies, the latest of which was centered on the pullout of a politically themed film from the opening ceremony – allegedly because it was censored (per political sectors), or possibly because seven hours was too long to wait out a ceremonial entry (per festival organizers). This would not be surprising, considering that the pre-ousted Marcos family was known to be the most culturally obsessed among Philippine presidential administrations; although truth be told, at the peak of the Marcos Sr. presidency, any politically (and even sexually) daring movie would have been shown at the government’s Manila Film Center venue without anyone bothering to bat a false eyelash.
11011Prior to the current uproar, a commotion over a social-network film reviewer boiled over and took much longer to simmer down. In fact the said reviewer had already been writing for over a year, but the only filmmakers who objected were the ones working for a streaming outlet specializing in sex-themed material. (Personal disclosure: I acceded to several friends’ request to criticize the reviewer and uploaded an article to my blog, my first this year, for that purpose; see “Anonymity & Its Discontents.”) This for me remains the key to the trouble that the festival had with this specific evaluator. The participants – artists, readers, even the reviewer himself – operated from not just an outmoded but also a long-unworkable set of assumptions. No wonder no resolution could be worked out.
11011The premise I’m referring to is the one on which the entire concept of Cinemalaya rests: that of identifying and subsidizing a vanguard of “best” emerging film artists. The necessarily politicized process this generates can be tracked to a well-intended system of adequate training – way back when no such option was available in the country; so even from the start, only aspirants who were sufficiently privileged because of class and/or nationality could actually achieve the necessary qualifications. Meaning it was never sufficient to just be talented and motivated; some form of social entitlement (wealth, foreign training, industry contacts) would more often than not prove more effective. To better articulate the criteria and identify those who best exemplified the worthiness of outstanding aspirants, elite institutions – government and education, conveniently overlapping in the national university – volunteered to make their presence palpable.
Back to top
11011What this led to was a clutch of spectacles by which film commentary would be nearly exclusively identified: annual exercises, in the form of festivals, that showcase entries preselected by supposedly discriminating evaluators, plus sets of prizes either for this closed system or for the entire industry, nearly all of which enact a dramatic process that can still occasionally prove captivating and suspenseful. Said process begins when a group of “deserving” talents would be announced, from which a circle of self-proclaimed authorities would eventually declare (during “normal” conditions) one winner. One can see how entrenched this mentality is when several sets of academe-based groups continue to follow this annual ritual despite supposedly being more alert to its deleterious effects, starting with fostering divisiveness in the community of artists.
11011Hence the fascinating particulars of the Cinemalaya brouhaha, where the aforementioned Facebook reviewer provided rankings for the competition entries, culminating in an alternate set of awards. The complaints predictably came from filmmakers whose works were given low grades, with attendant unflattering commentary. What made this response dubious on its face is immediately evident: would they have voiced any objection if they were given higher evaluations? Earlier outed as singular and biologically male, the reviewer himself posted his rationale – that since film screenings are costly, he’s providing a service to the general public by assessing for them which entries he believes are worth watching and which ones should be shunned.[1]
11011A more sensible set of comments focused on the reviewer’s six-plus scoring system (from zero to five stars), which he had earlier expanded to include negative numbers. At some point, he wound up with a negative-infinity score for a movie he regarded as the worst, then realized that another movie was even worse and awarded it with a square root of negative-infinity score. This attempt to display mathematical competence is innumerate to anyone with a casual familiarity with basic principles in the field.[2] The actual issues, which everyone missed out on, is also what the entire existing system of film evaluation fails to do. First, determining film worth according to quantifiable standards of art, or relevance, or morality, no longer really matters as much as figuring out the issues that generated the work and how its audience responded to it. Hence the reviewer’s attempt at further refining his criteria (the equivalent of the award-givers’ categories) is a step forward … in the wrong direction.
Back to top
11011Second, which was the topic I’d posted about earlier, by presuming to write about practitioners who have no option except to announce their identities, the reviewer will have no ethical justification for insisting on his anonymity. Is the country under a system of colonization or fascism, when underground literature historically became indispensable? Or are the film practitioners capable of criminally endangering those who criticize them? These are only rhetorical questions, of course. The non-rhetorical one is: why is the community of publicists protecting this reviewer’s identity, and why are the complaining artists not seeing anything anomalous about this? The scary answer is – because they all agree that film evaluation can only be expressed one way, by ranking one another, and the more difficult scientific and cultural work doesn’t have to get done. The ultimate winner here is none other than our reviewer-ranker, the one who (in a better world) deserves to be positioned at the bottom of the heap, representing the award-giving critics who can laze around and write unthinkingly and assert their power over industry practitioners when the season for holding their trophies aloft arrives once more.
Notes
First published August 31, 2023, as “Film Critico Incognito” in The FilAm. The specified social-network critic took down all the posts referenced in this article. I am maintaining the current piece as a cautionary example, since in this type of instance, a vacancy left by anyone who attained virality can be easily replaced by some other interested party.
[1] This ranking system was first propagated by a member of the Filipino Film Critics Circle in the 1970s-80s, so it makes sense that other members of this group will be tolerant, if not supportive, of this reviewer. Anyone sufficiently familiar with this system will readily see how cultural products of all types are notoriously irreducible to preordained criteria. The most artistically innovative ones, in fact, demand that their evaluators observe a new set of standards, while the most popularly successful ones demand an entirely different set of approaches premised on historical conditions.
11011In fact, the Cinemalaya outcry echoed an earlier quarrel, this time between the reviewer and Marcos-family hagiographer Darryl Yap. With an army of fanatical followers of his Vincentiments page, Yap was able to lodge enough complaints against the reviewer to get the latter’s page suspended on Facebook. He also posted a photograph of the reviewer’s masked face but desisted from identifying him by name (presumably easily accomplishable by referring to the guest list of any screening attended by the person he wanted to denounce). The reviewer, meanwhile, frantically uploaded material supportive of Bongbong Marcos’s then-already defeated adversary, Leni Robredo.
11011Other close observers have similarly pointed out how the reviewer exhibits biases favoring certain queer or Chinoy filmmakers; whatever the implications of these preferences, the reviewer’s insistence on shielding himself from further inspection places him in an unearned special category, elevated in his own mind and possibly those of other publicists, critics, artists, and his own set of social-network fanatics, all of whom seem to accept his anonymous stature as a right only he had earned one way or another. More disturbingly, in terms of pandering to their respective admirers, Yap conducts himself with relatively more dignity and confidence, despite having to contend with more persistent trolls.
Back to top
[2]
The reviewer’s technical troubles begin with his ranking scheme: since he initially awarded anywhere from zero to five stars, he would write a specific score out of five (from 0/5 through 5/5). In overstepping these arithmetical specifications by providing negative points, his goal was obviously to demonstrate greater distance from the lowest possible value, which is 0/5 or zero. Negative-infinity, however, can be conceptually proved to be no different from infinity (which is why it is extremely rarely invoked in real-world applications, e.g. astronomy or nuclear physics), while the square root of a negative number would be an impossible value. But if we assume that a square root of a number can be taken before turning it negative, then because of the negative placement, the supposedly smaller value is actually larger: say our limit of infinity is 9 (and therefore -9 is negative-infinity); its square root is 3, which then makes -3 actually closer to zero and therefore higher than -9. So the intended lower value (square root of negative infinity) is demonstrably higher than the value that purportedly diminishes it (negative infinity).
11011More deplorable than this abstractional 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.
Back to top
ORCID ID 
Ámauteurish! 
Corrosive Criticism
Last month’s just-concluded Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, the first after a full year of the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., yielded a few controversies, the latest of which was centered on the pullout of a politically themed film from the opening ceremony – allegedly because it was censored (per political sectors), or possibly because seven hours was too long to wait out a ceremonial entry (per festival organizers). This would not be surprising, considering that the pre-ousted Marcos family was known to be the most culturally obsessed among Philippine presidential administrations; although truth be told, at the peak of the Marcos Sr. presidency, any politically (and even sexually) daring movie would have been shown at the government’s Manila Film Center venue without anyone bothering to bat a false eyelash.
11011Prior to the current uproar, a commotion over a social-network film reviewer boiled over and took much longer to simmer down. In fact the said reviewer had already been writing for over a year, but the only filmmakers who objected were the ones working for a streaming outlet specializing in sex-themed material. (Personal disclosure: I acceded to several friends’ request to criticize the reviewer and uploaded an article to my blog, my first this year, for that purpose; see “Anonymity & Its Discontents.”) This for me remains the key to the trouble that the festival had with this specific evaluator. The participants – artists, readers, even the reviewer himself – operated from not just an outmoded but also a long-unworkable set of assumptions. No wonder no resolution could be worked out.
11011The premise I’m referring to is the one on which the entire concept of Cinemalaya rests: that of identifying and subsidizing a vanguard of “best” emerging film artists. The necessarily politicized process this generates can be tracked to a well-intended system of adequate training – way back when no such option was available in the country; so even from the start, only aspirants who were sufficiently privileged because of class and/or nationality could actually achieve the necessary qualifications. Meaning it was never sufficient to just be talented and motivated; some form of social entitlement (wealth, foreign training, industry contacts) would more often than not prove more effective. To better articulate the criteria and identify those who best exemplified the worthiness of outstanding aspirants, elite institutions – government and education, conveniently overlapping in the national university – volunteered to make their presence palpable.
Back to top
11011What this led to was a clutch of spectacles by which film commentary would be nearly exclusively identified: annual exercises, in the form of festivals, that showcase entries preselected by supposedly discriminating evaluators, plus sets of prizes either for this closed system or for the entire industry, nearly all of which enact a dramatic process that can still occasionally prove captivating and suspenseful. Said process begins when a group of “deserving” talents would be announced, from which a circle of self-proclaimed authorities would eventually declare (during “normal” conditions) one winner. One can see how entrenched this mentality is when several sets of academe-based groups continue to follow this annual ritual despite supposedly being more alert to its deleterious effects, starting with fostering divisiveness in the community of artists.
11011Hence the fascinating particulars of the Cinemalaya brouhaha, where the aforementioned Facebook reviewer provided rankings for the competition entries, culminating in an alternate set of awards. The complaints predictably came from filmmakers whose works were given low grades, with attendant unflattering commentary. What made this response dubious on its face is immediately evident: would they have voiced any objection if they were given higher evaluations? Earlier outed as singular and biologically male, the reviewer himself posted his rationale – that since film screenings are costly, he’s providing a service to the general public by assessing for them which entries he believes are worth watching and which ones should be shunned.[1]
11011A more sensible set of comments focused on the reviewer’s six-plus scoring system (from zero to five stars), which he had earlier expanded to include negative numbers. At some point, he wound up with a negative-infinity score for a movie he regarded as the worst, then realized that another movie was even worse and awarded it with a square root of negative-infinity score. This attempt to display mathematical competence is innumerate to anyone with a casual familiarity with basic principles in the field.[2] The actual issues, which everyone missed out on, is also what the entire existing system of film evaluation fails to do. First, determining film worth according to quantifiable standards of art, or relevance, or morality, no longer really matters as much as figuring out the issues that generated the work and how its audience responded to it. Hence the reviewer’s attempt at further refining his criteria (the equivalent of the award-givers’ categories) is a step forward … in the wrong direction.
Back to top
11011Second, which was the topic I’d posted about earlier, by presuming to write about practitioners who have no option except to announce their identities, the reviewer will have no ethical justification for insisting on his anonymity. Is the country under a system of colonization or fascism, when underground literature historically became indispensable? Or are the film practitioners capable of criminally endangering those who criticize them? These are only rhetorical questions, of course. The non-rhetorical one is: why is the community of publicists protecting this reviewer’s identity, and why are the complaining artists not seeing anything anomalous about this? The scary answer is – because they all agree that film evaluation can only be expressed one way, by ranking one another, and the more difficult scientific and cultural work doesn’t have to get done. The ultimate winner here is none other than our reviewer-ranker, the one who (in a better world) deserves to be positioned at the bottom of the heap, representing the award-giving critics who can laze around and write unthinkingly and assert their power over industry practitioners when the season for holding their trophies aloft arrives once more.
Notes
First published August 31, 2023, as “Film Critico Incognito” in The FilAm. The specified social-network critic took down all the posts referenced in this article. I am maintaining the current piece as a cautionary example, since in this type of instance, a vacancy left by anyone who attained virality can be easily replaced by some other interested party.
[1] This ranking system was first propagated by a member of the Filipino Film Critics Circle in the 1970s-80s, so it makes sense that other members of this group will be tolerant, if not supportive, of this reviewer. Anyone sufficiently familiar with this system will readily see how cultural products of all types are notoriously irreducible to preordained criteria. The most artistically innovative ones, in fact, demand that their evaluators observe a new set of standards, while the most popularly successful ones demand an entirely different set of approaches premised on historical conditions.
11011In fact, the Cinemalaya outcry echoed an earlier quarrel, this time between the reviewer and Marcos-family hagiographer Darryl Yap. With an army of fanatical followers of his Vincentiments page, Yap was able to lodge enough complaints against the reviewer to get the latter’s page suspended on Facebook. He also posted a photograph of the reviewer’s masked face but desisted from identifying him by name (presumably easily accomplishable by referring to the guest list of any screening attended by the person he wanted to denounce). The reviewer, meanwhile, frantically uploaded material supportive of Bongbong Marcos’s then-already defeated adversary, Leni Robredo.
11011Other close observers have similarly pointed out how the reviewer exhibits biases favoring certain queer or Chinoy filmmakers; whatever the implications of these preferences, the reviewer’s insistence on shielding himself from further inspection places him in an unearned special category, elevated in his own mind and possibly those of other publicists, critics, artists, and his own set of social-network fanatics, all of whom seem to accept his anonymous stature as a right only he had earned one way or another. More disturbingly, in terms of pandering to their respective admirers, Yap conducts himself with relatively more dignity and confidence, despite having to contend with more persistent trolls.
Back to top
[2]
The reviewer’s technical troubles begin with his ranking scheme: since he initially awarded anywhere from zero to five stars, he would write a specific score out of five (from 0/5 through 5/5). In overstepping these arithmetical specifications by providing negative points, his goal was obviously to demonstrate greater distance from the lowest possible value, which is 0/5 or zero. Negative-infinity, however, can be conceptually proved to be no different from infinity (which is why it is extremely rarely invoked in real-world applications, e.g. astronomy or nuclear physics), while the square root of a negative number would be an impossible value. But if we assume that a square root of a number can be taken before turning it negative, then because of the negative placement, the supposedly smaller value is actually larger: say our limit of infinity is 9 (and therefore -9 is negative-infinity); its square root is 3, which then makes -3 actually closer to zero and therefore higher than -9. So the intended lower value (square root of negative infinity) is demonstrably higher than the value that purportedly diminishes it (negative infinity).
11011More deplorable than this abstractional 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.
Back to top
Share this:
About Joel David