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Itim
English Translation: Black
English Title: The Rites of May
Year of Release: 1976
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. & Gil Quito
Producer: Cinema Artists Philippines
Cast: Tommy Abuel, Mario Montenegro, Charo Santos, Mona Lisa, Sarah Joaquin, Susan Valdez, Moody Diaz
Photographer Jun meets Teresa, a woman who sporadically yet involuntarily slips into bizarre moods. It is later revealed that Teresa is actually being possessed by her sister, Rosa, who died years earlier though the cause is shrouded in mystery. As Teresa divulges the story behind her sister’s death, Jun discovers that he may have found a connection to Rosa.
It would take a few more years before Filipino students of cinema could attempt their own low-end exercises, and a couple of decades before the technology could allow them to present their own full-length projects as a matter of course. As the scion of studio owners, Mike De Leon mustered his family resources and elite-school training and proved himself worthy of the privilege. Several other debuting directors during this period also opted for horror-mystery challenges, but none of them turned out to be as accomplished as Itim. Part of the project’s continuing relevance derives from its critical inspection of the relationship between the materialistic function of media technology and the anxiety provoked by supernatural phenomena. De Leon’s casual, almost documentarian surrender to the “reality” of the gothic upholds several concerns that he would be focusing on afterward, including class and gender critiques, the rejection of authoritarian figures, and an abiding confidence in the power of cinema.
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Kakabakaba Ka Ba?
English Translation: Are You Nervous?
English Title: Will Your Heart Beat Faster?
Alternate English Title: Thrilled
Additional Languages: Japanese, Chinese, & English
Year of Release: 1980 / Color with B&W
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., Raquel N. Villavicencio, & Mike De Leon
Music: Lorrie Ilustre & Jim Paredes
Producer: Lvn Pictures
Cast: Christopher de Leon, Charo Santos, Jay Ilagan, Sandy Andolong, Boboy Garrovillo, Johnny Delgado, Armida Siguion-Reyna, Leo Martinez, Moody Diaz, Joe Jardy, Danny Javier, George Javier, Nanette Inventor, Jim Paredes
Japanese Yakuza and Chinese gangsters chase two young couples, after one of the four accidentally obtains a cassette tape that contains high-grade opium concentrate. The quartet ends up seeking refuge in a church in Baguio, but they later realize that this will occasion a zany adventure, complete with musical numbers, that will reveal just how significant the tape really is.
Among the variety of genres that Mike De Leon decided to tinker with, his second stab at the musical—after Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising (If You Should Sleep and Then Awaken, a.k.a. Moments in a Stolen Dream, 1977), strictly speaking a realist film with music—proved to be distinctive not just for his record, but for Philippine cinema as well. This time around, he opted to begin with realistic elements including diegetic, or plausible and plot-specific, singing; then, via the intensification of absurd humor, he progressed to fantastic and geopolitically allusive developments, along with the traditional musical feature of non-diegetic performances, where characters burst into song and dance without any onscreen evidence of musical instruments and motivation for design changes. One may complain that the in-jokes in Kakabakaba Ka Ba? fail to steer clear of racial and gender stereotyping, the music is too pop-Western, the protagonists are distinctly privileged, and so on; yet the level of technical invention and performing-arts discipline on display here would be worthy of Manuel Conde, the country’s one certifiable film-musical genius, who had also once worked at the De Leon family outfit. Kakabakaba can in fact make one momentarily forget that the many equivalent accomplishments of Conde can no longer be found, since De Leon virtually stamps himself here as a true master’s disciple. Hip and high, polished and elaborate, with a disco number guaranteed to bring the house (of worship) down.
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1—Kisapmata
English Translation: Blink
English Title: In the Wink of an Eye
Additional Language: Ilocano
Year of Release: 1981 / Color with B&W
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., Raquel N. Villavicencio, & Mike De Leon
Based on “The House on Zapote Street,” from Reportage on Crime by Quijano de Manila
Producer: Bancom Audiovision Corporation
Cast: Vic Silayan, Charo Santos, Jay Ilagan, Charito Solis, Ruben Rustia, Aida Carmona, Juan Rodrigo
Dadong, a retired police officer, has such inordinate control over his daughter Mila that, when she gets pregnant and marries her boyfriend Noel, the couple stays under his roof. Unable to bear his father-in-law’s excessive domination, Noel tries to convince his wife to move with him to his house instead. He unfortunately fails and ends up leaving her behind. But when Mila escapes to join her husband, Dadong is driven to desperation and violence in a way that reveals a well-kept family secret.
2—Batch ’81
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., Raquel N. Villavicencio, & Mike De Leon
Producer: MVP Pictures
Cast: Mark Gil, Sandy Andolong, Ward Luarca, Noel Trinidad, Ricky Sandico, Jimmy Javier, Rod Leido, Mike Arvisu, Dodo Cabasal, Edwin Reyes
College student Sid and seven others make it as the latest potential members of the Alpha Kappa Omega (AKO) fraternity. While various hazing rituals force other neophytes to quit, these only strengthen Sid’s desire to be a full-fledged member. But AKO’s intensifying conflict with a rival frat will soon prove to be the neophytes’ biggest hurdle yet.
If only the Pinoy critical community had been ready: the series of protest films that Mike De Leon made during the late Marcos period should have occasioned debates on the progressive usefulness of two devices, metaphor as opposed to metonymy. Kisapmata and its successor (actually delayed predecessor), Batch ’81, both functioned metaphorically, specifically as referents to unidentified authoritarian systems. Metonymy, where one or more textual signifiers directly implicate the system being described, is considered more useful for critical purposes because of the grounding it provides. That having been said, one would still be hard-put to find better anti-martial law metaphors than these two titles. De Leon facilitates this analogy by making clear who the victimizers as well as the victims are, and whose side he supports. He also pays extra attention to the alpha-male characters’ performers (Vic Silayan and Mark Gil, both now-deceased), draws from his extensive knowledge of global cinema to evoke dread and decadence through locally unmatched audiovisual virtuosity, and dares to end with downbeat, in-your-face catastrophes.
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Sister Stella L.
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1984
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Jose F. Lacaba, Jose Almojuela, & Mike De Leon
Producer: Regal Films
Cast: Vilma Santos, Jay Ilagan, Gina Alajar, Laurice Guillen, Tony Santos, Anita Linda, Liza Lorena, Eddie Infante, Ruben Rustia, Adul de Leon, Rody Vera, Malu De Guzman, Fernando Modesto
Moved by the stories of a namesake nun about the plight of laborers in her area, Sister Stella Legaspi leaves her job as counselor to unwed mothers to support workers’ protests. When her safety gets threatened, the young nun is ordered back to her convent. She finds a way to return to the workers but soon discovers that her commitment to activism has arrived at a crossroad.
The first overtly political effort by Mike De Leon had all the fervor and indignation of someone who had been holding back (forced to resort to metaphors?) for too long. Yet he’d wound up disavowing all the appreciative responses to the film, denigrating it as propaganda, after it made a near-clean sweep of the critics’ awards. One could retort that any text with a message propagandizes by default. In the case of Sister Stella L., certain problematic elements, starting with the notion that religion and progressive politics can be compatible, become worrisome in retrospect, after the recent history of Catholic-church meddling in state affairs. The movie also rises above the run of attempts at persuasive communication via the use of so-called third-cinema devices—mostly drawn, as the term suggests, from Third-World film practice. Notable among these are direct-to-camera address, discursive dialogue, and documentary-footage insertions—all of which materialize right at the point when the narrative wraps up. The unstable fusion of transitory issues and innovative technique has resulted in a fascinating spectacle, a work that evokes its historical moment as much as it remains defined by it. The best way then to be fully rewarded by the viewing experience, which may also explain the movie’s then-disappointing box-office performance, is to immerse in the historical experience of resisting a fascist system via united-front organizing.
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Bilanggo sa Dilim
English Title: Prisoner of the Dark
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1986
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Mike De Leon, Jose Almojuela, & Bobby Lavides
From the novel The Collector by John Fowles
Producer: Solid Video
Cast: Joel Torre, Cherie Gil, Rio Locsin, Edu Manzano
After obsessing over Marissa from her fashion-model photographs, Eddie successfully executes his plan to kidnap her and imprison her in his home away from the city. He tells her that his goal is to keep her until she gets to know him, confident that when she does, she will fall in love with him. He’s beset by his memory of how he had lured Margie, an attractive woman who engaged in prostitution to support her college studies and who ultimately disappointed him because of her lower social status. When Marissa finds the letter that Margie hid before she died, she realizes the full extent of the nature of the man who introduced himself to Margie as Lito.
Filmmaker Mel Chionglo, who had once worked on Mike De Leon’s early films, once described Bilanggo sa Dilim as the quintessential MDL text. As usual with such statements, as much error as truth resides in that kind of declaration. No other De Leon narrative presents as intensive an inward turn as Bilanggo, except perhaps for the dream sequence of the main character in his first film, Itim; this was in fact drawn from his 1975 short film “Monologo [Monologue],” which however was too abstract to be productively interpreted. More a sequel than a strict adaptation of The Collector, Bilanggo enables us to understand more fully the abductee’s condition by articulating the hopes and suffering of her predecessor. The performers’ intertextual significations in recently concluded martial law-era cinema mediates their characters’ mutual entrapment—Marissa and Margie in their captor’s fiendishly located and constructed prison, and Eddie/Lito in the necessity of constantly exercising unrelenting and unrelieved tyranny, with violent killing becoming a welcome form of release. Though planned and executed in a format vastly superseded by today’s state-of-the-art digital technology, Bilanggo puts to shame many contemporary attempts at advancing “personal” film statements, proof positive that any medium can only be as valuable as the vision that an artist invests in it.
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Bayaning 3rd World
English Title: 3rd World Hero
Additional Languages: English, Spanish
Year of Release: 1999 / B&W
Director: Mike De Leon
Screenwriters: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. & Mike De Leon
Producer: Cinema Artists Philippines
Cast: Ricky Davao, Joel Torre, Cris Villanueva, Joonee Gamboa, E.A. Rocha, Daria Ramirez, Rio Locsin, Cherry Pie Picache, Lara Fabregas
As two (unnamed) filmmakers research for a movie they plan to make about national hero José Rizal, the main issue they face is whether, the night before his execution, he actually retracted his criticisms of the Catholic Church. As they conduct interviews with Rizal and several people related to him, the filmmakers realize that they may have bitten off more than they can chew.
The so-far final but soon-to-be-penultimate Mike De Leon feature was supposed to have been a mainstream entry, by then-active GMA Films (previously known as Cinemax), on the life and death of José Rizal. De Leon’s resistance to standardized treatment resulted in the original movie being produced anyway (as José Rizal, 1998, directed by Marilou Diaz-Abaya), plus a number of other tributes to the national hero—and then this: a project that acknowledges postmodernism by being reflective, ironic, multiplanar, and open-ended. As focalized by the issue of whether he had retracted his rejection of his Catholic principles, Rizal remains the same elusive figure at the end that he was at the start. Yet, contrary to the movie’s naysayers, that should be an essential component of the text’s triumph, not its shortcoming. Rizal may require further understanding, but as Bayaning 3rd World suggests, this may not necessarily lead to any definite revision of his historical worth. The movie characters actually being subjected to critique are in fact the contemporary artists—and, by association, the members of the audience—who seek an advantage to gain in separating Rizal’s myth from his person.
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