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Oro, Plata, Mata
English Title: Gold, Silver, Death
Additional Languages: Hiligaynon, Spanish, English, Japanese
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Peque Gallaga
Screenwriter: Jose Javier Reyes
From stories by Peque Gallaga, Mario Taguiwalo, Conchita Castillo
Producer: Experimental Cinema of the Philippines
Cast: Cherie Gil, Sandy Andolong, Liza Lorena, Fides Cuyugan-Asensio, Manny Ojeda, Maya Valdes, Lorli Villanueva, Joel Torre, Ronnie Lazaro, Abbo de la Cruz, Mely Mallari, Mary Walter, Agustin Gatia, Arbie Antonio, Kuh Ledesma, Gigi Dueñas, Dwight Gaston, Jimmy Fabregas, Mona Lisa, Manny Castañeda, Ben Morro, Benny Warden
To evade the arrival of Japanese forces fighting in World War II, the Ojedas and the Lorenzos—two wealthy clans based in Negros—leave the city and head to a provincial mansion. As the war rages on, the families then flee to a nearby forest where they try to maintain their affluent lifestyle. But even as they hide from the war, it does not take long before they experience its nightmarish effects.
Peque Gallaga had been taken to task by mostly academe-based politically concerned commentators for his bravura evocation of the plight of the sugar gentry during World War II. This would be the equivalent of the controversy that befell a 1958 novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)—a fate that was the opposite of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film adaptation: the polarized politics of the time proved resistant to accommodating a narrative that focused on the elite, no matter how critical the perspective was. Based on the fireside tales recounted by Gallaga’s elders (with story credits for Gallaga, Mario Taguiwalo, and Conchita Castillo), Oro, Plata, Mata depicts the disruption of a landowning clan’s rural idyll brought about by the incursion of marauding Japanese soldiers, with the mortal conflict actually stemming from the uprising of the family’s exploited workers. Lost in this recollection of theme and controversy is the movie’s singular cineastic triumph: a sensuous and orgiastic fusion of period detail, natural wonder, and grand human folly—with masterly cinematographic handling by Rody Lacap—that had never been witnessed before or since in anybody else’s debut project. About three decades later, Gallaga and his co-director Lore Reyes would revisit the OPM locale with the movie’s lead actress, Cherie Gil, and yield the wise and charming Sonata (2013), quite literally an “art film” in the best sense of the word.
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Virgin Forest
Additional Languages: Kapampangan, Ibanag, Chinese, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Peque Gallaga
Screenwriter: Rosauro Q. dela Cruz
From a story by T.E. Pagaspas
Producer: Regal Films
Cast: Sarsi Emmanuelle, Miguel Rodriguez, Abel Jurado, Arbie Antonio, Jed Arboleda, Bruce Fanger, Bob Zwanziger, Ama Quiambao, Peque Gallaga, Turko, Crispin Medina, Leo Martinez, Ray Ventura, Pepito Bosch, Cris Daluz, E.A. Rocha, Rolando Tinio, Roy Lachica
It is 1901 and as the Philippines’s Spanish colonizers fall, American forces begin to take over. In a remote town, three young people—Chayong, a Chinese businessman’s kept woman; Alfonsito, an insular (native-born Spaniard); and Alipio, a lowly fisherman—are taken prisoner by Filipino mercenaries conspiring with two American officers who plan to capture President Emilio Aguinaldo. The three manage to escape but they soon realize that their differences make them vulnerable to enemies from all sides.
The backlash against Peque Gallaga for the unexpected success of Oro, Plata, Mata (1982) started with the far more ambitious Virgin Forest, which holds the distinction of showcasing arguably the best work of the peerless cinematographer Conrado Baltazar. The film lent itself to controversial responses in its deliberately ambivalent approach to Philippine historical events leading up to the capture of Emilio Aguinaldo (himself a problematic figure) by US colonizing forces, assisted by allegedly mercenary natives. The developments are observed by a trio of outcasts—a mestizo, a fisherman, and a runaway sex slave, who insists on her womanly prerogatives in the face of constant bickering between the two males, each of whom claims her for himself. The trio’s interactions blatantly convey the allegory where the then-emergent nation struggles to reconcile native and foreign forces. The resultant threesome is novel and titillating enough to overpower the real-life incidents. But the years since the movie’s release, with several disappointing attempts at determining the value of Aguinaldo’s contribution, have proved that Virgin Forest’s history-from-below perspective has been the only workable approach so far.[1]
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Scorpio Nights
Additional Language: Hiligaynon
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Peque Gallaga
Screenwriter: Rosauro Q. dela Cruz
From a story by T.E. Pagaspas & Rommel Bernardino
Producer: Regal Films
Cast: Orestes Ojeda, Daniel Fernando, Anna Marie Gutierrez, Eugene Enriquez, Amanda Amores, Mike Austria
Danny, a student boarder left in the city during summer break, becomes infatuated with the wife of a security guard who lives right below the room he is renting. When the guard returns and has sex with his still-asleep missus, Danny uses a hole on the floor to take a peek. One evening, he pretends to be the guard and succeeds in bedding the wife, who realizes someone else had touched her when her husband later gets with her. She then surprises Danny the next time he gets into her bed, and they are soon thrust into an illicit affair whose passion keeps escalating, oblivious to the dangers that lie ahead.
Controversy continued to hound Peque Gallaga since his distinctive debut, Oro, Plata, Mata (1982); this time it proceeded from the implicit support he supposedly lent the Marcos dictatorship by providing the regime with “decadent” entertainment in the form of this specific sex film for the government’s censorship-exempt venue. The historical paradox of course is that in all genuinely fascist systems, it is the government, not the opposition, that denounces decadence.[2] Since Scorpio Nights actually critiques the socio-economic deprivation that results in the depravity it depicts, its very existence winds up belying its critics’ moralistic impulse. One might wish for a more subversive handling directed at the heart of religious righteousness, which after all is the premise that unifies the movie’s objectors, whatever their political position. However, that approach would have aligned the movie with comedy-inflected Western pornographic-film tradition, and might have caused the product to be dismissed entirely out of hand. Scorpio Nights instead opted to break new ground in its own way, wherein an erotic text intended for mainstream release contained a combined meat-and-money shot toward the film’s close.[3] Evidence of the high regard for the movie among cineastes can be seen in how its spin-offs have been handled: Scorpio Nights 2 (1999) was directed by Erik Matti and Scorpio Nights 3 (2022, more a reboot than a sequel) by Lawrence Fajardo, Gallaga’s fellow Bacolodians and former mentees who each have their own canonical entries in this listing; between either, a sex-and-politics vehicle, titled Sseommeotaim (Summertime, 2001), was made by Korean filmmaker Park Jae-ho as a tribute to Scorpio Nights.
Notes
[1] Lore Reyes, who subsequently became Peque Gallaga’s co-director after the latter recovered from a major health problem, was production manager on several Gallaga films including this one. He provided clarification on several false claims by various internet-era authorities, of which mention must be made of two egregious ones: first, the declaration, supposedly issued by Gallaga himself, that he was present during the shooting in 1982 of the climactic scene of Ishmael Bernal’s Himala—a physical impossibility (to which I can also attest, inasmuch as I was then-employed at the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines), since the ECP scheduled the production of Gallaga’s and Bernal’s films to run concurrently so they could be released around the same time; second, that the dialogue of Virgin Forest contained, after Kapampangan, a high percentage of Ilokano. Familiar with the language, Reyes (who provided the list of languages in the film) said that not a single word could be heard except for the ones that the language shared with Kapampangan.
[2] In preparing an obituary for Peque Gallaga, I inquired about an incident, sensational during the time, where he denounced a number of specific cultural and academic personalities during the Scorpio Nights premiere at the Manila Film Center. The outburst, as it turned out, resulted from an attempt by an MFC official to cut out scenes from the film despite the fact that the venue was censorship-exempt. The encounter between director and official (who was also a film critic and professor) resulted in a violent scuffle and possibly accounted for the downgrading of the film by evaluation bodies, including the then-only film critics circle. See “My Peque Gallaga Interview” in Amauteurish (May 9, 2020), amauteurish.com/2020/05/09/my-peque-gallaga-interview/.
[3] In American pornographic-film practice, meat and money shots are considered genre-defining elements—at least until the emergence of “couples” or made-for-women material. The meat shot is one where male, female, or intersex genitalia can be visibly discerned, preferably in copulation. The money shot is taken when the male ejaculates, meant as documentary proof of the performer’s real-life engagement in the sex act. Those inclined to look further into these ideas are now fortunate to have a large number of scholarly titles; an excellent introductory reading would be Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989, updated 1999).
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