Canon Decampment: Raya Martin

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Independencia

English Translation: Independence
Year of Release: 2009 / B&W
Director: Raya Martin
Screenwriters: Ramon Sarmiento & Raya Martin
Producers: Cinematografica, Arte France Cinéma, Atopic, Razor Film, Volya Films

Cast: Sid Lucero, Tetchie Agbayani, Alessandra de Rossi, Mika Aguilos, Bodjie Pascua, Lui Manansala, Richard Gonzales, Carl Lawrence Lagasca, Bong Cabrera, Lav Diaz, Arnold Reyes, Angeli Bayani, Adriana Agcaoili, Arleen Cuevas

As American forces invade the Philippines during the late 1890s, a mother and her son settle in a jungle to hide from the ongoing chaos. One day, the son finds a wounded pregnant woman (everyone is unnamed in the story) who later becomes part of the family. Years pass but as a storm approaches and American troops wend their way through the jungle, the family’s peaceful existence could soon come to an end.

The reflexive strategy, where an artwork exposes its creative processes—a novel about a novel being written, for example, or a painting of the painter finishing a painting—succeeded in film more than in any other medium, for reasons that we take for granted today: its photographic nature guarantees a “real,” as opposed to abstract, experience; its use of actors provides the lure of star-worship; its commingling of all the other art forms that preceded it allows it to be indirectly self-referential in focusing on a non-filmic occupation. In this respect, the deep reflexivity that Independencia extends bodes well for literate film entertainment. Handling a late 19th-century fictional situation with late 19th-century cine aesthetics, Raya Martin renders the anachronism with such bravura expertise that we wind up accepting his stylistic strategy as an appropriate means of framing the narrative. In retrospect, silent-era cinema’s bold artificialities also enable our better-late-than-never response to the just-as-blatantly fake anti-revolutionary propaganda films churned out by Thomas Edison et al. for the US colonial government. An additional danger, that of fantasizing that Independencia is actually a piece recovered from an early-film archive (which is how the movie presents itself), may be a source of pleasure that the nostalgic-nationalist viewer can be forgiven for indulging in.

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How to Disappear Completely

Year of Release: 2013
Director & Screenwriter: Raya Martin
Producers: Cinematografica & Hubert Bals Fund

Cast: Shamaine Buencamino, Nonie Buencamino, Ness Roque, Ronnie Martinez, Abner Delina, Nicole Alejandro, Brent Michael Borro, Jamela Magbanlac, Vince Ivan Real, Patricia Rubiano, Francesca Venice Orense, Rainer Lumbera, Edson Jay K. Ortega, Feliciano M. Lumbera, Donabel Diokno, Mervic Jay Javier, Vener dela Cruz, Jaypee Plaza, mario Nipay, Dencio Gagarin, Prinz Gererd Madamba, Appie Badillo, Violy Orense, Jasmin Orense, Esther Banathlao, Pinky Baro, Violeta Lumbera, Josie Regalario, Susan Lumbera, Ma. Yssabella Nervie J.dela Cruz, Elmer Gamilla Jr.

[Note: spoilers provided] A girl’s voice informs a preteen boy that she wants to kill him and his family. He cries and his nose bleeds. A title reads “The islands. A year ago” and we witness a funeral procession of laughing children who drop petals on a girl’s body on a sepulcher. The mother of a girl reads the Book of Genesis narrative of how the daughters of Lot conspire to sleep with their father by getting him drunk on wine. Meanwhile the girl masturbates on her bed and avoids her father seeing her through the slats on the bamboo floor. As the mother sells sausages to a haggler next day, the father places bets on a cockfight while children play outdoors but “zombie women” (according to end credits) arrive and take them away. The girl arrives home in her play clothes but changes into her school uniform right before arriving. Later the mother witnesses what appears to be her hubby’s incestuous interest in their child. The mother tells her daughter the tale of how, in the seventeenth century, a tsunami hit their town and caused death and destruction with only one survivor, and old woman, who continues to haunt their plce looking for her lost daughter. Carrying a figurine of the Virgin Mary, the girl buys two bottles of gin from a convenience store, then she and her mother pray the rosary. The father next tells the story of an angel who told a king he’ll have a son, who turned out to be a chicken. The parents died after raising a large brood which wound up quarreling and led to the origin of the Texas rooster breed—a story he narrates to his fighting cock. The girl plays, in costume, the gun of the American who shot a playful Philippine native and started the Philippine-American War; when a teacher looks for the children to congratulate them afterward, she discovers they’re gone, abducted in a jeepney. Her parents search for her in their jeep and see her running ahead but fail to notice the old lady sitting in the back seat. Her parents are bound by ropes while the girl, brandishing a gun, marches around a burning cross, occasionally turning into the old woman, then she shoots her parents. A gang of young men desecrate the cemetery then rape and kidnap the girl’s classmates, tormenting them during the ride, and threatening to toss them over a bridge their vehicle’s crossing.

One will probably be unable to find a more authentic experimental-narrative film from the Philippines than Raya Martin’s How to Disappear Completely. The question of “better” or “best” achievement will of course be impossible to determine in such a category, although the nearly unanimous oversight of recognition bodies except for the limited (and now-defunct) film festival where it first participated, is a deplorable indicator of our presumptive film evaluators’ preparation in conducting out-of-the-ordinary film analysis—not that we never had any forewarning in the past. An enfant terrible, Martin never had sufficient support or encouragement from the elders who were then running the national university’s film program and opted instead to leapfrog the system they devised and proceed directly to foreign exhibition venues. A family background in political activism and a childhood in a semi-rural environment ensure that the material at least of HtDC will be rooted in Martin’s memories of authentic experience, with the digital medium’s tendency to opt for darkening imagery evoking the constant estrangement of personal memory from the artist’s grasp. The traumatic recollection of the past that commences the tale, along with the main character’s parents’ own remembered fantastic narratives, prove to be no match for forms of violence that the outside forces of history and uneven development imprint on the citizens. Despite its relatively short length, the film reveals its title well past the one-hour mark, possibly the longest wait for any local film, and presents its darkest events from this point onward, in the mercifully short running time that remains. But the preceding practice of juxtaposing unrelated events, characters, and time frames, ensures that HtDC will nevertheless maintain a fascination with what must have happened beforehand and where the film will end up afterward.

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