I planned a number of mini-articles to accompany the findings, starting with a preliminary quantitative analysis, but the exhausting nature of the completed project as well as a plan for an anthology of metacritical materials convinced me that relieving myself of this burden would match the kindness it would bestow on readers masochistic enough to read the entire text.
11011I also conducted myself as close as possible to a “no title left behind” principle, which intersected perfectly with a world where the open-access practice (in acknowledging the primacy of the public domain) became a value strong enough to contend with capitalist profiteering.
11011Since the project began in the early 2010s, I approached the conclusion of every year with greater anxiety than the typically careless award-givers among my elderly colleagues. Unlike news reports and fan celebrations, book publications exist in a realm where they have the potential to outlast even judgments made about them. But when the second decade of the millennium rolled in, I agreed with several colleagues to announce 2020 as the project’s cutoff year, and was pleasantly surprised at the manifold advantages that temporal distance provided. Any individual who believes that the gaps from 2021 to whatever happens to be the year that you read this, urgently needs to be filled in as perfectly updated a manner, is welcome to take up the challenge.
11011This leads to the final gesture I wish the project to make. Critics and academics in the field of film discourse have been making hay and getting away with mediocrity for far too long, which means that no amount of textual deconstruction or reconstruction will prevent them from persisting in their practice. The book is not for them, fortunately; it is for me (which should go without saying) as well as for all concerned appreciators of Philippine cinema. It is also for world-cinema enthusiasts who might share the same excitement in evaluating other historically and geographically circumscribed realms of practice.
11011I recently discussed in an online forum how I went over then-existing critical writing on Philippine cinema, which was how I knew what strengths I could bring and what weaknesses of mine I could work on. The rest won’t matter, and I hope that any future critical practitioner who thinks of attempting a similar project can exert as much effort (and have as much fun) to make what I finished not matter, which is how I’m already regarding it at this point. My post-canon life can finally begin.
Á!
ORCID ID 
Ámauteurish! 