Pardon the before-the-title credit, the only one I ever indulged in. Joel David’s Silver-Screen Captures: A Trilogy of Philippine Film Criticism was the title of a proposal (sans the name-in-title touch) that I submitted to Ateneo de Manila University Press in the late 2010s, under the directorship of Maria Karina A. Bolasco. Karina had published my first book, The National Pastime: Contemporary Philippine Cinema, in 1990, when she headed Anvil Publishing. ADMU Press published in 1995 my second book, Fields of Vision: Critical Applications in Recent Philippine Cinema, when it was headed by the late Professor Esther M. Pacheco. My third book, Wages of Cinema: Film in Philippine Perspective, was commissioned by the late Professor Laura Samson and published it at the University of the Philippines Press in 1998.
11011Karina announced a program of multivolume publications, which would have been intimidating to any author. The twist in my initial publishing ventures was that my very first book draft was ambitious enough to be contained in two bound manuscript volumes. When Karina said she preferred a manuscript that was half the size of my submission, I picked out reviews and articles that could sufficiently function as an overview of the field, and saved the rest as a prospective second book.
11011Inasmuch as I’d promised Prof Esther my second book manuscript, I took out some time to fill out what I felt were gaps that resulted from trimming down its original fuller version, and added a few metacritical articles including what turned out to be the first standard film-canon survey in the country. The step-up from the first book was noted by a few perceptive colleagues, including Prof Laura when I dropped in to update her on my study progress. She then asked me to list the papers I had completed for conferences and prospective journal publications, then contacted me before my return to US graduate school to show me how we could come up with a third volume that was more distinctive from the first two, in being entirely focused on issues of theory, history, policy, and world cinema.
11011So I was always aware from the start that my premillennial volumes displayed a critical project that progressed from mostly reviews through mostly criticism through mostly discursive material, or (in another colleague’s semi-jokey terms) from classical to modern to postmodern emphases. The millennial transition helped out, in a sense, by providing a break from celluloid to digital, along with several other related in shifts in production and distribution. My scholarly output was also disrupted, initially by the demands of completing my doctorate compounded by the politics of refusal – of remaining in the West, and later of remaining in my home country’s national university.
11011When my situation more or less stabilized, I resumed scholarly production in vastly different terms, with book writing and publication becoming the most difficult to realize. I edited several anthologies of my own and of others’ manuscripts, completed a shortish but well-received monograph for an overseas queer films series, and completed a personal comprehensive canon project after retirement. Karina’s multivolume publication project for Ateneo became an opportunity for me to re-present my premillennial volumes: Silver-Screen Captures would have been an omnibus collection of The National Pastime, Fields of Vision, and Wages of Cinema.
11011Obviously I was unable to finalize my manuscript submission. I planned to revise and update the originals, in effect creating new digital editions of each, but the exigencies of fulfilling professorial duties were not conducive to book completion because of the primary valuation of high-ranked journal-article writing. In fact after retirement, I resolved to complete Canon Decampment, the aforementioned canon project, in order to uncover or discover the most efficient ways of finalizing book projects. After CD came out in June 2026, here we stand now with the delayed not-so-new trilogy.
11011Here be the links then to the components of Silver-Screen Captures, with the vision of a thick singular volume remaining something for a future that may or may never come, which is apparently the reality of this current historical moment. Links to the downloadable PDFs appear right before each book’s cataloging-in-publication data.
- The National Pastime (Amauteurish Publishing, 2014, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21280755), ISBN 971-621-96191-2-7, 152+x;
- Fields of Vision (Amauteurish Publishing, 2014, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21293648), ISBN 978-621-96191-4-1, 144+viii; and
- Wages of Cinema (Amauteurish Publishing, 2014, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21293617), ISBN 978-621-96191-3-4, 140+viii.
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Ámauteurish! 