This was the text of a short lecture I delivered at the Korean Federation of Film Archives on June 8, 2024, to accompany a retrospective of nine LVN films made between 1939 and 1960. The event was arranged and hosted by KOFA Programmer Park Se-ho in coordination with the Philippine Embassy in Seoul (under Ambassador Maria Theresa B. Dizon-De Vega, with the assistance of Cultural Officer Anthony Cornista); Charlene Park, a Korean born and raised in the Philippines, translated English to Korean and vice versa.
The term “First Golden Age” was first propounded in 1972 by film journalist Jessie B. Garcia, about a dozen years after the period ended. At least one more Golden Age followed, although if you wish to be comprehensive, there may have been four of these Golden Ages all in all, with the most recent one either still ongoing or already recently ended. The Second Golden Age, which is what the Philippines is better known for, occurred after the imposition of martial law by Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, the father of the current Philippine President, and ended when his dictatorship was dismantled by the people-power uprising of February 1986.
11011I had some difficulty writing about the problem of the Golden Ages concept, primarily because I was the one who declared, periodized, and evaluated the Second Golden Age, in an article I wrote in 1989. It was the lead article in my first book, The National Pastime, so with the expected critical responses that usually arise in a contentious culture, I thought that it would be encounter the most number of deconstructive objections. To my surprise, even the harshest critics of the book assumed that it was the most reliable entry and made no mention of it; the term Second Golden Age has showed up even in foreign publications describing historical trends in Philippine cinema.
11011If I mention the other Golden Ages that various parties have been trying to add to the First and the Second, then you might have an idea of why I find the notion problematic. The official government history, published as an article in the Film volume of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’s Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, argued that the 1930s actually contained a Golden Age as well. Aside from generally making a blanket assertion without providing enough empirical proof, the article also skirts the reality that less than a handful of Philippine production remains from the period preceding World War II. One of these is Zamboanga, a fascinating exotic narrative of South Sea tribal conflicts complicated by American intervention, while the other is LVN’s first film, Giliw Ko, shown during the retrospective, a delightful realistic musical fairy-tale made more poignant by the fact that the country was anticipating the arrival of the storm clouds of World War II.
11011But the presence of two watchable though minor entries cannot be extrapolated to assert the existence of a sustained output of quality products, the way that the First and Second Golden Ages are capable of providing enough satisfactory evidence. Fortunately, no one has really taken this eccentric and unrigorous version of history seriously; otherwise, we would have to change our terms and call the 1950s the Second Golden Age and the martial-law period the Third one. The other period, which raises a different set of questions, is supposedly a stretch during the current millennium, when celluloid production transitioned to digital earlier in the Philippines than in most other countries, and several artists came up with productions celebrated even in foreign capitals as worthy of various forms of recognition. The problematics in this case are twofold: first, the previous Golden Ages could only be identified after they were over, since there would be recognizable shifts in the political economy to confidently declare that the factors that led to Golden-Age productivity are largely a matter of past history.
11011The second problem has more serious repercussions. The receptiveness of foreign responders to Philippine cinema is arguably an aftermath of the groundwork laid by practitioners who were active during the Second Golden Age, led by the late Lino Brocka. Several critics including yours truly have raised the issue of Philippine film talents making products expressly for foreign consumption, often without worrying that their aesthetic and topical materials might alienate the Philippine mass audience. This actually betrays the ideals observed by the Second Golden Age talents that they uphold as their models. Brocka, for example, presented his most politically controversial films in Europe as a means of raising their visibility in the home country, so that the local audience would be intrigued enough to defy authoritarian censorship and watch his films in triumphant turnouts. In fact, before his career was cut short by a tragic vehicular accident, he overcame his unstable either-or approach, when he would make politically serious movies only after providing enough profitable potboilers for his producers.
11011The final Brocka films were a throwback to the best practices of Filipino filmmakers as far back as the First Golden Age. The LVN series was fortunate enough to include Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa, which was the type of production that combined serious sociological discourse with impressive and pleasurable generic expertise. Ishmael Bernal and several other Filipino filmmakers were already engaging in this type of film presentation before Brocka came around, and I kept pointing out to my contemporaries in Philippine pop culture how Korea’s own triumph with Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite actually observed the same principles: ensure that a Korean film can be embraced by a Korean audience, first and foremost, and let its Western appreciators come around to its genius afterward. Fortunately, we have a growing number of Philippine practitioners who’ve come to realize that any country’s progressive film practice cannot exist outside of its mass audience.
11011We still have some filmmakers who insist on creating products that no native viewer will ever bother to watch unless they want to indulge in masochism, and most of the academically ensconced local critics similarly feel that their duty is to point out how deficient mass viewers are because they overlook so-called high-art samples. My own conclusion, which you may or may not share, is that they retain a usefulness as examples of pop-culture practice that adhere to outmoded and foreign modes of analyses, the kind of production and criticism that plugs into its own cycle of unsatisfactory and infeasible mutual appreciation, with the attention of less-knowledgeable foreign observers as its only means of validation. Thank you for your attention and happy viewing.
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