[Click here (recommended) for desktop mode. Click to jump to: Dyesebel, 1953; Pedro Penduko, 1954; Sanda Wong, 1955; Terror Is a Man, 1959; The Moises Padilla Story, 1961; El Filibusterismo, 1962; Women in Cages, 1971.]
Sisa
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1951 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Teodorico C. Santos
(Based on the title character created by José Rizal in his 1887 novel Noli Me Tángere [Touch Me Not])
Producer: Premiere Productions
Cast: Anita Linda, Reynaldo Dante, Eduardo del Mar, Eddie Infante, Naty Rubi, Tony Tolman, Pancho Pelagio, Ruben Rustia, Rosita Noble, Bebong Osorio, Francisco Cruz, Fernando Santiago, Don Dano, Andres Benitez, Boy Francisco
Sisa’s life takes an unfortunate turn after her husband is wrongfully jailed. To make matters worse, her sons—altar boys Basilio and Crispin—are falsely accused of stealing from their local church by the head sacristan. The two are severely punished and, although Basilio escapes, Crispin is killed. As Sisa looks for her children, her search leads to one ordeal after another.
How aware was José Rizal that, in fleshing out the narrative of a native woman forced to endure unbearable suffering and loss by all manner of men—from her abusive husband to colonial soldiery, officials, and clerics—he was providing an iconic representation of his own country that would have prevailed into the new millennium? Composited from the experiences of the author’s real-life acquaintances, including his own mother, Sisa-as-character affirms a protofeminist strain usually overlooked in appreciations of Rizal’s novels. Anita Linda, herself a politicized celebrity who got blacklisted at one point for her pro-labor activities, embodied the role so completely that it became the gold standard for outstanding performance for several decades afterward. As developed by Gerardo de Leon and Teodorico C. Santos, the handling of Rizal’s Sisa turned out to be so overpowering and self-contained that even a decade later, when de Leon subsequently attempted an adaptation of the source novel, Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not, 1961), the result paled in comparison.[1] The reason that Sisa succeeds where adaptations of the Noli have tended to flounder is because of its unqualified and unrelenting critique of patriarchy, in all its naked, malignant prevalence, in the de Leon film.
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Years of Release: 1953 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Pierre L. Salas
(Adapted from Mars Ravelo’s komiks series)
Producer: Manuel Vistan Jr. Productions
Cast: Edna Luna, Jaime de la Rosa, Carol Varga, Fernando Royo, Etang Discher, Max Alvarado, Vicente Madrigal, Mary Williams, Nello Nayo, Luis San Juan, Neonita Bona, Paquito Salcedo, Lito Ansurez, Jesus Lapid, Isa Rino, Belen Campillos, Jose Buencamino, Nieves Abrera Anita Hanna, Loudes Galicia
[Note: spoilers provided] Dyesebel, who is born with a fishtail, is raised by her parents away from civilization to avoid persecution. Diangga, a benign sea-witch, provides her with the ability to breathe underwater like regular merfolk. When she ventures on a beach that she thought was abandoned, she gains the attention of Fredo, who falls in love with her. Fredo’s ex-girlfriend Betty gets wind of his new flame and discovers her mercreature condition. Still in love with Fredo, Betty schemes with conniving henchmen to abduct Dyesebel and banish her to a circus, where she becomes a sideshow attraction. Fredo sees the circus announcement in a newspaper and rescues her, but he is overpowered by Betty’s goons. He throws Dysebel in the sea, where Diangga perishes in acquiring an amulet for her. When Dysebel reaches shore, Betty espies her and sees the mermaid use the amulet to acquire human legs. Impressed by its ability to endow Dyesebel with perfection, Betty steals the amulet and rubs it like Dyesebel did, but discovers her legs have turned into a fishtail. Fredo and Dyesebel reunite and wed.
Mythical characters, whatever their origin, should all be so lucky as to be launched by the most gifted visual stylist among all Filipino filmmakers. In fact the original Dyesebel and its sequel (Anak ni Dyesebel or Child of Dyesebel, 1964)—both recently rediscovered after having been officially declared lost—had an element that the subsequent versions could already take for granted, but which was then unthinkable for a children’s fantasy: a reference to, and constant awareness of, the mermaid’s sexual difference. And in stark contrast with Hans Christian Andersen’s “Den lille havfrue (The Little Mermaid),” the Dyesebel character has no claim to royalty, whether undersea or on land, and gets spared the fairy tale’s cornball metaphysical closure, where the lead character sacrifices herself for love and earns the right to ultimately have a soul. Our heroine fights for her heart’s desire although she understandably has to be discreet about it, and endures the several indignities her socially—and anatomically—advantaged rival visits on her. Small wonder that the descriptive term for her kind, sirena, eventually became synonymous with queer subjects—and as if to goad along this interpretation, Gerardo de Leon mischievously makes sure to depict the process of mer-transformation as a sight that never fails to freak out “normal” citizens.[2]
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Years of Release: 1954 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Ding M. de Jesus
(From the komiks series by Francisco V. Coching, as serialized in Liwayway)
Producers: People’s Pictures & Premiere Productions
Cast: Efren Reyes, Edna Luna, Lopito, Ramon d’Salva, Ruben Rustia, Lito Anzures, Nello Nayo, Paquito Salcedo, Purita Alma, Dely Atay-Atayan, Felisa Salcedo, Venchito Galvez, Max Alvarado, Juanito Lindo, Francisco Cruz, Francisco Martin, Tony Palomer, Jose Monasterial, Bino Garcia, Benny Panganiban, Onching Balibol, Nina Morales, Renato Robles
Pedro Penduko, a rural layabout, is goaded by his hunchback pal Terio to assist the limp Amparo, convincing him by saying she might offer them rice cakes. When Tony, a rich suitor, tells them to scram, Terio quarrels with him so Pedro has to help out. Marina, an heiress for whom Terio and Amparo work as househelp, invites Pedro to her welcome party celebrating her return from the US. Pedro’s father meantime promises his son an amulet that will protect him from harm, if Pedro agrees to bathe and court Amparo. Marina though has set her sights on Pedro and maltreats Amparo as her rival, further aggravating Tony’s rivalry. Their small-town concerns are brought to a head when Tirong, a bandit, kills Marina’s father and kidnaps Amparo, challenging Pedro to a duel if he wants to win the latter’s freedom.
In contrast with the previous year’s Dyesebel, Pedro Penduko, another of Gerardo de Leon’s komiks adaptations, has its soundtrack intact, although in unfortunately degraded video format. All to the best for Pinas cultural interests, since Francisco V. Coching’s material operates on a different plane in relation to literary artists of his era. (For a more straightforward treatment of another of his stories, see Conrado Conde’s Talipandas or Traitor, from 1958.) Even from among contemporary comic heroes, one would be hard-put to find someone who not only prefers to laze around but also whose body odor becomes his defining social marker, not to mention his preference for physically disabled chums. The psychoanalytic implications only intensify even as the characters are able to work through some of their prior hindrances, resulting in the best kind of comic situation: one where laughter is short-circuited by tragic backstories and where the requisite happy endings are well-earned. De Leon mounts an entire slew of contrarian readings by casting the agential roles against type: when hefty action star Efren Reyes in the amusingly harmless title role confronts the benign and contemplative Ruben Rustia as the ruthless outsider, the resulting instability requires an offbeat justification—one that Coching provides, with de Leon ensuring that it smacks the viewer as effectively as it would have on the printed page.
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Additional Language: Chinese
Year of Release: 1955 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriters: Ding Santos, Tony Santos, Teodorico C. Santos
(From a story by Teodorico C. Santos)
Producers: Manuel Vistan Jr. Production & Chapman Productions
Cast: Jose Padilla Jr., Lilia Dizon, Danilo Montes, Lola Young, Gil de Leon, Ligaya Lopez, Vicente Liwanag, Mario Barri, Bruno Punzalan, Ligaya Lopez
Lau Chien’s marriage to Lan Ying is stopped when bandits Sanda Wong and Yuen Fei try to steal from Chien’s vast inheritance. Shady garrison captain Koh Loo traps the two robbers to get the wealth for himself but Chien unexpectedly intervenes. Wong and Chien become unlikely allies but their bond is tested throughout Chien’s quest to be reunited with Lan Ying and reclaim his wealth.
Gerardo de Leon had already tackled the theme of an armed outsider reforming corruption in “straight” society in Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo (Snake in the Old Belfry, 1952); although weighed down by a surfeit of pulpy elements, the latter film resonated with the Philippines’s anti-US resistance movements, when the foreign occupants slandered our freedom fighters by calling them bandits—exactly the type of characters depicted in the film. In transposing the setting to an indeterminate “ancient China,” and introducing a male-bonding strategy that would intensify the conflicts in several of his forthcoming major films, de Leon managed to devise complex character interactions that could serve as the narrative counterpart of his diagonal deep-focus compositions. Moreover, he elevated his level of accomplishment to stake a claim on a type of Asian film that would proliferate later, where a lone hero sets himself or occasionally herself against a backward social order, exposing its barbarism in the process: Easterns, in effect, in contrast to Hollywood’s Westerns.
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Alternate Titles: Creature from Blood Island; Blood Creature
Language: English
Year of Release: 1959 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon [as Gerry de Leon]
Screenwriter: Harry Paul Harber
(Unofficially adapted from H.G. Wells’s 1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau)
Producer: Lynn-Romero Productions
Cast: Francis Lederer, Greta Thyssen, Richard Derr, Oscar Keesee, Lilia Duran, Peyton Keesee, Flory Carlos
When William gets shipwrecked on an island, he is taken in by Dr. Charles Girard. He also encounters the doctor’s disturbing experiment: a panther being turned into a human. William argues that the procedure is unethical although Dr. Girard believes otherwise. But when the creature manages to escape, the two men must find a way to stop the monster’s murderous rampage.
Because of its association with American B-film production, Terror Is a Man was largely overlooked in the home country. Nevertheless this reworking of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau performed profitably enough to initiate the Philippines’s strongest contribution to US pop culture, before Imelda Marcos came along and provided ready-made punchlines for comic and/or melodramatic material. The Blood-Island film cycle—named after Val Guest’s The Camp on Blood Island (1958), a fairly successful Malaya-set entry about a Japanese concentration camp, from horror specialists Hammer Films—in fact figured in film historian Robert Sklar’s genealogy of the Hollywood Vietnam-War movie genre. According to Sklar (in several books starting with Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Vintage Books, 1994), prior to the US’s pullout during the fall of Saigon in 1975, Blood-Island movies were the only way that English-speaking white male characters could be shown confronting literally animal savagery in unidentifiable tropical settings. A later rendition, John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), headlining Marlon Brando, reveled in the material’s camp elements—the same singular skill that de Leon would successfully develop much later, notably in his vampire cult films Kulay Dugo ang Gabi (Blood Is the Color of Night, 1964) and Ibulong Mo sa Hangin (Whisper to the Wind, 1966), plus his controversial local horror entry Lilet (1971). Among straight-faced adaptations of the Wells novel, however, TIaM is the version to beat.
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Year of Release: 1961 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Cesar Amigo
(From a story by Leon O. Ty)
Producer: MML Productions
Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Joseph Estrada, Lilia Dizon, Ben Perez, Oscar Roncal, Rosa Aguirre, Robert Arevalo, Joseph de Cordova, Alfonso Carvajal, Jose Garcia, Mila Montañez, Max Alvarado, Martin Marfil, Bruno Punzalan, Alfonso Carvajal, Mila Montañez, Salvador Zaragoza, Ric Bustamante, Bino Garcia, Paquito Salcedo, Francisco Cruz, Quiel Mendoza, Eddie Arce
Moises Padilla decides to run for town mayor after witnessing multiple counts of abuse done by the private army of Negros Occidental governor Rafael Lacson. Along the way, Moises gets his former war comrade, who is now the town’s police chief, as his bodyguard. But since Lacson controls the area’s military and police, he vows to ensure that Moises’s mayoral bid will not prosper.
By all credible accounts, Philippine cinema’s gravest single loss is that of its best directorial stylist’s allegedly best film, Ang Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed, 1965). An estimate of just how appalling this calamity is can be inferred from the still-existing, fairly competent propagandistic film-biography Iginuhit ng Tadhana (Determined by Destiny): The Ferdinand Marcos Story, directed by Mar S. Torres, Jose de Villa, and Conrado Conde, which Gerardo de Leon’s entry was meant to counter when they competed in the first Manila Film Festival: the de Leon film went on to deservingly sweep the industry awards, but it is the Marcos movie that remains available.[3] A more effective and poignant way would be to take a look at de Leon’s earlier exercise in political advocacy, The Moises Padilla Story, based on the brutal treatment of a reformist who supported then-Defense Secretary Ramon F. Magsaysay. The narrative creates a polarized situation and unfortunately typecasts as villains Max Alvarado, Martin Marfil, and Bruno Punzalan—three great character actors with East Asian features; it then overlays the plot with the conflictive relationship between the title character and his former World War II guerrilla buddy, depicted as a deeply moving bromantic tragedy by Leopoldo Salcedo and Joseph Estrada respectively. De Leon’s solutions to these dramaturgical limitations are mostly technical, but breathtakingly so; the remastered version managed to restore crucial portions of a grisly, extensive, cenaculo-worthy torture scene, enabling one to believe that anyone who watched it would have cast a vote for the Guy (Magsaysay’s nickname), had he still been alive, all over again.
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English Translation: The Anarchist
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1962 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriters: Adrian Cristobal, Jose Flores Sibal, Gerardo de Leon
(From the 1891 novel by José Rizal)
Producer: Arriva Productions
Cast: Pancho Magalona, Charito Solis, Teody Belarmino, Edita Vital, Ben Perez, Carlos Padilla Jr., Lourdes Medel, Robert Arevalo, Oscar Keesee, Ramon d’Salva, Joseph de Cordova, Paquito Diaz, Boy Francisco, Alfonso Carvajal, Jose Garcia, Nello Nayo, Patring Carvajal, Jerry Pons, Francisco Cruz, Paquito Salcedo, Dadang Ortega, Felisa Salcedo, Primo Yumol, Tommy Nepomuceno, Quiel Mendoza, Manny Ojeda, Fred Ramirez, Turing Ramirez, Johnny Fernandez
After touring the world, Crisostomo Ibarra returns to the Philippines as the mysterious jeweler Simoun. Wanting to spark a revolution to overthrow the Spanish colonial government, he allies with Basilio—the only one who knows Simoun’s true identity. After their initial attempt fails, their new plan will ultimately determine their fates.
Several possible reasons can be propounded as to why José Rizal’s much-acclaimed first novel, Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not), did not translate onscreen as well as his second one, or even compared with the former’s Sisa subplot, which had been adapted by Gerardo de Leon in 1951. In one of his later books, The Age of Globalization (2013, formerly titled Under Three Flags), the late Benedict Anderson argued that, among the late 19th-century’s several radical options, anarchism was the movement that eventually appealed to Rizal’s particular quest for identity and justice. Hence, although El Filibusterismo utilized a linear narrative, in contrast with the Noli’s use of multiple plot strands, it also had a more focused, nearly dogmatic ideological position. Any reader expecting a repeat of Noli’s grand humanist closure, its anti-colonial thrust blunted by its author’s still-reformist impulses, would therefore be understandably frustrated. Crisostomo Ibarra’s transmutation into Simoun in El Fili also heralded a darker, borderline-nihilist resolve in Rizal’s new realization: that only the full-scale purgation of the Philippine colonial system could lead to a brighter future for the country. De Leon’s ominous lighting and unsettling compositions, as executed by the great black-and-white cinematographic master Mike Accion, unexpectedly served the material better than anyone could hope for. If for nothing else, El Fili stands as proof that de Leon’s skills extended beyond technical expertise to include adept recognition and handling of politically complex material.
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Alternate Title: Bamboo Doll House
Initial Title: Playpen
Language: English
Year of Release: 1971
Director: Gerardo de Leon [as Gerry de Leon]
Screenwriters: James H. Watkins & David Osterhout
Producers: New World Pictures & Balatbat Productions
Cast: Judith Brown, Roberta Collins, Jennifer Gan, Pam Grier, Bernard Bonnin, Charlie Davao, Johnny Long, Holly Anders, Dwight Howard, Roberta Swift, Paul Sawyer, Jeffrey Taylor, Marissa Delgado, Paquito Diaz, Sofia Moran, Carpi Asturias, Ruben Rustia, Nick Cayari, Andres Centenera
Thinking that her double-dealing boyfriend will eventually save her, a woman nicknamed Jeff agrees to be sentenced for drug-dealing at the aptly named Carcel del Infierno. There she meets level-headed Sandy, heroin addict Stokes (who secretly agrees to murder Jeff in exchange for drugs), and Theresa, a native woman who’s the girlfriend of Alabama, the sadistic warden. The women come to realize that with all their differences, their only hope for escape is in agreeing to help one another.
The women-in-prison genre (more accurately a hybrid subgenre of several film types including action, melodrama, and soft-core pornography) has been around from nearly the beginning of narrative film history, or ever since producers realized that they could reap profits from catering to the male gaze. Even Gerry de Leon’s contribution, Women in Cages, was preceded by a few months by Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House, which shared the same producer and several actors. The Philippines-set confections are remembered for Pam Grier’s breakout performances, to be cemented the year after WiC with Eddie Romero’s proto-blaxploitation entry Black Mama, White Mama. Grier’s participation alone makes WiC worth the attention, despite—or even because of—several eyebrow-raising elements attendant to her prison-warden character: as if swapping the male-gender casting wasn’t unusual enough, she was also a politically aware sadist who picked out the women she fancied for her sexual amusement. In addition to her name, her sarcastic question to the prisoners brought to work at a sugar plantation clues us into her function: “Don’t it make you pine for those cane fields in the South?” Her comeuppance in the hands of the maniacal posse she designated to hunt down escapees may be seen as a form of ironic justice, but then it arrives after a series of severe and sometimes mortal punishments that she inflicts on her unruly charges. Small wonder that Grier fan Quentin Tarantino described the film as “just harsh, harsh, harsh” while making sure to reference WiC in several of his own exploitation projects and providing Grier with her best role ever, in Jackie Brown (1997). More than Terror Is a Man (1959), WiC proves that de Leon at his peak was capable of drawing in insights and significations from a wide range of film genres and historical traumas, while centering one of the most beautiful foreign actors to ever grace an anonymous Pinas locale.
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Notes
[1] Another Noli Me Tángere (1930), by the legendary Jose Nepomuceno, garnered even more acclaim than any subsequent version, declared by some commentators as the best Filipino movie ever made up to that point. Like another more recent all-time best, Gerardo de Leon’s Ang Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed, 1965), it has been lost to posterity. Other local films through the years took the cue from de Leon’s Sisa by also featuring characters from Rizal’s fiction—e.g., Jun Aristorenas’s (as Junar) Elias, Basilio at Sisa (Elias, Basilio and Sisa, 1972). The last major adaptation of the Noli was the 1992 TV series produced by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and directed by de Leon’s confrere, Eddie Romero. In 1999, Mario O’Hara directed and wrote his own Sisa, where the title character interacted with the real-life Rizal.
[2] A nitrate-stock print of Dyesebel and its sequel, Anak ni Dyesebel (Child of Dyesebel, 1964), also directed by Gerardo de Leon, are the earliest Filipino films I remember watching, double-billed in a second-run provincial theater. Understandably my memory of either is patchy, with certain scenes of one film being confused with the other. Fortunately, I was able to figure out some details from conversations with the late GDL enthusiast Vic Delotavo, most memorably the line of dialogue where Dyesebel’s rival asks the male lead, “What does she have that I don’t have?”; my recollection of male mer-transformation, which incited what psychoanalysts might describe as a mild form of castration anxiety, is possibly in the sequel’s narrative.
11011According to archivist-critic Jojo Devera, the existing videocopy available in the Philippines was struck from a film print in Thailand, which replaced the original soundtrack with a Thai-dubbed version and separated the film sound in audiotape format; unfortunately Teddy Co, the tape’s custodian, died before he could secure resources to facilitate the sound transfer. Monchito Nocon, member and board trustee of the Society of Film Archivists of the Philippines, directed my attention to Dyesebel Film Soundtrack Digitization and Restoration, a private Facebook group, that posted a copy of the much-contested tape. Pending further developments (which could take years to realize), the existing Dyesebel video may be regarded for now as inadvertently a silent film, a status it shares with Arnel Mardoquio’s 2013 entry Ang mga Tigmo sa Akong Pagpauli (Riddles of My Homecoming) in this entire canon listing—which is also mainly why this canon entry’s storyline is exhaustive.
[3] Another Ferdinand Marcos Sr. film-bio, Eddie Garcia’s Pinagbuklod ng Langit (Joined Together by Heaven, a.k.a. Heaven’s Fate, 1969), was produced for the dictator-to-be’s successful re-election campaign. A year later, a crony-owned company produced Jerry Hopper’s Maharlika (Royalty), a retelling of the Marcos-concocted myth about his World War II exploits as commander of the Maharlika unit. Possibly intended to justify his claim about having been the most decorated soldier in the Philippines, the movie also featured the story of Isabella, the American female soldier who fought alongside him and died in the effort, and with whom he had fallen in love. Dovie Beams, the American starlet who got the role, claimed that Marcos fell in love with her—in real life. The scandal acquired lurid and surreal dimensions when Beams called a press conference to claim that her life was being threatened by Imelda Marcos, and played apparently authentic and unexpurgated recordings of her intimate sessions with the President. For this reason, the movie’s local release was permanently postponed, although it was apparently screened in Guam and elsewhere; a year after the Marcos regime was ousted, however, Maharlika was finally shown in Manila.
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Á!
On August 17, 2023, James de la Rosa posted, on his “Baul ni Juan” page on Facebook, the newspaper layout (plus supplemental pics) of Gerardo de Leon’s The Gold Bikini, a 1967 release that seemed to foreshadow Maharlika: it featured, in Elizabeth Thompson, what period slang would have described as a “white-leghorn” actress; the lead actor’s code name was Agent 777 (the numerologically obsessed Marcos’s favorite number); and the lead actor’s family name was … Marcos. No serious connection can be made between this and Beams’s project, except for the (still-distant) possibility that Marcos or one of the film producers may have been inspired by it. Pending further though unlikely disclosures, we can chalk this up to one of those serendipitous coincidences that a thriving popular culture occasionally offers up.
ORCID ID 
Ámauteurish! 
Corrosive Criticism
Last month’s just-concluded Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, the first after a full year of the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., yielded a few controversies, the latest of which was centered on the pullout of a politically themed film from the opening ceremony – allegedly because it was censored (per political sectors), or possibly because seven hours was too long to wait out a ceremonial entry (per festival organizers). This would not be surprising, considering that the pre-ousted Marcos family was known to be the most culturally obsessed among Philippine presidential administrations; although truth be told, at the peak of the Marcos Sr. presidency, any politically (and even sexually) daring movie would have been shown at the government’s Manila Film Center venue without anyone bothering to bat a false eyelash.
11011Prior to the current uproar, a commotion over a social-network film reviewer boiled over and took much longer to simmer down. In fact the said reviewer had already been writing for over a year, but the only filmmakers who objected were the ones working for a streaming outlet specializing in sex-themed material. (Personal disclosure: I acceded to several friends’ request to criticize the reviewer and uploaded an article to my blog, my first this year, for that purpose; see “Anonymity & Its Discontents.”) This for me remains the key to the trouble that the festival had with this specific evaluator. The participants – artists, readers, even the reviewer himself – operated from not just an outmoded but also a long-unworkable set of assumptions. No wonder no resolution could be worked out.
11011The premise I’m referring to is the one on which the entire concept of Cinemalaya rests: that of identifying and subsidizing a vanguard of “best” emerging film artists. The necessarily politicized process this generates can be tracked to a well-intended system of adequate training – way back when no such option was available in the country; so even from the start, only aspirants who were sufficiently privileged because of class and/or nationality could actually achieve the necessary qualifications. Meaning it was never sufficient to just be talented and motivated; some form of social entitlement (wealth, foreign training, industry contacts) would more often than not prove more effective. To better articulate the criteria and identify those who best exemplified the worthiness of outstanding aspirants, elite institutions – government and education, conveniently overlapping in the national university – volunteered to make their presence palpable.
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11011What this led to was a clutch of spectacles by which film commentary would be nearly exclusively identified: annual exercises, in the form of festivals, that showcase entries preselected by supposedly discriminating evaluators, plus sets of prizes either for this closed system or for the entire industry, nearly all of which enact a dramatic process that can still occasionally prove captivating and suspenseful. Said process begins when a group of “deserving” talents would be announced, from which a circle of self-proclaimed authorities would eventually declare (during “normal” conditions) one winner. One can see how entrenched this mentality is when several sets of academe-based groups continue to follow this annual ritual despite supposedly being more alert to its deleterious effects, starting with fostering divisiveness in the community of artists.
11011Hence the fascinating particulars of the Cinemalaya brouhaha, where the aforementioned Facebook reviewer provided rankings for the competition entries, culminating in an alternate set of awards. The complaints predictably came from filmmakers whose works were given low grades, with attendant unflattering commentary. What made this response dubious on its face is immediately evident: would they have voiced any objection if they were given higher evaluations? Earlier outed as singular and biologically male, the reviewer himself posted his rationale – that since film screenings are costly, he’s providing a service to the general public by assessing for them which entries he believes are worth watching and which ones should be shunned.[1]
11011A more sensible set of comments focused on the reviewer’s six-plus scoring system (from zero to five stars), which he had earlier expanded to include negative numbers. At some point, he wound up with a negative-infinity score for a movie he regarded as the worst, then realized that another movie was even worse and awarded it with a square root of negative-infinity score. This attempt to display mathematical competence is innumerate to anyone with a casual familiarity with basic principles in the field.[2] The actual issues, which everyone missed out on, is also what the entire existing system of film evaluation fails to do. First, determining film worth according to quantifiable standards of art, or relevance, or morality, no longer really matters as much as figuring out the issues that generated the work and how its audience responded to it. Hence the reviewer’s attempt at further refining his criteria (the equivalent of the award-givers’ categories) is a step forward … in the wrong direction.
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11011Second, which was the topic I’d posted about earlier, by presuming to write about practitioners who have no option except to announce their identities, the reviewer will have no ethical justification for insisting on his anonymity. Is the country under a system of colonization or fascism, when underground literature historically became indispensable? Or are the film practitioners capable of criminally endangering those who criticize them? These are only rhetorical questions, of course. The non-rhetorical one is: why is the community of publicists protecting this reviewer’s identity, and why are the complaining artists not seeing anything anomalous about this? The scary answer is – because they all agree that film evaluation can only be expressed one way, by ranking one another, and the more difficult scientific and cultural work doesn’t have to get done. The ultimate winner here is none other than our reviewer-ranker, the one who (in a better world) deserves to be positioned at the bottom of the heap, representing the award-giving critics who can laze around and write unthinkingly and assert their power over industry practitioners when the season for holding their trophies aloft arrives once more.
Notes
First published August 31, 2023, as “Film Critico Incognito” in The FilAm. The specified social-network critic took down all the posts referenced in this article. I am maintaining the current piece as a cautionary example, since in this type of instance, a vacancy left by anyone who attained virality can be easily replaced by some other interested party.
[1] This ranking system was first propagated by a member of the Filipino Film Critics Circle in the 1970s-80s, so it makes sense that other members of this group will be tolerant, if not supportive, of this reviewer. Anyone sufficiently familiar with this system will readily see how cultural products of all types are notoriously irreducible to preordained criteria. The most artistically innovative ones, in fact, demand that their evaluators observe a new set of standards, while the most popularly successful ones demand an entirely different set of approaches premised on historical conditions.
11011In fact, the Cinemalaya outcry echoed an earlier quarrel, this time between the reviewer and Marcos-family hagiographer Darryl Yap. With an army of fanatical followers of his Vincentiments page, Yap was able to lodge enough complaints against the reviewer to get the latter’s page suspended on Facebook. He also posted a photograph of the reviewer’s masked face but desisted from identifying him by name (presumably easily accomplishable by referring to the guest list of any screening attended by the person he wanted to denounce). The reviewer, meanwhile, frantically uploaded material supportive of Bongbong Marcos’s then-already defeated adversary, Leni Robredo.
11011Other close observers have similarly pointed out how the reviewer exhibits biases favoring certain queer or Chinoy filmmakers; whatever the implications of these preferences, the reviewer’s insistence on shielding himself from further inspection places him in an unearned special category, elevated in his own mind and possibly those of other publicists, critics, artists, and his own set of social-network fanatics, all of whom seem to accept his anonymous stature as a right only he had earned one way or another. More disturbingly, in terms of pandering to their respective admirers, Yap conducts himself with relatively more dignity and confidence, despite having to contend with more persistent trolls.
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[2]
The reviewer’s technical troubles begin with his ranking scheme: since he initially awarded anywhere from zero to five stars, he would write a specific score out of five (from 0/5 through 5/5). In overstepping these arithmetical specifications by providing negative points, his goal was obviously to demonstrate greater distance from the lowest possible value, which is 0/5 or zero. Negative-infinity, however, can be conceptually proved to be no different from infinity (which is why it is extremely rarely invoked in real-world applications, e.g. astronomy or nuclear physics), while the square root of a negative number would be an impossible value. But if we assume that a square root of a number can be taken before turning it negative, then because of the negative placement, the supposedly smaller value is actually larger: say our limit of infinity is 9 (and therefore -9 is negative-infinity); its square root is 3, which then makes -3 actually closer to zero and therefore higher than -9. So the intended lower value (square root of negative infinity) is demonstrably higher than the value that purportedly diminishes it (negative infinity).
11011More deplorable than this abstractional weakness is the reviewer’s moral failure in posting insulting or abusive comments against the films he regards as unworthy of his high scores. Not surprisingly, his followers find this behavior delightful, thus further inciting their pseudo-expert’s immature conduct. Yet again, the educational training of a school population encouraged (even by purportedly progressive educators) to regard pop-culture artifacts as deserving of dismissive treatment results in such lumpenbourgeois spectacles. Lost in this cheap grasping for maximum virality is the reality that any industrial undertaking in a developing country will always be under threat of collapse, with any number of breadwinners facing the possibility of resorting to more desperate forms of fund-raising as a result. In short, regardless of the ranking that any critic assigns to any completed film, the recuperation of its investment will mean, first and foremost, that its workers can continue to hope in the prospect of a follow-up project. From this perspective, any critic who aims to impede this drive for productivity deserves to be regarded as no better than an antiproletarian henchperson.
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