I have decided to attempt the drafting and revision of an article whose final form I am still uncertain about. It will have elements of what we might recognize as basic film research, so it may wind up as a formal essay or a scholarly article. Depending on the terms that any prospective publisher might specify, this article may be pulled out (“embargoed” I think is the technical term) before it can be considered finalized. I will of course alert readers where and when it will be published. For the foreseeable future, I expect to add bibliographic notes, to be minimized if I can help it, and illustrations, as much as I can compile. I also prepared an appendix summarizing the archival status of the auteur subject’s films, but I could not include it in this post without extending the article as well as distracting from it. For now, it appears as an independent upload.
Colleagues in academe: I admit to being tempted to call this post a preprint, but it departs in too many significant ways from the standard sample. I appreciate the comments that have pointed out ways to improve the article, although I find my having posted it just as useful for soliciting pointers from other experts. Better to regard it then as an preprint wannabe, or whatever we call drafts before they can be considered fully ready for formal peer review.
To jump to later sections, click here for: Contentions; “Yoyong”; Family Tragedy; Showpieces; and Notes & Works Cited.
I must begin with a personal paradox: I started in film studies during a time when auteurism (or the “auteur theory” for those who prefer Andrew Sarris’s mistranslation of the politique des auteurs) had its heyday and persisted mostly in the minds of what today’s cultural snobs would call fanboys. I participated in such activities as a way of demonstrating the many lacks that local critical practitioners brought to their activities, and saw the millennial generation pick up on the mechanics but not the critique that I thought would make people hesitate or avoid auteur politics altogether.
11011I subsequently became aware that the prevalent trend in pop-culture activity will always be toward more prestige markers, not less (definitively explicated in James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige). In undertaking what I hoped would be my ultimate – and therefore final – stab at canon-formation (see David, Canon Decampment), I came to understand a significant aspect of its appeal: in recounting a work we have cherished, the more exclusively the better, we get to replicate the pleasure we experienced in appreciating the piece, along with the satisfaction of knowing, or hoping, that our writing might persuade other people to reconsider their differences with us.
11011The canon project I had been working on (formally as consultant for a publication team) affirmed for me the collected names of appreciated filmmakers – or what Sarrists would call a Pantheon, an assemblage of worthies – along with occasional additions or tweaks, mainly in the direction of rectifying the constant and predictable errors of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, the original Filipino critics circle. This process has become so commonplace that most of the better young film bloggers could figure out for themselves how to evaluate films and bodies of work without falling into the established critics’ self-laid traps.
11011With earlier film samples, the provision of proof becomes more burdensome, mainly because of the country’s archival travails. One might stumble across the claim of certain oldtimers (some of them now gone) that Gerry de Leon’s the all-time greatest Pinoy film talent, were it not for the loss of his reputedly best entry, Daigdig ng mga Api [World of the Oppressed] (1965). Yet when I reread a vital article by the best among the first batch of MPP members, Petronilo Bn. Daroy, he expressed serious reservations regarding this film, and instead upheld Lamberto V. Avellana’s Anak Dalita [Child of Sorrow] (1956). Lamentably, the latter film exists, in a remastered condition … and will probably be unable to sustain more than a single screening with audiences who do not share its church-fomented biases against slum residents, lumpenproles, and racial minorities.
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Contentions
Interestingly, these first two winners of the Order of the National Artist represented not just rival studios but also different sets of creative associates and political affinities. Although both (along with another National Artist, Eddie Romero) directed episodes of Tagumpay ng Mahirap [Triumph of the Poor] (1965) for Diosdado Macapagal’s ultimately failed campaign against Ferdinand E. Marcos, Avellana managed to switch sides quickly and effectively enough to be able to get his National Artist recognition ahead of de Leon.
11011The one last studio-era National Artist, Manuel Conde, also labors under the loss of his “best” entry, the series of political satires that feature his version of folk trickster Juan Tamad, as well as his celebrated color musical, Bahala Na (1957); the few Conde musicals I’ve seen, including the now also lost Ikaw Kasi (1955) and Basta Ikaw (1957), suggest that his work in this genre may be an even bigger loss than his later homiletic output. What remains in his name is the charmingly problematic Genghis Khan (1950), evidence of the Philippines’s once-confident cosmopolitanism in appropriating a “lesser” culture’s heroic figure and devising rollicking entertainment premised on the legendary exploits that led to the rise in power of Temujin Borjigin, prior to his Eurasian expansion of the Mongol Empire during the 13th century.
11011Hence, via a process of elimination, the First Golden Age film that most contemporary film buffs have been holding in highest regard for the past few decades would be Manuel Silos’s Biyaya ng Lupa [Blessings of the Land] (1959).[1] Like Anak Dalita, it was produced by LVN Pictures, famed for its costume epics. Another quality both pictures share is an insistence on social conservatism as vital to the definiton of nationhood, along with the open and violent rejection of marginal characters. It would be tempting to conclude that Filipino film observers tend to revert to reactionary values in evaluating the past, although I would caution against such a headlong conclusion. It may be safer to assume that whatever tools they may have devised for appreciating contemporary releases seem to them to be inappropriate for older films.
11011For this reason I have insisted on maintaining the vital importance held by Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa (1958). I also submit that its modernity gestures toward our present, which is why it appears anachronistic, capable of baffling viewers of early cinema who expect the samples to be genteel, virtuous, placid, and old-fashioned, possibly out of understandable and well-placed empathy for their elders.[2] Nevertheless such sentiments are beyond me, for better or worse, so my own uphill struggle to convince colleagues to keep rewatching these titles until they arrive at a level of familiarity that breeds either contempt or admiration can only be assuaged by the fact that Malvarosa will be capable of leaving behind most of them, and a lot of latter-day cinema besides.
11011A major part of the difficulty of championing Malvarosa is the figure of its director. Gregorio Fernandez was celebrated for his mid-1950s output, which when regarded by the acclaim bestowed by the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences Awards would have indicated a declension: from a sweep of the major categories for Higit sa Lahat [More than Everything] (1955), to a best film and technical prize only for Luksang Tagumpay [Mournful Victory] (1956), to nominations for the direction of Hukom Roldan [Judge Roldan] (1957) and Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo [If You Love Me] (1960), with an “International Prestige Award of Merit” (presumably for foreign film-festival recognition) for Malvarosa.
11011As anyone familiar with award-giving trends might be able to infer by now, these prizes do not track Fernandez’s achievements with satisfactory accuracy. His first incontrovertible world-class masterwork arrived before the FAMAS took notice, in Prinsipe Teñoso [Prince Teñoso] (1954), dismissed then presumably for being an overtly commercial adaptation of a literary form, the metrical romance, introduced during the Spanish colonial era and previously filmed in 1942, also for LVN Pictures, by Manuel Conde (who takes story credit in the Fernandez version). From available evidence, Higit sa Lahat would be a gendered twist on the Hollywood melodrama perennial Stella Dallas (silent, dir. Henry King, 1925; B&W/sound, dir. King Vidor, 1937; color/sound version titled Stella, dir. John Erman, 1990), but the succeeding films up to Malvarosa demonstrate even more admirable and often successful risk-taking.[3]
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“Yoyong”
Born in 1904, Fernandez died before he reached 70, in 1973. This was about a year after the Order of the National Artist of the Philippines was first introduced. Considering the many other Filipinos who were able to acquire the distinction posthumously, Fernandez is certainly highly qualified. In fact, with the ready availability of several of his major projects for his home studio, LVN Pictures, one could easily make the argument that Fernandez has been severely underrated and unfairly overlooked. (For these and all other general filmographic and archival references, please refer to the Appendix.)
11011The prevailing assumption about Fernandez is that he shone brightest during the 1950s, the height of the First Golden Age, with a number of his films dominating the so-named academy prizes, in a way that would only be surpassed by Gerardo de Leon, an early National Artist Awardee, in the 1960s. The comparison between the two filmmakers goes beyond the acclaim they received during this period. They were both actors, held advanced health-science degrees (de Leon in medicine and Fernandez in dentistry), provided unforgettable roles for actresses, and had clan members who also became prominent in the local industry.
11011While de Leon’s productive streak continued way after the collapse of the studio system in the early 1960s, Fernandez’s output became scarcer until he seemingly gave up on making films altogether. Unlike de Leon, who was still working on an unfinished epic (Juan de la Cruz, for Fernando Poe Jr.) when he died in 1981, Fernandez worked on a hagiographic bio-picture for Diosdado Macapagal and a few sex-themed films. De Leon also did Daigdig ng mga Api for Macapagal’s campaign and a number of genre projects, but he seemed to weather the collapse of the studio system better than Fernandez, making films for the actor-producers who dominated the independent-production system as well as B-films for the US drive-in market.
11011The relative inactivity of Fernandez may have baffled serious observers during the time, but all we have are a few reports posted online as well as the accounts of some of his now-elderly contemporaries. (People were understandably more discreet during this period.) His daughter Merle forged ahead of the aspiring sex sirens of the late 1960s by pioneering in the trend known as bomba, which were erotic melodramas that were premised on the more (literally and figuratively) frontal depictions and discussions of carnal situations that originated in Western cinemas.
11011While the founding elders of the MPP decried the collapse of the vertically integrated studio system (and the First Golden Age along with it), I have pointed out elsewhere that the tendencies they considered most deplorable – bomba films and teen-idol musicals, both products of low-budget “quickie” efforts – actually betoken a progressive sensibility in the local mass audience. Inasmuch as the new urbanites, comprising rural migrants working in factories and domestic labor, demanded a new breed of stars who resembled them more closely (non-white females rather than the studios’ emphasis on Euro-manqué males), the standard old-time mestizo performers were forced to immerse in taboo-busting material.
11011We ought to take note of the fact that a National Artist for Literature, Bienvenido Lumbera, once stressed (in “Pelikula” 216) that bomba films deserve to be revaluated in light of their overt challenge to the strictures of conservatism and denial of women’s prerogatives in acting on their desires and preferences. (Fernandez’s last film, in fact, starred his daughter, possibly accounting for an abhorrent rumor that both engaged in an incestuous relationship.[4]) With the declaration of martial law in 1972 by President Ferdinand E. Marcos, bomba-film production ended, as did Merle Fernandez’s acting career for the most part. Instead, she provided contacts and support for her younger brother Rudy, who became one of the country’s top action stars, renowned for his ability to combine stunt scenes with serious drama.[5]
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Family Tragedy
Interview articles on Gregorio Fernandez during this period situate him in his hometown, where he earned another kind of renown – as an expert cockfighter. He may have worked this out as his way of retiring from industry practice, although this may also indicate some degree of estrangement (from his familial and work circles). One might want to speculate that his professional troubles may have started from the suicide of his wife, Pacita Padilla (a.k.a. Paz or Ching), whose record as a performer is so far unavailable on standard internet sources including the Internet Movie Database.[6] The tributes that came out after Rudy Fernandez’s untimely death from cancer mention how he was the first family member to encounter his mother’s body – a traumatic experience, considering he was 5 years old when she died in 1957.
11011We can speculate on the ways that this incident may have affected Fernandez’s frame of mind, i.e. that he still valiantly managed to come up with an early feminist masterpiece the next year, in Malvarosa, and that he lost his enthusiasm for innovative filmmaking afterward, as perceivable in a decline in his later LVN films. This would be a tricky way of applying auteurist principles, however, primarily because his non-LVN films from the 1960s onward are unavailable. To reference once more Gerardo de Leon, I remember how most cineastes tended to uphold his prestige productions up to Daigdig ng mga Api but dismissed his co-productions and genre projects; yet when video copies of these films became available later, many of them constituted major revelations.[7]
11011In Fernandez’s case, we are fortunate to have LVN scion Mike de Leon, who has overseen the video transfers of nearly all existing Fernandez films and selflessly uploaded these on his Vimeo website, open-access style. I would enjoin all Filipino film enthusiasts to go over the Fernandez titles chronologically, to be able to acquire a proper appreciation of his considerable skills as director and actor. The most significant aspect I noticed in the major films was his careful attention to identity issues, both in terms of strong women (and children) roles as well as in a sincere respect for Muslim Filipinos, to the point of providing them with a heroic twist in the spy narrative of Kontrabando (1950).
11011He could not avoid the Cold War tendency to demonize East Asian characters, unfortunately; but in Capas (1949), he brought up the fraught issue of wartime collaboration and provided a conflicted Japanese officer as a way of demonstrating to the Filipino double-agent that people on the enemy side could also be capable of human decency. We may note here that this film came out almost right after the end of World War II, several decades ahead of Mario O’Hara’s comparable (though expectedly better-focused) Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos (1976).
11011The other primary mark of Fernandez’s films is his willingness to deploy comedy. Even in his serious works, this tendency enables him to approach the material with a light touch, reminiscent of a great Classical Hollywood practitioner, Ernst Lubitsch. Despite its several promotional placements, Miss Philippines (1947) evinces the bemused stance that would sustain Fernandez through the “heavier” material he would tackle later; in fact the situation of the alcoholic mother and the daughter torn apart by filial loyalty and her longing for happiness would subsequently reappear, with fuller social implications, in Malvarosa.
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Showpieces
In the meanwhile, he came up with the only available color film bearing his credit, Prinsipe Teñoso (1954), and it’s a marvel beyond the novelty of its Ruritanian-type romance. Its storytelling is so assured and skillful that the existing print’s archival predicament, resulting in a narrative leap from the title character’s attempt to defy his father to his wandering in another kingdom as a leper whose true form appears when he bathes, becomes an unexpected modernist touch – perfectly in keeping with the film’s championing of women, captives, the outcast, and Islamic outsiders.
11011Fernandez’s major FAMAS winners, as recounted earlier, were Higit sa Lahat (1955) and Luksang Tagumpay (1956), which attempt to spin the genre of melodrama by placing the burden of saving the family on male characters. The first time I saw these two during a late 1980s retrospective, I had the impression (affirmed in Prinsipe Teñoso) of a director who was not content with observing the standard approaches dictated by genres, star personas, even Classical Hollywood stylistic prescriptions. The now-missing final sequences of Luksang Tagumpay had an Expressionistic denouement, where the central male character’s domestic world literally starts falling apart around him. I remembered having just seen a similar sequence in a film whose title escaped me then; when I saw it again later – Mikhail Khalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying – I needed a double-take, because Luksang Tagumpay had preceded it by a year.
11011This was all in preparation for a final Fernandez revelation, heralded by Mike de Leon’s social-media announcement. Hukom Roldan (1957) is the major black-and-white discovery of our time, proof that Fernandez’s maverick impulses led him to attempt narrative and cinematic techniques that anticipated a globally influential trend that was just about to break out a year later in France. The fragmentation of linear time, abrupt shifts from one character to another, sudden insertions of direct-address sequences – even the narrative twist in following the title character’s story only to focus more intently on the woman he inadvertently betrayed: when Alfred Hitchcock attempted this defiance of audience expectation a few years later in Psycho (1960), the gender emphasis was in the more conventional direction of disposing of an unruly woman so we could focus on the man who solves the mystery of her disappearance.
11011I am not in the habit of lionizing our local filmmakers so enthusiastically, because I believe that we do them (and ourselves) a disservice by overemphasizing their achievements. With Gregorio Fernandez, I have finally come across a filmmaker whose available body of work can sustain enough appreciation for us to declare, no matter how late in our history, another master film artist. I would rate Malvarosa (1958), for which he is justly celebrated, as superior to all the other existing “best” works – Manuel Conde’s Genghis Khan (1950), Lamberto V. Avellana’s Anak Dalita (1956), Manuel Silos’s Biyaya ng Lupa (1959); Gerardo de Leon would peak in the 1960s, so Fernandez’s films in the 1950s ought to rate more highly than even de Leon’s.
11011Since it would require an entirely separate article to explicate why Malvarosa deserves more than the significant appreciation it already enjoys (our best black-and-white movie would not be difficult to declare), I should just close for now by pointing out its merits vis-à-vis its contemporaries: its focus on the downtrodden is not “redeemed” by the intervention of society’s superiors; it embraces slum culture – its lingo, pastimes, and aspirations – while slyly and good-naturedly pointing out their limits; it provides warm emotional closure without falsifying the tragic losses that our poverty-stricken compatriots (still) undergo. This may help explain why it has been easier for film commentators to dwell on the other 1950s films: although more identifiably of its time than most of the other entries, the treatment that Malvarosa invests in this material is beyond-classical in its sophistication and naturalistic in its sociological observations.
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Notes
[1] In two of the most comprehensive canon surveys covering Philippine cinema, we can track the persistence of the stature of Biyaya ng Lupa. In “Ten Best Filipino Films Up to 1990” (David & Garduño), it was ranked one rung behind Anak Dalita. In the 2013 poll “100 Greatest Pinoy Films of All Time” (Labastilla), it was the only pre-1970s film in the top ten. It also holds the distinction of being the second Filipino film to be the sole subject of a book publication, after my entry Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (published in 2017), considered National Artist Ishmael Bernal’s most important output. I still have not been able to source the volume, Edward delos Santos Cabagnot’s Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time & Manuel Silos’s Biyaya ng Lupa; a third book, Clodualdo del Mundo Jr.’s Ang Daigdig ng mga Api: Remembering a Lost Film (published 2022) tackled the archival stature of still another “best” film by yet another National Artist, Gerardo de Leon.
[2] Camp may have been around for decades, but its acceptance by evaluators only became possible after Susan Sontag paid tribute to it in her essential 1964 essay. In Pinas film practice, campy humor became the staple, starting in the 1970s, of a loose group of directors who used to convene at the Laperal Apartments and later supported one another in a series of omnibus projects, and whose output was consequently downgraded by high-minded film evaluators. Yet once more, Fernandez preceded everyone. As a sample, in one of Malvarosa’s several familial tragedies, the following exchange occurs between the youngest and only female sibling, Rosa, and her gangster brother Leonides, who has killed a prospective holdup target and is now engaged in a shootout with Philippine Constabulary soldiers (in the provocative spirit of camp, Vic Diaz, who plays Leonides, references his physical appearance):
LEONIDES (opens door and lets her in): Why did you come here? Have you gone crazy?
ROSA: You’re the one who’s crazy! You’re deluded! Don’t you know that the law rules above us all? What you’re doing has no hope of winning! Best that you can do is surrender.
LEONIDES: Surrender? So that they can barbecue me on the electric chair? Leonides hasn’t lost his marbles yet!
ROSA: That won’t happen. You might not know it, but the law is just. If you’re innocent, you won’t be punished.
LEONIDES: Idiot! I’m far from innocent! If I weren’t guilty, why would I be in hiding?
(Scr. Consuelo P. Osorio, trans. Joel David)
[3] While I would generally downgrade quantitative measurements of achievement, especially those based on periodical award-giving, the forthcoming canon project I mentioned in the opening section (see David, Canon Decampment) has claims to providing more accurate assessments of individual filmmakers’ accomplishments: it allowed for as many, or as few, or even no available titles for every year covering the history of Philippine cinema, with works under contention re-viewed for as many times as would be necessary for a team of sufficiently informed evaluators to arrive at an assessment. Without going into quantitative specifics, I can describe that Gregorio Fernandez had, after Gerardo de Leon, the most number of entries, with all the rest of their contemporaries limited to one or two films each.
[4] Rap Fernandez, grandson of Gregorio Fernandez via his son Rudy and the latter’s wife Lorna Tolentino, replied to my query on the allegation by stating: “I was only made aware of the rumor through the research I conducted for my thesis on Gregorio but I know for a fact that this is blatantly untrue. There were even rumors that my father was Merle and Gregorio’s secret son but that’s just completely false.” A niece of Merle, Jane Po, affirmed not just the falsity but also the implausibility of such a scenario. (Both exchanges were conducted via Facebook Messenger.)
[5] Gregorio Fernandez introduced Rudy to Sampaguita Pictures in time for the musical teen-idol trend mentioned earlier, but the son probably shared his elder sister Merle’s dilemma of being too fair for the preferences of the early 1970s mass audience, aside from coming in when the trend (along with bomba) was at its peak. Rap Fernandez pointed out Merle’s involvement in finding opportunities for Rudy; she also grieved over his death from a terminal illness, maintaining that she had lost someone she deeply cared for (interview with Leavold & Palisa).
[6] Standard information sources also mistakenly identify Fernandez’s wife as Pilar Padilla. The prospect is certainly believable, since the actress apparently made at least one film with Fernandez as director and actor, titled Dalawang Daigdig [Two Worlds], and chose to be inactive not long afterward. However, no source lists her year of death – which is entirely factual because as of this writing (November 2023), she holds the record at 94 years as the country’s longest-living star-level performer. Below is the MyHeritage genealogy website where both names are announced and the differences between them unresolved, followed by a photo of the tombstones of Gregorio, Paz, and their son (and Rudy’s older brother) Jose, who had also killed himself, ten years after his mother passed away.
Courtesy of Rap Fernandez
It would make sense to place Gregorio Fernandez’s peak in the 1950s, a decade ahead of Gerardo de Leon’s, since the latter actually was nearly ten years younger. Gerry de Leon’s
Terror Is a Man (1959),
Women in Cages (1971),
Kulay Dugo ang Gabi [
The Blood Drinkers] (1964), and
Ibulong Mo sa Hangin [
Blood of the Vampires] (1964) hold varying degrees of favorable regard for cineastes who specialize in B-film production.
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Appendix: An Archival Summary of the Gregorio Fernandez Filmography
[Posted separately]
Works Cited
Cabagnot, Edward delos Santos. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time & Manuel Silos’s Biyaya ng Lupa. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2018.
Daroy, Petronilo Bn. “Main Currents in the Filipino Cinema.” Readings in Philippine Cinema. Ed. Rafael Ma. Guerrero. Manila: Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, 1983. 95-108.
David, Joel. Canon Decampment. Quezon City: Amauteurish Publishing, 2023.
———. Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017.
David, Joel, and Melanie Joy C. Garduño. “Ten Best Filipino Films Up to 1990.” Fields of Vision: Critical Applications in Recent Philippine Cinema. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1995. 95-108. 125-36.
Del Mundo, Clodualdo Jr. Ang Daigdig ng mga Api: Remembering a Lost Film. Manila: Film Development Council of the Philippines & De La Salle University Press, 2022.
English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Value. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Labastilla, Skilty. “100 Greatest Pinoy Films of All Time.” Society of Filipino Film Reviewers. Online post, 2013.
Leavold, Andrew, and Daniel Palisa, dirs. The Last Pinoy Action King. Documentary. Reflection Films, Death Rides a Red Horse, and Quiapost Productions, 2015.
Lumbera, Bienvenido. “Pelikula: An Essay on Philippine Cinema.” Tuklas Sining: Essays on the Philippine Arts. Ed. Nicanor G. Tiongson. Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1991. 190-229.
Osorio, Consuelo P., scr. Malvarosa. Dir. Gregorio Fernandez. LVN Pictures, 1958.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. 1968. New York: Octagon, 1982.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell Publishing, 1966. 277-93.
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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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