Category Archives: Star texts

April 19, 2025

Nora Aunor’s Multiple Resuscitations

By Joel David

In terms of her health issues, Nora Aunor was only revived once after her vital signs had stopped last year, ironically on the day when she was supposed to find out she’d been finally declared National Artist. This meant that she could attend the awards ceremony under the new President, whom she had endorsed. Typical of her problematic political positions, one of her last statements was an expression of sympathy for the beleaguered former President now imprisoned at The Hague under a warrant served by the International Criminal Court.

11011I won’t deny that I pondered what points to raise in the inevitable obituary once her physical existence gave out, but after a social-media outpouring that still hasn’t abated as of this writing (see FACINE chair Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr.’s Facebook page, where he has been compiling everything he could find by reposting them), I had to conclude that what she deserves is a series of volumes from authors interested in writing on her, continuing the early volumes in the early 1970s that jump-started the trend in Philippine film-book publishing that continues all the way to the present. A circumstantial, if morbid, discursive opportunity presented itself anyway: her death followed a half-week after Pilita Corrales’s, another long-prevailing talent who also initially gained recognition in singing before branching out to film and television.

The Nora Aunor star at the Eastwood City Walk of Fame. [Megaworld Lifestyle Malls Facebook page]

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11011Corrales preceded Aunor’s emergence, which was no surprise considering that the latter was over a decade and a half younger. What will sound incredible is each one’s respective career trajectory: despite Corrales gaining global recognition and immediate local fame, Aunor was the artist whose records sold like proverbial hotcakes, snapped up by fans directly from delivery vans even before they could be inserted in cardboard jackets and plastic-wrapped.[1]

11011Corrales was an engaging, spirited onscreen presence – which makes understandable the major film producers’ hesitation in launching Aunor, who was physically everything that Corrales was not; yet a small independent outfit with ears attuned to box-office performances noted how the movies where Aunor made guest appearances were delivering above-average receipts, which is how Tower Productions devised a string of potboilers and made a killing just by posting her in various romantic locales and getting her to lip-synch the contents of her current long-playing albums.

11011The challenge for scholars of Foucauldian genealogy is to track at what point Aunor decided that phenomenal success was not going to be enough for her, where she aspired not for the expected greater returns on investments, but for artistic peaks that only an exceptional status like hers could facilitate. Perhaps it was when she opted to swing away from cover versions of international hits and standards, toward what we might term the Philippine songbook by classically trained composers as well as the original pop songs that would later segue into what became known as the Manila sound – an innovation where Corrales had actually preceded her.[2] But she knew from her multimedia exposure that there would be no further development possible in this direction, unless she ventured into composition and arrangement herself.

Nora Aunor’s coffin during her wake at Heritage Memorial Park at Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City. [Heritage Park Cemetery Facebook page]

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11011Preferring interpretive exertions, she must have deduced that histrionic craft was the obvious next stage. Her own outfit, NV (for Nora Villamayor) Productions, started as early as the year after the declaration of martial law, with now-lost films that were box-office flops because of their art-film qualities. After recovering with a few hit projects, she came up with the tribal epic Banaue (1975), the last film by Gerardo de Leon, and the next year produced a period film, Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos, her first collaboration with Second Golden Age figure Mario O’Hara. Once more her audience could not catch up with her, but she managed to win the first critics’ performance award, a distinction that may have been precipitate (at least one nominee, Mona Lisa in Insiang, demonstrates superior abilities) but may have been a substitutionary reward for the substantial producer’s risk that she had taken.

11011This led to a short-lived valorization of her stature as a critics’ darling, cut down in 1982 with the group’s inexplicable downgrading of her reading of the lead character in Ishmael Bernal’s Himala, now regarded as one of the possible peaks in Philippine film performance, in contrast with the never-mentioned-since hysterical delivery that the critics selected. (Inside information: I was with the group during this period and made the proper choice, affirmed by the director and writer of both competing films.) As if to demonstrate that their choice was unassailable, the critics continued rejecting her achievements in succeeding years, sometimes against the preferences of all the other award-giving groups, even when the directors of their selected performances complained about their choices.

11011Aunor of course was more secure in her self-assessment. When the National Artist award was withheld from her twice in succession, she assured everyone that she was disinterested in how the process played out. In case anyone had the impression that she was merely attempting to save face, complaints emerged from film researchers that she did not worry if her collection of prizes was maintained or if certain items were pilfered. Following the principle that dying folks tell no lies, we find her assuring more than one confidant that her source of pride lay in the series of films, whether funded by her outfit or by others, that she was able to see through to completion.[3]

Half-mast state tribute accorded to recipients of the Order of National Artists. [Daily Tribune]

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11011Proof that her pride was not misplaced lies in the products themselves. Those familiar with only the standard Aunor canon are missing out on the most impressive single-person display of performing-arts ability in the country’s history. The stage plays she appeared in might now be a permanently unavailable opportunity for millennium-era audiences, but any avid Aunor follower (as I was during her active years) will be able to confirm that, even in trashy or dismissible films, she demonstrated skills beyond anyone else’s reach. The critics who downgraded her deserve to be installed in a hall of shame, but then she wouldn’t have given a hoot about them anyway.

Notes

First published April 18, 2025, as “Nora Aunor: How She Aspired for Artistry,” in The FilAm.

[1] The 1960s through the mid-’70s may be considered the final period of internal labor migration, when job-seekers in the country would move from the rural margins to the urban centers, primarily Manila and suburbs (now Metro Manila); afterward, systemic labor migration would treat Manila as only a way station for overseas work, to be able to compensate for the Marcos dictatorship’s economic mismanagement. Hence the period of emergence of several new stars led by Aunor turned on the presence of working-class Filipinos who had sufficient disposable income to demand a new breed of stars – those who resembled them as closely as possible, instead of the Euro-manqué types foisted on the audience by local producers.

[2] Contrary to conventional belief, her artistic aspiration may have started earlier, when one of her “dismissible” teen musicals, Nora, Mahal Kita (Nora, I Love You, dir. Orlando Nadres, 1972), actually featured original compositions by composer Doming Valdez and lyricist Levi Celerio, later recognized as a National Artist for Music & Literature. Similarly, the major actor-producers who emerged in the wake of the First Golden Age also made sure to invest in “award-worthy” though less commercially successful projects before she came along: Amalia Fuentes (with her AM Productions outfit), Fernando Poe Jr. (FPJ Productions), and Joseph Estrada (Emar, later JE, Productions). What makes Aunor’s record as producer distinctive is that, while at least two of her predecessors (Poe and Dolphy with his RVQ Productions) had longer records of self-produced titles, she had far and away the higher percentage of quality projects. Film critic Mauro Tumbocon observed (via Facebook Messenger chat-group messages) how Poe, Estrada, and Dolphy recognized a kindred spirit in her and never hesitated to provide her with funds or equipment whenever she called on them. A further distinction of her producer’s record, recalled during summations of the career of Ricky Davao (who died not long after she did), was how she also invested in stage material: “In 1982, he made his theater debut in Convent Bread, produced by the late Nora Aunor and directed by Maryo J. de los Reyes” (“Ricky Davao’s Career Through the Years,” Rappler, May 3, 2025).

“Nora Aunor’s State Funeral” from National Flag Days Serye, May 28 – June 12, on Charles Bautista’s Facebook account, posted on May 31, 2025.

[3] I had been privy to some filmmakers’ discussions of projects with Aunor; two first-hand accounts so far include an interview with scriptwriter and her National Artist co-winner for film Ricky Lee, with whom she planned, among other things, a multi-installment autobiographical feature as well as a museum – see Allan Diones’s “Reaksyon ni Sir Ricky Lee sa Pagpanaw ni Ate Guy” [Ricky Lee’s Reaction to Ate Guy’s Death], YouTube, April 18, 2025); as well as Nestor Cuartero’s “Larger than Life, Even in Death,” Manila Bulletin, April 19, 2025, where she volunteers to provide seed money for a welfare fund for film workers. Stories also abound regarding her readiness to distribute her earnings to co-workers, fans, and even strangers whom she perceived as suffering financial deprivation. This perspective contextualizes the only expression of anxiety that she articulated regarding the National Artist Award, to her acting colleague Ruby Ruiz: “Para pag namatay ako, wala nang poproblemahin ang mga maiiwan ko (So that when I’m gone, my heirs won’t have to worry [about money])” – see Jerry Olea’s “Why Ruby Ruiz Declined Offer to Be Nora Aunor’s [Production Assistant],” Philippine Entertainment Portal, April 21, 2025. A final revelation, which she divulged with only her closest circle, was the medical discovery of an advanced stage of cancer, which possibly complicated her health condition although her official cause of death was her long-time heart ailment. I would hesitate speculating on what motives she had and prefer to focus for now on the incomparable legacies that she insisted on enhancing all the way to the end.

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June 1, 2024

Answer to Vilmanianism query

By Joel David

* I’m seriously concerned that you seem to be playing favorites among our top movie icons. I’m referring in particular to your open preference for Nora Aunor and lack of support for Vilma Santos. Even on this thread you admitted admiration for Sharon Cuneta, so that makes your silent treatment with regard to Vilma more obvious. I know that critics have to be up-front about their biases, but how can you maintain objectivity by praising one artist but not her rival?

I’d like to point out, with as little condescension as I could muster, how appreciative I am of your query. To be honest, I read it word for word a few times over, and it must be the only writing sample of its kind: a Vilmanian who doesn’t seem to harbor any racist bias against Nora Aunor. Yes, I did go there, inasmuch as I’d been telling friends these past several years that I intend to point out the toxicity that infests fan appreciations of good old Ate Vi. Just visit any of her Facebook pages or blog fansites and search for any reference to Nora, or look for major news valorizing Ate Guy where a Vilma fan feels like trolling her admirers. You don’t even have to tolerate the usual miseducated insensible enthusiast. Ask who the Vilmanians are among multi-awarded artists or name academicians or authors, schedule an exchange with them, and see how racist bile eventually starts spewing out of them.

11011I remember mentioning, in criticizing the first presidential rejection of Nora Aunor’s nomination to the Order of the National Artist, how she and Vilma embodied a defiance of the Euro fair-skinned preference that the studio system of the First Golden Age promoted. What’s ironic here is that Aunor, as the darker-skinned yet more popular entrant, obviously led the way for the likes of Oriental types like Santos to follow. But that should be a matter for a more intensive interrogation into our culture’s horrifically fundamental(ist) tendencies, which I’ll admit to being unprepared to pursue at the moment.

11011I did mention the National Artist prize though, which I think is the source of all this ongoing attention on the Vi-vs.-Guy rivalry. So we might as well foreground the issue. I don’t really count myself as prejudiced in favor of or against any artist – in fact I remember voting for Vilma more than once in some of those competitions that she seems to relish more than most other people including even Nora herself. She also has several films listed in the decade-plus-long canon project I’ve been working on, although if you compile my mini-reviews of her films and compare them to Nora’s, you’ll be able to track the point where their rivalry started out as a well-matched race, with Vilma often enjoying the upper hand. Then Nora overtook her as well as everyone else and decided to focus on maintaining artistic primacy, while Vilma won more local critics’ prizes and triumphed mainly as a well-loved star, even in her public-service phase.

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11011I don’t think any genuine performing-arts expert will be able to deny Nora’s supremacy, regardless of whatever recognition she may or may not have acquired, the National Artist Award included. Insider allegations about a certain influential elderly critic’s bias against her (which he opportunistically reversed when her rise in prestige seemed unstoppable) seem to be gaining traction and will have a far longer way to go, if karmic justice will manage to have its way. In the meanwhile, it would help clarify matters for Vilma fans if we distill the process of how any aspirant gets selected for the honor. For better or worse, the success of a nominee hinges on the assent of her or his peers, a procedure that any serious academician (like yours truly) would be all too familiar with. This accounts for the several instances this millennium in which the final approbatory authority, the Philippine President, wound up at odds with the experts who forwarded their lists of endorsements. The one time that the Supreme Court had to intervene, the members predictably sided with that aspect of the process that underwent peer validation.

11011How does this square with the Vilmanian drive to get the Order bestowed on Santos? All I can observe from my vantage point is a strategy of noise-making, often heightened to hysterical Nora-bashing proportions by whoever happen to be the movers and shakers of, who knows, possibly Ralph Recto-Santos or his minions. Literal evidence of passing the peer-review process would be any article published in any sufficiently credible peer-reviewed journal, the way that several on Nora Aunor, on all the other National Artist winners, and even a number on Sharon Cuneta can be marshaled as proof of their cultural noteworthiness. Book chapters won’t possess the same valuation hereabouts, especially in an academic culture that still has to attain sufficient competence in university press review.

11011I might as well bring up my own personal experience on this matter, as further proof of why I don’t really feel too affected about the question of maintaining objectivity in this case. About a decade ago, Kritika Kultura, the country’s (and region’s) premiere humanities and literature journal, acceded to my proposal to edit a special forum on Nora Aunor, which serendipitously preceded by a few weeks President PNoy Aquino’s severely criticized refusal to proclaim Aunor a National Artist. The response to the call for articles was overwhelming, not surprisingly, although nearly all the submissions were (also unsurprisingly) hagiographic or polemical in arguing in favor of Aunor as deserving of the award. When these essentially fan submissions weren’t upgraded by their respective authors to peer-reviewable articles, I requested the journal editors to expand the forum topic coverage, from Aunor to Philippine stardom in general. Thereafter I got potentially publishable drafts on Cuneta and Judy Ann Santos and one more performer which unfortunately couldn’t endure the admittedly stringent review process. But above and beyond awaiting specific submissions, I actually identified academicians – in Metro Manila and way beyond, including other islands and countries – known for their admiration of Vilma Santos, and nagged them or got their close friends to ensure that they provided article drafts. Every single one of them eventually pleaded to be excused because of busy schedules.

11011Was there something about our Ate Vi that seemed to preclude scholarly discourse? I attempted a theoretical exercise afterward, but I simply couldn’t formulate a useful argument about her, ironically because she seemed (to me at least) to be too perfect to be problematized. Whether this is the reason why her own scholarly admirers hit a blank wall themselves is not as major a concern for me as several other cultural matters I have to attend to. And just to close this particular exchange, let’s circle back to Vilma’s only remaining historical claim of superiority to Nora: her record number of critics’ trophies. That same circle of critics crows constantly about being ensconced in Philippine academia, so wouldn’t the real question be obvious enough to anyone at this point? As supposed peers, they passed judgments over Aunor in favor of Santos more times than most observers felt would be justifiable. Instead of asking me how I could be objective in handling the differences between these two celebrity performers, which I’ve more than adequately answered already, how about we ask them where their credible scholarly defense of the awards they dispensed favoring Santos can be found? [Posted June 2024]

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March 17, 2024

Bold in Heaven

By Joel David

With the announcement of Jaclyn Jose’s sudden demise last March 2, a significant number of mostly middle-aged Filipino film observers were stunned to realize that, in keeping aware of her, a full, challenging, and ultimately triumphant life became their privilege to witness. Even the trajectory of her physical appearance, from anxious young waif to authoritative full-bodied matron, bespoke a life conducted at peak critical tension, constantly in search of solutions to creative challenges and grateful to be afforded the opportunity to find fulfillment in a specialized type of stardom where her work discipline and moral integrity ensured that she would have next to no rivals whatsoever.

Jaclyn Jose in her early waifish phase. [From her Facebook fan page]

11011She was of course intelligent enough to realize from the start that “bold star” status was a title that most women anywhere would find unappealing, if not appalling. But having been born in poverty, and realizing that sex-film production was on full blast because of the Marcos (Sr.) regime’s desperation in looking for ways to discourage mass participation in the burgeoning antidictatorship movement, she realized that this was a unique opportunity that might never come her way again.[1]

11011In a remarkable interview with Ricky Lee, who was writing a number of screenplays for her, she foregrounded the debates her professional self was having with her religious orientation. (Titled “Walang Bold sa Langit” or “Bold Not Allowed in Heaven” and retitled “May Bold Ba sa Langit?” or “Is Bold Allowed in Heaven?” for a later anthology, the piece was reprinted in a number of Philippine outlets as a tribute to her.) She admitted, among other things, that she was hoping to compensate for what she considered were transgressions, by performing the standard penance of good work.

11011In fact, she was already overcompensating even that early. William Pascual, who directed her in the ensemble Chikas [Chicks], picked her out to star in the superior chamber piece Takaw Tukso [Constant Craving], where she outshone the then-best available names for a crime-of-passion melodrama. She achieved the same feat of upstaging more established actors in White Slavery – which happened to be directed by Lino Brocka, who consequently made sure that she would be the sole female lead in Macho Dancer. Chito S. Roño’s debut, Private Show, showcased what was arguably the most challenging “bold” role possible, that of a live-sex performer, which another star, Sarsi Emmanuelle, had already made definitive in Tikoy Aguiluz’s Boatman.

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11011Private Show was railroaded by the February 1986 people power uprising, since it was the type of extreme sample that could only be screened in the Marcoses’ censorship-exempt venue, the Manila Film Center. More than any of Jose’s earlier work, it contained passages that were also bold in the sense of being expressionist and surreal, expertly (possibly even lovingly) melded with an approach to material that combined naturalism with social critique. When Roño, still with Lee scripting, decided to unfold a diptych with Curacha: Ang Babaeng Walang Pahinga [Curacha: A Woman Without Rest], he cast the post-Marcos era’s top sex siren, Rosanna Roces, but he also provided a climactic moment where Jose’s character reappeared to suggest solidarity – not just between two generations of live-sex characters, but also between the best bold stars of their respective eras.

Jaclyn Jose in a midcareer supporting role, in Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s May Nagmamahal sa Iyo (1996). [Screenshot by Jojo Devera][2]

11011As she had correctly anticipated, roles that featured the character types she specialized in quickly dwindled. Nevertheless Jose had enough acclaim and acting trophies to ensure that she could still be cast in supporting roles, usually as the lead actor’s mistress or lead actress’s best friend. At this stage, she apparently had another round of figuring out (complemented by an intensive theater experience, in Lee’s Pitik-Bulag sa Buwan ng Pebrero or Playing Blind-Guess in the Month of February), and arrived at a workable solution: for minor roles, she would attempt a consistently affectless delivery, then let loose at peak level wherever the character had a dramatic opportunity, usually in her final scene. The approach served to remind audiences and colleagues that she remained a talent who refused to be taken for granted.[3]

11011With the emergence of digital technology and streaming services in the new millennium, Jose was able to secure greater opportunities in her career path. She could once more land an occasional lead role, and explore her potential for class-parodic comedy in TV series. The lesson she provided as exemplar was undeniable to anyone who bothered to take stock: one may already have the rare fortune of emerging fully formed, but longevity can only be attained through hard work, in her case in both analytic and physical terms. From this perspective, her Cannes Film Festival prize merely affirmed what Filipino audiences already realized and admired about her through several decades of familiarity.

11011The few instances where she mentioned feeling abandoned should not be conflated with the tragic circumstances of her death from a bad fall when no one was present to check on her well-being. She’d always known that life would be hard, and that the pursuit of artistic excellence will always be a lonely undertaking. Her initial appearance reminded observers, no doubt including Brocka, of a talented predecessor, Claudia Zobel, who died in a horrific car accident – as Brocka also would a few years later; two other waifish bold stars, Pepsi Paloma and Stella Strada, died by their own hands at the time when Jose was contending with a decline in film assignments. One might wish she lived longer than she did, but we could just as well marvel at how she managed to thrive as long as she had.

Near-contemporaneous nymphets, in order of emergence: Claudia Zobel (1965-84), Pepsi Paloma (1966-85), Stella Strada (1965-84), Jaclyn Jose (1963-2024). [Various screenshots posted and saved from internet sources]

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Notes

First published March 9, 2024, in The FilAm. The author would like to thank filmmakers Lawrence Fajardo and Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, and film critics Jerrick Josue David, Jojo Devera, and Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., for providing additional insight and information.

[1] Jaclyn Jose’s extraordinarily sharp instincts as performer were complemented by her manager Ed Instrella’s preparation in nationalist theater (with the Philippine Educational Theater Association) and inclination toward independent projects. At their respective career peaks, Instrella’s talents – among whom were Cherry Pie Picache, Julio Diaz, Gardo Verzosa, and Alan Paule – were consistently highly valued for their willingness to immerse in sex-themed films while delivering fine performances. I am grateful to Mau Tumbocon for bringing up this frequently overlooked background detail. I also made a belated appreciative social-media post of her performance in Emmanuel Dela Cruz’s Sarong Banggi [One Night] (2005), which will be part of the Amauteurish Publishing volume of Philippine canon choices titled Canon Decampment.

[2] In his tribute post to Jaclyn Jose’s triumph at Cannes, critic Jojo Devera mentioned that “if I were to choose one small, elegantly wrapped gift [from Marilou Diaz-Abaya] above all others, it would be the role she created for Jose in the ensemble of May Nagmamahal sa Iyo [Madonna and Child] (1996), where she’s both exacting and brilliant. In an immensely sad film, her Editha is one of the saddest things, carrying her disappointment with a show of lightness we know is just an attempt to save face” (Facebook, May 24, 2016).

[3] In his article “Back in Her Element,” film scholar Johven Velasco wrote: “Although she’s gifted with one of local cinema’s most haunting and eloquently mobile faces capable of articulating a gamut of emotions, detractors have criticized her monotonic speech pattern. In due time, she would correct this shortcoming as she did television soap operas and drama series that required a style of acting that contrasted markedly with the subtlety and control that she was becoming known for” (Huwaran/Hulmahan Atbp., University of the Philippines Press, 2009, p. 15).

11011In editing Velasco’s posthumous volume, I queried Ed Instrella (see endnote 1) regarding the Internet Movie Database’s misspelling (since corrected) of Jose’s screen appellation. Instrella clarified that her given name should be spelled without a k – hence, the films that credited her as “Jacklyn” were in error; Mary Jane Guck (Jose’s real name, possibly a deliberate and playful reference to cannabis) expressed her concurrence in an SMS forwarded by Instrella: “nagkakamali lang yung iba pero hayaan mo na [others are mistaken but just let them be]” (February 17, 2008, 4:41 p.m.).

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August 9, 2022

Artist in a Hurry

By Joel David

There will always be ambivalence surrounding the Filipino word for performer: artista. The word it suggests in English is in many ways opposed to the notion of an artist, who supposedly stands apart from issues of popularity and financial success. This is why the first film star recognized as National Artist, Nora Aunor, underwent such a difficult process that politicians involved in two successive final rounds regarded her omission as no big shakes.

11011Cherie Gil, who died before she could turn 60, started as a star, became an active and reliable supporting actress, left the country to attend to her family, and returned when she found she wasn’t cut out to merely be a wife to Rony Rogoff, a globally acclaimed violinist. When news of her death broke recently, folks in my limited netizen circle were as shocked as I was that she was already more than the sum of everything she was before she first departed, during the preceding millennium. Gil belonged to the renowned Eigenmann clan of performers, where ironically only her parents and elder sibling, Michael de Mesa, remain after another brother, Mark Gil, passed away in 2014; both he and Cherie were admirably stoical about keeping their illnesses private.

11011Before her mother, Rosemarie Gil, retired from acting, production projects that required a good-looking villainess only needed to decide whether she should be older or younger, then contact the Eigenmanns. Cherie Gil’s film appearances since her comeback were authoritative owing to a renewed seriousness, and radiant from the loveliness endowed by her mixed-race heritage; she opted to teach acting and study scriptwriting, signs of a restlessness of spirit; she produced her own dream project, a reworking of an earlier prestige film titled Oro, Plata, Mata (1982) with the same director, Peque Gallaga, in tandem with Lore Reyes.

11011Sonata, her 2013 Gallaga-Reyes production, brandishes what on paper might seem like a fantasy figure: an opera diva traumatized by losing her voice, who returns to her rural estate and learns to overcome her reclusive state by taking an interest in the several munchkins who hang around the place. Only someone who underwent an equivalent process in real life and resolved to heal her heartbreak by plunging into artistic fulfillment would be able to display the full measure that the character required, and we will always be fortunate that Gil was already exactly that person. As if by way of preparation, she had portrayed a similar role onstage a few years earlier, as a vocally damaged Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class.

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11011It was these theatrical forays of hers that the local cognoscenti looked forward to, and Gil accommodated the offers whenever she could. The mass audience still had some catching up to do, but her pre-departure appearances were already proving iconic to different kinds of people. Her role as lesbian drug dealer Kano in Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980) combined a tough exterior with a movingly self-destructive faith in true love,[1] while her performance in Bilanggo sa Dilim (1986), Mike de Leon’s exceptional video adaptation of John Fowler’s 1963 novel The Collector, presaged her triumphant collaboration with the same director’s Citizen Jake (2018), where she demonstrated how malignant damage could be delineated with a minimum of words and gestures.

11011It was her premillennial turn as nasty celeb Lavinia Arguelles, won over eventually by the humility of Sharon Cuneta’s loyal fandom in Bituing Walang Ningning (1985), that inspired generations of drag queens to memorize her single-sentence fulmination, glass of cold water at the ready. Cuneta posted the bittersweet farewell she was able to have in person with Gil – which led to the heavier realization that descended on observers: these were two chums who were able to mature together, in parallel but impressive ways, so many of us hoped it may only be a matter of time before Gil could persuade her BFF to explore the legitimate stage together with her.

11011That, and many other potential treats, will now only have to be relegated to the realm of speculation forever. But the lesson that Gil modeled for later generations of pop-culture jobholders abides: that one can always upgrade one’s craft, and in so doing, leave this world a better place even ahead of schedule. Politicians will always make their self-serving claims and will die off in time, but real art is what will always remain and be worth treasuring.

Note

First published August 7, 2022, in The FilAm, reprinted in The FilAm: Newsmagazine Serving Filipino Americans in New York 55 (September 2022). The author would like to acknowledge the information and feedback provided by Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., Jerrick Josue David (no relation), and Jojo Devera.

[1] In drafting my 2017 monograph Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic, I planned to interview the film’s most prominent then-surviving participants: production designer and script consultant Peque Gallaga, and the primary queer-character performers Bernardo Bernardo and Cherie Gil. Gallaga had several Facebook posts which I could draw from, while BB proved to be such a printed-word raconteur that the series editors decided to use our Q&A exchange (originally posted on Ámauteurish!) as an appendix. Gil could only reply sparingly, apologetic that she could not remember much about that period of her life, which was understandable; I requested use of a photo that she had with BB for one of their dinner-theater productions and slated her for a possible future career lookback. All three are now gone, a reality that induced a personal degree of regret the moment I learned about Gil’s demise.

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July 9, 2020

Mother Pinas, Onscreen

By Joel David

From the Internet Movie Database.

Out of Anita Linda’s several bouts of mixed fortunes, the fact that she survived into the internet era should count as her so-far final stroke of good luck. Tributes, recollections, even film excerpts regarding her excellence as performer flooded Pinas social media on the day she died, two days before Independence Day 2020 – a time when people were seeking fitting symbols of the nation to honor.

11011Linda would of course be the perfect embodiment. Dying in the early morning – or, in keeping with her professional approach, sleeping her last – she seemingly made sure that no schedule that required her for the day would be disrupted by any untoward drama in real life. Anything dramatic, for her, should be allowed to emerge only in her performances.

11011Anyone should be able to pick up the basic details by now, and a whole lot more might be added to her bio once historians of pop culture have finished combing through the many anecdotes her co-workers have been posting about her. Born in 1924 to an American father and Ilongga mother, Alice Lake was discovered while watching a stage show by Lamberto V. Avellana, and given her screen name by Avellana’s wife, the former Daisy Hontiveros.[1] She expressed reluctance because of her difficulty with Tagalog, but Avellana was insistent and cast her in a non-speaking stage part.

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Sisa publicity pic. [From Video 48]


11011World War II delayed the screening of her first film, Avellana’s Tiya Juana [Aunt Juana] (1943), for LVN Pictures, Avellana’s home studio. Her next projects, however, came out four years later, for Premiere Productions: three films in 1947, five in 1948, seven in 1949. Premiere was where Gerardo de Leon worked, and Linda may have impressed him enough to cast her in a period project, Sisa, based on the tragic figure in Jose Rizal’s 1887 novel Noli Me Tangere [Touch Me Not], who in turn was partly based on the persecution by Spanish authorities of the hero’s mother, who had made herself vulnerable by marrying a Chinoy.[2] Most of the other evidence of Linda’s evolution as film actor may be impossible to source by now, since most of the Premiere holdings were burned in one of those warehouse fires that kept razing down combustible celluloid stock.

11011An added misfortune was political in nature. Linda, along with Patria Plata, supported a crewpersons’ strike at her home studio, led by soundperson Casimiro Padilla. The owners decided to shut down the production company, leaving the strikers stranded, the actresses included. (Based on their production credits, this would have occurred around the mid-1950s.)[3] During this period, the studio system was also faltering from its top-heavy vertical integration and was facing challenges from more successful stars, who had enough of their own money to start producing their own films. Unfortunately, this tension resolved into a highly commercial catch-as-catch-can approach to production that did not guarantee that many of the titles made by practitioners during that period could be preserved for posterity.

11011Felicitously for Linda’s most celebrated film role, Lino Brocka spearheaded a recovery program with a team whose members hunted down Gerry de Leon films from all over the country, starting with the most logical final destinations – provincial theaters where celluloid prints would usually be left to deteriorate or be cannibalized as caps and horns for Christmas and New Year merriment. The recovery of Sisa (1951) bowled over a new generation of observers, who had been earlier transfixed by a more recent performance, Lolita Rodriguez’s in Lino Brocka’s own Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang [Weighed But Found Wanting] (1974).

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In Emmanuel Quindo Palo’s Sta. Niña (2012), with Coco Martin. [Cinemalaya & CCM Creatives]


11011Linda in Sisa deservedly took top spot as Pinas cinema’s most outstanding film performance, the gold standard against which a much younger aspirant, Nora Aunor, was subsequently to measure herself. To say that Aunor was eventually able to surpass her is no slight on Linda’s achievement: a new filmmaking generation brought with it more openness and artistic daring, along with Aunor’s own considerable resources as top multimedia star of our time. Nevertheless Linda persisted and even managed to occasionally headline her own film projects, possibly the oldest Filipino actor to ever achieve the feat. The two millennial-era films where she appears as lead actress, Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.’s Adela (2008) and Brillante Ma. Mendoza’s Lola [Grandmother] (2009), deploy the benevolence and humility that Linda became known for among her colleagues.[4] It were as if the directors scouted for unusual and inaccessible urban settings, set Linda down in them, and instructed her to be her truest self. Her final film, Alix’s Circa (2019), also features her in lead capacity – a fitting end to a career with several highs but also too many lows.

11011This may also have been a consequence of iconicity, a higher realm than stardom: people become aptly reverential, sometimes to a fault. One of the unforgettable anecdotes about Linda on the set of Sisa was of de Leon adjusting her delivery by saying, “Anita, konting libog pa [more libido please].” Cineastes may have delighted in this narrative by imagining how much greater the director was than his performer, but Linda’s output throughout and beyond the Marcos regime (regarded as the Second Golden Age of Philippine cinema) belies this auteur-snobbish interpretation. Scroll through the tribute excerpts posted by, as an example, Facebook’s Cristina Gaston (a pseudonym adopted from an Alma Moreno character): Ishmael Bernal, Maryo J. de los Reyes, Elwood Perez, and Joey Gosiengfiao were never content to just depict her as mother to the star(s) of their projects. She had to be kooky, eccentric, decadent, flighty, bitchy, alcoholic, unfaithful, and/or ambitious.

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The working-class assassin in Gumapang Ka sa Lusak (1990). [Viva Films]


11011These characterizations did not arise out of disrespect. On the contrary, they came from a recognition that Linda was always game for unusual challenges, and seemed grateful to make use of comic devices for a change. We’ve left out Lino Brocka, with whom Linda was most associated with sanctimonious-motherly roles. Yet even in this territory, we find departures from her later mater-dolorosa persona. In Jaguar (1979), she scolds her son for his social-climbing delusions but shields him later from pursuing police agents and helps him escape when they get near; in Gumapang Ka sa Lusak [Dirty Affair] (1990), nominatively a sequel to Jaguar, she reprises the role played by Carlito Dimailig in real life, assassinating the movie’s Imelda Marcos figure with a bolo (though as in real life, the person gets killed by security personnel).

11011In the Madama Butterfly-inspired “Hello, Soldier” segment of Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa [Three, Two, One] (1974), she transforms from a devoted mother dutifully preparing to surrender her daughter to the American who fathered her and now wants to adopt her, to a drunk-off-her-ass slum dweller re-enacting the moment she, as a then-younger bargirl, espied and seduced the foreigner she would fall for and be abandoned by. Brocka documents the sequence from the moment she wakes up from her intoxication, through her panic at the thought of being left alone and wandering the streets, regretful at how she was unable to say a proper farewell, without a single line of dialogue: Linda pursues and finishes the tale magnificently, by the use of her face and nothing else.[5]

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The wordless closure of the “Hello, Soldier” episode of Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa (1974).

11011In two films by Mario O’Hara, we find definitive formal proof of Linda’s capabilities. In Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? [Why Is the Sky Blue?] (1981), she executes extended melodramatic arguments with Nora Aunor and proves to be the only actor capable of matching the country’s most gifted performer, line by spiteful line. In Babae sa Bubungang Lata [Woman on a Tin Roof] (1998), she uses the disadvantages of representing a lost past in cinema, narrating her tale rather than enacting it, providing embarrassingly manipulative final-act revelations, and winds up claiming equal-ensemble status as the younger performers via the force of her haunted slow-burn delivery.

11011It would therefore be unsurprising to learn that when Elwood Perez decided to initiate an autobiographical film trilogy as his final artistic statement, Anita Linda heralded the first installment, Otso [Eight] (2013). Her presence infuses the entire film, even though she appears only in the final sequence – as Alice Lake, playing a once-famous actress known as Anita Linda, now the owner of a residential building where an aspiring artist learns about life, love, and desire, realizing to his amazement that his present has become possible because of what the lady at the top floor, overlooking events in her property, underwent in the past.[6] This may be the ultimate way to remember Linda: a woman who dedicated her life so completely to her craft that it expectedly defined her, but also unexpectedly and even more profoundly became defined by her.

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Alice Lake in Otso (2013). [Film Development Council of the Philippines & Earth Moving Pictures]

Notes

First published June 13, 2020, as “Remembering Anita Linda: She Devoted Her Life So Completely to Her Craft that It Defined Her,” in ABS-CBN News Channel. The author acknowledges the solicitation and assistance of Jerome Gomez, as well as anecdotes shared by the late Vic Delotavo and several leads provided by Bibeth Orteza (including the very first endnote entry). This article is for a wonderful and supportive social-media acquaintance, Jane Po.

[1] Most reports ascribe the source of Linda’s screen name to Avellana, but their granddaughter Ina Avellana Cosio provided the clarification – that it was Daisy rather than Lamberto who suggested the name – in her comment on my Facebook post of June 10, 2020. Incredibly, Linda’s father named her after his sister, the silent film star Alice Lake (1895-1967), known for co-starring in “Fatty” Arbuckle comedies. See “Anita Linda: Truly a Legend,” a compilation of interview excerpts by Ricky Lo (Philippine Star, June 12, 2020).

[2] I recall this staggering and essential revelation on why a member of the landed gentry was made to march from her home to the municipal jail from one of the first article publications of Caroline S. Hau, whose title I do not recall but which I read for certain in the 1990s. In a recent exchange, she mentioned that her account was cut from the final version of The Chinese Question: Ethnicity, Nation, and Region in and Beyond the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014).

11011In her typically generous manner, she maintained that “the Sisa-Alonso link is [now] orthodox in the scholarship on Rizal, and the authorities really made an example of her, not caring if she was herself of relatively high social standing in the town…, so there’s no need to cite anything I wrote” (“Re: Query re Teodora Alonso Realonda,” email received by the author, July 25, 2020) – all the more reason for a non-Rizal scholar like me to insist on acknowledging Hau’s continuing contribution to this field of study.

[3] This information first came out in the citation for Anita Linda’s award for outstanding lifetime achievement, given by the Filipino Film Critics Circle, of which I was a member then. (Her acceptance speech, delivered in English, was a marvel of humility, ending with – paraphrasing, regarding her worthiness – “If people still want to have me around, I promise to keep working as long as I live.”) The citation was published in the group’s first decadal collection and reprinted in the second; see “Anita Linda,” in The Urian Anthology 1970-1979 (Quezon City: Manuel L. Morato, 1983), pp. 420-21, taglined Jun Cruz Reyes, trans. Nicanor G. Tiongson. After 1953, Patria Plata stopped working altogether at Premiere, while Anita Linda had occasional projects, although not as actively as before.

11011My provisional speculation is that she may have been emboldened by winning the first industry-wide award for an actress in Sisa. Her people skills may be seen in her returning for the occasional Premiere project, as well as for production companies set up by her colleagues in the studio, specifically Gerry de Leon and Larry Santiago. In fact, by freelancing not just for rival studios but also for independent outfits, she may have been the first star who demonstrated the instability and morally questionable logic behind the oligopoly of the Big Three. One of her early “indie” projects anticipated the wild and woolly years of the post-studio 1960s: Nardo Vercudia’s Basagulera [Troublemaker] (1954), for Everlasting Pictures.

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[4] Update: a little-known anecdote that typifies industry practitioners’ reverence for Linda, from multimedia artist Bibeth Orteza, whose mother-in-law, Armida Siguion-Reyna, was then the chair of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board:

When Joseph Estrada got elected, Fernando Poe Jr. asked for only two people to be appointed to a government slot. One was for his pal Rudy Meyer, who was put on the board of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation, and the other, Tita Alice (what we all called her because Alice Lake was her real name, after her aunt, the silent film star in Hollywood), for the MTRCB.

11011We lived just a village apart in 1998. Tita Alice requested a copy of Presidential Decree 1986, the law which created the MTRCB, so I sent her a hard copy. Less than an hour later, she was on the phone. “Hija, please tell Armida I am grateful for the offer of my appointment. But please convey my apologies to her, and to Ronnie, because I cannot accept the post.”

11011I was surprised, and asked her why. She said, “The law says only natural-born Filipinos can serve on the board. I am not a Filipino citizen. I am still an American citizen.” She was so honest about it that Armida wept, in appreciation. (Facebook Messenger exchange, April 15, 2021; acronyms spelled out by the author)

[5] A precursor of how her soon-to-be-rediscovered performance in Sisa was about to recapture the top spot in local film appreciators’ regard was during the 1975 awards ceremony of the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences: while Lolita Rodriguez in Lino Brocka’s Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang affirmed her stature as an outstanding female performer by winning best actress, it was Linda’s far shorter role, misclassified as supporting actress, in one of three episodes in Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa, that presenters kept raving over.

11011One of the possibly apocryphal tales about the shoot is that the art-direction team used actual (inexpensive working-class) booze on the set, resulting in Linda accidentally getting drunk during the buildup to her confrontation scene. Finding authenticity in her delivery, Brocka proceeded to document her in her inebriated condition.

Update: The aforementioned story is apocryphal. Bibeth Orteza (see endnote 4) narrated an account of how Linda wanted to confront some neighborhood toughies who turned rowdy whenever they got drunk. She challenged them to a drinking contest and won – by remaining sober even after they had finished several rounds of liquor (Pelikulove evaluators’ Zoom session, March 11, 2022).

[6] A wistful and poetic full circle has been inscribed with Otso as well, when we consider that Elwood Perez’s first film, the now-lost Blue Boy (1970), starred Fred Cortes Jr., Linda’s son by Fred Cortes, with whom she had starred in her first film, Tiya Juana. (And just as her husband acted in her first film, she also appeared in her son’s debut.) She put her film career on hold, for the last time, when she opted to live with Cortes in the US, but returned after their union ended. Cortes died in 1966.

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May 9, 2020

My Peque Gallaga Interview

By Joel David

Maurice Claudio Luis Ruiz de Luzuriaga “Peque” Gallaga (1943-2020). [From the National Commission for Culture and the Arts]

I will admit that I tried, for the longest time, to keep distance between myself and Peque Gallaga. During the publicity blitz for his first solo film, Oro, Plata, Mata [Gold, Silver, Death] (1982), I preferred to interview his wife, Madie, the film’s producer who also happened to be the daughter of my mother’s supervisor at what was then the national sugar institute. He had a reputation for being temperamental and I preferred to avoid celebrity types, although I discovered later that I enjoyed studying them. Since this was the “new cinema” moment when the film world lavished adulation on auteurs, and OPM was a star turn more for its director than for any of its actors, Peque became as much the star of one of the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines’ initial productions as Nora Aunor was (then-already) the star of the other, Ishmael Bernal’s Himala [Miracle].

Gallaga directing his films: Oro, Plata, Mata (1982, above) and “Manananggal [Viscera Sucker]” segment of Shake, Rattle & Roll (1984). [From Focus on Filipino Films and Ronald Rios]


11011In fact I’d made his acquaintance earlier, when I had just joined a then-still-studious critics group that decided to invite the members of the newly formed production designers’ guild in order to get pointers on how to properly evaluate their category – for an annual awards system that I also soon repudiated. When the guild president kept arguing that PD practitioners insist on lavish adornments in order to shame producers who skimped on production budgets, Peque spoke out and said that the best kind of mise-en-scène was one that did not draw attention to itself. In effect, he stated that PDs should learn to welcome the challenge of working within narrow budgets, although whether he knew or didn’t, by saying so he contributed one vital brick to the ethical critical structure I was building for myself.[1]

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11011On another occasion, in one of those many self-congratulatory receptions the then-booming industry loved to sponsor, I had occasion to mention to him that I attended the rescreening of a film where he participated as actor. This was Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos [Three Godless Years], which came out in 1976, the same year he won the critics’ prize for production design for Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? [As We Were]. Over coffee after the screening, one of the founding members asked me if I’d seen it before (I had), and what impressed me about the present viewing. “Peque’s performance,” I said, and he agreed. I said it might be the best of that year for the supporting-actor category, and he agreed again, somewhat sheepishly (I thought, because Peque wasn’t even nominated for it).[2]

11011About a year later, when the agency provided me with a scholarship to complete a second bachelor’s degree in the country’s first academic film program at the national university, I arrived at the office to turn in my output for the day. The whole place was abuzz with the premiere of the first sex film made by Regal Films, the country’s most successful studio. It wasn’t the first so-called bold film, or even the first locally produced bold film, to be exhibited free of censorship at the Manila Film Center; neither was it Peque’s OPM follow-up, since he’d already exhibited Bad Bananas sa Puting Tabing [Bad Bananas on the Silver Screen] (made for the 1983 Metro Manila Film Festival) as well as the soft-core historical allegory Virgin Forest, also a Regal production, earlier in 1985. Scorpio Nights promised to be different though, with its title suggesting an overtly and unapologetically sex-focused product.

11011But the buzz I mentioned was something else. It centered on an event that occurred right before the pricey but expectedly jampacked screening. Those who’d attended said that when it was Peque’s turn to speak, he let go of a volley of curses, naming specific individuals who were officials in the ECP and/or colleagues of mine in the critics’ group. Despite the fact that I’d already forsworn participation in the group’s annual awards after extreme frustration with not just the individual choices but also the hypocrisy and cynicism behind the process, Peque’s outburst made me anxious. At that time, I guessed that it had to do with the backlash by left-leaning critics against OPM, to which our group had given its highest prizes; some of the OPM-bashers were former members, others were later invited to be part of the group.

11011With some hindsight, I later thought that it also may have had to do with the fact that the cash-strapped ECP bypassed its next year’s second-place scriptwriting contest winner, Flores de Mayo [Flowers of May], and favored the third, Soltero [Bachelor] (1984), thus ensuring that Flores would never get done: not only was Flores written by Jose Javier Reyes, the same person that Peque recruited to write OPM as well as Bad Bananas, but Soltero was written by an official of the ECP – one of the names Peque had singled out. Friends at the agency however told me that any hurt feelings were subsequently smoothed over via an apology that Peque issued.

11011I got some measure of assurance later, after I completed the film program and worked up enough nerve to contact him to tell him how much I appreciated Scorpio Nights, how I disagreed with the critics locking it out of their major awards categories, and how relieved I was to drop out of the group so I could finally criticize them as an independent entity. He was effusive with praise for me, pointing out something that didn’t occur to me up to that point: “those people,” he said, “should have done what you did – study the field that they were dabbling in, so they’d know what they’re talking about and earn the right to call themselves qualified.”

Films co-directed by Gallaga: Binhi [Seed] (with Butch Perez, 1973, above) and Sonata (with Lore Reyes, 2013). [From Ronald Rios and Rappler]

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11011Academe gave me the time and inclination (though not the funds) to pursue a career as resident film critic of what was then the country’s most consequential newsmagazine, National Midweek. A foreign graduate-study grant became available right after I published my first book, and I stopped communicating with Pinas industry participants for nearly a decade. I maintained contact with some practitioners of a narrative format that I announced as my dissertation topic, but when the most prolific among them, Ishmael Bernal, died unexpectedly, I decided to stay put in the US until I completed my doctorate.

11011This is my roundabout way of explaining why my most intensive interactions with Peque since the present millennium consisted entirely of social-network exchanges. I knew I could get a great interview out of him, but in the meanwhile what I needed was some information for the book on Manila by Night (1980) that I was writing. I knew some of his stories as its production designer (for which he won his second critics’ prize), and I was aware that he was referring to his work on it when he articulated his principles during the critics’ soirée with the PD guild several years earlier.

11011What stumped me regarding Manila by Night was a different type of design – film sound. I apologetically brought up the topic with him, expecting him to hint at least that I should focus on his visual specialization. What do you know, he did get involved with the movie’s aural design, confirming my suspicion that the film’s extremely accurate and well-timed voices and noises were actually artificially – and painstakingly – recreated in the sound studio.[3] Much like creating a news report using memory and restaging the incidents one wanted to cover, carefully enough so that the total reality effect was replicated.

11011So one of my long-term to-do projects was an all-out Peque Gallaga interview, covering the full spectrum of his participation in film and film-related activities: as project conceptualizer, director (for film, TV, and theater), performer, visual and sound designer, theater-guild founder, professor, and whatever else he might remind me. I just needed to muster the guts to handle what I thought was his contempt for film critics, since he never failed to blast my older colleagues even after they handed him a well-deserved life achievement award about a decade ago. I also take every opportunity to point out their shortcomings, so at least we could have that useful convergence as starting point.

Gallaga and Lore Reyes, his co-director since 1987. [From Lore Reyes’s Facebook page]

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11011The final factor that eliminated all my misgivings regarding his belligerence occurred via a casual conversation I had late last year with his co-director, Lore Reyes.[4] I mentioned, in one of my recollections of the ECP screenings, Peque’s flare-up during the Scorpio Nights premiere. Apparently, according to Lore, everyone else had forgotten about it – but of course I couldn’t, since I had to steel myself for a Peque interview that was never to be, as it turned out. The story involved an otherwise highly regarded personality who was associated not just with ECP but also with the critics group as well as the national university’s film program. I deduced that he was acting with the support or encouragement of people in these institutions, the same people Peque had called out.

11011From our November 21, 2019, exchange: “Did you know? I caught Hammy [Agustin Sotto] cutting Scorpio Nights near dawn on the morning before its ECP premiere. I told Hammy I was going to fetch Peque, he said go ahead, fetch Peque. So I did. Peque punched him and kicked him in the head. It was a scene straight out of a cheap indie movie: a 5,000-foot reel unspooling all over Jess Navarro’s editing room in [the Regal office in] Valencia as Jess and I tried to stop Peque from beating up Hammy.[5] Later that day, [unknown to Manila Film Center head] Johnny Litton and Hammy, Jess restored all the clips that Hammy had cut (we brought a Steenbeck to the ECP parking lot and bribed the ECP projectionist so we could borrow the premiere print). That was where Peque’s rage was coming from, when he cursed all those personalities who were right there in front of him on the first row. They tried to cut his film without his knowledge.”

11011Goodness, I realized, I had nothing to fear at all about the man. He would defy hell itself to fight for something he thought was right. About that interview….

Notes

An account of Peque Gallaga’s achievements is recounted in the tribute issued by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts on its Facebook page. An abridged version of this article, titled “Peque’s Rage: A Retelling,” was published in the May 12, 2020, issue of The FilAm; it was also reprinted in the June 2020 issue of The FilAm: Newsmagazine Serving Filipino Americans in New York. (Click on pic below of the newsmag version to open PDF file.)

[1] In Monchito Nocon’s unpublished 2012 interview with Peque Gallaga regarding Manila by Night, Peque quoted Ishmael Bernal’s response when he demanded a reshoot of the Halloween revelers’ frolic at Manila Bay, since the camera operator had forgotten to bring the right lenses: “A film can never be perfect. It has to have a rough edge … a mistake … a human aspect.”

[2] To the credit of the late Mario A. Hernando, with whom I was conversing, he devoted a portion of his newspaper column (Kibitzer, in the now-defunct Times Journal) to raise this very same issue. The incident also alerted me to the dangers of passing canonical judgment based on swift and temporally marked-off considerations such as awards schedules.

[3] Abbo Q. de la Cruz, who played the rebellious peasant in Oro, Plata, Mata [Gold, Silver, Death], and whose Misteryo sa Tuwa [Joyful Mystery] (1984) was the first film completed during the second and final batch of ECP productions, was credited for sound effects in Manila by Night. On a Facebook post that was subsequently deleted by the account owner, Peque mentioned how he and Abbo locked themselves in the sound studio and worked themselves to exhaustion, until they felt they had all the possible audio coverage that the director might require.

[4] Another critical issue that besets the Gallaga credit is the directing partnership he maintained with Lore Reyes. This should resolve by itself as Reyes continues making films on his own, as he has done and as he should continue doing. Gregory Paul Y. Daza, in “The Unsung, Ignored Half of the Gallaga-Reyes Movies” (for the September 4, 2015 issue of BusinessWorld), provided what amounts to a useful primer for the Reyes-Gallaga dilemma.

[5] Tina Cuyugan, in a Facebook comment posted on April 10, 2020, narrated that “Peque did mention that he went to that encounter with Hammy brandishing (although not using, in the end) a cane that had been hand-carved by prisoners in Palawan. The type of precise Bakunawan detail that can stick to one’s memory for 35 years.” (“Nelson Bakunawa” was the name Peque used for his account, bakunawa being a mythological serpentine dragon capable of disrupting weather cycles and causing eclipses and tremors; the account has been archived by his family and is no longer available.) My own assessment of Hammy’s extremely conflicted positions as film critic, historian, festival promoter, educator, and aspiring industry practitioner may have to wait until I have been able to ensure my own objectivity about his actuations vis-à-vis the far-from-perfect institutions wherein he operated. For an essential and intensive retrospective report on the production history of Scorpio Nights, see Jerome Gomez’s “Coital Recall,” in Rogue (November 2015): 74-81.

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October 29, 2019

Showbiz Babylon: A Tribute-of-Sorts to the Barretto Sisters

By Joel David


Pique and pulchritude: Claudine, Gretchen, and Marjorie (left to right), the protagonists of the Barretto family scandal, 2019 edition. (Instagram collage courtesy of ABS-CBNNews.com.) To jump to later sections, click here for: New Blood; Trophy BFs; Weaker Sex; and Notes.

“La dénonciation du scandale
est toujours un hommage rendu à la loi.”
– J. Baudrillard[1]

Since celebrity scandals observe the same cycle of fostering fatigue among the public after a period of intense engagement, don’t be surprised if the latest Barretto family intrigue has mellowed, if not dissipated, by the time you read this. Before the first member of the family emerged on the national stage, “Barretto” used to be better known as the location of a coastal drive along Subic Bay, where girlie bars featuring women from all over the country catered to American GIs willing to spend their precious dollars for rest and recreation (even if they wound up getting neither).

11011This made the Barretto clan locally prominent citizens in so far as any red-light area could bestow respectability. (It might help to remember that the illustrious residents of Malate also reside adjacent to another former red-light district, Ermita.) Hence Gretchen Barretto, or her handlers, did not feel the need to use another family name when she was launched as part of the second batch of mixed-gender Regal Babies. Unfortunately, the rival Viva Films studio had just launched its monstrously successful all-male Bagets batch, and Rey de la Cruz had an all-female troupe, the Softdrink Beauties, claiming whatever (frankly prurient) interest could be generated in good-looking women.

11011So the Regal Babies II were destined for certain oblivion, with a bravely determined Gretchen languishing in supporting roles.[2] She was barely noticeable in Lino Brocka’s Miguelito: Batang Rebelde (1985), for example, banking on her classy features but limited by her narrow range as a performer. By the 1990s, she had shed enough of her premature flab and gained enough height to look alluring enough for male-gaze purposes. Robbie Tan, founder-manager of Seiko Films, profitably deduced that the public had tired of sex sirens who looked and behaved like they came from the wrong side of the tracks. He devised a series of projects that objectified seemingly unattainable porcelain beauties led by Gretchen, turned his outfit into a major player in the process, and made the first Barretto star (Figure 1).[3]

Figure 1. Gretchen Barretto in one of Seiko Films’ early “sex-trip” hits, Abbo Q. de la Cruz’s Tukso: Layuan Mo Ako (1991).

New Blood

Another Barretto quietly took Gretchen’s place as constant second-stringer: Claudine, her younger sister. Unlike her predecessor, Claudine handled her years of relative obscurity as an opportunity to hone her performative skills. Her walk in the sun had a healthier component to it, by conventional moralist standards: she came of age when romantic comedies succeeded in displacing all the other then-profitable local film genres – horror, action, comedy, even her elder sister’s soft-core melodramas – and managed to prove her mettle alongside the peak capability of Vilma Santos, in Rory B. Quintos’s Anak (2000).

11011An accident of fate though propelled Claudine to a stature never attained by Gretchen. It was, unfortunately, a tragedy, the first indication that the Barrettos could only really soar on the wings of bad news. Just as Gretchen became a star by shedding her clothes, Claudine captured the public imagination when she broke up with her buena-familia boyfriend Rico Yan, grandson of a former army chief and ambassador during the presidency of Ferdinand E. Marcos. The heartbroken beau repaired to a Palawan resort, where he failed to awaken on an Easter Sunday, of all days, after a night of heavy drinking (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Claudine Barretto’s Instagram memento of the last note sent her by Rico Yan, posted after the latter died.

11011The public response was hysterical, with Yan’s wake and funeral march overshadowing those of two National Artists for Music, Lucio San Pedro and Levi Celerio. A reporter from the rival of Yan’s home station happened to be at the resort and scooped its competitor, which in turn avenged itself by preventing all other TV stations from occupying vantage points during Yan’s wake. Best of all, for Claudine’s fortune, her co-starrer with Yan, Olivia M. Lamasan’s Got 2 Believe (2002), had just opened in theaters, with Yan’s death catapulting it to record-blockbuster status.

Trophy BFs

This made of Claudine an even bigger star than her Ate Gretchen, and acrimonious vibes from the sisters’ perceived rivalry began getting airtime, with then-incipient social media paying due interest. Gretchen became the constant partner of businessman and media mogul-aspirant Antonio “Tonyboy” Cojuangco, while Claudine linked up with and eventually married another alumnus of De La Salle University, Raymart Santiago (of the well-known brood fathered by producer-director Pablo Santiago, preceded in showbiz by his elder brothers Rowell and Randy). Their mother Inday declared her preference for Claudine – a position eroded by her daughter’s on-cam pummeling of one of the roughneck Tulfo brothers (Figure 3) and her later separation from her husband amid speculation of excessive drug use, with Gretchen openly declaring her sympathy for Raymart.

Figure 3. Screen cap of mobile phone video taken by onlooker of Claudine Barretto and Raymart Santiago beating up Mon Tulfo for allegedly recording a quarrel they had with airport personnel.

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11011Which brings us to the latest teapot tempest. The situation could not be more high-profile, with the country’s chief executive, a family friend, attending the wake of the just-deceased Barretto patriarch. Gretchen and Claudine had patched up their differences, and Gretchen attended ostensibly to reconcile with her mother. A third Barretto showbiz aspirant, Marjorie, who never attained the same level of stardom as her younger sisters, refused President Duterte’s admonition to greet Gretchen, alleging that her niece, Nicole, was traumatized by Gretchen spiriting away a lover, businessman Atong Ang. (A full report of the incident, alongside related coverage, appears in Nikko Tuazon’s “Who Is Nicole Barretto?” published at Philippine Entertainment Portal, October 21, 2019.)

11011In a sensational tell-all TV interview, a remarkably articulate and sensible-sounding Marjorie acknowledged that after the collapse of her own marriage to Dennis Padilla (actually Dencio Padilla Jr., son of a late well-loved comedian), she bore a love-child to Recom Echiverri, a former mayor of Caloocan City; this was by way of her pointing out that Ang was also very much married, and that Gretchen was thereby being unfaithful to Cojuangco, who similarly was hitched to someone else.

11011Predictably, Gretchen denied any physical relationship between her and Ang (Figure 4), a sufficiently credible assertion when we consider how she never balked at admitting any of her past indiscretions. The clarifications and counter-accusations will continue for some time, until the family arrives at a level of accommodation acceptable to the major players in the current fracas.

11011What conclusions can we draw from the situation? One is that the Barretto sisters are smart and determined enough in stretching their media mileage, notwithstanding the occasional evidentiary recordings of such social slip-ups as Claudine’s fistfight with Mon Tulfo or the screams and hair-pulling (with the Presidential Security Group atypically befuddled) that erupted during Miguel Alvir Barretto’s wake.

11011Marjorie’s subsequent TV interview effectively effaced an earlier scandal caused when her daughter, Julia, admitted boinking hunky star Gerald Anderson, who was supposedly committed to another star, Bea Alonzo.[4] Julia claimed that she had broken up with male starlet Joshua Garcia (just as Anderson’s relationship with Alonzo had supposedly ended), but also subsequently wound up denying that she was the mistress of another elderly entrepreneur, Ramon Ang.

Figure 4. One of Gretchen Barretto’s series of socnet posts mocking the charges made by her elder sister Marjorie and referencing Recom Echiverri.

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Weaker Sex

Another conclusion we can make is that males involved in any capacity in this dustup will be better off keeping quiet. Atong Ang appeared in one of those obviously staged “ambush interviews” coddling his legal family while declaring he had never diddled any of the Barrettos. Assuming he was truth-telling, he was also effectively saying (awkwardly, at that) that some of his Barretto friends were lying. The family patriarch, in contrast, was ironically better off reposing in a coffin: even with Gretchen recapitulating her accusation that he had molested her, no one will want to continue speaking ill of the dead.

11011As pointed out by the late film scholar Johven Velasco in his book article on Rico Yan,[5] a number of influential talk-show personalities were penalized by their TV stations, after they revealed that the deceased young star, upon learning that Claudine had allegedly been unfaithful to him, had obtained Ecstasy tablets to counter his depression. The reality that it could be factual didn’t matter as much as the possibility that a recently dead star might be slandered.

11011An even more significant conclusion that Velasco makes, echoed by social experts looking at the current familial flameout, is that any scandal’s staying power derives from what it says about us, more than about the family itself. In this instance, it’s women claiming for themselves what moral authorities used to say only men were entitled to: the privilege of behaving badly (“war of the courtesans,” to use a semi-complimentary description by expat artist Therese Cruz). The scope even has the trigenerational impact of classical Greek tragedy, a curse being passed on from parents to children to their children’s children.

11011A fast-declining generation might remember when a similar phenomenon used to command the attention of the media and public, not just in the Philippines but also overseas: the Marcos family saga, from the patriarch’s womanizing and his wife’s philistinic overcompensation, through their rebellious daughter’s romance with an oppositionist scion (including a kidnapping and fall-guy killing that foreshadowed the murder of Benigno Aquino Jr.), to their exile and triumphant return to a country that seemingly, masochistically, has not had enough of their excesses. Thankfully, the worst that the Barrettos can visit on themselves and their public will never be as malevolent as their higher-profile media predecessors had been.

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Notes

First published October 28, 2019, as “The Barrettos and the Privilege of Behaving Badly,” in The FilAm. An abridged version of this article, titled “Barretto Sisters: The Privilege of Behaving Badly,” was reprinted in the December 2019 issue of The FilAm: Newsmagazine Serving Filipino Americans in New York. (Click on pic below of newsmag version to open PDF file.)


[1] From Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1981): “The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law,” trans. Paul Foss, Paul Batton, and Philip Beitchman (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 1983).

[2] Incidental disclosure: some time after completing my second undergraduate degree (film, at the national university), I was a freelance production assistant in a Regal Films project, Emmanuel H. Borlaza’s Asawa Ko, Huwag Mong Agawin (1987), a Vilma Santos-starrer that featured the 1960s tandem of Amalia Fuentes and Eddie Gutierrez; Santos played the mistress of Gutierrez (and rival of Fuentes), while her much younger boyfriend was essayed by Gabby Concepcion, an original (first-batch) Regal Baby. A then-deferential and reclusive Gretchen Barretto was cast as one of the older couple’s neglected children.

[3] In much the same way that an early martial law-era pop-culture term, “bold,” was introduced by Regal Films, the country’s longest-running major studio, to distinguish its soft-core entries from the pre-martial law period’s more overtly sex-themed “bomba,” Robbie Tan felt the need to distance his productions from the late Marcos-era’s hard-core “penekula films.” Seiko Films did this by first appropriating “sex-trip,” abbreviated as ST, and later introduced an English coinage, “titillating film.” See “Fleshmongering” in Fields of Vision: Critical Applications in Recent Philippine Cinema (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1995), 112-14.

[4] An update, as of late 2020: after having starred in the aptly titled rom-com Between Maybes (dir. Jason Paul Laxamana, 2019), Julia Barretto and Gerald Anderson sent out broad social-media hints that they have remained … conjoined, as it were. Their apparently unsullied contentment may yet prove to be its own scandal, by standing out as the only happy ending in the 2019 Barretto saga. Even better (though worse for us gossip hounds), Julia claimed that she and Joshua Garcia are going gangbusters as friends, with the more showbiz-savvy Julia mentoring her exemplary sport of an ex.

[5] “Rico Yan: Posthumously Recognized and Constructed,” in Huwaran/Hulmahan Atbp.: The Film Writings of Johven Velasco, ed. Joel David (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2009), 24-38.

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June 27, 2019

Manoy Takes His Leave

By Joel David

The sudden end to the long and productive life of actor-director Eddie Garcia was unnecessarily tragic, with corporate negligence compounding the foolhardiness of an artist too game to retire at an age when most other people would have completed two or more entire careers. The evaluation of netizens is on the mark in this case: Garcia’s willingness to take risks, typical of his approach throughout an extended and colorful career, should have been tempered by the studio that had apparently bet on countering the most successful serial program of the moment by showcasing, among other novelties, the physical agility of the country’s oldest active action performer.[1]

11011First appearing as a contract actor by the most star-obsessed among the 1950s First Golden Age studios, Garcia’s unconventional attractiveness positioned him a degree apart from full star stature: he could occasionally headline a project, but never the romantic leads that required the Euro-mestizo prettiness claimed by any number of now-forgotten actors. Having decided to make the most of a range of skills that allowed him to dabble in genres as disparate as horror, action, comedy, even soft-core melodrama, as leading man or villain, he settled on making himself indispensable as a competent ensemble performer who could draw on reserves of brilliance in case the role happened to demand it of him.

11011His filmography of over 650 film appearances (a possible local record) attests to the success of his strategy, but he had a higher purpose in mind: to be able to carve out a parallel career as film director. His choices were informed by the same principle of populist entertainment that he maintained for his acting career. One can see how his efforts could be occasionally penalized for being too mainstream, in a system that prized (then as now) “independent” efforts: when his best film, Saan Nagtatago ang Pag-ibig? (1987), came out, the Filipino critics’ group declared that no film during that year was worth considering for its annual prizes. Saan Nagtatago has since then been regarded as one of the high points in Pinoy melodrama.

11011Observers were also prone to concluding that his expertise as director accounted for his actorly acumen. This may be safely accepted as conventional wisdom, in conjunction with his pronouncement that his original dream was to be a military official. His work ethic, arriving about an hour ahead of call time, lines already committed to memory, was typical of performers of his generation, and those of theater-trained actors even today. Yet there were fault lines in this ultra-professional approach, and it occasionally showed up in his filmmaking record. He directed (and won his first directorial award for) the second biographical campaign movie of Ferdinand Marcos, Pinagbuklod ng Langit (1969). When later, the then-newly founded directors’ guild declared a boycott of the film projects of Gabby Concepcion, Garcia defied guild president Lino Brocka by accepting a Concepcion assignment for Viva Films.

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11011Ironically, Garcia’s acting projects with Brocka constituted his most rewarding body of work. He had memorable roles in the first few films of Ishmael Bernal, showed up in some of Eddie Romero’s more ambitious projects, and endeared himself to camp fans in the sex-comedies of Danny L. Zialcita. But as the most politically committed Filipino director, Brocka required effective representations of political villainy, and no one delivered the goods as well as Garcia, in a series of acclaimed works: Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (1974), Miguelito: Batang Rebelde (1985), and Gumapang Ka sa Lusak (1990), among others. Their collaboration was cemented early on, in Brocka’s second film assignment and first serious work, Tubog sa Ginto (1970), still arguably the highest peak in male Philippine film performance.

11011The mystery in Tubog lies in how Brocka managed to create his best queer film during the period when he still had to come around as an openly queer artist. His later “out” movies, notably Macho Dancer (1988), pale in comparison to the early work. People tended to ascribe some credit to Garcia, to his admission that he conducted intensive research among colleagues in the industry, plus his earlier attempt in essaying a comic version of the closeted authority in Kaming mga Talyada (1962), affirmed by his subsequent willingness to tackle similar roles (comic and dramatic) even in his old age – including his last film assignment, Rainbow’s Sunset (2018). To be honest, the results were always mixed and not as definitive as Tubog itself; in a comic ensemble work, Mga Paru-parong Buking (1985), he was upstaged predictably by Bernardo Bernardo and unexpectedly by George Estregan.

11011Eight years ago, in one of those confluences that make pop culture an endlessly fascinating phenomenon for its devotees, several identifiably masculine actors admitted to past same-sex experiences. One of them was Garcia, who said that his own episode occurred early, when he was 15, as part of a quest to determine his own preference. One could look at the group of confessors and note for the record that they were all extremely accomplished performers. Yet the measure of the audience’s distractability, as well as Garcia’s own volatility, is that most people remembered his queer performances, but not his own acknowledgment of the roots of his appreciation. All in all an occasionally spotty record then, but generously strewn with gems worth treasuring: rarely have we been so lucky.

[First published June 23, 2019, in The FilAm]

Note

[1] In the wake of the tragedy, the studio, GMA-7, announced that its series, Rosang Agimat, was shelved. The new program was intended to challenge ABS-CBN’s long-dominant Ang Probinsyano, where Garcia had (ironically) also been a featured player.

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March 23, 2018

Farewell Farewell, Bernardo Bernardo

By Joel David

Rapid Pinoy pop-culture quiz: name another media celebrity with a double name. Aside from the usual nickname or fancy given name (Jonjon, Zsa Zsa, or, for political controversy, Bongbong), only a sufficiently elderly local observer might be able to remember Justo Justo. And unlike Bernardo Bernardo, Panfilo C. Justo opted to use a pseudonym by reduplicating his family name.

11011More recent friends of Bernardo would also know that he specified a second name, also reduplicated: BB, coined (as he once told me) to facilitate conversations in Facebook and FB Messenger.[1] Born on January 28, 1945, BB was too young to remember the intensification of World War II, leading to an ending, about half a year after his birth, where there were in fact no winners except for the abruptly wealthy Americans. The recollections of his elders must have induced in him a resolve never to face any historical crisis without contributing his share to social change, for better or worse.

11011This much can be seen in his choice of college major: journalism, then-available (circa the mid-1960s) only at the University of Sto. Tomas, with the national university still laying the groundwork for its own media program. In addition to his stint as editor-in-chief of the Varsitarian, Bernardo struck an imposing Adonic figure, tall, smart, and confident; his moreno features only served to heighten his appeal – and not surprisingly, the performing arts started knocking on his door and never stopped calling on him till the end.

11011Before he succumbed last March 8 to a particularly severe bout with pancreatic cancer, BB had made a name for himself as the most successful crossover actor in the country, conquering stage, film, and television (in that order) and expanding his reach to global stages and festivals, while also directing and producing some of his projects. Name a Philippine National Artist still alive during BB’s active years, and chances are that the name “Bernardo” will appear in the roster of participants, twice. Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., director of the Filipino Arts & Cinema International (FACINE), confirmed in private that the Annual Filipino International Film Festival was planning to recognize him with a life-achievement award during its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in San Francisco this year.

11011Regarded in retrospect, Bernardo was always a step or more ahead of his colleagues. He parlayed his facility in English into lead roles at Repertory Philippines, known for its restaging of US theater and musical hits. By the time the production of the West End musical Miss Saigon scouted for Filipino talents, zeroing in on Rep and discovering Lea Salonga in the process, he had long moved on. He first sought a more remunerative arrangement via the then-burgeoning dinner-theater scene, and stood out in the multicharacter sequel of Boys in the Band at Century Park Sheraton, where he was “flaming enough to burn the ballroom down,” as he described in an interview I had with him, titled “Manay Revisits Manila by Night.”

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11011Ishmael Bernal, who had seen his performance, was then on the lookout for an actor who could play one of the lead roles in Manila by Night, intended to be the second-anniversary presentation of Regal Films as a production outfit. The character, Manay, was meant to represent the “conscience” of the film – a flawed one, it must be added, since the project entailed an encompassing and necessarily dystopic vision of the city under militarized dictatorship. Nighttime was when everything repressed by prevailing social institutions during martial rule could emerge – prostitution, drug transactions, queer assignations, live-sex shows, drag displays, hypocritical masquerades, political corruption, police abuse, polyamorous promiscuity, and so on.

11011The other requisite that made the role of Manay the most challenging in the film was that, like the rest of the other characters, it was intended to be improvised by the actor in conjunction with the director as well as a number of script consultants, with help from the very denizens that Bernal modeled his characters on. In “Manay Revisits Manila by Night,” Bernardo describes his process of collaboration with Bernal: “Although it is true that there were no conventional shooting scripts provided, there were definitely scraps of paper on the set with key dialog for the film character’s objectives for the day. On a typical shoot, with Bernal’s approval, I would ad-lib during blocking rehearsals to bookend the philosophical riffs of Manay that Bernal wrote. Bernal understood that this process helped me to give the dialogue a more conversational, spontaneous feel.”

11011When contemporary filmmaker Lawrence Fajardo, who has been specializing in the multicharacter film narratives that Bernal pioneered in, opted to return to his theater roots, he picked out a play, Herlyn Gail Alegre’s Imbisibol, and cast Bernardo in a role intended for a straight actor. Realizing that BB’s strengths lay in camp and humor, Fajardo requested him to collaborate in revising and improvising Benjie, a character several steps removed from Manay: older, impoverished, sickly, working overseas as an undocumented laborer, whose only happiness lay in the domestic relationship he shared with his same-sex partner (played in the film by Ricky Davao). When the film version was completed, shot on location in Hokkaido, Bernardo won his second critics prize for performance (the first was of course for Manila by Night) – the only actor since Vic Silayan to win in all the instances he was nominated.

11011In effect, BB was drawing from his experience as a health worker in the US, where he had gone into self-exile after enduring stereotyping in his film and TV roles because, ironically, of his triumph with his Manay character. An avowedly queer subject, he had also had, after all, his share of heterosexual romances, including a years-long high-profile affair with Chanda Romero. Younger acquaintances familiar with his occasional cross-dressed socnet pics needed a double-take or two to grasp the full measure of his boundary-busting, genre-challenging, culture-crossing persona, what with some of his female contemporaries admitting to having had crushes on him.

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11011A more direct deduction one could make regarding his facility in various professional capacities is that he was always fully prepared, in practice as well as in theory: his professional record yields an enviable number of academic qualifications, including scholarships and graduate degrees at prominent American universities, as well as faculty stints in US and Philippine educational institutions.[2] During the past couple of years he would mention work on a memoir as his legacy project, and posted some wonderful little-known anecdotes on his Facebook wall as samples.

11011This was about the same time that he came out, as it were, in another sense – in support of the presidential candidacy of Rodrigo Duterte. Such a political stance set him off against several of his friends in literature and the arts. As someone who refused to capitulate to polarized positions, I was able to continue corresponding with him, and saw how his motives were as earnest as when he linked up decades ago with Bernal, Lino Brocka, and the other founding members of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines against the Marcos dictatorship. He read the drafts of the book I was working on (titled Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver, where “Manay Revisits Manila by Night” appears as an appendix), and suggested some helpful changes and corrections.

11011During the final revision, I informed him that I expanded the book’s conclusion, saying in effect that not only had nothing changed since the Marcos years, but that the plight of the country’s poor had worsened. To drive the point home, I juxtaposed some scenes from Manila by Night with drawn-from-headlines photographs of extrajudicial executions, and offered Bernardo the opportunity to revise anything in his interview by way of responding to this harsh indictment of the Philippine political system. He took an unusually long time before he finally replied, on FB Messenger: “I’ve decided not to make a statement regarding the current state of affairs in Manila under the new dispensation. After those years of depression in the US, I think it’s healthier for me to cling to a more hopeful outlook. Eyes wide open. [Smile] Love the book, Joel. [Heart] So proud and honored to be a part of it. Maraming, maraming salamat.”

11011Before we consign Bernardo to a historical past, a few things ought to remind us that he deserves to be around longer. Manila by Night remains the only major Filipino film still awaiting restoration and the memoir he left behind still has to be published. FACINE also recently announced that he’ll be the first posthumous awardee of their Golden Harvest prize – an indication that when BB left, he made sure we would all be enriched by his presence.

Notes

First published March 21, 2018, in two parts, as “Farewell Farewell, Bernardo Bernardo” and as “Toward the End, a Hopeful Outlook for the Philippines,” in The Filam.

[1] Posted in Ámauteurish! as “Bernardo Bernardo: Exchanges on Facebook Messenger.”

[2] Many thanks to Sari Dalena (director of the University of the Philippines Film Institute) and Ina Avellana-Cosio (UPFI researcher) for information on Bernardo Bernardo’s extensive academic background.

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