Tag Archives: canon

November 15, 2023

Canon Decampment: Gerardo de Leon

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Sisa

Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1951 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Teodorico C. Santos
(Based on the title character created by José Rizal in his 1887 novel Noli Me Tángere [Touch Me Not])
Producer: Premiere Productions

Cast: Anita Linda, Reynaldo Dante, Eduardo del Mar, Eddie Infante, Naty Rubi, Tony Tolman, Pancho Pelagio, Ruben Rustia, Rosita Noble, Bebong Osorio, Francisco Cruz, Fernando Santiago, Don Dano, Andres Benitez, Boy Francisco

Sisa’s life takes an unfortunate turn after her husband is wrongfully jailed. To make matters worse, her sons—altar boys Basilio and Crispin—are falsely accused of stealing from their local church by the head sacristan. The two are severely punished and, although Basilio escapes, Crispin is killed. As Sisa looks for her children, her search leads to one ordeal after another.

How aware was José Rizal that, in fleshing out the narrative of a native woman forced to endure unbearable suffering and loss by all manner of men—from her abusive husband to colonial soldiery, officials, and clerics—he was providing an iconic representation of his own country that would have prevailed into the new millennium? Composited from the experiences of the author’s real-life acquaintances, including his own mother, Sisa-as-character affirms a protofeminist strain usually overlooked in appreciations of Rizal’s novels. Anita Linda, herself a politicized celebrity who got blacklisted at one point for her pro-labor activities, embodied the role so completely that it became the gold standard for outstanding performance for several decades afterward. As developed by Gerardo de Leon and Teodorico C. Santos, the handling of Rizal’s Sisa turned out to be so overpowering and self-contained that even a decade later, when de Leon subsequently attempted an adaptation of the source novel, Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not, 1961), the result paled in comparison.[1] The reason that Sisa succeeds where adaptations of the Noli have tended to flounder is because of its unqualified and unrelenting critique of patriarchy, in all its naked, malignant prevalence, in the de Leon film.

Dyesebel

Years of Release: 1953 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Pierre L. Salas
(Adapted from Mars Ravelo’s komiks series)
Producer: Manuel Vistan Jr. Productions

Cast: Edna Luna, Jaime de la Rosa, Carol Varga, Fernando Royo, Etang Discher, Max Alvarado, Vicente Madrigal, Mary Williams, Nello Nayo, Luis San Juan, Neonita Bona, Paquito Salcedo, Lito Ansurez, Jesus Lapid, Isa Rino, Belen Campillos, Jose Buencamino, Nieves Abrera Anita Hanna, Loudes Galicia

[Note: spoilers provided] Dyesebel, who is born with a fishtail, is raised by her parents away from civilization to avoid persecution. Diangga, a benign sea-witch, provides her with the ability to breathe underwater like regular merfolk. When she ventures on a beach that she thought was abandoned, she gains the attention of Fredo, who falls in love with her. Fredo’s ex-girlfriend Betty gets wind of his new flame and discovers her mercreature condition. Still in love with Fredo, Betty schemes with conniving henchmen to abduct Dyesebel and banish her to a circus, where she becomes a sideshow attraction. Fredo sees the circus announcement in a newspaper and rescues her, but he is overpowered by Betty’s goons. He throws Dysebel in the sea, where Diangga perishes in acquiring an amulet for her. When Dysebel reaches shore, Betty espies her and sees the mermaid use the amulet to acquire human legs. Impressed by its ability to endow Dyesebel with perfection, Betty steals the amulet and rubs it like Dyesebel did, but discovers her legs have turned into a fishtail. Fredo and Dyesebel reunite and wed.

Mythical characters, whatever their origin, should all be so lucky as to be launched by the most gifted visual stylist among all Filipino filmmakers. In fact the original Dyesebel and its sequel (Anak ni Dyesebel or Child of Dyesebel, 1964)—both recently rediscovered after having been officially declared lost—had an element that the subsequent versions could already take for granted, but which was then unthinkable for a children’s fantasy: a reference to, and constant awareness of, the mermaid’s sexual difference. And in stark contrast with Hans Christian Andersen’s “Den lille havfrue (The Little Mermaid),” the Dyesebel character has no claim to royalty, whether undersea or on land, and gets spared the fairy tale’s cornball metaphysical closure, where the lead character sacrifices herself for love and earns the right to ultimately have a soul. Our heroine fights for her heart’s desire although she understandably has to be discreet about it, and endures the several indignities her socially—and anatomically—advantaged rival visits on her. Small wonder that the descriptive term for her kind, sirena, eventually became synonymous with queer subjects—and as if to goad along this interpretation, Gerardo de Leon mischievously makes sure to depict the process of mer-transformation as a sight that never fails to freak out “normal” citizens.[2]

Pedro Penduko

Years of Release: 1954 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Ding M. de Jesus
(From the komiks series by Francisco V. Coching, as serialized in Liwayway)
Producers: People’s Pictures & Premiere Productions

Cast: Efren Reyes, Edna Luna, Lopito, Ramon d’Salva, Ruben Rustia, Lito Anzures, Nello Nayo, Paquito Salcedo, Purita Alma, Dely Atay-Atayan, Felisa Salcedo, Venchito Galvez, Max Alvarado, Juanito Lindo, Francisco Cruz, Francisco Martin, Tony Palomer, Jose Monasterial, Bino Garcia, Benny Panganiban, Onching Balibol, Nina Morales, Renato Robles

Pedro Penduko, a rural layabout, is goaded by his hunchback pal Terio to assist the limp Amparo, convincing him by saying she might offer them rice cakes. When Tony, a rich suitor, tells them to scram, Terio quarrels with him so Pedro has to help out. Marina, an heiress for whom Terio and Amparo work as househelp, invites Pedro to her welcome party celebrating her return from the US. Pedro’s father meantime promises his son an amulet that will protect him from harm, if Pedro agrees to bathe and court Amparo. Marina though has set her sights on Pedro and maltreats Amparo as her rival, further aggravating Tony’s rivalry. Their small-town concerns are brought to a head when Tirong, a bandit, kills Marina’s father and kidnaps Amparo, challenging Pedro to a duel if he wants to win the latter’s freedom.

In contrast with the previous year’s Dyesebel, Pedro Penduko, another of Gerardo de Leon’s komiks adaptations, has its soundtrack intact, although in unfortunately degraded video format. All to the best for Pinas cultural interests, since Francisco V. Coching’s material operates on a different plane in relation to literary artists of his era. (For a more straightforward treatment of another of his stories, see Conrado Conde’s Talipandas or Traitor, from 1958.) Even from among contemporary comic heroes, one would be hard-put to find someone who not only prefers to laze around but also whose body odor becomes his defining social marker, not to mention his preference for physically disabled chums. The psychoanalytic implications only intensify even as the characters are able to work through some of their prior hindrances, resulting in the best kind of comic situation: one where laughter is short-circuited by tragic backstories and where the requisite happy endings are well-earned. De Leon mounts an entire slew of contrarian readings by casting the agential roles against type: when hefty action star Efren Reyes in the amusingly harmless title role confronts the benign and contemplative Ruben Rustia as the ruthless outsider, the resulting instability requires an offbeat justification—one that Coching provides, with de Leon ensuring that it smacks the viewer as effectively as it would have on the printed page.

Sanda Wong

Additional Language: Chinese
Year of Release: 1955 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriters: Ding Santos, Tony Santos, Teodorico C. Santos
(From a story by Teodorico C. Santos)
Producers: Manuel Vistan Jr. Production & Chapman Productions

Cast: Jose Padilla Jr., Lilia Dizon, Danilo Montes, Lola Young, Gil de Leon, Ligaya Lopez, Vicente Liwanag, Mario Barri, Bruno Punzalan, Ligaya Lopez

Lau Chien’s marriage to Lan Ying is stopped when bandits Sanda Wong and Yuen Fei try to steal from Chien’s vast inheritance. Shady garrison captain Koh Loo traps the two robbers to get the wealth for himself but Chien unexpectedly intervenes. Wong and Chien become unlikely allies but their bond is tested throughout Chien’s quest to be reunited with Lan Ying and reclaim his wealth.

Gerardo de Leon had already tackled the theme of an armed outsider reforming corruption in “straight” society in Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo (Snake in the Old Belfry, 1952); although weighed down by a surfeit of pulpy elements, the latter film resonated with the Philippines’s anti-US resistance movements, when the foreign occupants slandered our freedom fighters by calling them bandits—exactly the type of characters depicted in the film. In transposing the setting to an indeterminate “ancient China,” and introducing a male-bonding strategy that would intensify the conflicts in several of his forthcoming major films, de Leon managed to devise complex character interactions that could serve as the narrative counterpart of his diagonal deep-focus compositions. Moreover, he elevated his level of accomplishment to stake a claim on a type of Asian film that would proliferate later, where a lone hero sets himself or occasionally herself against a backward social order, exposing its barbarism in the process: Easterns, in effect, in contrast to Hollywood’s Westerns.

Terror Is a Man

Alternate Titles: Creature from Blood Island; Blood Creature
Language: English
Year of Release: 1959 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon [as Gerry de Leon]
Screenwriter: Harry Paul Harber
(Unofficially adapted from H.G. Wells’s 1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau)
Producer: Lynn-Romero Productions

Cast: Francis Lederer, Greta Thyssen, Richard Derr, Oscar Keesee, Lilia Duran, Peyton Keesee, Flory Carlos

When William gets shipwrecked on an island, he is taken in by Dr. Charles Girard. He also encounters the doctor’s disturbing experiment: a panther being turned into a human. William argues that the procedure is unethical although Dr. Girard believes otherwise. But when the creature manages to escape, the two men must find a way to stop the monster’s murderous rampage.

Because of its association with American B-film production, Terror Is a Man was largely overlooked in the home country. Nevertheless this reworking of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau performed profitably enough to initiate the Philippines’s strongest contribution to US pop culture, before Imelda Marcos came along and provided ready-made punchlines for comic and/or melodramatic material. The Blood-Island film cycle—named after Val Guest’s The Camp on Blood Island (1958), a fairly successful Malaya-set entry about a Japanese concentration camp, from horror specialists Hammer Films—in fact figured in film historian Robert Sklar’s genealogy of the Hollywood Vietnam-War movie genre. According to Sklar (in several books starting with Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Vintage Books, 1994), prior to the US’s pullout during the fall of Saigon in 1975, Blood-Island movies were the only way that English-speaking white male characters could be shown confronting literally animal savagery in unidentifiable tropical settings. A later rendition, John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), headlining Marlon Brando, reveled in the material’s camp elements—the same singular skill that de Leon would successfully develop much later, notably in his vampire cult films Kulay Dugo ang Gabi (Blood Is the Color of Night, 1964) and Ibulong Mo sa Hangin (Whisper to the Wind, 1966), plus his controversial local horror entry Lilet (1971). Among straight-faced adaptations of the Wells novel, however, Terror Is a Man is the version to beat.

The Moises Padilla Story

Year of Release: 1961 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Cesar Amigo
(From a story by Leon O. Ty)
Producer: MML Productions

Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Joseph Estrada, Lilia Dizon, Ben Perez, Oscar Roncal, Rosa Aguirre, Robert Arevalo, Joseph de Cordova, Alfonso Carvajal, Jose Garcia, Mila Montañez, Max Alvarado, Martin Marfil, Bruno Punzalan, Alfonso Carvajal, Mila Montañez, Salvador Zaragoza, Ric Bustamante, Bino Garcia, Paquito Salcedo, Francisco Cruz, Quiel Mendoza, Eddie Arce

Moises Padilla decides to run for town mayor after witnessing multiple counts of abuse done by the private army of Negros Occidental governor Rafael Lacson. Along the way, Moises gets his former war comrade, who is now the town’s police chief, as his bodyguard. But since Lacson controls the area’s military and police, he vows to ensure that Moises’s mayoral bid will not prosper.

By all credible accounts, Philippine cinema’s gravest single loss is that of its best directorial stylist’s allegedly best film, Ang Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed, 1965). An estimate of just how appalling this calamity is can be inferred from the still-existing, fairly competent propagandistic film-biography Iginuhit ng Tadhana (Determined by Destiny): The Ferdinand Marcos Story, directed by Mar S. Torres, Jose de Villa, and Conrado Conde, which Gerardo de Leon’s entry was meant to counter when they competed in the first Manila Film Festival: the de Leon film went on to deservingly sweep the industry awards, but it is the Marcos movie that remains available.[3] A more effective and poignant way would be to take a look at de Leon’s earlier exercise in political advocacy, The Moises Padilla Story, based on the brutal treatment of a reformist who supported then-Defense Secretary Ramon F. Magsaysay. The narrative creates a polarized situation and unfortunately typecasts as villains Max Alvarado, Martin Marfil, and Bruno Punzalan—three great character actors with East Asian features; it then overlays the plot with the conflictive relationship between the title character and his former World War II guerrilla buddy, depicted as a deeply moving bromantic tragedy by Leopoldo Salcedo and Joseph Estrada respectively. De Leon’s solutions to these dramaturgical limitations are mostly technical, but breathtakingly so; even in the surviving print’s disjointed condition—missing, in addition, some portions of a grisly, extensive, cenaculo-worthy torture scene—one could believe that anyone who watched it would have cast a vote for the Guy (Magsaysay’s nickname), had he still been alive, all over again.

El Filibusterismo

English Translation: The Anarchist
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1962 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriters: Adrian Cristobal, Jose Flores Sibal, Gerardo de Leon
(From the 1891 novel by José Rizal)
Producer: Arriva Productions

Cast: Pancho Magalona, Charito Solis, Teody Belarmino, Edita Vital, Ben Perez, Carlos Padilla Jr., Lourdes Medel, Robert Arevalo, Oscar Keesee, Ramon d’Salva, Joseph de Cordova, Paquito Diaz, Boy Francisco, Alfonso Carvajal, Jose Garcia, Nello Nayo, Patring Carvajal, Jerry Pons, Francisco Cruz, Paquito Salcedo, Dadang Ortega, Felisa Salcedo, Primo Yumol, Tommy Nepomuceno, Quiel Mendoza, Manny Ojeda, Fred Ramirez, Turing Ramirez, Johnny Fernandez

After touring the world, Crisostomo Ibarra returns to the Philippines as the mysterious jeweler Simoun. Wanting to spark a revolution to overthrow the Spanish colonial government, he allies with Basilio—the only one who knows Simoun’s true identity. After their initial attempt fails, their new plan will ultimately determine their fates.

Several possible reasons can be propounded as to why José Rizal’s much-acclaimed first novel, Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not), did not translate onscreen as well as his second one, or even compared with the former’s Sisa subplot, which had been adapted by Gerardo de Leon in 1951. In one of his later books, The Age of Globalization (2013, formerly titled Under Three Flags), the late Benedict Anderson argued that, among the late 19th-century’s several radical options, anarchism was the movement that eventually appealed to Rizal’s particular quest for identity and justice. Hence, although El Filibusterismo utilized a linear narrative, in contrast with the Noli’s use of multiple plot strands, it also had a more focused, nearly dogmatic ideological position. Any reader expecting a repeat of Noli’s grand humanist closure, its anti-colonial thrust blunted by its author’s still-reformist impulses, would therefore be understandably frustrated. Crisostomo Ibarra’s transmutation into Simoun in the Fili also heralded a darker, borderline-nihilist resolve in Rizal’s new realization: that only the full-scale purgation of the Philippine colonial system could lead to a brighter future for the country. De Leon’s ominous lighting and unsettling compositions, as executed by the great black-and-white cinematographic master Mike Accion, unexpectedly served the material better than anyone could hope for. If for nothing else, El Filibusterismo stands as proof that de Leon’s skills extended beyond technical expertise to include adept recognition and handling of politically complex material.

Women in Cages

Alternate Title: Bamboo Doll House
Initial Title: Playpen
Language: English
Year of Release: 1971
Director: Gerardo de Leon [as Gerry de Leon]
Screenwriters: James H. Watkins & David Osterhout
Producers: New World Pictures & Balatbat Productions

Cast: Judith Brown, Roberta Collins, Jennifer Gan, Pam Grier, Bernard Bonnin, Charlie Davao, Johnny Long, Holly Anders, Dwight Howard, Roberta Swift, Paul Sawyer, Jeffrey Taylor, Marissa Delgado, Paquito Diaz, Sofia Moran, Carpi Asturias, Ruben Rustia, Nick Cayari, Andres Centenera

Thinking that her double-dealing boyfriend will eventually save her, a woman nicknamed Jeff agrees to be sentenced for drug-dealing at the aptly named Carcel del Infierno. There she meets level-headed Sandy, heroin addict Stokes (who secretly agrees to murder Jeff in exchange for drugs), and Theresa, a native woman who’s the girlfriend of Alabama, the sadistic warden. The women come to realize that with all their differences, their only hope for escape is in agreeing to help one another.

The women-in-prison genre (more accurately a hybrid subgenre of several film types including action, melodrama, and soft-core pornography) has been around from nearly the beginning of narrative film history, or ever since producers realized that they could reap profits from catering to the male gaze. Even Gerry de Leon’s contribution, Women in Cages, was preceded by a few months by Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House, which shared the same producer and several actors. The Philippines-set confections are remembered for Pam Grier’s breakout performances, to be cemented the year after WiC with Eddie Romero’s proto-blaxploitation entry Black Mama, White Mama. Grier’s participation alone makes WiC worth the attention, despite—or even because of—several eyebrow-raising elements attendant to her prison-warden character: as if swapping the male-gender casting wasn’t unusual enough, she was also a politically aware sadist who picked out the women she fancied for her sexual amusement. In addition to her name, her sarcastic question to the prisoners brought to work at a sugar plantation clues us into her function: “Don’t it make you pine for those cane fields in the South?” Her comeuppance in the hands of the maniacal posse she designated to hunt down escapees may be seen as a form of ironic justice, but then it arrives after a series of severe and sometimes mortal punishments that she inflicts on her unruly charges. Small wonder that Grier fan Quentin Tarantino described the film as “just harsh, harsh, harsh” while making sure to reference WiC in several of his own exploitation projects and providing Grier with her best role ever, in Jackie Brown (1997). More than Terror Is a Man (1959), WiC proves that de Leon at his peak was capable of drawing in insights and significations from a wide range of film genres and historical traumas, while centering one of the most beautiful foreign actors to ever grace an anonymous Pinas locale.

Notes

[1] Another Noli Me Tángere (1930), by the legendary Jose Nepomuceno, garnered even more acclaim than any subsequent version, declared by some commentators as the best Filipino movie ever made up to that point. Like another more recent all-time best, Gerardo de Leon’s Ang Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed, 1965), it has been lost to posterity. Other local films through the years took the cue from de Leon’s Sisa by also featuring characters from Rizal’s fiction—e.g., Jun Aristorenas’s (as Junar) Elias, Basilio at Sisa (Elias, Basilio and Sisa, 1972). The last major adaptation of the Noli was the 1992 TV series produced by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and directed by de Leon’s confrere, Eddie Romero. In 1999, Mario O’Hara directed and wrote his own Sisa, where the title character interacted with the real-life Rizal.

[2] A nitrate-stock print of Dyesebel and its sequel, Anak ni Dyesebel (Child of Dyesebel, 1964), also directed by Gerardo de Leon, are the earliest Filipino films I remember watching, double-billed in a second-run provincial theater. Understandably my memory of either is patchy, with certain scenes of one film being confused with the other. Fortunately, I was able to figure out some details from conversations with the late GDL enthusiast Vic Delotavo, most memorably the line of dialogue where Dyesebel’s rival asks the male lead, “What does she have that I don’t have?”; my recollection of male mer-transformation, which incited what psychoanalysts might describe as a mild form of castration anxiety, is possibly in the sequel’s narrative. According to archivist-critic Jojo Devera, the existing videocopy available in the Philippines was struck from a film print in Thailand, which replaced the original soundtrack with a Thai-dubbed version and separated the film sound in audiotape format; unfortunately Teddy Co, the tape’s custodian, died before he could secure resources to facilitate the sound transfer. Monchito Nocon, member and board trustee of the Society of Film Archivists of the Philippines, directed my attention to Dyesebel Film Soundtrack Digitization and Restoration, a private Facebook group, that posted a copy of the much-contested tape. Pending further developments (which could take years to realize), the existing Dyesebel video may be regarded for now as essentially a silent film, the only such title in this entire canon listing—which is also mainly why this canon entry’s storyline is exhaustive.

[3] Another Ferdinand Marcos Sr. film-bio, Eddie Garcia’s Pinagbuklod ng Langit (Joined Together by Heaven, a.k.a. Heaven’s Fate, 1969), was produced for the dictator-to-be’s successful re-election campaign. A year later, a crony-owned company produced Jerry Hopper’s Maharlika (Royalty), a retelling of the Marcos-concocted myth about his World War II exploits as commander of the Maharlika unit. Possibly intended to justify his claim about having been the most decorated soldier in the Philippines, the movie also featured the story of Isabella, the American female soldier who fought alongside him and died in the effort, and with whom he had fallen in love. Dovie Beams, the American starlet who got the role, claimed that Marcos fell in love with her—in real life. The scandal acquired lurid and surreal dimensions when Beams called a press conference to claim that her life was being threatened by Imelda Marcos, and played apparently authentic and unexpurgated recordings of her intimate sessions with the President. For this reason, the movie’s local release was permanently postponed, although it was apparently screened in Guam and elsewhere; a year after the Marcos regime was ousted, however, Maharlika was finally shown in Manila.

Á!

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November 15, 2023

Canon Decampment: Gerardo de Leon & Abe Yutaka

By Joel David

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Dawn of Freedom

Alternate Titles: Liwayway ng Kalayaan; Fire on That Flag!; Ano hata o ute
Additional Language: Japanese
Year of Release: 1944 / B&W
Directors: Gerardo de Leon [as Associate Director] & Abe Yutaka
Screenwriters: Ryuichiro Yagi & Hideo Oguni
Producers: Eiga Heiku Sa, Toho Company, & X’Otic Films

Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Fernando Poe, Angel Esmeralda, Norma Blancaflor, Rosa Aguirre, Shigenobu Kawazu, Ichirô Tsukida, Denjirô Ôkochi, Fred Montilla, Carmen Rosales

During World War II, Filipino soldiers Captain Reyes, Captain Gomez, and Lieutenant Garcia leave their families in Manila to join the fight against invading Japanese forces in Bataan. Once there, they discover that Filipino troops are abused by their American counterparts. Gomez wanders into the Japanese camp and discovers a different reality, while Reyes and Garcia are betrayed by their American allies.

This singular epic, produced by the official film agency of the Japanese during World War II,[1] provided themes that other Filipino filmmakers would only be able to take up years later, after the emergence of anti-imperialist nationalism in the late 1960s initiated questions about the country’s one-sided preference for US domination. Seen today, the images of (homoerotic) fellow-Asian camaraderie set against unmitigated American duplicity are capable of delivering a primeval jolt. It is a wonderment drawn from the parallel-universe speculation of how things might have turned out if the West—as fantasized, understandably, in Dawn of Freedom—had lost the war, and probably not as badly as our worst fears might have convinced our forefathers then. After the defeat of the Japanese, Gerardo de Leon managed to avoid the wrath of the returning US colonizers because certain members of his production team testified that he had assisted their guerrilla activities. Since then, he understandably avoided any overt suggestion of the pan-Asian ideal tackled in this film: his immediate postwar output was either silent on the question of the Philippines’s Asian identity or, as in the unnecessarily extended World War II prologue in 48 Oras (48 Hours, 1950), insistently and apologetically opposed to any such possibility. Dawn of Freedom’s propagandistic function, including footage of the Japanese’s victorious battles in the Philippines, may have required false depictions of the realities of the Imperial Army’s atrocities as well as of the local resistance to the occupation, but then any number of action quickies produced after the war were similarly guilty of plugging into the reverse bias of being pro-US, and therefore anti-fellow-Asian. Reduced to the question of which type of propaganda film has a more constructive message, Dawn of Freedom deserves to be high, if not on top, of the list, its cinematic integrity serving as icing on the cake.

Note

[1] The goal of imperial Japan was to promote a “Greater East Asian Cinema” as an essential component of its “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” (Janine Hanse, “The New Earth: A German-Japanese Misalliance in Film,” in In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru, ed. Aaron Gerow and Abé Mark Nornes, Kinema Club, 2001, pp. 184–97). For a sample of necessarily pro-American anti-Japanese propaganda, the well-known Atrocities of the Orient (also known as Outrages of the Orient or Beast of the East, directed by Carlos Vander Tolosa with new footage provided by William H. Jansen, 1948) may be sourced at YouTube.

Á!

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November 15, 2023

Canon Decampment: Eduardo de Castro

By Joel David

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Zamboanga: A Fanciful Tale of Moro Sea Gypsies

Alternate Title: Fury in Paradise; Native Bride
Languages: English, Tausug
Year of Release: 1937 / B&W
Director: Eduardo de Castro
Screenwriters: Bob Wagner & Billy Icasiano
Producer: Filippine Films

Cast: Fernando Poe, Rosa del Rosario, Johnny Monteiro

Minda, granddaughter of Datu Tanbuong, is set to be married to the pearl diver Danao. But the leader of another tribe, Hadji Razul, also wants Minda. He connives with a renegade American captain to kidnap the young lady when Danao goes on a journey. When the pearl diver returns, a massive tribal war ensues and ultimately determines Minda’s fate.

The earliest available Pinoy feature film until 2021 [1] also manages to be the most impressive among all surviving pre-World War II local features. None of the early critical accounts gave it much importance, since it was intended to showcase the country’s potential as the Asian counterpart of Hollywood. But those limitations—excessive polish and exoticization, half-naked eye-candy performers, gimmicky underwater photography, manic-yet-dismissible, though also politically incorrect, plot developments—became key to its foreign success and gave it a rare shot at preservation. The current available print has characters speaking native languages, but a voice-of-god narrator overlays the entire proceedings and tells the intended foreign audience how to respond. A seemingly easy-to-forget diversion, whose extreme watchability gives it a distinction that most latter-day films would be grateful to possess, and whose innocent, rambunctious spirit sets it off from the too-reverential though occasionally also prurient handling that marked later treatments of Philippine ethnic material.

Note

[1] Film archivist-historian Teddy O. Co explained in a message that the only known copy of Carlos Vander Tolosa’s Diwata ng Karagatan (Spirit of the Ocean, produced in 1936 by Parlatone Hispano Filipino) “is at the Royal Belgian Film Archives. It’s been there for decades, hidden under the title Wong le tyran, and dubbed into French. Its movie ad advertised it as having been released in Europe. But it’s less than 60 minutes, so a lot has been excised—perhaps the musical parts, to make it a more action-packed film. It was also released (according to Hammy Sotto) under the title South Seas. To date no one has acquired a copy yet here so far, but a few people know about it…. It has a very young Rogelio de la Rosa” (Facebook Messenger exchange, Sept. 9, 2021). See as well an unresolved query about a 49-minute film (screened at Manila’s silent film festival), produced in 1934 and directed by John Nelson, titled “Is Silent Flick Brides of Sulu Pinoy or Kano?” (Carmela G. Lapeña, GMA News Online, Aug. 27, 2011). On October 31, 2025, film historian Nick Deocampo announced that was able to confirm in person the existence of the filmprint.

Á!

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November 15, 2023

Canon Decampment: Alphabetized List of Filmmakers with Their Respective Film Titles

By Joel David

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Click here to return to the book’s landing page. To read the links below in desktop mode (recommended), click here. Titles (308 so far, from 129 directorial entries) connected by an ampersand (“&”) are sufficiently related and thereby share the same singular review after their respective descriptions and synopses.

Click on the following to navigate more quickly through the list: B; C; D; E; F; G; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; V; Z.

Abaya, Matthew: Vampariah, 2016.

Abe Yutaka – see de Leon, Gerardo, & Abe Yutaka.

Abrahan, Giancarlo: Dagitab, 2014; Sila-Sila, 2019.

Acedillo, Vic Jr.: Ang Nerseri, 2009.

Aguiluz, Tikoy: Boatman, 1985; Segurista, 1995; Biyaheng Langit, 2000.

Alix, Adolfo Jr.: Tambolista [as Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.], 2007; Imoral [as Adolfo B. Alix Jr.], 2008; Isda, 2011; Porno [as Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.], 2013; Madilim ang Gabi [as Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.], 2017.

Altarejos, Joselito: Ang Lihim ni Antonio, 2008; Unfriend [as J Altarejos], 2014; Jino to Mari, 2019.

Aunor, Nora: Greatest Performance [as Guy; unfinished], 1989.

Avellana, Lamberto V.: Anak Dalita, 1956; Sarjan Hassan, 1958; Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, 1965; The Evil Within, 1970.

Barbarona, Arnel: Tu Pug Imatuy, 2017.

Bernal, Ishmael: Pagdating sa Dulo, 1971; Lumapit … Lumayo ang Umaga, 1975; Ligaw na Bulaklak, 1976; Nunal sa Tubig, 1976; Nonoy Marcelo’s Tisoy!, 1977; Ikaw Ay Akin, 1978; Salawahan, 1979; Aliw, 1979; Manila by Night, 1980; Pabling, 1981; 1) Relasyon, 1982 & 2) Broken Marriage, 1983; Himala, 1982; Working Girls, 1984; Hinugot sa Langit, 1985.

Bernal, Joyce: 1) Booba [as Binibining Joyce Bernal], 2001 & 2) Masikip sa Dibdib: The Boobita Rose Story [as Binibining Joyce Bernal], 2004; Kimmy Dora: Kambal sa Kiyeme [as Binibining Joyce Bernal], 2009.

Bernardo, Sigrid Andrea: Ang Huling Cha-Cha ni Anita (Anita’s Last Cha-Cha) [as Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo], 2013; Lorna [as Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo], 2014; UnTrue [as Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo], 2019.

Borlaza, Emmanuel H.: 1) Bukas Luluhod ang mga Tala, 1984; 2) Bituing Walang Ningning, 1985; Stolen Moments, 1987.

Brocka, Lino: Tubog sa Ginto, 1970; Stardoom, 1971; Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, 1974; Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, 1975; Insiang, 1976; Jaguar, 1979; Bona, 1980; Cain at Abel, 1982; 1) Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim, 1984 & 2) Orapronobis, 1989; Miguelito: Batang Rebelde, 1985; Babangon Ako’t Dudurugin Kita, 1989; Hahamakin Lahat, 1990; Gumapang Ka sa Lusak, 1990.

Cabreira, Junn P.: Beloy Montemayor Jr.: Tirador ng Cebu, 1993.

Castillo, Celso Ad.: Asedillo, 1971; Daluyong at Habagat, 1976; Burlesk Queen, 1977; Celso Ad. Castillo’s Totoy Boogie, 1980; Uhaw na Dagat, 1981; Paradise Inn, 1985.

Castro, Jade: Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington, 2011; LSS, 2019.

Cayado, Tony: Mga Ligaw na Bulaklak, 1957.

Chionglo, Mel: Playgirl, 1981; Sinner or Saint, 1984; 1) Nasaan Ka Nang Kailangan Kita, 1986 & 2) Paano Kung Wala Ka Na, 1987; Babaing Hampaslupa, 1988; Developing Stories: Lucia, 1992; 1) Sibak: Midnight Dancers, 1994 & 2) Burlesk King, 1999 & 3) Twilight Dancers, 2006; Iadya Mo Kami, 2016.

Chui Chung-San, Alan, & Yuen Bun: Mabangis na Lungsod, 1995.

Conde, Conrado: Talipandas, 1958.

Conde, Manuel: Genghis Khan [credited to Lou Salvador], 1950.

Cruz-Alviar, Mae: Bride for Rent [as Mae Czarina Cruz], 2014.

Dayao, Dodo: Midnight in a Perfect World, 2020.

Dayoc, Sheron R.: Halaw, 2010.

de Castro, Eduardo: Zamboanga: A Fanciful Tale of Moro Sea Gypsies, 1937.

de Guia, Eric – see Tahimik, Kidlat.

de Guzman, Susana C.: Lupang Pangako [incomplete], 1949.

dela Cruz, Abbo Q.: Hubad na Pangarap, 1987.

Dela Cruz, Emmanuel: Sarong Banggi, 2005.

de Leon, Gerardo: Sisa, 1951; Dyesebel, 1953; Pedro Penduko, 1954; Sanda Wong, 1955; Terror Is a Man [as Gerry de Leon], 1959; The Moises Padilla Story, 1961; El Filibusterismo, 1962; Women in Cages [as Gerry de Leon], 1971.

de Leon, Gerardo, & Abe Yutaka: Dawn of Freedom, 1944.

De Leon, Mike: Itim, 1976; Kakabakaba Ka Ba?, 1980; 1) Kisapmata, 1981 & 2) Batch ’81, 1982; Sister Stella L., 1984; Bilanggo sa Dilim, 1986; Bayaning 3rd World, 1999.

Deligero, Keith: Iskalawags, 2013; Lily, 2016; A Short History of a Few Bad Things, 2018.

de los Reyes, Maryo J.: Schoolgirls, 1982; Diosa, 1982; Bagets, 1984; Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit, 1984; Anak ni Waray vs. Anak ni Biday, 1984; Dinampot Ka Lang sa Putik, 1988; Magnifico, 2003.

del Rosario, Joey: Kahit Pader Gigibain Ko, 1998.

Deramas, Wenn V.: Ang Tanging Ina, 2003.

Diaz, Lav: Hesus, Rebolusyunaryo, 2002; Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, 2012; Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan, 2013.

Diaz-Abaya, Marilou: 1) Brutal, 1980 & 2) Moral, 1982; Karnal, 1983; Sensual, 1986; May Nagmamahal sa Iyo, 1996; Milagros, 1997.

Dulay, Zig Madamba: Bambanti, 2015.

Dulu, Dolly: The Boy Foretold by the Stars, 2020.

Espia, Hannah: Transit, 2013.

Esteban, Tata: Alapaap, 1984.

Estella, Ramon A.: Kembali Saorang, 1957; Samseng, 1959; Saudagar Minyak Urat, 1959; Pusaka Pontianak, 1965.

Fajardo, Lawrence: Amok, 2011; Posas, 2012; The Strangers, 2012; Imbisibol, 2015.

Fernandez, Gregorio: Kontrabando, 1950; Prinsipe Teñoso, 1954; 1) Higit sa Lahat [as Dr. Gregorio Fernandez], 1955 & 2) Luksang Tagumpay [incomplete], 1956; Hukom Roldan [as Dr. Gregorio Fernandez], 1957; Malvarosa [as Dr. Gregorio Fernandez], 1958.

Fiola, Bagane: Baboy Halas: Wailings in the Forest, 2016.

Gallaga, Peque: Oro, Plata, Mata, 1982; Virgin Forest, 1985; Scorpio Nights, 1985.

Gallaga, Peque, & Lore Reyes: 1) Tiyanak, 1988 & 2) Aswang, 1992; Sonata, 2013.

Gallardo, Cesar: Geron Busabos: Ang Batang Quiapo, 1964.

Garces, Armando: Sino ang Maysala?, 1957.

Garcia, Eddie: Saan Nagtatago ang Pag-Ibig?, 1987.

Garcia-Molina, Cathy – see Garcia-Sampana, Cathy.

Garcia-Sampana, Cathy: One More Chance [as Cathy Garcia-Molina], 2007.

Gosiengfiao, Joey: La Paloma, 1974; Underage, 1980.

Guillen, Laurice: Kasal?, 1980; Salome, 1981; Init sa Magdamag, 1983; Kung Mahawi Man ang Ulap, 1984; Sumayaw Ka Salome, 1992; Dahil Mahal Kita: The Dolzura Cortez Story, 1993.

Ignacio, Louie: Area [as Luisito Lagdameo Ignacio], 2016.

Illenberger, Tara: Brutus, ang Paglalakbay, 2008; High Tide [as Tara Barrera Illenberger], 2017.

Intalan, Perci M.: Dementia, 2014.

Jadaone, Antoinette: That Thing Called Tadhana, 2014.

Jamora, Marie: Ang Nawawala, 2012.

Jarlego, Ike Jr.: Tigasin, 1999.

Jeturian, Jeffrey: Pila-Balde, 1999; Tuhog, 2001; 1) Bridal Shower, 2004 & 2) Minsan Pa, 2004; Kubrador, 2006; Ekstra, 2013.

Jover, Ralston: 1) Da Dog Show [as Ralston G. Jover], 2015 & 2) Hamog [as Ralston G. Jover], 2015; Rene Villanueva’s Hiblang Abo [as Ralston G. Jover], 2016; Bomba [as Ralston Gonzales Jover], 2017; Latay (Battered Husband) [as Ralston Gonzales Jover], 2019.

Kayko, Sixto – see Roño, Chito S.

Khavn: 1) Ang Pamilyang Kumakain ng Lupa, 2005 & 2) Ang Napakaigsing Buhay ng Alipato, 2016; Pusong Wazak: Isa Na Namang Kwento ng Pag-ibig sa Pagitan ng Kriminal at Puta, 2014; Desaparadiso: Corrido at Buhay na Pinagdaanan nang Tatlong Principeng Magcacapatid na Anac nang Haring Fernando at nang Reina Valeriana sa Cahariang Berbania, 2015; Balangiga: Howling Wilderness, 2017.

Kim Bong-han: The Golden Holiday, 2020.

Lamangan, Joel: Hubog [as Joel C. Lamangan], 2001; Walang Kawala [as Joel C. Lamangan], 2008; Burgos, 2013.

Lamasan, Olivia M.: Minsan, Minahal Kita, 2000; Milan, 2004.

Lana, Jun Robles: Die Beautiful, 2016.

Lao, Armando: Biyaheng Lupa, 2009.

Laxamana, Jason Paul: The Day After Valentine’s, 2018.

Lerner, Irving: Cry of Battle, 1963.

Mambo, Rico – see dela Cruz, Abbo Q.

Marcos, Pepe: Tubusin Mo ng Dugo, 1988.

Mardoquio, Arnel: Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim, 2012.

Marquez, Artemio: The Untold Story of Melanie Marquez, 1987; Sa Puso Ko Hahalik ang Mundo, 1988.

Martin, Raya: Independencia, 2009.

Martinez, Chris: Here Comes the Bride, 2010.

Matti, Erik: On the Job, 2013.

Meily, Mark: Crying Ladies, 2003.

Mendoza, Brillante: 1) Foster Child, 2007 & 2) Tirador, 2007; Serbis [as Brillante Ma. Mendoza], 2008; Lola [as Brillante Ma. Mendoza], 2009; Ma’ Rosa, 2016.

Milan, Willy, & Fernando Poe Jr. – see Poe, Fernando Jr., & Willy Milan.

Monteras, Treb II: Respeto, 2017.

Montgomery, George: Samar, 1962.

Natividad, Toto: Totoy Guwapo: Alyas Kanto Boy, 1992; Amang Capulong: Anak ng Tondo, Part II, 1992; Ka Hector, 1994; Wangbu, 1998; Notoryus, 1998; 1) Double Barrel (Sige! Iputok Mo.), 2017 & 2) Riding in Tandem, 2017.

Navoa, J. Erastheo: Totoy Buang: Mad Killer ng Maynila, 1992.

O’Hara, Mario: Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos, 1976; 1) Condemned, 1984 & 2) Bulaklak sa City Jail, 1984; Bagong Hari, 1986; Pangarap ng Puso, 2000; Babae sa Breakwater, 2003.

Ongkeko-Marfil, Ellen: Boses, 2008; Indigo Child, 2016.

Palisoc, King: Tandem, 2015.

Paolo, Steve – see Esteban, Tata.

Parungao, Monti: 1) Bayaw [as Monti Puno Parungao], 2009; 2) The Escort [as Monti Puno Parungao], 2011.

Pascual, William: Takaw Tukso, 1986.

Pasion, Francis Xavier: Jay, 2008.

Perez, Elwood: Silip, 1985; Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit, 1989; Ang Totoong Buhay ni Pacita M., 1991; Otso, 2013.

Perez, Roman Jr.: Sol Searching, 2018.

Poe, Fernando Jr.: 1) Ang Panday [as Ronwaldo Reyes], 1980 & 2) Pagbabalik ng Panday [as Ronwaldo Reyes], 1981 & 3) Ang Panday: Ikatlong Yugto [as Ronwaldo Reyes], 1982 & 4) Ang Panday IV [as Ronwaldo Reyes], 1984; Ang Maestro [as Ronwaldo Reyes], 1981; Ang Dalubhasa [as Ronwaldo Reyes], 2000.

Poe, Fernando Jr., & Willy Milan: Kahit Butas ng Karayom … Papasukin Ko [as Ronwaldo Reyes & Wilfredo “Willy” Milan], 1995.

Poe, Fernando Jr., & Augusto Salvador: Eseng ng Tondo [as Ronwaldo Reyes], 1997.

Portes, Gil: Gabi Kung Sumikat ang Araw [as Gil M. Portes], 1983; ’Merika [as Gil M. Portes], 1984; Bukas … May Pangarap [as Gil M. Portes], 1984.

Posadas, Francis: Amanos: Patas ang Laban [as Francis “Jun” Posadas], 1997; ’Di Puwedeng Hindi Puwede! [as Francis “Jun” Posadas], 1999.

Quintos, Rory B.: Kailangan Kita, 2002.

Raquiza, Jun: Krimen: Kayo ang Humatol, 1974.

Red, Jon: Still Lives, 1999.

Red, Mikhail: 1) Birdshot, 2016 & 2) Neomanila, 2017.

Relucio, Brandon, & Ivan Zaldarriaga: Di Ingon ’Nato, 2011.

Reyes, Efren: Ang Daigdig Ko’y Ikaw, 1965.

Reyes, Jose Javier: Minsan May Isang Puso, 2001; Kung Ako Na Lang Sana, 2003.

Reyes, Lore – see Gallaga, Peque, & Lore Reyes.

Reyes, Ronwaldo – see Poe, Fernando Jr.

Richardson, George – see Suarez, Bobby A.

Rivera, Marlon N.: Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, 2011.

Romero, Eddie: The Passionate Strangers, 1966; Savage Sisters, 1974; Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon?, 1976; Banta ng Kahapon, 1977.

Roño, Chito S.: 1) Private Show [as Sixto Kayko], 1984 & 2) Curacha: Ang Babaeng Walang Pahinga, 1998; 1) Itanong Mo sa Buwan, 1988 & 2) La Vida Rosa, 2001; Bakit Kay Tagal ng Sandali?, 1990; Alyas Stella Magtanggol, 1992; Bata Bata Paano Ka Ginawa?, 1998; Caregiver, 2008; Signal Rock, 2018.

Salvador, Augusto: Masahol Pa sa Hayop, 1993.

Salvador, Augusto, & Fernando Poe Jr. – see Poe, Fernando Jr., & Augusto Salvador.

Salvador, Leroy: Badlis sa Kinabuhi, 1968; Beloved, 1985.

Salvador, Lou – see Conde, Manuel.

Sanchez, Sherad Anthony: Huling Balyan ng Buhi o Ang Sinalirap Nga Asoy Nila, 2006; Jungle Love, 2012.

Santiago, Pablo: Amado Pagsanjan’s Asiong Salonga, 1961; 1) Pepeng Kaliwete, 1982 & 2) Annie Sabungera, 1982.

Santos, Teodorico C.: Taufan [as T.C. Santos], 1957.

Sayles, John: Amigo, 2010.

Siguion-Reyna, Carlos: 1) Hihintayin Kita sa Langit, 1991 & 2) Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal, 1992; Ang Lalake sa Buhay ni Selya, 1997; Tatlo … Magkasalo, 1998.

Silos, Manuel: Biyaya ng Lupa, 1959.

Solito, Auraeus: Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, 2005.

Somes, Richard V.: Yanggaw, 2008.

Suarez, Bobby A.: They Call Her … Cleopatra Wong [as George Richardson], 1978; Red Roses for a Call Girl, 1988.

Suzara, Romy V.: Pepeng Shotgun, 1981.

Tahimik, Kidlat: Mababangong Bangungot, 1977.

Tarog, Jerrold: Heneral Luna, 2015.

Topacio, Soxy: Ded Na si Lolo [as Soxie Hernandez Topacio], 2009.

Torres, Mar S.: Jack en Jill, 1954.

Vander Tolosa, Carlos: Giliw Ko, 1939.

Velasco, Veronica: Nuuk [as Veronica B. Velasco], 2019.

Villaluna, Paolo: Pauwi Na, 2016.

Villamor, Irene: Meet Me in St. Gallen, 2018; Ulan, 2019; On Vodka, Beers, and Regrets, 2020.

Villegas, Dan: Hintayan ng Langit, 2018.

Zaldarriaga, Ivan – see Relucio, Brandon, & Ivan Zaldarriaga.

Zapata, Dominic: Boy Pick-Up: The Movie, 2012.

Zialcita, Danny L.: T-Bird at Ako, 1982; Palabra de Honor, 1983.

Zuasola, Remton Siega: Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria, 2010.

Á!

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November 14, 2023

Canon Decampment: Forward March

By Joel David

One advantage of having been present at the birth, so to speak of formal Philippine film studies is that I could initiate some of the activities that preoccupied global practitioners for a while, then proceed to repudiate these activities’ premises (usually still pursuant to foreign trends, especially when no local colleagues pick up on the provocations). The most insistent instances of these oscillations between creation and deconstruction occur in evaluative film activities, and for good reason: as the supposedly inferior, younger counterpart of literature, film is regarded as forever self-limited in terms of discursive ability and potential for complexity, and even its advantages over canonical lit (mainly its incontestable long-term popularity) render it comparable at best to lit’s pulp and trash manifestations.

11011These are utterly erroneous and definitely irrelevant premises, of course. But when we seek out canon-construction exercises in cinema, we find people reverting to these assumptions, whether by (sometimes unconsciously) upholding them or by openly contesting them—which effectively acknowledges their ascendancy. I’ve stopped wondering whether a critically conscious mode of practice can be devised, and within the modes I’ve devised, what I would recommend (to myself and the others I can persuade) is to stop short of certain commonplaces: the touchstones that we associate with even our most casual or fun-filled attempts at canon formation, that tend to trip us into conforming to standards that our better judgments caution us against.

11011Like any self-serious film scholar, I began creating canons in the usual areas; in increasing degrees of conflictedness, these would be instruction, criticism, and award-giving. Canons are unavoidable in teaching because of the requirements and limitations of the semestral arrangement in higher education: only so many weeks, with concomitant impositions on reading and screening lists, for the average university-level course. The properties of the lecture class and (barring an instructor’s inability to comprehend screen cultural studies) the possibility of insightful majors speaking up: these ensure that the subject’s particular canon need not permanently impair the students’ understanding of film issues, whether aesthetic or social in nature. Award-giving, the other extreme, is even more obviously a matter of any film appreciator exercising basic logic, since the inconsistencies are so conspicuous that one would need to devise grandiose structures of collective narcissism (as in the statement “We have the most prestigious and incorruptible awards ever”) to override the reality that award-giving may be profitable or glamorous but is, at bottom, a false claim to critical supremacy.

11011The middle term, criticism, is where I have found the most productive, and most difficult, issues to resolve. I may have been able to avoid the tendency of the least-reflective critics circle members in their performance of what we can term awards-speculative writing (embarrassing rubbish like “This performance should win an award”), but my festival reports wound up with rankings, specified or otherwise, of from-best-to-worst entries; my period-enders (usually of specific years, sometimes of entire decades) also proceeded to list outstanding entries. But in order to declare an end to my predilection for comparative assessments, I laid out sample canons for the widest possible areas of coverage: highlights of 1980s releases, for example, or winners for awards categories for all films from the beginning of local cinema to the present, meaning the early 1990s. (These exercises, including the next one I will be describing, appeared in my second book, Fields of Vision, while the personal listings may be found in my digital edition-only release, Millennial Traversals.)

Interpolations

At a point when I had refined my film-criticism classes to include quantitative-analysis methods (always controversial in terms of findings), I asked an enthusiastic batch whether the idea of a canon survey project appealed to them. This was the same group of students that couldn’t wait to get into cultural production, some of whom gave up completing their degrees for the sake of exploring and exploiting breaks that they knew may never come along again, fully and frankly aware that nothing their teachers could provide them would be comparable to what they could learn in the field. (As a then-recent former student, deep down inside I had to agree.)

11011We formulated, finalized, and reproduced questionnaires, and drew up a list of “critical” practitioners using the widest possible definition—i.e., not just regular critics but also film-production personnel who exhibited a capacity for artistic assessment and growth in their output. Nearly thirty, or about half of the potential respondents, turned in their personal list of ten best Filipino films, all except in two cases ranked from first to tenth, with a few (including myself) deviating from the round-figure total. When the results were tallied, another issue came up: how would a respondent rank the other films that she may not have mentioned but that she might have also seen? We wound up creating a second questionnaire comprising the “master list” of all the films mentioned by the respondents, intending to send these back to those who had participated, asking them to further rank the rest of the films not on their respective lists.

11011One can imagine the nightmarish demand we would have been making on the respondents, forced to split hairs until they could rank whatever they had seen among the eighty-plus titles we confronted them with. Fortunately the semester was scheduled to end in a couple of weeks, so I had to conceal the relief I felt when the students said that sending out copies of the new questionnaire, awaiting the answers, and retrieving the sheets would definitely cause the project to spill over beyond the deadline for submission of grades. I submitted the report to the publication where I was declared the “resident critic,” National Midweek, which made it their cover feature and their bestselling issue ever. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I saw the procedure replicated by blogger-aggregators during the new millennium. A bit more surprisingly, I received an email invitation to participate in Sight & Sound’s archetypal decadal survey for 2002, probably facilitated by a British Film Institute-connected lecturer at New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies who appreciated the copy of Fields of Vision that I gave him. (This person, Questions of Third Cinema co-editor Paul Willemen, as well as my dissertation adviser Robert Sklar and national-university mentor and fellow Sight & Sound respondent Ellen J. Paglinauan, have all passed away, as have nearly thirty percent of the National Midweek survey participants.)

11011The Sight & Sound exercise affirmed for me that the National Midweek survey was more correct in its differences: in combining the tallies for critics and practitioners (the second of which S&S limited strictly to directors), I came up with just one listing instead of separate critics’ and directors’ choices; more important, in taking into account the individual rankings provided by the respondents, it became possible to tabulate not just the movies most often mentioned (including, separately, those mentioned as top-rankers) but also arrange these according to their relative worth for each respondent. But the Sight & Sound survey also provided its own curious lesson—and that is, certain people from all walks of life, all over the world, pay attention to film canons. The magazine printed my specific choices on the same page that it discussed the top-ranking film, Citizen Kane (“The Critics” 29), and included my explanation of why I preferred to downgrade the Orson Welles film (“too whiney-white-guy precious” was my dismissive remark).

11011Reports regarding the survey results, from blogs and discussion boards as well as “legit” outlets like Slate and The Guardian, mentioned my list for including a porn film (in fact I listed two, three if we include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo in the category), although only once, in an email from an Australian scholar, were my other choices mentioned: a Bollywood film, an American B-movie, a structural-materialist piece, two documentaries (one radical-left and the other fascist-right), and standard choices for a film scholar (Jean Renoir’s La regle du jeu) who happened to hail from the Philippines (Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night). In reality, mine was not the only listing that featured a porn film or two, since the very first porn feature, Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat, also appeared on the comprehensive listing. (I provided a more detailed narration of the process on my blog, titled “Sight & Sound ’02.”)

Final (so far) Canon

My Sight & Sound submission, the only one I participated, coincided with the completion and defense of my doctoral dissertation. Upon returning to the Philippines, my concerns focused on repaying the student loans I had accumulated during graduate school—an impossible mission so long as I confined my prospects to the national university. I make no secret about finding the political intramurals dispiriting and pathetic, considering the never-sufficient amount of money at stake. Upon stumbling on a near-ideal overseas arrangement with which I could conduct research and publication without worrying excessively about time and funding, I set up the archival blog by which I hoped to make available my published materials without requiring researchers either to track them down via distant repositories or to purchase them at exorbitant rates.

11011After laying out a workable plan for attaining tenure, I was contacted by Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon, an acquaintance from my post-collegiate freelance period, now an entertainment editor about to retire and working out some legacy activities. No need to look farther than your field, I told her; see how new media has led to an explosion of personal and group canons, almost entirely on Philippine cinema? Since your publication (Summit Media’s YES! magazine) has its annual “canon” of beautiful faces and power players, we can come up with the ultimate local film canon, if you’re willing to sponsor a one-shot long-term project. I explained how I took charge of a local survey project, inspired by Sight & Sound, and how the most ambitious internet-era aggregator websites were conducting similar projects. I mentioned the predicament I and my students faced with the National Midweek survey—how the attempt at (in effect) ranking everything could raise unnecessarily oversubtle pettifoggery, reducing discussions to explaining why film b comes between a and c and not in either position or elsewhere, instead of expounding on a film’s merits and limitations without accounting for its precise position on a linear spectrum from best to, say, hundredth-best.

11011Two special arrangements had to be finalized: in order to ensure that one person’s idiosyncracies wouldn’t mark the project as a whole, a screening committee whose members would be readily available from beginning to end of the project should be constituted; and in order to determine the inclusion or exclusion of borderline titles, a system of multiple screenings of titles in contention should be arranged, with films being watched as often as necessary until the body arrives at a sufficient consensus on whether a film deserves to belong or not to the final canon list. Ideally the committee should have comprised Philippine film experts; less ideally, though still passably, the members should be film enthusiasts—a qualification that could encompass a vast majority of the population. Fortunately, though the YES! staff could be considered less than (qualified) experts, they were more than mere aficionados. I came on board as project consultant, while Maglipon, with the time she logged with celebrity interviews, showbiz coverage, and entertainment editing (plus all the film-screening that those activities entailed) would definitely be a Philippine-cinema specialist.

11011I should beg the reader’s indulgence in outlining the process, if only for posterity’s sake. I started by compiling the then-recent 2012 Sight & Sound survey (where Citizen Kane was finally toppled, after forty years of dominance, and where nine Filipino titles showed up), plus all the canonical listings—the PinoyRebyu blog survey, Mel Tobias’s One Hundred Acclaimed Tagalog Movies (with titles alphabetized), the Facebook Cinephiles! Group’s “Top 100 Favorite Films Poll Results” (with twenty-five Filipino movies, slightly less than France’s and over four times less than the US’s), the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Cinema 100 (edited by Kim Ji-seok and Kim Young-woo, with four Filipino titles), plus the list of awards handed out by the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (including its two-year predecessor, the Manila Times’ Maria Clara Awards) and the two critics groups, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino and the Young Critics Circle (all of which are available online on either the organizations’ websites or information-database websites such as Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database); finally, titles usually listed in global retrospectives, starting with those that appear in the government encyclopedia (Tiongson, Philippine Film) and the Manila International Film Festival’s Focus on Filipino Films, would constitute a core or standard canon.

11011For the sake of completion, the YES! project team considered even films shortlisted or nominated whenever and wherever the information was available, cross-checking the list against the available filmographic listings in Maria Carmencita A. Momblanco’s thesis and Nicanor G. Tiongson’s Urian anthologies. The task may have sounded daunting, but was considerably lightened by another, more tragic requisite: only films available in reasonably viewable audiovisual quality may be considered, since we envisioned any canonized film itself as sole empirical proof, regardless of awards, acclaim, oversight, or controversy. On the other hand, any movie included in the standard canon which generated reservations (either during or after the moment of its inclusion in the canon) would be marked as “must rewatch”; certain titles may be boosted by historical significance, but all had to meet a reasonable measure of entertainment value and discursive insight. The final “outer” boundaries were defined by technical requirements: the films had to be feature presentations, full-length with a minimum of sixty minutes’ running time, and inclusively and recognizably Filipino even with the participation of foreign capital, talent, and/or setting.

Film-Canon Discourse

I was aware that I had to find metadiscursive literature that could enable me to provide useful bases for the project as well as situate the activity in contemporary conceptual currents. We were apparently building on the “scientific” totalizing taxonomies attempted by Andrew Sarris (himself building on French projects) and updated by Jonathan Rosenbaum, but the launch of the project was benefited by two extremely useful recent texts. The first was a book-length study by James F. English, The Economy of Prestige, which discussed, among other things, the rise of “modern” awards (starting with the Nobel Prize), the role of controversy, and the tendency toward proliferation. The second, Paul Schrader’s “Canon Fodder,” was a would-have-been book, abandoned by the author but with the most crucial findings published in Film Comment.

11011Schrader’s self-imposed challenge was supposedly a film-focused volume patterned after The Western Canon (34). The book by the late Harold Bloom has been a fairly recent publication, so its denunciation of political correctness premised on identity politics benefited from seeming radical in terms of countervailing then-prevalent revisions and revaluations of the literary canon. Schrader does not pinpoint a singular material reason for dropping the book project despite having received a commencement fee from the publisher. But his avowed reason, that “my foray into futurism had diminished my appetite for archivalism” (35), appears to detract from the fate that befell The Western Canon: despite its reviewers’ acknowledgment of the author’s critical seriousness and acuity, its intent to restore the literary canon as it used to be known never really took off. Instead, the book was inexorably conscripted as one of the more sober manifestos of the conservative faction of the still-ongoing US culture wars. At best, its effect was to retain the titles that dominated the so-called DWM (dead white male) canon; it certainly did not stop people from expanding the canon by including titles by authors who used to be ignored or excluded as a matter of course.

11011Since Schrader apparently had no urge to deconstruct the Bloom volume, his output would have been patterned after the same introductory apology, a call to observe fixed, impossibly eternal aesthetic values, and a reading of the “objectively” top-of-the-line titles. I was momentarily inspirited by his selection of La regle du jeu as his all-time-best, but the rest did feel like Sight & Sound redux, where any cinema-studies freshman can instantly identify the title based on the auteur entry: Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), Charles Chaplin (City Lights), Robert Bresson (Pickpocket), Fritz Lang (Metropolis), Welles (one guess), Jean Cocteau (Orphée), Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin-Feminin), Ingmar Bergman (Persona), and Alfred Hitchcock with Sight & Sound’s recent post-Citizen Kane champ, Vertigo (48). Despite Schrader’s acknowledgment of Rosenbaum’s limitation, wherein the latter (in Essential Cinema) “discusses hundreds of films, describing many as ‘classics’ [yet] for the life of me, I’ve been unable to discover the criteria by which he culls these films” (42), he runs into his own culs-de-sac by first over-defining the canon, tracking the idea from scriptural applications through Hegel’s tautological insight that “the philosophy of Aesthetics is the history of Aesthetics” (Schrader 34), to the canon’s rise and subsequent fall, replaced with the “rise of the non-judgmentals” (40). From here he observes Bloom’s imposition of a set of criteria, describing his specifications for film as “refurbished” (42) when in fact it resembles Bloom’s retrospective efforts: that is, given these long-uncontested titles, these are the criteria that can be propounded and maintained, or (from another perspective) imposed.

11011The seven standards that Schrader lists have varying degrees of applicability: beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality (44-45). The first and last (beauty and morality) are too amorphous and problematic when narrowly defined, while unity betokens a classical bias. The others would be qualities that similarly informed the YES! magazine project, still in different degrees of urgency. As mentioned earlier, repeatability would be the method we relied on—well, repeatedly. Strangeness would be the value I found myself upholding, but the rest of the youthful members understandably focused on viewer engagement. Tradition had to be invoked in a few cases, usually with polemic texts whose topicality (e.g. anti-dictatorship politics) had long elapsed. One solution I devised was to combine the less-preferred titles so that one could strengthen the other. By doing a series of such combinations, I was able to maintain the round number of one hundred entries up to a point. However, the logic (not to mention the citations) tended to become too defensive in several of these instances. In the end, the title was slightly revised to accommodate the larger figure: SINÉ: The YES! List of 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema.

Future Views

Each of the canon-forming exercises I conducted had the express purpose of providing an “ultimate” example. However, when we look at the instance of the basic recognition provided by awards (and studied, as earlier mentioned, by James F. English), we find some strange, counter-intuitive trends. First is the issue of controversy: scandals supposedly and inevitably befall awards that exist long enough to become institutions (English 187-96), like the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Oscars, Cannes Film Festival Awards—and in the Philippines, the Orders of National Artist and National Scientist, the National Book Awards, the Film Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (FAMAS) Awards, and (as in the US) the critics’ awards handed out by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino and the Young Critics Circle. English maintains that, although a controversy may be able to maim and possibly defeat a newly installed award, stronger, long-term awards in fact actually benefit from controversy and are strengthened by it. (This accounts for my bemusement whenever I attack my former colleagues in the MPP and observe the members’ responses—manifested at one point in an earlier roundtable, on film criticism, in these same pages: per English, and per existing evidence, the Urian should simply get strengthened, although I could never imagine myself demanding the members’ gratitude for it.)

11011Awards, of course, will always be theoretically capable of discontinuing themselves, temporarily or permanently, for some reason or other. The other issue is ultimately and definitely irresolvable, and more distressing for people concerned with order, integrity, and logic. Members of a certain generation were able to witness this in the Philippines. The intervention of the Marcoses in film activities led to the government rectifying the FAMAS by decreeing the formation of the Film Academy of the Philippines. During the FAP inauguration in 1982, the Director-General of the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, Imee Marcos, declared that the FAMAS would be dissolved, since its claim to being an academy was anomalous and, by then, unnecessary. Joseph Estrada, who was gunning for the first Hall of Fame as Best Actor multi-awardee, led the lobby for its maintenance (he got his HoF prize the next year, along with a simultaneous HoF as Best Producer); he also won a post-Marcos presidency, but that ought to be a separate discussion.

11011Since the Catholic Mass Media Award was arguably the revival of a pre-martial law set of Church-sponsored media awards, the only other film award set up during the martial-law period was the Urian, with some of its members forming the Manila Critics Circle to administer the National Book Award. The FAP had its own problematic procedures; on a more advanced level, so did the Urian. After the ouster of the Marcoses, a breakaway FAP group formed. I helped found the Young Critics Circle as an alternative to the Urian, then broke away once more to organize Kritika (which lasted for only three years, since all of its members departed for foreign countries for work or graduate studies). More film groups formed (educators, online critics, etc.), with breakaways and breakaways-of-breakaways being threatened or actually being realized. Since this trend resembles the persistence of local canon-forming surveys decades after the National Midweek report, I can conceivably imagine another future, intensive, consensus-driven canon-forming activity in future, possibly even within my lifetime.

11011One might say that an authoritarian regime (like the Marcos martial-law dispensation) would have the ability to control the proliferation of awards; however, English reasonably adopts the assumption that liberal democracy will be the once-and-future system, and concludes, rather persuasively, that there may be some slowdowns, but there will essentially be no end to awards proliferation (50-68).[1] Within the larger ironic framework that canon discourses will be occasionally capable of scholarly contribution on the meta level, the theoretical endlessness of awards (and hence basic canon) formations will shape up as the primary challenge, or at least the primary distraction, to the future of film discourse.

Note

[1] Another foreign trend that still has to take root in the Philippines is that of ratings aggregation (as famously featured by Rotten Tomatoes) as well as awards aggregation (à la Metacritic). The 2017 edition of the latter lists 58 annual non-festival awards in the US, 38 of them handed out by self-identified critics circles. At the present time, these types of functions are performed by a number of Filipino film buffs on Facebook, with such blogs as Pinoy Rebyu, Film Police Reviews, and #Pop #Culture #Diva providing casual summaries of local and foreign ratings, awards, and/or festival results.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994.

“The Critics.” Sight & Sound, volume 12, issue 9, September 2002, pp. 28-36.

David, Joel. Fields of Vision: Critical Applications in Recent Philippine Cinema. Digital edition, Amauteurish Publishing, 2014.

———. Millennial Traversals: Outliers, Juvenilia, & Quondam Popcult Blabbery. Digital edition, Amauteurish Publishing, 2016.

———. “Sight & Sound ’02.” Amauteurish, 30 May 2014.

Kim Ji-seok and Kim Young-woo, eds. Asian Cinema 100. BIFF Special Programs in Focus Series, Busan International Film Festival, 2015.

English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Manila International Film Festival. Focus on Filipino Films: A Sampling, 1951-1982. Brochure for a retrospective as selected by “Filipino Film Screening Committee,” Metropolitan Manila Commission Information Group, 1983.

Momblanco, Maria Carmencita A. “Philippine Motion Pictures, 1908-1958: A Checklist of the First Fifty Years.” Thesis, (2 volumes), University of the Philippines, 1979.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Da Capo Press, 1996.

Schrader, Paul. “Canon Fodder.” Film Comment, volume 42, issue 5, September-October 2006, pp. 33-49.

Tiongson, Nicanor G., ed. Philippine Film. Volume 8 of the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1994.

———, ed. The Urian Anthology. Decadal compilations covering 1970-1979 (Manuel L. Morato, 1983); 1980-1989 (Antonio P. Tuviera, 2001); 1990-1999 (University of the Philippines Press, 2010); and 2000-2010 (University of the Philippines Press, 2013).

Tobias, Mel. One Hundred Acclaimed Tagalog Movies. Peanut Butter Publishing, 1998.

Leave a comment | tags: canon | posted in Book

November 14, 2023

Canon Decampment

By Joel David

Original Digital Edition (2023)
Cover design by Paolo Miguel G. Tiausas
“Bomba” © 2019 by Mina Saha
[Click on pic to enlarge]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The manuscript began as a project with Summit Media. The process is elaborated in the introductory article, “Canon Fire!” and revaluated in the closing article, “Forward March.” I wish to extend thanks to the editor of the now-defunct YES Magazine, Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon, as well as her inhouse staff, for undertaking a film-viewing and deliberation process that was both extensive and intensive. The book title indicates my readiness to let go of canon exercises after this point. I will still be celebrating outstanding work as it comes along, but the practice of determining whether it belongs on an all-time-best list will just have to be taken up by other interested parties—of which I’m sure history will never run out of eager and willing participants. With all this book’s flaws and limitations, I nevertheless hope that any succeeding canonizer (a word that will always embarrass me for all my past associations with it) will take note of the time- and labor-intensive process that went into this current exercise, and either attempt to measure up to it or outdo it, or else admit failure.

11011The volume also happens to coincide with my retirement as tenured professor, in a place where I happen to be the equivalent of a sui-generis canonical entry. It is not a condition that I gloat about, because to me it reflects an entire national culture’s (specifically the Philippines’s) failure in training its regular faculty to become competent scholar-researchers. Nevertheless I’d opt to acknowledge, if I may, all the students I ever taught, in three countries or two continents over close to four (discontinuous) decades, regardless of how they decided to perceive me afterward; I’m at the stage where my stature, not to mention my ego, stands distant and resilient against whatever sticks and stones anyone might feel justified in aiming at me. (Regarding an alarming recent uptick in cheating, though generally not among my students in Korea—that would be one of a few headaches I’ll be relieved to pass on to future generations of teachers.) Always treasurable are the several names who look me up, sometimes years or decades later, just to see how I’ve done since they took my classes. I only hope that I’d managed to seem higher-evolved than I did in the past, although of course several things (starting with the concern for teaching and careful preparation in mentoring) deserve to remain the same. But if I were to pick out just one name to represent the best of the rest, it would be Corina Bedonia Millado, over whom I’ve been exultant for the past few decades and who’ll deserve more accolades than I could bestow.

11011Canon Decampment is an e-book uploaded in fulfillment of final publication obligations at Inha University. The author acknowledges assistance provided by the Inha University Faculty Research Grant as well as by Summit Media. “Canon Fire!” was drafted in 2015 and posted 2022 at Amauteurish, while “Forward March” was published in 2017 as “Muzzled Bombardments: The Philippine Film Canon and Its Discontents” at Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society. Films that were not included in the original list are, in chronological order: Gregorio Fernandez’s Higit sa Lahat (1955) and Luksang Tagumpay (1956); Gerardo de Leon’s Women in Cages (1971); Jun Raquiza’s Krimen: Kayo ang Humatol (1974); Ishmael Bernal’s Lumapit … Lumayo ang Umaga (1975); Celso Ad Castillo’s Daluyong at Habagat (1976), Paradise Inn (1985), and Ang Daigdig Ay Isang Butil na Luha (1986); Lino Brocka’s Stardoom (1971), Bona (1980), and Cain at Abel (1982); Mario O’Hara’s Condemned (1984) and Pangarap ng Puso (2000); Maryo J. de los Reyes’s Anak ni Waray vs. Anak ni Biday (1984); Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s May Nagmamahal sa Iyo (1996); Arnel Mardoquio’s Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (2012); Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes’s Sonata (2013); Paolo Villaluna’s Pauwi Na (2016); Khavn’s Ang Napakaigsing Buhay ng Alipato (2016); Irene Villamor’s Meet Me in St. Gallen (2018) and On Vodka, Beers, and Regrets (2020); and Joselito Altarejos’s Jino to Mari (2019).

11011All these titles, except for the two earliest, were films that I urged for inclusion but were rejected, sometimes even after a few rescreenings, or that were unavailable at the time. In the case of the Gregorio Fernandez films, I’d initially counted them as overrated because of the major industry prizes that they won, but realized later that they were indispensable to the director’s pursuit of transformation of standard material via a careful working over of its constitutive elements. As film critic Bienvenido Lumbera once remarked, regarding the accumulation of citations for annual film evaluations: in an endeavor where the possibility of error can never be eradicated, it will always be best to err on the side of liberality.

A note on translation: Non-English entry titles are provided with both direct translation and their official version, when these diverge from each other. Any subsequent mention of the title in the same section will therefore be untranslated, while other non-English film titles will be similarly translated only when they are first mentioned. Whenever possible, I have tried to coordinate translations and credits with whatever appears in the far-from-perfect Internet Movie Database, with existing copies serving as final authority; in the case of GDL’s Women in Cages, I managed to identify several performers who were unlisted in the film credits, and included them in the canonical entry.

National Library of the Philippines CIP Data

David, Joel.
11011Canon Decampment / Joel David. — Original Digital Edition. — Quezon City : Amauteurish Publishing, [2023], © 2023.
11011146+x pages ; 15×23 cm

11011ISBN 978-621-96191-8-9 (pdf)

110111. Motion pictures — Criticism and interpretation — Philippines. 2. Motion pictures — Philippines. 3. Film criticism. I. Title.

791.4375111111011PN1995.67.P51111110112023111111011P320230298

US Copyright Office Certificate of Registration:
TXu 2-402-907
“Canon Fire!” and mini-reviews
separately registered as TXu 2-054-744

Part 1. Canon Fire!

Part 2. Canon Munitions: From the Beginning to 2020
Note: This list is ordered chronologically according to premiere or initial release date, each of these 129 entries followed by the inclusive years of the directors’ selected films as well as by the total number of selected titles. Credits and synopses were prepared by the author and/or staff members of YES Magazine. For an alphabetical arrangement of directors, including each entry’s film(s) and year(s) of release, click here. Not all commentaries and synopses are complete as of this time. The links in this section will best be read in desktop mode.

Eduardo de Castro (1937: 1 title)
Carlos Vander Tolosa (1939: 1 title)
Gerardo de Leon & Abe Yutaka (1944: 1 title)
Gerardo de Leon (1951-71: 8 titles)
Susana C. de Guzman (1949: 1 title)
Gregorio Fernandez (1950-58: 6 titles)
Manuel Conde (1950: 1 title)
Mar S. Torres (1954: 1 title)
Lamberto V. Avellana (1956-70: 4 titles)
Tony Cayado (1957: 1 title)
Armando Garces (1957: 1 title)
Ramon A. Estella (1957-65: 4 titles)
Teodorico C. Santos (1957: 1 title)
Conrado Conde (1958: 1 title)
Manuel Silos (1959: 1 title)
Pablo Santiago (1961-82: 3 titles)
George Montgomery (1962: 1 title)
Irving Lerner (1963: 1 title)
Cesar Gallardo (1964: 1 title)
Efren Reyes (1965: 1 title)
Eddie Romero (1966-77: 4 titles)
Leroy Salvador (1968-85: 2 titles)
Lino Brocka (1970-90: 14 titles)
Celso Ad. Castillo (1971-86: 6 titles)
Ishmael Bernal (1971-85: 15 titles)
Jun Raquiza (1974: 1 title)
Joey Gosiengfiao (1974-80: 2 titles)
Mike De Leon (1976-99: 7 titles)
Mario O’Hara (1976-2003: 6 titles)
Kidlat Tahimik (1977: 1 title)
Bobby A. Suarez (1978-88: 2 titles)
Laurice Guillen (1980-93: 6 titles)
Marilou Diaz-Abaya (1980-97: 6 titles)
Fernando Poe Jr. (1980-2000: 6 titles)
Fernando Poe Jr. & Willy Milan (1995: 1 title)
Fernando Poe Jr. & Augusto Salvador (1997: 1 title)
Mel Chionglo (1981-2016: 10 titles)
Romy V. Suzara (1981: 1 title)
Peque Gallaga (1982-85: 3 titles)
Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes (1988-2013: 3 titles)
Maryo J. de los Reyes (1982-2003: 7 titles)
Danny L. Zialcita (1982-83: 2 titles)
Gil Portes (1983-84: 3 titles)

Emmanuel H. Borlaza (1984-87: 3 titles)
Tata Esteban (1984: 1 title)
Chito S. Roño (1984-2018: 9 titles)
Elwood Perez (1985-2013: 4 titles)
Tikoy Aguiluz (1985-2000: 3 titles)
William Pascual (1986: 1 title)
Abbo Q. dela Cruz (1987: 1 title)
Eddie Garcia (1987: 1 title)
Artemio Marquez (1987-88: 2 titles)
Pepe Marcos (1988: 1 title)
Nora Aunor (1989: 1 title)
Carlos Siguion-Reyna (1991-98: 4 titles)
Toto Natividad (1992-2017: 7 titles)
J. Erastheo Navoa (1992: 1 title)
Junn P. Cabreira (1993: 1 title)
Augusto Salvador (1993: 1 title)
Alan Chui Chung-San & Yuen Bun (1995: 1 title)
Francis Posadas (1997-99: 2 titles)
Joey del Rosario (1998: 1 title)
Jeffrey Jeturian (1999-2006: 6 titles)
Ike Jarlego Jr. (1999: 1 title)
Jon Red (1999: 1 title)
Olivia M. Lamasan (2000-04: 2 titles)
Joyce Bernal (2001-09: 3 titles)
Jose Javier Reyes (2001-03: 2 titles)
Joel Lamangan (2001-13: 3 titles)
Lav Diaz (2002-13: 3 titles)
Rory B. Quintos (2002: 1 title)
Wenn V. Deramas (2003: 1 title)
Mark Meily (2003: 1 title)
Khavn (2005-17: 5 titles)
Auraeus Solito (2005: 1 title)
Emmanuel Dela Cruz (2005: 1 title)
Sherad Anthony Sanchez (2006-12: 2 titles)
Brillante Mendoza (2007-16: 5 titles)
Cathy Garcia-Sampana (2007: 1 title)
Adolfo Alix Jr. (2007-17: 5 titles)
Joselito Altarejos (2008-9: 3 titles)
Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil (2008-16: 2 titles)
Francis Xavier Pasion (2008: 1 title)
Tara Illenberger (2008-17: 2 titles)
Richard V. Somes (2008: 1 title)
Soxy Topacio (2009: 1 title)

Raya Martin (2009: 1 title)
Vic Acedillo Jr. (2009: 1 title)
Monti Parungao (2009-11: 2 titles)
Armando Lao (2009: 1 title)
Chris Martinez (2010: 1 title)
John Sayles (2010: 1 title)
Sheron R. Dayoc (2010: 1 title)
Remton Siega Zuasola (2010: 1 title)
Lawrence Fajardo (2011-15: 4 titles)
Marlon N. Rivera (2011: 1 title)
Jade Castro (2011-19: 2 titles)
Brandon Relucio & Ivan Zaldarriaga (2011: 1 title)
Dominic Zapata (2012: 1 title)
Marie Jamora (2012: 1 title)
Arnel Mardoquio (2012: 1 title)
Erik Matti (2013: 1 title)
Hannah Espia (2013: 1 title)
Sigrid Andrea Bernardo (2013-19: 3 titles)
Keith Deligero (2013-18: 3 titles)
Mae Cruz-Alviar (2014: 1 title)
Giancarlo Abrahan (2014-19: 2 titles)
Perci M. Intalan (2014: 1 title)
Antoinette Jadaone (2014: 1 title)
Zig Madamba Dulay (2015: 1 title)
Ralston Jover (2015-19: 5 titles)
King Palisoc (2015: 1 title)
Jerrold Tarog (2015: 1 title)
Matthew Abaya (2016: 1 title)
Paolo Villaluna (2016: 1 title)
Louie Ignacio (2016: 1 title)
Bagane Fiola (2016: 1 title)
Jun Robles Lana (2016: 1 title)
Mikhail Red (2016-17: 2 titles)
Arnel Barbarona (2017: 1 title)
Treb Monteras II (2017: 1 title)
Irene Villamor (2018-20: 3 titles)
Jason Paul Laxamana (2018: 1 title)
Roman Perez Jr. (2018: 1 title)
Dan Villegas (2018: 1 title)
Veronica Velasco (2019: 1 title)
Kim Bong-han (2020: 1 title)
Dodo Dayao (2020: 1 title)
Dolly Dulu (2020: 1 title)

Part 3. Forward March

Appendix. An Empirical Exercise

Leave a comment | tags: canon | posted in Book

May 7, 2023

Trauma at Length

By Joel David

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE
Directed & written by Lav Diaz

Waves of admiration greeted Lav Diaz’s venture into a self-styled version of long-form filmmaking – called “slow cinema” by most observers, a term that Diaz abhors. His first attempt, Batang West Side (West Side Kid, a.k.a. West Side Avenue, 2001), broke the four-hour maximum running time for commercial releases. His next long-form entry, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), ran for about double BWS’s five-hour length, at 9 to nearly 11 hours, depending on which version is being screened. Ebolusyon bore the qualities that would mark the rest of Diaz’s long-form films: done in digital video, utilizing black-and-white cinematography, filled with long takes and long shots, completed with a small crew whose members would double as the movie’s actors, with material drawn from harrowing historical memory. To further challenge audience expectations, he announced a trilogy based on the theme of trauma.[1] Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012) is the trilogy’s last entry, and the shortest at six-plus hours. It stands out from Diaz’s other early work in that it was the first and, until recently, the only one to focus on a woman. The title character’s suffering – CTE refers to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, inflicted on her by her father – is so distressful and heartrending that only a mean-spirited viewer would attempt to look away and ponder the movie’s allegorical issues. Unlike its long-form predecessors, it also foregrounds the tranquil beauty of the countryside, with the majestic presence of the Bicol region’s Mayon Volcano overlooking the proceedings. The movie’s stately and formal perfection provides the anchor by which Florentina’s experience becomes bearable enough to witness; in fact, it is the mercifully few moments when she cannot be seen, when only her cries can be heard, that the movie comes closest to visceral horror. Diaz’s storytelling strength is in his handling of time and duration, and Florentina Hubaldo provides further evidence in its interweaving of seemingly distinct strands that, by the movie’s sad-yet-hopeful close, fully reward the patient viewer.

Note

From Canon Decampment (2023), from Amauteurish Publishing.

[1] The materials as well as the narratives in the trilogy are unrelated, and may therefore be viewed individually. For those curious about the other titles, these are the nine-hour Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007) and the 7.5-hour Melancholia (2008).

Leave a comment | tags: canon | posted in Film Criticism

October 16, 2022

Shout Out Film Festival citations

By Joel David

In line with my coverage of tiered film awards, first fully initiated by Kritika (1990-92) and currently exclusively practiced up to this point by the Filipino Arts & Cinema International (FACINE), I am providing the citations I wrote for the selected entries in the first Shout Out Film Festival of Pelikulove. The entries consisted of short films funded via subsidies from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and the council of evaluators comprised me (as chair), Bibeth Orteza, and Glenn Sevilla Mas, with Pelikulove founder and chief creative producer Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil and Raffy Tejada, program director for the board of festival directors, present during deliberations to be able to answer queries that we, the evaluators, might raise. (The complete roster of filmfest directors included Ricky Lee, Rody Vera, Jeffrey Jeturian, Issa Manalo Lopez, and Cristina Juan.) At the end of this set of citations, I appended the description of the process that I read before we started announcing the entries, proceeding from the last listed selection to the first one. The highest compliment, in so far as I was concerned, was stated by the Pelikulove GM when she described the results as “the most progressive set of local awards” that she knew of.[1]

CITATIONS

I. FILM

Gold

11011• “How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad” (Indiopendente Productions, Roman Perez Jr., Mary Ann Perez, & Ferdy Lapuz) – for its compression of a social reality that functions as multi-leveled metaphor and cautionary tale in the same instance, with the several recent concerns over media, representation, and bureaucratic corruption raising the questions of who exactly are society’s prisoners, and who among us deserve to be imprisoned.

11011• “No Trespassing” (La Salle Film Society, Tanya Lopez, Julius de la Peña, & Dada Grifon) – for its ultimately moving explication of how age-old problems remain and beset people who are conveniently hidden from us because of their distant locale and several cultural and linguistic differences, and how their very existence is threatened because of our social superiors’ drive to attain wealth and prosperity at all cost.

11011• “Quarantine 5” (Sining Banwa, Reymark Boaloy, & Elmira Jasmin Broncano) – for its novel reformulation of the standard reunion scenario, friends who grew apart coming together to mourn someone who represented their past idealism, with the mediations and interventions of new-media technology.

Silver

11011• “Libro for Ransom” (Giya Productions, Ralph Morales, Khaye Medina, Arjanmar H. Rebeta, & August Espino) – for its concern for the endangered status of history in our revisionist present, without the usual grim-and-determined approach that makes progressive material difficult to approach.

11011• “When a Manananggal Loves a Man” (IPAG & Arlen Abanes) – for its formulation of a tragic situation – a mother who wishes only the best for a daughter who resists because of a love that has never succeeded before – leavened with a language and sensibility that can only be described as hip, healthy, and transgressive.

Particularly Noteworthy

11011• “Hypertext” (Maria Cristina Juan & Jovi Juan) – for its willingness to provide a slice of life far removed from the here and now of Philippine reality, in a foreign context that may soon become a reality for global citizens including overseas Filipinos.

II. WRITING

Characterization, Gold

11011• Paul Exequiel dela Cruz (“How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad”) – for the consistent and well-rounded development of a key collection of male characters from various social strata, while the central figure turns into the personification of bureaucrat corruption with a benevolent visage.

11011• Andrew Estacio (“Quarantine 5”) – for the careful delineation of former comrades with enough commonalities that signal their past experience as a tight-knit unit yet with enough indications of how they had grown apart, with the bonus of also revealing one final character, someone who will never be able to meet with them again.

Characterization, Silver

11011• Salvador Bolano (“Ilaw sa Labas ng Tahanan”) – for presenting a dialectical opposition between sisters confronting a fight-or-flight option in seeking justice for the deaths of their husbands.

Structure

11011• Paul Exequiel dela Cruz (“How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad”) – for the clever and ironic use of various settings as both plot device and a means of unveiling increasingly distressing scenarios for its viewpoint characters.

11011• Andrew Estacio (“Quarantine 5”) – for the nearly imperceptible buildup to mounting tension among a close-knit group of mostly ex-activists brought together by the death of their most committed member and their reckoning of how the past has shaped their understanding of the present.

Dialogue

11011• Raymund Barcelon (“When a Manananggal Loves a Man”) – for the humorous yet insightful combination of traditional expressions with millennial lingo in order to demonstrate the separation between generations as well as the emergence of the acceptance of differences in the younger generation.

11011• Dada Grifon and Members of the Cast (“No Trespassing”) who translated Filipino into their own language – thereby allowing Hiligaynon to function as a language of dispossessed Filipinos, articulated with the required native expertise and credibility despite the complex political crises confronting the characters.

Theme

11011• Viva Andrada O. Flynn (“Cooking with Love”) – for highlighting a loved one’s devotion to familial duties even at the expense of sacrificing personal happiness and paying tribute through continuation of her passion and good deed.

11011• Jovi Juan (“Hypertext”) – for literally transporting an overseas Filipina through her encounter with new forms of prospective relationships with posthuman entities.

11011• Ralph Morales (“Libro for Ransom”) – for demonstrating the importance of historical accuracy within the contemporary period of revisionism, ironically by revising an event dismissed in the past but using fact-based evidence to demonstrate the only acceptable way of moving forward, in effect holding up a magnifying glass both to see the past in better detail and to shine a brighter light on the present.

III. PERFORMANCES

Ensemble, Gold

11011• Ley Dornilla, Christine Fel Viernes, Milton Dionzon, John Arceo, Mary Jane Quilisadio, Wee Trinidad, Roem Ortiz, Ramil Satingasin Jr., Rose Fransz, Kathryn Baynosa, Jeffrey Lazaro, Kent Ontanieza, Harley Hojilla, Marion Opuan, Rodney Jarder Jr. (“No Trespassing”) – for the impressive realness of a wide array of characters in a milieu whose distance from middle-class urbanity results in difficulty for mainstream professionals to realize, with even the smallest players succeeding in maintaining a documentary-like authenticity.

Ensemble, Silver

11011• Elmira Jasmin Broncano, Jobert Grey Landeza, Breco Halum, Ma. Quency Castillo (“Quaratine 5”) – for meeting the challenge of a theatrical staging by making a collection of distinct personalities believable while also performing as entities separated yet brought together by internet media.

Actresses

11011• Desiree Joy Briones (“Libro for Ransom”) – for conveying the ease and humor with which millennials deal with new-media activities while trying to solve professional and historical challenges.

11011• Elmira Jasmin Broncano (“Quarantine 5”) – for anchoring the various conflicting emotional outbursts of her comrades in a sympathetic and conciliatory acceptance of her friends’ differences with one another.

11011• Maria Cristina V. Macapagal (“When a Manananggal Loves a Man”) – for voicing the traditional argument in enforcing the separation between humans and monsters, based on an experience of heartbreak from the betrayal of a mortal lover.

Actors

11011• Soliman Cruz (“How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad”) – for the expert use of warmth and avuncularity in the process of revealing an unexpected depth of cynicism and depravity.

11011• John Arceo (“No Trespassing”) – for embodying the painful realization that the struggle for justice has no end in sight and exacts a tragic toll on the most helpless among us.

11011• Jobert Grey Landeza (“Quarantine 5”) – for the portrayal of a mature activist who has to own up to his youthful errors while confronting the loss of a dearly loved comrade.

IV. TECHNICAL ELEMENTS

Direction

11011• Roman Perez Jr. (“How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad”) – for successfully depicting the conditions in a congested prison while building up to the horrific realization that criminal corruption by elected officials effectively imprisons the rest of society.

11011• Sari Saysay (“Quarantine 5”) – for the innovative arrangement of providing a singular indoor space wherein characters convey the experience of communicating via mobile devices as suggested by actors situated in close proximity with one another.

Visual Design

11011• Nathan Bringuer, DOP; Charley Sta. Maria, PD (“No Trespassing”) – for the authenticity of the depiction of the private and work spaces of disenfranchised rural citizens.

11011• Alex Espartero, DOP; JC Catigay, PD (“How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad”) – for the ironic use of setting, where a prison courtyard turns out to be a safer space than a privileged prisoner’s inner sanctum.

11011• PJ Tavera & Arjanmar H. Rebeta, DOP; Jeric Delos Angeles, PD (“Libro for Ransom”) – for incorporating historical and topical issues within an identifiably contemporary situation.

Editing

11011• AB Mactao (“How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad”) – for providing a series of unexpected transitions without losing believability by assuming the perspective of two innocents drawn into a hidden web of corruption.

Sound

11011• Jovi Juan (“Hypertext”) – for the spare use of subway sounds and announcements as well as phone keyboard haptics that contrasts with the characters’ stressful exchanges.

11011• Fatima Nerikka Salim (“How to Make an Effective Campaign Ad”) – for the subtle transformation from the camaraderie of the prison setting to the increasingly hostile domestic space where the voice of the candidate reveals a hidden monstrosity.

11011• Raymund John Sugay & Jayson Baluno (“No Trespassing”) – for the uncanny use of silence punctuated by an ominous drone that lends the proceedings a mysterious and inexplicable aura of danger.

Music

11011• BJV Music Productions (“Quarantine 5”) – for the affective and heartfelt use of song as a means of remembering the past and commemorating the ideals it represented.

PROCESS

Online Recognition Ceremony
September 24, 2022

Good evening, let me start by explaining the process we observed. It was a simple one really, because if your final results have the potential to get really complicated, it’s always best to agree on basic principles. Believe it or not, these steps were drawn from lessons that I learned from my membership in the Filipino Film Critics Circle, which hands out annual awards that many practitioners consider the most widely coveted.

11011Since I was an insider during their early years, I can tell you that a lot of the procedures we followed then are no longer being observed today. But I’ll leave you to figure out what those are. My plan was for the evaluation team to watch all the entries together and discuss each one right afterward, but since many of the workshop participants did not meet their deadlines, we had to watch individually, as each one was submitted. We also planned to convene with the filmmakers to inquire about their intentions and production difficulties, but for the same reason that did not become feasible any longer.

11011So we set an appointment for an online deliberation session, with some Pelikulove officials attending so they could fill us in on any questions we might ask. We agreed on a basic number of groups, similar to the basic challenge that each production team would face: recognition for writing, performance, technical achievement, and overall excellence. The refinement of the recognition within each group was an innovation that I was able to introduce along with another member of the local critics group, who resigned like me, for many reasons including the highly unsatisfactory option of conducting traditional film awards.

11011What I mean by trad awards is the one you’re familiar with. Categories are fixed, and a fixed number of nominees are announced, and then during a special ceremony, the winner of each category is proclaimed. It probably works for beauty contests and presidential elections, but my former colleagues were academics like me, and that’s not how academia works. There’s a standard everyone has to meet to attain tenure and win promotion, with a non-negotiable point system to follow. So if no one in your batch of instructors makes the cut, the university replaces everyone with other candidates. If everyone makes it, that’s a headache for the administration’s budget, but on the other hand, your department gets bragging rights about having faculty who can survive in the highly competitive world of globally recognized research and publication.

11011So when Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr. (FACINE’s founder) and I set up our critics orgs, we made sure that we would have this type of system. You’ll have certain basic prizes available for film and performance and tech achievements, but within those areas, you can have no winner or one winner or several winners. Also, the types of winning might differ from one another, and we gave ourselves leeway to announce that. You’ll notice that here when the writing awards get announced. In cases where two or more entries provided impressive work, but some faced greater challenges than others, we used a tiering system – gold and silver and so on.

11011We also had a few later rounds via Messenger chat, where we talked about whether we might have overlooked or misclassified some of the achievements we recognized. In those cases, we made adjustments and additions. This is why for a short film competition, we were able to come up with not just several categories, but also mostly several winners per category. Compare this to the critics’ awards for short film, where only a small number of entries are announced as nominees, and only one awardee is declared. During the awards nights that I attended, I went home angry and brokenhearted for the nominees who weren’t announced as winners, who put on a brave face and tried to strike up civil and spirited conversations. This also comes from knowing how some winners were picked – mostly from camaraderie, and sometimes in order to punish the other nominees.

11011I’m sharing this because I always believed that the artistic process can only be completed with critical thinking, and that artists should be conversant with critical ideas in film and media and cultural studies, just as critics should be informed about the artistic process, especially when they set out to write on any specific film. I always get criticized by other critics for saying this, but I’m now at the stage where I can say I don’t care and, more important, that they are seriously in error. No wonder we have so many problems not just in culture but also in politics.

11011Final words for everyone – whatever you think you’ll be going through after we announce our selections, we, all your elders, went through the same things before. If you were hoping for a specific recognition and didn’t make it, that’s actually better than winning and deluding yourself that you have nothing more to prove. (At least that’s how it worked for me.) If on the other hand you won something, just think that it’s your first work so you had it too easy. You’ll need to convince everyone and yourself that you have to keep getting better in order to have proof that you deserved the early recognition you got. This year’s National Artist winners for Film – I was able to observe how they conducted themselves after early triumphs and frustrations. For them, the recognition they got was just icing on the cake. The real prize always lay in the future achievements that they planned for themselves.

11011With that introduction, we’ll proceed to the awards for technical achievement….

Note

[1] Update: I belatedly remembered the first and only set of Philippine film festival awards accompanied by citations. It was for the 1977 Metro Manila Film Festival, whose board of jurors was chaired by Rolando S. Tinio. The awards format followed traditional practice and generated heated responses from some filmmakers associated with the losing entries, since all the available prizes went to the same film, Celso Ad. Castillo’s Burlesk Queen, with a special prize for technical excellence for Mike de Leon’s Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising. The citations were distributed via the filmfest awards ceremony brochure (which I was able to read) and a now-lost publication of the Metro Manila Commission. Written in Tinio’s impeccable and dexterous prose, the citations unfortunately indulged in elitist overvaluation of the winning entry while nitpicking on the other films’ shortcomings. Aside from the easy-way-out of jurors keeping silent since then, this may have been one of the reasons for their avoidance of citations in subsequent award-giving efforts.

Leave a comment | tags: canon | posted in Film Criticism

May 1, 2021

Acceptance message for the 2021 Gawad Balagtas for Film Criticism

By Joel David

The Covid-19 global pandemic necessitated an online program for the recognition ceremony of the annual awards of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (Writers Union of the Philippines). With three minutes set as the limit for the recorded acceptance message, I read out the text below.[1].

An anachronistic pabebe wave to everyone.[2] I will admit that my response to the news of winning the Gawad Balagtas was immensely moving, partly because it reminded me that people at home were keeping tabs on me, and partly because these people represented an organization for whom criticism used to be distinct from (and less essential than) literature. The big secret I’ve kept to myself was that I never regarded criticism as any different from other forms of literature. I could sense throughout my career that some artists and authors appreciated the efforts I invested in my output, just as I also admired them when they were able to critique their own work and plow back their lessons and insights in their future products.

11011The reason why the UMPIL recognition is meaningful for a still-active critic like me is that the field where I function has been making occasionally valiant efforts at moving forward, to keep up with advances in other areas of criticism as well as in art and literature. But the distractions of more lucrative options in public relations as well as the dangerous assumption that film criticism should never challenge its readers’ intelligence all conspire against introducing new ideas and approaches.

11011This is why whenever I step back to assess how far I’ve been able to arrive, my journey was extensive only in terms of time and space. As public intellectual, I always feel like I’ve barely moved from where I started. I am hopeful that UMPIL will allow me the option of meandering down new pathways, playing with new concepts, championing practitioners who I feel have been overlooked, stumbling around once in a while, and maybe looking like I’m having too much fun – because I’ve learned that that’s the best way that difficult innovations can be announced and implemented.

11011I always delight in pointing out how I keep attacking canon-formation activities but ironically have to set up canons the right way in the first place. And at this stage in my life, I find myself being canonized as well, sometimes by institutions whose premises and motives I find necessary to contend with. This of course is always the risk we face when we announce our approbation of individuals who are still capable of, and intent on, changing.

11011For all the timeliness of the Gawad Balagtas, the careful deliberation that I’m sure must have gone in deciding to add me to the roster, and the symbolic consequence of being cited by the most credible and accomplished community of Pinas citizens, considerately extending their reach overseas, in defiance of a still-ongoing historic health disaster: my sincerest gratitude, lubos na pasasalamat sa inyo, 여러분 정말 더럽.[3]

Notes

Thanks to the people who provided advice on what I should (and shouldn’t) be saying: 박신구, 박해석, and 손범식, as well as to 권성진 for helping me pick out an appropriate final greeting. Special shoutout to UMPIL Board Member Louie Jon A. Sánchez, who made sure I had enough time to prepare for the occasion.

[1] The text of the citation was in Filipino and appears in the preceding illustration. It may be translated as follows:

For his vigilant advocacy of his field of practice, his faithful guidance in its nationalist and democratic aspirations, and his interventions in upholding film as a vital component of the everyday life of Filipinos and as a crucial factor in the unfolding of the history of the Philippines.

11011He is not only foremost in his field, but also the primary developer of [Philippine] film criticism, which has become a flourishing and indispensable literary form because of his tireless contributions.

[2] “Pabebe” is a Taglish term that may be approximated as “trying to be baby-like.” It was first used for the popular phenomenon on Philippine TV that enjoyed its own coinage, AlDub. The baby-ism specifically referred to a voiceless character appropriating the beauty-queen wave, which in turn was an imitation of the Queen of England’s distinctive hand wave.

[3] The standard utterance, “yeoreobun jeongmal dureob,” is a comic insult that translates to “you’re all really dirty.” The L and R sounds are represented by the same letter (ㄹ) in the Korean featural system, so with the adjustment of a consonant in the last word (to “duleob”), the statement aurally registers as “you’re really all the [ones I] love” in Konglish. Understandably, the wordplay will be recognizable mostly to younger generations of Koreans.

Leave a comment | tags: canon | posted in Film Criticism

August 24, 2018

Signal Rock and a Hard Place

By Joel David

Directed by Chito Roño
Written by Rody Vera

Signal Rock is a deceptively simple film whose complications begin with its current emergence in the public consciousness. It is released as an entry to the Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino, so to single it out as the excellent entry that it is should not be taken as a downgrading of the other entries. To make matters worse, the PPP follows yet another event, the older Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, so audiences who already splurged in watching this year’s entries might be understandably reluctant to spend further on the current (and pricier) lineup. PPP also features previously unreleased films from earlier festivals – this time a more definite guarantee of jury approval, notwithstanding the Cinema Evaluation Board’s weirdly moralistic downgrading of a couple of aspirants.

11011In fact, some of the PPP entries are also regional films like Signal Rock – Tara Illenberger’s Iloilo-set High Tide and Arnel Barbarona’s Manobo tale Tu Pug Imatuy come to mind, as well as the only one I’ve seen of the lot, Khavn’s CEB-victimized Balangiga: Howling Wilderness, which like Signal Rock is also set in Samar. A comparison of Balangiga and Signal Rock would be a useful place to start then. Where Balangiga’s narrative enlarges on the incomprehensible historical trauma of genocidally motivated colonial warfare, Signal Rock demonstrates the impact that globalization has made on even a far-flung Third-World island.

11011The movie is the director’s and writer’s second project set in Biri island, part of a municipality in Northern Samar – which makes it one of the Visayan islands closest to Luzon.[1] Their earlier Biri film, Badil (2013), featured a young man attending to his father’s unsavory (and ultimately bloody) vote-buying activities during an election period where the still-running mayor asks for support from his cohorts. Intoy, the Biri lad at the center of Signal Rock, is more recognizably provincial, by our usual cynical-urbane standards: laid-back, easy-going, content with helping everyone and indulging in occasional youthful hijinks, with an equally indulgent police chief making sure that he and his homies get their token share of punishment.

11011His initiation into worldliness, in more ways than one, occurs when he falls in love with a local lass, whose father regards him as unworthy for a prospective in-law. Intoy’s naïveté catches himself off-guard: he could have known the kind of future he’d be facing if he reflected on the troubles that his sister had been struggling with as an abusive foreigner’s mistress, forced to seek refuge by herself in a foreign land. The lesson becomes even more pronounced in the dilemma of his best friend, whose childhood sweetheart returns as the now-prosperous wife of an elderly Caucasian, upon which his still-besotted friend is reduced to being his ex-girlfriend’s paramour. Intoy’s epiphany, that the women of the town are being groomed to work for – and eventually be claimed by – overseas masters, is something that most Filipino intellectuals have known for some time. Signal Rock’s first singular achievement is in restoring the sting to this revelation, by allowing the kind of Filipino we used to know to be overcome by it.

11011That insight alone would have been enough to add depth to any number of romantic comedies (and you might find it unusual for me to claim here that Signal Rock is, literally, a romantic comedy – more conventional in fact that the contemporary mainstream versions whose terms were set four years ago by That Thing Called Tadhana, Antoinette Jadaone’s indie-crossover hit). But the director-writer team have a better treat in store: where the usual melodrama, even the long-drawn-out telenovelas, would bypass a bureaucratic process and get by with merely mentioning it, the movie delineates the process itself and draws dramatic tension out of it, as well as some light comedy, essential suspense, and insightful glimpses into small-town relationships. Here the filmmakers manage to traverse the tricky depiction of desperation and corruption among the destitute without falling into the trap of poverty porn, via the still-rare culturalist strategy of refusing to pass judgment on any of the characters and by partaking of any instance in their celebration of their existence, no matter how paltry or seemingly pathetic.

11011This approach even enables them to engage in reflexive touches, as when the plot follows Intoy’s venture into Manila’s talons of neon, thereby equating his character with that of Julio Madiaga in Lino Brocka’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag. In this particular instance, Signal Rock signifies its ideological superiority over Philippine cinema’s global critics’ favorite, just as Christian Bables’s performance as Intoy will prove to be more enduring than Bembol Roco’s still-impressive Julio M.: Maynila may remain one of the most technically accomplished Filipino film epics ever made, but none of its identity problems (sexism, homophobia, racial and anti-lumpen prejudice) mars Signal Rock’s engagement with a wide variety of working-class and lumpenprole types. A mother’s hard-heartedness toward her husband is explained via his past cruelty and negligence toward her; the said husband (Intoy’s father) is able to draw on his limited English-language expertise in order to redeem his daughter’s own standing as an overseas resident; a hotheaded fratricidal slacker retains enough of a conscience to surrender to authorities thanks to his close relationship with the parish priest, with whom he may or may not be lovers; and so on. The movie’s emphasis on mostly male characters derives not from a desire to heroize them (least of all Intoy), but from the circumstantial result of women abandoning the community in order to earn a living for everyone via foreign labor.

11011The clue to understanding how the film can pull off the delightful hat trick of melding process, lead character, and community into one arresting narrative is in looking over the director’s background. I don’t refer to the fact that he happens to be a Samareño who acquired familiarity with the Philippine capital as well as with other global centers, or that his father was the longest-serving minister of Ferdinand Marcos’s martial-law administration while he oversaw the “alternative cinema” screening schedule of the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines. Chito Roño is generally overlooked in accounts of still-active survivors of the Marcos-era Golden Age, partly because of the progressive sector’s eagerness to reject anyone associated with the regime, but also partly because he devoted himself to so-called “low” genres, specifically those dealing with sex, horror, lurid melodrama, and action films centered on women.

11011Those who bothered to look more closely into his output were rewarded with some of the most innovative attacks as well as delectable performances in commercial cinema, in packages that weren’t burdened by the “prestige” imprint. More than Badil, Signal Rock would be the equivalent of David Lynch abandoning his usual offbeat material and methods in order to do his appropriately titled 1999 film, The Straight Story. Yet the same creative and critical sensibility infuses Signal Rock’s “regular” world. Intoy’s awakening to illicit relationships, for example, begins when he witnesses his friend resume his affair with his now-married girlfriend, and intensifies when the town mayor confides in him the paternity of his illegitimate son. When he starts witnessing people in similarly unexpected and possibly incriminating situations, he learns to practice discretion – a skill that comes in handy when he finally meets up with his girlfriend in the big city.

11011Roño’s directorial flourishes are more foregrounded in Signal Rock than they were in Badil, yet they remain unintrusive (as discreet as Intoy learns to be) – a sign of the filmmaker’s maturation. In the first few scenes with the title object alone, we already see expert overlappings of image and sound so that more than one event transpires in single scenes; the first time Intoy visits the place by himself, we hear the wind transformed into the sound of a woman weeping.[2] The movie is so full of these throwaway gems that the only advisable response I can provide for a first screening is to sit back and take in the pleasure of a conglomeration of talents who love what they do and know how to go about making it happen.

[First published August 17, 2018, in the Philippine Entertainment Portal]

Note

[1] Because of the Northern Samar islands’ diagonal position in relation to Luzon, Capul island lies closer to Sorsogon Province although Biri is the northernmost Visayan municipality.

[2] Interestingly, the similarly named Signal Hill, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, was named for its setting as the site of the first wireless transatlantic transmission, when Guglielmo Marconi awaited a signal from England on December 12, 1901. See Diana Lambdin Meyer, “Canada’s Vital Role in the Communications Revolution” (BBC.com, September 2, 2017).

Comments Off on Signal Rock and a Hard Place | tags: canon | posted in Film Criticism

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