In a country like Pinas with its history of several systemic impediments to social change, such as colonial occupation and authoritarian regimes, anonymity has proved to be a useful, even honorable, device. Underground opposition groups benefit from posting their critiques in their long-running cat-and-mouse skirmishes, proceeding from the guerrilla-warfare examples of predecessors throughout global history.

11011What I find concerning in my circumscribed area of specialization though is a contemporary “viral” poster who’s been dispensing judgmental remarks and ratings for the past several years. I’d previously posted observations about the flaws in this person’s methods, and apparently several practitioners as well as some of his followers have started expressing dissent or dissatisfaction wtih his pronouncements. But what alarms me is the lack of objections among practitioners to his insistence on maintaining anonymity.

11011It’s producers and artists I have to call out, because as far as I know, they’re the ones who’re aware of the identity of this so-called critic, who requests attendance at their press previews. Organized groups have responded differently (or worse, indifferently), as would be their wont. The most recent group, honest enough to drop the C word in their name, was the Society of Filipino Film Reviewers, which offered to provide membership to the writer in question on condition of identifying himself in his public posts. On the other extreme is the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (Filipino Film Critics Circle, on which more later), which remained quiet except for one of its members expressing amusement with and tolerance of this particular commentator’s practice.

11011The most successful anonymous activist group at the moment is called, aptly enough, Anonymous, a hacker group that punishes abusive Western institutions by launching cyberattacks against their internet operations. I’m old enough to acknowledge participating in underground media in some antidictatorship projects in the distant past; but I also found myself at the receiving end of so-called critics, organized by a publicist suspected of being a government informant, who wrote a series of anonymized attacks against personalities they considered compromised because of popular success and therefore fraudulent in their claims to progressivity, and included writers they considered supportive of such individuals. Part of my entire critical mission, even before these ideological purists came along, was to point out that the condemnation of mass patronage leads to unproductive culs-de-sac, premised on flawed readings of leftist culture theory and not much different from reactionary critical approaches.

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11011Anyone who’ll say that the current author in question is spearheading new ways of thinking on media that could potentially endanger his personal safety is as much of an ignoramus as he and should be permitted to withdraw from our present discussion. The only argument left for said writer to wield is that of privacy, which should normally be observed by anyone including myself, regardless of my unqualified support for outing closeted celebrities. However, as I’m sure most practitioners are aware of, media producers and creatives are not entitled to the same luxury of privacy, unless they prefer to withhold from themselves the benefits that accrue from successful (and therefore profitable) practice.

11011There are two speculative possibilities then, one mildly positive and the other positively awful. One is that media practitioners don’t really have much regard for criticism: whether you append your name to a review or use an alias, they’ll pretend to be concerned but really couldn’t care less, since for the most part the commercial performance of any release can be historically overdetermined (e.g., James Cameron’s Titanic will make its global box-office record even if all the world’s critics unite in describing it as an entry that deserves to sink to the depths of forgettability). The other possibility is that artists keep quiet when some of them acquire acclaim from an author, and resolve to just wait their turn, hoping it comes sooner than later.

11011This second option parallels what happens on a more comprehensive annual scale, when bands of critics retreat into the anonymity of film awards, as the Manunuris were first to exemplify. Like the writer under discussion, they declare their decisions as unhampered by influence and motivated by concern for artists and audience—both self-serving distractions, as any intensive analysis of the historical record will reveal. The community of artists appears less inclined to buy into these shameless lies at present, compared to earlier generations’ responses, but enough of a supportive press machinery springs to action during awards season to celebrate these critics’ decisions; which means those excluded from nominations or awards are expected to display good sportspersonship, allow their winning colleagues to praise the critics’ critique-less integrity, and hope their own good behavior will be rewarded at some future point.

11011As I wrote in a prior study, the practice is not even modern if we were to look for Western equivalents. The uncommon practice of less-than-adequate writers who benefit from collective protection and keep their interests intertwined, resulting in a scary but fascinating spectacle, resembles the hold that the Rattenkönig or rat king once had on the public imagination. Defenders of tradition might respond that our contemporary viral critic is unnamed, unlike the members of the critics’ group that I compare him to. But the analogy I make is simple enough to be comprehensible to anyone: when any local industry practitioner tolerates his anonymity, she may just as well be replicating her response to organized critics when they unify their individual identities in a judgmental scam that purports to be above everyone, most especially the recipients who compete for it and feel fulfilled even without the benefit of productive critical commentary.

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Á!

The presence of a couple (so far) of unidentifiable Pinas cinema-focused film-evaluation websites on the social network, one of which has accumulated a following in the thousands, induces a strong measure of unease and disgust in me. It didn’t require any extensive Freudian cure to figure out the cause. In what now seems like a lifetime ago, right before I embarked on foreign graduate studies, I found myself on one side of a conflict with an organized band of self-identified critics. A movie reporter suspected of being a government agent provided them with an outlet – a tabloid that only a few people bothered to read – from which they launched their attacks on everyone whom they considered guilty of supporting pop-culture capitalism.

11011Obviously the most complicit sector, the mass audience, became the structuring absence in their critiques, since their supposed Marxist position was intended to benefit the “people,” presumably including pop-product consumers. Their write-ups were, I kid you not, extremely convoluted and horrendously unreadable, with fog-index ratings that would overshoot Robert Gunning’s comprehensibility charts several times over. The reason was easy to deduce even then: call yourself a progressive, then denounce the people who produce and support samples that prove to be popular, and you’ll find yourself crawling and jumping through all the bumps, hoops, and handicaps that your own logic instantly sets up on your way to the self-valorizing endpoint where you install yourself as society’s cultural messiah. Add to this an unexamined aspiration to be an alternate and superior source of literature and you wind up with attempts at obscure metaphorical flights and unnecessary syntactic complexities, closer to doggerel than to poetry.

11011No wonder nothing from that outburst of self-righteous pretension survived to the present. The only vexation that gang provided was in masculinistically identifying their perceived “enemies of the people” (while fearlessly maintaining their invisibility of course) – specifically artists who took the extra effort of investing their social and political critiques with popular appeal,[1] and critics (like me and a few others) who made sure that their troubles were rewarded with good notices, if nothing else. A cousin of mine, who was then an experienced lawyer and later became a judge but died recently from the pandemic, said he could help me file a case for libel if I wanted to; I replied that I was already on my final extension in postponing the commencement of my Fulbright grant, so I couldn’t focus on anything else until I completed the study program.

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11011Where the contemporary socnet-based reviewers and the self-declared progressive critics of that era intersected was, as I belatedly realized, in their cowardly resort to anonymity. I would even argue that their motives were similar, even if the current anonymous reviewers would, from the looks of it, deny any left sympathies. Both types attempt to draw from an association with the heroic record of freedom fighters (initially against colonialism, subsequently against fascism) evading tyrannical systems by operating underground. Both are also, ironically and hypocritically, impelled by essentially antipopular animosities – which is why you can find the same kind of logic in the current anonymous socnet reviewers: they’ll find and grasp onto any academically validated excuse to denounce successful practitioners, although they’ve made exceptions for certain auteurs.[2] This is the reason why their claim to objectivity can be easily deconstructed, if our school-trained population only knew how to go about the process; if their actual identities were known, it would be a far simpler matter of determining how they benefit from the practitioners and producers they support.

11011Best we can do for now is turn to an analogous recent situation in politics. In the wake of an extremely divisive electoral exercise that was actually more regionalistic than ideological, certain supporters on either side of conflicting party-led campaigns started adopting aliases before issuing hard-hitting social-media posts. Their aggrieved opponents would then conduct investigations to uncover who these authors were, and initiate name-and-shame blitzes once their identities were determined. It would be easy to comprehend the tendency of an avid supporter of either side to inevitably harbor and express hatred for the opposite side, inasmuch as religious fundamentalists would be encouraged to do the same, and guess where this secular tendency springs from. The resort to the concealment of identity would likewise be understandable, but morally indefensible in the same instance, whichever side happened to be benefiting from the ruckus. As in the case of the tabloid gang I mentioned, the Philippine state no longer looms as an enforcer of proper behavior with total authority over one’s existence, where one can be legally declared a menace to morality and/or national security without the benefit of a public trial and consequently openly apprehended and punished by state agents.

11011Owing to the lessons from that highly contentious political transition about a half-decade ago, political propagandists have known better since then than to attempt romantic underground-activism drama the way that we used to practice it during the martial-law era of Marcos Sr. Hence to put it bluntly, these current anonyms infesting film commentary need to be flushed out as well, their backgrounds and affiliations held up to the light, the way that the rest of us – including the very folks I have differences with today, unlike the deservingly forgotten tabloidists of yesteryear – allow ourselves. Then again, just to uphold my constant contrarianism, how else would we be able to have examples of failed criticism that needs to cower behind masked identities, if bad critics were to think twice before making their declarations and announcing their ratings?[3] They’d be ridiculed out of existence, even if they were too clueless to realize their own mediocrity.

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11011They may have a few thousand followers now, but then there will always be privileged people too miseducated to be able to appreciate anything local, much less pop-cultural. One side fulfills a pathological need in the other, and I’d venture to bring in organized critics while we’re on a search for people who ought to know the right thing to do and have the means of doing it. While I’d expect critics’ orgs to watch out for these samples and call them out for their adverse impact on critical practice, once more I can figure out why they’d rather pretend they have better things to attend to. Because who else would be invested in protecting failed practice using organizational prerogatives? That doesn’t excuse their passivity, and when one day the history of Pinas film criticism gets drafted, their inaction regarding reviewers who function as faceless terrorizers of otherwise serious practitioners (who also offer up their names for historical judgment) will definitely be listed under the category of destructive negligence.

11011The long-term game is what these pseudonymous losers will be unable to play, unless they draw on humongous self-promotional resources. Extensive (and still-growing) is the list of critics who thought their claims to fame entitled them to compile their output for posterity, and whose volumes will be forgotten as soon as they’re no longer around to hype them up themselves. Then again, how about more anonymous film reviewers joining the fray and eventually organizing their own invisible critics organization, complete with annual awards dispensing air trophies for untitled films made by hidden talents, with a secret anthology to celebrate their historical intervention? Might as well have as much imaginative fun as possible while it lasts.

Notes

[1] While I would caution against regarding awards as infallible indicators of prestige, the processes of the Order of the National Artist have been irreproachable for the most part, outside of the meddling of Philippine politicians. As of 2022, all of the artists who were singled out for attack by these state university-based know-it-alls have become recipients of the award. Not to play the game of whether or not these names deserved the recognition, but what the title of the order bestowed was exactly what they strove for – artistry made for the nation, intended to be comprehended and valued by the nation. Which is where I put an end to this line of argument.

[2] One fascinating point made by observers is that the more popular anonymous reviewer(s) seemed to prefer selected openly queer practitioners, a commendable progressive turn in and by itself. But without foregrounding the website’s familiarity or benefit (or lack of either) with its author’s or authors’ favored practitioners, this kind of bias can be described with any number of adjectives, all of them neutral or unflattering. To my mind, the worst possible descriptor for its championing of some (but not all) Others for not-all-that-exceptional accomplishments, while denigrating these Others’ rivals as lesser artists and using a strategy associated with subversive activists, is that it’s as conservatively unqueer as it’s possible to get. Anyone remember that social mechanism called the closet?

[3] Another point that must be raised, which might help explain my seeming ambivalence. In media I remain libertarian, so just as the tabloid writers of long ago were unfairly mistaken in thinking I wanted to censor criticism that I disliked, I just as strongly would insist that awful net-era authors go about their business, so long as we know who they are, and so that any potentially sensible reader could be better informed before she continues patronizing the garbage they spew. As an enthusiastic appreciator of certain achievements in “trash” cinema, I wouldn’t mind making room for trash criticism, which has always been around anyway and which serves an admittedly selfish purpose for my occasional bouts of insecurity: how else would I know that I’m not really as terrible as my hypercritical inner self often declares, if none of these lousy practitioners ever existed?

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“CATEGORY E” SAMPLES

Although a stand-alone post, this section should be read in conjunction with the original article, “From Cloud to Resistance.” Click here for Part 1 (“The Problem of Our Critical Approaches”) and here for Part 2 (“Toward a More Responsive Critical Practice”). Here’s a link to this section’s Note on Sources.

In the same way that I listed titles that came closest to fulfilling the highest ideal prescribed by “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” I had a separate listing of films that were arguably seen as “firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which [turned] out to be so only in an ambiguous manner.” Not only was this group unwieldy by necessity, I also found it inadvisable to insist on elaborating on the editorial’s fifth category once I had pointed out its importance, rather than wander down the admittedly meandering and subjectively determined pathway that this appendix section explores.

11011Most of the titles in the list I mentioned were drawn from the counter-canon book project I started working on over ten years ago with a now-defunct entertainment publication. The volume is still undergoing finalization and ought to come out in a few months. The process involved the selection of films by an inhouse team of media practitioners, who voted on the titles they deemed worthy of inclusion, rewatching borderline choices as many times as necessary until they could arrive at a consensus. The coverage would be comprehensive, starting with the earliest available samples all the way to a recent end date. The target number was one hundred titles, but this was of course impossible to maintain; the final tally is closer to 120. My role as project consultant was to prepare the team for specialized instances of historical, high-art, or low-genre screenings, and write citations for the films that the team approved for inclusion. [Update: See Canon Decampment, which now includes over 170 films from 80+ filmmakers.]

11011The fact that several films lionized during their time could not sustain their reputation, while a larger number of overlooked works unexpectedly held up better at present, should not surprise anyone familiar with the complex and contentious canonization processeses that experts encounter in art and literature. Nevertheless, the historical implications of the team’s left-field choices impressed me enough to sound a call for political-economy studies of Philippine film production houses and policy institutions at the close of “From Cloud to Resistance.” Also, although certain already-canonized works were accommodated in the list, many of these turned out more definitely reactionary, borderline or outright fascistic even, particularly in terms of their downgrading or exclusion of Othernesses: Lamberto V. Avellana’s Anak Dalita (1956) and Manuel Silos’s Biyaya ng Lupa (1959) from the First Golden Age, and several of the Filipino Film Critics Circle’s choices through the years.

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11011It would prove more rewarding, for example, to jettison the FFCC’s very first best-film winner, Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? (1976), in favor of the same director’s The Passionate Strangers (1966), a film noir that tracks the investigation of the murder of a labor leader and uncovers neocolonial intervention and interracial liaisons in the process. The martial law-era sex films, denounced during their time for allegedly helping the regime distract the mass audience’s attention from the then-percolating anti-dictatorship movement, deserve credit for highlighting the poverty and decadence that induce the least-privileged to seek solace or resistance in carnal gratification: Peque Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights (1985) deservingly recovered lost ground, but Elwood Perez’s Silip (1985) proved to be metatextually indispensable in functioning as a witty and transgressive answer film to the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines’s most celebrated production, Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (1982), while Mel Chionglo’s lesser-known Sinner or Saint (1984) deployed naturalism to track the journey of a defiantly wayward housewife and succeeded in implicating the moralistic society that insists on judging her at every turn. An effective summation of these films’ common theme of courtly love games turning deadly when played by the underprivileged, is proffered by William Pascual’s Takaw Tukso (1986), made ostensibly for the Marcos era’s censorship-exempted Manila Film Center but released after the collapse of the regime.

11011The Pinoy sex film was an outgrowth of melodrama, much-maligned historically for its appeal to female viewers (which helps explain the grudging respect accorded sex cinema, for its orientation toward male viewers). Yet certain offbeat samples demonstrate more deconstructive intelligence in this area of practice than in, say, action or art films that tend to be dominated by males on either side of the profit-vs.-prestige divide. Armando Garces’s Sino ang Maysala? (1957), from the First Golden Age, foregrounded its production history by naming the characters after the actors who portrayed them – even calling Paraluman “Carmen” because the role was originally intended for Carmen Rosales – and thereby enabled a reel-to-real correlation when “Bobby” Vasquez was actually arrested for unruly behavior. Leroy Salvador’s Badlis sa Kinabuhi (1969) made use of a dramatic race-against-time recovered testimony of a traumatized underage witness in order to facilitate the acquittal of a woman accused of killing her abusive stepfather.

11011Surprisingly, and unexpectedly, the filmic repudiation of the patriarchal excess fostered by Marcos’s declaration of martial law occurred in two bodies – one an individual’s and another an institution’s, both closely associated with the regime. The individual was Nora Aunor, whose full-scale attempt at critiquing her “superstar” status inhered in her post-Marcos auteurist project, Greatest Performance, which she attempted to rub out before she could finish it; the institution was Viva Films, sequestered (though subsequently cleared) by the Presidential Commission on Good Government after the fall of the Marcoses, which spearheaded a series of glossy strong-women projects and conditioned the fan base of the country’s final movie star, Sharon Cuneta, to welcome her transition from teenybopper to independent woman.

11011The Viva Films output, like that of Aunor, tended to be downgraded by the FFCC because of its association with the regime, among other reasons. This persisted even with Lino Brocka’s post-Marcos (and post-Cannes) switch to developing projects for the outfit, including a number of Cuneta films, as well as his merger of politics and commercial appeal in Gumapang Ka sa Lusak (1990), whose success on both fronts caught him by surprise and led to his attempts to commission a series of similar projects – all cut short by his sudden demise. The first major local artist to accept a Viva-melodrama assignment was Laurice Guillen, whose Kung Mahawi Man ang Ulap (1984) not only affirmed the rich potential available in still-scorned komiks-sourced material but also signalled the audience’s readiness to accept the narrative of a woman directly confronting a patriarchally dominated system, and winning.

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11011The Viva contribution persisted beyond the Marcos era and even introduced postfeminist notions: in Eddie Garcia’s Saan Nagtatago ang Pag-ibig? (1987), women realize a solidarity among themselves by rejecting familial arrangements, while in Chito Roño’s Bakit Kay Tagal ng Sandali? (1990), a network of women succeeds in excluding the interests of men by openly misbehaving against (though eventually reconciling with) one another. In fact, Elwood Perez’s Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit (1989), an Aunor-starrer regarded as the ultimate Filipino melodrama, can be considered an acknowledgment of the triumph of what became known then as the Viva Films house look, a successful branding strategy that relied on surface gloss and visual excess that, to be sure, was used in a number of insidious ways as well.

11011A extraordinary achievement in Philippine melodrama, Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s independently produced Milagros (1997), made use of elements of sex-film intrigues in order to disclose the strength and nobility behind a “ridiculous” woman’s willingness to repay her just-deceased impoverished father’s debt by servicing an all-male household while aspiring to consummate a pilgrimage to a mystical destination; more than Ishmael Bernal’s Nunal sa Tubig (1976), Milagros may be espoused as the Philippines’s supreme “category e” sample, operating on several prodigious levels of authorial, generic, narratological, and cinematic aporias. From an institutional perspective, the now-historical millennial success of romantic comedies enjoyed primarily by Star Cinema (including two exemplary mature-woman texts featuring Sharon Cuneta, Olivia M. Lamasan’s Minsan Minahal Kita from 2000 and Jose Javier Reyes’s Kung Ako Na Lang Sana from 2003) can also be traced to the production traditions set by Viva Films. In fact the genre-transformative samples of the primary rom-com practitioner of the present, Irene Villamor’s Meet Me in St. Gallen (2018) and On Vodka, Beers, and Regrets (2020), were both Viva-produced.

11011The institution has dominated the Philippines’s streaming subscription services via its Vivamax arm, and has inevitably participated in the politicization of film-prod discourse mentioned in the opening of “From Cloud to Resistance.” Of the contending filmmakers, right-wing apologist Darryl Yap has in fact provided an indispensable entry, Sarap Mong Patayin (2021), which must be ascribed for now to an idiot-savantish fluke, whereas Vince Tañada’s artistic promise lies in his future attempts. Other directors with avowedly political intentions worth noting would be Joselito Altarejos (with an ongoing trilogy that expresses leftist commitment in terms of queer sexual preferences) and Joel Lamangan, who has been able to recently fulfill an early commitment to infuse entertainment with social discourse. A definite “category e” tinkerer who started out by specializing in Ishmael Bernal’s multicharacter innovations is one more Vivamax talent, Lawrence Fajardo, while long-term practitioner Jun Lana, with his recent non-Viva product Big Night (2021), has proved himself ready to confront the tricky challenge of upending conventional-seeming material with creative handling.

A Note on Sources

The right-wing content of specific entries in the First Golden Age canon was an occasional topic of online chats that I had with filmmaker Lawrence Fajardo, affirmed whenever I rewatched the titles we discussed. Andrew Leavold’s rediscovery of Silip occasioned a galvanizing reconsideration of one of the many (typically dismissed) sex films screened at the now-defunct Manila Film Center. Sino ang Maysala?’s metaradical achievement was impressed on me by the great film scholar Johven Velasco, more convincingly articulated in his posthumous volume Huwaran/Hulmahan Atbp. (University of the Philippines Press, 2009); another title he was planning to write on was Pangarap ng Puso, which he regarded as preferable to the other works of Mario O’Hara that were honored by critics’ prizes. The early left-field properties of specific Viva Films productions as well as the generic accomplishment of Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit were subjects of exchanges I had with Patrick Flores during the early 1990s. Most of my insights on Milagros derived from neither the recognition provided by the FFCC nor the few (frankly unimpressive) reviews by its members, but from discussions with Bliss Cua Lim and the late Agustin Sotto, right after the entry was screened in a Filipino film retrospective at the Lincoln Center in New York City. The text that alerted me to the eccentric merits of Sarap Mong Patayin, along with a few other recent titles, was the indispensable 2021 monograph by Epoy Deyto, titled Post-Dilawan Cinema and the Pandemic (downloadable for free at his Missing Codec blog). Jerrick Josue David cited Big Night as his preferred title for its year of release. During the historical moment when watching films has attained a level of unnecessary difficulty, the recommendation of friends has become the primary means for me to seek which titles to track down.

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TOWARD A MORE RESPONSIVE CRITICAL PRACTICE

[Click here for the previous (opening) installment. To go to the following sections, click here: Continuities; Final Category; Filmic Implications; Notes & Works Cited. An Appendix is posted separately.]

Before concluding our consideration of the applicability of what has proved to be an effective and engaging, though admittedly difficult, set of prescriptions from an avowedly progressive Western sector, I ought to stress that the goal here is not to substitute one set of left-appropriated dogmas (either the orthodox left’s or the FFCC’s) with another. Rather, the goal is to explore a new, necessarily open-ended approach to see what destinations it might lead to, not just for Filipino critics but for local practitioners as well.

11011In the previous half, we considered the types of films that Comolli and Narboni warned against accepting wholesale – those that unironically uphold reactionary material using conventional technique. They caution that even with “political” subject matter (as well as the “realist” orientations advanced by advocates of cinéma-direct, promoted in the Philippines by the UPFI’s predecessor, the UP Film Center), the uncritical adoption of standardized narrative treatments and the assumption that the depiction of what is real is capable of presenting truth: these need to be regarded as complicit with the arsenal of tricks used by the dominant ideology to maintain the delusive goal behind acceptable capitalist entertainment, which is to lull audiences into accepting the certainties that their respective social spheres assure them as the reality they recognize and operate from within.

11011Hence the authors’ opprobrium regarding artists who identify as progressive but who fail to realize that any alternative they set up to replace the system they rail against “takes no account of the fact that any other system is bound to be a reflection of the one [they wish] to avoid.” In much the same way, they assert that “every film is political” (underscoring theirs), which makes it essential to create a category to problematize films “which have an explicitly political content … but which do not effectively criticize the ideological system in which they are embedded because they unquestioningly adopt its language and its imagery.” This categorization would suffice to apply to the general run of nearly all the movies identified as explicitly or metaphorically against the historic martial-law dictatorship, whether made during the Marcos regime or afterward, regardless of the responses of the FFCC or European film festivals. The only challenge here would be to point out how and why these texts fall short.

11011As I also strove to demonstrate previously, not all such attempts failed. But the recognition provided by local taste-mongers would prove to be inadequate barometers of these film samples’ worth: some garnered limited rewards, many more passed under the radar, so to speak, and in a few cases even endured disapprobation from people who should have known better. The case of our most avowedly political filmmaker, Lino Brocka, is instructive: his exposure to an arena of exhibition and distribution that rewarded him for conforming to its idea of what a proper Third-World artist should be, merely served to delay his own growth as practitioner. But even with his too-short persistence into the post-Marcos era, Filipino filmmakers were afforded a useful model for emulation, or even resistance.

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Continuities

It is in this recognition of Brocka’s own martial law-era discourse extending beyond the first Marcos presidency that we find works like the contemporary contending releases, one favoring and the other disavowing the era of military dictatorship. (The psychosis that induces an artist to believe that any instance of tyranny can be justified deserves its own separate treatment, which this article unfortunately cannot cover satisfactorily; the forces of reaction may resolve to find ways to upgrade their own aesthetic practice, which is tantamount to an oxymoronic pursuit, but the goal for progressive players is to leave them behind, rather than match their mediocrity.)

11011A few locally produced post-Marcos-era texts may be regarded as incontrovertibly fulfilling the requirement of simultaneously challenging both ideological material and ideological form, in effect honoring the legacy of the Second Golden Age practitioners better than most academic write-ups and formal recognition mechanisms (here or in Europe – same difference) have been able to do. Once more, we need to exercise caution in going over these samples: a couple succeeded in garnering institutional honors, but the rest continue to reside in a limbo that local critics have been unable to break open because of their tendency, per Comolli and Narboni, to aim “either for speculation (commentary, interpretation, de-coding even) or for spacious raving[1] … [rather than providing] a rigidly factual analysis of what governs the production of a film (economic circumstances, ideology, demand and response) and the meanings and forms appearing in it, which are equally tangible.”

11011Hence the admittedly delimited practice of post-Marcos “martial-law cinema” will benefit from the close evaluation of works like Chito S. Roño’s Curacha: Ang Babaeng Walang Pahinga (1998), intended as a sequel of the same director’s Marcos-era debut, Private Show (1984), but opening with an unexpectedly marvelous incident that implicitly juxtaposes the Catholic establishment’s seizure of political power with military rebels’ less-successful attempts; Mario O’Hara’s Pangarap ng Puso (2000), a fabular tale that proceeds to subvert historical perception alongside its characters’ political radicalization; Jeffrey Jeturian’s Tuhog (2001), the realization of a script originally intended as a production of the Marcos film agency, which exposes the manner in which sex films bastardize their underprivileged real-life source materials for the sake of maximizing lucrative sensationalism; Keith Deligero’s Lily (2016), the tale of a haunting that spreads from rural wildlife to urban sprawl and transforms its own cinematic unfolding; Khavn’s Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (2017), a dramatization of the country’s first 20th-century colonization trauma that focalizes the unbearable via the perspective of a child responding to his infernal environment with wonderment and courage and heartbreak; and Brillante Ma Mendoza’s Resbak (2021), an ostensibly standardized staging of the impact of bureaucrat-capitalist corruption on a typical slum resident that builds up to the title’s realizable vision of retributive justice in the face of the social order’s self-restoration. For a cinéma-direct sample, I can only name for now a special case, Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil’s Indigo Child (2016), the coverage of a play on military torture wherein the psychiatrically damaged victim’s accounts are complemented by digital mediations that raise essential questions of historical credibility.

11011One may insist on a dogmatic reading of the Cahiers du Cinéma editorial in order to point out a number of other titles I overlooked. At this stage, however, it would be expedient to foreground an assumption whose ubiquity could be taken for granted in French cinema – so much so that it did not have to be articulated beside the many other words of caution specified by the authors. This would be the relative affordability of film production in the First World, coupled with the reliability of film subsidy and patronage in Europe. As a result, a wide array of film practice would be more financially viable in the specific historical context that the article addresses – a condition that the contemporary digitalization of film comes close to approximating, though still with vital differences in place.

11011Hence the added criterion that I took pains to observe, for which I consistently get denounced by apologists for the UPFI/FFCC axis: the requisite of popular appeal or, as perfectly phrased by a Pinay filmmaker, observing a non-negotiable respect for the mass audience[2] (it can never be emphasized enough that capitalists should be allowed to recover their expenses only as a strategic measure, to be able to finance more projects). Not all works that follow this principle garner commercial success, inasmuch as the elements that factor into this type of result are actually rarely perfectly conducive with one another. Yet we should insist on recognizing and respecting any instance where a filmmaker intends to ensure that her production project recover its cost, and once more, just to be clear: not as a means of enriching her investor, but for the sake of maintaining the continuation of production activity.

11011Nevertheless, in what should be regarded as an unnatural, opportunistic, yet also ultimately workable option, a privileged circle of Filipino practitioners has been able to parlay the support of the film-culture elite in Pinas (usually working in conjunction with European filmfest impresarios) into sustaining the production of a series of deliberately alienating material that purports to provide political or historical discourse. Understandably, global scholars without immediate access to Philippine popular culture will have no other choice except to work through this type of output. Filipino scholars who do the same are exercising their right to write according to their preference, but we should hesitate in accepting their claim to progressivity, regardless of the frameworks and buzzwords they trumpet. For if a Philippine practitioner has been able to convince Western (or Westernized) investors that they could assuage their postcolonial guilt by throwing money at a film project that has minimal or no chance of earning back its expense, then that may be counted as a separate though minor victory all its own, with concomitant Western acclaim as frosting on the madeleine. Critics groups might believe that some glamour rubs off on them when they mimic Western award-givers, but the only historical question that must be asked here is devastatingly simple: how authentic is a product that makes use of native elements but guarantees that only non-natives will be able to tolerate it?

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Final Category

A corollary to this concern for popular acceptance is the manner in which films that belong to the very first category mentioned by Comolli and Narboni – where they described the majority of film productions as belonging to this order of output that neither politicizes its material nor devises ways to expose, if not subvert, the mechanisms of ideology – should be treated. In the era of new media, when the possibility of comprehensive commentary has become increasingly realizable, the act of dismissing an entire group of entries should not be regarded as tantamount to ignoring them altogether. What should be cultivated by what they termed scientific criticism is discursive action, with activism always a potential ideal. A textual failure, for example, requires that film critics “look into the way the ideological system and its products merge at all levels: to study the phenomenon whereby a film being shown to an audience becomes a monologue, in which the ideology talks to itself.”

11011In fact, Comolli and Narboni prescribe a more passive response to their fifth category (out of seven – the final two were covered in the previous section): “we have absolutely no intention of joining the current witch-hunt against [these films]…. They criticize themselves, even if no such intention is written into the script, and it is irrelevant and impertinent to do so for them. All we want to do is show the process in action.” The advantage of hindsight allows us to see that the more mature a national industry has become, the more films than in any category, other than the first, wind up in this category. Unsurprisingly, these films could be mistaken by careless observers as classifiable in the first category, “at first sight [belonging] firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner. For though they start from a non-progressive standpoint, ranging from the frankly reactionary through the conciliatory to the mildly critical, they have been worked upon, and work, in such a real way that there is a noticeable gap, a dislocation, between the starting point and the finished product.”

11011The article’s elaboration on this category, about as long as the first one, turns on an awareness and acceptance of deconstructive principles. This places young Filipino critics at a grave disadvantage, since this now-standard Western approach still has to be introduced in the country’s secondary and core university curricula. Intensive self-study in poststructural philosophies and methods should therefore be part of the basic training for aspiring critical practitioners, inasmuch as the right-wing clericalist domination of Philippine education still has to be dismantled.[3] Other historical and theoretical contexts presumed in the article will also have to be pursued more intensively in specialized film studies, starting with the film-realist concepts of André Bazin and the politique des auteurs of the New-Wave participants in Cahiers du Cinéma (already mentioned in the previous section’s historical contextualizing).[4] All of these will have to be worked through even before the study of deconstruction can be initiated, which in turn will bring the serious critic up to date on the theoretical concepts in film theory right after Bazin effectively declared an end to concerns with the specificities of the medium.

11011For these reasons I would recommend caution in navigating the two opposed tendencies we find in politicized Philippine film criticism: either a leapfrogging from the humanist pseudo-Marxism underlying the auteurism that enables critics everywhere to imagine themselves in conversation with the global film community, to contemporary abstractions in identity or intersectional activism, usually adopted without the authors’ appreciation of how these were rooted in a now seemingly distant call to read Marxist texts anew and reconfigure these discoveries in the constantly evolving present, thereby enabling right-wing cooptation; or a return to some form of Marxist orthodoxy, usually affirmed by organizational practice, with necessarily a resolute denial of how circumstances in the specific ideas’ historical context exposed the weaknesses and inadequacies of the ideas in question, and how these had to be replaced with more useful applications. As usual in materialist cultural studies, a tracking of the circuits of pelf and power will reveal which critical institutions benefit from these twin regressive ideologies of auteurism and high-brow aestheticization of film discourse; concerned critical thinkers owe it to themselves, the mass audience, and outstanding practitioners, to identify the UPFI/FFCC and call to question its members’ claims to progressive credibility, instead of allowing the axis to trap them in an unnecessary, unproductive, and unending orbit.

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Filmic Implications

All this hemming and hawing on my end though is in fact a prelude to a final spot of brightness. Despite the editorial authors’ near-virtual dismissal of films in this fifth group (sometimes called “category e” – see Appendix), the study of these types of works and the artists who created them has constituted the largest body of film criticism in the West’s politicized journals. It provided an impetus for revaluating the earlier Cahiers batch members’ appreciation of the works of Alfred Hitchcock as well as their recuperation of B-(and lower-)film productions. The challenge is something that only genuine film connoisseurs will be able to welcome, rather than fraudsters who make a pretense at upholding outmoded political ideals and use their commitments as an excuse to spend as little time as possible in repeatedly watching entries that they admit fondness for, delving into the films’ production circumstances, inspecting how these apparatuses reconfigure themselves as transmitters of pleasure, querying how their appreciation of the films’ political achievements matches or departs from the audiences’ response, and so on.

11011One means by which these types of more definitively materialist and observational criticism can be facilitated is via a more intensive awareness of the political economy of the studios and governmental institutions responsible for film production and policy implementation. Even in the instance of “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” this lack was immediately noted, critiqued, and addressed by Western film scholars. The not-so-great news for progressively inclined Filipino critics is that these studies will also have to be undertaken, if we desire to have more solid grounding for the practice of post-canonical, anti-auteurist, genuinely politically responsive film appreciation in the Philippines.

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Notes

The idea of using the Cahiers du Cinéma editorial to critique the state of Pinas film criticism stemmed from intensive discussions with the participants of Writing Pinas Film Commentary, a short online course held during March-April 2022; thanks to enrollees Manuel A. Alindogan Jr., Ace Balbarez, Roland Cartagena, Luna Sicat Cleto, Christine Marie L. Magpile, Homer B. Novicio, Ryan Oquiza, Josh Paradeza, and Jianne Piguing, and auditors Jerrick Josue David, Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, and Raffy Tejada. The article is for unaffiliated Philippine film critics, among whom Jojo Devera, Epoy Deyto, and Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr. have continued to provide me with useful insights over the years. I can only keep hoping that my output becomes worthy of the high standards they maintain for themselves.

[1] This may have been a typo for “specious,” although the non-literal definition of “spacious” can also make sense, in a less useful way.

[2] This was stated in a number of interviews by Marilou Diaz-Abaya, which I recollected in the obituary I wrote on her. See “The Carnal Moral of a Brutal Miracle,” Millennial Traversals: Outliers, Juvenilia, & Quondam Popcult Blabbery (Part II: Expanded Perspectives) (Quezon City: Amauteurish Publishing, 2019): 24-28.

[3] One of the ironies in the ongoing years-long attempt to revise the country’s education curriculum is that the participants in the Commission on Higher Education’s Technical Committee for Humanities Education are mostly associated with secular institutions. The members of the conservative left, having been rooted in state universities (where they once epitomized the only radical option during the latter Cold-War era, roughly coexistent with the Marcos dictatorship), now benefit too immensely from the control of perks, positions, grants, exchanges, and so on, to be able to initiate significant adjustments in their ideological positions. This resembles the “retreat” of Western leftists to the halls of academia after May ’68, with one crucial difference: those practitioners made use of a free and stable environment in order to continually develop their critique of orthodox Marxism, to make it more useful for contemporary conditions.

[4] Although acknowledging André Bazin’s contributions, the Cahiers editorial writers preferred to endorse Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary praxis. They also repudiated the phenomenological positivism of the then-fashionable Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as the mechanical materialism of orthodox Marxists and the debates on economic determinism that it generated, while acknowledging the usefulness of Louis Althusser’s critiques of both Stalinism and Marxist humanism as well as the semiotic tradition that emerged from Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic studies. I am unaware which of Mikhail Bakhtin’s texts were already available in France around this time, although Comolli and Narboni evince an awareness of dialogism. I would strongly suggest an inspection of the carnivalesque for the purpose of furthering progressivity in media practice, but this notion seems to have bypassed the authors.

Appendix: “Category E” Samples
[Posted separately]

Works Cited

Comolli, Jean-Luc, and Jean Narboni. “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Editorial. Cahiers du Cinéma 216 (October 1969): 11-15. Trans. Susan Bennett. Screen 12.1 (Spring 1971): 27-36. See as well The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973), ed. Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), for a fuller grasp of this era. The book is in 2 volumes (1, Ideology & Politics; and 2, Aesthetics & Ontology), and may be availed in open-access formats directly from the publisher in certain locales.

David, Joel. “Pinoy Film Criticism: A Lover’s Polemic.” Manila Review 3 (August 2013): 6-8.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam, and Robert Galeta. New York: Athlone Press, 1983 & 1985.

“On Poetics and Practice of Film Criticism in the Philippines: A Roundtable Discussion.” Ed. Patrick F. Campos. Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society 13.1 (June 2016): 148-87.

[Click here to return to the opening section and here to proceed to the Appendix]

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THE PROBLEM OF OUR CRITICAL APPROACHES

[Click to go to the following sections: What Dreams Have Gone; Geneses; Refinements; Notes. Here are further links for the separately posted second of two parts as well as for the Appendix.]

You are so fortunate, a colleague from my long-ago activist past told me, that the debate over political ideals is now being conducted in terms of rival releases. Typically I neither assented nor demurred, since I didn’t know how to tease out the implications of the statement. For one thing, I wasn’t in the spaces where the conflicts were taking place – the cinemas of the urban capital, rather than in one or more of the streaming services available to overseas viewers. For another thing, I was familiar with the “canon” of anti-dictatorship texts, most of them films and books, with certain netizens bravely circulating links to digital files intended to showcase the most vital among the films that took a stance against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos (Sr.), some of them even while he was still in power. (A similar collection of PDFs has also been in circulation, and I enjoin readers who have the hard-drive space to download what they can, if only out of duty to liberal commitments, while taking care to continue reading.) Finally the national university’s film institute, which I was instrumental in founding, announced a number of simultaneous courses on film and martial law, which I imagine draw up screenings of works intended to highlight the most exemplary samples, possibly many of the same titles that appear in the aforementioned collection of links.

11011With the essential proviso that I have neither seen the twin battling films of the moment, nor glanced at any of the so-far unposted syllabi of the University of the Philippines Film Institute courses, I maintain that it would still be possible to draw up a critique of contemporary critical approaches to what we might term “martial-law cinema” in the Philippines. The critique necessarily has to begin with the institution that purports to provide guidance in endorsing supposedly appropriate methods for evaluating cinema: the UPFI itself, which was molded by personalities associated with the Filipino Film Critics Circle (hereafter FFCC), whose most senior member claimed critical credibility on the basis of belonging to a group that handed out incorruptible (in his words, non-purchasable) awards. This was apparently in response to a critique of Filipino film criticism that I published almost a decade ago, where I deplored the model proffered by the FFCC – a predictable series of evaluations predicated on the prospect of announcing nominees and winners on an annual basis, premised on the false assumption that a finalized organic work can be broken down and discussed according to discrete creative, histrionic, and technical elements.

11011To the FFCC’s credit, after sponsoring a UPFI “roundtable” held while I had to attend my overseas classes where my points were attacked without naming either me or the article I wrote, the group’s awards started exhibiting a concern for ideological discourse, which their elder members insisted on announcing especially during instances when their choices of winners raised more issues than they resolved. All that this served to do, however, was paper over the larger issue that I raised: that in so far as film criticism should be concerned, award-giving can only be a secondary concern at least, or at best should be of zero concern whatsoever. To make matters worse, the FFCC’s guiding lights appeared to take the cue from their supposedly most highly qualified member, who outlined a prescription for evaluating the worthiness of films. The best ones, he asserted, should deal explicitly with poverty while using high-art principles; works that refuse to eschew what he derided as mainstream aesthetics should be condemned as essentially reactionary.

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What Dreams Have Gone

One can and should date the source of these progressive-sounding notions. A Western school of Marxism refused the orthodox (Soviet) reduction of artworks and literature to the nature of the economic systems that generated them – which is to say, successful socialist works can only be produced in a socialist system. The positive contribution of this new school – which at one point did call itself New School – was to allow authors to operate within pre-socialist systems, following the orthodox teleology of capitalism eventually succumbing to socialism. You can imagine how such a rejection of orthodox prescriptions could induce guilt in Christianized (especially Catholicized) practitioners, including critics, despite the fact that they were finally permitted to indulge in pop-culture commentary. This is why this school insisted on upholding the “highest” aesthetic standards formulated by modernism, which was after all the ultimate goal of post-capital development. This is the reason why this school’s acolytes in the Philippines could think it only appropriate to select their most-awarded filmmaker as their youngest life-achievement winner; the reality that the mass audience (not just in the Philippines) will never be persuaded to attend the screening of black-and-white movies dominated by extremely long shots with running times reaching up to 11 hours didn’t seem to be an issue whatsoever with these trophy-givers.

11011Hence Filipino movie-goers can be occasionally interested in politicized discourses in films, as they are at the moment and as they had been in the past. But in the general course of film history, they will turn to whatever available fare of “reactionary” material happens to be on offer, whether these be sex, violence, toilet-humor comedy, feel-good fantasies, melodramas on the rich and powerful, regurgitations of the latest global film trend, and so on. Within this scenario, critics and professors will feel justified in their uppity disdain for mass culture and continue insisting on so-called progressive material infused with the exclusivist aesthetics that they presumably studied and assimilated, pointing to mass rejection as proof that they deserve to latch onto their institutional perks while they patiently seek to disseminate their ideals via awards, courses, books, articles, and reviews.

11011This would be the kind of scenario we should all settle for if there weren’t any other option available. But I would not be writing this if this were so. The failure of the UPFI/FFCC axis is in insistently overlooking the aforementioned option, actually a once-new though now long-established progressive tradition, for the sake of maintaining their claims to credibility, premised on handing out recognition to the practitioners they favor (and withholding the same to practitioners they wish to punish, but that’s an entire other can of worms). From this point it should be evident that a bit of overseas historical contextualizing will be necessary, and most of it was overlooked by Noypi progressives – mainly because it didn’t directly involve the then-flourishing socialist bloc and it bypassed the country’s neocolonial centers (specifically the US and Vatican State); its impact on Western film studies, though, was immediate and overwhelming and still persistent, but one would not be able to appreciate its prevalence if one remained ignorant of its origin.

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Geneses

The event that marked this turning point in Western film discourse was the May 1968 turmoil in Paris. It’s considered the closest instance that a Western country ever came to a Marxist revolution; the fact that it failed because of the Communist leadership’s capitulation became the starting point for reconsidering the principles and strategies behind socialist ideals, with the then-existent systems increasingly labeled as “orthodox” or “vulgar” in their misreadings and misappropriations of progressive thinkers starting with good old Karl. The full-scale collapse of this bloc around two decades later, in a series of mostly peaceful upheavals, led to a renewal of debates and expressions of mourning, with Communism returning to the spectral position that it had earlier assumed in The Communist Manifesto (1848).

11011Progressive cultural scholars did not look on helplessly during all this time; neither were they content to rely on prescriptions that preceded May 1968 (which groups like the FFCC apparently regard as sufficient for their purposes). The male critics who advocated for a dubious filmic revolution, who converged in the early editions of Cahiers du Cinéma, had moved on to flourishing careers as the guiding lights of the French New Wave. If you want to look into the aspiration of film institutions, including the UPFI, to train young people to become film critics who could later succeed as directors, it all derives from an attempt to replicate a cultural phenomenon that should have occurred only once, in a developed society primed for this kind of intervention, with standard film language still straining to break free of Classical Hollywood strictures. To see it being reconfigured as a model worthy of emulation in cultural contexts far removed from Cold War tensions and late-European modernity, is to find parodic elements emerging in the mix; to insist that it can be productively applied to a postcolonial culture necessarily positioned against Euro-American traditions, is to find parody slipping into pathos.

11011By the time the late 1960s rolled around, the original French New-Wave batch was sufficiently ensconced in their country’s film establishment while a new generation of Cahiers critics, politicized yet wary of a wholesale rejection of historical lessons, found its approaches challenged by a more trad-left publication, Cinéthique. In late 1969, Cahiers published its groundbreaking editorial titled “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” initially a short dozen pages that ventured to explain its stance toward what constituted films that were worthy of critical attention (a translated copy of which is uploaded here). The article listed seven categories under which films may be classified, with the first three describing the types of films that may be regarded without reservation. The first category, comprising films that should be dismissed (though see my later qualifier), would be works that “are imbued through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated form, and give no indication that their makers were even aware of the fact.” Significantly, this covers the majority of productions, “even those whose discourse is explicitly political” (another category covers this seeming contradiction more definitively). The next two categories, comprising works that the publication welcomed as its objects of study, would be “those [films] which attack their ideological assimilation … by direct political action, on the level of the ‘signified,’ … [and by formal innovation, when they] challenge the concept of ‘depiction’ and mark a break with the tradition embodying it” in one category; and in another, those films which operate like the second case, “whose content is not explicitly political, but in some way becomes so through the criticism practiced on it through its form.”

11011With this enumeration of categories, the editorial authors, Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, not only signalled their acceptance of long-standing progressive ideals in aesthetic evaluation; they also engaged in what was even then a problematic reduction of a collaborative product into elements that could be more clearly distinguished before the entire process of production has been completed. The separation of content from form could prove tricky enough in the fine arts and literature, as anyone who attempts to compare, say, a ratty volume of a Sergei Eisenstein collection on stained newsprint with barely stable binding, with one of the FFCC’s ultra-elegant and generously illustrated coffee-table anthologies, will presently realize. One ought to cost more than the other, but then the FFCC’s, may we say, uncritical acquiescence to the values of (among other things) bourgeois comfort, Western institutional validation, and ideological stagnation – should no longer render surprising their conviction that their decisions are beyond assailment. I would pay more for the Eisenstein, and so should you, but we may have to wait for too long before an FFCC anthology sells at the price it deserves to be pegged at.

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Refinements

The last two items listed by Comolli and Narboni concern a larger category of a once-flourishing venture called cinéma direct (actually a specialized approach to documentary film practice), so we may mention them next for representing just as small a proportion of output as the favored initial categories. The first, more typical sample would be those that “suffer under the primary and fundamental illusion that if they once break off the ideological filter of narrative traditions … reality will then yield itself up in its true form,” a flawed assumption since “reality holds within itself no hidden kernel of self-understanding, of theory, of truth,” where “ideology goes on display to prevent itself from being shown up for what it really is, contemplates itself but does not criticize itself.” In the second type of “‘live cinema,’ [the] director is not satisfied with the idea of the camera ‘seeing through appearances,’ but attacks the basic problem of depiction by giving an active role to the concrete stuff of his film, [thus making it] productive of meaning and not just a passive receptacle for meaning produced outside it (in the ideology).” The final category, per the authors, deserves the same treatment as the second and third groups mentioned previously, where evaluators are tasked to demonstrate “how the films operate critically on the level of signified and signifiers” – or in so many words, how they succeed as progressive texts.

11011In the case of Philippine films, overt political discourse is extremely rare since an atmosphere of a special type of real-life anxiety (most obviously, political campaigns) first has to be fostered in order to convince viewers to attend to works that purport to deal with provisory issues, just as other films get produced according to certain pop-culture markers: sports or beauty-contest victories, dramatic (preferably bloody) combat stories, rags-to-riches narratives, lurid sex crimes, bedroom-to-boardroom scandals of the rich and powerful, and so on. Hence one has to be prepared to accept a certain degree of awkward, sometimes inadequate technical competence if one were to scout for passable samples, with critical responses sometimes on the mark, more often way off. From the First Golden Age of the 1950s studio system, Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa (1958) presents a large impoverished family, overseen by their youngest daughter, struggling against a callous and indomitable patriarchal system, while the post-studio system’s Sa Atin ang Daigdig (dir. Cesar J. Amigo, 1965) reworks a similar situation of a poor woman confronting challenges to her social mobility using the unexpected framework of a romantic comedy.

11011The martial-law period (1972-86) of Ferdinand E. Marcos ironically led to a flowering of filmic expressions, primarily because the dictatorship regarded cinema as an ideal showcase for its claims to benevolence, with the country’s artists concomitantly finding in the medium an opportunity to practice their respective professions while being able to earn a decent living. Before Lino Brocka or Ishmael Bernal came up with genuinely progressive texts using Cahiers du Cinéma’s prescription of transforming form alongside content (which, to be clear, Brocka’s 1975 Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag fails on several levels at attempting), Celso Ad. Castillo stepped up with Daluyong at Habagat in 1976, and Elwood Perez countered the next year with Masikip, Maluwang: Paraisong Parisukat (alongside Castillo’s far-less-vital Burlesk Queen). Perez’s work was resolutely ignored by most local observers, while Daluyong at Habagat was bafflingly excoriated by both conservative and progressive members of the FFCC.[1] As a result, several of the aforementioned films, except for Malvarosa and Maynila, are either extremely rare or lost.

11011What tends to trip up local evaluators is the relationship of progressive film discourse with genre. The FFCC and its ilk adheres to a Marxian prescription tethered to the mid-20th-century celebration of the revolutionization of film technique via the innovations introduced by the French New Wave and its aftermath. From the perspective of US-dominated global distribution, these products were initially arthouse material, particularly in contexts (including the US’s) that required specialized handling, including exemptions from censorship. The keyword here is “initially”: once any innovation becomes viable in the sense of being both affordable and profitable, it inevitably gets cannibalized and plugged into a system of blanket commodification. What was posited as the challenge to the hegemony of Classical Hollywood posed by the transmogrification of New-Wave principles to a just-as-hegemonic European art cinema (unfortunately accepted as a progressive standard by an over-eager but surprisingly inadequately prepared Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books) eventually devolved into a generic formularization that can be deduced from the Brocka “triumphs” at Cannes Film Festival: observant of Classical Hollywood narrative unities, tackling realist subject matter reflective of the country’s Third-World condition, with a nihilistic or defeatist resolution that signals the decadence and/or desperation that a neocolonial dictatorship levies on its population.

11011The reduction of Euro art-film practice to increasingly remunerative generic practice should not be surprising to long-term observers of global film trends. But rather than point out how deplorable this way of all flesh, or celluloid, has turned out, I prefer to point back to the remaining categories in the Cahiers editorial, after this admittedly subjective recollection of what our progressive-film achievements have been. What should not surprise us is how the filmmakers under discussion regarded it as their prerogative to deploy whatever genre happened to lend itself to commercial exploitation at their specific moment of production. The question of worthiness among genres has of course been a constant stumbling block in narrative criticism, preceding film analyses by several centuries of literary practice. Even Comolli and Narboni were experienced enough to describe the “ideological filter” of narrative in no uncertain terms as “not the most important one.”[2]

11011Not surprisingly, it would take Brocka’s breakaway from his Cannes contacts for him to embark on what was an auspicious start in progressive film production, with his multigeneric metatextual Gumapang Ka sa Lusak (1990). Certain gestures toward this achievement were made earlier, in Gregorio Fernandez’s trailblazing Hukom Roldan (1957) as well as Mike de Leon’s shift from metaphorical treatments to the more openly (though timidly) metonymic Sister Stella L. (1984). Prior to these achievements by the country’s globally recognized auteurs, Bernal carved out a vigorous social critique while developing a distinctly homegrown genre, the multicharacter film format, with two films that should more properly be regarded as an originator text and its sequel: Aliw (1979) and Manila by Night (1980).[3] Further studies will need to be done to answer the question of why such a productive individual was never able to attain the several future peaks that these mid-career concoctions promised. Meanwhile we need to move on to the crux of our argument on Philippine political cinema, proceeding from the rest of the categories brought up in the Cahiers editorial.

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Notes

Acknowledgments and list of works cited appear in the Notes section of the second (concluding) part of this article.

[1] The deeply weird reversals of fortune of Celso Ad. Castillo’s standing with the critics’ group will require more intensive research into the dynamics of the organization. All I can attempt for now is a sketch of the occurrences and the possible reasons that lay behind them, based on one observable premise and another speculative one. The group, despite its claim, has been unable to resist its preference for personalities associated with a geopolitical designation that we may provisionally, though admittedly not entirely accurately, call Dilimanian – i.e., nominees associated with the primary scholastic consortium comprising the national university, Ateneo de Manila, and De La Salle (in decreasing order of preference), as well as their non-Manila campuses, will have a stronger chance of winning their annual competitions. Castillo, Elwood Perez, and a long list of other talents, on the other hand, hail from the University Belt of Manila, if not elsewhere.

11011The other, more regrettable, form of discrimination can only be inferred circumstantially. The year the group was founded and Castillo released Daluyong at Habagat, a national university member had a similarly overtly political entry, Sakada. D&H tackled labor unrest but set itself in a past era, while Sakada’s depiction of rural troubles was more identifiably contemporary (though ideologically problematic and occasionally risible in execution). Said faculty filmmaker was supposed to have resigned, in observance of a rule that industry figures should no longer participate in award-giving activities. During the next year’s deliberations, where Castillo’s Burlesk Queen was far and away the strongest entry, he attended meetings to openly denounce the film using words never heard before or since in such gatherings, resulting in zero wins for BQ – a turnout that caught media observers by surprise.

11011The next year, with an overly romanticized epic on peasant rebellion, Castillo finally managed to score his first and only critics’ prize. Although this third entry, like the earlier two, was period in scope, the critics’ reviews interpreted it as if it were still an ongoing contemporary concern (which, as in the previous films’ instances, it was). My reading of these developments, pending plausible confirmation or repudiation by expert observers, is that the members’ Dilimanian parochialism was compounded by political partisanship: the erstwhile revolutionaries referenced in Castillo’s material would have been affiliated with the pro-Soviet Communist party, whose leadership (much like France’s) had unilaterally capitulated to the government’s inducements to surrender, in exchange for estates in Mindanao. Nevertheless Castillo’s cinematic treatments never wavered in upholding his rebel characters’ opposition to the establishment. Only with the addition of members more inclined to acknowledge his talent and daring was he able to finally win favor with the organization.

[2] See Barbara Klinger’s “‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited” in the Film Genre Reader IV (ed. Barry Keith Grant, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012, pp. 93-109) for a provocative – though necessarily dated – formulation of what might constitute a progressive genre film. In a another volume titled Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner enact a similar enumeration of properties to identify a progressive film text beyond generic requisites, but include the useful admonition that “the criterion for judging such matters should be pragmatic, one that measures the progressive character of a text according to how well it accomplishes its task in specific contexts of reception. What counts as progressive varies with time and situation, and what works in one era or context might fail in another. Moreover, the notion of progressive is always differentially or relationally determined” (268). The Cahiers du Cinéma editorial may be problematized within these terms, although we can maintain for now that its focus on content and form furnishes it with transhistorical value.

[3] I elaborated on the multicharacter narrative mode, including a discussion of its radical potential as well as its impact on Philippine cinema, in my book on Bernal’s 1980 film, Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017). Also see “This Genre Which Is Not One: The Philippine Multicharacter Film,” UNITAS: Semi-Annual Peer-Reviewed International Online Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society 95.2 (July 2022): 315-47, DOI:10.31944/2022950211.

[Click here for the concluding section and here for the Appendix]

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