To jump to a reverse-chronological listing of uploads in previous years, please click here for: 2021; 2020; 2019; 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015; & 2014.
December 16 – Why does December seem to induce these reflective turns of thought? The latest entry in my Queries page (indexed as “Gatekeeping”):
* I remember sending you the question on gatekeeping that appears at the end of this section, way before the other queriers. You gave me what you described as a tentative answer. Do you intend to answer the question, once and for all? Or are you hesitating because of the new controversy you stirred up with your former colleagues in the Philippines? (Which, BTW, I found highly instructive but scary in its rigor – I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to respond to it, roundtable or no roundtable.)
Thanks for the appreciative remark (in re “From Cloud to Resistance”). I do feel worried, not because of any retaliation they might (again) undertake, but rather because their inaction might be indicative of the larger public response. So far, most of the people whose feedback I value have signalled their bemusement, if not outright support. Then again that could also mean that I’m just preaching to the already-converted. I get how blog posts tend to produce an impact nowadays that’s slower and milder than they used to. I get some consolation in observing how publications exclusively featured in Ámauteurish! are starting to show up in the bibliographies of articles in major journals and even in top-university dissertations. I’d prefer though to have such rarefied appreciation shared by the Philippine public while I’m still around to observe how it affects their thinking processes, for better or worse. The fact that entrenched authorities have seen fit to denounce and even censor me convinces me that my recommendations are unacceptable to these soon-to-be-irrelevant mandarins.
What I look forward to is a culture where younger critics critique what I write in order to move further onward, instead of spinning back to established ideas and processes (as a few of them actually declared: rather than take a close look at the ideas I spout, they simplistically presume that because I collide with self-identified progressive personalities, then I must be anti-progressive myself). For this reason, I don’t think I’ll be able to answer your query about whether I intend to “gatekeep” Pinas film criticism. I might seem to have that effect right now, but….
October 2022
October 16 – Nearly entirely forgot to post the results of the deliberations of the council of evaluators (of which I was chair) for the first Shout Out Film Festival of Pelikulove. I uploaded the list of citations and appended the description of the process that I read during the recognition ceremony, held online last September 24.
September 2022
September 13 – I will continue correcting and refining “From Cloud to Resistance,” my contribution to political discourse in Pinas cinema, but with the completion of a stand-alone appendix, I have to begin letting go. So the multi-part article’s months-long drafting stage is over, and bato-bato sa langit, as old wits used to say, roughly translatable as “a pigeon in flight (craps where it will, or must).” Herewith are the uploads, in one convenient collection: Part 1, “The Problem of Our Critical Approaches”; Part 2, “Toward a More Responsive Critical Practice”; and Appendix, “‘Category E’ Samples.”
September 7 – “The Problem of Our Critical Approaches,” the incomplete article I posted earlier (see August 30 entry below), is now the section title of the first part of “From Cloud to Resistance.” The second (concluding) part has also been uploaded, titled “Toward a More Responsive Critical Practice.” These will continue to be revised until their titles’ “draft” indicator has been deleted.
August 2022
August 30 – “The Problem of Our Critical Approaches” is not just a draft but also the first of two parts, of an attempt to respond to the recent politicization of film discourse in the country. It will continue to be revised, notated, and expanded; even the title is just a placeholder, an unsatisfying one at that.
August 22 – “The Performances of Nora Aunor et al.” has now become the most extensive feature in Ámauteurish! For this reason, the entries have been organized according to films that feature Nora Aunor, non-films (including TV series or episodes as well as concert excerpts) that also feature Aunor, and films that feature performers other than Aunor. Years of release have also been added, to help casual browsers decide what to read. The opening sentence provides a link to the first category in the newly revised directory.
August 9 – “Artist in a Hurry” is the obituary I wrote on Cherie Gil, first published in The FilAm. Gone too soon, never to be forgotten.
August 7 – A swift tribute in The FilAm to the late film and theater maven, Cherie Gil, who succumbed to cancer last August 5.
August 6 – “A Formative Sojourn” is a personal account of insights I picked up on film criticism, based on my experience with the local awards-obsessed critics’ circle.
July 2022
July 28 – My latest peer-reviewed journal article is out. It’s titled “This Genre Which Is Not One,” and it’s in a special (centennial) issue of UNITAS: Semi-Annual Peer-Reviewed International Online Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society. Best part, with more to come, is that the journal now has digital object identifiers, so my contribution has DOI:10.31944/2022950211.
July 15 – The previously mentioned guest feature by Jojo Devera is now titled “The Performances of Nora Aunor et al.” and includes reviews of performances in films made by Aunor’s fellow National Artists for Film, namely director Marilou Diaz-Abaya and scriptwriter Ricky Lee; initial entries are movies that include Vilma Santos (in Baby Tsina, 1984) and Lorna Tolentino and Jaclyn Jose (in May Nagmamahal sa Iyo, 1996).
July 9 – Running for a week now, “The Performances of Nora Aunor,” a special feature by guest critic-archivist Jojo Devera, has 16 entries and counting. Drawn from the author’s Facebook posts, it includes (so far) a TV movie, a live concert, and song performances, posted with video excerpts. The link is now the first entry in the Ámauteurish! sidebar.
June 2022
June 26 – “A Season of Comebacks” is an opinion piece on issues pertaining to the current batch of National Artists.
June 11 – The latest recipients of the Order of the National Artist have been announced. Since the start of Ámauteurish!, I’d written on two of them – Nora Aunor after an earlier President rejected her nomination, and Marilou Diaz-Abaya after she died. For a third winner, Ricky Lee, I submitted a letter addressed to the ONA Secretariat, which I uploaded some time afterward but embargoed while the process was ongoing. It generated positive responses from the few people who’d read it, and since it has now officially become part of the public record, I’m making it available right here.
June 3 – “What Lies Above” is a mini-commentary that ought to concern folks who observe the state of film criticism in the country.
May 2022
May 27 – “The Studio System’s Final Movie Queen” is my short tribute to Susan Roces (1941-2022). It was originally printed in The FilAm.
May 24 – A too-short recollection I wrote of the last First Golden Age movie star, Susan Roces, who passed away last May 20. It was printed in The FilAm and is titled “Jesusa Sonora Is Gone; Long Live Susan Roces.”
May 20 – In response to friends who’ve remarked that some titles I announced as forthcoming in the Books section have still not come out: some of these have their own publication dates already indicated, so it’s all a matter of waiting. The rest were affected by the now-subsiding global pandemic, since no one really looks forward to delays in anything, right? In any case, whenever possible, I uploaded some of my own articles. When you find a title that contains a link, just click on it to be able to open my contribution. These links will remain for as long as the volumes stay unpublished, and will be either embargoed or modified, depending on the arrangements I can work out, once the books come out.
May 6 – My first book, still a long way from the nearly $1,000 that Fields of Vision once posted a few years ago, also at Amazon. But the lesson still holds: why shell out precious funds for a pre-owned, pre-corrected, and pre-updated volume when the digital edition’s available on this site, free as any number of world-class plunderers? (Books will be at the Books section. I don’t know till when, but I hope to be around for a while so I can make sure they’ll remain available.)
May 2 – Took out three awkwardly classified entries in my Books listing and provided a new subsection for them, titled Forewords and Introductions.
April 2022
April 27 – A series of testimonials regarding the short film criticism workshop I conducted was posted on the Facebook page of the sponsor, Pelikulove. I wish I could be egotistic enough to reproduce the statements here, but you’ll have to content yourself (for now) with logging into your account and following this here link.
March 2022
March 22 – In order to cover local multicharacter film texts in detail, I brought with me copies of the published scripts of Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night and Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Moral. I also had a transcription of Bernal’s Aliw, completed earlier, and transcribed a VHS copy (purchased from LVN Pictures) of Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa prior to working on my dissertation. I lost the Aliw text, but recently discovered a printout I made of the Malvarosa transcription. So I scanned the material that I had originally written and saved and whose digital copy I’d lost, and uploaded it just now; it will be listed in the FWIW section of Extras.
I’d also prepared a chart of Filipino film releases from the beginning up to that point in the study, and extended it when I uploaded it in 2016. Then I realized I needed to consider the film-viewing experience from the perspective of the audience, so I requested a research team comprising former students (headed by Melanie Joy C. Garduño) to count the number of foreign releases per month during the martial-law years of Ferdinand E. Marcos. When I got the figures, I realized that the exercise would not have much productive application beyond the usual quantitative accounting, so I set aside the data.
Recently I came across the tally sheets again, scanned and processed the material, and decided to upload the resulting chart anyway FWIW (which is why it will be listed in the same section described in the preceding paragraph). It’s frankly fascinating to see the great discrepancy between foreign releases and local productions, especially at the beginning of the era. To save you the trouble of looking for it, I’m posting it right here, where you can click on it for a bigger and more complete image:
March 10 – I uploaded “The Political Is Personal,” my review of Sheila Coronel’s “Marcos and Memory: The Past in Our Future,” which was this year’s Adrian E. Cristobal Lecture of the Writers Union of the Philippines. This will be listed in the Remarks section.
March 6 – My latest review (such as it is) for The FilAm is on this year’s much talked-about Adrian E. Cristobal Lecture, sponsored by the Writers Union of the Philippines. It’s by Sheila Coronel, a former colleague during my campus journalism days, and titled “Marcos and Memory: The Past in Our Future.” I hope to be able to step away every so often from the subject of a long-deposed dictator but his family’s been determined to take over Pinas once more. We’ll see how this spins out after the presidential elections in May.
March 4 – Writing Pinas Film Commentary is the title of a now-forthcoming month-long online course for which I wrote a short, eponymously titled manual. The landing page is still on Ámauteurish!, but the entire text (in PDF format) can only be accessed at Pelikulove, which is sponsoring the activity.
February 2022
February 22 – Reprint of a reprint: my review of Subversive Lives, the family memoir edited by Nathan Quimpo and the late Susan Quimpo, came out in the January 2022 issue of The FilAm: Newsmagazine Serving Filipino Americans in New York. Titled “The Marcos Dictatorship and the Irreparable Damage to a Family, the Filipino Experience,” it was an abridged version of my original submission to The FilAm’s online edition and was first reprinted in the print edition’s August 2020 issue. I’m assuming that this current round is intended to shore up all available arguments against the Marcos family’s attempt to recapture the seat of power in the Philippines.
For a spell I had this strange notion that the majority of Filipinos, who were excluded from the so-called revolution that toppled the Marcos regime in February 1986, only want to be able to do it their way. I’ll continue to maintain my distance – literally too, stranded as I am in my overseas workplace – from political exercises, in order to maximize my amusement (thank you, Donald Trump & family, for the long-running global clown show! – now watch how a pro like Imelda manages to get away with illegally amassed billions). I’ll also still be entertaining these intensive speculations of how the Philippine political dispositif resolves its manifold contradictions within and outside the hallways of power.
February 21 – A recent addition to the List of Textual Problematics regarding my book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017), on the second sentence of page 69 (described in the post as Lino Brocka’s last-minute rejection of the commerce-vs.-artistry binary):
My primary source for this still-to-be-standardized insight has been Ricky Lee, who kept me updated during the making of Gumapang Ka sa Lusak [Dirty Affair] (1990), the project he was working on with Lino Brocka. Lee mentioned how delighted Brocka was that he could accept an outright commercial assignment yet imbue it with political relevance. This occurred at a felicitous intersection in Brocka’s career, where he had accumulated enough skills in a wide variety of popular genres during the precise historical moment when demonizing elected officials became extremely profitable box-office material. Lee devised a postmodern narrative that blended elements of the dance musical, suspense, melodrama, action, comedy, and soft-core porn to which Brocka once devoted specific projects in the past, within a brazenly reflexive premise. Brocka rose to the challenge while making sure to enjoy himself in the process, and was rewarded with not just what may have been his strongest box-office hit, but also a recognizable mass following: when he died in an accident the year after, the folk-hero dimension of his wake and funeral march would have been the envy of popular movie stars….
February 3 – Will responding to an HTML query enable you to claim techie status? I did provide an answer, although (story of my life) it only raises other issues.
February 1 – Welcoming the Year of the Tiger by easing the efforts of researchers: I went over my journal articles (categorized as peer-reviewed studies, review articles, or non-peer-reviewed items) and decided to upload PDF transcriptions of those whose journals required the user to register. When you see any affected entry, it will be followed by the instruction “Click here to download a PDF transcription,” with the link provided within. This also became an opportunity for me to update or correct any problems I came across in the articles themselves.
Plus an advanced Valentine’s treat for all those Noypi film-history nerds who I’m sure already know where to sniff it out.
January 2022
January 19 – A researcher asked me whether a well-known movie writer was once a member of the Filipino Film Critics Circle. I knew for a fact that he wasn’t, but I could not point to any existing comprehensive listing of the group’s past members. I looked up my Urian Anthology collections and included a note in my article on the group’s Wikipedia entry where I could provide a list of members since the 1970s.
January 16 – Not my idea of starting the year right, but then the pandemic already made clear that responsiveness is sometimes all that we can allow of ourselves, and that social media will constantly find ways of intruding no matter how far you flee. Then again, I do have more than a passing interest in the sociology of rumor. Melodramatic excerpts from the latest Q&A exchange: “I didn’t want to believe what I heard. Please tell me it isn’t true.” “I’ll be first to acknowledge that I occasionally commit errors, though not in this case.”
December 8 – Nothing’s expected to last forever, least of all ourselves. The definite thing about Ámauteurish! is that it is coterminous with me, in either literal or figurative senses. That is, it dies if ever I die (no automatic renewals for the subscriptions that sustain it), and if I do reach my impending retirement, it either “retires” or it may end if I’m unable to find a means of storing it anywhere online. This is the reason I’m making available as downloadable files all the material I can compile, slowed down (as is happening right now) only by the ambition and unfamiliarity of some conversion challenges. Just jotting down a few notions before moving onward some more.
December 3 – After a colleague started asking when I posted one of my early replies on the Queries page’s Selected Exchanges, I realized that I needed to indicate the dates when I provided individual answers. No need to be more specific than month and year, but it does seem like a lot more people have been reading the section and sending me queries of their own lately.
November 2021
November 28 – With my academic mentors all gone, I set down some notes in order to remind myself of the lessons they imparted. Also, with Pinas election campaign fever on the rise, I’m getting prodded once more to declare my political preference for everyone’s appraisal.
November 17 – A follow-through of my October 30 article for The FilAm (listed below), titled “Every Tier a Victory; Or Why Film Awards Don’t Have to Be So Divisive,” to be posted in the Remarks section’s opening Mega-Meta boxed feature.
November 8 – My cheerfully depraved friends (they know who they are) kept insisting that I post the source of the transcription of the Dovie Beams sex tapes. I kept averting my chaste organs of sight but finally managed to upload the entire hideosity. You’ll have to endure my intro to the book chapter to find it though, although just this once I’ll be providing the link to the PDF file.
October 2021
October 30 – My latest article for The FilAm, on a forthcoming film event, is titled “Nearly 3 Decades-Old FACINE Is the Longest-Running Fil-Am Film Festival.” The publication’s server was down for about a week but was restored just recently.
October 22 – “Don’t make the mistake of showing up at the University of the Philippines or you’ll be getting a taste of your own medicine” said one letter writer. I’ll have to congratulate myself for providing an answer while pretending to take the threat seriously.
October 20 – From the present decade going forward, I’ll be providing screen caps for my film reviews on Ámauteurish! whenever I can, because why not? Check out these layouts for my commentaries on Nerisa and on Lockdown.
October 14 – “I tend toward the most conservative writing rule available, just because this takes care of one basic area and allows me to indulge in the violation of preferences and sensibilities in other areas.” I couldn’t believe I’d actually be writing those words one day, but once I set them down, they started to make some sense. My latest response in answer to a detailed question.
September 2021
September 28 – “Nether Nation” is my review of Joel C. Lamangan’s Lockdown, originally published in The FilAm. This will be listed in the blog’s Remarks section.
September 27 – A review I wrote on a vital/viral entry came out today in The FilAm, titled “Macho Dancing Goes Virtual in Joel Lamangan’s Lockdown.” More cause for complaint from self-appointed moral guardians who think I should steer clear of “immoral” topics, but wait till the fuller version of the article comes out on this blog. (The FilAm stipulates a maximum word count, which I never managed to meet in all my first drafts.) Related issues in the September 10 & 11 entries below.
September 13 – An article I drafted earlier this year but still have to finalize: it’s on the most seriously neglected Filipino filmmaker, Gregorio “Yoyong” Fernandez (1904-73), and titled “A Missing Installation in the Philippine Pantheon.” Big words, I know, so consider the gauntlet thrown down.
September 11 – I was in New York City 20 years ago to the day, but I only found out what was happening that morning when my mother interrupted my dissertation writing with a long-distance call from Manila. The first tower crashed on live television just as I turned on the set. I knew everyone’s life would change from that point onward, including mine, even as we now still have to cope with more human-induced disasters, this time as consequences of extensive environmental degradation. Though I always thought the Twin Towers spoiled the beauty of the lower Manhattan skyline, I never imagined they’d be wiped out in such a horrifically inhumane manner.
This recollection was far from my mind when I added some Q&As to my blog’s long-stagnant Queries section a couple hours ago, one dealing with my supposed disrespect for a highly regarded Second Golden Age movie, and another regarding my use of dirty language. They seemed borderline-zany when I looked them over again, though not when I was drafting them. Judge for yourself, if you have some time to waste.
September 10 – How is the picture below, from a recent release, related to Ishmael Bernal’s 1980 film Manila by Night? The answer’s in my latest entry in the textual problematics I listed for my 2017 book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (available at major global outlets).
Screen cap from Joel C. Lamangan’s 2021 film Lockdown.
September 8 – Since Kritika Kultura made another recent adjustment to its home page and still has to link its Digital Object Identifiers, I have adjusted my articles’ DOIs to open the pages directly. (I have articles listed under two blog subsections – peer reviewed studies and non-peer-reviewed items.)
I have also opted to exclude myself from the editorial boards of journals of the Philippine national university’s College of Mass Communication, and belatedly rejected their so-called Glory Award.
August 2021
August 25 – “Siren Call” is my review of Lawrence Fajardo’s streaming entry Nerisa, first published August 23 in The FilAm. This piece will be stored in the blog’s Remarks section.
August 23 – Year’s half-over but I only managed this one review, of the latest film by Lawrence Fajardo. It (the review, not the film) is titled “In Nerisa, Viva Brings Back Regal’s Low-Budget Blockbuster Formula” and came out today in The FilAm. Been at work on blog-related material, though, so I hope to be able to come up with something soon.
July 2021
July 16 – “An Error in the Urian’s Internet Record” is an account of my short adventure in investigating an unacceptable inaccuracy of the official critics group’s declaration of the best local films of the 1970s. I was a member of the organization when the list was finalized and announced, which explains my investment in the issue. (This short report will be stored in the blog’s Remarks section.)
Also, the revision of the PDF version of Writing Pinas Film Commentary has been finalized, so the text may be downloaded once more. You can visit the book’s landing page and click at the Contents link, or open it directly here.
July 8 – Writing Pinas Film Commentary now has its own set of online pages, comprising a landing page and links to sections (actually shortish chapters). This makes it the first Ámauteurish! book available as both PDF and web item. The PDF download link appears on the book page’s listing of contents. I hope to make this kind of feature available to all my other book items on this blog. Patience is key.
June 2021
June 3 – Another e-book, downloadable for a change: Writing Pinas Film Commentary, also an Ámauteurish! exclusive. Only in PDF format for now. Get it while it’s hot.
June 2 – An article I once posted, “Some Words on Film Awards,” became part of Millennial Traversals and is therefore no longer on this blog, though still open-access if you can search for it. It contained a chart that listed (by category) all the film awards handed out in 1991. The same problem encountered by MediaWatch, the magazine that published it in 1992, also applied to the book format in which it now appears: it could not be printed on one page without being truncated. I reuploaded the chart itself, which can now be found in the Fil(m)ipiniana listing of the Extras section. To see the chart directly, click here.
May 2021
May 29 – The rediscovery of a 1958 LVN production titled Barkada [Gang], directed by Lou Salvador Sr. and uploaded on Mike de Leon’s Citizen Jake Vimeo page, led to some further commentary that I posted on my textual problematics page for Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017). The smorgasbord-movie trend was concocted by Sampaguita Pictures, which had been specializing in multicharacter productions as early as the mid-1950s. A late-’50s takeoff, the Lo’-Waist Gang bad-boy films created by practitioners associated with Premiere Productions, possibly convinced Sampaguita to find a way to profit from an innovation it initiated – hence the smorgasbord concept as well as the Stars ’66 batch of talents, two strategies that proved influential (because profitable) throughout the Second Golden Age and thereafter.
Barkada may be regarded as part of the aforementioned LWG trend, which points up the severe lack in sourcing evidentiary texts for local film history. As far as I know, the only proto-smorgasbord films available are two Sampaguita titles by the same director, Tony Cayado’s Mga Ligaw na Bulaklak [Wild Flowers] (1957) and Kaming mga Talyada [We Who Are Sexy] (1962), plus Armando Garces’s Sino ang Maysala? [Who Is to Blame?] (1957) – none of them in celluloid. Nothing else from a long list of smorgasbord movies and their predecessors is available (but kindly apprise me if I overlooked anything), with the painful irony that a rival studio once appropriated another outfit’s trend and now winds up with the only available filmic proof that LWG movies once existed.
Final unrelated though intriguing insight: the initial smorgasbord film practice of recruiting several directors, each of whom would direct an episode in an omnibus project, was observed in two competing entries from 1965 that were anything-but-multicharacter: the incumbent president’s campaign film Tagumpay ng Mahirap [Triumph of the Poor] (featuring talents associated with Premiere) as well as the pseudo-heroic Sampaguita production Iginuhit ng Tadhana [Drawn by Destiny]: The Ferdinand E. Marcos Story, annoyingly available for what it’s worth. (Also FWIW, Sampaguita was where then-hopeful movie aspirant Imelda Romualdez screen-tested, before she was Marcosed away.) The smorgasbord and Stars ’66 trends were launched the year after FM won, when an interesting new era for Pinas cinema (and Pinas history) took off.
May 1 – The Balagtas Awards were handed out yesterday in a ceremony broadcast as a Facebook live video. I uploaded my recording on Ámauteurish! for those who’re curious about what I said but don’t have the time to go through the few hours of the event – as well as the text I read, for those (like me) who can’t stand watching my own image onscreen.
April 2021
April 21 – You’re seeing it here first: a clearer pic of Ishmael Bernal with his mother Elena, in front of the coffee shop that “Ishma” opened and managed – and I don’t mean Kasalo. It’s from the must-read Pro Bernal Anti Bio volume (I posted this mini-review last year) drafted by Bernal, continued by Jorge Arago, and completed by Angela Stuart-Santiago. I discuss the pic in my Illustrational Problematics post that extends my corrigenda page (see my April 19 entry below) for my 2017 book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic – a must-read of another sort, available at major global outlets, pardon the opportunistic plug. Click on the pic for an even larger image:
April 19 – The corrigenda & problematics page for my book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (2017) was becoming too extensive. The corrigenda page now provides links for separate lists of textual problematics (issues that came up during or after the publication but could not be pursued without exceeding the project’s maximum word count) and illustrational problematics (the visual counterpart of textual problematics).
April 15 – “NUT’s Kernel,” originally published in The FilAm as “NUT to Film Critics: ‘Don’t Take Things Too Seriously,’” is my tribute to Nestor U. Torre.
Also, an addition to an earlier tribute, to Anita Linda, from Bibeth Orteza. It’s listed as endnote 4, but if you haven’t read yet the entire article, or want to reread it, start from the top. Because it’s Anita Linda.
April 14 – Out today in The FilAm, a tribute to the late Nestor U. Torre, founder of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino [Filipino Film Critics Circle] and director of the underappreciated (and tragically lost) Ang Isinilang Ko Ba’y Kasalanan? [Is It Wrong to Give Birth?], titled “NUT to Film Critics: ‘Don’t Take Things Too Seriously.’”
April 1 – Not only because I remain reluctant to return to my former intensive participation in social media: for the first time since Ámauteurish! launched in 2014, I am posting here something that has nothing to do with the blog, though it concerns an author-professor who had possibly the strongest impact on me as a queer feminist scholar. Julia Lesage, “just turning 82 and in good health and compos mentis,” writes what purports to be her latest (not last) editorial for Jump Cut, the journal that she and the dearly missed Chuck Kleinhans founded in 1974, and turns it into an assessment of her personal trajectory as well as a renewed call to academics everywhere to reconsider the consequences of using privilege to maintain critical independence. Typically unassuming, it’s titled “The Last Word: Since the Last Issue.”
March 2021
March 19 – Latest additions to the comprehensive Pinas film bibliography: City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila’s Alternative Film Culture (Jasmine Nadua Trice, in Cultural Studies & Political Economy); Melodrama and Asian Cinema (ed. Wimal Dissanayake, in Non-Filipino Anthologies); and Philippine Diary: A Gay Guide to the Philippines (Joseph Itiel, in Manuals & Reports).
March 17 – News about the Balagtas Award for Film Criticism, in The FilAm, a New York online newsmagazine. Originally announced on social media (with the accompanying illustration) by the Writers Union of the Philippines.
March 15 – My self-retraining in Microsoft Access in order to better maintain the comprehensive Pinas film bibliography couldn’t proceed fast enough. I wound up accumulating several book titles, some from as far back as 1983. So I decided to upload everything I had up to this point. My other predicament is that the pandemic has left me stranded outside Pinas for over a year now, though fortunately in the country best-prepared to handle national crises of any kind. That meant that I couldn’t conduct final confirmation for several recent titles which their publishers or editors neglect to clarify or even respond to queries. I promise to rant more fully after I draft another bibliographic mini-essay, focused on auteurist texts and memoirs (after striving to make a distinction between the two). Without further ado, the recent additions according to their categorizations in the original iteration of the biblio (with translations and annotations available in the links):
- Non-Filipino Anthologies: Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (ed. Richard Abel); The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media (ed. Lori Kido Lopez & Vincent Pham); Pinay Power (Peminist Critical Theory): Theorizing the Filipina/American Experience (ed. Melinda L. de Jesús).
- Manuals & Reports: How to Become a Star.. Now!!! The Seven Universal Laws and Principles of Attraction to Be a Star (Tato Malay).
- Screenplays & Teleplays: History with Lourd: Tsismis Noon, Kasaysayan Ngayon (Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra); In My Own Little Corner: Stories and Screenplays (Jeanne Lim).
- Literary Adaptations & Accounts: Between Maybes (Makiwander).
- Reviews & Criticism: A Richness of Embarrassments and Other Easy Essays (Butch Dalisay).
- Histories: Insight & Foresight (Renato Constantino); Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Erik Barnouw); The Best of Ang Pinaka (no author); I Am Bubble Gang: The Bubble Gang 20th Anniversary Commemorative Comedy Chronicles (no author).
- Studies, Festschrifts, Special Journal Issues: Bien! Bien! Alagad ng Sining, Anak ng Bayan (ed. Teresita Gimenez-Maceda, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, & Galileo S. Zafra); Cultural Hybridities of the Philippines (ed. Raul Pertierra); Filipino Nurse Migration under JPEPA (ed. Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes & Yuko O. Hirano); Vernacular and Regional Cinemas in the Philippines (ed. Paul Douglas Grant).
- Auteurist Materials: Ciro H. Santiago: Unbekannter Meister des B-Films (David Renske); Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez); Glimpses: Essays, Letters, Memoirs (A Selection from the Writing Class from February to August 2009) (ed. Letty T. Salas & Felipe L. Reyes); Bongga sa Kusina: Recipes from Sarap Diva (Regine Velasquez); The Bubble Bible by Bitoy; (Michael V.); StyLIZed: Liz Uy’s 10 Style Essentials (Liz Uy); and two by Love Marie Escudero (a.k.a. Heart Evangelista) – Styled with Heart and This Is Me, Love Marie.
- Memoirs: Alden Richards: In My Own Words (Alden Richards); Everyday Kath: Kathryn Bernardo’s 365 Ways to Be Your Own Teen Queen (Kathryn Bernardo); Kulang na Silya at Iba Pang Kuwentong Buhay: Essays on Life and Writing (Ricky Lee).
- Cultural Studies & Political Economy: Halakhak: National Humor in Philippine Popular Cultural Forms (Maria Rhodora G. Ancheta); Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (Peter X. Feng); Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (Darrell Y. Hamamoto); plus three books by Celine Parreñas Shimizu – The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, The Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema, and Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies.
- Proceedings & Film/Festival Brochures: Year One (Experimental Cinema of the Philippines).
For credit where it’s due, in the order that assistance arrived: Michelle Gallaga for the Glimpses anthology where her essays on her parents Madie and Peque Gallaga appeared; Nestor de Guzman for the University of the Philippines Press titles plus historian Renato Constantino’s startling footnote in his self-quoted passage on Nora Aunor during the 1970s; Ram Banal for Ricky Lee’s first (but not last, let’s hope) book of memoirs; Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., for the several cultural studies entries, including the admirable output of Celine Parreñas Shimizu, who deserves to be studied by Pinas film scholars PDQ; and Lio Mangubat, editor-in-chief of Summit Books, the exception who proves the rule that all the other entertainment book publishers couldn’t care less about what legacy their volumes might leave on history.
Finally, let me state for the record that certain (arbitrary) thresholds have been reached: I was able to record an annual total of 25 books as of 2019, while the grand total of 475 over the past century-plus makes the possibility of 500 attainable in two years at most, at the rate we’re going (for the years during and since the Marcos presidency, click on the pic below). We might actually be way closer, once I manage to verify the long list of titles I have on hand – if I could only return to Pinas, or if I get disposable income to buy books I won’t have any need for, or if entertainment publishers and editors shape up and start posting whatever preliminaries they might have.
February 2021
February 23 – Another article of mine in a Korean publication, Konkuk University’s International Journal of Diaspora & Cultural Criticism, is titled “Videodisc Piracy as an Instance of Resistance” (issue 11, volume 1, January 2021: pages 98-137, doi:10.15519/dcc.2021.01.11.1.98). Click here to download a PDF transcription.
February 21 – After “The Aunor Effect,” another mini-essay for the Pinas film bibliography, titled “The Rise in Spin-offs.” Click here to bypass the landing page.
February 15 – I originally intended a plain landing page listing all the references in this blog to the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines (where I worked during almost its entire existence). The text kept insisting on comments and clarifications, so the end result is a strangely worded article that I titled “Experimental Cinema of the Philippines: A Hasty Recollection.” It was meant to be a Special Lists sidebar entry, so there it shall stay.
February 12 – Focus on Filipino Films has been (minimally) enhanced and is now uploaded in spread (verso-recto) format. It remains listed in the Extras section’s Fil(m)ipiniana category.
February 6 – Latest in the Auteurist Materials section of the Pinas film bibliography’s a 2020 book by Michael Guarneri titled Conversations with Lav Diaz; lead provided by Mauro Feria Tumbocon Jr., founder-director of FACINE. Let’s hope I can keep everyone posted every time I update the biblio.
February 2 – Learned only recently that Dovie Beams passed away in 2017. She deserves much more than the short tribute I posted, but that might have to be taken up by someone with more time and resources than I have at present. This piece will be stored in the Remarks section.
Two further splits in the categorized version of the Pinas film biblio: Auteurist Materials & Memoirs are no longer combined, while Histories are now of two types: one that ends before the first presidency of Ferdinand E. Marcos began (in 1965), and another that includes accounts that begin during or culminate in the Marcos years or thereafter. This brings the total number of categories to a dozen, excluding the list of forthcoming titles.
February 1 – Apologies for not providing updates about the lengthening list of additions to the Pinas film biblio. The latest, in the categorized version’s Non-Filipino Publications section, is the volume edited by Rashmi Doraiswamy and Latika Padgaonkar, titled Asian Film Journeys: Selections from Cinemaya, comprising six entries on the state of Pinas cinema as well as on the works of Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Eddie Romero, and Ramon A. Estella.
January 2021
January 26 – The full title of the largest category in the Pinas film bibliography was “Screenplays, Teleplays, Novelizations, Accounts.” It shared some of the most active recent film-book publishers like ABS-CBN Books (formerly ABS-CBN Publishing) and VRJ Books (a.k.a Viva Books). The continuing productivity of participants in this category, however, necessitated its division into two new groups, one for screenplays & teleplays and another for accounts & literary adaptations (mostly novelizations but also including short stories as well as a stage musical). When I first uploaded the bibliography over a year ago, I thought that the “Reviews & Criticism” category would be the one that might require splitting up – such was my personal-practice bias.
January 20 – Casting about for effective ways to embed research questions and editorial notes to myself within some of my posts, I finally figured out a means of providing first-line indentations for WordPress uploads (a limitation that’s a consequence of HTML usage rather than the blog provider’s shortcoming). As far as I’ve been able to cover, all linked articles are now properly paragraphed. In case you come across something that isn’t, kindly hie over to the Queries section and let me know. And even if you think everything’s been corrected, stay around for some amusement over these Selected Exchanges I’ve been posting.
January 13 – Still far from completing something worth posting, but meanwhile, I did retitle what I used to call the Contacts page in the main menu: it’s now called Queries, with the submission form for questions still in place, but with a possibly continuing series of selected exchanges drawn from textual interactions on various social media platforms. Some friends have remarked that it’s the first item they look up in the blog, and I don’t really judge them, those inveterate gossipmongers. Just like me.
January 6 – Just noticed that, during the start of the pandemic, I took out a section from the Book Texts volume to upgrade its contents and forgot to restore it. No wonder the collection didn’t seem to function the way I expected it to. It’s a clutch of articles on Non-Film Reviews, just freshly uploaded.
December 30 – Was hoping I could still post something substantial before the year closes but we’ll just have to wait till early 2021. Meanwhile, for those knee-deep into bibliographic science, I managed to compile cataloging-in-publication data from the National Library of the Philippines for all my digital-edition books; legwork was courtesy of Juan Miguel B. Manansala, now completing his training for the Philippine National Police. The CIP info will show up on the individual book page, after the … preface, I guess, and before the list of linked contents.
December 18 – A translation of the review by Chuckberry J. Pascual of my 2017 book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic, published in the 2020 issue of the University of the Philippines Film Institute’s relaunched Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema. This will be referenced in the blog sidebar and stored in the Remarks section.
December 16 – A listicle titled “8 Scholars and Critics Expanding Our Understanding of Culture,” uploaded a while back by Sheila O’Neill on the Ezvid Wiki website. (Thanks to Caroline Eliasson for the good tidings.)
December 11 – What used to be the Comprehensive Pinas Film Bibliography is on its way to becoming a downloadable e-book, titled Authoring Auteurs. Click the cover pic above to open the digital-edition page.
December 1 – I was happy enough when I was informed that I was listed in this year’s batch of winners of Trinity University of Asia’s Platinum Stallion Media Awards. The recognition concept was open, pragmatic, populist – something that I’d always advocated for. Then someone mentioned that I must be the only Philippine author given formally cited recognitions as film critic, first in 2016 at the Filipino Arts & Cinema International Festival in San Francisco, Calif., and now finally in Las Islas Pinas. Brava not to me, but to the TUA’s innovative Media and Communication Department. I may be platinum but never really a stallion, but I’ll keep working at being worthy of the title of film critic, just to be deserving of such a lovely and carefully considered prize. [Thanks to JC Velasquez for the pic.]
November 2020
November 4 – Since I had lost all the electronic files for my out-of-print sole-authored book publications (except for the last, Wages of Cinema), I initially scanned both book and source pages with the intent of running them through Optical Character Recognition software. I gave up on my share of materials, as did my assistants with theirs, so I wound up having the first two books typed all over again. I copyedited the results as best I could then, but after a publisher recently requested a complete file of these texts, I decided to print out everything and go over them one more time.
If you find me walking around with an appalled expression, it derives from my realization that so many typographical errors were lurking in those texts all these years, despite my constant though admittedly hit-or-miss rechecking. (Nothing can ever take the place of copyediting a printout, is the lesson I’ve always known but felt too exhausted to observe that time.) I also took the opportunity to update several articles, usually via endnotes. So the current digital editions of The National Pastime (1990), Fields of Vision (1995), and Wages of Cinema (1998) are now as good as I can make them, until another future round of revaluation requires new annotations and revisions.
October 2020
October 31 – Reconsidering fonts because of adjustments WordPress made to the Elegant Grunge theme that I’m using, effectively replacing my original base font with a less satisfactory one. For now I’m reversing the serif and sans-serif choices, opting for headings in Abril Fatface (if it looks useful then it can call itself anything) and base in Cabin. Will appreciate responses or suggestions (please use the form in the Queries page).
October 16 – After years of searching, I managed to stumble across an upload of the Malakas at Maganda mural that greeted theatergoers at the Main Theater of the now-defunct Manila Film Center. It appeared as an incidental illustration of the work of Victor Cabisada Jr. and Peter Alcántara for the Philippine Children’s Medical Center in Quezon City, posted on John Paul “Lakan” Olivares’s Lakbay ng Lakan blog (worth a detour) and reprinted here with permission. It is now included in a final category, Illustrational Problematics, on the corrigenda page of Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic. Click on pic to enlarge:
October 14 – The previously hastily posted file of the maiden (and only) issue of SineManila has been reprocessed and reuploaded, with each spread accorded its proper verso-recto presentation.
October 10 – I finally managed to complete scanning and uploading all my articles reprinted so far in The FilAm: Newsmagazine Serving Filipino Americans in New York. They can be found in the Articles section’s Magazines & Supplements page.
October 7 – A new sidebar feature is headed “Videos (Mostly) for Free!” and appears on the right-hand side of the blogsite, after the list of recommended “Facebook Pages & Groups.” Kindly update me if you see that I’ve overlooked any essential entries; please exclude websites that feature only trailers and/or announcements.
October 6 – The reprint of my tribute to Peque Gallaga in the June 2020 issue of The FilAm: Newsmagazine Serving Filipino Americans in New York, has been scanned and uploaded as a PDF file in the Notes section of “My Peque Gallaga Interview.”
October 4 – Another, possibly last, iteration of the Comprehensive Pinas Film Bibliography (see October 2 announcement), would be this chronological arrangement of all the entries, perfect for history buffs as well as casually curious pop-culture researchers.
October 2 – The Comprehensive Pinas Film Bibliography contains a new listing: in addition to the alphabetical arrangement according to author(s), I have uploaded a file where the entries were rearranged according to title. Click here to bypass the landing page.
September 2020
September 20 – A further addition to the Extras’ Fil(m)ipiniana section: the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines’s first and only issue of its inhouse publication titled Jario Scenario. Curiously, all the ECP materials I have been able to upload so far came out in the same year, 1983.
September 19 – PDF scans of the original publication of two of my articles may be found in their versions in Ámauteurish!: “A Second Golden Age” (originally drafted in 1989) and “Ten Best Filipino Films Up to 1990.” In each article’s introduction, click on the pic of the first page of the published version to open the PDF file.
September 14 – Since I deactivated my official Facebook account, I can only post my tribute to a recently deceased friend, Laura Samson, via this piece. It will now constitute the epilogue to Wages of Cinema.
August 2020
August 17 – I added a description of a problematic for Ishmael Bernal’s governmental links on page 56 of Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic.
August 6 – My articles in the online The FilAm publication were occasionally getting reprinted in the monthly print version, titled The FilAm: Newsmagazine Serving Filipino Americans in New York. I finally managed to get around to listing them, in the blog’s Non-Journal Articles: Magazines & Supplements page.
August 6 – In the Categorized version of the Comprehensive Pinas Film Bibliography, I added a new subcategory titled Forthcoming Titles. These comprise books that have been announced but are still unavailable, and will not be listed in the other (Alphabetized and Reverse-Chronologized) versions of the biblio.
August 2 – Added an entry to “Memoirs & Bios” with Bibsy Carballo’s Filipino Directors Up Close.
July 2020
July 30 – A new feature, to be continually updated: as my so-far final supplement to the Comprehensive Pinas Film Bibliography, I’m providing a “Memoirs & Bios” entry, which lists the relevant samples I’ve been able to access and comment on. The first batch of five includes works by Nestor de Guzman and Mario A. Hernando (as editors of Si Nora Aunor sa mga Noranian and Lino Brocka: The Artist and His Times respectively), Baby K. Jimenez (as author of both volumes of Ang True Story ni Guy), Jerry B. Grácio (with Bagay Tayo), and the team of Ishmael Bernal, Jorge Arago, and Angela Stuart-Santiago garnering a rave two-paragraph mention for Pro Bernal Anti Bio.
July 15 – I expanded the corrigenda file for Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017), to include a list of problematics, referring, per the introduction, “to issues that occasionally are unresolved, or that otherwise would be too cumbersome to attend to within the physical and/or editorial limits of the publication. Most of these issues already inhered in the material during the process of its creation, although in one instance, the problem arose some time after publication. They range from the aforementioned complication in attribution, to a queer controversy involving a different film, to the usual quirks in historical interpretation.”
July 9 – “Mother Pinas, Onscreen,” originally published last June 13 as “Remembering Anita Linda: She Devoted Her Life So Completely to Her Craft that It Defined Her” in ABS-CBN News Channel, is my tribute to the late movie queen.
July 3 – Finally managed to complete scanning all my entries (and then some) in the second edition (2017) of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. I combined these with my entries in the first edition (1994), in one landing page, to which the entry in the Books menu’s Chapters in Anthologies section is linked.
June 2020
June 28 – The Articles menu is also now a landing page that lists both journal groups and non-journal types of publications.
June 22 – The Comprehensive Pinas Film Bibliography is now a landing page instead of the categorized listing. It includes a new version of the biblio, where the entries are arranged in reverse-chronological order.
June 17 – A rare but useful reference: a PDF of Readings in Philippine Cinema, from 1983. Warning: file is large and may take a while to load.
June 13 – My first article after nearly a decade for ABS-CBN News Channel (ANCX, formerly ABS-CBNnews.com) is a tribute to a recently departed film goddess, titled “Remembering Anita Linda: She Devoted Her Life So Completely to Her Craft that It Defined Her.”
June 6 – I uploaded a corrigenda file for Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017). This will be announced in the introduction to the book, also posted in Ámauteurish!
June 4 – The Comprehensive Pinas Film Bibliography has been updated to include the following items in the categorized version:
• in the Screenplays, Teleplays, Novelizations, Accounts section, essential accounts – by Eleanor Coppola, Peter Cowie, and Steven Travers – of the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979);
• in the Conference Proceedings & Film/Festival Brochures section, a Bengali-language book, Nirmal Dhar’s Bhin Desher Cinema [Cinema from Foreign Countries]; and
• in the Auteurist Materials & Memoirs section, Phaidon Press’s decade-old entry in its Take 100 series, The Future of Film: 100 New Directors by Cameron Bailey et al.
May 2020
May 12 – “My Peque Gallaga Interview,” published May 9, 2020, in Ámauteurish!, has been reprinted (in abridged form) as “Peque’s Rage: A Retelling,” in the May 12, 2020, issue of The FilAm. I have also posted a transcript of a mobile phone interview of Peque Gallaga by Monchito Nocon, for a commemorative volume that never came out. This will reside in the Extraneous section of the Extras page.
May 9 – “My Peque Gallaga Interview,” in commemoration of the recently deceased film master. This will be included in the Remembrances section of the Remarks page.
May 5 – The Special Issue on Film Criticism in the Philippines that I co-edited with Joyce L. Arriola, for the May 2020 issue of UNITAS: Semi-Annual Peer-Reviewed International Online Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society, is now out. Please click on the pic of the cover page below to open the PDF file:
May 3 – Book Texts now contains “Fleshmongering” from way back 1990, in effect my contemporary response to careless critics-scholars who inexplicably insist on misnaming (not to mention misreading) historical realities in local cinema, with this article encapsulating the type of disgusting presumption I’m referring to. Past sex-film trends, however, connected with a wide sector of the audience, many of whom are still around, so I’m always confident in articulating the outrage of many, who may understandably prefer to remain silent. The only possible explanation for such irresponsible laziness is the contempt that experts from supposedly “higher” cultural forms and “prestigious” political advocacies and institutions feel qualified to impose on popular cultural phenomena. Popcult fuckwittism, is the soft-core coinage I would proffer.
April 2020
April 28 – This may just be the moment when my out-of-print books are starting to command collector’s-item prices (see February 13 entry below). Here’s a second-hand copy of The National Pastime, which originally sold at less than 100 Philippine pesos in 1990, its year of publication:
Once more, the revised & updated – and reillustrated – 2014 digital edition awaits your consideration.
April 24 – All the long articles uploaded (as opposed to linked) to this blog now have jump links at the beginning, to enable readers to go to specific sections that they want to inspect. No more need to scroll down until you get to the portion you want to reach.
April 7 – At 5 a.m. today I provided a long-distance lecture for the class on Philippine history, literature, and performance of Professor Lisandro Claudio at the University of California, Berkeley. By way of preparation, the students were assigned to watch Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, 1982) and read Nick Joaquin’s “Golden Girl” article from Nora Aunor and Other Profiles (Manila: National Book Store, 1977). I prepared an outline plus a PowerPoint presentation, and since the lecture raised mostly basic issues, I’ve opted to embed here the PPT slides instead, for what they’re worth (pls click on frame below to start the presentation):
March 2020
March 28 – My article “Showbiz Babylon,” on the late-2019 Barretto family scandal, came out in the December issue of The FilAm newsmagazine. For a scanned copy, please click here. This link will appear in the acknowledgment of previous publication, at the bottom of the article.
March 5 – The years-in-the-making canon project on Philippine films will be revising its title, which is still to be determined. It has been undergoing layout and proofreading for the past few years and has been scheduled for release in the second half of 2020.
February 2020
February 24 – I resisted from the start but I had to capitulate after I included a foreign book with an article on Philippine cinema in the Pinas film bibliography I uploaded late last year. The book, as it turned out, was simultaneously published as a scholarly journal’s double issue. So the bibliography’s Studies & Festschrifts section has now been updated and retitled Studies, Festschrifts, & Special Journal Issues. I also managed to include the output of the publishing arms of the most active contemporary producers, Viva Films’ VRJ Books as well as ABS-CBN Publishing, both of which emerged only within the last half-decade; these appear almost entirely in the categorized bibliography’s Screenplays, Teleplays, Novelizations, Accounts section. The charts and figures in the bibliographical essay have been adjusted accordingly.
February 14 – A bit of ancient history, as I went over some old and nearly worn-out news clippings and found the report of my winning in the first batch of the national university’s system-wide Outstanding Student Awards right after I finished my second undergraduate degree, in film. I listed this in the Extraneous section of the Extras page, but here’s the evidence so you don’t have to take the extra step of going elsewhere before finding it (click on pic to enlarge):
February 13 – As a pre-Valentine’s Day treat, here’s a sample of what you don’t get by using Ámauteurish! – having to pay nearly a thousand US dollars (before shipping & handling, plus taxes) for a used copy of the 1995 version of my book, which had originally sold for 150 Philippine pesos per copy:
Get a hold of the revised & updated 2014 digital edition – for free, instantaneously – by clicking here.
January 2020
January 28 – In response to requests to elaborate further on an aspect of “Authoring Auteurs: A Bibliographical Essay” I posted earlier, here’s a mini-essay titled “The Aunor Effect in Philippine Film Book Publications.” This piece will reside in the Remarks section of this blog.
January 18 – First post of the year is an Amauteurish! exclusive: an article titled “Authoring Auteurs: A Bibliographical Essay,” to supplement the Comprehensive Pinas Film Biblio, also exclusive to this blog.
December 23 – An article by De La Salle University Professor Ronald Baytan, descriptively titled “On Bernal’s Homage to Manila: A Review of Joel David’s Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic,” is out in the current issue (on the theme of Fandom and Cinephilia in Southeast Asia) of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society: vol. 16, no. 2, December 2019, pp. 189-96.
December 22 – I finally managed to scan (in full color) the pages where my contributions appeared in the second edition of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art. Although listed under Chapters in Anthologies in the Books section, a link will open a page where sets of PDF files are listed. Included as well are such extras as the Film (Volume 6) preliminaries, the pages where my entries as author and as source appear, and the earlier PDFs of my entries in the encyclopedia’s first edition.
December 4 – As a service to researchers (including myself), I have compiled and uploaded a bibliography on Philippine cinema, arranged according to a number of arbitrary categories. The same list is also available in an alphabetized arrangement.
November 2019
November 15 – Kritika Kultura is calling for papers for a special issue on Genders and Sexualities in Asian Cinema, with February 2021 as target publication date. Deadlines and other specs are in the linked file, a list of possible topics is included, and the editor will be yours truly.
November 9 – The publication date of the special issue on Film Criticism in the Philippines that I’m co-editing with Joyce L. Arriola for UNITAS: Semi-Annual Peer-Reviewed International Online Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society has been postponed, from November 2019 to May 2020. The issue will comprise a mix of scholarly articles as well as position statements (with corresponding sample critiques) from Filipino film scholars and critics.
October 2019
October 31 – “Showbiz Babylon” is my Halloween-appropriate commentary on the Barretto family scandal, earlier published as “The Barrettos and the Privilege of Behaving Badly” in The FilAm. This will be stored in the Remarks section.
October 1 – “Third Cinema, Queer Technique, and Manila’s Multiple Characters” is a review by Josen Masangkay Diaz of my book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017. It’s in the Fall 2019 (no. 59) issue of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media and runs for three web pages; please click on the links at the lower-left side of each page to move to the succeeding page.
September 2019
September 29 – Publication details now available for “Di/Visibility: Marks of Bisexuality in Philippine Cinema,” in the Journal of Bisexuality: Volume 19, Issue 3 (September 2019): pages 440-454. DOI:10.1080/15299716.2019.1656474.
September 20 – International Standard Book Numbers are now complete for all Ámauteurish Publishing books – one for each of two parts of this year’s Millennial Traversals book edition and one each for the 2014 digital edition of The National Pastime (originally printed in 1990), Fields of Vision (1995), and Wages of Cinema (1998). See the first (sole-authored) set of entries in the Books section.
September 17 – “Di/Visibility: Marks of Bisexuality in Philippine Cinema” is a survey article of mine, just out in the Journal of Bisexuality (paywalled, sorry). It’s listed under JoB’s Latest Articles, which comprise works that were “accepted for publication in this journal but not yet published in a volume/issue.” Its most definite citation detail at this time is DOI:10.1080/15299716.2019.1656474. I’ll be updating its entry in the Articles section once volume and issue details have been finalized.
September 1 – Another development in the millennial traversals of Millennial Traversals, as it were. Originally an Ámauteurish! e-book in two parts, now available as two open-access journal issues of UNITAS: Semi-Annual Peer-Reviewed International Online Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society, the intervening print editions will be reprinted as a back-to-back single edition, the first dead-tree product of Ámauteurish Publishing. Confusing, I know, so just await further announcements if the idea of owning a physical copy of the material strikes your fancy. Just about to commence printing, as soon as I’m able to secure International Standard Book Numbers for them.
August 2019
August 2 – In the event titled “From Screen and Stage to Page: Adapting Drama and Screenplays into Book Form,” held at Raffles Makati during this year’s edition of the Philippine Readers and Writers Festival, I half-jokingly warned the audience not to misspell the Ámauteurish! blog name. That’s because leaving out the first “u” will open this portal:
Then again, who can blame folks for typing less letters? Fortunately, as I said, “all web browsers allow their users to open multiple windows, so go ahead if you’re curious, open the amateurish.com page, but also make sure to look into amauteurish.com….”
July 2019
Article & book writing & editing.
June 2019
June 27 – The tribute to Eddie Garcia, to be stored in the Remembrances category of the Extras section.
June 23 – Manoy Takes His Leave, a tribute to the late Eddie Garcia, published in The FilAm.
June 8 – New and improved Timeline of Events accompanies the Annual Filipino Film Production Chart (through 2016).
June 5 – Independent filmmaker Joselito (Jay) Altarejos posted an announcement of a screening of his excellent social-problem film, Jino to Mari, quoting a message I posted last April 9 on Facebook:
To enlarge, click on the above pic. I will be retaining this form of specialized content in the Remarks section.
May 2019
May 14 – The PDF solutions:
• Some articles of mine that appeared in anthologies were originally linked to their Google Books copies. Since these had started behaving strangely, hiding pages at a stretch, I scanned the articles and uploaded them instead. Hence clicking on links provided in the entries for “Awake in the Dark: Philippine Film During the Marcos Era” (2008) and “Philippine Film History as a Site of Postcolonial Discourse” (2000) will now open scanned PDF files of these articles.
• Researchers who need to check inclusive page numbers and other publication info regarding my out-of-print books (specifically The National Pastime [1990], Fields of Vision [1995], and Wages of Cinema [1998]) will find links to scanned PDFs of these books’ essential preliminary pages right before the digital editions’ table of contents. The preliminaries would comprise the title and copyright pages, the book edition’s table of contents, acknowledgments, and preface, foreword, and/or introduction – in short, nearly everything numbered by a roman numeral (visible or otherwise).
May 1 – Sine: 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema (co-written with Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon and published by Summit Media) is scheduled for a final-quarter release this year.
April 2019
April 27 – I delivered a plenary lecture at the International Conference on Ethical Literary Criticism: Celebrating Literature as a Distinctive Ethical Expression, held at the University of Santo Tomas and sponsored by the UST Office of the Scholar-in-Residence/UNITAS Office, in cooperation with the Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Department of Literature, and the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism. The material I read, titled “Auteurs & Amateurs: Toward an Ethics of Film Criticism,” is posted herewith.
April 22 – I restored an article, “Problems in Philippine Film Awards,” originally a memorandum submitted to my colleagues at the University of the Philippines Film Institute. It initially appeared as an entry in Millennial Traversals but had to be taken out because of its incompatibility with the rest of the contents. It now appears in the “Mega-Meta: A FilmCrit Folio” feature that opens the website’s Remarks section.
April 12 – I have reformatted all the blog’s bibliographic and filmographic listings to feature hanging indentations. This includes the entries in the Reviews and Auteurs & Authors sections as well as in the Chronologically Arranged Listing of Publications special feature.
March 2019
March 25 – “A Salute to Our Pinay Filmmakers” is a short statement I originally posted on Facebook, in recognition of the innovative contributions of women directors to the local rom-com genre. This entry will be listed in the Remarks section of this website.
March 19 – I wrote the introduction for Two Women as Specters of History: Lakambini and Indigo Child by Rody Vera, titled “Theater, Film, & Everything In-Between,” now listed in the Books section’s Chapters in Anthologies subsection. The book is published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press and may be ordered from the publisher’s website.
January & February 2019
Site maintenance & copyright processes.
December 25 – “Tears Go By” is my review of Mes de Guzman’s Ang Pamilyang Hindi Lumuluha, originally posted on the All Things Sharon fan website.
December 19 – In the interest of providing as much information as I can divulge, I posted a Chronologically Arranged Listing of Publications for people to marvel at how productive (or not) I had been through the years. In this regard, to recognize the perhaps inevitable function of Ámauteurish! as an occasional source publication, I have added the blog as an entry in the Articles list titled Online Publications. I also prepared a provisional self-study titled Empiricals.
December 15 – Just in time for Christmas shopping: my book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic can now be ordered overseas directly from its Canadian publisher, Arsenal Pulp Press. The price at this moment is about US$3 less than Amazon’s.
December 3 – The latest revised schedule for publication of SINÉ: The YES! List of 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema is early 2019. Coverage will be the entirety of existent Philippine cinema from the earliest available film to the end of 2018. Toward this end, I deleted the “Short Takes” links in the Reviews and the Auteurs & Authors sections.
November 2018
November 17 – A report on the final defense (where I was panel member) of the pioneering dissertation by Louie Jon A. Sanchez, titled “Ang Drama ng Ating Buhay: Isang Kasaysayang Pangkultura ng Teleserye sa Filipinas Hanggang 2016 [The Drama of Our Lives: A Cultural History of Teleseries in the Philippines Until 2016],” held at De La Salle University.
November 16 – As plenary speaker at the 3rd Panpacific International Research Conference held in Royce Hotel at Clark Freeport Zone in Mabalacat, Pampanga, I delivered a lecture titled “Condemned Property: Video Piracy as Nationalist Resistance in the Philippines.” The event was sponsored by Panpacific University. Please click here for a posting of the PowerPoint slides.
October 2018
October 23 – In the intensive social-media interest over Nora Aunor’s exclusion once more from the proclamation of the latest batch of National Artists of the Philippines, I scanned and uploaded Quijano de Manila’s “Golden Girl,” from his out-of-print book Nora Aunor & Other Profiles.
October 18 – Not my first film review of a Sharon Cuneta film, but the first I made of her indie-film project, Mes de Guzman’s Ang Pamilyang Hindi Lumuluha, titled “Tears Go By” and published (another first) in her exemplary All Things Sharon fan website.
October 5 – Finally managed to watermark the videos posted on the blog, most of which appear in the Extras section.
September 2018
September 8 – The Articles section now leads to a list of my journal publications. All my other articles (for newspapers, magazines, online outlets, etc.) now appear in a section called Non-Journal Articles.
August 2018
August 31 – A page linked in the Books section dedicated to Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic, so that the foreign-published monograph contains its own blog feature, like the rest of my sole-authored books.
August 24 – “Signal Rock and a Hard Place” is the revised version of my review of Chito Roño’s film, originally published in the Philippine Entertainment Portal on August 17, 2018. This piece will remain in the Remarks section of this blog.
August 17 – “Signal Rock and a Hard Place” is my review of Chito Roño’s Signal Rock, out today in the Philippine Entertainment Portal.
August 16 – “The Millennial Traversals of Millennial Traversals” is the lecture I read during the launch of the University of Santo Tomas’s UNITAS website. This post will be respectively stored in the Events portion of the Extras section.
August 7 – “Queerness as Defiance in Manila by Night” is the lecture I delivered during the launch of Angela Stuart-Santiago’s project Pro Bernal, Anti Bio (on Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic), at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. This post will be stored in the Special Folio on Manila by Night (under Texts).
July 2018
July 30 – “Innocence Regained” is the revised and updated version of my review of Khavn’s Balangiga: Howling Wilderness, originally published in The FilAm on July 16, 2018, as “Amid the Nightmare of War, a Coming-of-Age” (see below). This piece will be stored in the Remarks section.
July 25 – Magsine Tayo!, the website that used to make available an excellent and subtitled transfer of Manila by Night, has been shut down. I will be writing more on this later.
July 16 – “Amid the Nightmare of War, a Coming-of-Age” is my review of Khavn’s Balangiga: Howling Wilderness, out today in The FilAm.
July 14 – My 2015 open-access volume, Millennial Traversals: Outliers, Juvenilia, & Quondam Popcult Blabbery, is now in book form, published as special issues by the University of Santo Tomas’s UNITAS: Semi-Annual Peer-Reviewed International Online Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society:
• Part I: Traversals within Cinema is Volume 88, No. 1 (May 2015); while
• Part II: Expanded Perspectives is Volume 89, No. 1 (May 2016).
May 2018
May 11 – A special folio on Manila by Night (1980) now opens the Extras section.
April 2018
April 16 – Revisions may be found in the blog sidebar (below the page, on a mobile device). The list of metacritical articles is now a boxed feature in the Remarks section, while most of the other features will be found in the newly overhauled Extras section.
April 15 – A Statement on the Availability of Filipino Films during the Internet Era, to be housed in the Remarks section. In connection with this as well as with my Arsenal Pulp Press book Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic, a newly video-remastered subtitled print of the film may be found at the also new (blog-no-longer) Magsine Tayo website [update: please see July 28, 2018 entry above].
April 3 – The inclusion of journals in either or both the Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) and Scopus databases, and/or their defunct status, is now indicated via superscripts after the ISSN(s) of each title in the Journal Publications section.
April 1 – SINÉ: The YES! List of 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema, the years-in-the-making Summit Media project with Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon, will now have a target release date of July 2018. Not an April Fools Day announcement, I’m hoping.
March 2018
March 30 – My contribution to the Roundtable on the Filipino Film Canon of the November 2017 issue of Plaridel (14.2), titled “Muzzled Bombardments: The Philippine Film Canon and Its Discontents,” has come out.
March 29 – Millennial Traversals, the first (as far as I know) non-journal open-access volume in the country, now contains links to an announcement regarding the book’s forthcoming availability.
March 23 – Another category, “Remembrances,” has been added to the browser sidebar (bottom of the page on mobile devices), between Source Exchanges and Filipiniana listings. Among the names featured are Lino Brocka, Johven Velasco, Dolphy, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, and Bernardo Bernardo. [Now transferred to the Extras section – see April 16 announcement.]
March 21 – “Farewell Farewell, Bernardo Bernardo” is the first of a two-part tribute to the recently departed multitalented artist. The second part, also out in the same issue of The FilAm, has been titled “Toward the End, a Hopeful Outlook for the Philippines.” The article itself will be stored in this blog’s Remarks section.
March 13 – “Bernardo Bernardo: Exchanges on Facebook Messenger” is what it says: a compilation of my social-network personal correspondences with the late major performing artist, source of several of my recent output including the book manuscript and its attendant interview of Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic.
March 7 – The “Source Exchange” I conducted with Jerrold Tarog, in preparation for my review of his 2015 blockbuster Heneral Luna. Plus a surprise entry: a contribution, titled “Parallel Growths,” that I had completely forgotten about, in commemoration of Kritika Kultura’s thirtieth issue.
March 4 – The interview with Bernardo Bernardo, originally titled “Manay Revisits Manila by Night” and published on this blog, is now an Appendix in my Arsenal publication, Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic (Matthew Hays & Thomas Waugh, series editors). I have replaced the original with a page excerpt from the book.
March 3 – “Source Exchanges,” featuring the discussions I conducted with artists, authors, and producers of reviews and interviews, will now be a section in the blog’s Special Features sidebar (appearing at the bottom of the page on mobile devices). [Now transferred to the Extras section – see April 16 announcement.]
February 2018
February 28 – Matthew Abaya’s Vampariah, which I had reviewed in January 2017 (see “Peerless Vampire Killers”), is now complemented with a “Source Exchange.” Both review article and exchange will be maintained for now in this blog’s Remarks section.
February 26 – My first book, The National Pastime: Contemporary Philippine Cinema, has been “reillustrated,” with pictures restored from the original print edition, plus a few more from other sources.
February 20 – My first article for the country’s oldest journal, published by the University of Sto. Tomas, is out: “A Certain Tendency: Europeanization as a Response to Americanization in the Philippines’ ‘Golden-Age’ Studio System,” in UNITAS: Semi-Annual Peer-Reviewed International Online Journal of Advanced Research in Literature, Culture, and Society, vol. 29, no. 2 (November 2017), pp. 24-53.
February 7 – A new feature, “Facebook Pages & Groups,” has been added to the Suggested Features sidebar (found on the right side of the blog page in the browser version, and at the bottom of the page on mobile devices). It will be the last entry, located at the bottom portion, after the listing of recommended blogs.
January 2018
January 13 – Announced as “available” by January 16, Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic, an entry in Arsenal Pulp Press’s Queer Film Classics series, may now be ordered online via Amazon. The book’s copyright year is nevertheless listed as 2017. At the Extras section, I posted the extensive storyline I originally drafted for the book’s synopsis section, that had to be eventually reduced to one medium-length paragraph.
December 18 – The release dates of two of my book publications, SINÉ: The YES! List of 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema and the Manila by Night monograph, have both been moved to early 2018.
November 2017
November 11 – The first Glory Awards of the College of Mass Communication Alumni Association of the University of the Philippines: a report with mini-album.
October 2017
October 26 – “Seeds in the Garden of Letters” is my review of Patrick F. Campos’s The End of National Cinema, published in the July-December 2017 issue of Humanities Diliman. The qualifier I wrote in my Facebook post went as follows: “Essential personal disclosures, aside from the ones in the review: Campos and I were technically non-colleagues at the University of the Philippines Film Institute, since he joined the faculty after I left. Also, as editor of HD, his only participation in this article was in acceding to my suggestion that I review his book; all the editing, proofreading, and peer-reviewing coordination tasks were conducted entirely by HD staff members. In fact I was the one who caught a minor inaccuracy in my first draft – when as book author, he could have been the one to point it out to me. (Which means, whether he read the submission or not, he maintained a hands-off approach.)”
October 7 – Colleagues at the Association of Filipino Educators in Korea, after a lecture-seminar I conducted on Academic Journal Writing and Publication (I’m fifth from the left). I hope to be able to finalize the lecture and upload it eventually.
September 2017
September 18 – My review of Treb Monteras II’s Respeto, originally published in The FilAm, has been corrected and updated, with the same title: “Film May Be Dead, but Film Culture Is Alive and Well.” Some bases for the corrections may be found in the record of exchanges that I kept: “Source Exchange for Review of Respeto.” For now, this article will be maintained in this blog’s Remarks section.
August 2017
August 25 – Videos on Ámauteurish! (posted on the Extras page) are now sourced from Vimeo instead of YouTube.
August 18 – “Film May Be Dead, but Film Culture Is Alive and Well” is my review, published at The FilAm, of Treb Monteras II’s Respeto.
August 13 – “Source Exchange for ‘The Transnational Pastime’” is the original material for “The Transnational Pastime: An Interview with Joel David,” conducted by Paul Douglas Grant, a professor of film at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, and published in the June 2017 (volume 4, number 1) issue of Plaridel.
August 6 – Two-way page jumps are now available for all articles with endnotes. This means the reader may click on an endnote number in the body text to be able to read the endnote; afterward, clicking on the endnote’s numerical indicator will return the reader to her previous position in the body text. This feature will be incorporated in the introduction to this page.
July 2017
July 17 – I delivered a lecture titled Understanding Film & Culture, from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the Bonifacio Hall of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. The invitation was extended by Evangelina S. Seril (Dean of the College of Arts and Letters) via Gigi Felix-Velarde David, a professor at PUP’s Theater Arts program, who also provided the rather smallish accompanying pic.
July 4 – A 12-page interview article (including an extensive Q&A) by Paul Douglas Grant, a professor of film at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, titled “The Transnational Pastime: An Interview with Joel David,” appears in the volume 4, number 1 (June 2017) issue of Plaridel, the journal of the University of the Philippines’s College of Mass Communication.
June 2017
June 19 – In what is turning into a tradition of its own, the scheduled June release of SINÉ: The YES! List of 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema has been moved once more to (at the very latest) early September.
May 2017
May 28 – ISBNs and ISSNs are now listed along with the books and journals where my writing appeared. Defunct periodicals have also been indicated.
May 16 – I delivered a paper titled “Rusty Arms and Itchy Fingers: A Cultural Perspective on President Duterte’s War on Drugs,” at the 5th International Conference on State Violence and Trauma, sponsored by the Gwangju Trauma Center in Gwangju Metropolitan City, South Jeolla Province, Korea. The conference was part of the 2017 Gwangju Asia Forum and is observed in commemoration of the May 18, 1980, uprising of the people of what was then Gwangju City against militarization and tyranny. A copy of my paper, translated as “녹슨 팔과 가려운 손가락; 두테르테 대통령의 마약과의 전쟁에 대한 문화적 시각,” appears in the proceedings.
April 2017
April 3a – The Digital Object Identifiers that are available in my list of Journal Publications have now been included as links to their respective publications, following Crossref prescriptions. Articles whose DOIs lead to a paywall will still have alternate links to PDF transcriptions.
April 3b – One further delay, for editorial and production reasons, has resulted in a June target date for SINÉ: The YES! List of 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema. Apologies to everyone who saw March come and go without any trace of the publication.
March 2017
March 23 – Old material I kept forgetting to upload: the (originally restricted) 1981 UNESCO Technical Report, prepared by Christopher Roads for the Marcos government, on “The Manila National Film Centre,” which provides insights on the origins of the building that would become the Manila Film Center, as well as the agency that would eventually be called the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines. This will be lodged in the Extras section of Ámauteurish!
March 22 – My article, titled “Remembering the Forgotten War: Origins of the Korean War Film and Its Development during Hallyu,” has come out in the February 2017 issue of Kritika Kultura as part of the “Hallyu in and for Asia” forum.
March 8 – I just found out that Amazon has announced on its website my forthcoming book with Arsenal Pulp Press’s Queer Film Classics series, a monograph on Ishmael Bernal’s 1980 release, Manila by Night. The announcement also specifies November 14, 2017, as the book’s date of availability. The Arsenal series is edited by Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays. The title is also announced on my Amazon book page.
March 1 – Sidebar feature: “These Blogs” provides a background and rationale for the list of websites that appear at the bottom of the Ámauteurish! sidebar. It may be accessed at the sidebar itself, by clicking on the “These Blogs (for Me)” list title.
February 2017
February 5 – Over five years in the making, the canon project of Summit Media is still on track with its March 2017 release. (I was on board as consultant and author of each entry’s mini-review.) Its title, however, has been modified with a plus sign: SINÉ: The YES! List of 100+ Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema.
January 2017
January 28 – I have uploaded a transcription of my book review of Rolando B. Tolentino’s Contestable Nation-Space: Cinema, Cultural Politics, and Transnationalism in the Marcos-Brocka Philippines, published in this month’s issue of the International Journal of Asian Studies. Please see the Journal Articles section for a note on citing and referencing PDF transcriptions on this blog.
January 27 – I noticed that my How to Use Ámauteurish! blog page had a portion that has become increasingly useful as a stand-alone statement, so I spun it off as a Review & Recommendation Policies announcement.
I finally managed to upload my information (as former Fulbright Student Program scholar) at the International Exchange Alumni directory of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Fellow grantees who’re registered with the IEA website may find my profile by logging in and then clicking on this link.
January 23 – I have added a paragraph to my review of Matthew Abaya’s Vampariah. Titled “Peerless Vampire Killers,” the article will be lodged for now in the Remarks section.
January 22 – The website appearance of Ámauteurish! has been modified to include a Suggested Features sidebar.
January 13 – My review of Matthew Abaya’s Vampariah, out on The FilAm, is titled “Vampariah as Subversive Aswang Film.”
January 11 – Summit Media’s much-awaited SINÉ: The YES! List of 100 Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema (wherein I wrote the mini-review for each entry and participated as consultant) will be available in March 2017. Also, an announcement I had missed out on, which came out in the October 2016 issue of YES! magazine, titled “Hurray!”
January 10 – “Distinguishing the Film Critic from the Reviewer,” an interview article by Vanessa B. Ira, published in March 1991 in the Times Journal and originally arranged by Anvil Publishing to publicize my first book, The National Pastime. This will be listed as a 1991 entry in the Extras section.
January 7 – I added a timeline of events in Philippine history and cinema to the “Annual Filipino Film Production Chart,” originally uploaded about a year ago.
January 3 – Mauro Feria Tumbocon’s summary of Philippine cinema circa 2016, titled “2016: Amazing Year for Filipino Cinema, New Grounds Broken,” published in GMA News Online. Vital for taking a global perspective, Mau being the founder and director of the San Francisco-based FACINE, which holds the longest running Fil-Am film festival.
December 22 – “MMFF: A Festival in Flux” is a commentary I wrote on this year’s edition of the Metro Manila Film Festival. It is posted in the blog’s Remarks section as “A Festival in Flux.”
December 13 – I have decided to introduce a new section, titled Remarks, where my previous – and future – commentaries will be compiled. It will appear as one of the Menu options in Ámauteurish!
November 2016
November 22 – “Transcription Chapter,” a PDF file scanned from Hermie Rotea’s Marcos’ Lovey Dovie (Los Angeles: Hermie Rotea, 1983). Uploaded in the interest of historical documentation.
November 5 – As the final extensive revision (or so I hope) in Ámauteurish!, I adjusted links to open articles and enlargeable pictures in new tabs.
October 2016
October 23 – “The Role of the Film Critic in Cultural Discourse” is an abridged version, published in TheFilAm, of the 2016 FACINE Gawad Lingap Sining Lecture (see preceding post, immediately below this one) that I delivered on October 18 at the City College of San Francisco.
October 19 – “Cold Word Wars: Philippine Film as a Critical Activity” is the 2016 FACINE Gawad Lingap Sining Lecture that I delivered yesterday at the Diego Rivera Theater, City College of San Francisco; to be listed in the Remarks section.
October 10 – The website of the 23rd edition of Filipino Arts & Cinema International included an announcement of the Gawad Lingap Sining (Culture Nurturer Award):
September 2016
September 23 – The Kritika Kultura website has been revised, links on this blog have been updated.
September 2 – I just managed to confirm today that the website of Kritika Kultura is being revised. This means that certain recent publications I have listed on this blog might not show up. I will be checking occasionally and announce when the site is functioning properly once more.
September 1 – “Fallout to ‘A Lover’s Polemic’” is my account of “A Round Table Discussion on Poetics and Practice of Film Criticism,” as published in the recently posted vol. 13, no. 1 (2016) issue of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society. In relation to this, I have uploaded, as a one-time previously unpublished blog entry, a review of Marie Jamora’s Ang Nawawala [What Isn’t There] (2012), titled “Searched For, But Not Missing.” Both of these will be lodged in the Remarks section.
August 2016
August 30 – The Facebook page of FACINE (Filipino Arts & Cinema International) has announced a lecture I will be delivering, as recipient of FACINE’s Gawad Lingap Sining (culture-nurturing award), on October 18, 2016, at the Diego Rivera Theater, City College of San Francisco (co-presented by FACINE, PAWA and the Philippine Studies Department, CCSF through its Chair, Prof. Lily Ann B. Villaraza).
August 18 – The release date of Summit Media’s SINÉ: The YES! List of 100 Films That Celebrate Philippine Cinema has been moved from late 2016 to early 2017. To those who’ve been awaiting the publication, thanks for your patience.
July 2016
July 22 – My inclusion in the International Board of Editors of Ateneo de Manila’s Kritika Kultura was confirmed today. KK is the Philippines’s only humanities journal that is listed in the Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information (in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index) and Scopus, and is indexed by the Modern Language Association of America.
July 14 – “In Ma’ Rosa, Cannes Best Actress Jaclyn Jose Plays a Meth Dealer with Eloquence, Warmth” is my review of Brillante Ma. Mendoza’s latest release, published in The FilAm. This has been incorporated (as “Ice with a Face”) in the New-Millennium Pinoy Film Reviews section of Millennial Traversals.
July 2 – “Doy del Mundo on a Controversy over Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag” is a source interview for my article “Thinking Straight: Queer Imaging in Lino Brocka’s Maynila (1975),” published in the August 2012 issue (volume 9, number 2) of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society. A PDF copy of the article (with a brief introduction) that generated the controversy can be found here. This feature will appear as a 2012 entry in the Extras section, and will be cited as well in the Journal Articles page.
June 2016
June 19 – I have started uploading entries to Google Scholar, with a link to Amauteurish! Since my pen name turns out to be fairly common, I’ll be providing a link at this website’s About page (you can find it here as well). The citation results so far appear as follows:
June 7 – The letter of recommendation written for me in 2007 by my dissertation adviser Robert Sklar, who died in an accident four years later (before I managed to acquire tenure at my present university). This will be listed in the Extras section.
May 2016
May 21 – Karl Castro, a former student and one-time film director of mine (for Manwal sa Paggawa ng Pelikula [Manual for Filmmaking], a 2008 short feature), will be holding an exhibit titled “The Secret Lives of Books,” opening today and running until June 8 at the Ayala Museum in Makati City. One of the items is a mock-up of Millennial Traversals, whose cover he designed:
May 15 – My take on the recently concluded Philippine presidential elections, titled “How Pop Culture, Social Media Played a Role in Halalan 2016,” published in The FilAm; to be listed in the Remarks section.
March 2016
March 11 – A formal letter I wrote to “Colleagues in the Graduate Faculty” at Southwestern University, regarding controversial Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao. This will be listed in the Remarks section.
March 8 – Remembering/Rethinking EDSA, edited by JPaul S. Manzanilla & Caroline S. Hau, has just been published; contains an essay I wrote, titled “Grains & Flickers” (pp. 172-87), on the exceptionally enlightened film policy of the Marcos regime, far and away its only overall-positive achievement in culture. Orders may be placed at the Anvil [currently under renovation] website or at Amazon.
February 2016
February 25 – “Annual Filipino Film Production Chart” plots the number of films produced per year in the Philippines, along with sources and a short description. I’d made variations of this chart for some of my publications since 2002, but with this illustration (with data updated to 2015), I’ll be listing it under 2016 in the Extras section.
February 18 – “Artists, Cultural Leaders Speak Out against Pacquiao’s Words”: one of several short statements solicited by GMA News Online. The complete text is: “The tragedy of Manny Pacquiao is a magnified version of the situation that confronts Filipinos who aspire for a better life and who manage to achieve it, usually by working overseas: Filipino culture (including the educational system) fails to prepare the citizens for a life of privilege and leisure, and allows or even encourages them to fall back on pre-scientific belief systems. Pacquiao is correct in saying that his statements appear in the Bible. What he overlooks is the fact that those prescriptions were made for a specific place and time, roughly the desert culture of 3,000 years ago. It may be a simple process of deduction for a few educated people to realize that the difference between then and there on the one hand, and here and now on the other, is tremendous. However, the fact that the tools necessary for Pacquiao to take that fairly simple step were unavailable to him should be the shocking realization, the wake-up call, for the government’s responsibility in fostering a scientific and material approach to Filipino culture.” To be featured in the Remarks section.
February 10 – “Roads Less Traveled” is my review of Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil’s Lakbay2Love, published in Rappler; this will also be the final addition to the New-Millennium Pinoy Film Reviews section of Millennial Traversals. “Beginner’s Luck” is a semi-permanent listing of suggested postings, found at the beginning, which is the geographic bottom, of this page.
January 2016
January 15 – Nerd-whopper’s delights. The sequence list of Malvarosa (dir. Gregorio Fernandez, 1958), which I prepared for my dissertation; this is listed in the Extras section. Also, a PDF of the Spanish version (translator unknown) of “The Golden Ages of Philippine Cinema: A Critical Reassessment,” titled “Las edades de oro del cine Filipino: Una reevaluación crítica”; this appears in the Chapters in Anthologies section of the Books menu.
December 20 – “My Big Fat Critic Status” – draft of a letter I submitted to the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (Filipino Film Critics Circle) in 1985, requesting for a less-active status, meaning non-participation in the annual awards exercise. This entry will be archived in the Extras section.
December 19 – “Intrigues, Maneuvers, Interventions: Screen Images of the Korean War and Its Aftermath” – keynote lecture for the opening plenary session of the fourth Philippine Korean Studies Symposium (November 10, 2015, at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City). Published in 4PKSS (Philippines-Korea in the Changing Asia: Drawing Connections): Proceedings of the 4th Philippine Korean Studies Symposium (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Department of Linguistics, 2015): 4, 25-49.
December 12 – “The Reviewer Reviewed” features the only instance I responded to a review of my books, in this case Fields of Vision (1995).
November 2015
November 20 – One of several ways in which open-access books trump printed texts: both Millennial Traversals and Book Texts have been updated with my review of Jerrold Tarog’s Heneral Luna.
October 2015
October 15 – “Historical Film Depicts Antonio Luna’s Fall and Rise,” my review in The FilAm of Jerrold Tarog’s historical epic Heneral Luna. Plus an added treat, exclusively on Ámauteurish!: a review (written in 2009 and listed in the Extras section) by Jerrold Tarog of his mentor Johven Velasco’s Huwaran/Hulmahan Atbp.
October 3 – The list of journal articles (which may be accessed via a link on the Articles page), now separately provided, contains the abstracts and keywords of specific scholarly articles.
September 2015
September 21 – Ateneo de Manila University’s Kritika Kultura 25 (August 2015) features “Forum Kritika: Nora Aunor and the Philippine Star System,” the first peer-reviewed collection of articles on Philippine movie stardom; includes an essay of mine, “Firmament Occupation: The Philippine Star System,” which culminates in a reading of Aunor’s rarely seen Greatest Performance.
September 3 – The Philippine Film entry (last, meaning chronologically first, in the “Chapters in Anthologies” section of the Books menu) now contains PDF copies of my listed CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art articles. [Warning to researchers: said articles had been co-written, relied on dated auteurist perspectives, and were occasionally outright erroneous.]
August 2015
August 30 – The complete initial (and only) issue of SineManila, published in 1983 by the Public Relations Division of the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, with pages properly rescanned. Along with Focus on Filipino Films, this feature will be lodged in the Extras menu, as the very first (meaning the very last) entry.
August 28 – “Alien Abjection amid the Morning Calm: A Singular Reading of Horror Films from beyond Southeast Asia” (co-written with Ju-Yong Ha), out in Plaridel.
August 10 – Educators, students, and intrepid laypersons who wish to conduct a selective reading of my sole-authored books might find some use in Book Texts, a sampler I prepared.
July 2015
July 23 – My newest book, Millennial Traversals, is now out. Exclusively available as an open-access digital compilation on the Ámauteurish! blog.
June 2015
June 23 – “Local Film Reviews – New Millennium” is a self-described compilation (with short intro) of material I wrote since my return from graduate studies. The entries under the Reviews and Auteurs & Authors menus will now point to blog postings like this, while the entries in the Articles menu will continue leading to the original online publications for as long as the links remain active.
June 22 – The brochure prepared for the second edition of the Manila International Film Festival in January 1983, titled Focus on Filipino Films; the event comprised 24 films released within the period 1951-82, selected by a screening committee, from which new subtitled prints were made. This feature will be lodged in the Extras menu, as the first (i.e., bottom-most) entry.
March 2015
March 5 – A clutch of uneven “Commentaries.”
March 2 – “Some Words on Film Awards,” a snapshot of film prizes given in 1991; published in the rarely sourced Mediawatch, and includes a matrix of awards, categories, and winners.
February 2015
February 26 – An early – in fact, my first – scholarly article, “Reflections on a National Pastime,” published in the now-defunct Philippines Communication Journal and unseen since then (by me, among others), till now.
February 14 – “Star Builders on Parade,” an early interview article on talent managers Rey de la Cruz (see also this more extensive account), Douglas Quijano, and Jesse Ejercito.
February 11 – Two just-completed sections, one before my National Midweek stint and the other during & after, comprise print-era film reviews from various sources, previously unanthologized in any of my book publications.
January 2015
January 15 – A special issue on “Media and the Diaspora,” co-edited with Violeda A. Umali, has been finalized in Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society 11.1 (February 2014). Includes an article, “Phantom Limbs in the Body Politic: Filipinos in Foreign Cinema,” based on the first Kritika Kultura Global Classroom Lecture of Ateneo de Manila University’s Department of English.
December 12 – Compilations of articles on film festivals in, but of course, “Film Festivals,” and of periodic summations in “Period Enders.”
December 5 – My reviews of selected foreign films released in Manila, never before included in any of my book anthologies, can now be accessed in two compilations: “Warm-ups” and “Exertions.”
November 2014
November 12 – Old interviews, in chronological order: Ramon Reyes (early 1984), Pio de Castro III (late ’84), and Bienvenido Lumbera (1990).
October 2014
October 27 – PDF transcriptions of my Asian Journal of Women’s Studies articles may now be downloaded from this site. For those with the resources, kindly subscribe to AJWS, via Ewha Womans University’s Asian Center for Women’s Studies. [And no, “Ewha Womans University” is not an error.]
August 2014
August 5 – “A Critical Consideration of the Use of Trauma as an Approach to Understanding Korean Cinema” (co-written with Ju-Yong Ha); my first scholarly foray into Korean cinema, published in Asian Studies: Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia.
June 2014
June 23 – “Nora Aunor: A National Artist We Deserve” – a reprint in Rappler of the June 21 article from The FilAm, on the Philippine President’s rejection of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts’s endorsement of multimedia star Nora Aunor; first published a few hours after the official confirmation of the now-infamous snub.
June 13 – The National Pastime (complete & updated); Ámauteurish! goes live.
June 2 – “Ethics First.”
May 2014
May 30 – A last (for now) addition to the banner menu, titled Extras; including background to participation in the 2002 Sight & Sound poll, and a special topics syllabus.
May 5 – Two canonical exercises, “One-Shot Awards Ceremony” and “Worth the While,” as well as the book epilogue “The Last of Lino,” complete the updated version of Fields of Vision.
May 4 – “Ten Best Filipino Films Up to 1990.”
April 2014
April 25 – A new feature, Reviews, has been added to the banner menu. It lists reviewed films and books alphabetically, according to titles as well as according to directors or authors.
April 24 – “A Second Golden Age.”
April 23 – Books, listed according to sole authorship, edited volumes, chapters contributed to anthologies, and papers in proceedings.
April 21 – Wages of Cinema (complete & updated).
April 17 – “The ‘New’ Cinema in Retrospect.”
April 12 – “Ordinary People: Movie Worker,” an account of short-lived film-industry experience.
April 5 – “National Midweek Output (as Resident Film Critic),” which provides a background to my National Midweek stint as well as a comprehensive (reverse-chronological) list of articles.
March 2014
March 24 – “How to Use Ámauteurish!” containing an overview and navigation tips, as well as a partial list of “Articles.” These appear as new semi-permanent pages, listed above the blog entry.
March 20 – Two travelogues from 1988 – “Slow Train to Thailand” and “Empire of the (Risen) Sun” [on Japan]; and a short report on the capital of the universe, titled “Small World, Big Apple.”
March 19 – Some striving-for-controversy stuff: “How to Become a Film Critic” (written when critics were still sensitive to criticism, but before I was actually ready to perform full-on bashing) and “The Fantasy World of Rey de la Cruz,” the last major interview (as far as I could tell) with the controversial and definitely murdered star-builder, which brings up in passing his even more controversial and … allegedly suicidal ward, Pepsi Paloma.
March 18 – The full transcript of an interview that was eventually highly condensed for publication: “Critic in Academe: Bienvenido Lumbera” will be a good bet to remind us that someone once walked tall among us.
March 17 – “The Golden Ages of Philippine Cinema: A Critical Reassessment,” which is an attempt to question the Golden Ages concept (that I had once been complicit in validating).
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