Who’s afraid of Philippine cinema?

Geopolitics Of The Visible
Edited by Rolando B. Tolentino
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000

The trouble with movies is that a hundred viewers could come out of a theater with 100 interpretations playing in the cinema of their minds, each bullheadedly insisting that his version is the accurate one. What indeed! The banning of Joey Reyes’ Live Show propelled flamboyant artists and bejeweled moralists into acrimonious debates. As Conrado de Quiros recently wrote with palpable exasperation: "You find the movie artless, I find it artful; you find a movie excessive, I find it restrained."

If there’s anything this controversy teaches us, certainly it is the fact that a movie such as Live Show is deemed powerful enough to represent the real, to figure it, and eventually, to move its viewers into action. Such imagined power is what one may call, at least provisionally, a film culture.

Here, the anthology Geopolitics of the Visible, edited and with an introduction by Rolando B. Tolentino, proves helpful in identifying the problems and prospects of film cultures in the Philippines. Consisting of 16 essays from eminent scholars such as E. San Juan, Jr., Fredric Jameson, Patrick D. Flores, Neferti X.M. Tadiar, Alice G. Guillermo, and Caroline S. Hau, among others based in universities here and abroad, the anthology lays bare the invisible forces that inform the way we see films as visible representations of a society in crisis.

In other words, the essays collected in this anthology seek to explain the place of Philippine cinema in the light of global economic and cultural transformations. How, for example, do we make sense of a film about the ill-fated life of a Filipina maid in Singapore? What does it say about a government that institutionalizes the exportation of women’s bodies as forms of domestic labor in cold foreign countries, distant as planets? What does it matter if a local film gets recognized in an international film festival? Why can’t certain Filipino directors resist from showing films that depict the Filipino as butcher of pigs in some flashy barrio fiesta–as exotic in other words?

The contributors in this anthology acknowledge that there is neither an easy answer nor a single explanation. It is apparent, however, that their explications rest upon the bedrock of a solid political, cultural, and historical analysis. Meanwhile, Camilla Benolirao Griggers’ contribution points out that the birth of cinema in the Philippines coincided with the Philippine-American War. At this beleaguered time, cinema as propaganda was made to support the imperialist expansion of the United States. To illustrate, Griggers cites one of the short films produced and directed by Thomas Edison in 1899. Edison’s Colonel Funstan [sic] on the Baglag River, for instance, was shot on location in the woods of New Jersey, making it appear as though the film was taken in the Philippines and complete with African-Americans cast as Filipinos to boot.

Similarly, Tolentino rightfully notes that the arrival of cinema in the Philippines in 1887 marked the transition from Spanish to US colonization that necessarily signaled the colonization of the natives’ imaginary and their ways of seeing the world and their place in it. The result of which, according to Tolentino, is a visual rendering of Philippine cinema in "imperial and neocolonial framework" that persists–like a grotesque memory of Salvador Dali’s images–up to the present. Half of what Tolentino says is true, half of it, sadly, is misguided. Why, for example, would anyone attribute the periodic bad art which at once plagues and sustains the present movie-making industry to the ghosts of dead American colonialists? Let me explain.

Though the presence of Hollywood films continues to attest to their monopoly of local visual image and imagining, there are also local films that contest the very validity of US cultural ascendancy. The TV show Tabing Ilog, for example, is a shameless copy of Hollywood-produced Dawson’s Creek, or, say Oka Tokat is a burlesque of Are You Afraid of the Dark? One such rare film that counters the deluge of Hollywood visual images and fantasies is Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. Jameson and San Juan’s articles, in varying degrees, prove this point. In Jameson’s discussion of Perfumed Nightmare, he argues that the film is an exemplary example of Third World Cinema that poses a corrective to the decadence of Hollywood cultural dominance.

In other words, Jameson–a Western Marxist critic comfortably positioned in one of America’s wealthiest universities–looks to the Third World for an imagined salvation from what he calls a "corporate capitalist daily life" that, paradox of all paradoxes, nourishes his very own existence: the boon of his life. To say that Perfumed Nightmare exhibits an "aesthetic of revolt" may be correct in the sense that the film is indeed aesthetic. But to argue, however, that the same is revolutionary is too much. How can a film be so revolutionary when only a small circle of well-perfumed aesthetes and pompous academicians have watched the film and talked about it among themselves? San Juan correctly remarks that Tahimik’s films are "mainly viewed and appreciated by a Western metropolitan audience." As far as I can remember, the last time Perfumed Nightmare was shown on popular TV programming was years ago in celebration of cinema’s 100 years. (Was it at 11 p.m. when half of the viewers were already snoring?)

This is the sadness of our cinema: the best of our movies are seen by the least of our people. Such isolation is made even more pronounced by critics whose discussion of a popular film is mediated by a language that a populace may find totally ungraspable, if not impossible. How can a revolution happen in a secret movie theater frequented by a coterie of critics speaking the most mysterious language? But it can be fairly noted that the anthology envisions specific audiences and addresses specific issues.

Some discussions, however, are interesting–almost cinematic in their rendering. Take, for instance, Alfred W. McCoy’s "RAM and the Filipino Action Film." An historian by training, McCoy is able to retrace the self-made fiction of military men from the Philippine Military Academy being played out in movies like a broken, forgettable refrain. According to McCoy, the term "mistah" that means "classmate" originates from the 1933 Hollywood film Mista Rastus whose lead actor resembled in "striking likeness" a PMA cadet named Pedro V. Merritt. In no time, cadets were using the term to refer to one of their kind–making it an indispensable term in Academy slang or "slingo" that has endured for over 60 years now. Without a doubt, a film is potentially able to make its viewers imagine a vision similar to the one being viewed. As McCoy observes, "the film industry, interpreting changing global fashions through local productions, crafted a succession of images for a Filipino martial masculinity."

By and large, the anthology provides a solid analysis of Philippine cinema’s problems and prospects that make it as incendiary as volatile bodies caught raw in the most bomba of our films. Elsewhere, something other than cinema is playing.

* * *

The author writes poetry and teaches at the English Department of the Ateneo de Manila University.