Not a review, but a review: Notes on Roxlee’s ‘alphabet’

Roxlee’s five-minute animated film ABCD begins with a marking of territory: “A as in animation.” The phrase “as in” replaces “is for” and signals a review of something that is assumed to be already known as opposed to something that has never been encountered before. As in when one speaks on the phone and the signal becomes so bad that the phonetic alphabet becomes necessary (“A as in alpha”). Or as in when expressing disbelief (“As in!”). “As in” is a clarification, or better yet, an insistence. This becomes more apparent later in the film when the familiar globoid creature who slips in and out of the sequence of letters asks rhetorically in “Q as in question”: “WHY IS THE PHIL IN DEBT WHEN WE ARE RICH IN NATURAL RESOURCES?” To which another globoid creature rhetorically responds: “BECAUSE OF INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND? BECAUSE OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM?”

Roxlee’s “lazy” film, as he calls it, condenses a reflexive, personal, political and hilarious critique into a consistently astute and irreverent alphabet. Its intelligence surfaces in the succession of images that oppose its own position of intelligence as a “teacher” through an execution of the word exercise that the film laughingly appends, taunts, and ridicules. The filmmaker flips from teaching to sniping throughout the entire lesson, interspersing the animated didactic clips of the ABC lesson with drawings of bleeding, naked and corpulent men in various states of pleasure and suffering; surreal mutations of terrible and angry creatures; snapshots of the frontlines of mobilizations; documentation of military forces attacking protesters; inkblots (similar to some extent to the painted films of Stan Brakhage but less imposing, more playful); and other pissing, farting, sweating figures that run into pointy breasts (“P FOR POINTED MATTER”), shout “No!” and have sex. It is important to note that the film was made in 1985, a year before EDSA and a time of much anxiety, desperation and agitation. Roxlee’s familiar tropes are present — his contempt of radioactive warfare and the dictatorship, imaginings of dystopia, and mockery of the male body — creating incisive and clever associations with the equally ingeniously written alphabet that remain lucid, disturbing and accessible until today.

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Thanks to Shireen Seno and Merv Espina’s “The Kalampag Tracking Agency” for lending the film.