Restoring Maynila
MANILA, Philippines - The fully-restored version of Lino Brocka’s Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag, whose official English title, insists its producer and cinematographer Mike De Leon, is Manila In The Claws of Night, will be the fourth Filipino film to be shown at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is also the second classic Filipino film, after Manuel Conde’s Genghis Khan, that the FDCP and NFAP have helped restore. We talked to Bono Olgado of the NFAP about the circumstances that led to it and on the future of film preservation and restoration in the Philippines.
SUPREME: Take us a bit through the restoration. How did it start and how long did it take?
BONO OLGADO: After Genghis, we heard from the grapevine that Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation (WCF) was exploring the possibility of restoring another Southeast Asian film after the Indonesian film After the Curfew (1954) by Usmar Ismail in 2012, and that they had talked to the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, which had a print of Maynila courtesy of Mike De Leon. We got in touch with Douglas Laible of WCF through colleagues, and we started corresponding on the possibility of restoring a film together. We threw around a number of different titles to work on, but Doug had been talking with the Asian Film Archive (AFA) and also with Mike de Leon as early as the summer of 2012 regarding Maynila. Considering the significance of Lino Brocka’s oeuvre and the paucity of relatively good prints in circulation, we decided that his films would make excellent candidates for restoration. By then, it was between Maynila and Jaguar. But given the availability of workable elements of Maynila initially through AFA and Mike, we ultimately decided to push through with it. The restoration was done at the L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, Italy, which the WCF regularly uses and where Genghis was restored. The actual restoration began in November. We’re now at the tail end of the restoration. Mike de Leon is personally overseeing color grading and subtitling.
Was there a difference in terms of process between the Genghis Khan and Maynila restorations?
Yes, quite a difference. For one, Genghis is black and white and Maynila is color; this entails a different set of approaches. The former is also shorter than the latter, running time wise, which directly affects man hours needed. I cannot fully speak for the lab with regard to the difficulties they’ve had, but knowing what I know, the restoration projects were quite different from each other. But based solely on the workflow, I can say that the Maynila restoration will prove to be even better than that of Genghis Khan’s.
The task of archiving, preservation and restoration has always been difficul. Has it gotten easier? What’s the general outlook?
Four restorations in eight months are pretty damn good. Is it enough? Not nearly. How I wish we could release at least one newly restored film per month. But it’s not about how many or how fast we can churn out restored films. Restoration is dependent on the availability of elements to restore. If you have no salvageable elements, there will be nothing to restore at all. It all starts with preservation. We at FDCP and NFAP take to this task optimistically, but grounded in practical actions and sustainable strategies. There are matters currently being addressed with regard to sustainability. Restoration is an expensive endeavor. The key is to make it a sustainable one. This is where the public comes in. Beyond the resources, expertise, and political will that we are slowly gaining, what we really need more than anything else is the cooperation of our stakeholders and the general public’s support. If we want to see more films restored, then we should go and support these films accordingly. Go and pay for a ticket, buy a DVD. More than discreet government funding and more than the dictates of the private market, public support will shape the direction and economics of preservation and restoration. The archives can neither be built in a day, nor is it built solely by a few. Without a doubt it’s going to be a difficult endeavor, but one we don’t intend giving up on. It’s going to be a very long road ahead; we’re just hoping we’re not going to be alone as we traverse it.
What’s next?
We actually have a number of short films being restored at the moment, including Henry Francia’s On My Way to India Consciousness, I Reached China and a number of Mowelfund films. As for our next feature-length restoration, we are researching but would definitely love to hear from the public what film they would like to see again in its full cinematic glory.
