The archives of your mind
Film scholars be moan the lack of a proper archive — restored, catalogued, and preserved in a climate-controlled environment — of Filipino movies. Many recognized classics such as Gerardo De Leon’s El Filibusterismo have disappeared forever: the film reels decayed beyond repair, the rolls recycled into components for New Year’s Eve noisemakers (torotot), damaged in fires, or simply thrown away. Now and then the reels of some near-forgotten classic are discovered in a crumbling cinema awaiting demolition, but how many stand-alone movie theaters are still standing in the age of the multiplex? It’s a significant sign of our times that some of the old movie palaces in Recto and Avenida, Manila are now bargain bazaars selling pirated DVDs.
Outside of the cable channel Cinema One, the finest archive of Philippine movies now exists mostly in the minds of moviegoers. This archive is incomplete, inaccurate, corrupted, and most likely embellished, but our memories of these films are all that’s left of them. We are the characters of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (which was filmed in the ‘60s by Francois Truffaut, interestingly enough), except that we’ve memorized movies instead of books. We also need to get our act together: far too many people have memorized Temptation Island.
For the generation that grew up in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the primary source for movies was not video shops but a television program called Sine Siete. It aired every afternoon after the lunchtime variety shows, when good children were supposed to be having their siesta. Summer vacations were a daily retrospective of ‘50s melodramas and war action flicks, ‘60s musicals and romantic comedies, and ‘70s parodies and teenybopper romances. While we were “sleeping,” we were taking courses in cultural anthropology. The sleep we lost may have ruined our chances of growing to be six feet tall, but we learned the right way to profess undying love: in an earnest stream of metaphors delivered with a straight face while standing under a mango tree in the middle of an open field, followed by a duet with the beloved. No wonder romance is dead: try finding a mango tree in the middle of EDSA.
To supplement our memories, a few dozen DVDs of old Tagalog movies are now available at bookstores and video shops. Recently I saw Ang Tangi Kong Pag-Ibig starring the leading post-World War II love team of Carmen Rosales and Rogelio de la Rosa. In the movie Carmen Rosales plays Jovita, a nightclub singer who resolves to leave her immoral life in the big, bad city for the purity and goodness of the country.
This is a recurring theme in ‘50s movies: the corruption of the city and the virtues of rural living. She hasn’t done anything reprehensible, but she declares herself “dishonored” because everyone thinks she is the club owner’s mistress.
So Jovita returns to her hometown, where Sergio, the haciendero’s son played by Rogelio de la Rosa, is recovering from his last relationship with a nasty city girl. They meet when his dog bites her — the rare cinematic exploration of the romantic possibilities of rabies. Jovita has to get a daily anti-rabies shot at the convent clinic for 25 days, and that’s when they get to know each other. He falls in love, she plays hard to get, they make passionate declarations of eternal love and finally set a wedding date.
Who should appear on the big day but the nightclub owner, who tries to take Jovita away. Sergio beats up the bad man, but Jovita disappears without a trace. Sergio spends the next six months scouring the city for his lady. He drinks heavily and gets into a car crash because it’s the ‘50s and nobody stops him from driving under the influence. He is rushed to a nearby hospital run by a religious order. Who should be nursing him but Jovita, who has become a nun because she was mortified at the scene during her wedding. This is a movie where people are motivated by embarrassment. (By the way, she never told her beloved about her “dark past,” presumably because she was too embarrassed.)
Jovita saves Sergio from going blind by personally fetching the surgeon from his house even if it’s his day off. When Sergio can see again — it’s a very quick recovery — she tells him that they’re finished because she’s taken holy vows. But the surgeon visits Sergio and tells him that Jovita is not yet a nun. Then the two men light up and smoke cigarettes in the hospital room next to the oxygen tank, because it’s the ‘50s, smoking is cool, and no one has seen the ending of Jaws (which is apparently not a scientifically-sound method for getting rid of a shark, but still).
In the end, the Mother Superior tells Jovita to get over herself and marry the man she loves. Sergio appears wearing jodhpurs because rich people are supposed to wear riding clothes, even if there isn’t a single horse in this movie. And that is how love conquers embarrassment.
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