The new cinema experience: Air Supply and eye surgery
If there’s anything that cinema can still deliver it’s that air of strangeness — that feeling that’s unique to the art form, conveying the visceral shock of the visual image, the ambient brooding of a piece of music and the impact of an narrative — simultaneously. We may be looking at an artificial world that looks eerily like our own but at its best it rings even truer, actually more like our own than the given reality of our own eyes. It shows just how alien we truly are.
Last Sunday, at the Cinemanila Tribute to the late, great Alexis Tioseco, they screened the program he assembled for the recent 13th Thai Short Film & Video Festival as part of the “S-Express” program series that travels to film festivals in the region and around the world. He was also one of its founders. Anyone who wants to know how profoundly strange the Filipino experience can be needn’t look any further than the four shorts Alexis chose.
The first two seem to be grouped in a category that can be considered examples of magic and legend, or the “irrational” or pre-science understanding of phenomena. Opening the program was Raymond Red’s Ang Magpakailanman (“The Eternity”). Hailed by Noel Vera as one of the Philippines’ best local short films, he writes that it is also in “its 25 densely packed minutes, possibly one of the strangest Filipino films ever made.” The second, Auraeus Solito’s Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2 Scene 2: Suring and the Kuk-ok (“The Brief Lifespan of Fire: Act 2 Scene 2: Suring and the Kuk-ok”), is based on a native myth from Palawan. In only nine minutes, it achieves an alchemy of imagery and sound in an audacious demonstration of potent filmmaking.
For the next two films, the focus shifts to the “rational,” in that the films use the terminology and processes of science and technology to explain their perceptions. Tad Ermitaño’s The Retrochronological Transfer of Information concerns itself with an experiment using a two-peso bill as a time machine to transmit a message to Jose Rizal. Presented as a documentary, the idea is tested using scientific methodology and structured like a news report, making the fiction soluble with plausibility. Chistopher Gozum’s Surreal Random MMS Texts para ed Ina, Agui tan Kaamong ya Makaiiliw ed Sika: Gurgurlis ed Banua (“Surreal Random MMS Texts for a Mother, a Sister and a Wife Who Longs for You: Landscape with Figures”) uses Carlos Bulosan’s 1942 poem “Landscape with Figures” as well as the music of local electronic music stalwarts Tengal and Moon Fear Moon to create an unsettling portrait of Filipino expatriates in the Middle East longing to return to Pangasinan. It’s comprised of images taken with a cell phone of the foreign landscape (most memorably, real-time footage of an eye being operated on that’s reminiscent of Buñuel).
Watching these strange films in an open-air cinema in the middle of Bonifacio High Street, right between the Krispy Kreme and the Nike Store, only added to the experience. Even the usual irritants such as the piped-in music from the Seattle’s Best nearby (Air Supply, to be exact) while seeing an eye being sliced open made sense: it was somehow painful without actually touching you. Interestingly enough, the playwright and teacher Paul Dumol told me that one of Alexis’ dreams was to screen films in such a setting and just let people watch for free. Minus the Air Supply and street lamps, this might’ve been exactly what he envisioned. At least, if not, it’s a start. In any case, he would’ve appreciated the surreality of the sight of an almost exploding head, erotic foreplay with the earth, a buried slipper retrieved from a ditch and the oppressive whiteness of the walls in Dubai.
We’ll continue watching. We’ll continue trying.
After all, it’s still too strange out there for us to stop.
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NU 107’s Rock Awards this year will be produced by no less than Quark Henares and it promises to be the most interesting in a long time. Aside from the live performances by bands like the Itchyworms, Kamikazee, Chicosci, Sandwich, Juan Pablo Dream and Up Dharma Down as well pre-show performances by Duster, Turbo Goth and the Low Techs, there are several surprises in store so best get your tickets now at all SM Ticketnet outlets and at the Araneta Coliseum box office. Presented by Red Horse Beer Muziklaban, Smart Buddy and Clear. “Rock Awards’09: High Definition!” seems to be a nice way to cap a crappy year, if an interesting one, at least in music.
