tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57053724280972110812024-03-12T16:37:44.251-07:00Closely Watched FramesRead at your own risk. These reviews are in a constant state of flux -- rough drafts which are not likely to get finished. I revise and supplement them as needed, but never to reverse what I originally thought of the films. Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.comBlogger141125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-75945170880361451662015-11-18T03:48:00.003-08:002016-01-13T17:32:53.400-08:00BUKOD KANG PINAGPALA (Sheron Dayoc, 2015)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">He awakens her, a religious
devotee, from a vegetative sleep, a long-standing coma. He heals her of paralysis, festering bed sores and all, and then soon he is ravishing her in
her sleep and whispering commands in her ears. Is he the real thing or some opportunistic being in sheep’s clothing? In this religious horror mystery, questions like
this are asked to make us doubt our received pieties of many centuries. In
this, it tries to be polemical, but in this, for better or worse, it is unsure of conviction. That, and ammunition.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">It is little we haven’t heard of
before, no matter how this entity in question looks like Jesus
Christ according to Davinci: dark beard, a crown of thorns, and flowing hair
like a Nazarenite. No, no matter how the house under seeming possession seems
like a gallery of religious European artifacts, like some symbolism emanating
all the way from the Quattrocento. The proceedings are as breakable as the
house’s statuary.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Of course Roman Catholicism as
European/Spain’s religious legacy is the target here. But Dayoc’s new film -- something atypical of his previous work -- falls short even in its portentousness: the biblical rhetoric spouted all throughout is
rehashed and regrettably underwritten – to think that three heads share screenplay credits. Many of the lines sound like trite expressions of damnation cut and pasted from some
unlettered forum or message board. Sure, they may be read as symptoms of
postcolonial malaise, but little is done with this chestnut that is
imaginatively new. It is almost already everyday stuff. To find someone
answering to the name of God or something just as bizarre, you need only to
peruse the news about our religious cults or the strange characters coming out of the woodwork during election season. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Despite this film’s efforts to
make itself controversial and polemical, the script is lackluster, unsubstantial, miserably wanting. The polemic it foists on us feels uneven, unsure about how to
achieve the demonization of Christianity while floating the possibility that
the whole shebang isn’t of divine inspiration at all. It plugs in worn-out
biblical symbolism – a dove here, a serpent there – to keep us
guessing. But it just comes off playing safe, too calculated and too medieval. Its
real target is thinly veiled, after all, whether he shifts shape as a succubus or as flesh and blood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">In a country where the excesses
and pitfalls of (false) devotion and religiosity are quite apparent – even
movies have depicted this skepticism from Bernal's Himala onwards – this is not
uncharted territory anymore. So much so that films -- like Miss Bulalacao,
another competition entry -- have widened their scope to include
extraterrestrial intervention and determinism in man’s affairs. Not that I
approve of it. It’s just one deus-ex-machina for another.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">For better or for worse, Bukod
Kang Pinagpala’s stabs at horrifying us away from religion, in the end, are
attended with laughter and tittering. No one was into it. No one in the
audience was. Not the actors and actresses with their empty, worn-out lines,
and half-hearted performances. Not even the subtitlists were in the know. At
times the captions refer to the supernatural figure with reverential
capitalized pronouns, sometimes that’s out of the window. Pity, it seems as if Dayoc
was trying to do a Kleist or a Bunuel, but the latter’s humor and irony, for
one, are nowhere in sight. From a familiar and therefore challenging premise,
the film isn’t equal to it, but only gives way to profane reactions for the
wrong reasons.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-84592583793208379282015-11-10T08:42:00.002-08:002016-01-12T07:04:12.072-08:00MANANG BIRING (Carl Joseph Echague Papa, 2015)<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Admittedly there is much in the making of Manang Biring
that translates as sheer Greek to me. Until today,
I had never sat through a full-length animated movie done exclusively with
the use of rotoscoping. I’d once seen a few brief glimpses of Linklater’s Waking
Life, but had found the film overlong for one sitting, decided to take a rain check and forgot about it. My first impression of this modality of animation was that it works to impart an oneiric, sometimes comics-like quality, sometimes painterly dimension to live action. Rotoscoped imagery might remind you of the distortions
and flatttenings of modern art, from Matisse to Munch, from Expressionism to Fauvism to Hyperrealism, or it might come across as animated comics done by a skilled draughtsman. A virtue with great applications, apparent even then.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">No question, there is a serious art to it. There is also the
artisanal dedication in the attention to detail that it entails. These
days, however, there’s also recourse to the labor-saving substitute of 2D and 3D applications (even Adobe Photoshop can do it at a pinch) not to mention more powerful gpu and cpu rendering that can be had on the cheap. Beyond being an exercise in style, however, a work like Manang Biring makes you wonder what
makes an animator take the pains to essentially make two
movies – one, a live-action representation, the other, the
rotoscoped product, a representation of the representation -- for the price of one. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">In Manang Biring, there seems sufficient justification for a full-length feature rotoscoping: one, that no other Filipino has done it, and two, the film features apropos material (e.g. dream sequences, moments of absurdity) that is less easy to achieve with live action, and more evocative if done with the stylization of rotoscoping. My own sense is that, as this is
a sort of elegy in honor of the filmmaker’s mother, a rotoscoped world affords the filmmaker a grieving distanciation, a mediation, a dressing of the wounds for
something that remains fresh and unhealed in his memory. Manang Biring is further homage to Papa's late mother as well as a sublimation of grief. If last year’s award-winning Ang ‘Di Paglimot ng Mga Alaala captured the mother's actual footage, this time, Papa swings to the other end of the spectrum with fictionalized animation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">From all appearances, Manang Biring entailed easily more time and elbow grease to put together than last year's debut, but Papa’s paean
to his mother this time proves not without logical clunkiness and betrays, unwittingly, reservations about the idea of motherhood. As the titular mother, Manang Biring errs on the side not of motherly
instinct but of worldly irrationality predicated on timidity and vanity, illegality and sheer lack of horse sense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">As if, in the end, after all, this mother does not want to be
seen with warts and all. As if this tough Ilocana who bludgeons burglars and
sells abortifacients in front of Quiapo Church suddenly grows deathly afraid
(more afraid than death even) at the mention of a daughter who has gone missing
for years and who now makes her whereabouts known all but too late -- when Manang Biring is battling for her life. If anything, someone faced with mortality knows no modesty when it comes to
the comfort of family. One is truest at the verge of dying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">When Manang Biring receives word of her daughter’s homecoming,
though, a daughter who has hitherto scarcely been a good, filial example, what does Manang Biring do with her borrowed time? She burns the candle at both ends committing one far-fetched, illegal scheme after another in an effort to make money to extend her life: teaming up with her erstwhile burglar in order to steal from an ecstasy dealer to selling the narcotic pills herself at a club for ravers. When all else fails, she conspires to put a stand-in
in her place when the appointed time comes. That doesn't sound like human nature, let alone the verity about mothers. It sounds like the stuff of pure comics. Here are some of the reasons for the use of
rotoscoping, after all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">If Kurosawa’s Ikiru is about how a terminally ill man
tries to do his best to help his community, Manang Biring, all but to the end,
is about scheming and deception, a headscratcher that even involves a male impersonator taking her place. Maybe it’s my
naivete kicking in and the likes of Kanji Watanabe are a thing of the past. Cynicism, they will sing, is the ballad of the times. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Which begs a common sense question, my most nagging incredulity at this supposedly up-with-the-times world, this quick-fix world: why are the proceedings anachronistically trapped in a time warp where Manang
Biring has to wait for many long months to get in touch with her daughter when
she can get hooked up with latter-day telephony at an instant? And who even takes pains to write
snail-mail these days? Perhaps Papa begs not to repeat himself, as videocam dialogue was the main motif of his debut film. The point of the delay of course
is to dangle the specter of drama and death over the slowly-fading figure of the mother. There’s no question what obsesses Papa at the moment, there's no question about his sincerity about it, but the turns and
devices of narrative should be better thought out in future projects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Admittedly the foregoing may sound less than flattering, but let me temper that with a confession. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Manang Biring goes on to win the grand prize and subsequently make the rounds of overseas festivals. The film has virtues, I suspect, that only honest-to-goodness filmmakers can put a finger on. Papa is a filmmaker's filmmaker, full stop. He looks set toy go from strength to strength, what with all his technical wizardry to make even worthier, if not truly masterful films. His passion for filmmaking is immense. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ambidexterous in his command of the medium, even. He is like a Jan Svankmajer with his restless versatility who leaves little to chance. He is a meticulous animator who must be his own worst critic, teasing out detail after detail that may slip the casual eye. And his nods to cinema are those of a studious and devout
adherent. Notice the littlest salutes to traditional filmmaking: how, for
instance, a fish-eye lens effect bloats Manang Biring’s face. Note how he tries to achieve in rotoscope such cinematographic values as narrow depth of field and deep focus. Notice how timelapses
of clouds swirl over Manang Biring as if ready to consume her. Pity, though, she
all but cowers, even when she alternatively looks toughest. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fight or flight? Manang Biring seesaws between the two extremes. Part of the unsettled internal conflict seems to stem from the long tradition of othering the Ilocana has undergone in screen representations. Much like the way the Waray has been portrayed as the other, the Ilocana as the other may still derive from the way Gloria Romero portrayed Manang Biday, the tough and feisty Ilocana, in the 1950s: tobacco munching, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">tough-talking, bellicose,</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> armed with a two-by-two. Minus much of the trappings, Manang Biring channels this regional archetype, but dubiously extends it to naturalize an unlawful aggression, a wrong-headed means to stay alive. This defines a hamartia that is then compounded by a contradictory hamartia at the other extreme, that of Manang Biring being made to look like a timid, vain old lady when it comes to the matter of her daughter. Things don't add up. She seems, after all, not so much a more nuanced character as a confused and addled one. Mestastasis in the brain?</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Maybe. Maybe, and this is perhaps what the circuitous and clunky detours of aporetic feeling Manang Biring wishes to convey: everyone quakes at the prospect of death, even more so the prospect of a guilt-ridden, lonely and undignified death.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
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Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-48333285727945928392015-10-27T06:36:00.002-07:002016-01-21T01:46:26.671-08:0088:88 (Isiah Medina, 2015)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Abstract time, a mode of temporality invoked and highlighted by Isiah Medina in this experimental sortie, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">might be read as a shorthand for a concept of time that runs counter to concrete, empirical, linear, historical time, a time that parenthetically encompasses the growing problems of social disaffection and precarity persistent within the film's locality. Abstract time negates the despondency of this immanent </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">concept of time that is reified and commodified by bandyclocks and stopwatches which dictate the duration and segmentarity of working life. This open-ended, e</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ternal concept of time seems to be the only recourse for an emancipatory possibility in the future, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">in a society
where the regimentation of time has become </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the site of social imprisonment and disenfranchisement. Abstract
time also repeals what concrete historical time has enshrined and become coextensive with: </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Philosophy, for instance, is discredited as an ineffectual tool of explaining the logic of existence. Reason, that </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">legacy of Enlightenment, has also ceased to be a source of meaning. If it were ever useful, it </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">has stopped to serve the purposes of the powerless and the
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Set in the less-than-thriving suburbs of Canada where the sometimes angry, often disenfranchised and unemployed young folks find themselves </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">marginalized from the socio-economic apparatus, the film subjects
them to artistic sublimation, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">rendering them as subjects in an unusual variety of
documentary, although it hardly looks like one, even if</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> it might as well be one because its socio-economic
concerns, its quest for ontological meaning, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">capture the fears and frustrations, the ruminations and dreams, the desperation and deprivation of its characters. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">In the background we hear their voices in the act of reading and engaging in rationalization. They quote and recite from books and their own writings, but sometimes the sound they make is a mundane one of blowing off steam. W</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">hat is all but obfuscatory, however, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">is how their difficult lives are given expression in murmurs or in half-audible whispers, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">often disembodied, off screen, as if spoken in nascent madness, as if realizing the subversive nature of their words, as if sensing the surveillance by those</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> who may suppress their notions of resistance and recalcitrance, their notions of revolt. What is sometimes frustrating is how much of
the volume of the film is deliberately </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">turned down to our incomprehension so that one must strain
to listen and make the words out – sometimes </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">to the point of futility -- made more confused and
incomprehensible by the overlap and confusion of simultaneous voice</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">s, whether expressing a sentiment or giving
voice to a personal idea or a passage in a </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">book.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Despite a certain sense of despondency, Medina creates an atmosphere of airiness, an artifice of buoyancy, through the visual motifs of his formal and stylistic </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">experimentation. The nature of what the camera captures could be termed impressionistic and casual and repetitive in their occurrence: we get many outdoor shots of pavements and concrete surfaces </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">of suburbia, side by side with the private quarters and bedrooms of youthful couples. Visuals and </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">sounds, for the most part, do not always go hand in hand, seldom
complementary in an effort, it seems, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">at estrangement. T</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">he mechanics of montage contrast stylized frames of saturated colors </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">with seemingly washed-out frames of
suburbia: the better to declare the film's experiment and the better to show the desolation of life on the ground. But it is the human dimension that gives heart to the </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">film for it is that which lives, breathes and aspires for better
life: a brief but poignant image is that of a sharing of a </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">sandwich sliced in half presumably for hungry couples who can't afford a square meal. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cinematically speaking, however, the most notable and most courageous aspect of Medina’s worthy
project is its uncompromising and </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">stubborn refusal against narrative and formal conventionalism. Apart from the added stylization
in post-production -- sometimes </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">genuinely startling and striking, sometimes simplistically
conceived and executed -- there are sequences of striking unfamiliarity and and points of view that further render the unicity of technique. But what Medina does with all of it is what makes the enterprise worthwhile: the film complexifies into a</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> poem of singular tonality expressing what it means to survive and to be alive</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> -- a living, breathing palimpsest inscribed with the
voices of the marginalized, their thoughts and feelings, their </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">fears and aspirations. However frustrating, this palimpsest is inscribed with dehumanized articulations: unfinished sentences, bits and pieces of them, and </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">sometimes thoughts and ideas trailing off, yet crescendoing into an accumulation
of disparate voices that threaten the strictures of </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">linear, univalent time, of a future that hangs in the balance. In the final reckoning, it is abstract time that may protect us from </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">everyday temporality entrapping our movement and freedom. Abstract time may be a means to afford
us a line of flight, a </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">return to infinity.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">P.S. Never got around to reading the synopsis, can merely guess what the title is about, but this is my take on it. </span></div>
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Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-24695522968409329572015-08-30T07:48:00.002-07:002016-01-12T07:06:50.564-08:00Christopher Pavsek - The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik (2013)<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">No review here. Just picked it up. Didn't know about it until Sir Eric himself (aka Kidlat Tahimik) tipped me off about its publication.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Everyone must know about this already, but worth repeating is another Tahimik sighting, a brief cameo, in Werner Herzog's "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" as Hombrecito, a self-reflexive nod to a character in an earlier film, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God", that of an aboriginal flutist who accompanies the doomed Aguirre down the Amazon River. Back to Kaspar Hauser, Tahimik not only plays the flute but makes up a spiel in Tagalog. No one seemed the wiser, except that Tahimik would go on to excerpt this cameo for one of his own films, "I'm Furious Yellow."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Worth mentioning, too, is a book entitled "Geopolitics of the Visible," edited by Rolando Tolentino, where Fredric Jameson describes "Perfumed Nightmare" as an example of "Art Naif." Coincidentally, I've been calling it very similarly, consubstantially, as "Faux Naif," in reference to more contemporary films (e.g. the works of John Torres, Raya Martin, Shireen Seno) that seem to trace their roots to Kidlat Tahimik's distinctive style. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One should also check out the magazine Cinema Scope, particularly the spring issue for this year. It contains an interview with Tahimik regarding his latest film "Balikbayan # 1." </span></span></div>
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Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-46135726958596275952015-08-17T04:23:00.000-07:002016-01-15T06:46:31.935-08:00AN KUBO SA KAWAYANAN (Alvin Yapan, 2015)<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;">Every filmmaker of note seems haunted by its specter: the nostalgia for our nation's lost origins. What they, and perhaps each of us, seek, however, isn't dissimilar from a Derridean trace, a
reference to the past that seems elusive, ill-defined and indeterminate, "a mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;">." Yet our historicist and history-conscious filmmakers persist. In Kidlat Tahimik’s “Why Is Yellow The Middle of The Rainbow?” the director-narrator
recognizes the virtues of</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;"> the Native American shaman and brings him to an apotheosis as an ideal parallel to our own babaylan, our own bygone version of
the seer and miracle-worker. I</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 17.12px;">n the cinematic corpus of Auraeus Solito, i</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 107%;">t is the babaylan of Palawan that serves
as the conduit of old, healing wisdom. In Kristian Sendon Cordero's "Angustia," a heroic Bicolano shaman is placed in favorable relief against a headlong Spanish man of religion. Meanwhile Lav Diaz's expansive explorations of the so-called Malay time are hypostatized examples resulting from a yearning for idealized roots. In "Todo Todo Teros," John Torres lends the soapbox for Diaz to expound on what he had read of Pigafetta's famous chronicles of Magellan's expedition, in particular the accounts of Cebu, detailing the natives' cultural precocities. Even in the already postmodern phase of his
mature work, Raya Martin invokes precolonial nativism as a life-saving, albeit superstitious, talisman that
finds expression in such works as "Independencia" and "How to Disappear
Completely."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The attempt to locate the ideal historical substrate for our vanished civilization and culture, the attempt to retrieve it, can be vaguely read into Alvin Yapan’s latest work. As in many films that take this route, there is a crypto-mystical tonality to the proceedings. In "An Kubo Sa Kawayanan," the bamboo house seems alive, surrounded by woods also stirring with strange, enchanted animals and insects. And the inhabitant of this hut, a kind of hermit, has turned inward in the hut's solitude, in her quasi-schizophrenic state. (She speaks to herself, perhaps in response to all the decoded flows of labor, capital, and commodities that encircle her: the lure of technology, the lure of jobs, the lure of the city and the world.) The hut seems to know the past as much as the future: how its stairs begin to creak as if to forewarn its tenant of threat and danger. How it appears to tell the hermit in dreams what is about to unfold. <br /><br />In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes: “The hermit’s hut is a theme which needs no variations, for at the simplest mention of it, “phenomenological reverberation” obliterates all mediocre resonances… Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb “to inhabit.” “ Yapan's hut is indeed surrounded by breathtaking solitude and enchantment, but it cannot hide itself as a rickety structure, a site of decay. Yet it seems to serve its sentinel as an oracular house that imparts wisdom and admonition – it communicates with her -- and extending the hut as a metaphor of immensity and cosmicity, it might be the Filipino's larger habitation. Time and place. History. <br /><br />Our enchanted, indigenous history, then, as hopelessly propped up by its last, steadfast tenant. Although the hut seems structurally unsound, and perhaps untenable, Yapan constructs his locus-of-hut-as-history with something endemic, resilient and pliant: the bamboo. How he frames the primeval grass with lyricism: how it rustles and sways in the winds. How it is buoyant in water. And in seeming contradistinction, Yapan intercuts these bucolic images with those of mammoth ships, presumably of global trade and commerce. Side by side, the bamboo seems valorized, quixotically so: that matrix of our folklore, of our creation myths, from which our first man and woman emerged (i.e. Malakas and Maganda). And the mystical bamboo hut with its enchanted milieu speaks like the old wisdom it evokes.<br /><br />If the hermit’s hut and its vicinity stand for precoloniality or that so-called idealized past, Yapan, however, seems confined, mostly, to mythopoetic gestures inscribed on the terrain of global and domestic conjunctures (Yapan has mined this vein of postcoloniality and globalization before in films like "Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe" and "Debosyon"). Little here, it seems, can be offered on how the course of history will have to change. If Yapan views the past with idealism, it is almost perhaps as an automatic reflex to invoke the "unalloyed" past. For where to locate our vanished origins, the “arche,” the beginning? It would be ridiculous to subscribe to the nostalgia of Levi-Strauss, who rhapsodized how man should revert to a savage/precultural stage of anthropological development. History is after all contingent and aleatory and not trapped in describing circles, let alone in primitive temporality. What lies ahead can thus not be determined in advance. Nonetheless we must not lack historical perspective -- that history is not a smooth continuum, but composed of ruptures and breaks. Instead of mystifying the originary past, we must nurture an appreciation of history that enjoins a development of a philosophy of resistance, whether materialist or not, one that can challenge a faulty status quo, whether with a syncretic horizon or not, and offer the possibility of a genuine and significant change. <br /></span>Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-101333710418469232015-03-27T11:15:00.001-07:002015-10-27T18:38:02.315-07:00VIOLATOR (Eduardo Dayao, 2014)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">No causality, no teleology, but the spontaneity of evil. This is Violator's doubtful premise, or perhaps the pretended, ostensible premise. Evil happens, or in more colloquial terms: shit happens. Possibility: telos points towards hell, given how the picture ends portentously in carnage -- and perhaps its determinism, too, given how, at the start, the world is already half-eclipsed: semaphored by crushed shadows, images of rustwork and stormclouds and other
minutiae of brooding, benighted atmosphericism. A world spiralling and hurtling towards apocalypse. Meanwhile, what the film considers its talismanic line -- on the order of "evil for evil's sake" -- is
twice-told, repeated, spelled out with emphasis just to deny the possibility of ambiguity (Jadaone’s That Thing
Called Tadhana cloyingly quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald twice for a more romantic purpose.). </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">One can make, however, a case for the causality of evil, despite the disclaimer of characters: evil can be traced to the opportunism of human power, as cops with guns, as cult leaders possessed with charisma and mystique, both evident here. Throw in natural catastrophes and paranormal hauntings in the background apropos of a new millennium (It's getting late for catastrophic end of millennia, though. This smokescreen is wearing thin) and you have a universal unravelling. With regard to the syntagm of "the spontaneity of evil," it can be taken as the nervous irony from the mouth of
evildoers, a denial on the eve of inevitable doom and retribution, a euphemism for those to whom what goes around, comes around.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Storm clouds, deluges threaten on the horizon, the film forebodes at the start. A reminder that Mother Nature can be not so motherly after all, but decidedly, lopsidedly evil. Conflictual Nature, we have it in spades, but a conceit once too often resorted to. After all, the trajectory from Homo natura to Homo historia has long come and gone. (Not hereabouts, one may contend, but it remains an old chestnut that should remain windfallen.) Nature here is atmospherically not so neutral, a dark expressionism. Nature is black and Manichean evil, and to mix religions, this nature basks after theodicy, if such
a thing exists. In Violator's world, things are post-Christian, but the supposed benevolence of God, or a despair for his immanence, is blasted symbolically in the form of brittle plaster figurines of patron saints and the Holy Family lined up like hapless
victims of execution, pulverized by the bullets of a dying police protagonist. Another index of residual religion: men immolate themselves as in some Eastern religions. And another: assorted suicides and cultists
neatly mass-murder themselves according to fatal prophesy. Entropy is order. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Eschatology of evil, then, although Violator seems to blur, or intentionally confuse, a sense of natural calamity and paranormal or a kind of last judgment apocalypse for a precinctful of crooked cops. Well, these are all understandably obfuscatory devices of deferral in the film's process of becoming. Like retribution, like memories to haunt conscience, apparitions
of dead cultists and those of other nameless spirits take their maddening turns. How much of it exists in the mind, how much is diegetically real? All part of its thesis on evil and its genre-bending slippages and machinations, one may suppose. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">As befits genre conventions, Violator tries to ratchet up horror at the end, but the picture has somehow undercut itself. The horror is all but paradoxically dissipated with its shift from the general lay of the land to the specific -- that is, from an unpredictable, and thus unsettling, first half to a second half flood-bound in a police precinct, its crooked cops spooking each other by the numbers. Not even a demonic being who infiltrates the proceedings does the trick. It hardly helps when the blacks become more and more crushed, to the point of blinking,
stuttering darkness in the thick of a no-exit ending. My eyes glaze and get rheumy with this kind of exaction, this
taxation of vision, as in the case of Hindi Sila Tatanda. But if nothing else, early on -- that is, the first half of the film -- Violator has cinematic moments of sheer cogency (take immolation, take videographic footage of cult proceedings) that creepily blindside you as it can simultaneously depict elements of horror Japanese-style -- otherwise the picture can get somewhat, well, dim. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">PS. Wrote this long ago when the film first came out, but I'm still wondering what a known, staunch partisan/ a bosom buddy of the filmmaker was doing on the board of judges. Ethical propriety hereabouts, I guess, is just a suggestion, not a moral injunction.</span></span></div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-40841523363866587982015-03-13T04:33:00.002-07:002015-03-28T07:46:50.019-07:00A GIRL AT MY DOOR (July Jung, 2014), HAN GONG-JU (Lee Su-Jin, 2014), THREAD OF LIES (Lee Han, 2014)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSusJLyDY-OcjOHV_ou6a0InruWu_PkPcomloShlly4gCJNktFnQitNBJrIXc1kpez1hRR3kfuC9C550mgqeuZrHjB2T_eL6YdbdJqJGQM3JfHyaVMt7WOQl8XUQkSxpd8wKLogmiUHAey/s1600/han+gong+ju.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSusJLyDY-OcjOHV_ou6a0InruWu_PkPcomloShlly4gCJNktFnQitNBJrIXc1kpez1hRR3kfuC9C550mgqeuZrHjB2T_eL6YdbdJqJGQM3JfHyaVMt7WOQl8XUQkSxpd8wKLogmiUHAey/s1600/han+gong+ju.jpg" height="400" width="280" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Let me say at the outset, my knowledge and appreciation of South Korean culture
can at best be described as fragmentary, that of a dilettante. Yes, I’ve visited the country in the past, but it was just that, a sojourn that was always never close enough for the purposes of a full acculturation. Some
aspects of what I have experienced appeal to me more than others. Bulgogi is sweet and tender, soju is bracing, but the telenovella and K-pop, no matter what splash Fil-Korean Sandara Park seems to be creating as a singer, cut no ice with me. My strongest affinity, for now, starts and concludes
with the country’s art-house films.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Lately catching up on some of last years’s films, I came across this cluster of dramas, quick and random choices, that thematize what it is like to be a young Korean
girl. Curiously, by some tell-tale coincidence, they seem to be performatively saying and meaning the same things
with dire univocal repercussions. All revolving around young female protagonists – around the ages
of 13-15 years old -- these films show an onerous subject formation that traumatizes, stigmatizes, and ultimately drives their protagonists to a point of no return. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In a society that preens itself on a long-held claim of modernity,
where phallicism ostensibly has for many generations not excluded female genitalia, is there really a legitimate whisper for help regarding the brutalization of young adolescent girls? Do these films suggest the groundswell for the return of the repressed -- that is of the need for authoritarianism once experienced in the country's history? Or is it the other way around, given the wayward adult figures in this film? Or are these perhaps mere coincidental fabulations of cinema in a country so progressive it's run by a female president? (Having said that, female president notwithstanding, it doesn't necessarily invalidate the premise of these films either. One has to ask incredulously again: Where does the sudden topos of beleaguered adolescents come from? Is it just a manifestation of presentational, that is, prioric art?)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A Girl at My Door features a young, adolescent Do-Hee who
suffers corporal and verbal violence at the hands of her step parents. Han Gong-Ju tells the eponymous story of a
teenager who is, this time, gang-raped
by several dozen teenagers right in her home. Thread of Lies weaves the affecting tale, told in mixed tones, of Cheon-Ji who is driven to
suicide by school bullying and the seeming neglect of those nearest to her.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In varying shades of desperation, they reveal, if they are
based on the empirical and more than just anecdotal, the issues that fissure the upbringing
and makeup of young Korean girls. Young male teenagers seem to act with entitlement and impunity -- abetted, it seems, by permissive parents.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">And the invariable response seems to be a drastic one. Although she is shown to be a free spirit who enjoys
to dance by the breakwater, Do-Hee, always bangs her head, irrationally, against the wall as
if wanting to atomize herself whenever she realizes her situation in life. There is little succor for her, unless a deus-ex-machina is mercifully inserted into the proceedings.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Cheon-Ji is a thoughtful young girl who is made the butt
of jokes, the butt of hectoring and psychical violence, alternating with being an object of indifference. As all this unfolds, told in flashbacks that immortalize her, she is all too introspectively aware of her problematic
milieu that she checks out volume after volume on self-help and psychology from the school library. Preparing her suicide
carefully, she has the most courteous and dignified reproach to her family and
tormentors.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Not with dissimilarity, Han Gong-Ju realizes early on -- although
she is whisked away to a more silent town, seemingly a more insulated place
away from the juridical proceedings -- that
the situation will only come to a head. She ineptly practices swimming lessons for
the denouement that she foresees for herself. At a crucial moment of conjuncture and desperation, she will be made to choose whether to throw
herself into a river. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Two kinds of unduly privileged men and young men become apparent
here. Those who are quick to inflict violence – the step father (along with her step grandmother) of Do-Hee who make her black and blue all over and the young gang-rapists of Han
Gong-Ju. But the presence is just as apparent as the absence. Do-Hee, Han
Gong-Ju and Cheon-Ji are all but without father figures - - fugitive or merely absent -- with Do-Hee all but an orphan who will
latch on to the kindness of strangers. The majority of the other parents and adults posited by these three films, meanwhile, are all neglectful and thus enablers of a dangerous vacuum by their absence. The mob rule of the gang-rapists' parents that almost lynches Han Gong-Ju is also disinhibited and telling here.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Present-day surveys indicate that South Korea is fast becoming a decidedly atheistic society – the numbers range from 40-50
% of the population -- and these three films seem to attest to a
growing measure of anomie and nihilism, presumably filling in the void left by religion. They seem to ask for a spiritual ballast, a guiding direction beyond the
blind and desperate anti-solution of self-annihilation. It makes us wonder what Slavoj Zizek, who visited the country last year, had to say about the psychoanalytic imaginary of the country and the seeming dialectical condition between the sexes -- a dialectic, not an alternation, between yin and yang, if you will -- faced by Korean women had he been asked on the urgent subject. Then again psychoanalysis, of which the Slovenian philosopher is
a master juggler, has always been centered on oedipalization – the formation of male psyches from boyhood into adulthood. No room for the distaff side at all. Small wonder then they invited the Elvis of Philosophy over -- maybe even, in the process, to win over the womenfolk to oedipal hegemony. </span></span></div>
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Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-25073303304930035602014-12-28T21:48:00.001-08:002015-10-20T09:33:15.734-07:00THE NATIVITY WILL NOT BE TELEVISED (Noli Manaig, 2014)<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="337" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/115509677" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="600"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/115509677"></a><br />
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<br />Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-60522305741357567462013-12-27T02:24:00.000-08:002014-05-18T01:08:05.718-07:00NORTE, HANGGANAN NG KASAYSAYAN (Lav Diaz, 2013)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">As far as Lav Diaz remains the capable puppeteer pulling his strings, Fabian Viduya serves as the director's vitriolic mouthpiece, the bitter voice of commentary spouting a deeply rotten state of things rooted in a deeply flawed history and a pseudo-scientific society, this time as filtered through the self-destructive philosophies of the West. Inhabiting Norte's narrative, Fabian is a powder keg, a loose cannon ready to explode. Anyone versed enough in Western critical thought and philosophy may discern how he spouts contradictions that try to evade, but
only betray, an entrapment in dangerous thinking, whether it subscribes to the specters of postmodernism or something else, one that's bound to end in grief and tragedy. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Fabian foresees a "Zero Society," a scenario, presumably, after the end of history, the end of ideology, where infinite pluralism and pandemonium reign, symptomatic of a widespread but faulty appreciation of postmodernism. To counteract this apocalyptic belief that anything goes, Fabian proposes the elimination of "what is wrong," but what is wrong to his mind is even more all-encompassing: his very own family, his unscrupulous usurer, his feckless self, anything that may represent evil. Thus what is right may be a question mark given the near totalization of what is wrong. What seems to loom large and imminent before him is the ideology of capitalism, which he observes and suffers on a daily basis. Otherwise his position seems overdetermined by the abstractions of theories and the burdens of imagination, never as utopian as what he may envisage in his dark den of books. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">As Norte's discursive context, the choice of postmodernism and other pseudo-sciences such as religion is well-calculated. As an ideology, postmodernism is no longer as peremptory and relevant as it used to. Perhaps, for instance, Fabian should even be glad
that </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">European hegemony and </span></span>the European <i>grands recits</i> are over and done with. Decentering or delimiting the meta-narratives of the West will allow us to cultivate our own national narrative, or retrieve our own glorious past. Instead, Fabian is caught up in a personal dialectic with himself: he seems to see no redeeming value in finishing his studies, none in Magda the usurer who lends at an exorbitant interest, none in his rich, capitalist sister despite her willingness to set him up for life, and perhaps none at all in himself if he fails to bring about the fruition of his notions of a utopian scheme of things. To the discursive puppet, Fabian, hostage to Western aporia, it all seems to hinge upon the outright negation of what is wrong, what is rhizomatically evil, a solution that is purely theoretical, doctrinaire, easier said than done.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">What is most striking about Norte, then, in the context of depiction and discourse, is its embodiment of a Filipino protagonist in a radically foreign, postmodern mold -- distinct from the voiceless subalterns and the oppressed that dominate our present cinematic lore. Postmodernism is nothing new as an aesthetic and stylistic methodology, favored for a while by such filmmakers as Raya Martin (e.g. anti-narrativity,auto-referentiality and so on), but Norte's novelty lies in its unique central character: a postmodern creature, a Cartesian ego, depicted in an extreme crisis of self-awareness and contradiction. Postmodernism is
a European discourse and yet here we encounter its tendencies lurking among us in ways that recall a Bruno Dumont or a Michael Haneke film. Reexamining it with scrutiny, however, will bear the writer-director out. For
one Diaz sharpens his end-of-history thematics with the flipside of millenarian euphorics – made more pronounced and conscious
by Diaz's references to Mayan and Filipino-cult doomsday scenarios. Fabian’s psychological meltdown is not just the product of conceptual cooptation by Westernized learning but also of cultural
and sublunary complexities that encompass us in the idea of an actual end of times.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Fabian's flawed vision may foresee the world's imminent collapse, but his thinking remains not ahead of the times but behind it. European postmodernism does
not signal the world's end since it has since been undercut by such schools of thought as Third Culture,
Post-Theory or Post-Criticism, and Cognitivism. European continental philosophy is now
just one of many available philosophies, no longer the monolithic arbiter of critical or philosophical
thought. If Fabian had exerted himself enough in his studies, he would have been spared the ill effects of defective perspective and ideology. Perhaps even spared committing the same ghastly murders as detailed in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. (But of course, it will be said, that's the film's very point, a variation on Dostoevsky's novel.) </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Norte is
not, however, a mere portrait of addled intellectuality and the lunacy born out of it. Norte may be Diaz's stern reproach of the West itself – how its ideas and
ideals have corrupted us and the rest of the world. (On the other hand, Norte itself, as a film product, might be an act of gratitude, a catering to the liberal West, especially Europe, where many of Lav Diaz's masterworks during the last decade have been feted, have found home and have made their screening debuts.) Norte itself is a classical movie (in its enshrined binary opposition, however, it may be viewed as structuralist and thus anti-humanist as well) but timeless in pitting good and evil in all their complicated antinomy and dynamic. While
the murderous Fabian represents someone who deludedly thinks he is ridding the world of the evil of capitalism, his reverse is the classical, martyr-like (if perhaps fatalistic) Joaquin Atillano, an inherently
good man, seemingly too ironically good, who gets convicted and jailed for the crimes Fabian has committed. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">As a kind of Filipino everyman, Joaquin Atillano answers his trials and tribulations by dint of virtue. In prison, Joaquin does not become the hardened and brutalized human
being; instead, it seems to bring out the most noble deeds in him. Even when distance and absence separate him from his family for years, he steadfastly remains rooted in goodness. He is a living, breathing transcendence: in his dreams, he journeys
in astral travels and visits his family in faraway Ilocos. Tarkovskian shades of our own paranormal and mystical phenomena
take place here. This is Diaz’s
roundabout conviction made manifest -- the reciprocal of Fabian’s warped
unconscious -- that in spite of the distinct presence of evil in the world, Diaz still puts faith in the tenacity and uprightness of man. Postmodernism and other insidious ideologies may confound us, but Diaz will not leave this up to
the perils and deadlocks of such a discourse, only to the identifiable contrast of evil against which to put virtue in true relief. (Does Joaquin seem to simulate virtue? Certainly not.) If the world is inexorably approaching the apocalypse, man must persist -- despite the prospects of extinction and dissolution -- in transcendent goodness.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Title in English: Norte, The End of History </span></span>
</div>
</div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-88089265352499071182013-12-21T09:29:00.002-08:002014-03-27T00:29:31.847-07:00HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY (Raya Martin, 2013)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Two
distinct ways to read Raya Martin’s How To Disappear Completely. One interpretation suggests that
out of sheer despair Martin has gone out of his brilliant mind, all but berserk in foretelling a turbulent disintegration of our nation from within, toppled from rickety historical foundations,
well beyond salvation from the clutches of Western religion and neo-colonialism. For much of Martin's young but extensive filmography, he has undertaken a de facto revolutionary project against the lingering constructs of colonialism, to the point of intimating an affinity with and cathexis to
pre-colonial nativism. However, here he appears in despair in projecting his cinematic
enterprise in a losing struggle. The other interpretation is
more palatable, more heroic, more acceptable conscience-wise, but not untouched with a kind of extreme subject
positioning in a counter cinema that envisions a confrontational revolt against what
is keeping us in insidious shackles. Take your pick: Martin either as a doomsaying visionary resigned to predicting and foreseeing a social meltdown, or as a a steadfast quixotic but terrifying foot soldier -- how we've come to know him -- still flailing away at the enemy's windmills.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Through a youngster's perspective, an instance of the faux-naif vantage that can survey difficult themes with suspended, defamiliarized judgment, Martin demonstrates the extreme possibilities of social dissolution and revolution, seeing matters through
the viewpoint of an adolescent girl who is gradually inculcated and traumatized by her parent's Westernized imaginary, shaped by societal
institutions founded on Spanish Catholicism and American mythos and materialism.
At the symbolic turning point, her mother thus instills fear in her: “Your way home is not as safe as you
might think.” This might represent the incipience of her adolescent awakening but this coincides with a realization of all her socio-historical vulnerabilities, and by extension an entire nation and its posterity's susceptibilities. This is the metaphorical stage that makes her
chillingly hear and see things in and out of the unconscious. Not just a possibly imagined
metaphor, but this also points out the metonymy that puts her in close
proximity to the real, actual dangers her mother symbolically describes: the
man with a rifle in the forest, the labyrinth-like navigability of this milieu,
her father’s incestuous attentions.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Negotiating this nosedive from childhood's Apollonian idyll and order to Dionysian
disquiet and chaos of a budding pubescent is handled through the film’s systematicity of suspense, through hyper-stylized visual and aural designs. Aurally, with
a pulsating electronic bass and beat, or with the hum of menacing fluorescence,
or with the eerie chirp of cicadas that shades into technological buzz, the
young girl’s fears are indexed in the present and all their modern complications. The strategic elision of sound is also bewildering, seemingly laden with dark secrets and just as suspenseful in what it withholds from us. This soundscape
is coupled with a no less aggressive optical approach, how things appear eerily out of focus, how phantoms seem to appear in the mirror or flit across someone's field of vision, to say nothing of the girl's psychosexual dreams. Here the visual aspects oscillate between the
impressionistic and the expressionistic: the former with what is roughcast and
deliberately made out of focus, phantasmatic or hallucinatory in their echoes,
slowed down to frame-by-frame commitment to memory of suggestive horror, and the latter
with its ritualized, religious images filtered in red, pig entrails marinating
in blood.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Martin’s
visionary prediction seems bleak and pessimistic if his double-edged imagery may
be resolved and clarified. However, he also
allows for the possibility of a genuine nullification of many of our ghosts in the
dialectic he proposes. For one he sees a chaos of ideologies that may cancel
out each other in a process of self-regeneration that will bode well for our future, but whether this is an overture for a symbiosis of absorbed cultures is at cross purposes with Martin's apparent
nativism (e.g. how the central character lost in a fearsome forest uses the guidance of folklore and finds her way home is a motif used before in Martin's earlier work, Independencia.) </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">How the warring ideologies symbolically engage each other represents the film's most allegorically indelible, if chilling, imagery. This climaxes in the symbolic burning and desecration of cruciforms that suggest an awakening from spiritual, or perhaps historical, passivity. Who are these rampaging figures, however, at the
forefront of these subversive acts of irreligion? Here, a teenage girl who takes armed revolt
against her defective ancestry, and there, a bunch of skateboarding thugs, leaving behind a destructive aftermath in a cemetery, raping schoolchildren in sight.
These images, while powerful, may work to infantilize and downgrade their greater ideological mettle into a seeming outburst of rebellious teen spirit. Yet, from one politicized film to the next, Martin has assumed a deliberate faux-naif perspective, a child-like vantage that disguises its venomous discourse. If not, perhaps this reading is all
too literal, the title's self-terminating act. Perhaps Martin is not as disillusioned as that may imply. Perhaps if
anything Martin is grounded in the miraculous present, how he frames counter
reality with irony, making current for us symptoms of periodization, anachronistic yet relevant: how we remain the opposite of the cinematic figures he has experimentally
depicted, how although passive we are not so addled, how not yet irredeemably rooted in psychosis,
how from this fucked-up historico-ontological matrix not yet emerged as Western-style mass murderers and serial
killers. </span></span></div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-62117019240236233712013-11-25T19:59:00.001-08:002014-02-18T04:14:59.665-08:00ISLANDS (Whammy Alcazaren, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Already many days away, weeks away from having seen it for the first time, Whammy Alcazaren’s Islands keeps surging back to me, wave after wave of images washing over my imaginary, surprisingly intact, surprisingly of a piece, unscathed, even through the sieve of unreliable memory. Faces in anguish, faces in lachrymose release, minimalist, futuristic interiors of a space ship, lush, leafy forests and dark landscapes -- many frames of such nature have become a brand on the brain. Certain images evoke those of Tarkovsky and other thoughtful directors: more than a handful come close to becoming iconic, so well-designed
and so well-composed as to linger long and endure. Colossal now seems like a rough draft for this. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This
time the audio-visual aspects and overall design have caught up with Alcazaren's vision. This time the themes pop out of the abstract, rounded out, the signifiers give justice to the signifieds. This time, however, he scales down his scope -- though it remains a vast one. If the expansive myth of man is part of the subject of Colossal alongside man's timeless grief, Islands centers on seemingly narrower existential longings -- loneliness -- something Alcazaren traces speculatively to prehistory and extrapolates to the future.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Rigor and restraint remain palpable ideals to admire in the filmmaker, pinpoint in purpose and composition: the concretization of an abstraction, a difficult task, is never refracted nor distorted out of shape. Simply, Islands is of a distinctive look -- is this perhaps the filmmaker's coming to his own? his mature aesthetics? -- although not necessarily stylized nor rendered raw from the camera. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What might be deemed conventional staples and set pieces in an avowed sci-fi film, which Alcazaren declares Islands to be, mostly takes place off-screen. In essence, we get, instead, a sombre but riveting tone poem -- variants on a theme -- that sustains itself and our rapt attentions over the duration. Lest this raises the red flag, that of a monotonous meditation, Islands is a reassuring film that maps out loneliness without neglecting its timeless opposite. Thus the filmmaker exposes himself with nude vulnerabilities, taking great emotional risks to chart, to considerable extent, the progress and struggle of love.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Like an archipelago of fragments, Islands is a cluster of three seemingly separate but interconnected narratives, signifying one meaning: the bane of being solitarily an island, the syndrome of being unbearably alone, to join the allusion to John Donne and the metaphysical poetry of the 17th century. With this theme as a central organizing principle, these three stories are surprisingly not too dated nor too antiquated for comfort. This intersecting tryptich - shot by a diegetic director -- are contained within a primary narrative, contrapuntal in look and feel</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">. While the embedded diegesis broods with eclipsed existence, the primary narrative bristles with color and vibrancy, steeped in the personal moment yet steeped in contemporary ethos, full of bonhomie and intimacy, yet going in circles with what remains unsaid, forever out of turn.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Aspects of awkward romance, the labor of love. However, we are first thrown a curve ball, the fictional director's treatise on the subject of unrelieved loneliness and the elusiveness of its antithesis. This inflects our anticipation of hard-won love, whatever it is going to be -- agape, philia, eros -- as this three-part-film-within-film lingers over how -- sadly, not why -- man can't stand to be alone and the diachronic deductiveness of love's failure. Perhaps because human nature remains inexplicable in its mysteries, an inexact science, even in its most basic mechanisms, so that this embedded film seems flawed with assumptions as it crisscrosses time and space and is aptly told in non-linear terms.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Story 1 of 3. Somewhere in outer space, in unknown time, two astronauts in a space station are cut
off from earthly contact for lengthy periods of time, sustained only by a chamber full of books and phonographic records, cut off even
from each other, although they are identical twins. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Something -- or someone -- has driven a wedge between them, a seeming</span></span> displacement of agape by suspected eros meant for someone else. One dines alone; another goes on a solitary stationary
bike. In loneliness, tears of regret flow.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Story 2 of 3. Set in the present, a second story is that of a
matriarch living alone, who, except for occasional visits from
her daughter and her grandson, is almost without outside connection. She is tied to the past, to her veneration of the Virgin Mary, to the memory of a dead husband, refusing the overtures of her daughter, the comfort afforded by technology. She
speculates about her neighbors and talks, in almost otherworldly tones, of a sublime silence.
She remains haunted by a vision from her past of a bright space craft shooting into space.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Story 3 of 3. To make complete the ubiquity of love and its denial, the film harks back to prehistory, where a man trapped in the vast wilderness, an existential cave man if ever there was one, stalks a landscape yet to be tamed. Primitive of clothing and tools, this man is made complex by tears, made so apparently by the rejection of a woman whose love belongs to another. For his needs, this man can slay big game, even dinosaurs, but he is powerless in the refusal of the love he offers, in his lack of companionship. When he hunts, when he sleeps, when he wakes, alone: Tears stream down his face. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Meditating on such dark, brooding, Manichean emotions, t</span></span>his is the prehistoric condition of man, the film assumes, in the continuum of time.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Relying on its filmographic predecessor as a frame of reference, Islands exemplfies the judiciousness of Nam June Paik's well-known lesson, which performatively says, "If something works, then use it again." That is to say, many of the virtues of Colossal are here put to good use: Islands explores, once again, black emotions, their analogue of secluded landscapes, rendered in regional poetry and expansively framed by the pan-ontological convergence of past, future and present timeframes </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">(Colossal also encompasses cosmogony and pan-historical dimensions in its overreaching attempt at grand abstractions)</span></span> -- only this time fleshed out more thoroughly, more sustained in its scrutiny. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Presumably conceding to his own joie de vivre, his bliss and happiness in contemporary times, Alcazaren invests faith in a pronounced presentism, suggesting, seemingly, the past and the future's fatal, dialectical dead-ends: one with its primitivist loneliness, a world with barrenness and lack of solace, while the future mechanically sublates or sublimates the apparatus of love. Even the matriarch's tale, set in the present, contradicts its loneliness and elegy with a different treatment, neither moody, but perhaps even beatific with religious iconography, alive with revelatory color, alive with available dynamism and possibility that contemporary life offers. The black-and-white tonalities thus give way to a fuller palette of contemporary hope, commending itself to the transformative potential of how love-makes-the the-world-go-round, how love-conquers-all.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Why sci-fi when this film seems to deny the genre's conventions? To call it a sci-fi film is to all but single out for praise its modest props, its miniature space ship model glimpsed behind the scenes of the diegetic film. But seriously, the anything-can-happen potency, the time-tunneling trick of sci-fi, remains, conceivably, the most durable device to serve the film's all-encompassing themes. Foregrounded, at the heart of the film, however, human capacities and
susceptibilities take precedence. Perhaps this dark vision of unknown ages may be just that, the fear of the unknown or perhaps something that further hints at Alcazaren's presentism, attuned alone to the zeitgeist of our times and what it offers. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Think about his conception of the other aspects of the future: Islands remains patterned after the anthropomorphic. The future still seems like us: Astronauts eat like we still do – on regular tables, with
utensils, chewing food as we do. Listen to pop music as we do; read books as we do; decompress as we do. No whiz-bang and glittering functioning of gadgets or machines of
advanced technology alienates us: Some simple human innovations though may have been discarded, so much so that no one is there to administer the Heimlich maneuver. Time travel seems the only functional index of the future, hinted at, ostensibly, for one to return to a loved one in the past.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Seeing this side by side with Zulawski’s On The Silver Globe, also a story about astronauts but with over-the-top
narrative excess, is an instructive study in contrasts: Islands is strictly stripped to essentials and well-disciplined, going in the opposite extreme with austerity, sustaining one unvarying note to the point of simplicity. If Zulawski’s
shows a hyper-plotted construction of the future, Alcazaren’s slow-burning meditation of austerity must have been conceived with utmost calibration of functionalism, with strict, geometrical and rigorous architectonics. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Yet here again, at the beginning, another strength of Alcazaren is reaffirmed: his fluent poetry given voice via a forlorn woman, lamenting someone’s leave-taking, the commiseration of nature, and the hope of the loved one's return. (That maybe the tenor, or my memory is quoting another film.) This sets up the melancholy prologue of the film, a reminder of what Alcazaren has done in the past, and a point of departure for him. Towards the end of the film, then, Alcazaren, unable to keep a straight face, switches registers and the solemnity bursts into topical song, a pop rock ditty in all its idiomatic popularity, deep in outer space.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Epilogues, even here, stand for modest but promising new beginnings. Set in a bar in the present, a man after hours talks about work on a film (the same above-mentioned film) with a girl he dances attendance to. Slowly they slide into contemporary codes of courtship: not stilted nor formal prose, but one that is loosely conversational, au courant, in lockstep with each other: a kind of leap of faith to reach the other, an act that renounces for now Alcazaren's trademark poetic monologue. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Growing in synergy, the twosome engage in an
antiphonal exchange, a crypto-romantic back-and-forth, with sometimes silly, sometimes winsome results. The camera frames the prospective lovers with a seeming reassurance of its pretense of non-attraction, the pretense of faux-romance. Perhaps an intimation of a post-structural romance. (Modernists, someone once said, hate the predictability of popular music, something Islands apparently disagrees with.) </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">After the predominantly cheerless content of most of his output, Alcazaren has switched from dismal darkness to a kind of diurnal dreaming. Bare frames of pure white, symbolic of pure intention, reminiscent of a Mondrian, or a De Stijl distillation, are the coda to the film while the conversation continues off-screen between man and woman. Even with such abstract frames, this is Alcazaren at his most unguarded moment, an unmistakable prelude to the profession of love. </span></span></div>
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<![endif]-->Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-53363299115600349282013-11-20T20:39:00.001-08:002013-12-10T06:41:24.485-08:00ANGUSTIA (Kristian Sendon Cordero, 2013) <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Doubtless,
the film throws into perfect relief the microstructures, as it were, of 19th century Bicol.
Doubtless, the film displays due diligence, none more apparent than in its impressive grasp of foreign and indigenous
languages – Latin, Agta, Bicolano, Spanish, and so on. Doubtless, the mise en
scene sports all the texture and fabric befitting its time, its church architecture and costume done to a tee.
Doubtless, if it needs to be spelled out, all the technical and production polish on this film proves beyond reproach.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">However,
there’s the rub. As a consequence of its obsession to get the particulars of the period right -- e.g. the old, indigenous songs, the old Latin, liturgical rituals, the old architectural filigree and the traditional portraiture of flora -- Angustia's gloss seeps and sticks to the surface, even as it neglects the psychological spiral of </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Don Victorino Hernandez, a creole secular priest, and his irrevocable descent from religious zeal and fervor to self-destructive madness. Instead, it manufactures a most unreliable man of cloth: when it is convenient, zealous and brave in his catechism and evangelism, yet at others, when again convenient, too weak and brittle at the crucible. He is someone who couldn’t hold a candle to, say, Bunuel’s Nazarin or Bresson’s country priest, who must be turning and tossing in their graves.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What the film is intent to accomplish is clear enough: the humanization of clergymen, the exposure of
their carnal flaws, their baser instincts. But this is too simplistic, too outmoded, if not too antiquated by now. This might be explained by its origin in an old and dusty Bicolano legend. Rizal, meanwhile, made novels out of priestly warts more than a hundred years ago. Leo X is no oddity, but a tip of the iceberg. Latter-day scandals of pedophilia involving men of cloth only serve to reinforce that.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Don Victorino</span></span>’s downward spiral from enthused evangelism to sin and anguish to what he deems as the release of suicide can only be a cop-out of characterization. In the tenacious theology of the Church,
taking one’s life is taking the mortification of flesh a little too literally.
It represents a damnable, unforgivable act for a priest to commit self-murder, even
as an act of repentance. Such an act is tantamount to self-excommunication: to be buried without sacrament, away from the blessed dead. That is a deterrent from a path of self-destruction that is seldom overlooked. Pain at the threshold of death, but not naked death, is more their style.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Yes, in the
overall scheme of things, the priest’s impending death by his own hands serves the
film’s grander theme, and that is the capitulation of the secular priest to pagan catholicity. Genuine angustia, however, consists in carrying
one’s cross and reliving the passion of Christ. Suicide is the easy way out. But shouldn’t
we relish that this film attempted the reversal of Catholicism, in
favor of indigenous religion, or at least a union between those two schools of spirituality? Shouldn't we be thankful for the spectacle of one of them all but defrocked from a hieratic place on the pedestal?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">If it were
set in more contemporary and Freudian times, Angustia may have kept itself honest at mirroring verisimilitude and describing actual psychological states.
But even without it, one can cite Bunuel as an exemplar at dissecting and exhibiting these sacerdotal figures with accuracy through sophisticated surrealism, realizing the resilience, persistence and expedience of these men beneath cowls: these priests are no pushovers, never
self-defeatist, so that even this arch-critic of the Church was often between two minds about them, later on becoming “fond” of these clerics as benign pets, or as worthy adversaries, as
film critic Pauline Kael once put it.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Detail after detail paints a promising beginning for Angustia, but the protagonist's credible transformation is not forthcoming. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Don Victorino Hernandez</span></span> is presented as someone with vast
reserves of evangelical will and zeal. He is as fond of botany and pious to the
Virgin Mary as St. Francis was of animals. Also, he is undertaking a grandiose mission to
convert the Agtas of the mountains of Bicol. Once, at the edge of the forest, he finds
one playing cat and mouse with another Agta. He promptly converts Dunag to
Catholicism and falls in love with her. They soon partake of carnal knowledge everywhere, even in
the confessional. He then converts Dunag’s
pursuer as well. Big mistake. The two Agtas court under his nose and decide to marry. Priest
goes suddenly psycho and kills them with his own hands. Then he starts to see their
ghosts.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What begins as liturgical drama (i.e. Don Victorino Hernandez, ensconced deep in his forest paradise, a paradise expressed in his love for wild flora, and the bliss of the Eucharist, expressed in the dead language of Latin, is about to lose it all) turns into Jacobean drama, with sensational elements of murder, sex and acts that can't be washed away so easily like laundry, before morphing into something no less incongruous: the implicit apostasy of the priest, that is, his implicit reverse conversion by a Christianized babaylan, who represents the syncretism of indigenous and foreign beliefs. Then the act that one can already prefigure. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Does this make believers, as it were, out of us? </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Don Victorino Hernandez's fatal trajectory has been done to the point of indifference already, too pat, and yet unearned, in its inevitability, in many a film or work of literature. Real, priestly anguish is sadomasochistic, but not fatal: manifested in the belief of unworthiness, the vow of poverty, the mortification of the flesh, self-flagellation, self-abnegation, the ritual crowning of thorns. Hence an ending true to that tradition seems more plausible: the priest driven from our midst, like Bunuel's Nazarin bearing all his burdens, or Bresson's priest of Ambricourt, </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">despite terminal sickness, </span></span></span></span>dedicating himself to his duties, w</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">ith graceful anguish in his heart, until the very end. </span></span></div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-35366237288346069472013-11-20T00:47:00.003-08:002014-02-18T04:33:08.726-08:00BUKAS NA LANG SAPAGKAT GABI NA (Jet Leyco, 2013)<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ1uC5YmkTLaMgqd7hnbcGC8gH-0xlGmBPbBqHrQoje2q0BfDg2igFpvsgY55kWnETqA8sfLNeBT7tk51o75VfXZBcNs4a2XoHM6HLPQ7VCvYMt277ja5OdHDXnIHsM-C9WhncBujZgjJn/s1600/Bukas-Na-Lang-Sapagkat-Gabi-na-Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ1uC5YmkTLaMgqd7hnbcGC8gH-0xlGmBPbBqHrQoje2q0BfDg2igFpvsgY55kWnETqA8sfLNeBT7tk51o75VfXZBcNs4a2XoHM6HLPQ7VCvYMt277ja5OdHDXnIHsM-C9WhncBujZgjJn/s400/Bukas-Na-Lang-Sapagkat-Gabi-na-Poster.jpg" height="400" width="276" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Whoever utters this evasive expression may be hiding the truth. Does the counsel of a pause inhere in the darkness of the hour, or the darkness of the story? Perhaps, either way, the film forebodes a harrowing outcome. As it slowly unfolds, true enough, the narrative confirms our worst apprehensions and the lasting wound it has already left on
our collective psyche, so that it cannot be told in a straightforward way. Such a telling entails the perspective and distance of time and space, both requisites of which Leyco possesses with serendipity and acuity. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Bukas Na Lang Sapagkat Gabi Na, to begin with, hints at being chapters in
a historical book. A paratextual instance intercalates “figures” or pictures at the beginning which we often see in illustrated volumes. They occupy small areas of the frame, but we discern a series of smoke clouds billowing within the pictures. They all bear captions of the 1970s, and the smoke appears like the aftermath of
volcanic eruptions. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Where there's smoke, there must be fire. This is going to be about a a cataclysm, a catastrophe, but what
we suspect it is going to be isn't a natural calamity but something wholly man-made. This is
hinted at by the peritext: an epigraph that speaks of solidarity and unity in a
continuing struggle. True enough, as the
chapters of this quasi-volume unfold, we see the darkness of the socio-politcal climate of the
1970s, the looming large of Martial Law. There are four chapters told asynchronously, in reverse order. They tell stories of death and disorder, where everything sacred gives way to the
profane, the civilized to the savage.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">At first, when the outlines of a story remain to be established, it
appears a miscalculation to sequence the movie in this way. But this strange deferral of ultimate cause and effect, this erasure of narrative sequencing, allows the film a patient pacing to gather momentum, although the opening chapters seemingly have a tenuous synchronic connection. The first chapter is a middle-class wedding gone
haywire, with the father of the bride-to-be running amok, possessed with personal and parochial affront, shooting down
everybody in his way. The period detail is perfectly established by how it is captured: through
the lens of an old video camera, monochromatic
and full of technological static, handled by a wedding videographer. The
second chapter is about how a father of a guerilla tries to contact his son
about a matter that might save him from the military operations in the
mountains where the guerillas are hiding out. The chapter ends with the apparent firefight between guerillas and government troops, capped off with archival documentary footage of the New People’s Army.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Closer and closer toward the beginning, redolent of our kind of demented engagement with history that goes in circles or backwards, the third and final chapters are what bring
the film to a powerful close. The third
chapter is about a priest who performs bestialities upon the dead. He has set up a laboratory in
his parish to keep the cadavers fresh and free from necrosis. The fourth chapter reveals a most aggravating circumstance, the possible identity of the dead and their dehumanization, but also perhaps their symbolic resurrection and immortalization.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Paratextually again, the film exits with yet another “figure” -- this time a tiny icon of the infamous mountain face of President
Marcos mouthing the titular line in a cartoonish way, in comic contrast to all that preceded it. After its dark portrait of authoritarian, religious and military treacheries, the
film stamps this stretch of history with an unexpected watermark -- an affirmation, perhaps, that Leyco may not write history in a literary way, but he may certainly write it cinematically. We know our
history, what came after the epoch in question, but Leyco’s film has the hint of a playful rendering of those
times that may be construed, in a way, as a staking out of a vantage point, a leaving behind of his signature, and certainly, an irreverent gesture at the brutal Marcosian repression, fueled by the stabbing and penetrating script of the equally irreverent and iconoclastic person of Norman Wilwayco. It is an act of solidarity with revolutionaries and social reformers as well, though Leyco's ways suggest that his contribution to the cause may be to some extent idiosyncratic, since it is personal, since his voice may be a generation removed from the era in question. The utilization of paratextual elements emphasizes this: the parodical 70s-inspired film's poster is impish epitext, as well as the visual presence of video game snippets,
the use of artificial, arcade-game-like sound effects to punctuate gunfire -- all
tell us that history need not be consigned to books in the intermediality of contemporary times. History must always
remain fresh in our memory. As such, it ought to be given
expression in all forms of mass media, and perhaps none more artful, none more singular in its perspective, none with greater valency than film itself. </span></span></div>
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Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-27327486600575397962013-11-18T07:13:00.001-08:002013-11-23T01:18:50.423-08:00ISKALAWAGS (Keith Deligero, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT-CsSTXlWkmxvdibbMcDlrk8o4oQDfj5r4ZoaWP0ziAiVOUF0ZrjPYTFwQra5llbWU-iP5A-NWyvjEi7vYmfe8MqToFSz5zmUzDCom1g-G-jlzpq_7VZoaCQWM5GP8IIx94FvxvQGLl8w/s1600/iskalwags.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT-CsSTXlWkmxvdibbMcDlrk8o4oQDfj5r4ZoaWP0ziAiVOUF0ZrjPYTFwQra5llbWU-iP5A-NWyvjEi7vYmfe8MqToFSz5zmUzDCom1g-G-jlzpq_7VZoaCQWM5GP8IIx94FvxvQGLl8w/s400/iskalwags.png" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">No bullshitting, nor turning your backs on these irrepressible pranksters, they command your honest vigilance, but maybe, just maybe, soon enough, they'll get their just comeuppance. I kid you. You'll see. What Keith Deligero's Iskalawags perfectly evokes and captures are the territory and swagger of childhood, the picaresque adventures portrayed impishly, seen through the pellucid eyes of one of
the gang, a pair somewhat welling with tears, a voice shifting with emotion and color, tinged with nostalgia and wonder, loss and regret.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Like summers of bygone times, much of the movie is a
series of mischief-making episodes, a skewer of adventures that involve this
notorious group of adolescent boys under their black flag, narrated through a syncopated and rippled diction in thoughtful Binisaya. Set in a sleepy, seaside village on Camotes Island, Cebu -- sleepy if not for these unruly scamps -- a story of what might seem like a parataxis of pranks,
the seeming impunity of children, is slowly preparing them for a rude awakening like sheep to a slaughter. Well, I kid you. Believe me.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">We are thrust, without preliminaries or preamble, into the Iskalawags’ make-believe
world: this motley crew -- led by Palot, the ring leader who rules by
virtue of his seniority (15 years old), the only one so far with pubic
hair, the narrator interjects in colorful idiom – reenact a gangster-like showdown from
a 1980s or 1990s actioner. When not indulging
their betamax fixation, most especially Jeric Raval starrers (a screen idol who makes a curious but telling cameo
here), the boys remain inseparable, by day out for sport or by night in their hideout, or under the stars, dreaming of their next mischief.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Transposing Erik
Tuban’s story to film is a triumph of Keith Deligero’s imaginative vision. The
detail that the time and place of his world evoke reflects on his assured and mature direction. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Noteworthy too is the almost unstudied naturalism of
acting of the young non-professional ensemble of actors. They seem immersed in the illusionism of fiction, oblivious to all except their own personas. I</span></span>t must be said, however, that such a coming-of-age movie, by now, is far from new or novel:
one may even suspect the paradigmatic film it references is Rob Reiner’s Stand
By Me, complete with its invitation to the fatal, not to mention the adult voice-over narration of one of its characters, and
a chubby figure among them, both fixtures of coming-of-age movies at this point.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Where Iskalawags distinguishes itself, among a diverse and varied field at Cinema One 2013, lies in its brash and unabashed provincialism. This Deligero achieves with a quaint but appropriate visual and aural design: the combination of
its seemingly washed-out patina (as in old photographs or old betamax tapes) and a Binisaya narration
that is perfectly thoughtful, nostalgic yet modulated. Many of the episodes prove immersive and unique, its fractious kids sincerely inhabit and believe in the wonder of the diegesis, the kind you find only hereabouts. Or thereabouts in a seemingly embracing and permissive
Sitio Malinawon, a lost frontier of freedom and dreams.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Foreseeable
functions of their teenage years, some</span></span> of the Iskalawags' objects of curiosity and obsession may read as follows: the vulva of a woman and sex education, spider
fights, pretty teachers and pretty teenagers, feisty crabs on the shore, the
massacre of chickens with slingshots, not to mention Palot's passion for papayas -- the symbolism surely not
lost on you.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sometimes, it bears noting, even worthy literature does not survive the transition to film, but Iskalawags manages to capture, perhaps even excel, the piquant and
percussive story originally written by Erik Tuban. The rhythmic pensiveness and playfulness in Binisaya, a few days removed, still pits and pats in my ears. What I seem to miss, though, is an ending that may better hint at what sets off the reveries of the narrator. What
happens to Palot and the rest of the gang at the moment of their crucial
witness also remains a mystery. Gone in the secretive flashback, it seems. All we see is the silhouette
of a man on a boat, apparently in a foreign land. The strictures of the grown-up world pinning him down, his memories yearning for the whitecaps and pennants of childhood rippling in the wind -- something the Iskalawags
once embodied and stood for -- something, crazily, maddeningly, bidding him back home. </span></span></div>
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<![endif]-->Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-89534003003625363582013-11-17T06:29:00.002-08:002013-12-10T06:43:22.497-08:00SITIO (Mes De Guzman, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Sitio, by Mes
de Guzman’s own admission, originates from a story that he had to dig up from
his old baul. It is a decent film, to a certain extent likable, but to be
honest about it, it gets iffy with its embryonic ideology. This time de
Guzman's adopted province of Nueva Vizcaya and its country types are
defamiliarized beyond recognition. Whether in a good way or not is another
matter altogether.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Sitio, in
essence, tells the tale, at once harrowing and humorous, of urban folks
rusticating to the titular village in Nueva Vizcaya: Jonas, a real estate
magnate reeling from a business fiasco, is on the retreat with his two younger
sisters in tow. Here, they encounter rural men with ominously strange gallows
humor (Don’t be surprised if these crazy Ilocanos suddenly point a bolo at your
jugular and threaten your life if they want to play a prank on you.)</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">This, then,
sets up a world turned upside down. De Guzman posits an urban-rich/rural-poor
dichotomy. This encapsulates an oft-examined scenario basic to the cinematic lore of the former Communist countries (good examples would be Otar Iosseliani’s
Pastorale and Vsevolod Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia), where this time the binary
hierarchy of these two spheres is reversed in the manner of Derrida. This time,
then, the city dwellers, with their superior airs, are in for a surprise. At first they
may seem in power, but the rural protagonists here are not without cunning.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">The crux for
the urbanites comes when they are suspected of killing one of the villagers. This sets off a scheme on the part of the dead man's
relatives – all of whom are male (which may or may not accrue to a subtext of
phallocracy) – to live off Jonas and his sisters. So they make merry – with food
and drink – at the expense of the put-upon hosts. The rural denizens thus become
the oppressive and privileged class.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">But the
ideological schema diagrams the situation this way: the poor locals show a limited, simple-headed opportunism, while the rich urban visitors evolve from
complacency to fierce display of self-preservation. The Marxist critic may be left wondering as to who, in truth, is
the more adaptable and resilient of these antagonistic classes. So much, it seems,
for the ascendance of the real oppressed.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Perhaps it
should not be unexpected of De Guzman to go off on such a tangent. Sitio,
however, is an act of recidivism; it represents an admittedly more larval stage
in the director's evolution. His more mature work has seen him go from strength to strength, from romanticizing young children in Iranian New Wave fashion in early films like Ang Daang
Patungong Kalimugtong to demonstrating the desperate pedagogy of the
oppressed in Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa up and just earlier this year, Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti. His
version of the oppressed has become more complex. They have unmistakable
shadings of moral ambiguity, alloyed with human dimensions.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">In Sitio,
however, we come face to face with crude, unsophisticated cosmologies: a regression of thought processes, which somehow interrogates the reason for
the creation of this film. The situation the poor provincials create is rather
factitious and begs questions. If all they are ever after are a handful of free
lunches, they are doltish tricksters. Real opportunity, real pragmaticism, real
revolution, is not about a free meal but a transfer of the mode of production,
as it is explicated in Marxism.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Even in
affluent societies, acts of opportunism are an offshoot of such a premise (e.g. it goes
under the heading of "a litigious situation"), but that of the poor
in Sitio represents something of a caricature of historical materialism. There
is no urgency nor tension to settle fatal class grievances. As if aware of
their place in a farce and black comedy, the dead man's relatives are content
to partake of banquets and milk their hosts for money in piecemeal fashion.
Meanwhile, the rich captives are just as simple-minded, not thinking of
taking the matter with all the moral certainty to the authorities (Here one recalls, too,
an escape route in an earlier episode involving a dead chicken.) This way it nullifies the
deadlock of entrapment to come as in Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Which may be the
point of the exercise, a nod to an ancestor, something which Sitio makes
plain, trying to recreate it with less violence and terror but with mixed
success. </span></span>
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<![endif]-->Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-14714791233149593372013-11-12T08:54:00.001-08:002013-11-19T06:12:37.123-08:00BENDOR (Ralston Jover, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEityZXKdfRjTiX1fwvmjIEnFUcwzlhUfrTX3TiHM5tCpEiSbeanHWjeHSuhPRicySXBKpabNwpx-jDn5SNal_1-l5XKhmZn8EZq_ut-zy52TVBClm7Gwuf_D6fSL34fUzuVikySsrOkxkyv/s1600/Bendor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEityZXKdfRjTiX1fwvmjIEnFUcwzlhUfrTX3TiHM5tCpEiSbeanHWjeHSuhPRicySXBKpabNwpx-jDn5SNal_1-l5XKhmZn8EZq_ut-zy52TVBClm7Gwuf_D6fSL34fUzuVikySsrOkxkyv/s400/Bendor.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It is not an accident of portraiture that Vivian
Velez has been cast, in part, for her imposing presence, broad shouldered and powerfully built with strong echoes of a once-virginal
youth. She reminds one of the Madonna in Michelangelo's Pieta with its homologous exaggeration
of proportion, a youngish Madonna with seemingly brawny shoulders, courageously cradling her fallen son. That Ralston Jover’s Bendor seems to have patterned Blondie, a robust and youthful
grandmotherly figure, after the ageless Virgin Mary, may have validity: her efforts to appear young, for one, are indexed by her ever-changing and highlighted hairdo, her stoutish build seemingly in consonance with Michelangelo’s notion
of the strong, unbowed mother who shoulders, as it were, the weight of the world.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Unlike the Virgin Mary, however, Blondie, although a matriarch with much resilience and forbearance, is not made of
incorruptible purity. In the opening sequence alone, she betrays her
interpellation by the ideology of corruption. She has just assisted a quack
doctor in an abortion, and the post-prandial talk, as it were, centers, with street-wisdom, on Blondie’s husband’s inept indiscretions. And this sets the
stage for a downbeat and listless framing of its unprepossessing subjects and a cataloguing of a no-less depressing backdrop, a receding and detached
panorama of problems besetting society. The hemorrhaging of society may not be unlike the hemorrhaging of abortion, expressed by a casual quip of the quack doctor : "It is just like having diarrhea."</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">At this point in </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">the evolution of Filipino film practice, has
the certain tendency towards social problems, our Third World calling card, by
this instance, become all too desensitized and tedious? The “diarrhea” seems to have covered
all the bases and caught up with all the modus operandi of crime and the modus vivendi of poverty detailed by the
headlines. From child laborers to death squads, from drug mules to war and displacement
from the South, from garbage colonies to squatter warrens, from prostitution to forced marriages, from principled desaparecidos to petty pickpockets, from corrupt politicians to unscrupulous police --
every snapshot of casualty or victim, every mug shot of criminality and pathology seems
to have been taken and catalogued, every pair of red hands seems filmically identified and fingered.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">With the cyclical and rhizomatic nature of social ills
seemingly without solution, is the thematics and poverty aesthetics of the social problem, by now, a
spent and inutile force? Yet do we have
the stomach to give way to the problems of the privileged upper classes?
Jover can only step back and gesture again toward the overly-examined subjects,
a virtual re-establishing shot of the marginal spaces, as if we were back to
square one because, after all, the other and the oppressed must speak, even if, troublingly, they point to a hopeless prognosis, a bleak metastasis of poverty
and the social ills it has spawned. Bendor, a reference to the titular monger of the piecemeal purchase -- and now a sticky-fingered, two-faced version who cheats the scales or
sneaks in bruised fruit -- can only itemize its response with impressionistic and cursory detail, instantiating with broad strokes what plagues the lower rungs of society.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Life in these margins is schematized between the guileful (e.g. Blondie's kind who are full of illicit enterprise) and the guileless (e.g. the garbage pickers, the street beggars) and yet the distinction seems unrecognizable<span class="messageBody" data-ft="{"type":3,"tn":"K"}"><span class="userContent">. Everyone struggles. Life in these fringes has naturalized itself to the devil taking the hindmost</span></span>. Criminal sleight of hand is
just one option for self-preservation: through its warped logic, it can go hand-in-hand with the burning of
votive candles and a devotion to graven figures, which, if it isn’t a weapon of
spirit then it is a weapon of aggressive survival and criminal rationale. The rampant trading of abortive contrabands, for one -- another of Blondie's and her family's illicit piecemeal schemes --
happens at the doorstep of Quiapo
Church. When the guilty are made to gather
and account for their acts, they finger each other like the most virtuous, or least guilt-ridden, of
souls. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The same with the seemingly toughened Blondie. Even as
she recoils at the assaulting stimuli around her – e.g. the stench of roadside garbage, abortive women whom she mistreats and abandons, an extended
family that is a burden to her -- Blondie's assumptions do not exalt her in the social pyramid. Life has taught her the rules of Darwinistic adaptation too well, and yet, after all the hard knocks, she is just as embattled. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Nor
is she is a specific, one-off case, but just one instance of struggling subalterns with a similar fate -- a metaphor for replicates Jover culls, perhaps, from magic realism or the supernatural phenomenon
of multilocation who may represent a much-needed guide or companion through life. Blondies are everywhere but each one alone, a legion hermetically sealed from assistance, Jover's images suggest. She may possess the strong shoulders to bear the brunt
of problems: against a good-for-nothing husband, a musician son and his family continuously cash-strapped, an
entire extended brood of dependents to feed; she may be the eyes through which we
witness the degradation of society, but
she herself is in the trenches, no less trapped and involved in the unstoppable rhizomatic branching out of problems </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">that permeate society. </span></span>(i.e. the social maladies are overdetermined so that solving Blondie's problems may not solve, say, the beggar's problems, and so on.)</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Known for her lustful and frisky screen roles in the 1980s,
Vivian Velez ‘s Blondie’s efforts at the notion of rejuvenation gives way to a
tired and defeated iconography. By this time, she has gone the rounds,
committing crime, enabling crime, abetting crime, eluding arrests before landing
in jail. It is almost too apropos and fitting for this mother-lode of a subject to emblematically end this
way -- for Blondie and perhaps a national cinema's investigation and indictment of society's hydra-headed dilemmas -- with the receding camera framing her teary-eyed hesitancy before her reopened jail cell, too weary and wary of granted
freedom. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Freedom has come to mean its obverse: the yoke and harness of servitude and suffering that perhaps only a fictitious Virgin Mary can miraculously shoulder.</span></span></div>
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<![endif]-->Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-79138124254802431622013-11-05T08:00:00.000-08:002013-11-12T09:55:44.334-08:00ALMANAC OF FALL (Bela Tarr, 1985)<div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This household barely stands. The walls are creaking, ready to burst from the weight of unsavory secrets. In the throes of demise, it cradles - or, perhaps, corrals together - some of the most grotesque specimens to be found in any menagerie. With a virtuoso command of his directorial powers, Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr constructs a leery portrait of a feral group of characters in dire need of domestication, held together by the accident of blood and mercenary need.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Hedi is the matriarch of this house who rules precariously, an aging widow who must contend with a rebellious son, Janos, who has lost all filial piety and looks at her as a cash cow. Janos, unbeknownst<span style="font-size: large;"> </span>to his mother, is carrying on an affair with her live-in nurse, Anna. Anna, for her part, is involved with not one, not two, but three men.Miklos, her original lover, after fits of rage and violence seems to take a more cerebral tack. Tibor, an aging school teacher, is the third lover, who is also never far from the lonely matriarch’s orbit. These deeply flawed and fragmented characters are not above losing their scruples: they lie, cheat, steal, inflict violence on one another, form tenuous alliances, and plot each other’s demise.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Almanac of Fall represents a watershed between Tarr’s earlier films which were mostly social realist depictions and the current cycle of films culminating in Werckmeister Harmonies. It is neither of<span style="font-size: large;"> </span>those two styles. After helming The Prefab People three years earlier, a story of another household threatened by bitter strife, Tarr takes the kernel of that story and couches it in pseudo-melodrama. Yes, it contains certain elements of melodrama, but emotionalism and sentimentality are reined in: rage – of sex, of violence – is what is most visible here, witnessed <i>in medias res</i>, so that the audience is caught off-guard, more surprised than steeped in emotions. Tarr further turns this genre on its head with an absurdist twist: the<span style="font-size: large;"> </span>characters, as though growing philosophical or suddenly wise or perhaps momentarily touched, suddenly burst into song in the middle of a scene, as though singing lullabyes, the lyrics containing the metaphors of the moment. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Tarr also brings the mannerisms of other well-known melodramatists to this film’s mise en scene. The unnaturalistic lighting is redolent of Douglas Sirk (as in All That Heaven Allows) and Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy. The stylization does not end there, but we witness it, too, in how the figures are shot: flat, two-dimensional, from oblique angles, often in claustrophobic close-ups, often framed in close proximity. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">When the dust settles, Tarr executes a last plot pirouette: something has happened offscreen, an ellipsis that overturns much of what came before. Rapprochements are in the offing, a scapegoat emerges, and the house restores itself from entropy. Or so it seems. As though to provide a counterpoint to the outbursts of harangues and histrionics that came before, it all ends with a dance. Life should be about grace and tenderness, Tarr seems to say, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Yet we suspect we see through it all -- the lull before the storm, this most untenable impasse.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">reviewed: October 3, 2006 </span></span></div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-5166953850290003782013-10-20T08:01:00.000-07:002013-11-11T03:18:32.859-08:00ANG TURKEY MAN AY PABO RIN (Randolph Longjas, 2013)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE8SDNwc3jSxBIfbNFWCvCOiIVv58ufDbm4ec-MM3fZtj2H_tBCInsbWFcwNBEpUZ7IMf7MCF5YpUM6_G4odp0zEDxIDNp3vCgAHjyQbk0xbXcRaw34j8gIhUQintzrOM8jDOU0GujN_CA/s1600/turkey.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE8SDNwc3jSxBIfbNFWCvCOiIVv58ufDbm4ec-MM3fZtj2H_tBCInsbWFcwNBEpUZ7IMf7MCF5YpUM6_G4odp0zEDxIDNp3vCgAHjyQbk0xbXcRaw34j8gIhUQintzrOM8jDOU0GujN_CA/s400/turkey.png" width="275" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Don't laugh, don't gag, or maybe you should, but I sat through Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin with my prejudicial notions of a lowbrow film, and came away with a serviceable smile at the end. The film's got the surface of comedy all right, but the trajectory is one of both fantasy and reality, the better to keep us on tenterhooks. Yet what comes to the fore, in the final reckoning, are the ricochets of all its spoken details -- the whole seemingly made to subordinate to its parts (its <i>paroles</i>) -- teased out with a fine-toothed comb for what they are comically worth and how they finally cohere into a repeatable picture of a not-so-uncommon reality: our unique relationship and transaction with the American White through language and logos.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin begins with a frantic search for a turkey,
to be cooked and made ready for an American-style Thanksgiving Day on Filipino soil.
The searcher is a twenty-something Filipina (named Cookie Bigoy) who, along with her trusty best
friends, crisscrosses the city to purchase this relatively uncommon variety of poultry in order to surprise
her new American husband (named Matthew Adams). The couple are depicted as a success story: poster children for an online site revealingly called KanoLovesPinay. com. It’s not, however, what one might cynically think. While
a lot gets lost in the cultural and linguistic translation, this is no one-way
street, not a marriage of convenience for either side: the couple seem to genuinely take
pains to meet halfway as they adjust to one another’s cultural idiosyncracies
and language barriers. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">But will it all be enough? Will the marriage of miscegenation work
out? Many an utterance here lays, piece by piece, a brick on the wall of sound dividing the couple. Every instance of verbal communication
between them represents an everyday (mis)adventure: transliterations, homonyms and multifarious puns,
idiomatic malapropisms, even twang and diction, among other linguistic pitfalls, become
an occasion to confound the couple, and translate to comical recognition for
us with a dramatic -- or rather, comic -- irony that we so cherish. Even when the American seems to be catching on to the
quirks of the Tagalog tongue: his wife unwittingly springs the trilingual trap on him (the average local is uniquely trilingual, of course). The Filipino, it bears observing, switches signs and codes almost unconsciously to
the consternation of the foreigner.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">That's what's at the tip of the tongue. Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin sustains a steady stream of consciousness, a laugh-a-minute pace for much of its duration. The Filipina at the center is not glibly alone: she has an equally uproarious set of friends
and an equally uproarious set of parents, who among other things, display their inability to memorize the
foreigner’s name, while spouting their supernatural superstitions.The Filipina's brother, meanwhile, has traded his jeepney for a career in rapping while curiously resenting the American and his sincere overtures of friendship.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Longjas' film, however, can sometimes be a mixed
bag of new and hackeneyed hilarities, all too ready with its scatter-shot approach to
comedy, so that even the lisp, that hoary old trope of comicality, gets another insufferable ventilation here. (Didn’t we just suffer through another stuttering character in Purok 7?) But
side by side with another comedy watched on the same day, Bingoleras, Ang Turkey
Man Ay Pabo Rin seemingly has few comedic pauses. That might be a dubious sign – its
over-eagerness to please -- but in
hindsight the crude mixture is the kind of chatter one encounters day after day. Just as one says that, the film mixes tones, switches gears and takes on the touch of the serious -- when the Filipina presents herself at the American Embassy to get a
much-coveted visa, a passport to Pennsylvania and a much-cherished anticipation
of snow. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">With a scenario negotiating interpersonal and interracial relationships, the onus is on enunciation and acting, and both its leads, Tuesday Vargas and Travis Kraft, come up aces. Vargas, for one, has expressive diction which, coupled with rubbery facial
expressions honed on tv and in stand-up routines, seems all but second nature. Kraft is no slouch either, he may have the seeming package of a Superman but he
has the comic prerequisite, the much-mocked and much-imitated, iconic twang. Both come across with upstanding personalities for roles that entail wholesomeness (squeaky-clean, albeit already conditioned by American-ness by the time the film opens). Together, they pull off a genuine couple, despite their disparate backgrounds:
the American, a white-collar professional, and the Filipina, a deboner of milkfish, with a son by
another man. Somehow, key to bridging the linguistic chasm remains, paradoxically, true understanding. Watch, and yes, listen, to see and hear why.</span></span><br />
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Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-12390915874340485792013-10-15T08:05:00.000-07:002015-12-24T01:13:44.805-08:00LUKAS THE STRANGE (John Torres, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Lukas The
Strange bears an alias that's hard to live down</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> -- the odd one, the solitary one, the alienated one --</span></span> as inscrutable as the circumstances surrounding his life. Even as the luster of tinsel -- in the form of a film shoot -- comes to his village, partway a source of hurtful jouissance, part bittersweet pleasure, the shy, withdrawn Lukas grapples not just with adolescence but with his strange knowledge and conception of his father.
The-Name-of-the-Father, it seems, preoccupies him as a source of bewilderment, of troubling resonance. In an opening
sequence of this new, beguiling film by John Torres, the father intones to his 13-year-old son, as in a dream, a father finessing his son into the acceptance of a stigma, a confession of a cardinal sin: he is half-horse, half-human.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">"A tikbalang." Well-understood. Well, almost. The tikbalang, after all, is the indigenous, folkloric, centaur-like trickster that leads travelers astray. Through this dream-like admission made by the father, Lukas is made to learn what it all signifies, not just the negative tenor behind his father's voice: is the symbolic confession a shorthand for a serious crime (say, of causing people to disappear as tikbalangs do, a euphemism for doing away with the era's desaparecidos, the enemies of the state, as Torres intimates in an interview?) or is it just as much a shorthand for the father's indiscretions having to do with women (another Torres motif) ? Lukas thus begins to parse adult language to enter the symbolic terrain – and how the sobriquet starts to become him! On
closer reflection, is the father's condition an inheritance to be passed down to his son who will duplicate it in his adulthood? In this realm of the boy's growing psyche, there is seemingly, as yet, no law, society, or a grasp of adult language: indexes which the psychoanalyst Lacan sees as necessities to confirm the boy's place in proper society.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">The father, someone once said, is often a source of centrifugal power. He is often the disruptive presence within a dysfunctional family and breaks up Oedipal bliss. Torres' film may be viewed for its mythopoesis or its historicity but it lends itself well to a psychoanalytic cartography
of the unconscious. The film, in essence, is auto-psychoanalysis, as it tries to triangulate what Lacan conceives to be the human psyche and its attendant tensions (1) The
Imaginary Order, the narcissistic side, sees Lukas participating in
auditions to land a role in a film being shot in his village. (2) The Symbolic Order – the assimilation of language
and the rest of what he needs in order to assume what "The-Name-of-the-Father" stands for -- sustains the threat of disruption (possibly, in Lacanian terms, a psychosis) borne out of a father's damaged example. (3) The Real
Order, the locus of anxiety, the antithesis to fantasy that is ultimately beyond symbolization, is interwoven with the imaginary: Torres, an artfully deceptive analysand projects it onto a social turmoil (e.g. the film's dark historico-political aspects) but not without the bittersweet overlap of the imaginary of the pastoral myth, the ethos of a celluloid-hungry
psyche. If one pursues this to its conclusion, Torres proves to be his own Lacanian theorist, and Lukas The Strange is his impossible attempt at the Real.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">The crux, in the artificial realm of tinsel and make-believe, remains how the father’s virility overshadows the growth and upbringing of Lukas. The father, as the movie
and the movie-being-shot-within-the-movie wear on, becomes an object of rumor, that of being intimate with Melanie Moran, the actress, a figure of fantasy,
the object of desire, for Lukas. While a pining voice on the
soundtrack, Lorena, the confidante who uniquely understands Lukas, is full of longing for her strange, bosom friend. The film is fraught with the object of unattainable desire, what Lacan calls the "objet petit a" -- a lack in a person's life that mostly remains unfulfilled.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Circumspectly
choosing the predominant gauge of 35 mm intercut with sparing digital video, the better to bear the cicatrices and artifacts of his visuals, Torres
interweaves this psychoanalytic fable – about absent, wayward
fathers, that dieu obscur -- against the backdrop of a time of authoritarian monstrosity
in the person of the tyrant Marcos. Such diegetic aspects add to the pathos of longing,
yearning, desire, loss, pain and a kind of orphanhood.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Despite the dolorous themes and undertones, however, Lukas The Strange is not strictly a clinical study at all, if one shuns its subcutaneous significance: it is grounded in true cinematic and artistic finesse and dexterity in the way it weaves in and out of its narrative tenses; it has a wealth of low-key but diverting dedramatized sequences that straddle the modes of narrative and documentary; it is simply an enchanting faux-naif film to experience, almost like a companion piece to Shireen Seno's feature debut Big Boy. The story of a colorful if beleaguered youth is assuaged with eidetic imagery -- from bucolic shots of the North, to a natural occurrence of a tornado, to the auditions happening in the village of Lukas: children being cued to tumble and roll downhill, men firing away with imaginary guns, a row of pretty village lasses filing in and out of the frame. There
is also a formidable river that must be swam and crossed as in a trial by ordeal, its tributaries flowing the same way downstream, bearing a box of pornographic videotapes, the father's legacy -- like an ominous pattern floating away, to be salvaged or to be let go, like a bloodline, like a message in a
bottle inscribed with the deepest sense of loneliness and void.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Title in Tagalog: Lukas Nino </span></span></div>
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<![endif]-->Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-82972187428390903912013-10-08T06:44:00.000-07:002013-10-23T22:06:53.756-07:00ANG KWENTO NI MABUTI (Mes de Guzman, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Money connotes evil. Not just that, money has come to denote evil. Entirely evil. Lopsidedly that is how Robert Bresson coldly dissects the figure and presence of money in L'Argent: a manipulative demon with its accompanying materialist ideology, a trail of murder and crime lying in its wake. Nothing good can come out of it: money reeks. Enter Ang Kwento ni Mabuti, a film that reimagines this signifier of sin, repurposing money for yet another intention. The old aura of money seems to invert and shift colors in this new and commendable film by Mes de Guzman: foregrounding the question
of what is virtuous in a world where nothing is unalloyed, where ethical and moral absolutes are a pipe dream even for utopians among us. Here many of the dependent characters are deeply flawed and face an unpromising earthly future,
their sins wearing out their originality and mortality, by the time the virtuous Mabuti is placed in the hot seat, tested by poverty's ineluctable problem and a bagful of money. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In its searching of worldly deliverance, Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti is not unlike an old morality play, where its title character has an <i>agon</i> with her sense of right and wrong, whether it will serve an individual or a social good (at least her own society), but the stakes are less otherworldly and sublime, more immediate and mundane: terrestrial salvation. Forget the world to come, it seems to imply. Pragmaticism and consequentialism are not untenable, it whispers. Mabuti must read the fine print that comes with the money and the semaphores of circumstance: isn't it value neutral?</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All but a truism to say that everything Nora Aunor touches turns, even from dross, into gold: the alchemy of Mabuti is no exception. Nora lends tremendous cachet
to it by her stellar thespian presence, reaffirmed here with understated perfomance in the Ilocano idiom. But what must be equally recognized is how Mes de Guzman’s authorial achievement lays equal claim to this
movie, based on a story he wrote some time ago without an explicit wish of making it into a medium for a Nora Aunor. Everyone around
de Guzman, however, simply couldn’t help discerning the bright adumbration
of the great actress in the role of Mabuti. De Guzman kept his fingers crossed and one
day, with a connection made and consummated, she simply showed up on the set.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti may present a scenario so well-trodden as to be negligible -- how to transform the matter of money, the crux of conscience? -- but de Guzman handles it in such a way that we simultaneously shake and nod our heads by the time his film concludes. Chances are, most will agree with its signals of predestiny, but not without a sneaking question left hanging silently somewhere within. But it is all part and parcel of
Mabuti’s own passion. Along the way, she, like a pilgrim in progress, is tested
and tempted, and when we suspect coming on an obligatory Christian ending, de
Guzman inverts the influence of religion: Mabuti’s own definition of virtue comes to the
fore. Remember how the devilish son gets
thwarted time and again in de Guzman’s earlier film, Diablo? This time the progress of Mabuti’s journeys gets often interrupted, but all is stoically shouldered. That is Mabuti’s deceptive grace. Mabuti, like a ministering
saint, fields and keeps the needy under her wings: the daughters of her errant
daughter, the equally cavalier and wayward son, and the many neighbors who need
her faith and shamanic succor.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">But in greater moral terms, if Bresson fingers money as filthy lucre, passed around as a gun in a genuine Russian roulette, de Guzman elevates the matter of money beyond something like a Kantian category, although we might be convinced we are trapped in one with all the crookedness and immorality surrounding Mabuti. Perhaps when, in the
hardscrabble, poverty-stricken life that must be waged in the mountains of
Nueva Vizcaya – where Communist insurgency remains; bankrobbers, too -- Mabuti’s
countenance seems to change at the sight of money, hinting at the vortex it represents, money that's not rightfully
hers, the dangers of fate she thinks are playing tricks on her prove to be self-perpetuating and
self-terminating. Fate seems here to
tempt and ultimately withhold its own dangers and risks. That is perhaps, the one of two knocks
on the film - along with its raft of piggybacking characters. -- Or is it simply the nature of fate?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Mabuti, in this sense, is the incarnation of sainthood made
pragmatically attuned to the times. Far from a daughter who has
children by many different men, a son who adds another, Nora's Mabuti remains resilient and earnest reminiscent of a Giulietta
Massina through it all: she has a shy smile behind a dusky and weathered
exterior. When not minding her many granddaughters, she has always enough time – the
patience of a saint -- to dispel the incessant threat of rabies and venom with some
spit and her magical poison-sucking stones.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Local color proves both bane and boon for the film: the mostly
non-professional characters, Novo Vizcayanos, come off as mostly wooden if you speak their language, but they also have the unique presence, the <i>sui generis</i>, to enchant you by their strangeness – even as de Guzman makes no secret of his enthusiasm for his home province, his intent to democratize filmmaking in those parts. Sometimes, however, the movie's stab at equal opportunity threatens to spin off to many loose ends and subplots that divert
with their seeming function of dedramatized anthropology. On the other hand, indigenous details may divert in a good way -- e.g. the playthings of the forest,
the sumpak, the proliferation of shops for secondhand clothes or wag-wag stores, the
corruption of local officials with jueteng, the many military checkpoints, the
superstitions around faith healers. Somehow, it all works -- all accretes to texture. Forget how de Guzman passes off the town of Aritao
as a city, because these are the ramifications of a journey of fate where, from de Guzman’s perspective, nothing is simply as it seems. Even as Nora has expressed an earnest interest in a film about villainy, the seeds of evil have been subtly planted here,
only justified with a benevolent end, deep within Mabuti's bosom. Think about it. Light, after all, may never occur without its underside of shadow. </span></span></div>
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<![endif]-->Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-28363235768767038772013-09-21T06:47:00.000-07:002013-10-09T00:46:42.236-07:00THE GUERILLA IS A POET (Kiri/Sari Dalena, 2013) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXAJy5DnZU85aqVxjKTLoYCv3yURxt4IK1mLuoYInOSPCayNZwIOhY3zYxs_69bZdwFns1b0y0mu9popKYAf-LuqQuKkZtmMci8sQKsKFEIL2B1Rnx7hE7CwnfAWUyLVLpVDMMz6LCl_ut/s1600/guerilla.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXAJy5DnZU85aqVxjKTLoYCv3yURxt4IK1mLuoYInOSPCayNZwIOhY3zYxs_69bZdwFns1b0y0mu9popKYAf-LuqQuKkZtmMci8sQKsKFEIL2B1Rnx7hE7CwnfAWUyLVLpVDMMz6LCl_ut/s400/guerilla.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Hitler, however, was a painter too. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">What I regret most about this documentary is how it sanctifies Jose Maria Sison as a trans-historical hero, and how it attempts to foist this on us with selective memory. Reenacting the anecdotes of an interview conducted recently by the Dalenas, The Guerilla is A Poet is the apparent meandering of memory, hither and thither, without dramatic structure and logic, only with a view towards glorious apotheosis. Never in doubt a hero, as wide-eyed reverence goes, it shows Sison from an early age already made aware of his feudalistic family's land grabbing and as a young man already fully formed laying the groundwork for the New People’s Army, to his becoming monument to the Communist Party of the Philippines. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">What is regrettable is the man of marble, a portrait that verges on the cult of personality, warts and all simply omitted, along with the thick accretion of crimes barnacled around him. What is regrettable is how throughout its duration of 2 and a half hours, this itinerant documentary fails to meet head-on much of the supposed apocrypha, but generously allocates time for Sison's height of popularity and heroics, his martyred coevals, even his famous contemporaries like Ninoy Aquino, as if to gloat over his own iconic status, while remaining silent on the more urgent issues raised against his past.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">It is most exigent that this film wax enthusiastic not just about Amado Guerrero (Sison's pseudonym) and his poetic side, but about the negation of his perceived dark side, his putative ruthlessness, as a revolutionary leader. In recent decades, his image has undergone an all but total eclipse and this film, an overlong non-sequitur, strains to be his rejoinder. Sometime in 2006, snapshots of him exposed him dancing cheek-by-jowl with actress Ara Mina in a Christmas shindig in the Netherlands, as if captioned to question his lifestyle while in exile, whether his vow of solidarity with those still fighting in the hills of his country is an earnest one. But that is the least of his worries. For one he has been charged with the indiscriminate purging of the New People's Army in the 1980s, to root out deep penetration agents, but at the expense of thousands of innocents. He has disavowed any role in it, but there remains the allegation, too, of his having a hand in the assassinations of former NPA commanders in the early 2000s like Arturo Tabara and Romulo Kintanar, who were his vocal enemies and dissenters.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">The Dalenas seem to tiptoe around the Sisons here, careful to ask sanitized questions and teasing out romantic displays of heroism and comradeship, poetry and song. Was this a documentary ever meant to be an objective one? Doubtful, given that some of its collaborators -- a couple of actors here, a script writer there -- are recognizable partisans from the Left. If the crimes alleged against Sison are all part of black propaganda – perhaps by the state or by Sison’s enemies within the movement -- The Guerilla is A Poet is tantamount to an instance of revisionism and vanity press. Here there is an attempt at an iconic rehabilitation and restoration. His only crime, the movie deigns, is how he would obliviously forget his children and leave them unattended, all the while typing away committed literature and poetry. A slap on the wrist, while foregrounding the romantic zealousness of his passion as a man of letters. All venial sins, if at all, as opposed to the alleged mortal sins the movie should be investigating. The one imputation against Sison that he deigns to confront here is his widely believed responsibility in the Plaza Miranda Bombing, an accusation shared even by the irreproachable Senator Jovito Salonga. Sison deflects it and fingers the convenient suspect: then-President Marcos. Easy out, of course. End of story. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Interminable at a full 2 ½ hours, a time that should have been more than enough to answer all the rumors swirling around the man, what we get is digression and detour. Amorphous, there is no rhyme or reason, no dramatic arc to be gleaned, just anecdotes stitched together in an incoherent skein, with an occasional, intermittent line from Sison that makes us wonder about the veracity or fictiveness of what is being portrayed. What we get are relatively unimportant subplots and figures like Major Aure, the fearsome military torturer accompanied with portentous music, and Ka Teresa, the beautiful revolutionary and her equally doomed revolutionary husband. We are never certain about their facticity: most probably enthusiastic evocations of legends known in Communist lore. Simply, none of the hard questions get asked, not even a great deal of the man and his wife’s life in the Hague is touched upon.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">What we are made to appreciate is a heroic man of commitment, the firebrand of the revolution, the writer of the supposed “bible of the Communist Party”. How he has risked his rights as an enemy of the state, how he has risked his freedom as a fugitive, how he has risked his life crossing treacherous terrain, mountains and rivers, while finding time by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp to create poetry in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods. All romantic, superlative stuff. There are several moments about the nature of life in the hills and in the armed struggle -- in particular the parity between female and male revolutionaries when it comes to love -- that sometimes prove interesting, but they come few and far between, amid the obligatory portrayals of fist pumping, intoning of committed slogans, revolutionary/Communist rhetoric and the singing of the Internationale and songs of protest.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Even as this movie plays in major theaters across the capital to the enthusiastic slumming of bourgeois audiences, the mysterious deaths of Sison's opponents remain unsolved. It is said that a series of fatwas still remains in force against the man’s enemies within the movement. If you saw this movie without knowledge of his alleged past, you would never suspect the man of any evil and wrongdoing. You might even swoon over this idealized man who can wield the armalite as well as the writing pen. There is a scene here that encapsulates the thrust of the film: Jose Ma. Sison waxing eloquent with revolutionary tirade as he, even under military custody, confronts the buffoonish figure of President Marcos. Did this dialogue ever really happen? The film – Sison himself in voice-over -- claims it did. But perhaps all too late, even the man may be uncertain about his recuperation now -- never to be embalmed for worship, never to lie in state like Uncle Ho, or his idol, Chairman Mao. Ever.</span></span></div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-52399222448396660052013-09-12T19:08:00.001-07:002013-09-14T20:44:39.903-07:00TRANSIT (Hannah, Espia, 2013)<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOkMCDsMlIMEueCXShhTUJKch_XN_6KkPE5l2XQ9uO9ej0VoHqN5j5fvBBhb1dbwupF3akeoJtWNDEcdBpuWyMrE1Ck57vAVHWGYMnb-mtvEOM_s2aGRvkQrmBavPoo8QUE10rJy7lzj5P/s1600/transit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOkMCDsMlIMEueCXShhTUJKch_XN_6KkPE5l2XQ9uO9ej0VoHqN5j5fvBBhb1dbwupF3akeoJtWNDEcdBpuWyMrE1Ck57vAVHWGYMnb-mtvEOM_s2aGRvkQrmBavPoo8QUE10rJy7lzj5P/s400/transit.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">The
need for
roots, writes philosopher Simone Weil, underlies the most vital and
essential
of necessities which constitute "the needs of the soul." Few people take this perspective more to heart
than the
Filipino diaspora, several millions strong, trapped in transit,
scattered around the world in uncertain provisional chronotopes. As
dramatized by Hannah
Espia’s feature debut, Transit, the striving wish to reterritorialize in
their
place of exile is of uncertain liminality.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Filipino
expatriates and their families are precariously subject to the
ever-shifting domestic configurations of their adopted
countries. In Israel, after the passage of an immigration law in 2009
that aimed to curtail
the rights of children born out of foreign workers (primarily those
under
five years old), there is a sense that they are deemed "hyphenated" and
forced back to their supposedly foreign country of origin. In
Transit, its Filipino-Israeli subjects must learn
to live and hide -- like the film's elapsed migrants -- in the inconspicuous margins of the country they have
grown – and grown up -- to call home. </span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Espia’s
deeply affecting first film dramatizes the lives
of these Filipinos and part-Filipinos who are in the process of once
again
being displaced, deterritorialized and broken apart. Set in Tel Aviv,
the film is framed as five perspectives of five primary characters:
Moises, a
caregiver to a sympathetic old man, and his son named Joshua, not yet 5
years
old and subject to the new immigration law; Janet, a domestic helper who
must
contend with her teenage daughter Yael, who is undergoing adolescence
and a crisis
of identity that favors her Israeli upbringing; and their niece, Tina,
who must go into hiding after her visa has expired. Their stories all
imbricate, and thus amplify, the bigger picture of a sense of home and
identity under threat of forfeiture.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">In
Transit, the fate of 4-year-old Joshua bookends this film, his
impending repatriation means a harsh fate, a destiny of displacement
that might be beyond his comprehension,
one which will take the deportee to an irregular future of familial
separation, an unfamiliar country he will be forced to inhabit and adapt
to. Repatriation
seems even a misnomer -- Joshua's young worldview is instinctively
Hebrew, adopting few Filipino attributes, tendencies and loyalties --
the place of one's birth and childhood is most certainly the
place of one’s home and culture, familiarities and customs.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Rootlessness
characterizes the fate of Joshua's kind. An absence of freedom -- an
instinctive agoraphobia -- in Joshua's known birthplace, is a strong
undercurrent within the film. Nurturing spaces across Tel Aviv and the
rest of Israel are not meant
for children of immigrants anymore – playgrounds have turned desolate
and barren. Children subject to the new immigrant legislation must learn
to keep indoors, out of
sight, and fear the approach of law enforcers. The first things they
learn to
do is to lie about their identities, to even wear disguises and hide.
They must learn to become “invisible.” Such is Transit's indirect
indictment of a homeland that cannot provide and sustain, so that it is
preferable to hide, fugitive-like, in another country.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">If Espia
focuses on the Filipino immigrant and his uncertain transit, his efforts at
reterritorialization in their adopted country, which they have served with
earnest labor and loyalty, face a complicated reality: none of the children
here, for one, seem to identify with their parents' ethnicity. What the film
calls into question, in the main, is the severity of the new immigration law –
protestations against which are made by Moises and Janet and the presence of
Israeli advocacy groups seeking the law’s repeal -- which seems blind to its
harsh repercussions of dispersing and fracturing families.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">As
an exilic and diasporic film, Transit is a deceptive example that does
not show the usual artisanal aesthetics, but it certainly qualifies as
what Hamid Naficy calls "accented cinema" -- not the least for its
multi-linguality (not unlike those true-to-life characters they portray,
even the cast literally acculturate by learning Hebrew and
internalizing "a double consciousness") -- that foregrounds
the spirit of uncertainty and liminality at the mercy of countries of
migrancy. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">While
the film depicts the common
Israeli as a compassionate human who takes in the Filipino, the
law proves to be another matter: a merciless institution to be feared
and, helplessly, to reckon with. Espia, however, does not demonize
Israeli immigration with
draconian cruelty, but they are no less strict, uncompromising enforcers
of their domestic and immigration
policies. Against this background of unsparing enforcement of laws,
Espia weaves human stories of silent dignity and struggle, doing so with
mature dexterity and emotions, although momentary, impressionistic
narrative gaps in one or two episodes appear (e.g. the episode involving
Tina seems muddled and elliptical), seemingly glossed over, presumably
owing to logistical constraints. But maybe it's just as well, Transit is
better off understated than bogged down in sentimental overload.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Never,
it must be said, has a Filipino production on foreign soil demonstrated
such a mature and elegant assurance --
never with such controlled drama, with such a familiarity of time and
place, with such a marshaling of resources, with such scope and detail,
with such texture and tone -- that easily outpaces preconceptions of
what the world has come to
dismiss as the conventional Filipino film. Espia is a director to watch
out for and Transit stands head and
shoulders above the field at Cinemalaya 2013. </span></span>Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-2440184563495496212013-08-08T00:06:00.002-07:002013-10-15T18:40:32.655-07:00DEBOSYON (Alvin Yapan, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Henceforth, a compact between him and us -- both sides sustaining, in each other, a mutual faith. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Keeping faith, pledging belief in the praxis of this writer-director as a creator of cinematic art, as
a storyteller, as a purveyor of native knowledge. In return, he vows not to shortchange us in an effort to keep us in the thrall of "enchantment." I’ve never met Alvin Yapan, nor have ever heard any anecdotes about him, but this
appears to me is Debosyon’s secret thesis. Yapan is in search of his twin – the poet
in search of his steadfast reader, a kindred audience. Yapan has proven to be an enchanter, a thoughtful fabulist, literally
the interpreter of our native fantasies and folklore amid our backtracking stance from the phenomena of the mythic and the supernatural. Yapan embodies
the dwindling breed who can still shift shapes with the times, even in monstrous ways, in the hopes of exhorting his
viewer to keep faith and not abandon him.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">The director of Ang Panggagahasa Kay Fe is very much the director of Debosyon. Both films convincingly transport us to Yapan’s realm of fantasy
and unreality that we are gradually
relinquishing and crowding out, metaphysically and spatially. If Ang Panggagahasa shows a kapre's earthly incursion as an act born out of territorial marginalization and encroachment, Debosyon is likewise that -- where forests once lay untouched, they are now crawling with flower gatherers and rebels -- installing the
legend of Daragang Magayon and the Virgin of Penafrancia as the last bastion of our spiritual and mythical culture.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Myth and religion, and their final stand. We must stay
the course and keep faith in it. Yapan seems to say this in ways that never sound too
desperate, but always with a modicum of grace and artistry. Debosyon may one day be no more than a
relic of a forgotten time, an anachronism in the age of shifting cultures and ideologies, but the artfully
heroic and tenacious holding onto a fast receding epoch is where Yapan commits and casts his lot.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Devotion, to tease out the connotations of this word, is a heroic, even mystical, attribute, after all. Yapan, by the
way he has reconstituted our narrative heritage and returned to something that exerts lesser and lesser influence on us, is a
heroic, perhaps quixotic, yet nonetheless dedicated director. Thus he hopes nothing less from us: that we, his audience, will reciprocate his own
devotional and votive efforts. Yapan, after all, is a university professor whose
intrinsic tendency is to impart knowledge. Devotion should be a two-way
avenue: the teacher instilling knowledge, as the student processes his every
word and converts it to usable wisdom.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">Yapan’s Debosyon proves no less as a shorthand for a leap
of faith, no matter how the fantastic half-human, half-mythical chimera takes
form. No matter what shape and shift Oryol, Daragang Magayon, the Virgin of Penafrancia assume, the viewer must stand firmly by and not lose ground. Debosyon,
if anything, is almost certainly a repudiation of the literalism of verifiable science,
in contradistinction to the way Yapan has come to end his films with double or multiple meanings. That
is the realm of poetry, not cut-and-dried certainty always reduced to a
unitary resolution. But even as Yapan exhorts us to pay heed and keep faith, he will
endeavor to show all his cards, his own human nature perhaps, out of his own good faith as a steadfast
educator. Debosyon is his confession of not being infallible, that he can be a monstrous
entity, but his monstrosity is not ill motive but simply a rigorous eagerness to profess and be learned from.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; line-height: 115%;">As Debosyon culminates in
the intertwining of man and myth, both in metaphorical and literal ways, a more intense
confession takes place. Why man has kept faith in his supernatural beloved is
the result of a devotee’s instinctual epiphany through intuition – again a
reproach of the growing scientificity of civilized and modernized life. Debosyon, by contrast, stands as an earthy, all but bestial reproach of the strict morality that science props up -- the monism of science dovetailing with the monotheism of religion -- a science which finds no virtue nor value in the union of
man and myth, man with anyone. (What might be the most chimerical sex, the most chimerical union, the film seems to rhetorically ask.) As with Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng
Dalawang Kaliwang Paa where the prospective male lovers face each other eye to eye in a meaningful way, Debosyon does confess how the transcendent glint in the eyes tells the whole story. Cinema, it bears repeating after all, is the kindred medium for the eye, and this is Yapan’s newfound medium to
instruct us, never too literally, but with a creatively sinuous and shape-shifting dexterity.</span></span></div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705372428097211081.post-40099288953745097072013-08-06T21:22:00.001-07:002013-09-12T20:41:34.073-07:00PUROK 7 (Carlo Obispo, 2013)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Once I
relished a fonder -- or perhaps vaster -- recollection of childhood. I remember
the names of streets of my old hometown. I remember the vistas of dirt road and the
wilderness surrounding the house I first called home. I remember how Indian
mangoes, guavas and cacao fruits could be plucked from its unguarded trees.
Those places were wide open spaces. Those spaces were a universe all their own,
and every day did not pass without a sense of adventure. Those were idyllic times,
and I would cherish through the years their presence in the mind’s
eye. Characters of unforgettable attributes would jump out of my memory: the tattooed jailbird who brandished his paltik whenever drunk; the
mistress whose house smelled of sardines; the so-called village madman, a
gentle giant who roamed the streets, there, in a predominantly Ilocano enclave
mingled with the Gaddang tongue. Years later I, would return here to try to
revivify those memories, only to be blindsided by the distortions of time: my
conception of my first milieu, to my dismay, had become severely
disproportionate to actuality. These spaces had shrunk and had lost some of
their virtuous dimensions. Gone were the characters that populated them. Memory
all these years had flattered my sense of first habitation, and expanded its
reaches of wonder, it all now seems.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Carlo
Obispo’s Purok 7, a bittersweet portrait of the wonder years set against a
backdrop of tragedy, seems to operate on such a prospective view of a time inextricably
entwined with the happy hyperboles of memory. Two children, Diana and Julian,
are left to fend for themselves when their mother undertakes a journey abroad
she is bound never to survive. Their father, by then, has separated from her,
and has started another family. Purok 7 concerns how a small village closes
ranks and, actuated by sympathy, nourishes its virtual orphans. Later on, the
truth may shed its disguise and dawn on them, as many adults come to realize,
but time may by then have also healed their tragic loss. Time would have
expanded and romanticized the landscapes and homescapes of the past. This is
Obispo's hopeful thesis. Memory’s idealization of distant times will have
cushioned the impact of the past's severities.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">All but abandoned, Diana, 14
years old, and her younger brother Julian remain on the surface unaffected by it all. Approached by Obispo with a measure of
mirthful sympathy -- Diana wears an unusual smile as Julian points out at one
point -- their lives of feasting on nothing but swamp spinach or humble viands,
however, are not without a sense of wonderment. Diana, the budding adolescent,
receives unusual fondness from her childhood friend, for whom she fosters a
palpable crush. Obispo’s observation of early youth is more or less precise,
anchored on an uncanny sense of the idealization of childhood against a time of
overarching loss. His sense of memory does not overly sentimentalize, but
orchestrates proceedings with a very gingerly touch – almost to the point that his
movie feels unstaged or unsimulated; its tone and acting are both grounded in
lighter-than-air spontaneity. The director's intention is to counteract the
depiction of a childhood of potent hurt with one filled with the more caring
influence of benevolent humanity. Obispo’s compassionate concern invests faith
in the resilience and self-healing attributes of the young, forging a film that
stands more blithely and obliviously than such unsparing depictions of
childhood as Miyazaki’s Grave of Fireflies, Jang Sun-Woo’s A Petal, Amir
Naderi's The Runner, and Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Purok 7’s
tangle-and-twist-free plotline, however, seems both to work for and against it.
Combined with its close immediacy and intimacy, on one hand, it works because
there is a sense of unhampered, almost real-time take on its subjects, but from
the standpoint of conventional dramaturgy, it seems like dead time.
Dedramatization is not bad, but when the material is overly familiar as in this
case, it can impoverish the experience. (Watch So Yong-Kim's Treeless Mountain for an illustration, a film with a very, very, very similar dynamic, set of themes and subjects, but with much deeper, more immersive and more complex emotions involved.) A predominant chunk of Purok 7
regrettably plays as a form of dreamy-eyed puppy love that we have seen
elsewhere and often. Besides, it all feels unrealistic for the most part: the
rich city dream boy all but requiting the shy presence of a plain, provincial
Diana stretches it a bit, long before sympathy for Diana comes in and justifies
his solicitous attentions. Instead of relegating us to adolescent pining too
often frequented, the film could have been better served with a more thorough
exploration of spaces and people of the village -- not this generic purok devoid of character and characters (not the overly familiar stuttering best friend, please) -- all in the manner
that Gaston Bachelard describes as a sense of home that "protects the
daydreamer." Only during short intervals is its underlying social issue touched upon: one or two underplayed scenes that haunt with the apparition of
the absent mother. Despite this, the concentration on adolescent infatuation
feels too central and minimizes attention from its bigger theme – the familial
sense of distance from many overseas parents. This must be Obispo's way of
showing his weariness with the less-than-subtle representation of the death-row
subject itself. The effect is that of a metaphorical reverse shot of the
melodrama and hysteric spectacle of films featuring overseas Filipinos on the
verge of execution: the focus is, instead, the steadfast and spontaneous
day-to-day life of those left behind. Still one can't shake the feeling that
the existent material, as it stands now, can be further rendered more compactly
and freed of extraneous matter, and work just as effectively as a short-to-medium-length
film.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">There is more than a </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span id="easel_hw">titillating</span> hint that Amor Y Muerte is meant to be a
vehicle for the exploitation of Althea Vega’s shapely and buxomly body. The film is constructed in such a way that her
character named Amor, a free-spirited native Tagala married to a repressive Spanish insulares named Diego in 16th century Bulacan, has multiple drawn-out sex
with different men. Not only does Vega’s character have numerous steamy -- noisy, for everyone to hear -- bed scenes with her husband, she also has indiscretions
with a g-stringed Tagalog native in every conceivable nook and cranny: there's even the all-but-compulsory moment against the backdrop of a cascading waterfall: "artistic sex," so must think its director. After all this sexual galore, however, one is
left with a static and stagnant affair: its temporal setting is sketched with monotonous exposition; its mise-en-scene -- a few native houses in a leafy, watery rural backdrop in the Tagalog region -- is a given even to this day; but its thespian cast are acting tyros who can't shoulder the onus of authenticity necessary for this film.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">These deficiencies are only symptomatic of the systemic failure of the film. The main crux of its problems seems to be undue diligence, its over-reliance on the fragmentary, unholistic literature from and about those times, as filtered through European eyes. Most, but not all, of what we know of precolonial times are derived from the handful of books left behind by Pigafetta and de Morga. These European prisms suspiciously appear to be what the film's researchers rigidly used as their frame of reference. Rizal's annotations may help to some degree, but it must be noted that our hero himself was not immune to his European education and imaginary. Thus a predisposition to exotica and Orientalism can be discernible in Evangelista's film.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">More of archetypes than flesh and blood, its characters bear these traces of Asiatic exoticism and othering. "Carnality" is supposedly the main attribute of pre-colonial women. Amor obliges and embodies this typification, converted to Catholic faith but without a
sense of sin. She seems cut out of the erotic and sexual natives Pigafetta claimed to have witnessed in orgies during Magellan's expedition and passage through Cebu. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">(Another Pigafetta footnote that makes it into the film is the supposed use of
sexual toys and accessories by pre-Spanish natives.) But </span></span>the telling question is this: Does Amor really love
her husband as she claims while committing infidelities with another man? Monogamy was already practiced and well in place, it must be noted, before Spaniards arrived. The motivations for Amor's actions are amorphous if not incriminatory; her actions are indiscretions in all their promiscuous erotics, and thus not equate to virtue, let alone a metaphor for native rebellion, as the filmmakers may wish to imply.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Amor’s aunt, meanwhile, is another Christian convert but who secretly practices pagan convictions. She is also in cahoots with Amor’s father, a local rajah who conspires with Lakandula's revolt. Apitong, Amor’s lover,
is an unthinking cipher who converts to Catholicism, and incriminates himself and Amor through
a Christian confession. Here the
native characters are either idiotic, treacherous, scheming or depraved, motivated with unvaryingly unsympathetic traits.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All of these details seem to create an intractable picture of the
times. The characters are uniformly created as rebellious, but none of them show an ounce of
redemptive quality. The motivations of Amor are inscrutable and contradictory in the way she professes love for her husband but is not beyond committing infidelity. Amor's father brazenly lies to his son-in-law about Lakandula's revolt and affirms that he is "his son" now. Amor's aunt double-deals even in matters of faith -- hinting at her sense of duplicity and expediency.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Amor Y Muerte repeats proud contemporary assertions that the pre-colonial natives were rebellious towards Spain, but that is only half the story. Pre-colonial natives also freely and willingly collaborated with them in order to battle common enemies. This film simplistically, one-dimensionally depicts those times. Meanwhile, the thrust of the movie is obviously elsewhere
– towards the loins. Alongside the unnatural performances, a movie meant to have a handsome period and costume sweep descends into amateurism and bathos. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">By the time, the movie winds up in a violent
and bloody conclusion, there is less than a dramatic urgency to
be felt and be moved by. Despite the omnipresence of sex
and a smattering of violence, there is just too great a deal of lethargic action, not the least worsened by the somnolent delivery of dialogue -- whether in Spanish or Tagalog. The supposed rebellious freedom of its characters is thus ironically hampered, constrained by the lack of thespian capacity
and presence.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Amor Y Muerte. Sex and violence, in other words, and then where are we? Even the ending – a freeze-frame
in the middle of Amor’s vengeful wrath --
is a sorry symptom of an overall directorial aporia.</span></span></div>
Noli Manaighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08407559165450166131noreply@blogger.com0