ISLANDS (Whammy Alcazaren, 2013)

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 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.

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. 

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. Something -- or someone -- has driven a wedge between them, a seeming 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. 

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. 

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. Meditating on such dark, brooding, Manichean emotions, this is the prehistoric condition of man, the film assumes, in the continuum of time.

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 (Colossal also encompasses cosmogony and pan-historical dimensions in its overreaching attempt at grand abstractions) -- only this time fleshed out more thoroughly, more sustained in its scrutiny. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.) 

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.        

COLOSSAL (Whammy Alcazaren, 2012)

What has become abundantly, colossally clear with the arrival of Whammy Alcazaren on the independent scene and the premiere of his experimental first film, Colossal, is that this young wunderkind has grand ambitions for cinema. For his feature debut, he has taken on “the myth of man” for his towering theme, as the Cinemanila programme proclaims, and to a considerable extent he has been equal to the task. For the moment, however, the hyperbole of the title remains inapplicable to the final product -- so tantalizingly close, but unconverted. Not a masterpiece just yet. Ask anyone else, however, about their encounter with Colossal and the testimonials would be glowing and the gigantism of superlatives is bound to gush forth.

Don’t think this is meant to be contrarian, the prodigious talent of Alcazaren is there to marvel at: I can perfectly see what the converted and the faithful see, but their adulations are also often colored, quick to favor and factor in his astonishing youth, that this is just his thesis film at the University of the Philippines. A school project, to be perfectly honest about it. And the myth of man? True, true. Such grand themes for such a young, collegial filmmaker. They say: "There is not anyone comparable, not any teenager or early twenty-something in recent memory, at least, who has undertaken such a work of such professed scope and breadth with such confidence and precocity. Not even Raya Martin, perhaps." That may not be too far-fetched, but about Colossal I harbor some reservations. 

What astonishes me, at this juncture, are the writerly gifts of Alcazaren. The screenplay for Colossal essentially consists of an epic monologue of consistent versification supposedly recited by an ancient, old man. Epics, it must be said, are rarely attempted in verse. For someone barely out of his teens, this hoary ventriloquism is no small feat. This has been, up to this point, Alcazaren's most developed metier. A considerable gift to envy even by writers twice his age. A gift so full-fledged and mature. The sinuousness and supple contortions of his syntax, as suggested by the English subtitles (how I wish I could understand Bisaya), are there for all to hear and see. The bamboo-like resistance of his lyricism sways with meanings: a single viewing may not be enough to illuminate the beauty of language and expression and comprehend the nuances of emotion and wisdom. But here it becomes a little dicey: the old ancient man addresses a second person -- is it even a person? -- whose death grieves him, but whose identity seems to shift around, remaining a nagging, unresolved question. 

Colossal's grief is its motif of grief -- as given verbal expression by the ancient man in a dolorous low key, compounded by scenes of mourning of a young contemporary man -- has no clear referent. This grief is suspended in the ether of the abstract. Should it be simply be understood as universal grief about human death? Or is this grief something more colossal -- about the demise of races, cultures, civilizations, or even grand abstracts? As the ancient man poeticizes in a disembodied voice, the young contemporary man, who is equally grief-stricken, traverses natural landscapes -- from forests to caves to shores -- to commune with the consolations of nature, of the cosmos, to meditate on the nature of man and grief and loss. Are they one and the same: the ancient man and the contemporary man, or are they the grieving archetypes of their time? And who is the dead? Apparently someone in the young man's tribe, apparently someone the old man grew up with -- his oft-mentioned mother, his entire tribe, his nation? Apparently it is lapsarian man. Apparently someone universal, with the ancient's clear reference to the myth of Orpheus.

Apparently this is about us as a nation. We get a tell-tale word or two to suggest it, and a montage of photographs to emphasize it. The old man hails from many generations ago, he confesses, in a time of noble chieftains, a time of datus. He also alludes to the creation myth of Malakas and Maganda, a sure sign of his provenance. All the while his meditations are woven together with still photographs: towards the beginning, of old and new Manila, for instance, the photo of an old, manicured Luneta, circa 1960s, juxtaposed in contrast with a photo of vehicular gridlocks in our streets of today. Towards the end, as the old man expresses solidarity with “colossal youths” -- the freedom fighters, the fallen but fighting youths in the streets -- there is a procession of euphoric revolutionary moments, the recent Edsa 2 revolution in particular (the youthful Alcazaren is too young to remember the first one), side by side with photos of happy anthemic moments from recent live concerts of local bands. Colossal -- but all on paper. For the moment, it leaves too many questions pendant.

For the moment, the visual approach of Alcazaren is static and in dire need of imagination and expansion. His use of still photographs is slavish for one. Another callow flaw is his obsessive, unmoving regard for natural forms verging on the abstract and tactile textures, and their well-worn symbolism: for instance, those of predictable rock formations and especially water. Water imagery seems to be his calling card -- its fluidity, he seems to say quite tritely, is not unlike the passage of time, the process of grief, the history of man -- whether taken as stills or captured in the following ways: water rolling onto shores, water crashing in waves against rocks, water pooling at the foot of falls.

Surely Alcazaren has a lot else in store for us. Colossal is nothing to sneeze at. Take for instance the ingenious epilogue, monochrome as the rest of the film's 86-minute duration, featuring what seems to be a firmament of stars where geometric patterns of lines are drawn. It seems like an afterthought to end it all, and yet how strangely apt and evocative, as though Alcazaren imagines the ancient consultation of stars, the birth and death of old and new constellations, as though to ground the place of man in the universe. Maybe this is the best way to foreground the wisdom of the old man's words, the myth of man. 

For now, Alcazaren has not attained the rarefied heights of the original. He has taken unmistakable pages from his cinematic ancestors, the closest one being Christopher Gozum, most especially his first film Anacbanua. Between the two, the reliance on poety recited in a regional tongue is one striking similarity. The ranging over landscapes is another glaring parallel, with Gozum marking his chronotope with Pangasinan particularity. Alcazaren’s landscapes and tribe, in contrast, seem a generic one, although complete with token tattoos and shamans. Otherwise, this tribe doesn’t exist, or is unrecognizable. Surprisingly he did not shoot in the Visayas but expediently on location in Ilocos Norte (but the young grieving man in the film might indeed hail from Ilocos to begin with) at some expense of authenticity. But we must greet the young Alcazaren with open arms at the start of a promising career. He is the future of our cinema. He is bound to be colossal.