ANAK ARAW (Gym Lumbera, 2012)

If words stood for pre-existing concepts then they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true.

                                                   -- Ferdinand de Saussure

The value of culture (and therefore language) as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated.
   
                                                                 -- Amilcar Cabral





Language as a means of assimilation and indoctrination, language as a means of resistance.
 
In Gym Lumbera's hauntingly fascinating but ultimately sorrowful Anak Araw, the Thomasites are long gone: it is apparently the 1950s, but the enduring residue of American occupation seems manifest through the institutionalization of English as a medium of instruction. The film, in monochrome, begins with a litany of English words flashed one by one like vignettes (a kind of Letras Y Figuras devoted to this foreign tongue) on the screen. Then the film segues to images of live animals -- the dog, the cow, the goat -- captioned in English, followed by their Tagalog equivalents, like entries in a English-Pilipino dictionary. Simple and rudimentary enough, as if this is for the purposes of a child's education. In truth, this is for everyone and the learning curve can be steep, excruciating and unnatural.

Full of whimsy, heart and humor, Lumbera intersperses proceedings with documentary footage of the well-attended funeral of Togo, one half of that Laurel and Hardy-like comedic tandem that flourished in the 1940s (to the despair of Japanese colonizers) and the early 1950s. Lumbera seems to associate this elegiac moment to the end of some prelapsarian golden age. Pugo and Togo after all were vaudevillians and movie comedians who entertained us in crisp vernacular. With them, a national three-ring circus lapsed into history.

But this could be simply misdirection, an objective-correlative about lost innocence. Lumbera is in the act of adding temporal textures and signposts. Meanwhile, his own staged footage is seamlessly period-like, what we might imagine of this era. Bringing us to an insular Tagalog hinterland -- haunting with its crepuscular lights and a shadowy overhang of bamboo and acacia trees and masses of people framed in the photographic manner of Robert Flaherty -- Lumbera dramatizes the hard and perhaps futile reception of English.    

Each and every word for things, it seems, needs relearning. A displacement of one language has resulted in a kind of communicational tabula rasa in the new one. If De Saussure had come upon this, he would have declared that this island, and by extension a nation, had lost both langue (language) and parole (the everyday instances of that language), our signifiers (our words) and worse, our signified (the original concepts in our minds), in the confusing arbitrariness that relates two languages. De Saussure has noted how no two languages' vocabularies can have an easy one-to-one correspondence. Lumbera then imagines the meeting of languages as frictional and antithetical. So that in the act of attrition everything needs rechristening, a renaming of all things in the new, reigning language, like in Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, the similarly traumatized, amnesia-stricken backwoods in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Sometimes we are quick on the uptake, the cow is indeed a cow, sometimes the results are comical -- perhaps a deliberate act of native irreverence and rebellion? -- a crawling boy is captioned a goat.

Our languages, in truth, inscribe and reflect the cumulative traumas of historical violence. Taking this to heart, Lumbera goes one step further, as if to say that even the grand syntagm of cinema, his own, has been severely inflected and affected. We see it in the crisis of sound and image unfolding. We see how a mass of townsfolk, herd-like, reproduce the sounds of cattle or goats. (This moment of onomatopoeia -- which harkens to a people's pre-verbal purity -- might also be construed as the moment of collective resistance against the foreign tongue). Image does not correspond to sound. Cinema, as much as language, as much as any part of our cultural psyche, has not been spared. 

The artistic and cinematic wherewithal of Lumbera is considerable -- delightful and refreshing in its post-modern bent. He seems intent to follow in the footsteps of Raya Martin (history) and John Torres (myth) in the way, for instance, they eschew conventional narratology. Anak Araw elides narrative, but can be described as impressionistically historical. Although diverse and poles apart, these directors share a distinctive and delightful cinematic felicity that is unmistakably theirs, what might be called a faux-naif ethos.  (Martin's Independencia, Torres's Ang Ninanais and Shireen Seno's Big Boy are examples of this seemingly-tangential-seemingly-innocuous but not-necessarily-uncommitted film practice, all elliptical in their post-coloniality.) 

Already Lumbera has found entry points that he can mine – in this case, history by way of linguistics and perhaps semiotics. Besides his humorous linguistic juxtapositions and comical sound-image oxymorons, Lumbera also observes quiet but resonant moments that are the stuff of pure cinema. The patina of old, anthropological cinema is evoked and evocative. And he is no negligible student of sound, too, sometimes bravely foregrounding it to the exclusion of image. He punctuates, for instance, the end of the film with a black screen, and only the repetitive sound of a sputtering generator audible, refusing to jumpstart, a trope for the fits and starts of an abortive and benighted history.

Anak Araw demands close attention from the viewer, and even that may not  be enough; this review in itself is as speculative as this film’s methods. This film repeats our received notions of the past, but the director's fictive playfulness, his optical instincts, and the interdisciplinarity of his concerns and resources, mark him as a filmmaker to reckon with. Anak Araw sutures together fiction, history, found footage and even found audio, but the effect is not pastiche but surprisingly a work of considerable thematic unity. A found audio recording of an American crooner singing Dahil Sa Yo in a phonetic way to the rapturous delight of a Filipino audience is particularly noteworthy, a moment that speaks volumes about a people's addled mystique and his delusions of colonial kinship. Such are the latent and unenunciated joys of Anak Araw: short and sweet at around an hour but packs endless semantic power. Anak Araw, however, remains more connotative than denotative, more suggestive than literal. Anak Araw does not merely denote the albino, but connotes that inside-out chimera familiar to all of us, a chimera of historical genetics and identity, a chimera with dreams of America.    

BAYBAYIN (Auraeus Solito, 2012)

Auraeaus Solito’s Baybayin is a sumptuous feast of, and for, the senses. It's not merely an ocular-centric experience, but rather, a tactile, haptic, and sometimes auditory one for the viewer. Bringing to bear an intermodality of multiple sensory expressions, Baybayin demands a somatic engagement, which serves in good stead its representation of an indigenous people's culture as a living, breathing but dying organism. The film heavily invests in the paradigm of cinema as skin and touch, to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s original term, in order to affirm its fierce attempt at modern mythopoesis of the endangered Palawan way of life.

If Busong replicates the superficial usage of skin in Philippine cinema and television – skin as the locus of stigmata, skin as the palimpsest on which social, cultural and individual and genetic ills and their repercussions are inscribed -- Baybayin celebrates the human body, particularly that of the native Palawan, as a canvas of calligraphy, a medium of haptic contact and communication, as well as a musical instrument, and the vessel of dreams and knowledge . Through sequences where living human skin – and also the surfaces of earth, nature's skin, like sand and bamboo -- is made virtual papyrus, its sensual, semantic, and cultural properties are passed on crucially like pieces of heirloom, but sometimes not unlike pieces of inscrutable and slippery hieroglyphs, from one native Palawan to another.

Focusing on the much ostracized and marginalized native Palawans like he did in Busong, Solito centers his narrative on Alba and Alban, daughters of a shamanistic Palawan woman and a French anthropologist, and Bagtik, a full-blooded Palawan whose muteness and deafness are compensated for by a proficiency in the dying Inbaloran script -- vital but ephemeral on the water-swept sands where he scrawls it in order to communicate. Orphaned by the death of their mother, Alba and Alban are made to separate, the former is taken to the West with her father and later educated in Manila, while the latter is brought up in their seaside village and rebuilds her life with Bagtik. The return of Alba years later coincides not so much with a happy idyll but with renewed depredations from outside.

Although teeming with images of pristine beaches and picturesque underwater, marine life, Baybayin elsewhere hints at the haptic exploitation of a people and their habitat. Baybayin dramatizes the hostile rupture of contact, the forfeiture of touch, based on the Palawan's mistrust and the outsiders' abuse and treachery. Religion, the influx of other ethnicities, and moneyed business -- all have conspired to push the indigenous people and their culture on the brink of extinction. The Christian pastor, for instance, demonizes Bagtik, pointing out the latter's somatic nakedness as the indexicality of the uncivilized. The military are mercenaries who do the bidding of foreign capitalists – even if that means grabbing the ancestral lands of natives. The American ex-marine hellbent on appropriating Palawan land and waters is marked with military tattoos, the conventional markings of unscrupulousness. (The Palawans, in contrast, are inscribed continually with the intimacy of bare fingers in a sanctification of the body, never to be marred with tattoos. Bodies are more like sacred mediums for messages and prophetic dreams. The tactile act they use in writing indicates the vitality of the culture, that it’s a living process of creation.)   

       

Much of the narrative of Baybayin, however, is sadly often telegraphed, and the non-Palawan characters are mostly stereotypical ciphers, as if Solito has passed judgment on the greater world in a "we-versus-them" conflict. When the corrupt military man eyes Alba beadily, we know a rape scene is in the offing. When it becomes known that the gongs of the Palawans are valuable artifacts, you can guess exactly who will steal them. Solito seems singularly hypnotized by ink being imprinted on skin, script being scrawled on sand, like the obsessional bodily calligraphy in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillowbook or the bodily paintings in Mizoguchi’s Five Women Around Utamaro.   

If Solito is fast becoming redundant -- the themes and characters of his last two films seem like mirror images of each other -- it is all in the service of his embattled people. Having said that, it takes profound courage, a pair of balls, to temper his tribal allegiances with much-needed rationalism and humanism, interrogating, for instance, the mindless binary oppositions of some Palawan folktales. (His neutralization of one about the privileged myna bird and the marginalized monkey is particularly instructive.)

Solito also draws on his own background to create an important character in his mythopoetry: patterned after himself, Alba represents the outside-educated advocate and defender, a refinement of the educated shaman in Busong. To Solito, Alba can be key to the survival of his dying cultural heritage, even if only in the realm of cinematic diegesis. Through acts that define her allegiances, she, a hybrid of foreign and indigenous blood distinguished by inter-racial features, eyes and skin, has started to facilitate a crucial socio-cultural syncretism. Towards the end, Solito also finds brave Darwinistic wit to forward the biological imperative and a sanctioned Palawan practice that will allow its dwindling kind to propagate and preserve itself.         

SANTA NIÑA (Emmanuel Quindo Palo, 2012)

The stance of anticlericalism is a rare thing in the movies. For a filmmaker, it is akin to a granitic rock he picks up and bludgeons his head with. Pressure groups, the so-called guardians of morality, not to mention the church, are bound to scuttle his film and even threaten excommunication. Luis Bunuel was the odd one, the single biggest filmmaker the Christian Church has ever had for an opponent. Films such as L’Age d’Or and Viridiana attest to the surreal and artful means the Spanish master employed to skewer organized religion. Fast forward to the present and Emmanuel Quindo Palo has taken the cue from this precedent, venting his own hurts and heresies against the Church through his feature debut. Unlike Bunuel’s sophisticated broadsides, however, Palo’s mouthpiece is astonishingly the fervor of a layman -- and how he holds his own!

The story Santa Nina tells is striking but not unfamiliar: premised on the discovery of an uncorrupted young girl’s corpse in the lahar-laden wastelands of Pampanga. In the scramble for safety during Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption many years earlier, Marikit’s coffin had been swept away and got buried in volcanic material. The girl’s father, Pol, a man who has amends to make with the Church and with a deeply moralistic society, sees his child’s return as a sign of God’s forgiveness.

At this point the film pays homage to Bernal’s Himala as the illustrious corpse of Marikit becomes a kind of holy relic. We see the droves of the sick and the faithful making the pilgrimage to Pol’s house. And we see the cottage industries that sprout around it. Even the governor and his wife are soon believers bestowed with healing; Pol’s own senile mother has become lucid once again. Pol's estranged marriage also undergoes amelioration.  

When testimonies to the miraculous powers of the corpse start to spread, Pol becomes bullish and dares to believe that out of his sinful loins, he has fathered a saint. Here the scenes turn into reverse catechism, as Pol confronts religious leaders about his religious doubts and his fervent wish for his daughter. Basic and common-sense questions about doctrines go begging here. The film has to be watched if only for these seemingly simple-minded but potent questions. Pol’s words are as fiery as those of a scorned figure, and one by one the parish priest, Pol’s sister, a nun, and the archbishop of San Fernando fail to dissuade him. True, canonization is easier said than done, entailing a bureaucratic logjam, but all fail to argue against the simple logic of this layman.  Pol, however, makes silent and outspoken converts of some of his doubters, even among the ranks of the Church.

That religious skepticism, if not mischief, was on the mind of the filmmaker is when it handpicked Leo Martinez --- a comedian who often portrays corrupt politicians and rich, womanizing fat cats – to play the archbishop. His devilish typecast is not lost upon us. True enough, his archbishop hems and haws, a figure of fun, while Pol is not unlike Pasolini’s ferocious Jesus. Sister Madel meanwhile argues in favor of the layman, not unlike a layman, while decked in the vestments of the Church.

That Santa Nina has ultimately a conciliatory and seemingly submissive ending, that Pol swallows his own rebellious voice, that he undertakes Lenten crucifixion, may be Palo’s way of hedging his heresies. And perhaps, he must calculate and not push the Church to the rearguard. The Church should be made to think of its high ground, its magnanimity, its co-option of the film’s dramatic dissension. Even so, even as the holy relic proves to be an illusion, the gospel of Pol is now out there, spreading from mouth to mouth.

Alternate Title: Santa Nina, Sta. Nina

DIABLO (Mes de Guzman, 2012)

Diablo throws us for a loop with an opening scene that depicts a devil possession in a mining camp in the highlands of Nueva Vizcaya. This is a red herring, a play on our expectations as to the earthly manifestations of the devil, a play on our expectations when it comes to the traditions of horror. But this is no conventional horror. This may not be a horror film at all. If the prologue says anything, it is that dark forces do exist, in the chambers of cheerless caves up in the mountains, as well as in the chambers of  the heart in our own living breasts – where we don’t dare to look, where they are least expected. 

Then we find ourselves in the huge, half empty house of Nanay Lusing, a mysterious matriarch who seems to be a master of her solitude. She is a reserved and intrepid woman who hardly makes a peep when an earthquake shakes her house. She is a widow and has five sons, all of whom have left home but who come to visit once in a long while. There is the miner, there is the soldier, there is the inheritance-seeking never-do-well, there is the farmer, there is the Lamplighter, whose emulation of Jesus throws us for another loop. He comes in the night and scales Nanay Lusing’s home as though it were to battle a monolith of the devil. Again, director Mes de Guzman seems to be pulling our legs, and humorously preparing his meditations on the conflict of good and evil.     

    

The devil, in truth, does not come in the form of cloven hooves, forked tails and horns. The devil may very well be our own living flesh, our own spawn, our battle with loneliness, our battle with solitude. Nanay Lusing at first seems an impregnable wall:  all the “devil” can do is stand in silhouette in the shadows, another de Guzman joke. As long as she can hold on to the few things that keep her sane, however seemingly little, she is free of the devil. She is an impregnable wall who cannot be brought down by rumors about herself, the neglect by her sons. She insists that she can fend for herself. Instead, she befriends street waifs, feeds them, and takes them into her home.

Some of the most telling scenes on the ineptitude of the devil are made clear by the return of Nanay Lusing’s money-grubbing son, full of schemes and full of cunning and wiles. He will stop at nothing to get his way, he may even send her own mother down the river. If anything, however, the scenes involving  this son demonstrate how the devil gets discomfited and thwarted, how the principle of goodness almost makes easy fun of it. Look for the sequences full of risible magic realism, on the power of holy palm wreaths, and how they are supposed to ward off the devil.  

But de Guzman may be simply wearing the ill-fitting mask of humor. Like the deadpan faces in a Kaurismaki picture, the humor here can be dark and wry. As far as I can tell, this could very well be dedicated to the predestined loneliness of all mothers. I see my own mother here. I see his own mother here: I’ve heard about her delicate condition nowadays. When life starts to go haywire at the end, when the nature of life is overturned, the devil may very well be there to waylay. When Nanay Lusing yelps at the death of her radio’s batteries – a signal of how the cumulative force of human tragedies has finally hit her – de Guzman has taken an abstract of the devil’s impending triumph and has given it a concrete expression.

  

POSAS (Lawrence Fajardo, 2012)

Like a visual motif threading the film, the camera fixes on these ministerial words on the sides of patrol cars, on the walls of a police precinct: to serve and to protect. Transpiring in a matter of a day, Lawrence Fajardo’s crime thriller, Posas, demonstrates the terrible irony of such a fighting cry. It begins with the commission of one petty crime and ends disturbingly with a terrible mug shot of a well-entrenched culture of higher crime and corruption. At film’s end, who gets served and protected gets unmasked yet again in a society where law is no deterrent but, paradoxically, an expedient that serves the unscrupulous.

It all starts with the simple theft of a cell phone in Quiapo. A pickpocket operating in the vicinity, Jestoni Biag, is caught red-handed and identified by his victim. At this point, the police procedural unfolds with the customary manner of the genre, from the finger-printing of the suspect to his moment at the fiscal’s office. But as the proceedings wear on, the brutalization of the petty thief takes hold. The thief’s denials are easy pickings for the brutal police who force a confession out of him. The police secure him his pardon, but not before utter pain, not before anguish, not before a Faustian bargain for his soul.

If nothing else, Posas depicts the pecking order of crime and corruption: from the street-level thief to the fence to the police to the unseen voices on the phones. The entrenched nature of this breeding ground for crime ought to be a chilling proposition but the treatment by Fajardo is sadly too impressionistic and epidermal. Instead of enlarging on his stories, he sometimes gets caught up in the improvisational skills brought in by his actors. He seems to be aiming for a documentary immediacy, although it is bound to pale in comparison to, say, the rawness of TV Patrol.

But that is not to say that the film has failed in his purpose. Although most of this material is mundane knowledge, it has its moments. For one, there is an almost imperceptible rearing of ugly heads here: corruption almost sneaks up on us. What might start as a routinary questioning of the suspect turns gradually into obscene dehumanization. What might seem like a complaisant handling of a pretty victim’s case, turns out to be an insidious ploy by the police all along: a calculated act of evil that is too practiced and fluid not to achieve its ends.

Fajardo also contributes to this genre the psychology of the criminal. Like the corrupt policemen around him, he is getting adapted to the technicalities of the law. He latches on to the loopholes, and even his family starts to reason like him. But as pecking orders go, he remains the bottom feeder. Posas, then, retells the tragedy of the small fry who at the end of the day will get the bad end of it. And here as in real life, he fails to get his day in the sun. Instead, he must suffer the ultimate loss of his soul. Here as in real life, he must reside in the shadows of the bigger and monstrous forces who manipulate and circumvent the law.   

Title in English: Shackled