IMBURNAL (Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2008)

 

The history of cinema is the history of the tyranny of narrative films. The right of first refusal to anything worth committing to film belongs to the province of narrative films. Narrative films are what sells, here and elsewhere. Narrativization, it seems, is the handmaiden of crass commercialism. Young filmmaker Sherad Anthony Sanchez turns away from this corruption of cinematic art and kneels down at the tabernacle of the experimental. Through Imburnal, a 3-hour, 30 minute tour de force set in the sewers and shantytowns of Davao City, director Sanchez renews and defamiliarizes our received notions about what it depicts, in the process dismantling the predictable tendencies of narrative films, in the process, too, reawakening our collective conscience and consciousness. Let the wounds reopen and fester again!

What Imburnal succeeds in doing is to recompose and poeticize the ugly, the squalor and the wretchedness. In effect, the cinematic alchemy is to see the sewers in a new light. The result may not be an aesthete’s notion of a paradisiacal playground, but the sewers are not merely repositories of filth and refuse either, but afford a hideaway for its denizens. They are the last refuge and haunting places for the kids and teenagers living in the nearby slums. We don’t smell these sewers for some reason, even as the waters flowing through them aren’t pristine either.

Eschewing straight narrative, director Sanchez decides to film episodes of life in the margins as they take place in and around the sewers. The editor (Sanchez, too?) and a phalanx of cinematographers are agents of abstraction as much as the director: the camera blurs out of focus, it decenters compositions, runs on and on in lengthy takes. Editing is as defamiliarizing: freeze frames, an assortment of jolting and jarring filters, disjunctive and non-linear editing, all intertwined with simply lyrical compositions. Out of potential tabloid material, Imburnal is perhaps what we might call an instance of poetic social realism.

While Davao City is hailed by lofty honors as the safest and cleanest city in Southeast Asia, there is much squalor in the periphery. Allen and Joel, two kids who figure in Imburnal, practically think of the sewers as their second home. They play and frolic and swim there, and tom-peep the older kids fornicating in different permutations. The older kids, no older than teenagers, hang out here too. They have dead-end prospects in life; their talk centers on sex, the opposite sex, love, and the mundane. Otherwise, there are cheap vices – smokes, alcohol, improvised drugs and all – to be had.

Imburnal attests to the instinctive resiliency of life – its strange but seductive mutations – where none is expected to survive. The sewers may not represent heaven on earth, but they sometimes function as the last refuge for the young who have nowhere to go. Some of them even go to die there. Through Imburnal, Sherad Anthony Sanchez has created both a poem – an elegiac one perhaps – and a document that attest to the lives of the marginalized and the voiceless. From the depths of these sewers rises a film that can arrest us, a beautiful Baudelairean flower.

Reviewed: August 30, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision) 

HALAW (Sheron Dayoc, 2010)

 

Here in imperial Manila, how often do we stop and think about distant Mindanao? This begs repeating, for in truth we have consigned our southern brethren to the margins of consciousness. Worse, we think of them with a colonizer’s orientalism: warlike and belligerent, intractable and ungovernable. No understanding and touching base with their kind, let alone extending what is due them as part of the nation. Our nexus with them is tenuous, characterized by neglect and ignorance, hostility and strife. While the North gets the lion’s share of infrastructural development, budgetary allocations and administrative favor, the South is a poor relation that must fend for itself, even if it means scattering its desperate denizens in search of greener pastures.

Sheron Dayoc’s feature debut, Halaw, is a story of the dangerous, daily diaspora from Mindanao to immediate foreign territories, a story of risky human traffic we have for far too long turned a blind eye to. From a native Mindanaoan director, it is a welcome corrective to the lack of films about the region in general. Hopefully, it isn’t the last. It isn’t pretty to look at as it should be, no glossy and hypnotically arresting visuals but a cinematographic treatment marked by raw, cinema-verite imagery centering on those who would rather escape notice, let alone documentation. Halaw is a film that follows the human smuggling through the so-called southern backdoor. Rendered in real-time narration, it details, with a strict observational stance, one fraught passage through the perilous seas of Mindanao.

In a seaside town in Zamboanga, where it all begins, a Badjao named Jahid and his young daughter Daying prepare for the illegal pump-boat crossing to Sabah, where they intend to locate his missing wife. They lack the requisite fare but prevail upon the boat’s conductor with Daying’s last remaining possession, her earrings. Another practiced traveler is Hernand, a white slavery operator who is finding it hard to recruit his share of unsuspecting women (i.e. virgins are at a premium). In Hernand’s company is one such girl, too wide-eyed and ignorant to calculate her impending mistake, drawn ironically to her future incarnation, a middle-aged prostitute in the same boat, who plies her flesh in Malaysian territories. This prostitute gladly humors her with a modern woman’s accessories: her beguiling perfume, her fancy clothes and her lucrative claims if the younger girl played her cards right.

However, the sea journey is never free of risk and treachery. 

The pump-boat operators may know all the precautionary measures from mapping out the best routes to escaping detection in Malaysian waters, but nothing is guaranteed. The smallest exigency – e.g. the presence of water in the hull, the sudden sputtering of the boat’s motor – can be a cause of concern for both the travelers and their transporters. Easy passage is for the unusually lucky.

Even as there are divertissements along the way – e.g. the young Daying regaling her boatmates with what must be a Badjao dance, something she parlays into a handful of coins – the sense of reprieve is palpably temporary. In a well-conceived, penultimate scene set on Mananako Island, the last stopover, the sense of peril becomes apparent. Flesh becomes the currency to settle old debts, and the sea is no longer what it seems. The hardest part, however, is far from over.

If, as one watches, one detects an Ariadne’s thread of sorts through Halaw and films like Jeturian’s Kubrador, Mendoza’s Manoro and Ralston Jover’s Bakal Boys, the sure guiding hand of Armando Lao and his real-time paradigm have been at work all along. This scriptwriting wizard, who has for years ensured a steady stream of well-conceived screenplays, lends his assistance to a new filmmaker once again, although one begins to wonder if his unmistakable influence has made for a homogenization of those films he has helped to shape. Frankly, for as long as a film is given ample time to germinate in the collaboration, what matters should be the well-made product.

That seems to be part of Halaw’s one glaring problem, its rough-draft finish. Like an almost exquisite corpse, Halaw has some missing vital parts. The interaction between the travelers, the agoraphobia of the open seas, the different complexions and colorations of a journey, seem hurriedly sketched, rushed. A sense of narrative truncation happens at the end, all too abruptly. Perhaps, this picture’s structure is an attempt to draw a parallel to the lay of the land, highlighting the chopped-up nature of a nation. Like a gangrenous limb, there is a part of us that must want, desperately, to be separated, amputated. 

Reviewed: July 19, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

MEMORIES OF MATSUKO (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2006)

Bless her poor soul. All she ever wanted was to do right by her loved-ones. All she ever did was to give a part of her self with little expectation of reward. But hers was not a perfect world. Life would boomerang on her despite her best efforts. This, in essence, is the sad trajectory of Matsuko's worldly existence.

At first blush, it seems like a subject matter meant solely for a downbeat film. Memories of Matsuko, however, manages to achieve a more complex feat, a more multifaceted and more polyphonic film than might appear on paper. It tones down the tragic in favor of a hyper-realistic portrait of the comic and the dramatic. It’s a movie that tries and succeeds in not playing it straight and yet retains the sad eventfulness of its heroine's story. Oscillating between its evocation of humor and pathos in 127 minutes of sheer emotional push and pull, it aims true for the heart.

We learn about Matsuko, however, through second hand and in flashbacks. By the time the film begins, she is a box full of ashes. Her nephew Shou, a directionless youth, has been tasked by his father to clean out his dead aunt’s apartment. Shou hardly knew her. Yet in death, Matsuko might just affect the tenor of his disaffected life.  

Matsuko’s fall from grace is rooted in childhood -- her father rejecting her in favor of her sickly younger sister -- but culminates when she protects her high school student who is suspected of theft. She takes the blame for it and is discharged from her duties in dishonor. Her family, most especially her father whose approval Matsuko seeks, disowns her.

Thrown out of the family, Matsuko rebounds from one abusive relationship to another, as she looks for companionship that has long eluded her. Almost all her lovers, however, prove to be wrong choices: There’s an aspiring but heavy-handed writer who takes his own life, a married man who is simply jealous of the writer, a pimp, a yakuza thug who is as fearsome as his tattoos. When she seems to have found the right man, she is thrown into jail for a crime she has been running away from.

Finely balanced between comedy and drama, Memories of Matsuko is leavened by pop tunes and musical numbers whose lyrics are relevant to the moment and the fate of its heroine. It’s a film that mixes tone in just the right proportions and emerges as both entertainment and as serious meditation on a life tracing a downward spiral.

The life of Matsuko is pretty much the stuff of soap operas – only her life seems without payoff and redemption. The film, however, never faults her for her ill-advised decisions, although there is a lot of them. Prostituting herself? No. Murdering her lover? No. Refusing help when she most needs it? No. 

This is the achievement of Nakashima’s film: Matsuko remains sympathetic all throughout despite her flaws. Memories of Matsuko feels neither too oppressively heavy nor too insistent on pulling at our heartstrings – at least not until the end. We are simply dazzled by the visual sumptuousness on the screen, the gloss and the crisp, rich colors that recall the best color movies (Gone With the Wind is one of the conscious references.). We are likewise diverted by the many incarnations of Matsuko, as well as the colorful characters that she meets: her shady jobs, the porn actress, the suicidal writer, the yakuza gangster, her bedridden sister, the boy band.

As her murder unfolds at film's end, the bittersweet irony clarifies: Matsuko has genuinely touched a few lives, even those who could only respond with treachery. When it's all over, there is but a single abiding image: her face and lips puckered at us, a woman not ashamed to make herself look silly just to make our day.


Reviewed: July 5, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

From Antonioni to Brocka, The Allusive Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang

 

From Antonioni to Brocka, The Allusive Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang

Born and raised in Kuching, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang was introduced to movies by his grandparents, who often took him to screenings of popular films from China, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, America, and the Philippines at any of the dozen or so cinemas that populated their small, quiet town.
-- Darren Hughes, Senses of Cinema

Don’t think for a moment that Tsai Ming-Liang, that formidable auteur of Taiwanese New Wave, sprang fully-formed from the godhead of cinema with his feature debut, Rebels of the Neon God, in 1992. Far from it. As the epigraph suggests, Tsai has had an early exposure to the influence of film, a childhood pervaded by film and moviegoing, and it doesn’t end there. Long before the clinical term for his condition had a name, Tsai’s diasporic life saw him cultivating a cinephilia, a voracious consumption of films. It’s a cinephilia that seems unabated and has found expression throughout many of the director’s films. Think Tarantino, think French New Wave, only more integrated. Less apparently intertextual.

For Tsai, the real watershed that ushered him into a more serious and obsessive pursuit of the moving image was his relocation to Taiwan at the age of twenty. Unlike his native Kuching which could only offer commercial cinematic fare, the cultural institutions of Taiwan had vaster resources and deeper, more extensive archives. Enrolling himself in the Chinese Culture University in Taipei to study drama and film, Tsai was soon exposed to the films of the French New Wave and the New German Cinema. This formative period would see his initiation into the works of Truffaut, Fassbinder, Bresson, and Antonioni. These are the auteurs to this day that are most often identified with Tsai.

True to form, Rebels of the Neon God is a laudable first film that doesn’t forget to pay tribute to the director’s considerable filmgoing. Thematically speaking, Rebels mirrors the urban alienation that preoccupies Antonioni in such films as La Notte and L’Eclisse. Obsessed with the more “modern” milieus of cities, Tsai would go on to problematize urban relationships in such films as Vive L’Amour and The Hole.

Rebels of the Neon God, in sum, chronicles the disechanted lives of several youths, lost in the unforgiving shuffle of city life. As the film begins, Hsiao-Kang evinces the symptoms of this anomic affliction. One restive night, he inexplicably crashes his hand through a window pane, an allusion to a similar scene in Wenders’ tale of alienation, False Move.

Meanwhile in the garish lights of this stormy evening, Ah-Tse and Ah-Ping, two youthful operators, ransack payphones for their hoard of coins. Later on, Ah-Kuei, another restless denizen of the city, winds up in someone’s bed yet again, her palliative to combat her loneliness. Then, a day later, Hsiao-Kang, with his hand bandaged, tries to get a refund for tutorial classes he is taking at a nearby school. End of education. They are dropping out from life, and neither does Tsai offer a neat solution, let alone an optimistic end. Rebels, as far as cinematic depiction goes, are meant to toe the line or be crushed. For good measure, Tsai never misses the chance to juxtapose Hsiao Kang with a pasteboard image of James Dean circa Rebel without A Cause.

A more fascinating aspect of Tsai's film, however, is its seeming wealth of references and allusions to Filipino films. Rebels of the Neon God may very well be Tsai’s sneaking tribute to Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Neon, probably the nearest film to depict the crushing and grinding stranglehold of a city. Lee Kang-Sheng’s Hsiao Kang, the central outsider-loner of Tsai’s film, bears an uncanny resemblance and countenance to Bembol Roco’s shell-shocked provincial Julio Madiaga in Brocka’s masterpiece. As Julio Madiaga is cornered by a murderous mob towards the film’s end, Ah-Tse and Ah-Ping, who have just been caught stealing motherboards from video game machines, suffer a very similar fate in the denouement of Tsai's film. The similarities are, well, uncanny.

If the foregoing should be dismissed as a function of speculation, mere conjecture, the charge may be justified. But consider the eerie sense of recognition as one goes down Tsai’s filmography. Take Hsiao-Kang’s transformation into a porn actor in Tsai's Wayward Cloud, a narrative twist prefigured by Julio Madiaga’s turn as a male prostitute. In another Tsai film, The Hole, there is the pivotal conceit of a hole in the floor of an apartment building that becomes a lifeline between a man and a woman. Familiar? Can you say Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights? A more particular and thorough study may yield more connections and perhaps these shouldn’t be surprising. Tsai’s easter eggs embedded in his films are a fitting tribute to a cinema that is worthy of tribute and emulation. Our cinema.

Reviewed: June 28, 2010 (Northern Portrait & Film Angel/The Persistence of Vision)

LAST SUPPER NO. 3 (Veronica Velasco, 2009)

 




A litigant always loses, goes one casually delivered but very potent line in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. Set in a modern yet benighted German city, this magical realist novel proceeds to not just evoke this oft-presumed saying, but enlarges to incriminate an entire judicial system. It's a figment of Kafka’s imagination, a work of fiction, but it could very well be the marrow of Veronica Velasco’s Last Supper No. 3, a comic film on the same Kafkaesque themes, derived from an actual court case docketed in the Philippines just a few years ago.

Last Supper No. 3 recounts one curious case revolving around a missing tapestry. The man in the firing line is one Wilson Nanawa, an outwardly decent and unassuming gay man who toils as an employee for an advertising firm. His job entails, among other things, renting and taking care of props sourced from his own neighborhood. After one particular shoot for a corned beef commercial, however, Wilson discovers the disappearance of the titular wall décor. The owner, a money-grubbing man named Gareth Pugeda, insists that if the family heirloom (a kitschy one, yes, but he is adamant about its value: his father’s gift from Saudi Arabia) could not be replaced, its full monetary worth should have to be refunded. It’s a hefty sum, but at first it seems as if the grasping character and his mother have agreed to a much lower amount. It’s but a prelude to a nightmare: a lawsuit.

Last Supper No. 3, on the surface, is a funny and uproarious story, but its mordant satire can also sensitize. While we laugh belly laughs at the sight of the unsuspecting Wilson Nanawa being blindsided by one absurdity after another, the legal escalation that proceeds from this seemingly negligible case is mutually destructive. Estafa is compounded by charges of serious physical injuries (it’s a long story), but it still seems like a manageable case for Wilson and his co-worker Andoy to hurdle. As the days and months and years wear on, however, the wear and tear – mostly on Wilson – becomes both unbelievably comic and absurd.

Much of the absurdity is registered to perfection by Joey Paras who plays Wilson Nanawa. We see by slow, painful but funny degrees the trajectory of his character proceed from hope to disbelief to resignation. One wonders, though, about the filmmakers’ decision to make its much-abused doormat of a character a gay man. Should one be resigned to the stereotype of the gay man as a lightning rod for abuse to savor the comic pleasures of this film? Joey, meanwhile, essays his role like no other, with the right dose of vulnerability and sensitivity, on his tortuous, circuitous way to justice.

Many of the courtroom proceedings (the protraction of cases, the rehearsed testimonies) and what happens around the case (the vampirism of lawyers, the fixers and the bribable red tape and bureaucracy) are Kafkaesque in their absurdity, but Veronica Velasco and Jinky Laurel did not have to invent much of the script. It is an adaptation of a story by Winston Acuyong based on his real-life experiences. As it turned out, its absurdities have lent well to a comic evocation. What is perhaps more absurd is that there are more absurd cases than this.

Watching Last Supper No. 3, I sometimes balked at laughing even at its funniest moments. The details were all too familiar and soon came flooding back to me. As a child, I’d seen firsthand what was transpiring onscreen. My mother was an assistant provincial fiscal who would often bring home her work. At suppers, she would recount stories about defendants with evil eyes and corrupt judges. She would bring home state evidence, bags of marijuana, guns, jewelry. At home, she would rehearse the witnesses as they sat nervously and mutely in a corner, all seemingly according to her version of the truth. But at night, she would sit up bolt upright in bed when the dogs howled for some reason. She would go around the house, marching up and down the stairs, switching on and off the lights, like a restless sleepwalker. Even then I knew: the law could swallow you whole.

Reviewed: August 19, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

FLORENTINA HUBALDO, CTE (Lav Diaz, 2012)

Florentina Hubaldo represents the Tess of the d’Urbervilles of Lav Diaz's emergent diegesis of Bicol. (Slowly but surely, he is constructing a cinematic geography around his native land -- the topography of Mayon Volcano is now all but trademark -- with works situated thereabouts like Death in the Land of Encantos and Agonistes). Like Thomas Hardy’s hard-luck heroine, every sort of misfortune has befallen the young Florentina. Florentina’s father is a savage beast, the embodiment of evil, brutally killing her mother, enslaving Florentina and prostituting her even before she has grown into full womanhood. Florentina is so violently banged up by her father that she suffers from chronic traumatic encephalopathy and, as a result, must constantly and traumatically remind herself of who she is. Any plan of an escape that she dreams of is often quashed by her father’s brutal and drunken omnipresence, her being continually chained to a bed, and an inutile grandfather, who discourages her with inexplicable fatalism. All circumstances conspire to doom Florentina to a tragic fate. 

This story of agony seems to have been conceived by Lav Diaz as an amplification of an earlier 2-hour film entitled Agonistes, admittedly a rough draft, a work in progress, when it was shown a few years ago and had since been withdrawn from circulation. This lost piece of Diaz’s filmography has returned here and been refurbished to serve as a flipside to the fate of Florentina, a moral fable about two misguided poor souls desperately searching for lost treasure in the shadows of Mayon Volcano. Their desperation, they will soon realize, may not be so desperate vis-à-vis the tragedy of Florentina. Of late, Lav Diaz has favored the idea of mise en abyme, the idea of two or more disparate stories existing within a single film, acting like mirrors reflecting each other, producing supplementary or complementary reflections, or an amplification, whether through distortion or exaggeration, of its desired themes. This is evident here, as much as it is in last year’s magnum opus, Century of Birthing, with its intricate story-within-a-story structure.

On the surface, Lav Diaz's mature aesthetics remain intact. There is a handsomeness to the visuals here, a cleaner, less grainy and higher black-and-white contrast to the cinematography than we are accustomed to that suggests an upgrade of technological wherewithal. Florentina Hubaldo, however, also makes apparent its dramatic rawness, that it might also be a work in progress. The Cinemanila programme pegs the running time at 5 hours, but the version shown was nearly 6 hours long. This version of Florentina Hubaldo evinces scenes that lack artistic rigor and run obligatorily long. Long takes are Diaz's métier, only this time they feel like longueurs; a kind of tedium, from a sense of lacking narrative tension on the screen, overtook me, a kind of fatigue perhaps after having gladly sat through all of Diaz's lengthy mature works -- from Batang West Side to Century of Birthing. There is tightening at the editing end to be done.

Diaz also misjudges the ending of his film. Sacrilege to second-guess someone like Diaz, who knows a thing or two about narrative structures and storytelling to say the least, but the conclusion is pure anticlimax. Disappointing, since this is where he usually distinguishes himself, surcharged as he has often been with the most powerful, most unforgettably resonant epiphanies in film history to punctuate many of his masterworks. This is a 6-hour film without a pay-off, sadly. Between two choices – the fate of Florentina and her equally ill-fated daughter, on one hand, or the fate of the two treasure hunters on the other – Diaz has to choose wrongly.

Diaz merely repeats himself. The architectonic redundancy lies in concluding the film with Florentina’s eventual escape from the clutches of her father. No need at all: this particular detail by then has already been narrated and emphasized by the Good Samaritan – brother to one of the treasure hunters -- who would help Florentina and adopt her daughter. This anticlimactic ending takes up a better part of an hour and merely proves to be uneventful, interminable, and torturous -- not because of Florentina's symptomatic display of CTE, but because it is obligatory, and willfully repetitive in its purpose. To my mind, instead, there is some unfinished business in the fate of the two treasure hunters. Their search for treasure has only led to their discovery of an elusive and maddening gecko. There are possibilities left to explore there – the idea of a false, or a worthy, transcendental signified -- represented by the gecko, perhaps. What becomes of them? What is there for them to glean from their failures to find treasure and from the tragedy of Florentina? Is it enough to leave us with the ironically bourgeois rationale: the social and moral illusion that everyone, including these two desperate souls, should count themselves thankful for their lot in life, simply because there are human beings less fortunate than them like Florentina?

If Diaz's modest purpose is not a moral tale but pure, self-evident mimesis -- that is, a stark portrayal of evil and the unspeakable casualties it may cause -- Florentina Hubaldo is sufficient. It is patent and dramatic enough, even melodramatic. The sight of a discombobulated Florentina, reeling from CTE, repeating and repeating her name and her narration of her sob story is sufficiently effective. Yes, she will not be forgotten. Repetition ad infinitum can do that. Diaz's obsession with Dostoevsky's idea of evil shows itself again with the Karamazov patriarch, all vices and all hatefulness, finding expression in Florentina’s evil, incomprehensibly, inexplicably evil father. An exaggerated  reminder to all of us that such evil lurks in the world, that such unlucky, improbable creatures like Florentina Hubaldo and her daughter exist and can fall victim to it. All in all, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is in any other auteur’s filmography a worthy addition, but coming at the heels of all of Diaz’s masterworks in the last 10 years or so, it is something of a letdown.   

GREAT CINEMA PARTY (Raya Martin, 2012)

Unfortunately, Raya Martin’s Great Cinema Party represents one of the young director's most non-committal, most evasive works to date. Pity, there are plenty of missed opportunities here for the kind of committed statements we have come to expect from him. Perhaps, for once, he simply wanted to throw a party, and these are stolen outtakes from his personal archives that got into the wrong hands and were edited and passed off by some namesake. Maybe this is for the moment a sabbatical from all the fist-pumping post-colonialism we have pigeonholed him into. Nowhere in his cycle of faux-naif works -- from Indio Nacional to Independencia and even to the drug-addled Buenas Noches, Espana (the faux-naif tag is a misnomer but to me his works do convey a deceptive innocence that cushions their cogent historico-politico-cultural commitment) -- has he let up and relaxed his fierce Filipino Weltanschauung this much. This may be it, Raya Martin, the enfant terrible, in slacker mode.

The Great Cinema Party starts out, promisingly enough, with a silent 20-minute prologue consisting of snippets pieced together out of archival material and newsreels of the Second World War covering the fierce fighting on our own shores. We come to see all the horrors of the war, artillery firing, aerial strafing and dogfights, the Japanese, Filipino and American combatants, some of the many dead, and the bombardment and rubble of Manila. There is a frame or two shown upside down, as if to remind us of inadvertence, that this is the work of real people, of cameramen, of filmmakers. The rest of the visuals, however, passes without comment, as most of the movie disappointingly does. (There are precious few toeholds for us in the offing: too casual, too coy, too subtle, Martin is about to overestimate us.)

Ending this montage of newsreel footages in all its graphic glory is the superimposed image of Lav Diaz, a genie releasing us from the carnage and welcoming us, the audience, to the Great Cinema Party, with the promised attendance of Andrei Tarkovsky and Andre Bazin. The film then starts the celebratory itinerary on the island of Corregidor, that icon of Second World War resistance with its ruinous military bulwarks. Led around by that famous cicerone, Carlos Celdran, are youthful Caucasians, none of whom are recognizable but are supposed to be filmmakers. There is almost flippant curiosity here among these tourists, but thankfully there is refreshingly no solemn and sobering annotation on the war. However we are also left with next to nothing: the almost total absence of any historical comment seems to militate against the movie. Meanwhile, from concrete lookouts and battlements pop out heads of these tourists, a subtle attempt at levity. There is a moment when an unexplained explosion occurs in the distance while Celdran is making a point and this moment passes uncommented upon. What is that about? Fill in with your best conjecture. At nightfall, the tourists repair and dine at an ancestral mansion that houses cinematic artifacts from bygone times. The sometimes polite, sometimes flippant ignorance these guests show about our history and cinematic heritage is understandable but slightly disappointing.

Then the Great Cinema Party unfolds – and quite disappointingly as well. Everyone of note on the indie scene makes an appearance, from film directors to actors to critics, joining up with the Caucasian guests. Personally we see these indie luminaries often enough at festivals around town so the sight of them has all the frisson of seeing newly laundered clothes. Pleasant, but familiar. But here again missed opportunities abound. The cameos of these gathering celebrities are never parlayed into anything bigger. A comment by one of the assembled goes “I spend my salary on the Criterion Collection” and it comes across as banal and trite. Every cinephile makes such a claim. How about Second Run or Filmmuseum instead? The whole exercise of eating, drinking and exchanging banal comments turns into something, well, not so great. Nothing substantial comes out of it. 

If Martin is making any profound statement at all, it whistles over my head. Things again are just too offhand and oversubtle. If Martin is making a comment about filmmakers as regular people, I don’t know. If Martin, instead, takes this gathering as that of a rare breed, I'm none the wiser. If Martin is making a grand comment about cinema as the last custodian of history -- both of them joined at the hip in a vital relationship -- he is bound to deny it. What then if Martin refuses to comment on the proceedings? We are compelled to take the exercise for what it is -- one big shindig, dedicated to cinema and history, its twin concerns. What is there to celebrate, though, if history remains unkind to us, if we -- as much as our Hollywood-shackled cinema -- remain, inextricably, in the death grip of a lingering post-colonial malaise and a blighted kind of neocolonialism? Everyone, meanwhile, seems blissfully oblivious, enjoying and celebrating themselves: their presence, shorn ironically of presence, seems so enough, so complacent, and so self-satisfied, that they are caught up in the fireworks of it all, in the supposed company of Tarkovsky and Bazin, in their own imagined glory, in one empty act of triumphalism.