AN KUBO SA KAWAYANAN (Alvin Yapan, 2015)

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." 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 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. In the cinematic corpus of Auraeus Solito, it 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

DEBOSYON (Alvin Yapan, 2013)

 

Henceforth, a compact between him and us -- both sides sustaining, in each other, a mutual faith. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ANG PANGGAGAHASA KAY FE (Alvin Yapan, 2009)

 

Alvin Yapan’s Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe is set in a seemingly sleepy and serene town, secluded enough for its realities to engender a suspension of disbelief, but not so secluded as to be hermetically sealed from the world outside. While the world undergoes shifts and upheavals of economic paradigms, this film's setting throws us back to primal and elemental times. Yapan's story comes in the shape of a fable that recalls the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Greek myths, or better yet, our own rich folklore. In a word, the eponymous woman's rapture is an allegory on the plight of the Filipino woman, her bewildered stance at self-preservation in the face of many undesirable choices. 

Begin then with a disquieting scene in a quiet wooded town, a young man walking home witnesses to his horror a vision of three women hanging under a banyan tree. Seeking an explanation, he consults the local shaman, who explains that the three women were raped and hanged by Japanese soldiers during the occupation, apparently to demoralize their husbands who had taken up guerilla arms against the occupiers. Are these cries for help or are they coded messages from another world? Something is terribly amiss. 

This disconcerting prologue intimates the possible realities encompassed: the physical, the paranormal, the supernatural. The eponymous character Fe has just been repatriated from a job in Singapore, a casualty of a world in an economic tailspin, not realizing that her return may not mean a bucolic peace. The film segues into Fe’s reintroduction to the hard life in her hometown: while she works as a weaver of rattan baskets, her husband works in another department of the same small-scale factory. What Fe doesn’t know is his husband Dante’s dalliances with a co-worker. The proprietor of the handicraft factory is Arturo, a young man who was Fe’s onetime secret lover. Arturo and his family now also own the couple’s land, mortgaged to pay for Fe’s expenditures to secure an overseas job.

The poverty Fe experiences upon her return is both economic and spiritual. What she faces is a life of privation, a hand-to-mouth existence, so that when a basket of black fruits keeps appearing at her doorstep, she can only welcome it without question. Dante is suspicious of a suitor and beats her up for a confession. Fe confronts Arturo, whom she suspects of sending the fruits but who is as equally puzzled. This, however, rekindles their passions and leads to trysts. Fe’s worldly fate has boiled down to a choice between two undesirable choices, two heavily-flawed men: Dante, an adulterous, abusive and possibly impotent man; and Arturo, a weak-hearted man who can’t stand apart from a possibly abusive father. The local shaman, however, soon informs Fe of her secret suitor: the kapre.

Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe disquiets – and disquiets well – on myriad levels. On its most literal level, it not only foregrounds a story of adultery and infidelity but a story of institutionalized human indiscretions through generations. On a symbolic level, it depicts an allegory of a universal and modern theme: the struggle of women to assert their hard-won subjectivity. Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe also becomes the arena for the dialectical struggle of modern thought and the primal and mythological psyche.

Alvin Yapan is a fabulist who knows to tell his story with the right pitch and detachment – to achieve the proper effect and affect and never strain for the sensational, the melodrama of fear and horror. When the elemental kapre finally materializes, he is not a 10-feet-hirsute creature smoking tobacco with a horrifying, otherworldly presence, but a man of modest human dimensions, his face wreathed in tattoos, his voice full of solemnity and fierceness. He is almost like an emissary of our tribal ancestors sent to rectify modern permissiveness and wayward morality. But the colors we attribute to him are dark and her presence evokes eerie feelings.

Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe is mysterious without being overly mystifying. It lays down its narrative in a linear, straightforward way, set in concrete reality interspersed with calculated intimations of the otherworldly and the supernatural. Folklorists and mythological purists may not agree with the liberties the writer-director has taken in fleshing out his kapre, but this decision enhances the disquieting ambiguity inherent in the role of the elemental. Working from his own screenplay, Yapan achieves the fine overlap of realities, women trying to play bigger roles versus traditional subjugation and patriarchy, modern thought versus traditional superstition, world realities versus small-town life. Stories like Yapan’s remain common in the rural countryside, but are gradually disappearing in an increasingly urbanized society. Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe, however, ends on an eerie note, as though to uphold the irrational past, times when the rapture of a woman may only mean little reprieve and certain doom. 

Title in English: The Rapture of Fe

ANG SAYAW NG DALAWANG KALIWANG PAA (Alvin Yapan, 2011)

The grand and not so grand narratives of sexual awakening are a dime a dozen. Each one of us has a story to tell – and how often a story to embellish – at an early juncture of adolescence. More relevantly, within the annals of cinema, the terrain is a well-trodden one, assuming a subgenre all its own. Many a tawdry youth-oriented film has singlemindedly sexualized love, and thus vulgarized and grossly irrigated this honorable ideal. An entry of a preeminent kind, Alvin Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa is a lyrical and poetic tale that brings back respectability to eros so often shortchanged.

In truth, Yapan’s film does not merely touch upon pure and pristine love, but gracefully rebukes the tyranny of sanctioned love. As a tale exploring the first stirrings of homosexuality, Ang Sayaw is not so much about the wages of raging hormones as it is about the innocence and struggles of unconditioned, unmediated love.  It posits a primordial world when gender roles have not been internalized. Yet it must be said in the same breath, it’s a tale meant for everyone, not least of whom those who compartmentalize love. Either way, it’s a film akin to a puzzle: it recomposes itself after each telling: a multifaceted gem that will mystify the most searching eye.

To begin to describe the plot is to simplify it. On the surface, it registers as much as the next film wanting to tell what it knows about sexual awakening and sexual incipience. Here, however, God is in the details: one must listen to the readings – and promptings, if one is inclined – of suggestive and transgressive poetry on the soundtrack as well as to the meaningful gestures between characters. A line of verse may be as significant as the import of a gaze.   

In Yapan’s film, there are spades of either one. Verses of sexual initiation – from Ophie Dimalanta to Joi Barrios, from Benilda Santos to Merlinda Bobis – fill the soundtrack at every turn, readings from a literature class taught by a beautiful but curiously single teacher named Karen. There is little back story about her past except to suggest how she has sacrificed love in pursuit of the arts. Her life has become devoted to teaching not just the import of verse, but the language of dance. Marlon is a student smitten with her, though poetry, the kind that that demonstrates love regardless of gender, remains inscrutable to him. Karen’s assistant at her dance studio, Dennis, is in the same poetry class and has the tell-tale gaze.

Dennis has realized he has eyes alone for those of his own sex. When Marlon hires him in secret for dance lessons, a move to impress Karen, Dennis starts to draw his gaze closer. His lessons are not only instructive for the aspiring dancer but for the viewer, it yields the metaphor of how dance, as in other forms of cultural and social expression, is often a phallocentric performance. Man leads, and the woman follows. Man is active; woman, passive.

Here lies one of the film’s foremost curiosities: what happens when there are two men, or two women, performing the dance? What brand of dance is it? The dance of two left feet? Marlon and Dennis soon enough master the dance, not just dispelling our gendered assumptions, the tyranny of prescribed love, but here we see Karen, a kind of muse-like facilitator for the two youngsters, teary-eyed seeing, perhaps, a kind of synergy. Her gaze is a complex one. 

  

The last act of the film depicts a stage performance of Humadapnon, an epic poem rendered into dance by Karen’s troupe of dancers. Dovetailing like no other, Marlon and Dennis essay the lead roles, and breathe life into a kind of unmediated, spontaneous love that existed long ago. They have poured themselves into their roles, and at the climax of performance, Marlon, for the first time, looks meaningfully Dennis in the eye, and his tears fall.  His gaze tells an unflinching story.