HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY (Raya Martin, 2013)

Two distinct ways to read Raya Martin’s How To Disappear Completely. One interpretation suggests that out of sheer despair Martin has gone out of his brilliant mind, all but berserk in foretelling a turbulent disintegration of our nation from within, toppled from rickety historical foundations, well beyond salvation from the clutches of Western religion and neo-colonialism. For much of Martin's young but extensive filmography, he has undertaken a de facto revolutionary project against the lingering constructs of colonialism, to the point of intimating an affinity with and cathexis to pre-colonial nativism. However, here he appears in despair in projecting his cinematic enterprise in a losing struggle. The other interpretation is more palatable, more heroic, more acceptable conscience-wise, but not untouched with a kind of extreme subject positioning in a counter cinema that envisions a confrontational revolt against what is keeping us in insidious shackles. Take your pick: Martin either as a doomsaying visionary resigned to predicting and foreseeing a social meltdown, or as a a steadfast quixotic but terrifying foot soldier -- how we've come to know him -- still flailing away at the enemy's windmills.

Through a youngster's perspective, an instance of the faux-naif vantage that can survey difficult themes with suspended, defamiliarized judgment, Martin demonstrates the extreme possibilities of social dissolution and revolution, seeing matters through the viewpoint of an adolescent girl who is gradually inculcated and traumatized by her parent's Westernized imaginary, shaped by societal institutions founded on Spanish Catholicism and American mythos and materialism. At the symbolic turning point, her mother thus instills fear in her: “Your way home is not as safe as you might think.” This might represent the incipience of her adolescent awakening but this coincides with a realization of all her socio-historical vulnerabilities, and by extension an entire nation and its posterity's susceptibilities. This is the metaphorical stage that makes her chillingly hear and see things in and out of the unconscious. Not just a possibly imagined metaphor, but this also points out the metonymy that puts her in close proximity to the real, actual dangers her mother symbolically describes: the man with a rifle in the forest, the labyrinth-like navigability of this milieu, her father’s incestuous attentions.

Negotiating this nosedive from childhood's Apollonian idyll and order to Dionysian disquiet and chaos of a budding pubescent is handled through the film’s systematicity of suspense, through hyper-stylized visual and aural designs. Aurally, with a pulsating electronic bass and beat, or with the hum of menacing fluorescence, or with the eerie chirp of cicadas that shades into technological buzz, the young girl’s fears are indexed in the present and all their modern complications. The strategic elision of sound is also bewildering, seemingly laden with dark secrets and just as suspenseful in what it withholds from us. This soundscape is coupled with a no less aggressive optical approach, how things appear eerily out of focus, how phantoms seem to appear in the mirror or flit across someone's field of vision, to say nothing of the girl's psychosexual dreams. Here the visual aspects oscillate between the impressionistic and the expressionistic: the former with what is roughcast and deliberately made out of focus, phantasmatic or hallucinatory in their echoes, slowed down to frame-by-frame commitment to memory of suggestive horror, and the latter with its ritualized, religious images filtered in red, pig entrails marinating in blood.

Martin’s visionary prediction seems bleak and pessimistic if his double-edged imagery may be resolved and clarified.  However, he also allows for the possibility of a genuine nullification of many of our ghosts in the dialectic he proposes. For one he sees a chaos of ideologies that may cancel out each other in a process of self-regeneration that will bode well for our future, but whether this is an overture for a symbiosis of absorbed cultures is at cross purposes with Martin's apparent nativism (e.g. how the central character lost in a fearsome forest uses the guidance of folklore and finds her way home is a motif used before in Martin's earlier work, Independencia.) 

How the warring ideologies symbolically engage each other represents the film's most allegorically indelible, if chilling, imagery. This climaxes in the symbolic burning and desecration of cruciforms that suggest an awakening from spiritual, or perhaps historical, passivity. Who are these rampaging figures, however, at the forefront of these subversive acts of irreligion? Here, a teenage girl who takes armed revolt against her defective ancestry, and there, a bunch of skateboarding thugs, leaving behind a destructive aftermath in a cemetery, raping schoolchildren in sight. These images, while powerful, may work to infantilize and downgrade their greater ideological mettle into a seeming outburst of rebellious teen spirit. Yet, from one politicized film to the next, Martin has assumed a deliberate faux-naif perspective, a child-like vantage that disguises its venomous discourse. If not, perhaps this reading is all too literal, the title's self-terminating act. Perhaps Martin is not as disillusioned as that may imply. Perhaps if anything Martin is grounded in the miraculous present, how he frames counter reality with irony, making current for us symptoms of periodization, anachronistic yet relevant: how we remain the opposite of the cinematic figures he has experimentally depicted, how although passive we are not so addled, how not yet irredeemably rooted in psychosis, how from this fucked-up historico-ontological matrix not yet emerged as Western-style mass murderers and serial killers.               

NEXT ATTRACTION (Raya Martin, 2008)

Probably more famously known for his cinema of the historical (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, Autohystoria, and more recently, Independencia), Raya Martin is very rapidly making strides in another direction in what might be called his cinema of the topical. After inaugurating his Box Office Trilogy in 2008 with a film entitled Now Showing, the 24-year-old director has quickly followed it up with its second installment, Next Attraction, a film about the current state of the local film industry and about the young director’s conversations with his favored medium. In Next Attraction, we get for the most part the supposed neutrality of the cinema-verite documentary that is used, but the nature of what is being documented can be sometimes indicting. 

Right from the start, we are asked to ruminate on a sequence shot – a long static one – of a house built circa 1970s. More precisely, this first scene happens in the poorly-kept backyard of this house, grass unmown, the roof water-stained, suggestive, perhaps, of unsettled, troubled thoughts. Winds buffet the coconut and palm trees and the other ornamentals in the background as a woman saunters out of the house and sits in one of the wrought-iron chairs in the yard. From a distance, her slow, deliberate manner, running her fingers through her hair, is indicative of wistful, pensive thoughts. We aren’t too sure, however; her face is a blur. The winds soon die down. As the minutes pass meditatively, the strange detail of a klieg light standing in a corner, beaming brightly in broad daylight, becomes apparent. What is this film up to now? Then we hear the empathic word: Cut! This has been all a take; the woman is an actress in a film. 

It’s a film within a film. Director and writer Raya Martin, however, is not content with this tried-and-tested conceit. Francois Truffaut (Day for Night), Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up) and Andrzej Wajda (Everything for Sale) have tried their hand at this narrative device before, but Martin goes one better: Next Attraction is a film within a film within a film. What results is surprisingly an intricate but coherent work. Three realities, three verisimilitudes in one film: one conveying a fictitious film crew being documented; another conveying the fictitious documentarians who never become visible other than through their scrupulous hands covering camera lenses, indicating cuts; and the third conveying the apparently “true story” being filmed. What we ultimately see is the documentarians’ point of view chronicling a film crew in action. 

As might be expected when cameras are rolling, the film crew being documented are a picture of efficiency and synergy. They pull off the naturalism of a tight-knit group going about their business through a day of exacting work. Although they seem oblivious of anyone documenting them, they seem too eager to work with each other. No tantrum-throwing directors here, only modest actresses who don’t mind posing with admirers for pictures and such. This film crew is exemplary, bent assiduously on their tasks and everyone, from the director down to the technicians, is on his best behavior. 

Complementing this film crew very well are the documentarians: very discreet and unobtrusive, as they chronicle the long, grueling but not necessarily unsatisfying shoots of a film crew. Using cinema-verite methods, the documentarians position themselves in the least intrusive positions on the set, shielding their lenses and turning off their cameras when needed. They almost shy away from the filmmakers’ shoots, and seem to home in on the dynamics of this film crew instead. What they capture is by turns reflective (conveyed through simple cuts to black) and frenetic (or perhaps tedious) (conveyed through jump cuts). 

The overall tone of Next Attraction is, for the most part, tongue-in-cheek as it captures the controlled chaos of a film shoot. The fictitious film director (J.K. Anicoche) has time for small talk – jabbing playfully at Raya Martin the famous director in one of his overheard conversations with his crew. But if this is a time for a little humor, this also the time to pay homage to the capacity of the camera to fictionalize, to create its own truths. With simple editing trickery, this documentary of sorts is suggestive of ars cinematica – whose visual zeal and robustness echo the self-referential mannerisms of Godard. 

And the film being shot? When the resulting film is tacked on and shown at the end, it might seem like anticlimax: it seems too aestheticized, too prettified compared to the relatively grittier realism of the actual shoot. But this fictitious film embodies many of the truths about what goes on in local cinema. The penchant for melodrama, the current predominance of indie aesthetics and production values, and the commodification of homoerotic acts are but some of the salient points of this fictitious film. And what is it about? Suffice to say that it features a troubled relationship between mother (Jacklyn Jose) and her 17-year-old son (Coco Martin). 

Next Attraction is perhaps as much about the struggling (moribund?) state of one national cinema as it is a meditation on the nature of filmmaking, of what is true and what is not. Nothing (or perhaps everything) is what it seems: the truth is filtered through so many intervening mediations that might influence it. What may come billed as “a true story” is ultimately amplified, modulated and refracted by actor, film crew, director, editor and so on – subject to their synergy, the smallest eventuality, the smallest whimsy of everyone on the set. If there are passages that apotheosize an actress in bygone times in Now Showing, Next Attraction is more inclusive, it congratulates everyone who is (was ever) involved in that backbreaking endeavor called filmmaking. And perhaps that’s the note on which Raya Martin ultimately wants to leave us – not a scathing satire but an oblique homage to filmmaking.

reviewed: June 28, 2009

INDEPENDENCIA (Raya Martin, 2009)

For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign
domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation.
-- Amilcar Cabral

Everyone of us is channeling Americans. For over a hundred years now, we have imitated and internalized their smallest tics and their thickest twang; we aren’t called Little Brown Americans for nothing. Our assimilation of all things American is there to see – though perhaps too self-evident to notice. We eat Kentucky Friend Chicken and McDonald’s burgers and wash them down with swigs of Pepsi or Coca-Cola. We wear the latest shoes from Nike and listen to the latest songs by American Idols. We watch the latest movies churned out by Hollywood, starring our favorite state-side actors. These are our everyday realities. We are, in truth, not as independent as the history books would like us to believe; we are living in the shadow of these insidiously neo-colonial times.
 

Raya Martin’s Independencia, making its Philippine premiere on Independence Day ironically in a French film festival, may not espouse up-in-arms revolution (how, when the enemy is within us?) but delivers a subtly nativist message: the Filipino should endeavor to rediscover his pre-colonial roots. It’s the first small step in his long journey towards recovering true independence. Set in the early 1900s and onwards, Independencia avoids, perhaps by default, the grandiosely-scripted and astronomically budgeted depiction of an epical and heroic era: the American occupation. Instead, writer-director Raya Martin astutely focuses on common folks, non-comnbatants: a mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and her son (Sid Lucero) who flee to the forest as soon as the threat of war encroaches on their town.

Here, in this forest, reality seems refracted through a strangely allegorical and magical prism. Birds dart out of the bushes like shimmering bullets; breezes blow unceasingly; ferns and palm fronds sway and bend; a stream ripples and flows through it. In the conversations that will transpire within its bosom, this forest will be alluded to as the object of greed, and two towns go to war for it. This is where mother and son seek refuge. Soon (no one knows the nature of time here) they are joined by a woman (Alessandra de Rossi) who has been raped by American soldiers. In due time, she gives birth to a fair-skinned child. 
 

Independencia, however, is not about a family’s insularity. What this retreat from the outside world ultimately means is a symbolic return to the Filipino’s bedrock strength, a revalorization of his indigenous culture, his pre-colonial past. Within this film’s family, the oral tradition of myths, proverbs, legends and general folklore, is reenacted and passed down from one generation to another. Talk of talismans, giant wild boars, and the aswang circulate among this family in the woods. And the realities in the forest – e.g. the son finding his way home only after turning his shirt inside out, the appearance of wood spirits – don’t seem to contradict what this family partakes in.

Not unlike South American and other Third World writers employing magic realism in their works, Martin harnesses the inherently surreal/fantastical aspects of our folklore in order to mirror the under-emphasized and misrepresented aspects of our culture. Circulated in the deep of the night, circulated during meals, the stories exchanged in the depths of the forest are a kind of nourishment, a defense mechanism that both diverts and fortifies.

And yet in Independencia, Martin has fashioned out one of his least confounding and more accessible films to date. Independencia is not unlike a well-told legend: there are moments of facile objective reality combined with moments that ask us to suspend disbelief. Much of Martin’s unconventional and unpredictable narrative techniques are becoming familiar to us, it seems. He has also decided to meet his audience halfway: much of the counter-intuitive filmmaking we’ve seen in movies like Autohystoria and Now Showing is kept to a minimum. (But perhaps these are just the strictures of this particular film – to be displaced by the stylistic demands of the next film.) Instead of unknowns and non-professionals, he casts well-known, professional actors for this, and they invariably deliver.

Conceived as the second entry in Raya Martin’s cycle of films set during periods of national struggle (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional being the first), Independencia may not mention America once in any of the film’s dialogue but its pernicious presence, its colonizing threat, is palpable. There is a newsreel-like sequence at midpoint of Independencia that brings this home: an actual atrocity by American soldiers shooting a boy suspected of pilfering is reported in quasi-provincial, faux-American accent. The film finesses its point with humor. There are no strident anti-American slogans here. That the American atrocity mirrors what happens in a 1976 film (Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara's Minsa’y Isang Gamu Gamo), only seems to suggest the currency of the Americans’ unchangingly contemptuous, subhuman regard for Filipinos.

In this light, Independencia can be seen a sophisticated post-colonial film and Raya Martin, at least in this instance, a veritable post-colonial filmmaker. Making a virtue of meager funding from European institutions (in particular, the IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund in 2007), he uses unconventional and postmodern approaches to film Independencia. Noteworthy is his reliance on distanciation techniques, which puts the stamp of its real post-modern provenance on the film. This film, shot in black and white by Jeanne Lapoirie, may look like an early 20^th century American movie, but it is unmistakably a product of its time. Independencia is a living, breathing film: its colonial discourse is not restricted to the past, but remains as valid as ever. Hence, the tell-tale markers like the theatrical acting and theatrical dialogue, the unnaturally thick make-ups, the hybrid sets (a fusion of natural, live elements and handpainted backdrops brought to life by production designer Rodrigo Ricio), characters talking straight to the camera, the effect of film seemingly running out of its reel are not unjustified instances. The presence of White Leghorns – a variety of poultry not introduced to the Philippines until 1950 – in a film that is supposed to be set during the American era also tells us of the timelessness of the issues problematized by this film.

Independencia concludes, empathically, in the most unambiguous terms possible. Orphaned and alone, the fair-skinned boy (Mika Aguilos), whose outward Caucasian appearance might be a potentially symbolic vector of cultural syncretism between the colonizer and colonized, enacts the supreme gesture of self-determination. Pursued by American soldiers deep in the forest, the boy makes sure of signifying his true allegiances. His realization of who he is and where he belongs, paints the sky in different shades of brown. This is, after all, the brown man’s world -- his beloved country. Long live the Filipino!

Reviewed: June 18, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

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.

BUENAS NOCHES, ESPANA (Raya Martin, 2011)

Has Spain ever left us? Today, more than a century removed from our country's declared independence, Raya Martin’s latest film, Buenas Noches, Espana, seems to prompt such a question. From all indications, Martin appears unsure of a definite answer, unconvinced of a clean break. Implicit in the film's title seems a fervent wish: a valedictory with some finality. And yet Spain, it seems, is in his heart: proof positive is how he is sojourning in that country, enjoying its hospitalities, and primed to produce another film with a Spanish cast.

Understanding the tenor of Martin’s previous films, however, we take it to be no benign vacation: contemporary Spain remains a fertile hunting ground for artifacts and documents relevant to our nation. In our minds, Martin is not unlike a late 19^th-century ilustrado travelling through Spain and the continent, picking up pieces of Filipino heritage, and evidence against our old colonial masters. True enough, in Buenas Noches, Martin’s own personal archaeology while in Spain has yielded a startling find, a find that, sadly, many viewers never get to see in the aftermath of their decision to damn the film and walk out on it.

Buenas Noches may not be an easy film to sit through, but it justifies its devices. This film hinges on the mysteries of physics and those of altered states; and Martin never discourages such a notion: the film’s characters, he hints, may be high on hallucinogenic drugs. What else to expect when he takes a news item about an instance of teleportation in 1593 (one where a Filipino soldier vanishes in Manila and materializes in Mexico City), then soups up that gizmo of science fiction and passes it off as a wholesale possibility? Thus, all amped up, and all doped up if you will, Martin proceeds to blindside us with the postcolonial thrust evident in his previous films.   

From Autohystoria (2007) to Maicling Pelicula Nang Ysang Indio Nacional (2005) to Independencia (2009), Martin has been engaged on a mission of dredging up and retrieving our colonial past. That has meant everything from reconstructing the lay of the land in 1896 to doing a diachronic depiction of Filipino culture circa American times. This time Buenas Noches reveals more about our present-day cultural relations with Spain than anything else, something that might seemingly involve more diplomatically palatable facets of geopolitics, but still puts into perspective how much – or how little – has changed between the two countries. 

To show all this, Buenas Noches engages in untutored filmmaking. Almost spitefully, it offers no plot, no narrative, no dialogue, no exposition, no characterization, no budget: merely perhaps the capital of charm to sign up the services of two well-known Spanish actors (one is Pilar Lopez de Ayala, known for her work on Guerin’s In The City of Sylvia). What is in great abundance here are eyeball-gouging process shots, like tinted, superimposed, overexposed images, the better to underscore the atmosphere of hallucination. What is also in great abundance is the wall of sound on the soundtrack: a grating reverberation of electric guitars, looping percussions, industrial and mechanical noise. Then like canned accompaniments to punch-lines, there is music from old Hollywood cartoon shows, the better to highlight the pranks of a pair of teleporting lovers at the center of the film.

Still, of these teleporters, we know precious little. This kind of minimalism paradoxically adds to the mystery of their identities. Their journeys are even more meaningful, showing up everywhere with perfected spatial travel, visiting Spain and presumably its various colonies like Mexico and our own country. Teleportation, it seems, is that proximity borne out of colonialism. But this is all a prelude to a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, which, at first, they turn into a playground, unleashing themselves like refugees from Godard’s Bande A Part.

Levity, however, turns to tearful solemnity when they stumble on a sad reality: a clutch of Juan Luna paintings languishing in some neglected rack in the museum. Locked away in these institutional walls, they are too far removed to make a voice. The Spoliarium was returned to us on a whim. Will these lesser-known paintings in Bilbao suffer the same fate? For so long, we seem to be incapable of recovering parts of our patrimony that have been withheld from us not only by Spain, but by American and Japanese colonizers. This is our postcolonial condition.

But while this might be key to finding the intent of this film, is it the key to gleaning a narrative and understanding the film as a whole? The dubious have a point. Still the unusual interweaving between these two possible threads, and the red herring that this film represents for the purposes of archaeology, are beguiling and absorbing enough to recommend it to the viewer. History is never too simple, after all. Spain is in the heart, and not in the heart, and the infinite gradations in between.