Among the many unseen labors in cinema as an industry, it is film writing that occupies the most curious position. It often moves among three overlapping tendencies; it is either reduced to its purely commercial function where anything written about film is press release by extension, or it is that it’s dealt with animosity where any form of criticism is considered a hindrance to experience art and where artists, usually the director, has monopoly of meaning and interpretation, and lastly film is seen as something trivial that does not deserve rigorous academic investigation and methodical teaching. However in the context of the Philippines, a country with dismal archiving and restoration efforts and perpetually at the mercy of larger national film industries, especially but not limited to Hollywood, writing also functions as a formidable ally in preservation. Film writing is a form of memory keeping, especially when the screening is over. Gathered in this exhibit are books on Philippine cinema available from commercial, academic, and indie publishers at the moment, while a some are on loan from libraries and personal collections. It also doubles as a tangible proof from generations of writers and artists asserting that Philippine cinema is worth writing and thinking about. A similar preoccupation regarding legitimacy that is certainly found among emerging filmmakers from the regions.
The most important feature of film writing is its wide variation. This includes reviews, criticism, history, interviews, scripts, memoirs, among others. Some of these forms tend to dominate popular conversations, reviews especially, but they in fact mutually reinforce and inform each other. Significant also is to notice that one cannot approach Philippine cinema in isolation to other art forms and histories. It is no accident for example that pioneering scholars of cinema were first trained in theater studies, and responsible for laying out how conventions and practices have transitioned and persisted in film. This creative ecology also includes the mediums of komiks, radio, television, literature, the internet, and even fields that seem tangential like that of architecture and religion. In terms of connections, Philippine cinema has consistently been written about through transnational lens. Topics that have been explored covers genres and movements, colonialism and modernity, and how films have been controlled but also how they broke away from institutional mandate, especially that of the state. The transnational view also includes depictions of the Filipinos and the Philippines in foreign productions, and vice versa. When reading about these different contexts and perspectives, regional filmmakers and audiences will see that many issues at the present are actually permutations of those in the past. Film writing provides us with the wisdom of hindsight how cultural workers before navigated debates between art and commerce, between art and politics, or choosing to prioritize local or foreign audiences. Of course, an analytical frame doesn’t have to be maintained at all times, when reading these works we also relive earlier artists’ passion and brilliance as well as their frustrations and misgivings.
When one has immersed in Philippine film writing, one would soon realize that the regions have not been completely absent in national canon, though they are often romanticized or distorted. Seldom is the dialectic between the regions and the national capital the main focus of critical intervention in film writing. Kidlat Tahimik’s films for example exposes underdevelopment as a stand in for the countryside while also celebrating people’s resilience, Lino Brocka presents the despair of probinsyano or probinsyana characters corrupted by the big city, while also emphasizing the factors that pushed them out of rural areas in the first place, and lastly one can practically consider Peque Gallaga’s Oro Plata Mata (1982) as a classical Greek tragedy but it is also specifically about the sugar economy of Negros whose class antagonisms were intensified by war. The remedy to this regional absence is by making films from respective regions’ terms, this entails films using regional languages and examining immediate local realities. However stepping back from the national view, is only half the job. There are many efforts to produce film writings from and of the regions, and unsurprisingly the challenges in sustainably publishing them is twice as difficult, much like regional film making itself. As much as this exhibit shows what has been achieved in Philippine film writing it also traces the immense task of what needs to be done. Regional film writing shouldn’t settle on just ‘filling the gaps’, but be bold to challenge the idea of the national center, that of the national canon, or even our understanding of the nation itself.
Jacob Laneria 