La última película (2013)

Sabtu, 12 Oktober 2013

La última película (2013)

La última película (Raya Martin & Mark Peranson, 2013)

The year 2012 was for most of humanity a waiting game. The Mayans predicted the world’s end. Riots sprouted. Floods happened. Scandals erupted. It seemed the Mayans spoke true, but there was still no assurance that the world was on the verge of its own demise. Amidst the chaos produced by the world’s hesitation to die, film was quietly performing its own disappearing trick. There were debates. Self-proclaimed vanguards of the cinematic arts were busy looking forward, confident of the continuation of the business despite the business’ abandonment of its first medium. The rest, those oblivious to the business of movie-making, were subsisting on throes of nostalgia, scrambling for the last remaining reels of film and creating very personal odes to celluloid, on celluloid.

The apocalypse happened. We were there to witness it. Film cameras were no longer being made. Analog projectors were no longer being used. Raya Martin, who stubbornly made films in celluloid when his comrades were shooting in digital, and Mark Peranson, editor of Cinema Scope, had the best view of cataclysm. In La última película, an impeccable collaboration between the two very outspoken cinephiles, they are seen viewing the apocalypse. Images of rampaging meteors and fiery explosions are superimposed on a peacefully starless night sky. Despite the spectacle, the two are quite withdrawn. It’s just another show.

La última película, for all its brash self-consciousness, is neither nostalgic nor dismissive of that foregone era. It masks its melancholy with sarcasm, bleeding incessantly from the antics and bickerings of a filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry) and his Mexican guide (Gabino Rodriguez), who are in Yucatan to scout locations for what is planned to be the last film ever made.

When melancholy manages to escape the clutches of Martin and Peranson’s intellectual comedy, the pay-off is quite tremendous. The film within the film shows a woman visiting a departed loved one in the cemetery. She is singing a mournful song. What follows is a montage of random everyday oddities, all shot in celluloid, all beautifully textured. The sombre montage gives way to an abrupt change. We now see Martin and Peranson’s film crew in high definition digital, shooting the film within the film. Peranson asks Gym Lumbera, his cinematographer, a question about shooting in celluloid. Lumbera then relates how he is certain that the film camera has stopped recording. He can hear it recording. Filmmaking has become too dolefully quiet.

It all seems chaotic. La última película switches from one medium to another, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The images from the various media, edited together exposing their individual merits and faults, can either incite further or end the debate that has been hounding the film community since digital started replacing celluloid. While the film is quiet towards its biases, it nevertheless feels like film’s rightful valediction.

La última película elucidates the flurry of emotions surrounding what was the cinematic apocalypse. It is best viewed as a relic from a recent past, a foregone era, an enigmatic museum piece. It is that bewildering but very enjoyable artifact of how all the talk on the state of cinema has become so absurdly serious and seriously absurd. With a wondrous marriage of self-importance and self-irreverence, La última película succeeds in being everything it sets out to be, an often frustrating but always joyous celebration of cinema.

In La última película’s final scene, shot in red-tinted celluloid tinted, Perry’s fervent filmmaker rows a boat down an anonymous river. Martin, who has experimented with the physical aspect of film and as a result produced works of astounding and profound ingenuity like Ars Colonia (where a conquistador’s exploration of a new land literally explodes with marker pen-colored fireworks), again does with film what otherwise cannot be done with pixels. The red hue slowly consumes the entire frame, leaving only indiscernible traces of the filmmaker in a sea of crimson. What eventually surfaces is something else, something reminiscent of what Martin and Peranson were looking at in the night sky. Meteorites are falling. This is the apocalypse. And the apocalypse is just beautiful.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Great Cinema Party (2012)

Selasa, 22 Mei 2012

The Great Cinema Party (2012)

The Great Cinema Party (Raya Martin, 2012)

Raya Martin’s The Great Cinema Party, the final third of the 2012 edition of the Jeonju Digital Project which includes new works by China’s Ying Liang and Sri Lanka’s Vimukthi Jayasundara, is uncharacteristically joyous. Despite starting with several minutes of footage of war, the film is surprisingly held together by an atmosphere that seems new in a Raya Martin film. While Martin’s preoccupation with Philippine history is still there, it isn’t met with the same sorrow or regret that features pronouncedly in his previous works. There’s something more than the erstwhile levity here, an emotion that overpowers Martin’s expected angst about the painful inadequacies of what we presently perceive as a country’s recorded past. There’s actual joy.

The monochrome snippets from various unearthed footage of the Pacific War are edited together like a rousing action film replete with explosions and images of destruction, opening the film with a communal memory of a violent past. The absence of sound only makes the visuals stronger, allowing blasts and explosions created by a very fertile imagination to marry their appropriate images shotgun-style. The story, possibly invented again by the same fertile imagination, has foreigners waging war in the Philippines, with the hapless Filipinos, forced either to take sides or die without even trying. Like the rubbles from the war of those imperialists, Filipinos are but reminders of a history that is not their own. Lav Diaz, the foremost figurehead of Filipino independent filmmaker ends the turmoil and welcomes everyone to the great cinema party like some kind of deus ex machina.

A group of friends assemble in Corregidor, a tiny island in Manila Bay that has preserved relics from the Pacific War as its foremost attractions. Like the picnickers from that mysterious early Peter Weir film, they explore the curious landscape, digging for memorabilia, taking photos, and relishing in nuggets of trivia about the place. An explosion is heard from far away. It is more than a ghost from the past. They retire in a rustic mansion. They have escaped the fate of the famous Weir picnickers, thankfully. There is more to Martin’s film than manufactured atmosphere and head-scratching endings. In the mansion, another guest reveals the filmic past of the mansion, how it played opulent settings to celebrated films of those anonymous golden ages Filipino cinephiles reminisce with both glee and regret.

The film’s third half features the party itself. Local film personalities arrive in hordes, brandishing bottles of San Miguel while carrying plates full of food over a makeshift tent that is cinematically ornamented with globes of yellow light. Music drowns the discussions, the topics of which range from movies to nonsense. Everything fades to black. Only the high-spirited music’s left, teasing the fertile imagination, the same way the wartime images teased it to invent sounds and stories, to conjure images. Against the oppressive darkness, suggestions of light, of pictures, of figures, of a formation of friends expecting a fireworks display to cap the night, are displayed.

These images are our fireworks display --- the patches of light over darkness, the cinema. We form our own tableaus, united and eagerly awaiting for the cure to the temporary void, that violent war. Where history is a wellspring for melancholy and regret for Martin, cinema, which has evolved for him from the absorbed art, the made-up philosophy, the tainted theories, the remembered experiences of being alone or together in a darkened room with a random work of a random artist from a random place in the world to that and the relationships that cinema has pushed to surface, becomes the reason to live. The Great Cinema Party is Martin’s modest monument to the lifetime joys of the art for which he suffers for.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Buenas Noches, España (2011)

Kamis, 20 Oktober 2011

Buenas Noches, España (2011)

Buenas Noches, España (Raya Martin, 2011)

What separates Earth from space? If we are to base it from what could arguably be the most famous sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), it is a speedy ride along a futuristic highway. The sequence, around five minutes in length, oddly switching from black and white to color, and uses a Tokyo highway to pass for the futuristic highway, approximates the experience of travel, more specifically, space travel. Stripped of the usual pleasures of escapist science fiction where space travel is always depicted to be exciting or intriguing, Tarkovsky’s concept of space travel is more grounded, evoking a sense of displacement, awkwardness, even boredom. In a way, Tarkovsky has injected cinematic space travel with much-needed honesty, much-needed humanity.

What then separates now from then? Time travel is nothing new in cinema. Yet the actual experience of time travel has always been curiously neglected. At most, we have gotten ourselves satisfied by seeing speeding cars disappearing in the sky, or sparks and bolts of electricity appearing as kitschy contraptions are turned on. However, what actually happens to the human being that is transported back in time is left to the fringes of the imagination, unfairly blanketed by extraneous depictions of characters and things disappearing supposedly back in time. So if we are to base it from Raya Martin’s Buenas Noches, España, what separates now from then are not sparkles or random disappearances, it is reality-altering drugs and a lot of it.

The seemingly random events of Buenas Noches, España is grounded on one exposition, that on 1593, a Filipino soldier stationed in Manila suddenly vanishes and wakes up in Mexico City. Martin establishes several things through the anecdote. One, that non-traditional travel exists. Two, that there is an inherent connection between and among Spain and all of its former colonies. From those starting points, Martin places two lovers (Pilar Lopez de Ayala and Andres Gertrudix) in a trip across Spain, across time, and elsewhere. The footage of the couple are heavily processed, played and replayed in various tints of red, blue and yellow, accompanied by a perpetual droning and strategically placed sound effects from slapstick cartoons of the past.

Martin replicates the experience of being under the influence of drugs. He also replicates the feeling of being lost in time, seeing scenes played a few moments ago played again and again with various details changed, and listening to sounds that evoke reminiscence of carefree childhood. Being in the influence of drugs and time travel, although at first glance are two very different experiences, are actually interchangeable, giving Martin’s proposition logical sense, and very personal sense, too, since drug influence and time travel are both panacea to heartache, allowing a person an option to forget and to make what has been made permanent by the movement of time more or less malleable. Thus, the lovers seem to be in incomparable bliss being in that state of temporal randomness, oblivious of where they are and where they are going.

Curiously absent from the couple’s ecstatic trip is the Philippines, past or present. A visit to the museum would reveal artifacts from Spain’s past as colonial master: various paintings by Juan Luna, a Filipino artist who won various prizes for his paintings while sojourning in Europe with various other Filipino intellectuals. The sight of the paintings is sobering to both the lovers and Martin. From the vapid goofing around the museum’s various chambers, the lovers are mysteriously awestruck and emotional, as if reminded of a closeted fact in history. Martin slows down too, relaxing the editing, substituting the heavy drone with ominous silence, and settles with black and white visuals. The sudden break is strange but fitting, alluding to a shared history between countries, finally establishing that long lost thread that will finally connect present and past, and Spain and its former colony.

Buenas Noches, España is more frustrating than it is pleasurable. It is more experiential than intellectual. Just as Tarkovsky has created the most precise cinematic equivalent of space travel, Martin has created the most precise cinematic equivalent of being stuck in time, immobilized by some obsession with the past, with history, never moving forward, never moving backward.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Possible Lovers (2008)

Senin, 02 Agustus 2010

Possible Lovers (2008)

Possible Lovers (Raya Martin, 2008)

Raya Martin’s Possible Lovers, a ninety five minute film introduced by five minutes of silent vignettes of Manila in 1919 segueing to around ninety minutes of a ridiculously long take of a man watching another man sitting on a couch and ending with a self-referential stab at itself, could be anything. The title suggests a romance. The screen suggests a one-sided romance, from the gazer (JK Anicoche) and the subject of his gaze (Abner Delina), a sleeping man wearing a coat and a top hat. The man’s gaze towards the sleeping man, considering that nothing could attract such long a gaze except what could be the beauty of a face or the possible intrigue of what is happening within the sleep, is an act of selfless adoration. Nothing else happens. They remain only possible lovers within the scope of Martin’s film, a film that is far too short to appreciate beyond the possibility of that possible love.

“They made movies in 1919,” states the intertitles that separate the vignettes of old Manila from the extended shot of the two men. The clips are deteriorated, made overtly imperfect by the decay of the film source over time and the effects of digitalization. Hardly the movie that the intertitles speak of, the clips are but phantoms of an existence or the possibility of the existence of such movies. Given that what’s left is a mere reminder of what was or what could have been a cinematic past, the cinephilic adoration morphs into what essentially is a fetishistic attachment for the dead or the near-dead. Is the man wearing a top-hat really a man but a ghost of the unobtainable past? Is the gaze really a romantic gaze of affection or a suffering gaze of patience, longing, regret and psychotic expectancy for specter wearing the top hat to wake up from what seems to be an eternal slumber?

Teresa Barrozo’s sound design accompanies the near-static image with the promise of movement and action. Sounds of horses galloping, of motor vehicles on the move, of men making passage through grass, create an atmosphere of unrest that is discordant with the steady visual. Are these the sounds from the movie that the audience supposed to be watching? Are these the sounds from the movie that the man is watching?

“We were two possible lovers, waiting for the film to end,” concludes the film. At first glance and probably at second, third, and fourth to viewers who cannot get over the fact that they were just watching a man watching another man, the coda seems to play like the punch-line to the film’s overextended practical joke. However, the coda succinctly summarizes the subtle anguish that Martin bares in the film. It is anguish attributable to an unfulfilled need, like a love affair infinitely stalled because of the utter impossibility of the receiver to reciprocate a fervent love being offered. As the man with the undying gaze is in the middle of a possible love affair, the audience is also stuck staring on a possible cinema, only to be reminded by the abrupt coda that there is actually no end, no conclusion. We all remain waiting, possible lovers of that possible film.

For Martin, love and cinema, both of which are for him indisputably personal as all of his films, where both are interchangeable themes, can attest to, are perpetually connected. Possible Lovers, within the span of ninety five minutes, majority of which is spent in teaching the audience the art of the expectant gaze, articulates a pain common to both those who are hopelessly romantic and those hopelessly in love with cinema.

Manila (2009)

Jumat, 17 Juli 2009

Manila (2009)

Manila (Adolfo Alix, Jr. & Raya Martin, 2009)

Adolfo Alix, Jr. takes the experiment seriously. The latter half of Manila, a modern reiteration of Lino Brocka's Jaguar (1979), tackles Philip (heartthrob Piolo Pascual, artificially darkened to match his character's lower income roots), the personal bodyguard of an ambitious although reckless scion (Jay Manalo) of a big-time politician. After shooting and killing a man in defense of his boss, Philip is suddenly left on his own when his boss abandons him for fear of getting involved in the murder. Alix directs with admirable restraint and his portion of the film operates with the same energy and rhythm that Tambolista (Drumbeat, 2007) possesses which gave his visualizations of urban squalor a treacherous personality. Albert Banzon's black and white cinematography, jerky when necessary but never disorienting, contributes to the prevailing unease. While adeptly filmed, Alix's portion is more repetition than anything else. He does not even attempt to stray from what every Brocka disciple, from Joel Lamangan (Bulaklak ng Maynila (Flower of Manila, 1999) and Hubog (Wretched Lives, 2001)) to Mel Chionglo (Sibak (Midnight Dancers, 1994)), have made careers out of.

A belated colored credit sequence, which separates Raya Martin's first half and Alix's latter half, showcases something bizarre: Lav Diaz, director of films whose average running time is seven hours, is filming a romance starring Iza Calzado and Jon Avila, both of whom are popular television stars. It's an unlikely scenario (especially since Diaz seems to be quite comfortable in the set where he has klieglights, a sizable crew, and teen idols, at his disposal), both improbable and impossible. The credit sequence, funny, ironic and bursting with subtle sarcasm, gives an adequate outlook point to view Martin's portion. It begs to ask the question "do we simply believe the images as projected in the big screen, no matter how improbable and impossible they are?"

There is something subtly subversive in Martin’s portion, which opens the film. Seductively immaculate in the way he captures the city as atmospheric backdrop to the tale of William (Pascual, with whitened hair), perpetual drug addict who we first see escaping a police raid, the day portion of the film, loosely based on the characters of Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980), is driven not by narrative or a set of written characters but by an indescribable force that fuels the titular metropolis. Martin’s Manila is formless, like a nebula of rustic landmarks thinly connected by a shared motif. As with its first few minutes where Martin economically introduces his characters as cued by a jazzy soundtrack, the film exists primarily as a montage of exquisitely photographed (again by cinematographer Banzon) sequences that celebrate the allure of the city despite the thematic corruption that pervades its citizenry.

Pascual walks around a park only to lie down the grass. Martin cuts to his face. He cuts to show the sun. Martin cuts back to Pascual's face, now glowing with the sunlight, slowly being illuminated and fading to divine white. In an earlier sequence, Martin features Pascual being chased by the police after the raid of the massage parlor Pascual's character frequents. Out of the darkness, Pascual's worried but still very handsome mug appears. The subversion lies not with how expertly crafted these sequences are but by how his camera lovingly lingers to catch Pascual's face, to the point of utter ridiculousness. The visual satire of Pascual's celebrity reaches a climax during the confrontation between his character and Charito (Rosanna Roces), where an onslaught of maternal violence, tears, screams, and pleas, is captured in slow motion and extended much longer than necessary. It is supposed to be Pascual's moment to showcase his acting chops after being plastered as ornament to Manila's landmarks but Martin steals the show and creates a sequence so cinematically absurd and enthralling, that everything else, including Pascual who struggles to be convincing in slow motion, is overshadowed. Hitchcock once said "all actors should be treated like cattle." Thus, if you only have one cow and it is a goodlooking cow, you put it on display, and when it tries to do something it cannot convincingly do, you do something spectacular so attention is diverted somewhere else.

We actually never get a feel that Bernal is the driving force of his portion, except for the characters and the slow motion sequence in the hospital, all borrowed from Manila by Night. Given that Pascual seems to be a permanent fixture in Manila's seductive beauty, Martin's portion is more a hilariously surreptitious sabotage of a mainstream icon than a tribute. Pascual is the sole driving force, and Martin acknowledges it and to my mind, creatively pokes fun at it. Pascual, who after being groomed by the country's biggest television station, has turned into an insanely lucrative commodity. Pascual is not only a matinee idol, he is also a singer, a commercial model (Alix and Martin shares credits with Bench, a clothing line, Sanmig Coffee, a brand of instant coffee, Centrum, a brand of multivitamins, and a few other brands which Pascual endorses), and now, a film producer. Manila, more than a tribute to Brocka and Bernal, two of the Philippines' most prized filmmakers, is a vanity project for Pascual, and I suspect, whether it is voluntary or subconscious for Martin, is not satisfied with keeping it at that.

Independencia (2009)

Jumat, 12 Juni 2009

Independencia (2009)

Independencia (Raya Martin, 2009)

On June 12, 1898, a group of self-proclaimed generals and their supporters declared independence for an archipelago who has been under Spanish rule for more than three centuries. Since then, the archipelago has been the colony of the Americans for more than four decades and the Japanese for around three years before being granted by the Americans who rescued the islands from the clutches of the Japanese with independence on July 4, 1946. In an effort to acknowledge the sacrifices of the revolutionaries who strove for freedom from the Spanish, the Philippine government transferred Independence day from July 4 back to June 12, notwithstanding the fact that the waving of the Philippine flag by the momentarily victorious generals was more symbolic than real, given the fact that at that moment, the Americans have bought the islands, along with Puerto Rico, from the Spanish as if it were real estate. Thus, it is not very surprising that the concept of independence has been nothing but an elusive euphamism for most Filipinos. It is easily mistaken for patriotism, love for country, or worse, radicalism. With more than a century since the Filipinos declared for themselves independence, can this nation truly consider itself independent?

Last June 12, 2009, Raya Martin came home from Cannes to screen his aptly titled film Independencia to his countrymen. Martin, who alongside several internationally acclaimed Filipino filmmakers like Lav Diaz (Melancholia (2008) and Kagadanan sa Banwaan Ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos (2007)) and Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay (Slaughtered, 2009) and Serbis (Service, 2008)) have been accused of making films for foreign audiences instead of his fellow Filipinos, is unrelenting in his art but nevertheless values truth above visual and narrative pleasures. Martin creates films about concepts that matter to him. He seeks to recreate a historic past that he, and most other Filipinos have been deprived of (Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional, 2005), where short film vignettes of ordinary Filipinos during times of peace and war; and Autohystoria (2007), where the murder of revolutionary Andres Bonifacio and his brother is reenacted as a contemporary tale of political salvage), or his own personal memories (Now Showing (2008), a film that is divided into two parts: the first part about a girl's whimsical childhood and the second part about the girl living out her life borne out of his joyous past as punctuated by a traumatic event that separates the two parts), or filmmaking (Next Attraction (2008), also a film that is divided into two parts: the first part is about a film crew making an independent production and the second part shows the film they made).

Independencia is largely composed of nuances and minute details. The story is simple. A mother (Tetchie Agbayani) and his son (Sid Lucero) retreat into the middle of the jungle as American troops start invading the towns. Mother and son lead an austere yet satisfying life away from civilization until the son finds a woman (Alessandra de Rossi), injured and presumably raped by the Americans. The mother dies of illness. The man and the woman, along with her son (Mika Aguilos) start living together peacefully in the middle of the jungle. There are no heroes, no resounding acts of patriotism, and no rousing marches or melodies. Perhaps the most conspicuous element of Independencia is the aesthetics that it borrows from early American talkies. Shot entirely inside a sound studio that is refashioned into a jungle with painted backgrounds, plants, birds, and other creatures and sound effects that realistically capture the atmosphere, the film is oftentimes breathtaking to look at, with cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie making use of artificial lighting to create haunting images that complement Lutgardo Labad's momentous score.

There's a reason behind Martin's use of borrowed aesthetics. As with Maicling Pelicula where Martin makes use of silent film aesthetics as reaction to a recorded history that is predominantly centered on the privileged instead of the masses, Independencia's aesthetics marks as both an indignation of the cinematic culture that the Philippines has been deprived of (either by ignorance or deplorable film archiving, given the fact that most pre-war Filipino films have been lost to decay) and a commentary on the hypnotizing and bamboozling effect of what seems to be America's most enduring gift to the Filipinos: the love for cinema. In the middle of Independencia, the film gives way to a fake news reel about a kid who was shot dead by an American soldier for pilfering crops from a vendor. Accompanied with humorous sarcasm and satire, the reel is nonetheless telling of the mis-education that the Americans have inflicted on the Filipinos, to the point that the latter is willing to digest the blatantly illogical and immoral to please their colonial masters.

Independencia tackles the concept of independence in its most unadulterated form, where both mother and son sacrifice the comforts of colonial living, of so-called civilization to live in the jungle. By stripping themselves of their colonial past, they become subjects of nature and the elements. Beliefs transform as pre-colonial lore, with passed-on tales of powerful talismans and golden skinned deities, become redundant conversational devotions. Their sexual impulses, left unhindered by concepts of religion and morality, occupy both their idle time and dreams. The familial unit remains. More than the familial unit are traces of their former lives made apparent in their subconscious thoughts: the mother dreams of an intense sexual encounter while the son dreams of fighting a war. Independence remains an elusive concept, even to a family who was forced to give up the comforts of colonial living and learned to love the mystic allure of the jungle. Tainted, perhaps forever, with foreign influence, death seems the inevitable freedom.

The pale-skinned boy, presumably the son of the woman with her American aggressors, is the lone character that is truly independent. Born in the jungle with only tales from his known father and mother as guidance to the world, the boy's curiosity expands as he grows older. The Americans are slowly making their way into the jungle. As the jungle becomes less of a haven for the family, their choices get slimmer. For the couple, the rationale of keeping themselves freed from colonial rule is blurred by the demands of the tough times as food is becoming more scarce and a devastating storm is brewing. For the boy, the allure of what's out there seems natural and understandable, considering that the color of his skin hardly matches the skin of both his mother and father. However, the boy chooses independence and sacrifices his life for it. Martin marks the boy's sacrifice with striking colors, meshing style and substance together in a sublime sequence of tremendous beauty and emotion.

According to this reviewer who had the pleasure of seeing Independencia in Cannes, Martin introduced the film to his audience with a wish that people would be able "to die for their country, and for cinema." Morbid as it sounds, Martin's wish proves to be a logical solution to a world where people have forgotten to be independent and cinema has forgotten its role as recorder of culture and history. If death is the only measure to gain this independence, then let us be brave enough to slit our own throats or force ourselves in exile, symbolically. Lest we actually know the pains and pleasures of living outside the mainstream, of living without the influences that mutate the virtues that bind us as human beings, then we cannot honestly consider ourselves truly independent.

Now Showing (2008)

Kamis, 15 Mei 2008

Now Showing (2008)

Now Showing (Raya Martin, 2008)

One night while discussing the life, death, and rebirth of stars, a young Rita candidly asks her mother, "what if all the stars die at the same time?" Rita's mother, unable to provide a scientifically verifiable answer to her daughter's legitimate question, smiles and proceeds to her room to sleep. Raya Martin's fourth feature Now Showing, which is premiering at Cannes in the Director's Fortnight, deeply examines that void that possibly and probably happens when all the stars have died all at once. The film, epic-like in length with a running time of four hours and forty minutes, can be divided into two parts, an episodic account of Rita's childhood and her present experience as an adult working for her aunt's pirated DVD stall, divided by an intriguing interlude composed of clips from one of the few surviving Filipino pre-war films, Octavio Silos' Tunay na Ina (Real Mother, 1939).

There is an ominous air of sorrow that pervades the film. A palpable void in all the characters most essential of which is Rita, designates itself as the film's internal heartbeat. Right from the start, where animated alphabets playfully appear to complete a quotation by Rita Hayworth ("All I wanted was just what everybody else wants, you know."), the film already declares itself as a tale of outbursting longing of a myriad of needs.

It's a visually interesting film. The first half of Now Showing has the aesthetic feel of an amateur video. Artificially aged and damaged, Rita's childhood takes the appearance of a long-kept memory, an unearthed artifact of the past. Interspersed within the film are crudely stop-animated sequences. It is succeeded by similarly damaged black and white clips from Tunay na Ina, which further emphasizes the first half's role as hindsight to the pains of a near-forgotten childhood. The contrast of the first half to the latter half is apparent and striking, since the latter is visually more formally structured, shot predominantly to emphasize the social alienation and decay that intervene in the life of Rita. Like the dozens of pirated DVDs she sells that exemplify our fake culture of commodification, she dons trappings of superficial happiness and identity but in reality, is very confused and on the verge of facing the far end of the dead-ended road.

During the opening scene, we witness Rita alone in her room, singing and dancing like her namesake, in what I fathom as a private ecstatic moment. This scene is followed by Rita and her neighbors in the street, playing. She stumbles, and then assures her friends that she's alright before excusing herself from the game. She limps home and cries on her own. During her birthday party, she feigns contentment despite the fact that none of her invited friends were around; her birthday party appearing to be a family reunion rather than a celebration of the fact that she exists. A vacation to the beach concludes with her crying, probably in reflective jealousy and envy, while witnessing a family welcoming the fishermen back from the sea.

Now Showing is detailed in the way that it peeks into the private life of its main character. There's an almost voyeuristic delectation in the way we witness some personal things we tend to declare as mundane. That interest further glows as the melancholy of the character's private life becomes more apparent. That melancholy is of course tainted by the innocence and joy of childhood and growing up, but the picture swells with that incandescent burden of painful childhood memories, not necessarily traumatic in the way most coming-of-age tales are built upon but still evidently encumbering.

When Rita grows up to be a young lady, the privacy of her childhood melancholy is replaced with a pertinent social disconnect. She appears to be the typical misdirected youth, fleeting from one party to another, and wallowing in the excesses of contemporary living. She has blossomed into a tragic figure similar to her famous namesake, who died afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease, numb to the glory of her memories. Rita has succumbed to the most common of afflictions of the citizens of this contemporary world, an inability to look back, an incapacity to retrieve memories. The subtle void and emptiness that infect her life are caused by that affliction. She has forgotten the value of history.

What happens when all the stars die all at once? Rita's mother fails to provide an answer, but Martin hints at a possible outcome --- a debilitating sense of forgetfulness and a glaring inability to connect past from present. Martin furthers this theory with his brilliant intermission, a montage of flickering, deteriorating, decomposing scenes from a pre-war film made unrecognizable by time, abuse, and national neglect. Martin's metaphor of disconnect is as blatant as it is disturbing, since the nation is naively unhurdled by this cinematic void, with plenty more of its filmic treasures dying simultaneously like the heavenly bodies Rita curiously asks about. Basically, Martin mourns a nation composed of tens and millions of Ritas, unable to recall the lessons of the past simply because the memories have permanently disappeared from convenient reach.

Martin has always focused on history (or the lack of it) with his films. He laments his nation's prevailing amnesia by composing films that visualize such emptiness. In Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (O Ang Mahabang Kalungkutan ng Katagalugan) (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos), 2005), Martin recreates the Filipino war for independence this time through the eyes of the common man. With the film, he seeks to visually approximate a moment in history that has forever passed. Martin follows up Maicling Pelicula with Autohystoria (2007), more visually ominous, detailing the execution of Philippine revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio and his brother, another portion of Philippine history that has been draped with rumors and history. By placing the event in the contemporary social and political scenario, Martin succeeds in brandishing his thesis that this national amnesia is not merely a problem that exists primarily within a bubble. The problem is more deeply rooted, and connects directly to how the nation exists now. Now Showing is much more personal (little details like young Rita's uncanny resemblance with Martin, among others), especially since it is the most narratively-reliant of Martin's films. Martin masterfully places his cinematic advocacy to a clearly personal project, and the result is simply magical and Martin's most resonant, most thematically beautiful film to date.

The film concludes with a lengthy yet beautifully shot and edited sequence of travel and transition, exposing a light of hope despite the film's melancholic and wistful air. The baggages and the lessons of the past she tug as she contemplates and daydreams on her way to that undisclosed location. She sleeps, and the picture fades into white, instead of the typical black. A simple melody is heard (the first time music is ever heard from the film since Martin mutes every song for some mysterious reason). It's a compassionate gesture from Martin as he ends Rita's tale with subtle optimism, a conceivable twinkle of grace despite having witnessed Rita in her most private aching moments. With Now Showing, Martin bares himself not only as an extremely talented filmmaker (at twenty-three years old, he has made four films completely different from each other, but bare a stamp of integrity in theme and aesthetics) but as an uncompromising yet generous artist.

Autohystoria (2007)

Minggu, 16 September 2007

Autohystoria (2007)

Autohystoria (Raya Martin, 2007)

Andres Bonifacio, who founded and initially headed the Philippine revolution, and his younger brother Procopio were executed by the men of Emilio Aguinaldo, who continued to fight against the Spanish and later the Americans and became the first president of the Philippines, for allegedly conniving to topple Aguinaldo's leadership. The execution is a mere footnote in Philippine history; it's a big glaring hole that is merely filled with assumptions and hypotheses by different history scholars. In Autohystoria, filmmaker Raya Martin tries to create his own version of the story (thus, the "auto" and the "history" in the title), but instead comes up with something else, a gripping masterful artwork that works in so many levels --- as a linear retelling of a forgotten historical anecdote, as a nightmare, as a commentary on the many powers of filmmaking, and much more (thus, the "hysteria" in the title).

It opens with a tracking shot where the camera follows a man from across a street. Shot in black and white analog video (the rest of the film is in digital video), it partakes of the aesthetic of a surveillance video; the quality is obviously diminished and you can observe the color stains in the edges of the frame. The man in the video is being watched as the camera moves conspicuously and always right across the street (at one point, the man crosses the street but he doesn't notice the camera and continues to cross to the other side). The man enters a house and a few seconds later, the lights downstairs are turned on, and a few more seconds later, the lights upstairs are turned on. Another man goes out of the house to wait outside. What is the man doing inside the house, and why the need to walk all the way there (when there's an abundance of public transportation like jeepneys, taxis and pedicabs in that busy avenue)?

These questions that arise, I think, aren't merely assigned to the viewer but are also assigned to the invisible man holding the surveillance camera. In that sense, the viewers become the spies. That urgency enlarges as the curiosity about the man's activities widen. The sequence is followed by a lengthy still shot of an imposing structure which bears the statue of the Katipunan, the revolutionary group Bonifacio founded to rebel against the Spanish surrounded by a busy rotunda. There's a frustrating sense of redundancy in the shot as cars are circling around the monument without a notice. Is that the purpose of history, to serve as an uninspiring centerpiece to a busy rotunda, presumably ad infinitum?

We see a man wearing a tie-dyed shirt struggling in his seat. Beside him is a boy wearing his high school uniform in a tearful resolution of his known fate. We can see the outside of the moving vehicle; a row of stores in a numbing loop; later we become aware that the vehicle is circling the rotunda over and over again. The two men are clearly Martin's reincarnation of the two Bonifacios and their fate is obvious, they are to be executed (the modernity of the setting alludes to several theories since there is no more Katipunan (except for the famous avenue that leads to the country's premiere state university): for what crime are they to be executed, terrorism, and rebellion?). The more pertinent question however is why are they perpetually circling the rotunda that bears the statue of Filipino revolutionaries?

The moon holds its gaze as we are transported to a jungle. The camera follows the two captured men who are now bruised and injured walking in complete darkness. The ambient noise grips you entirely; Martin's film can't be considered contemplative as it doesn't allow contemplation; it grabs you immediately and puts you right in the middle of the terrifying event. Like the first tracking shot, the camera becomes a character (in the middle of the torturous sequence, the elder brother talks to the camera "are you going to shoot us?"), as the executor. Martin eases the tension with scenes of nature, of the green mountainside that invites the dawn or the running brook that is met with calming daylight, but the terror retains its effect and the serene blanket of nature's beauty can't simply erase the images of the two men awaiting their fate.

Martin's camera has dual roles, as a character to the ensuing events (it pits the audience as a conspirator to the treachery) and as recorder of the events (which assumes the responsibility of recreating lost history). The film ends with a couple of vignettes of Aguinaldo's navy, borrowed by Martin from the archives of American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.. It caps the story, from the surveillance to the capture to the execution and the leadership of Aguinaldo of the Philippine Revolution; it really is a coherent linear tale.

Yet it's also Martin's nightmare, the way history is recreated through the objects of contemporary Philippines. The two men here are clearly not the Bonifacio brothers, they are probably Martin's friends; the initial tracking shot isn't really a surveillance of a man conspiring to commit a rebellion, it's just a man walking a few blocks to visit a friend; the torture scenes in the forest is a myriad of many things: of Martin's everyday experiences in this contemporary metropolis, of the knowledge of the Bonifacio brothers' execution, of the current state of Philippine security (made more prominent by the passing of the Human Security Act by the Macapagal-Arroyo administration, and the many reports of terrorist attacks in television and newspapers), of this nation's worsening historical depletion.

There are no pretenses or borrowed aesthetics (it is certainly different from Lav Diaz's languid long takes as Martin's visuals is entirely personal, entirely his own; raw, crude, but his cinema hardly requires any semblance of prettiness) in Autohystoria. Martin is only in his early twenties but has made three feature films (Martin's first two features are Island at the End of the World (2005), about the Ivatans of Batanes who are separated from the rest of the nation including its history and homogenized culture by geography and climate, and Maicling Pelicula Nañg Ysañg Indio Nacional (O Ang Mahabang Kalungkutan ng Katagalugan) (A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or The Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos), 2006), an experiment in recreating Filipino life preceding the Philippine revolution through elegantly composed silent film vignettes) that are vastly different in tone and mood, but are graced with one common element --- a mature sense of history, aching and begging to exist.

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This review is also published in The Oblation and is also my contribution to the Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon at Unspoken Cinema.