Kamera Obskura (2012)

Senin, 23 Juli 2012

Kamera Obskura (2012)

Out of the Camera, into the World in Raymond Red's Kamera Obskura 

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

There are a lot of great ideas swimming in a pool of confusion in Raymond Red’s Kamera Obskura. The film is conceptually sophisticated, more so than the bunch of films like Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist that merely borrowed stereotypical silent film aesthetics for trite nostalgia. Red, in recreating a silent film and dressing that recreated silent film within a storyline of a celebrated discovery of an obscure lost film in an abandoned warehouse, already tackles several very current issues that deserve to be put in the forefront of cultural discourse.

In the first few minutes of the film, Red has legendary archivists Teddy Co, Cesar Hernando and Ricky Orellana debating on the import of their discovery in front of the media. In their excited discussions, they traverse a gamut of intelligent topics from Philippine film history to the dilemmas of film preservation, preserving in the film what would have been limited in private conversations over beer or coffee.

The film concludes with the same kind of discussion by the same people, although this time, their discussions are shielded from the eyes and ears of media. The three scholars, in a darkened screening room where their discovery just finished screening without the missing final reel, begin debating the merits of what they saw and the repercussions of the missing final reel. Hypotheses, educated guesses and opinions are thrown around. Despite that, everything deliciously ends in more confusion than when they began, cinephiles lost in cinematographic concerns. The film’s lack of resolution is remarkable. It expresses the very state of discourse in Philippine cinema, how it is honestly just a lot of babble and issues discussed and re-discussed ad infinitum.

The most painful part of this is that Red’s film is utterly brilliant, at least in concept. It is just that the middle and most important part --- the silent film that urged those three wise men of Philippine cinema to debate endlessly --- is wanting.

The film is tainted by Diwa de Leon’s ludicrous and tyrannical score that both limits and betrays the possibilities of emotions of Red’s undeniably dynamic visuals. The very existence of the musical score betrays the nature of the silent film where music is played live during screenings. The film’s bookends, where the projection of the so-called rediscovered lost film is featured as the framing device for the silent middle part, further negates the need for the scoring. The logical guffaw could just be ignored had De Leon’s score been a mere background, an ornament. However, the score is more damaging than that as it supplants interpretation and emotions with its inherent lack of imagination and subtlety.

Absent the score, the very silent film part itself, shot in digital and made to look like it was shot in film during post, is a mixed bag. The filmmaking process seems to be a brash betrayal of the core concept, but arguments can be raised supporting Red’s choice of filmmaking, especially in this age where film is quickly entering obsolescence.

There are arresting moments, particularly in the opening where Juan (Pen Medina) finds himself trapped in a cell where a single ray of light reveals the world outside, with an imposing building and flying machines all over, upside down, like inside the titular camera obscura. The very idea of that silent film within the film is astounding. By telling the story of Juan who upon his escape from the cell becomes some sort of political hero when a movie camera assimilates with his arm, Red expresses the power of cinema, how it can be used and abused, in the name of money, advocacy or, as the post-credit sequence reveals, the filmmaker himself. Unfortunately, most of the message gets lost in the spectacle and the noise.

Perhaps Red could have spent several more months or years perfecting the crafting of the film. The final product reveals the many compromises Red had to make in order to reach the wide audience that Cinemalaya has earned for itself. These compromises may very well be the culprit of all the disappointments and frustrations with the film. These compromises Red had to make expose the deficiencies of the film festival’s rules and mechanics that surround its film’s production, how its obsolete grants and inhumane deadlines create a culture of hurried filmmaking, turning filmmakers like Red and his compatriots into factories for the admittedly lofty goal of reaching to the festival’s captive market that promises the possibility of an audience for the their films once freed from the constrictions of a film festival.

A question appears. “Is that lofty goal really worth all the compromises?” Well, only the filmmakers can sincerely answer that.

(Cross-published in Twitch and ABS-CBNnews.)

Himpapawid (2009)

Kamis, 25 Februari 2010

Himpapawid (2009)

Himpapawid (Raymond Red, 2009)
English Title: Manila Skies

More than three decades after Lino Brocka's Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975), Filipino filmmakers are still busy depicting the treacherous allure of Manila. The styles and methods may have changed, with today's directors and story-writers eschewing melodrama for documentary-like realism, but the intent is just the same: to unmask the city of its glittering neon lights and expose the asphyxiating poverty that pervades it. Raymond Red, in Himpapawid (Manila Skies), goes further than trite exposition. He knows that we know that our dire situation, how the nation is always at the mercy of moneyed capitalists, how the masses are suffocated by an inept bureaucracy, how the poor are so impoverished that the only currency they acknowledge is hope. It is that hope that drives them to strive for a better future, relocate to the metropolis where opportunities are peddled left and right, and patiently persist despite the astute oppression and marginalization.

However, Himpapawid is hardly a film about hope. It is about the loss of all hope, about how this frustration rapidly morphs into desperation. The film is not simply about poverty, but about the absurdity of this nation's poverty; how despite two celebrated peaceful revolutions toppling corrupt presidents, and despite yearly reports of advances in the nation's economy, the poor remain poor, if not getting poorer. It is an angry picture. The anger, fluently communicated through the film's main character Raul (Raul Arellano), an ordinary laborer who we first see pleading, begging and finally, threatening for a day off to apply for an overseas job, is so palpable and pronounced, it frightens you immensely. Raul's story, enlarged by Red from a piece of news about a peculiar hijacking incident in 2000 where the hijacker, after collecting money and jewelry from the passengers and crew of the flight, jumps out of the plane and dies in the process, represents the ridiculous lengths the poor have to commit to in order to escape from an inescapable fate of what seems to be a cycle of tremendous hope leading on to tremendous disappointments.

A bag of cash and jewels falls from the sky. It just lands there in the middle of an undeveloped provincial farmland, almost magically. A farmer (Ronnie Lazaro) walks by, picks up the fortune, and runs home, promises his son he'll send him to Manila to study with a specific condition that he never returns to the province. The shot of the dreamy little boy carrying the baskets he and her mother sell for extra income fades (which cleverly gives an impression of a few decades passing by) to give way to Raul, crossing the street in crowded Manila, carrying a sack of goods on his back. From Raul's woeful experiences that we witness, from his unpalatable adventures in the middle of Philippine bureaucracy to his participation in his pals' botched attempt to steal from their shady recruiter the money that was stolen from them, the allure of the big city is exposed for the dangerous sham that it really is; that Manila, which is for the millions of Filipinos in the province, the place that holds for them the elusive promise of escape from the unbearable humdrum of their respective impoverished lives, is nothing more than a nightmare perfumed with neon-lighted billboards that display fantasies of prosperity. Yet, the sight of families of five, seven and ten crowding inside a makeshift shanty, a whiff of the pungent air from the hundreds of overly crowded squatter colonies that dot the city, and a survey of the plenty yet similar sob stories from these slums, all relating to their collective misfortune of leaving all their belongings in the province for the promised job in the city only to be left unemployed and without any money to go back, expose the sad and difficult reality in Red's outrageous fiction.

Red's play on the timelines, where he blurs the boundaries of past and present with the use of clever editing, cinematography, and production design, is more than just cinematic sleight-of-hand. In the 70's, audiences were horrified by the tragic fate of Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag's Julio Madiaga, who was plucked from the provinces, exploited in the city, killed by his fellowmen in a mob. In the 80's, audiences were again confronted by Brocka with Macho Dancer (1988) the same story of a man who flees the province for Manila, then works as a stripper in one of the seedy gay bars in the city, and ends up with the same fate as Julio. The 90's saw several variations of the same story, the most memorable of which is Carlos Siguion-Reyna's fantastically melodramatic Abot Kamay ang Pangarap (Elena's Redemption, 1996), about a barrio lass turned maltreated maid. The new millennium saw Maryo J. De Los Reyes' Laman (Flesh, 2002), and Mario O'Hara's Babae sa Breakwater (Woman of the Breakwater, 2004). Himpapawid, I believe, is not the last of its kind.

Himpapawid bears the purely cinematic sheen (the luscious cinematography, its genre aspirations, its traditional screenplay) of its predecessors. There is a marked difference between Red's feature and the several low-to-no budget features being produced by many intrepid Filipino filmmakers; as Red's film has an elegant pace and a clear and consistent mise-en-scene, recalling the disciplined artistry of studio filmmaking, before it was cheapened by the need to break-even in a cutthroat market. More than self-indulgence, the purpose of making Himpapawid such a consciously polished film, reminiscent of Brocka, Mike De Leon, and Ishmael Bernal, is, in my opinion, to enunciate the absurdity of the fact that things, whether in reality or in what defines this nation's cinema, are still criminally unchanged. There is no difference between today and forty years ago. Manila remains to be hell; perhaps glittered and gilded to the unassuming provincial dreamer, but definitely still hell. Cinema, reacting to such unchanging reality, can only either exploit it or be angry about it. Red thankfully does the latter.