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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520314634 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2020 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The Country and the City
Social Melodrama and the Symptoms of Authoritarian Rule
One of the most accomplished works of the new cinema that emerged in the Philippines in the early 1970s revolves around a scene of waiting, one in which little appears to be happening even though everything is actually at stake. The film, called Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light, 1975), returns intermittently to the image of a young man standing on a dingy corner of Chinatown. He has his eye on the window above an always-closed storefront. He waits for any signs of his lost sweetheart, a country lass who may have fallen prey to white slavery. Somewhere behind him, a fortune teller's sign reads: "Do you have a problem?" In an inconspicuous but visible corner of the movie screen, we might find the answer to that question. A snip of graffiti scrawled in blood-red paint on newsprint screams "Long Live the Workers!" Another handmade poster contains an image of a raised fist and the initials of a radical youth organization called Kabataang Makabayan (Nationalist Youth). A third poster, partially torn, alternately suggests the words Junk (Ibasura) and Take Down (Ibagsak), depending on which letters the man's body obscures and reveals as he moves around.
The political graffiti in Brocka's mise-en-scène are imprints of history. They are the traces of a political ferment that began in the West — in the antiestablishment and antiwar uprisings of the late 1960s — and spread, albeit not unchanged, to the third world country where the young man dwells. The First Quarter Storm was the name of the biggest salvo of the Philippine rebellion against "imperialism, feudalism, fascism" in the year 1970. From January to April, thousands of angry college students, laborers, and political activists took to the streets to express displeasure at the reelection of President Ferdinand Marcos and to demand change in the country. They turned out in droves for the first state-of-the-nation address of his second term and hurled rocks at the first couple as they exited the Congressional building. The first lady bumped her head as she scurried into a car. Four days later, activists rammed a fire truck into one of the gates of Malacañang, the chief executive's residence. Authorities went after protesters with batons, tear gas, and truncheons. Often, the youthful activists evaded capture with the help of Manila's sympathetic denizens, who popped open a door and pulled them in just seconds before the police turned a corner. Some of those events happened on the same streets where the film takes place. Yet in Brocka's movie, the images of this tumultuous period appear only in flashes, like the antiestablishment slogans glimpsed fleetingly behind the protagonist in the opening sequence.
In this and other chapters of the book, I venture a practice of closely reading such provocative inscriptions of politics and history in Brocka's martial law melodramas. The strict and inconsistent censorship of films during the Marcos regime demands that scholars pay attention to seemingly insignificant details. Such careful scrutiny is also necessary because of the abundance of both thinly veiled and subconsciously inscribed allegories in the director's work. As I hope to illustrate in this chapter, martial law melodramas follow a tradition of sociopolitical critique initiated in nineteenth-century Philippine letters. That tradition inscribes sociopolitical discourse overtly (through historical and political references) as well as indirectly (through allusions and metaphors). Central to it is the novel Noli me tangere (1887) by Philippine national hero José Rizal. Rizal's roman à clef inspired a nineteenth-century anti-colonial revolution against Spain.
Before I interpret Brocka's Marcos-era films through the prism of a critique inspired by Rizal, I wish to discuss the context in which his oeuvre emerged. The director articulated his desire to create a new kind of Filipino film in 1974, two years into martial law and the same number of years after he returned from a self-imposed hiatus from the film industry. Brocka's star was still on the rise when he took leave from filmmaking. He had directed nine genre pictures, six of them for an independent production outfit called LEA Productions. Several of his movies were box office successes, including his debut, Wanted: Perfect Mother (1970). His work also collected trophies for Best Picture and Best Director at awards ceremonies. Perhaps most notably, critics lauded Tubog sa ginto (Gold Plated, 1971) for its candid portrayal of homosexuality. Even the mediocre Cadena de amor (Chain of Love, 1971) — a romance that shows the leading man walking away from a small plane crash with only a reversible case of amnesia — took home seven prizes from the Manila Film Festival. His career hit a low point with two commercial efforts that opened to scathing reviews: Now (1971), a youth- oriented musical with a subplot about political activism, and Cherry Blossoms (1972), a romance filmed partly in Japan and featuring American actor Nicholas Hammond. Brocka shared the critics' poor opinion of his pictures and even told journalists to skip them.
Brocka declined to explain his respite from the movies, claiming that his reasons were "personal." One journalist speculated that a spat with LEA Productions prompted the hiatus. Rumors circulated that one of the outfit's proprietors bore a personal grudge against a star in Gold Plated and thus barred its exhibition at the Venice Film Festival. Whatever the reason, Brocka diverted his energies to making quality television drama with members of the progressive-leaning theater group Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), which he joined in the late 1960s. He also planned his eventual return to filmmaking by trying to secure financing for a movie that would take Philippine cinema in a new direction. But, as the director would later recall, he came up empty-handed. "I wanted to work, but producers could not understand my desire to make films that can truly be considered meaningful [may kahulugan]," he told a reporter. "Most of the producers that came to me wanted only action or fantasy movies." One of the board members of PETA created a scheme to fund the filmmaker's dream project. With the help of investors from the corporate world, the public sector, as well as film actors and creative personnel, Brocka scraped together enough money to found an outfit called CineManila. According to press releases, the company aimed to produce films "with a good story, good cast, that depicts Filipino values so that audiences can identify with them." Brocka also expressed his desire to make "a complete breakaway from the trend for fantasies and slapstick comedy" that ruled popular cinema. CineManila envisioned a transnational audience for its alternative pictures, identifying "Guam, Hawaii, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and California" as prospective markets because of their large overseas Filipino population.
A project initially called Buhay (Life) served as the test case for Brocka's new cinema. Mario O'Hara wrote the screenplay, based in part upon stories from Brocka's youth. The filmmakers changed the title to Tinimbang ka ngunit kulang (Weighed but Found Wanting), based upon a line from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. To obtain lush, bucolic scenery, Brocka filmed on location. As an article notes, he and cinematographer Joe Batac captured the rustic charm of the "hillsides of Tanay (Rizal), the heart of Sta. Rita (Pampanga), the pace and pulse of San Jose (Nueva Ecija) and the beautiful beaches of Nasugbu (Batangas)." Brocka made his "dream project" with a shooting ratio of 4:1, considerably exceeding his usually slim allocation of film stock.
The director remarked to a journalist that the film "is quite timely" ("medyo ayon sa takbo ng panahon natin sa kasalukuyan.") Quite tellingly, however, Brocka added in Filipino: "But it has nothing to do with Martial Law" ("Pero walang kinalaman dito ang Martial Law.") Fear of drawing the censors' attention seems to underpin Brocka's equivocation. This attempt to downplay the film's political relevance was a calculated gambit. There would have been no means for Brocka's cinema politics to do its proper work if the censors blocked the film. Indeed, he took pains to avoid shaping the movie around resolute political statements. Only brief instances occur in the film that signal any link to martial law or Ferdinand Marcos. Set alongside these politically charged fragments, Brocka's insistence on de-politicizing his work generates a curious irony. The conscious erasure of the political all the more registers the moments when, however briefly, it becomes perceptible. The method I propose for reading the films in this chapter, hence, is that of seizing these moments as the distinct allegorical shards of sociopolitical critique.
Beginning with Weighed, Brocka devised a model for an alternative kind of sociopolitical representation on film. Focusing on Brocka's newly developed filmmaking, this chapter analyzes two landmark works in this vein. Weighed and Manila fall under the rubric of "social melodrama." John G. Cawleti characterizes the social melodrama as "an evolving complex of formulas" that tell intricate narratives of heightened feeling and moral dilemmas "with something that passes for a realistic social or historical setting." Its purpose, he argues, is to give viewers a "detailed, intimate, and realistic analysis of major social or historical phenomena." Cawleti's term is especially useful in describing the two Brocka films, both of which combine realism with the sensibility and features of melodrama but also differ from each other in several respects. Equally important, as I have mentioned earlier, the films draw from strategies of representation and critique that Rizal popularized. As in the latter's novel, the director's new social melodramas feature sprawling multicharacter narratives with a young male protagonist at their center. Whereas Rizal's Noli represented the conditions of Spain's decaying empire, Brocka's movies registered the state of affairs in the country and the city during the early years of martial law. In the balance of this section, I shall elucidate the workings of Brocka's social melodramas, trace their connections to Rizal's example, and map the relationship of his two most pioneering films to the politics of the Marcos regime.
WEIGHED BUT FOUND WANTING
After the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it might seem odd that Brocka looked back to Rizal's canonical nineteenth-century fiction in his attempt at devising a novel approach to Philippine cinema. That said, the national hero never lost his appeal to Filipino artists and intellectuals in search of social relevance. To cite just a few examples from the same decades, characters and subplots from Rizal's fiction inspired such landmark works of Philippine literature as Rogelio Sicat's short story "Old Selo" ("Tata Selo," 1962) and Paul Dumol's play Barrio Captain Tales (Kabesang Tales, 1975). Rizal's influence on critical literature and the arts solidified many decades earlier. As Soledad Reyes notes, the pioneers of the twentieth- century Tagalog novel used his work as "the main sources not only of the realistic tradition but even as sources of realist techniques." They emulated as well Rizal's project of using literature to engender social reform or, as he put it eloquently, "to expose the cancer of the body politic on the steps of the temple so that a cure may be offered."
The influence of Rizal's vision of art and politics continued to spread with the help of legislation. Starting in the 1950s, the law mandated all Philippine schools to teach Rizal's writings, thereby informing the vision of artists of diverse political persuasions and various media. Philippine cinema from the start has celebrated Rizal's works and the hero himself. Its pioneers chose him as the subject of the first Philippine-produced movies. In the 1950s and '60s, the justly renowned Gerardo De Leon made film adaptations of Rizal's novels. De Leon was Brocka's idol, and it seems possible that his work inspired the latter's fascination with the national hero's legacy.
The influence of Riza's Noli on Brocka's Weighed is evident not only in the latter's approach to social criticism but also its narrative. Both stories begin with the young upper-class male protagonist trying to find his bearings in his provincial domicile. In Noli, Crisostomo Ibarra returns to the fictive town of San Diego (in Rizal's home province of Laguna) after seven years of studying and living in Europe. His homecoming is an unhappy occasion. He discovers that his father Don Rafael, one of the wealthiest men in town, died in prison after falling out with a Spanish priest named Damaso. In the Spanish-colonized Philippines, peninsular clergy such as Damaso were virtual sovereigns, more powerful and despotic than colonial administrators. Crisostomo eventually learns that Damaso not only put Rafael in jail but ordered the desecration of his corpse. Damaso's crusade against the Ibarras continues with his attempts to break up Crisostomo's engagement to his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara. The young woman is very dear to the friar. As it turns out, Damaso is Maria Clara's biological father.
Damaso makes snide remarks about Crisostomo's father on several occasions. Rather than minding such provocations, Crisostomo takes the high road and busies himself with charitable work. He finances the building of a modern public schoolhouse in his father's memory. Damaso and his fellow clerics ensure, however, that those plans never materialize. They attempt to kill Crisostomo through a staged accident at the school's construction site. When the scheme fails, one of the Spanish priests, driven by lust for Maria Clara, successfully frames Crisostomo as the leader and financier of a fictitious uprising against the Spaniards in town.
Damaso, who epitomizes the malevolence of theocracy and the colonial system, is but one of many broadly sketched characters that represent society's ills. He and other clerics prey on citizens from various social classes. The victims of this theocracy include the peasant Sisa and her two young sons. Sisa's boys earn a pittance as bell ringers at the church. Their supervisor, an ill-tempered sexton, frequently docks their pay and beats them up. In a series of tragic events, Sisa's children disappear (the younger likely killed by the sexton), and she loses her sanity as a result. Crisostomo, who learns about the family's troubles from a mysterious boatman named Elias, comes to their aid on several occasions.
Elias, witnessing Crisostomo's empathy for Sisa's family, reveals himself as an outlaw and dissident. Although Elias's family has a history of conflicts with the Ibarras, he recognizes Crisostomo's virtue and rescues him twice from the schemes of Damaso and his conspirators. On the second of those rescues, Elias heroically sacrifices his life to save Ibarra. He does so in the belief that a reformer from the upper crust would be better equipped to change society than a poor worker like himself. Rizal's novel concludes with many of the other virtuous characters — including Crisostomo, Maria Clara, Sisa and her older son Basilio — devastated, injured or dead. The faint glimmer of hope from Elias's sacrifice and Crisostomo's political awakening reappears in the novel's sequel, El filibusterismo (1891). In that work, Crisostomo returns under the guise of a Cuban jeweler named Simoun and uses his influence and wealth to gather the forces of dissent in a violent rebellion against the colonial order.
Like Crisostomo, the protagonist of Weighed belongs to a landed family. Junior (played by first-time actor Christopher De Leon) is the child of a couple with a rice plantation and business interests in rice milling and operating gas stations. As with Noli, the narrative of his development also proceeds along two lines of action that frequently converge. The first is a coming-of-age story. In the months between summer and Christmastime, Junior falls in and out of love with his first girlfriend, Evangeline (Hilda Koronel). Their relationship deteriorates, and she ends up getting impregnated by and marrying their mutual friend Nitoy (Joseph Siytangco), the mayor's son. All is not lost for Junior, however, as he experiences sex for the first time with an older woman named Milagros (Laurice Guillen). The latter, a college student from Manila, happens to be Nitoy's illegitimate half-sister. Amid these bittersweet events, Junior discovers a terrible family secret. The revelation changes his life.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Martial Law Melodrama"
by .
Copyright © 2020 José B. Capino.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxvii
1 The Country and the City: Social Melodrama and the Symptoms of Authoritarian Rule 1
2 "A Thoroughly Different Kind of Mother": Surrogate Autocrats, Restive Youth, and the Maternal Melodrama 42
3 The Melodramatics of Crime: Film Noir in the Twilight of Martial Law 74
4 Tales of Unrelenting Misfortunes: Family Melodrama and the 1980s Economic Crisis 108
5 Men in Revolt: Two Experiments in Political Cinema 128
6 A Dirty Affair: Political Melodramas of Democratization 161
7 Picturing "A Faggot's Dilemma": Sexuality, Politics, and a Commerce in Queer Movies 198
Coda: Three Non-endings 237
Notes 247
Index 287