Historical interpretations, myths, and mysteries: Luna, Aguinaldo, and Bonifacio

Encouraged by good commentaries from my son Keith and his wife Sari Dalena, indie–film makers, I watched the movie “Heneral Luna.” I was not disappointed.

Technically, it is an excellent movie. Our cinema industry has moved decades forward and this movie is testimony. I recommend it.

As a story plot, it reminded me of the 1950’s classic movie of Marlon Brando, Viva Zapata! How much of it was real and how much cinematic?

I never bothered much then about truth and reality in a movie. In the case of Zapata, Mexico is not my country and I was very young then. But Heneral Luna’s country is mine too and I am, I know, much wiser now.

Between cinematic drama and truth, drama often wins. In movies, embellishment for cinematic effect -- the Hollywood mystique – wins the audience or forces the message.

All kinds of story-telling are vehicles for telling the truth, a lie, a myth or fiction. The credentials of the story-teller are, therefore, important.

Interpretation of history. Changing vogues are par for the course in the interpretation of history. Such changes are like the movement of waves. Opinions influence society’s evolution. Judgments fluctuate with the prevailing wind.

In society, there is always a perennial struggle of viewpoints. Historians, social scientists, those in government and those outside of government, those forces within and those influences without – they all contend for primacy and control.

History is written by the victors, as military historians would tell us. Such a dictum– whether political, economic, social or cultural history – could be restated: the current prevailing wind of opinion or prejudice decides the score. (The thought need not be right, but it is in control of the information.)

Generals Luna and Aguinaldo. This movie takes sides. It is clear where the heroes and villains are.

General Antonio Luna, though shown as temperamentally imbalanced, comes out as the one with the foresight about the motives of the American conquerors. General Aguinaldo, though he was president, was shown as less transparent while in command.

In a highly dramatic, but fictionally improvised moment, General Luna delivers an impassioned case for war preparation in a cabinet meeting presided by the Philippine Republic’s president, General Emilio Aguinaldo.

All the major personages are present. In the clash of views, General Luna practically demolishes the middle-of-the-roaders (Felipe Buencamino and Pedro Paterno) and denigrates them as mercenaries who would hand the country to the Americans on a silver platter.

Always within hearing distance from the polio-afflicted Apolinario Mabini, his adviser and brains, General Aguinaldo is portrayed essentially as a weak chair of the Cabinet meeting.

In the final climactic dramatic scene, General Antonio Luna is assassinated. The scene leaves little to the imagination, but is overtly Hollywoodic. Luna looks like a superman without his kryptonite, receiving volleys of bullets and then being butchered, but taking almost an eternity to fall and yield life.

To escape the judgment of history, the movie’s target suspects for the murder, General Aguinaldo and Pedro Paterno, who both lived much longer lives than Luna, are allowed to absolve themselves of implication through their monologues.

Though historians have given much more definite documentation of the execution of Andres Bonifacio (also given cameo presentation at the start of this movie), in the case of Antonio Luna, there is no paper trail and implicating Aguinaldo to the plot is weak.

Andres Bonifacio. The historian’s estimate of Andres Bonifacio rose with the publication of Teodoro Agoncillo’s biography of him, Revolt of the Masses (UP Press, 1956).

Agoncillo’s book kindled Bonifacio’s humble background, his early struggles, his encounter and admiration of Rizal, his founding of the Katipunan and the subsequent expansion of the secret organization under his leadership as supremo, and finally, his providing the spearhead for the revolt against Spain during the year Rizal was executed.

In Bonifacio, a symbolic hero of the masses was discovered. Unlike Rizal who was born from comfortable circumstances, he rose from humble beginnings.

While Rizal was educated in the best schools and also secured higher professional learning in Europe, he was home grown but with an incomplete education.

Compared with those who wrote in the native language of the conquerors, he spoke and wrote only in the native tongue.

Agoncillo’s methods mined local sources, including informal interviews. While also using traditional historical method of validation through archives and records, he did not consider these as the final arbiter.

In this way, Agoncillo the historian used a larger variety of local materials. In his nationalistic framework, records kept in the archives of foreign powers could be tainted with bias and wrong interpretation.

Many Filipino historians embraced this contrast and began to put Andres Bonifacio up on a much higher plane compared to other heroes. Some even suggested that he deserved higher reverence than Rizal.

The invented hero? In his book, Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Recreation of Andres Bonifacio (New Day Publisher, Quezon City, 1997), Glenn May, an American historian, placed Agoncillo’s work under the methodological microscope. He criticized Agoncillo of manufacturing a hero out of Bonifacio because of his faulty sources.

This American historian had earlier published a book on the American conquest of Batangas province based on his own study of archival records. His main criticism of Agoncillo is that his methodology was wrong and his sources were faulty.

More specifically, his charge was that the main documents he attributed to be Bonifacio’s works were not original and had doubtful veracity.

More seriously, the former national librarian, Epifanio de los Santos (the historian after whom EDSA is named) and his son, together, kept Katipunan documents that were (unknowingly?) forged, if not copied from originals that could not be verified.

Almost like a wall, many Filipino historians and non-historians came to the defense of Agoncillo’s methods and the sources of his documentation. The dispute reached vitriolic proportions, touching raw nerves that harked back to animosities concerning past American role in the making of Philippine heroes.

The counter-attacks against the American critic were directed at May’s competence in the knowledge of Tagalog construction (which was the basis of his analysis of the documents attributed to Bonifacio) and on the quality of his scholarship.

Rafael Ileto, who is today, one of the country’s eminent historians, dealt with May’s methodological critique on even-handed scholarly terms. (Reynaldo C. Ileto, Filipinos and their Revolution: Event, Discourse and Historiography, 1998, especially “Heroes and Mythmakers,” pp. 218-237.)

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