Film as history: Recollections & lessons

For an industry whose genesis has been reduced to dusty notations on yellowed defunct magazines and obscured by faded memories of movie stars who reigned prior to WWII, Bienvenido Lumbera’s Re-viewing Filipino Cinema is a welcome recollection for the movie industry in the Philippines.

Lumbera has gifted the country with his Re-viewing, which we understand is already required reading for film students in certain schools. Deconstructed into four sections offering realistic insights into film as industry, culture and history, this anthology of critical essays and movie reviews written in both Tagalog and English by our National Artist for Literature, also a noted cineaste, is a virtual history of our national identity.

Re-viewing starts at the beginning of the Filipino film industry, its challenges and the effects from wars and dictators. The book delves into Filipino cinema as moneymaker, attempting a balance between entertainment and artistic needs; celebrates the artists and innovators in pushing Filipino films creatively and technically forward; and in its concluding section, covers Filipino film as social commentary, investigating society’s ills and encouraging us to evolve and meet social injustice head on.

To illustrate his four sections, Lumbera includes his movie reviews of some of the most critically-acclaimed films during the Martial Law era of Ferdinand Marcos. Sakada directed by Behn Cervantes is about unrest among sugar workers and Batch ’81 from Mike de Leon is an allegory on fascism — both were produced during that period. Scorpio Nights by Peque Gallaga in 1985, said to be the first Filipino feature to bring the porn genre out from the underside of legitimate filmmaking, is not only a magnificent exercise in erotic moviemaking, but also shows the role of politics during the Marcos regime, “which includes enjoyment of pleasures offered by food and sex under a repressive political regime” where attention is successfully diverted from activist activities.

In 1998, Jeffrey Jeturian directed his first film Sana Pag-ibig Na from a script by Bing Lao, a tremendous artistic and commercial success, which started a writer-director partnership. The film tells of a wife (Charito Solis) discovering that her husband (Chinggoy Alonso), who had just died, had a mistress (Angel Aquino). The son (Gerard Madrid) sets out to confront the mistress but ends up falling in love with her.

In Re-viewing Filipino Cinema, Lumbera, in answering charges of Filipino movies dying from competition with Hollywood, says that we cannot hope to approximate the technology and budgets of Hollywood, but “we do have an enormous supply of creativity, craftsmanship, and above all, heart, as Sana Pag-ibig Na amply proves. And perhaps it is heart, an honest-to-goodness Filipino heart that is at the center of Jeturian’s film, which will win back our straying audiences.”

Lumbera wrote his essay in 1998. After 14 years, we wonder if Jeturian who has been seduced by television recently would soon return to his first love. 

Similarly, Lumbera revisits Sister Stella L, Manila by Night, the Second Golden Age that spawned Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Celso Ad Castillo, Mario O’Hara, Mike de Leon and later, Marilou Diaz-Abaya and Laurice Guillen.

We believe that Re-viewing’s main purpose is found in a recurring theme: A call to action to locate and preserve classic Filipino films for future generations, which is intimately tied in with our identity as a people. He is certainly not afraid to call our colonial mentality the culprit behind Filipinos being ensnared by the filmic creations coming out of Hollywood and Japanese animé that are tragically replacing our own stories as told through the Komiks.

It is about time, we think, that Lumbera starts working on those essays that will cover the 2000 to 2013 era.

(E-mail your comments to [email protected].)