Photo still from Kristian Cordero's Hinulid (Sorrows of Sita, 2016)

Criticism of regional films demand the killing of the much-vaunted – and quite accepted – idea that the center discovered regional cinema and created the platform for them to develop. While mechanisms provided hastened the arrival of films coming from the region, those apparatuses were really geared towards the critical consumption by the said products of critics, curators, and film charlatans that were Manila-based and had access to capital or funds. 

The symptom of this kind of thinking occurred during the 10th anniversary of the “founding” of Cinema Rehiyon, the formalized aggrupation of filmmakers and their products. In a series of meetings, I was privy (as a member of the Executive Committee on Cinema under the auspices of the National Commission of Culture and the Arts) to the decision to hold the “Cinema Rehiyon” back to where it all began, Manila. The said act reproduced a socio-political relation embedded in the center-periphery/cosmopolitan center/satellite communities reading of society and culture or, more appropriately, societies and cultures.

The rationality and irrationality of the tenth year in the reckoning of a foundation or the appraisal of the origin asserts once more the very traditional and paternalistic notion of a coming home, to going back to the wellspring of ideas. I questioned that notion and, if the taking of minutes was faithful, asked that it be reflected – how I found that thinking irrelevant. 

Why return to Manila? Isn’t the region in the “regions” and, by definition of administration and management, away from the putative center? 

If we are to valuate and evaluate regional cinema, would it not be ideologically proper to move on and declare any achievement of cinemas from the region to continue it in the vast options provided by the region, instead of being circumspect and timid – and regressive – to exhibiting a patron-client attitude. This politics, for it is a political decision, of relying on Manila to once more present the said cinematic movement in its tenth year of achievement reflects the kind of seeing that cinemas from the region require to survive, subvert or surface. 

Cinemas were already “developing” in the region and it was merely needing an institution to bring them about. But for what and for whom are the greater imperative.  This need is also problematic because while the filmmakers from the region may continue to express gratitude to a patron, the said urgency has always been nurtured and greatly financed from the center.

In the dialogues and conversations therefore about the rise of the regional cinema, so much of the credits rolling before our very eyes are appearing not on the mythical silver screen but on the veristic wall of the central screen, propped up by audiences and film artists as well thriving on the idea of recognition from the powerful urban site. 

In Marcia Landy’s The Folklore of the Consensus, the dynamics between the regional and non-regional owes much to the spirit of Antonio Gramsci’s discourse. The films produced in the center become default cinema not only of importance but also of the national. 

Following Gramsci, Landy states how “Gramsci’s call for the creation of the national-popular culture and politics is thus tied to the imperative of creating affiliations between these opposing subaltern groups as a strategy for analyzing and overcoming ‘the present primitive sentiment of [their] being a despised race.” 

In the same book, Landy quotes Gramsci’s “critical” and “interrogative” approach to popular culture (and cinema is one) when the Marxist theoretician ranted about our constant reference to the people: “The people! But what is the people? Who knows them? Who has ever defined them?”

With the populist and popular arrival of regional cinema comes the departure of old criticism, the form that assumes there is a Philippine cinema or worst, a national cinema. The totalizing system that renders uniform and massed all films made in this country has now to be rejected. Genres are to be examined and not admitted for general patronage in the sense that forms are not only being questioned but subverted. Perhaps, with keen viewing, genres must go. In the face of artifice, differing approach to realities consumes the consumer. 

Even as we define what regional cinema constitutes, there is a growing consensus that regional cinemas should take place in the region. In locating the events in a particular site, one must contend with the language of the place. With the languages not anymore limited to Pilipino or Tagalog, film language is not the only crucial factor in the making of films. There is another language or languages spoken on screen. These languages are not exotic tools but instruments utilized to create a screenplay, flesh out scenes after scenes. 

If by film language we defer to the technologies of camera – the wide shot, the panoramic, the close-up, etc. – and the movements, the mise-en-scène, and other acknowledged elements of language – then all this has to be reconsidered. Out there in the regions, and in the cultures and histories of those spaces within the regions are ways and manners of depicting friendship, alliances, love and hate, joys and sadness. Even the notion of distance measurable for numerates now falls under the relativism of culture. (i)

Spaces as the subject of many papers in the art derive a re-reading in regional cinema. In films, for example, one must be cautious about the angles presented and to demand a knowledge about their meanings: is the profile natural among members of an ethnolinguistic community? Is extreme close-up allowed in some rural household?? Is the documenting of rituals, which are mystical and sacred to the insider but secularized for the film artist, allowed, allowable, tolerated, or negotiable?

Film aesthetics and principles lose their invincibility but otherwise gain a trenchant vulnerability, which now invests in the actors or those performing the story or relating the narrative potency and power. 

The altering questions for the filmmaker is not whether he has mastered the camera in the school of technologies and arts but whether he has learned to acknowledge the gazes involved in the landscape of the indigene.

Films owe more now to the ethnographic rather than the merely photographic. This does not mean the obscuring of the freedom in the techniques of a filmmaker or, specifically, a director of photography; this alternating (and not alternative) styles disclose or disclaim varying perspectives. 

The critic therefore enters not only a cinema but the universes of gestures particular to a place. The region is but a huge portal, beyond which can be located sites of interpretation, re-interpretations, and re-assessment.

If this new world for criticism appears from afar, it is so because many filmmakers have always managed to distantiate themselves from the areas of narrative in the guise of objectivity or because of approaches borrowing from distant, foreign shores. The colonizing gaze inherent in cinema, which has been described by many foreign critics as inescapably inter-national, turns into vocabularies of mediation. The other gazes are taken into consideration – the male and female gaze, the gendered look and many more. But within those gazes, the makers of films are asked to investigate further, to excavate through layers of meanings; to peruse the archives of kinship, politics, economics, inequalities, violence, peace; and, to be exegetical. 

Change, which is difficult to chronicle, is at the core of effective filmmaking. This is where the regional filmmaker filming the region insofar as he is grounded and resided in the geographies of his cinema has a valuable contribution. The ethnographic present – a narrative where a place seems to be trapped in the memories culled by a writer given his distance from the subject and the subjected place – can always present the wrong image of places at the margin. Thus the authenticities we demand are born more of ignorance than keen knowhow. The north and south of the Philippines (as its eastern and western sides) are facing shifts. The changes occurring are as real as those that happened in the historical past. Histories written down are no more important than the current sociologies of the place articulated and also queried 

Be that as it may, regional directors of regional cinema need not be kept within the regional territories in order that they would tell the stories of their disenfranchisement or empowerment. The dislocated artist is also a significant narrator. The writer resulting from the diaspora is a faithful witness to an arc in his life’s history. André Aciman in his essay, Shadow Cities, writes of the many quick changes happening around him and how any change reminds him how he is imperfectly connected to the place. He thus speaks: “I read the tokens of my dislocation, of my own transiency. An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.”

Aciman’s words despite and maybe because he is an outsider resonates well in the autobiography and auto-da-fe of the regional writer and filmmaker. The colonial histories of our country has given us histories plundered from our defeat, and constructed from the archives of the “enemies.” New historians and new readers of these histories are slowly claiming back oblique narratives, or stories that either run parallel along the stories told by colonizers are retold. The past is critiqued incessantly to the point of demonization of memories, or memories that are not ours, but remembered and stored for us. 

The supposed stability of the center negates the expulsion of a colonial or elite reading of the country’s collection of tales. The regions perceived always as unstable and fluid allow the splendor of altered and alternative histories and cultural mapping.  

The regions are exiles. Their cultures are exiled from the official culture established in and by the center. It will take a long time for the regions to banish the curse of the exotica, that element of beauty achieved because it is different, othered. But the world has changed: the exile is not anymore a de-facto unit of defeat. The exile, the refugee, and the displaced reflect more the conditions of majority of the people in the country. The regions do not merely contribute to the wholeness of the country; the regions are the missing parts in managing a more complete organization of identities for nation in progress, or in regress.

Eva Hoffman in The New Nomads pays tribute to the exilic factors of the real world that possesses “the virtues of instability, marginality, absence, and outsiderness.” 

As for the critic, he shall write of the contours of the landscapes generated by cinema from the margins. He takes notes of cultures and languages. While he may not have the rudimentary knowledge of all languages employed in cinemas, he should be aware of one fact: the subtitles in films that are really of his own county. This subversion of a national culture is both a lesson learned and an anthropological antenna raised. For while film criticisms pay tribute to the silences and nuances of a “good cinema” very few critics belabor the role of a different language being used on screen.

More than ever, the birth of regional cinema as we understand it to be (the battle for its definition rages on) is also the rebirth of the author, i.e. filmmaker. Declared dead by the high priests of post-modernism, the filmmaker and the writer are, now alive in the spaces of regional cinema. They are the potent sources of ways of understanding a film. It is as if cinema has once more displayed its power in the intertextual and extra-cinematic.  

It is perhaps my bias to say that the road to the cinemas of the region is almost the path of anthropologists. In his book on Franz Boas and the beginning of cultural anthropology, which bears the title Gods of the Upper Air. How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, Charles King writes: “We ought to suspend our judgment about other ways of seeing social reality until we really understand them, and in turn we should look at our own society with the same dispassion and skepticism with which we study far-flung peoples.”

King must be talking to all of us – regional cinema filmmakers, curators, and critics, even to those who live in the area where their stories come from. 


– Tito Genova Valiente 


(i) In my conversation with Teng Mangansakan, I brought up his use of spaces in his film. I remember how, instead of citing aesthetics, the filmmaker candidly spoke of his upbringing and how it instilled in him a pervasive, almost psychological tendency to create a clear space between him and other people. Apparently, this notion got translated onto the screen, with the distances and/or spaces manifested among his actors. 

References:

Aciman, André. Ed. Letters of Transit. Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss. New York.: The New York Public Library.

Landy, Marcia. The Folklore of Consensus. Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930-1943. Albany, NY.: State University of New York Press, Albany. 1998.

King, Charles. Gods of the Upper Air. How a Circle of  Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. New York.: Anchor Books. 2000.