Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, Gerardo de Leon, 1961), and Kino-Sine

For the occasion of the launching of Tilman Baumgartel's book Kino-Sine: Philippine-German Cinema Relations, basically a collection of articles that outlines the development of the Philippine independent filmmaking movement of the '70, '80s, '90s, and its strong links with the Goethe Institute Manila (Germany and the Philippines has this fascinating cultural--I don't know how to call it, affinity, fondness, affection--for each other)...for this occasion, I say, the Goethe Institute is kind enough to screen Gerardo de Leon's flawed but nevertheless fascinating masterpiece Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, 1961) on Wednesday, February 20, 1.30 pm, at the Cine Adarne, UP Film Center, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

The main reason Noli was chosen for the mini-festival, of course, was because the novel--Filipino hero and martyr Jose Rizal's first major work--was printed in Berlin, and the last surviving print of de Leon's film adaptation was helpfully if wobbily (it was in extremely poor condition) restored by the Goethe Institute.

Even with a perfect print, I can't imagine anyone saying de Leon's Noli is a perfect film. While the casting of the men is impeccable (Eddie del Mar as Crisostomo Ibarra, Oscar Keesee, Jr. as Padre Damaso, the great Leopoldo Salcedo as Elias), the women (Edita Vital as Ibarra's beloved Maria Clara, Lina Carino as the hapless Sisa) seem to have been hired more for their pretty faces than their acting abilities.

Actually the film's true star is de Leon' style, virtually an encyclopedia of low-angled shots, striking deep focus compositions, dramatic lighting, on-camera effects, and precision cutting--the variety in turn complementing the collection of anecdotes, plot twists, and melodramatic confrontations that made up much of Rizal's novel. If the results are not perfectly satisfying, perhaps that's in part due to the fact that De Leon is a master of gothic drama, and Noli a dark but essentially comic satire of Philippine society; only later, when the forces of oppression rise up triumphant does the film truly come into its own. Perfect marriage of material and filmmaking sensibility had to wait until El Filibusterismo (The Filibuster, 1962), when the ambivalently evil Simoun (Pancho Magallona, in what may be the greatest performance in Philippine cinema) plotted revenge against the all-powerful Spaniards.

Nevertheless--two boys, Crispin and Basilio, shiver like mice high up in a bell tower, where de Leon uses the claustrophobic space and enveloping darkness to suggest the shape and nature of the children's fears; when the tyrannical sacristan finally appears, de Leon momentarily wipes away the eyes' pupils, giving him the blank stare of a doll, a shark, a child's terror. When Basilio finaly comes home, he learns that his long-missing, much feared father had come home before him, eaten his dinner, left; Basilio ignores his mother's news and immediately checks her for bruises (a lovely gesture that endears Basilio to us--not only is he affectionate, he's smart, too).

De Leon's realization of the famous scene where Sisa is arrested (famous partly because it's based on what happened to Rizal's own mother) is equally vivid. Sisa runs up the street to the camera in panic; cut to Basilio in the house, backing away; soldiers are approaching. He drops out a window, sprains his ankle, but manages to crawl away. His mother isn't as lucky; as the soldiers approach the camera, de Leon cuts to her stepping in in from the side to stand in her way. She's force-marched across beautiful landscapes, past the church that was source of much of her troubles (she asks not to be humiliated before the townspeople; the soldiers order her to march two steps ahead--no more). At the station of the guardia civil she's marched past prostitutes and a hanging saddle (de Leon's not one to shy away from a sexually suggestive visual metaphor); the capitan angrily dismisses her. Sisa, running home, cries out for her two boys, both of which are now missing. She finds a torn shard of Basilio's shirt, and in one of the most beautiful shots in the film de Leon's camera peers at her from below as she raises the fluttering piece of cloth up to the sun.

There's Ibarra and Maria Clara's party at the fisheries, where a crocodile is discovered; a man dives in and Tarzan-fashion, wrestles with the creature. De Leon's cutting is fast and furious; there's so much splash and struggle you find yourself panicking along with the spectators. Ibarra jumps in to help, and the sequence ends spectacularly, with men pulling on a rope and a live creature hanging helplessly, roaring its defiance (the shot sells the entire sequence; seeing the monster in all its glory, you can't help but believe the danger the two men were in).

There's the attempt on Ibarra's life, the shot of Elias' profile as he catches wind of the plot, Ibarra's frightened look up at the fateful cornerstone hanging above him, de Leon's thrilling yet coherent cutting of the chaos that ensues. There's Sisa, driven mad at last, being made to dance, then whipped, by the capitan's sexually deprived, sadistic wife (the whip like a tongue, flicking about Sisa's body). Finally there's the great phantasmagorial sequence of heroic Elias, confronted with one revelation too many, running across the novel's many landscapes with figures from his dead past (a woman lying in the ground; a man's decayed and beaten head sitting in a cage; a young woman floating on surf, a knife buried in her abdomen) accusing him of cowardice. Flawed in print and execution de Leon's Noli may be, it still stands as the definitive, most visually striking realization of Rizal's celebrated novel.