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Mario Herrero O'Hara was known, if he was known at all, as legendary filmmaker Lino
Brocka's collaborator; more malicious wags called him Brocka's
lover (for the record--no, and there's a reason why). He acted in
several of Brocka's early films, playing a vivid villain in Tubog sa Ginto (Dipped
in Gold, 1971), and a
neglected son in Stardoom
(1971) opposite actress Lolita Rodriguez; three years later he played
Rodriguez's leprous lover in Brocka's seminal film Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You
Were Weighed But Found Wanting), having also written the film's
screenplay.
O'Hara wrote the teleplay that was the basis for what is arguably Brocka's best work, Insiang
(1976);
it went on to be the first-ever Filipino film to be screened in the
Director's Fortnight, in Cannes. The film--about a slum girl raped by
her mother's lover--is often called a masterpiece of realism, and no
wonder; O'Hara claimed in an interview that the story happened to his
backyard neighbors, in the city of Pasay.
(It's also claimed--and here you see the state of Filipino film history, that many details are open to contention, or can rarely be definitively documented--that the teleplay was based on a radio script written by actress and scriptwriter Mely Tagasa. Quite possibly both stories are true; that is to say, O'Hara took the premise from Ms. Tagasa's radio script but based details of the characters on his neighbors...)
It
was ever so in O'Hara's films and screenplays, his insistence that
everything and anything in his works be true, no matter how
fantastic. An outre character (a faded movie actress living in a
cemetery crypt), an outrageous occurrence (a historical figure
falling in love with his literary creation) can be allowed in his
films only if they were, by some convoluted definition, true.
O'Hara was notorious for not using a motorized vehicle--or rather he owned a vehicle, a van really, but drove it only on weekends and film shoots (he had a chauffeur who drove him around that he would also parsimoniously use in bit parts--I once spotted the old man playing Jose Rizal's father). Weekdays he took public utility jeeps and buses, and walked for hours from his house in Bangkal, Makati to Divisoria in Manila (a distance of some five miles), these marathon walks often being the source of his stories, characters, bits of dialogue, incidents (a particularly torrid film scene involving lovers coupling in a tricycle was inspired, he once, claimed, by something he actually saw happen on Taft Avenue). The joke was that
you had to watch yourself when talking to the man--he was liable to
put you in a movie someday, sometimes without your permission.
O'Hara
would make his directorial debut with Mortal
(1975),
his
fabulist re-telling of a real-life murder committed by a paranoid
schizophrenic; the film was to
be one of the first produced by the just-established Cine Manila,
under which Brocka had hoped to produce films. The murder victim's
family sued and won, unfortunately, and Cine Manila quickly folded.
O'Hara's second film was to be his first with popular singer-actress Nora Aunor. Aunor
had been looking for a prestige project to produce and
star in and asked for Brocka; Brocka didn't want to have “anything to do with
that Superstar!” and passed the project to O'Hara. O'Hara dug up an
old script and on a budget of about a million pesos--modest for a
World War 2 drama of that scale and ambition--created Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three
Years Without God,
1976), about the three years of Japanese Occupation when, as the
title suggests, God turned his face away from the Filipino people.
The film is possibly the
actress-producer's best performance, arguably the director's finest feature, and--possibly, arguably, strictly in my opinion--the finest Filipino film ever made.
Mario
O'Hara was born in Zamboanga City on April 20, 1946, the son of a
half Irish-American, half Filipino lawyer named Jaime O'Hara from
Antipolo, Rizal and Basilisa Herrero from Ozamis Oriental. Jaime
O'Hara's father was a Thomasite teacher, one of the earliest sent to
the Philippines, and this fact alone allowed the O'Haras including
Mario the chance to immigrate to the United States (Mario turned the
offer down).
It
was a large family--eight brothers and three sisters--and according
to O'Hara a happy one, with a childhood fueled by the imaginative
power of night-time radio. His neighborhood--some time after his birth the family had moved to Pasay City--had an unusual
layout, rich mansions on either side and a slum directly behind; O'Hara said many of his TV scripts came out of that backyard
slum. One of his brother's friends owned a movie theater and they
watched films for free--the titles included Michael Curtiz's The
Adventures of Robin Hood,
and the Flash Gordon serials.
O'Hara
planned a practical career--a chemical engineering degree, to be
earned at Adamson University--but the call of that childhood
night-voice proved too strong. On his sophomore year he auditioned
for a part in a Proctor and Gamble radio show at the Manila
Broadcasting Corporation; by third year college he dropped out
because he couldn't handle the load of both studying and performing on
radio.
In
1968 O'Hara met Lino Brocka; Brocka in turn used him as an actor on
the big screen and on the
theater stage, doing productions for PETA (Philippine Experimental
Theater Association). O'Hara came to helm his first feature by
criticizing Brocka's style of film direction. “If you know so much,
why don't you direct?” Brocka finally asked him. Brocka wanted to
do an adaptation of Edgardo Reyes' serialized novel Sa
Mga Kuko ng Liwanag
(In the Claws of
Light), to be produced
by Mike de Leon, so he passed on to O'Hara the film Mortal,
which he had been slated to direct.
After
the career high of Tatlong
Taong Walang Diyos
followed the career low of Mga
Bilanggong Birhen (The
Captive Virgins,
1977), yet another period epic. O'Hara was fired after accomplishing
ninety-five percent of principal photography (“I couldn't see
eye-to-eye with the producer,” he said); the picture was finished by another director.
We would see this tendency
time and time again--a film where the producer started interfering, and O'Hara either abandoning the project or allowing himself to be fired. On set he's described as a diligent, determined worker, but the moment you interfere with control of
the picture he was likely to drop matters and simply walk away.
One might try explain this tendency through O'Hara's attitude towards filmmaking, once articulated thusly: "first an actor, second a writer, and lastly a director." The self-confessed lack of commitment to cinema (think of Orson Welles spending four years of his life to finish Othello) can on one hand be considered a fatal flaw, in that O'Hara was often more opportunist than self-starter, his finished features far fewer than they could have been.
On
the other hand this gave his work an independent quality, a
fearlessness towards fellow filmmakers' (and movie audiences')
possibly angry responses to his more eccentric films (in Mortal
for example the film proceeds in a fragmentary, hallucinatory manner,
only later becoming more coherent--the way the protagonist's
schizophrenic mind becomes clearer as his mind grows gradually
saner)
Mga Bilanggong Birhen helped established a pattern: when O'Hara couldn't direct a film, he directed for television; when he couldn't direct at all, he acted; when he wasn't acting, he wrote. He performed for theater, radio, television, and film; he wrote scripts for Brocka and, at one point, for filmmaker Laurice Guillen's debut feature (Kasal? 1980); he also directed the television soap Flordeluna for a period of one year.
O'Hara wrote Ang Palayso ni Valentin
(The Palace of
Valentin), a zarzuela (a form of Filipino musical theater) about a decaying theater's decaying pianist, and his undying
love for the theater's beautiful singing star. The play was
O'Hara's valentine to the theatrical arts, and won the 1998 Centennial Literary Competition grand prize for drama. In 2002 he
reworked his best-known collaboration with Brocka (Insiang) into
a stage play, with the action relocated back in Pasay City where he
had originally set it (Brocka's film was set in Tondo), adding a hip
and funny narrator (much like The Common Man in Robert Bolt's A
Man For All Seasons) to comment on and provide context to the drama.
Second Act
In
the '80s, O'Hara would hit his stride on the big screen. His
Kastilyong Buhangin
(Castle of Sand,
1980) was a vehicle for both Aunor's singing talents and
stuntman-turned-actor Lito Lapid physical prowess, like a bizarre yet spirited union between
George Cukor's A Star
is Born and Ringo
Lam's Prison on Fire.
His Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? (Why
is the Sky Blue?
1981), about a shy young woman (Aunor again) who falls in love with a
mentally challenged young man, is O'Hara directly challenging mentor
and friend Brocka in his own social-realist territory. And then there
was what might arguably be called O'Hara's Manila noir
trilogy: Condemned
(1984), about a brother and sister (Aunor, again) on the run in the streets of Malate from a
dollar-smuggling gang; Bulaklak
sa City Jail (Flowers
of the City Jail,
1984), about a pregnant woman (Aunor yet again) incarcerated in the city's
hellish prison system; and Bagong Hari (The
New King, 1986), about
a man hired to unwittingly assassinate his own father. The three
films present a grim portrait of the city of Manila (the
last film earning an “X” rating from the censors, for extreme
violence), and might arguably be called the zenith of Filipino noir.
Pygmalion
If a good proportion of O'Hara's films seemed to feature Aunor there was a reason for this. O'Hara was one of the first filmmakers to recognize her worth as an actress back when she was considered a 'mere' multimedia pop star; both were shy, private people who only when required to do so (in public speaking, or before a camera) would switch on the thousand-watt bulb of their charisma. This seeming timidity concealing considerable talent is possibly the basis for the rapport between them, a spiritual resonance rarely found in other actress-director collaborations in Philippine cinema; you might even call Aunor the filmmaker's doppelganger, his onscreen expression of inner strength and hidden vulnerability, to be sorely tried and tested by the tortuous narratives of his films. For whatever reason, the titles (Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? among many others) speak for themselves: O'Hara's work with Aunor represent some of the best that either artist, or Philippine cinema itself, has to offer.
Pito-pito Films
In
1998 head of Regal Films “Mother” Lily Monteverde with the help
of filmmaker/producer Joey Gosiengfiao established Good Harvest, a
subdivision of Regal designed to churn out pito-pito
pictures, the term (which translates literally into “seven-seven”)
referring to the speed with which the films are to be made (seven
days of shooting, seven of post-production). The basic premise goes something
like this: Mother Lily gives the filmmakers a tiny amount of seed
money (two and a half million pesos, or roughly $62,500) and an insanely tight schedule (fourteen days from start of shoot to finished film) with the only stipulation being that the films should have commercial appeal (some violence, some choice eroticism);
otherwise, the filmmakers have carte blanche approval to do
whatever they want.
The
pito-pito
system helped newcomers produce their debut features, helped veterans realize old projects; O'Hara shot not one but two pictures in
fourteen days. Babae sa Bubungang Lata
(Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998)
was O'Hara's adaptation of Agapito Joaquin's two-character one-act chamber drama,
expanded to become a eulogy to the Filipino film industry; Sisa was O'Hara's tribute to Filipino historical figure and hero Jose Rizal, with the conceit
that Rizal did not fashion his most famous literary creation out of
whole cloth but actually knew her, as a living, breathing,
red-blooded woman (remember O'Hara's oft-repeated assertion, that the most vivid characters come from real life); and that this woman was the love of his life
(like Shakespeare in
Love, only with a
fraction of the production budget and a far more bizarre (read:
insanely imaginative) approach).
Final Act
In
2000 O'Hara directed his last pito-pito
film: Pangarap ng Puso
(Demons),
basically a genre-bending retelling of recent Filipino history as horror film, war drama, love story, and celebration of Filipino poetry. In 2003 he did Babae sa Breakwater (Woman
of the Breakwater) about the homeless folk who live along Manila's
breakwater--again O'Hara straying into Brocka territory (most notably Maynila
sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag)
only with a strong strain of magic realism running throughout, and troubadour Yoyoy Villiame commenting on the onscreen action through song (again, Robert Bolt's The Common Man, this time set to music).
His Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio (The
Trial of Andres Bonifacio, 2010) uses the actual minutes of the trial of Supremo Andres Bonifacio (much as Carl Theodor Dreyer did in The
Passion of Joan of Arc) as basis and occasion to give this neglected contemporary of Jose Rizal the long-delayed, low-budget, magic-realist due he
deserves.
O'Hara's
reunion with his oft-muse Nora Aunor would prove to be his last major work. Sa Ngalan ng Ina (In
the Name of the Mother,
2011), a mini-series retelling recent Filipino politics in teleserye
format, turns on the brilliant conceit that much of the melodramatic
excesses of contemporary Filipino soap opera (the drama, the
betrayals, the sex and violence) reflect the melodramatic excesses of contemporary
Filipino politics (the drama, the betrayals, the sex and violence). By this time O'Hara's health may not have been what it used to be; he codirected this
tremendous effort (twenty-five hour-long episodes) with
Jon Red, who also did all the series' action sequences.
All
that passion, all those sleepless nights, the massive strain on
O'Hara's health (at one point shooting Babae
sa Bubungang Lata and
Sisa
back-to-back) must have come at a cost. On June 19, 2012 the report came out over online social media that O'Hara had been rushed to
the emergency room due to symptoms of acute leukemia; the family, respectful of his retiring nature,
withheld the hospital's name (it was later revealed to be San Juan de Dios). Brother Jerry O'Hara reported
that he responded well to chemotherapy. The optimism was premature: on the morning of June 26 word went out that O'Hara had succumbed to cardiac arrest, the quiet man silenced at last.
Curtain Call
O'Hara's
significance to Philippine cinema is a challenge to assess. Unlike
his more outspoken contemporaries Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal,
O'Hara disliked discussing the ideas behind his films; he much preferred to stay in the background, playing cup-bearer to
the industry's gaudier princes.
There's an additional difficulty: if the works of the older generation of Filipino filmmakers are generally not readily available (Brocka's Tubog sa Ginto, for example, exists only as bootleg video), and O'Hara's are even more troublesome to obtain than most, then attempting to view his work can be compared in terms of difficulty and expense to a hunt for the Holy Grail (that may not be too much of an exaggeration, with some titles). I'd say at least four or five of the twenty-five film features he directed have no existing print, and that only five are readily available on DVD--not the clearest of copies, and without subtitles (unless otherwise indicated). His masterpiece Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos is on youtube with subtitles, though I refuse to link to that travesty; the experience is like viewing Velasquez's Las Meninas from the bottom of a septic tank (not a big fan of the translation, either). In trying to talk about his films you can't help but think of the seven blind men trying to describe an elephant; it's impossible to do justice to the wondrous creature.
Nevertheless--
O'Hara was a crucial collaborator of
Brocka's, and it's possible to argue that he introduced a note of
moral ambiguity not found in Brocka's other pictures--at the end of Insiang, for example, one couldn't really tell who was the victim, who the victimizer; in Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang the character O'Hara plays (Berto the Leper) is first seen as a possible rapist.
He took up Brocka's social-realist mode of storytelling
(Bakit Bughaw ang
Langit?) and
introduced baroque, even fabulist variations (Mortal, The Fatima Buen Story (1994)); later in his career he managed to fashion a mode of cinema inimitably his--imaginative in both form and content, yet filled with political, sociological and historical concerns (Pangarap
ng Puso, Sisa).
Arguably O'Hara was more fluent than Brocka in at least one or two dialects of the language of filmmaking. The prison riot that climaxes Kastilyong Buhangin, the varied and at times elaborate fight sequences in Bagong Hari confirm his status as one of Philippine cinema's finest action filmmakers; his use of pointedly angled shots and distinctly staged mis-en-scene reveal him to be the visual descendant of Gerardo de Leon (and behind de Leon the classicists: Ford, Eisenstein, Griffith).
O'Hara's early training in radio possibly distinguished him from other Filipino filmmakers of the '70s, who mostly came from Filipino theater: I submit that this training helped free him (the way it freed another filmmaker active in radio, stage and film) from the tyranny of the proscenium arch, giving one the sense of watching a film film instead of a film recording of a stage performance. Musical cuing (Brocka's weakness, according to O'Hara), sound transitions, overlapping dialogue linked his images, subtly amplified their cumulative emotional power. More, there was a fluidity to his editing (see Pangarap ng Puso, where the montage of photo stills act like the flicker-images of memory), a constant bounding from reality to fantasy and back (the protagonist's schizophrenia in Mortal, the children's view of supernatural creatures in the context of provincial life in Pangarap ng Puso) that suggests not so much a spatial orientation as an aural one, or at least one less limited by the unities of a specific location--a heedless leaping across time and space and emotion, taught to him by the equally fearless transitions (from present to past, reality to fantasy, comedy to drama) found in the radio shows of his childhood.
Not that he turned his back completely on theatricality. In Bubungang Lata he would present large swathes of Joaquin's play as a play, as two characters moving about in a tiny set with the camera just sitting there, drinking in their performances; the plainness of the approach underlined the plainness of their lives, their aspirations (this in contrast to the film's more fabulist characters, who are shot in a variety of angles and lighting). In Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio, O'Hara's first ever digital feature, O'Hara refrains from taking advantage of digital video's most obvious virtues (the mobility of the equipment, the ease in creating handheld, constantly moving shots) and instead locks down the camera, viewing the actors with an unblinking, dispassionate eye (if anything he takes advantage of digital's other virtue, its ability to record long takes). The stable framing and vivid color palette emphasizes a stylization not inappropriate to a moro-moro (yet another specifically Filipino form of theater) production, one of which is quoted extensively in the film, and serves as unspoken commentary on the politics behind the trial (in the moro-moro, the outcome is settled long before the play begins).
The heart of the matter
O'Hara's cinematic virtuosity would mean little without a moral and philosophical stance--this being possibly the most difficult aspect of all to pin down. His personal reticence, his reluctance to clarify and explicate his thoughts and intentions in real life extends to his films; in his very best work it's near impossible (Who is the victim? Who the victimizer?). O'Hara's films, like those of his friend and mentor Brocka, depict extremes of love, lust, hate, contempt, sadism, tenderness; unlike Brocka, you sense a distance between O'Hara and his subjects. The immediacy, the urgency, the white-hot anger that pulses through Brocka's films is missing in O'Hara's, the same time there are emotional hues found in O'Hara that are missing in Brocka (cynicism (the finale of Condemned); a sardonic sense of humor (the severed head in Bagong Hari)). The title of Brocka's breakthrough film summarizes his attitude towards his characters: he judges them, constantly and thoroughly, and can be an unforgiving justice with near-impossible standards.
O'Hara doesn't; there's a vast, yawning cavern of silence where his attitude towards characters should be. He doesn't seem to hate his villains (the Japanese rapist in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos), doesn't seem to particularly love his heroes (the hapless stuntman in Babae sa Bubungang Lata). His camera has that unblinking quality found in more contemplative Filipino filmmakers (Mike de Leon and Ishmael Bernal, to name contemporaries; Lav Diaz to name a more recent example). On occasion you find him cutting to a shot from high up looking down--the point of view of a deity, or superior being, or observing scientist, gazing down on its worshipers, inferiors, test subjects.
But if you look and listen closely--again, that aural element--if you pay close attention to his framing, to the timing of his cuts, to the choices made in staging and line readings and even actual words used in dialogue, there is the whisper, hint, suggestion of an attitude. The blind man carrying his palsied brother past the religious procession in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos; Babette saying goodbye in Bakit Bughaw ang Langit?--the first sequence is entirely wordless (one is struck by the size of the gigantic float swaying past the two brothers); the second nothing but words (it's less the words--mostly bits of practical advice--than Aunor's delicately shaded delivery of them that reveals Babette's true state of mind). O'Hara keeps the lamp-flame indicating his scenes' emotional temperature burning low, low, low...until you realize what the scene is really about, and the full meaning explodes in your face. Where Brocka was a full-on revolutionary raising a fist in the air and demanding change, O'Hara was a subversive, smuggling hidden contraband right under your nose, to detonate deep in your head where no defense is possible.
O'Hara's distance is no assumed pose; he's far too clear-eyed about the perversity of human nature to think we're just misunderstanding each other, or instinctively inflicting our own inner pain on each other. He understands that there is a keen pleasure to be found in imposing pain (again, the Japanese rapist in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos), and that there are those among us who crave that pleasure in regular doses (the police officer in Babae sa Breakwater, Rex in Bagong Hari). At the same time you hear a whisper from the cavern's yawning silence; when O'Hara's films are working full-on you feel the hairs rising on your arms and back of your neck as you sense--the way a sensitive senses a presence supernatural--that O'Hara does care about his characters, cares for them deeply,
but is too much of an artist to let this concern speak out too
loudly. Understanding of this contradictory pull of forces between the impassive and empathic in O'Hara, this double-vision if you will, is possibly key to understanding his cinema.
What to say, finally, of O'Hara the filmmaker? Frankly I could write for years and it wouldn't be enough. But a few words might help: he is, I believe, Philippine cinema's wayward spirit, its silent wanderer-observer (especially around the Makati-Malate-Quiapo-Divisoria area), its whispered yet insistent conscience. He is its reluctant poet, its low-key fabulist, its (to borrow a phrase from Manny Farber) termite artist, toiling away in the mud and filth to build something that isn't intended to be anything beautiful, perhaps doesn't even presume to become anything near beautiful, but which somehow, in some way, almost by accident if you will (though this random quality may be a hallmark of its authenticity) achieves a wayward, reluctant beauty.
He is (again, strictly in my opinion) the Philippine's finest filmmaker, and his death does our cinema an irretrievable, irrecoverable harm--not just for the life's worth of recognition owed to him, but for the works he might have given us, if he lived but a year longer (I once spent an evening listening to him talk of the scripts he has squirreled away, one more fabulous than the next). The world is a quieter place with this man gone, not necessarily a better one. We do well to mourn our loss.
First published in Businessworld, 6.28.12
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