Films of 2023

List of 2023

Not everything I've seen for the year but everything I think deserves to be noted, for good or bad. More mainstream than I'd like but life happens. I do try note films I've seen but not newly released in 2023, and why I thought them worth talking about. 

Caridad (from 'Fe, Esperanza, Caridad,' Gerardo de Leon, 1974)

A love profane

If anyone doubted Filipina singer/actress Nora Aunor's popularity in the late '60s to early '70s one only had to glance at her filmography, during which period she was on something worse than a hot streak, doing an unbelievable seventy or so films in seven years, from 1967 onwards. 

Science Fiction: A Ghetto

Science Fiction: A Ghetto

Science fiction as a genre gets little respect.

“What?” goes the cries. “With the Star Wars series, the Transformer series, the Jurassic Park series, and the Marvel Comics Universe raking in billions?”

Ang Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo (The Python in the Old Dome, Gerardo de Leon, 1955)

Phallic symbol

Gerardo de Leon's Ang Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo tells the story of an outsized man: Tulume (Jose Padilla Jr.), former farmer turned bandit when the Spanish Guardia Civil (Civil Guards) kill his wife (this during the years of Spanish rule). Now he's leader of his own gang, with a bounty of thousands on his head.

Pedro Penduko (Gerardo de Leon, 1954)

The legend begins

Legendary komiks writer-artist Francisco Coching's best-known work first saw light of day in Liwayway Magazine; its first of many incarnations on the big screen was this, Gerardo 'Gerry' de Leon's homespun folksy Pedro Penduko done the same year (if web sources can be trusted). 

De Leon is one of the few great filmmakers who dabbled in comics (others include--off the top of my head--Robert Altman, Mario Bava, Lino Brocka, Celso Ad. Castillo (who did a remake starring Ramon Zamora in 1973), Ishmael Bernal, Lamberto Avellana). The previous year de Leon had also adapted Mars Ravelo's Dyesebel, and while I generally agree with Martin Scorsese's jab at the Marvel Cinematic Universe I do think some comic-book adaptations are cinema--you just have to decide which. 

Fifteen Filipino films

(Thanks to Video 48 for some of the pictures)

Fifteen Filipino films

My old list.

Pinoy Rebyu's list

This can be neither comprehensive nor complete. We've lost so many of our films to vinegar syndrome, to New Year celebrations, to general apathy and neglect; a kind of accelerating cultural Alzheimer's, a tragedy I would argue comparable to many recent disasters only instead of lives lost we're losing our sense of self. This is a mere sample a sketch--a glimpse if you like--of what I believe are the finest Filipino films I've managed to see to date.

A film is composed of many elements--dialogue, sound, music, color, movement, the shape and texture of people's hands eyes faces. Of all these elements I'd say the most expressive are the last three--but that's me saying so, an assertion just dying to be contradicted (ask Michael Powell, or Robert Bresson).

And a list (any man's list, which I consider superior to any aggregate) is ultimately futile, is a man's way of insisting on his priorities biases (occasionally hopefully) insights.

I love futile gestures.

This for better or worse is mine.

Intramuros (The Walls of Hell, Gerardo de Leon, Eddie Romero, 1964)

For Veteran's Day, my short piece on a film about the Pacific War:

Hell on earth

Gerardo De Leon and Eddie Romero's Intramuros (The Walls of Hell, 1964), a fairly big-budgeted (for a Filipino production; as far as Hollywood goes it's in the B movie range) war epic set inside the actual Intramuros, outlines the story of how Japanese soldiers made a suicidal last stand within the walled city during the final days of the Second World War. Perhaps not that suicidal--Intramuros was designed and built to act like a massive city-sized fortress, with walls of solid rock twenty feet thick; as one American officer so vividly describes it, they hurled a hundred thousand shells against those walls, and still haven't breached them.

Gerardo de Leon: Two vampire films

For Halloween, two classic Filipino horrors:

Pair of Living Dead

On Gerardo De Leon's Kulay Dugo ang Gabi (aka The Blood Drinkers) and Ibulong Mo sa Hangin (aka Blood of the Vampires)

As noted by Mark Holcomb in his Senses of Cinema article; the Gerardo De Leon known to us today had two faces: as director of some of Philippine cinema's greatest films (El Filibusterismo (The Heretic, 1962), The Moises Padilla Story (1961), Daigdig ng Mga Api (The World of the Oppressed, 1965)) and as director of a handful of fine B-pictures (Terror is a Man (1959), Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968)). In 1964 and 1966 respectively, De Leon made two films: Kulay Dugo ang Gabi (Blood is the Color of Night) and Ibulong Mo sa Hangin (Whisper to the Wind).*

Banaue: Stairway to the Sky (Gerardo de Leon, 1975)

Pictures thanks to Video48

(On the occasion of Gerardo de Leon's yearlong Centennial celebration, there will be a screening of his Banaue: Stairway to the Sky (1975) at the CCP Dream Theater, May 17 Saturday at 4 pm.

The film is also available on DVD here--sadly without subtitles)

Stairway to heaven
 
As individuals director Gerardo 'Gerry' de Leon and lead actress Nora Aunor couldn't be more different. One was a respected lion of Philippine cinema whose career was on the wane; the other was the winner of a singing contest who parlayed her golden voice and morena good looks into a lightning strike of a multimedia pop phenomenon--countless gold singles, a long-running television variety show, over seventy movies in a mere eight years.

What Aunor didn't have despite her meteoric rise was artistic respect, though she did get favorable notices and an acting nomination for her multiple-role performance in the omnibus film Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, the director of the final segment (Caridad) being de Leon. Aunor reportedly liked the experience of working under him so much (the notices and award nomination didn't hurt) she asked to work with him again, this time on a much more ambitious project--Banaue: Stairway to the Sky, an action-adventure epic set at the dawn of Philippine history and, with a budget estimated at 1.6 million pesos, arguably the biggest Filipino production ever up to that point. The film would prove to be the master's last completed feature, an epic that I consider (despite its many flaws) badly underrated today, and in dire need of reappraisal.

Possibly Aunor didn't quite know what she was doing (after over seventy features this was her first ever large-scale project) and gave de Leon free rein; he reciprocated by shooting much of the picture with colored gels framing the images, the blurry edges of the screen adding a level of stylization almost unforgivable in its strangeness (though it must be noted that when a contemporary young Turk like Carlos Reygadas does it the effect is considered brilliantly avant-garde).

There's also something antediluvian about De Leon at this stage of his career, the maddeningly solemn way his characters often gaze offscreen, intoning their lines as if it were holy writ (by way of contrast, the slangy dialogue in Lamberto Avellana's Esperanza portion of the aforementioned omnibus film sounds as current as ever). When you have fresh faces like Aunor's Banawe, Christopher de Leon's Sadek, and Johnny Delgado's Pugnoy reciting what sounds like Old Testament text the disconnect is distracting, to put it mildly.

And yet the film remains compulsively watchable, in part because de Leon has lost none of his talent for visual majesty. The terraces are probably the most impressive achievement of pre-historic Filipinos, and as de Leon's camera pans up and down their sinuous slopes one can't help but look with awe (you need to ignore the travelogue-style narrator though, speaking in an irritatingly plummy American (presumably because they couldn't afford someone British) accent). 

Throughout the course of the two-hour plus film (my copy clocks in at a hundred and fifty-three minutes; not sure what the official runtime is, and IMDb is unhelpful) de Leon's camera continues to give us glimpses of grandeur: a huge boulder tumbles down a slope towards the camera, and as it crashes a wizened arm claws at the screen in agony (Sadek's parents have just been crushed to death); heads loom out of one corner of the frame to counterbalance smaller noggins at the opposite corner--an oddly pleasing demonstration of visual asymmetry--and a charge of electricity crackles up your spine ("yes--He still has It").

Where grandeur fails, surrealist horror blooms. A patriarch is decapitated, and his head journeys from one tribe to another as macabre prize (we see the head pronged on split bamboo, slowly liquefying with the course of time); back home, the patriarch's wife circles her husband's seated, festering corpse as she prays for the head's return (shades of Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, only on a relatively larger scale).

When battle breaks out (which it often does) de Leon shoots head-on, the fighting happening on different planes of action at once; when focused on one-on-one combat de Leon cuts and frames for maximum clarity (as in a dance sequence), the combatants showing a speed and physical prowess impossible to fake with digital enhancement, or unsteady camera, or ADHD editing. "Those are axes and spears and machete blades they are wielding" you find yourself thinking, "with nothing but loincloth and amulet to keep them from harm!"

Banaue would make a rousing war movie if Aunor's Banawe didn't raise the stakes to a whole other level. As de Leon (and writer Toto Belano) conceive her and Aunor incarnates her, Banawe might be the Philippines' first proto-feminist--she's no shrinking violet flinching in a corner as her lover Sadek is wounded and her father's head carried away; she accuses Sadek of cowardice, then organizes a strike force of lightly armed women to attack the enemy camp, hopefully win her father's head back. When one of the women complain that she doesn't have any combat skills, Banawe responds: "Doesn't take much skill to hold a man close, then stab him in the back!" 




If Banawe reserves the right to fight for her father's head, she also reserves the right to choose her lovers--Christopher de Leon's Sadek is the obvious choice for mate (the actors married during the film's production), only the two are separated early on; she meets the fierce Pugnoy, is unimpressed, meets Aruk (Ronaldo Valdez) who whips her--that gets her attention--only the joke is on Aruk, as he ultimately and hopelessly falls for Banawe (Aunor plays a variation of her celebrity persona, a woman irresistible to men--a persona not too far off from reality, as her complicated private life might suggest). 

Gerardo de Leon (and Nora Aunor) might be pointing up one aspect of aboriginal culture, that marital fidelity is not a do-or-die proposition, for entertainment or even prurient purposes--but I don't believe it. Banawe meets different men, but she's sincere in her regard and affection for them; she loves them for their different virtues (and sometimes equally varied flaws), she values what they bring to her life. If they hurt her or she hurts them or they hurt each other, it's not deliberate but part of the course of life. I might go so far as to say Banawe is pretty sophisticated about her love life (reflecting the actress' own), showing flexibility, maturity and restraint as needed (maybe not always, but when it counts). I suggest that de Leon (and Aunor) present this aspect of tribal society as an alternative to strict Christian monogamy (a monogamy practiced by many Christians, I might note, more in the breach than observance); not that one should immediately set aside one's wife (or husband) to love other women (or men), but that one should at least be aware that there are other ways of thinking about companionship than the black-and-white "till death do us part." 

It's a complicated way to live; at one point a man, exasperated, cries out to Banawe: "Who do you love more--me or him?" and she replies: "you--him--but more than either, my people." Banawe reserves the right to love not just any man but all men; reserves the right to transcend the merely sensual and strive for the wholly societal--a remarkably complex and thought-provoking thesis for what was supposed to be just another caveman drama, with a popular Filipina celebrity at its center. 

A remarkable achievement in both performance and film production, by a young woman who at the time of the film's release had not quite turned twenty-two. I imagine that if the real Banawe somehow crossed the thousand years separating her age and ours to watch this film, she'd wholeheartedly approve of what Aunor had done--not just established a long and fruitful career as daring film producer and even more amazing actress, but given an old master one last chance at creating a masterpiece.

First published in Businessworld, 5.15.14
  

Terror is a Man (Gerardo De Leon, 1959)

(On the occasion of Gerardo de Leon's ongoing Centennial Celebration, The Society of Filipino Archivists for Film (SOFIA), in cooperation with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) screened Terror is a Man at the Tanghalang Manuel Conde at CCP, April 12, at 4 pm. 

The film is available on Amazon and Netflix, respectively)

The Island of Dr. De Leon


Let's get expectations out of the way right now: Gerardo de Leon's Terror is a Man--about a scientist (Dr. Charles Girard) who surgically transforms animals (well, one animal; the production budget presumably couldn't afford any more) into human beings--isn't very frightening. Oh, some extremely sensitive adults and a handful of impressionable kids might have been swept away back in 1964 when Hemisphere Films reissued it under the less evocative title Blood Creature (it was a commercial failure when first released as a Lynn-Romero production back in 1959--an account nicely outlined in Scott Ashlin's horror blog 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting), but there isn't much gore compared with, say, the shocking bright blood of the Hammer films. The horror here recalls rather the Universal classics of the '30s: Todd Browning's Dracula, or James Whale's Frankenstein films or The Invisible Man, films that favor suggestion over splatter, their most distinctive attribute an atmosphere of lyrical dread. 

On the surface a no-budget adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau with a surprisingly literate screenplay from Paul Harber (whose career included only two more--one for an Eddie Romero kidnap drama, the other for an episode of Hawaii Five-O--plus a lifetime of television acting), the film could be a fascinating companion piece alongside Erle C. Kenton's classic The Island of Lost Souls (1932). Where the earlier version had a more emphatic tone--lush oversized sets evoking Moreau's jungle to great (if expensive) effect, Moreau himself played with half-sane intensity by the inimitable Charles Laughton--De Leon's adaptation is set in the languor of the real tropics (shot, if IMDb is to be trusted, in Corregidor Island, off the coast of Cavite), his Moreau (played with a lightly ambisexual note by Francis Lederer), a decidedly more subdued figure. 

It's instructive I think to compare the way Moreau explains his methods to Pendrick (the novel's protagonist/narrator) to the way Laughton's Moreau explains to the '32 Pendrick to the way Girard explains to our film's Pendrick figure, William Fitzgerald (a stolid and rather bland Richard Derr). Wells' Moreau goes to some lengths to point out historical parallels to his work--the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition; the "mediaeval practitioners who made dwarfs and beggar-cripples" described by Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs; the Siamese Twins (a covert operation, he claims). Along the way Moreau's brutally frank language suggests a man so monomaniacally devoted to his field of study you daren't question his motives (he devoted his whole life's energy to it, so he must be right). Laughton's Moreau updates his methods to include "plastic surgery, blood transfusions, gland extracts, ray baths" (Ray baths? Similar to tanning beds, only more radioactive?); to Moreau's monomania he adds a winking smirk (isn't this amusing? Aren't you entertained by all the nonsense?).

De Leon dispenses with the horrorshow, the electric moment (in Wells' novel) when Moreau drives a penknife into his leg, the even more vivid moment when onscreen Moreau presents one of his subjects on an operating table, howling in agony and terror. Girard and Fitzgerald instead have a discussion in the office, and Girard in the manner of a dull lecturer explains how he worked up from "skin and bone grafts" to "alteration of major organs." And as medical science has advanced since the '30s (having in turn advanced from the time of the novel's writing) he points out that "the real difference is in the brain," and proposes a chemical (taken from gland extracts, of course) that can "bring about an alternation of the individual cells, cell division and cell growth." Girard's methods seem more recognizably like our own partly because the science isn't so very far from our own, partly because De Leon's MD training helps ensure authenticity (you see it in the handwashing, the surgical instruments, the working autoclave in one corner), but also partly because Girard seems so calmly reasonable (where Wells' was insanely focused), so serious (where Laughton's was playfully coy) that we're halfway sold by his earnestness. This isn't Moreau the madman we're faced with but Moreau the progressive intellectual, the dedicated humanitarian, who can't think of one reason why he shouldn't be doing what he's doing--one reason why what he's doing is wrong. 

(A sidenote: Francis Lederer (Girard) who changed his name from the more German Franz Lederer (he was in Pabst's great '29 film Pandora's Box) was actually born Frantisek Lederer in Prague, the birthplace of the Golem and the word "robot" (from Karel Capek's classic play R.U.R.), and a major center of Czech puppetry--appropriate, considering Lederer plays yet another manipulative fabricator of artificial beings)

That's script and man, in a way more disturbing than the figure found in either novel or classic film because he's more persuasive--invincible, almost--in his solemn conviction. 

Then there's De Leon's camera, which in sequence after wordless sequence undermines Girard's words with quiet effectiveness. 

The first hunting sequence, for example, early in the film--the camera in a parody of the famous shot in Murnau's Sunrise pushes through leaves and branches to peer at a sleeping village. A native sits by a fire, watchful--he senses something lurking out there, isn't sure what. Cut to a shot of the camera approaching the man's back, as we belatedly realize: this the creature's point of view; growls and cries and sudden lunge, the actual death elided over with cuts not unlike the sudden transitions found in dreams. Cut to a wide shot of the entire village, to the sound of screams as the bodies are found, and the camera in a perverse inversion of Murnau (and anticipating Hitchcock's retreating shot in Frenzy by some thirteen years) pulls back into the surrounding jungle.

Then there's the creature itself, hidden not just by camera angles or deep shadows, but by layer after layer of surgical bandages. De Leon the MD probably asked why the creatures in Kenton's and James Whale's films don't spend more time under wraps--Whale's is studded with long stitches that don't bleed out, the stitching never once tearing no matter how violently it moves. A practical question, but looking at the creature, at the tear-brimmed eyes peering out from the reeking gauze, and all questions of plausibility fall away. This is a creature in agony, capable of doing anything and everything just to make the suffering stop. 

Unmentioned yet plain as bandages is the subtext of racism: Girard is the imperialist white man attempting to remake the Malay 'beast' into a civilized being (the story is set in a South Pacific island named La Ysla de Sangre (Blood Island)). Seated at a table and surrounded by Malay servants (one boy waves flies away with a whisk on a pole), having just been served a presumably Western meal, Girard's wife Frances (the well-endowed Greta Thyssen) gratefully toasts their guest for reminding them they "can still be civilized on occasion." She adds that she's "forgotten we have good china or silver, or the manners to use them." Girard's native-born assistant Walter (a sensually sinister Oskar Kesse) mutters the hope that he can get "that black devil back where he belongs"--presumably strapped to an operating table, shrieking (the sharp ear might catch the pronoun he used, an implicit admission that the creature is an equal). Girard contemptuously dismisses the natives on the island as "superstitious" for leaving just because an 'animal' was on the loose (though to his credit he thinks New Yorkers would probably act the same way). With every sneer and suggested condescension we Filipinos can't help but bristle; with every unthinking line of dialogue the Western actors affirm their superiority over the natives (us) and over the creature himself, coded to be the most native inhabitant of all (a supernative, if you like).

Then there's fraternal hatred: the creature kills several of the natives, the rest flee in fear; when it--he--encounters Frances, he spares her. Why? A Filipino's immediate unthinking (kneejerk) response: "oho, he likes white meat." Doesn't matter if actress Lilia Duran, who plays one of the victims, is a fresh-faced beauty--the fact that Thyssen is white (and top-heavy) trumps that. One of the uglier subtexts of the '33 Kong (which none of the remakes managed to mitigate--and which in fact is exacerbated in the Jackson version) is that Kong clearly prefers the white blonde--the first he's ever seen--over any number of black women offered (the latter he kills; the former he takes with him to Skull Mountain, presumably for an evening of date rape). De Leon's creature seems to unthinkingly follow this pattern--

--only he knows her; she took care of him over two years and countless surgical procedures. Where Girard would often inflict pain, she would often take it away. Where nearly everyone  in the island (natives included) regard him as some kind of stalking evil, she doesn't. She fears him but doesn't hate him--if anything, she pities him. Frances is both Girard's wife and surgical nurse, and nurses often represent compassion, mercy, a surcease of pain--and the creature recognizes that. Racist? Perhaps not. 

Final bit of business (skip this paragraph if you intend to watch the film!): Harber has Fitzgerald say to Frances: "I want to help you;" later Walter says the same thing, then attempts to rape her (Fitzgerald at one point finds bruises on Lilia Duran's arm--if we go by De Leon's lexicon, Walter is the pervert found in many of De Leon's films who arrives at sexual gratification through sadism). At a certain point the word "help" acquires a sarcastically obscene connotation, as she turns down aid of all kinds from males of all sides. When she finally ends up in a beach watching the dying creature float away in a rowboat, she casually remarks: "he wanted to help me." All sarcasm is gone from her voice: instead there's a bizarre yet poignant longing--as if she recognized the genuine nature of the 'help' the creature offered, a once-in-a-lifetime offer that she was very possibly a fool to reject.  

First published in Businessworld, 4.11.14

El Filibusterismo (Gerardo de Leon, 1962)

Thanks to Video 48 for the image

A dark masterpiece

El Filibusterismo (The Subversive) is one of two of Jose Rizal's major novels, Rizal being (to the Philippines anyway) a combination of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln--a founding intellectual of the country as well as its single most beloved historical figure (which has its good and bad points...but that’s a whole other article right there). El Filibusterismo is to Philippine history what Les Miserables or Huckleberry Finn would be to…well, not completely true: Les Miserables and Huckleberry Finn are masterpieces of world literature, and not many would claim as much for El Fili (our fond nickname for the novel).

El Fili and its companion piece, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), did, however, inspire a nationalist movement, and the death of their author did inspire a nationwide revolt--one which ultimately led to what is generally considered the first-ever democratic republic in Asia. I doubt if Les Miz or Huck Finn could boast of as much direct influence in their respective countries’ histories, classic literary status notwithstanding.

But it’s not just the historical importance--emotionally and culturally the two novels are still very much alive to some 75 million or so Filipinos. It and Noli are required reading in high school; more, every other high school in the country is named after the author (not to mention every other street, drive or avenue--if not after Rizal, then after characters in his novels: Maria Clara Drive; Simoun Street; Dona Victorina Avenue…).

It’s unfortunate that Rizal was too spread out, too involved in concerns personal, political, commercial, and scientific to pour his considerable energies into making the novels more artful. Mind you, they are genuine novels, in the classic sense of the term--the characters develop over the course of the narrative, the prose (in the English or Filipino translations, anyway--have not read them in the original 19^th-century Spanish) is florid but occasionally eloquent, and full of sharp, satirical observations. But they can't be considered groundbreaking or even outstanding examples of Victorian fiction--El Fili, for one, is obviously indebted to Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo without, unfortunately, inheriting that book's drive and genius for colorful detail (of course Rizal had other things in mind besides writing 'entertainment'). And Simoun may be a fascinatingly shadowy figure but pales in comparison to Dumas' Count, whose thirst for vengeance burned him deep into our collective consciousness.

This, I think, is where the film versions come in.

Officially there is no existing print left of El Fili. Rumor has it that one exists in some lab in Germany--but no further news has been heard since. I managed to catch the film on Viva Channel years ago, in what appears to be a poor video recording of a faded print, with almost none of the dialogue discernible (the cable channel no longer exists, and I have no idea what has happened to their copy). In a way, it was like watching a silent film adaptation of a literary classic.

And it works; the plot is complex, but all you need to know can be learned from the images onscreen. Proud white mestizos hover high and haughty over dark-complexioned indios; heroes Basilio, Isagani, Kabesang Tales--indios with rare courage and intelligence--defy civil and church authority. And behind all loom the shadowy figure of Simoun: jeweler, master manipulator, representative of all that is black and bitter within Rizal himself.

There are the interludes between Basilio and his beloved Juli, who meet by a tree on a high seaside cliff, a striking location composed of tree and cliff, sea and sky. But a pair of twisted crucifixes stand silent nearby, the graves of Juli's mother and sister, and add a note of foreboding to their courtship.

There is the subplot of a priest and a town official conspiring to rob Kabesang Tales, the farmer. When Tales finally picks up a rifle to pursue the two villains, De Leon shoots all three in extreme long shot, running like ants through a vast landscape--an image not unworthy of Erich Von Stroheim's Death Valley sequence in Greed.

Many of these sequences are not in the novel--Rizal mentions Basilio and Juli’s lovemaking only in passing, while the death of priest and politician is suggested by a pair of dead bodies found the morning after. By actually filming the events De Leon pushes Rizal’s political and social agenda into the background (where I for one would say it belongs), and brings to fore the characters' everyday struggles, their essential humanity.

Actually, Rizal had many intentions for his two novels--they were to serve as a panoramic assessment of Philippine society; a clarion call for reform; a scathing critique of the Filipino character as a whole. Ibarra/Simoun was meant to represent the fresh idealist turned soured revolutionary; Basilio was his younger, lower-class self; Padre Salvi, Dona Victorina, Cabesang Tales, Don Custodio and Ben Zayb represent various strata of Philippine society as it was then (and, in many ways, still is now). Cramming in all these characters with the full weight of their significance would have sunk the picture; De Leon, however, employs a  technique filmmaker John Huston often used in adapting literary classics--when faced with characters rich in symbolism and subtext he focused on incident, dialogue and detail, trusting the story as it unfolds to reveal the characters’ full meaning.

It’s a risky gamble--Huston’s flat adaptation of Under the Volcano, or overambitious staging of Moby Dick (sunk by the miscasting of harmless Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab) shows how this style of storytelling can go wrong. But De Leon is working with (admittedly) simpler material, and in the case of El Fili the technique works remarkably well. De Leon’s classical yet dynamic sense of composition--a sense that owes something to John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa--and clean storytelling style pares away much of the novel's dense underbrush, turning it into the intense drama of vengeance it always wanted to be.

Then there's De Leon’s conception of Simoun the jeweler, “The Brown Cardinal”--tall and silent, wearing dark cloaks and even darker spectacles. Simoun is the Gothic figure Francis Coppola probably wanted from Gary Oldman in Dracula but failed to get (perhaps because Coppola surrounded Oldman with so much extraneous silliness). De Leon keeps it simple, and his Simoun is truly menacing--rarely speaking or smiling, always standing in one corner of a shot, always peering at unfolding events like an artist examining his handiwork, or a spider its prey. In one wonderful scene Simoun leans back on a rocking chair and addresses a row of three bandits--with his body in a pose of total languor, his eyes masked by mysterious spectacles, he nevertheless dominates the three before him.

Which is metaphorically apt; Simoun, after all, is the figure behind all the machinations that drive El Fili--its heart of darkness, so to speak. Where in Noli Rizal, hoping for reform, wrote to expose the cancer eating away at Philippine colonial society, his message in El Fili is different: that the failure of reform may lead to violent revolution. He needed a hero diametrically opposed to the naïve Crisostomo Ibarra (played by the earnest Eddie del Mar) in Noli, and practicing both the principle of economic means and the principle of narrative symmetry, turned Ibarra into Simoun.

Pancho Magallona who plays Simoun gives what I consider to be one of the greatest performances in Philippine cinema. No Gregory Peck he, every moment he’s onscreen he radiates a sense of malevolent forces kept in careful check. Yet good as he is with his glasses on, with his glasses off (the rare moment recalling some awful memory, or undergoing some pang of conscience) he's even better, the eyes warm, sad, full of pain. Suddenly the monster that dominates much of the film acquires a human face and heart; suddenly, De Leon complicates the texture of Rizal’s story of revenge with the possibility of redemption--the forlorn hope that Simoun, despite his hatred, despite all the evil he has done, could somehow be turned around and saved.

One complaint I might lodge against El Fili--you don't really see De Leon cut loose here, not the way he does in the earlier Noli, when Elias runs across a phantasmagoric landscape while members of his dead family berate him for his failures. You don't see the De Leon of Sanda Wong with its hauntingly beautiful drowning scene, or endless rain of pythons summoned by a magic ring. You don’t see the De Leon of The Moises Padilla Story with its painfully extended torture sequence that visually parallels the crucifixion and death of Christ.

What you do see is an amazingly sustained piece of cinematic storytelling from one of the best filmmakers in Philippine cinema, translating to the big screen one of the most important novels in Philippine history--and, a rarity in literary adaptations, doing it well.

Though I hear Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed) is De Leon’s true masterpiece (the film’s prints and negatives are, tragically, lost), this one reportedly comes close. Easily the best De Leon I’ve seen to date and one of the greatest Filipino films ever made.

First published in Menzone Magazine, a Businessworld publication, May 2001

Sisa (Gerardo de Leon, 1951)

Mother dearest

Gerardo de Leon's Sisa (1951) is amazing, not the least because the director takes a memorable if minor character from Filipino activist and intellectual Jose Rizal's seminal political novel Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) and makes her the protagonist of his film. Tom Stoppard tried something similar on the theater stage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead some fifteen years later; a film version followed forty years after that, and achieved only a fraction of de Leon's visual panache.

Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, Gerardo de Leon, 1961)

Can't touch this

Even with a perfect print, I can't imagine anyone saying De Leon's Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, 1961) 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 finally 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 caring, 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 from the side to stand in their 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 gazes 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 inside the netting; 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 witnesses. Ibarra jumps in to help, and the sequence ends spectacularly, with men heaving on a rope and pulling out a live, roaring creature (the shot sells the sequence; seeing the monster in all its glory, you can't help but believe the two men were in mortal danger).

There's the attempt on Ibarra's life: Elias' profile as he catches wind of the plot; Ibarra's frightened glance at the cornerstone hanging fatefully above him; De Leon's thrilling yet coherent cutting of the chaos that ensues. There's Sisa--driven mad at last--urged to dance then whipped by the capitan's sexually deprived and sadistic wife, the whip like a tongue flicking about Sisa's body.

There's a shot midway through the film--Ibarra and Maria Clara walking down the street when they encounter a leper; Sisa standing beside the leper and pointing to the church tower above them; soldiers of the Guardia Civil riding up to drive the leper away--that's clearly a throwaway moment, one the viewer can easily miss, but the shot is colonial society crystallized in a single image, arguably the greatest in all of Philippine cinema. Standing at ground level, the bourgeoisie; low near the ground are derelict and outcast; towering above all--aloof and unperturbed--is the almighty Catholic Church's bell tower.

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 prostate on the ground; a man's decayed and bloodied head in a cage; a girl floating on surf, knife buried in her bosom) bitterly accusing him of cowardice. Flawed in print and execution De Leon's Noli may be, still it stands as the definitive, most visually striking realization of Rizal's celebrated novel ever made.

(Portions of this post taken from my entry on the film found in Chris Fujiwara's Little Book of Movies)

2.19.08

The Moises Padilla Story (Gerardo de Leon, 1961)

Thanks to the website Video 48 for the photographs

The passion of the Christ figure

Gerardo De Leon’s The Moises Padilla Story--about an aspiring Negros Occidental mayoral candidate (Leopoldo Salcedo) tortured and killed during election season (a hazard common in Philippine politics, with the violence continuing in Negros even today)--was an unabashed quickie propaganda flick said to have been made on behalf of President Carlos P. Garcia for his re-election run (didn't work--he lost to Diosdado Macapagal). One man’s propaganda, though, may be another’s cinematic near-masterpiece; De Leon’s vivid direction--plus the film’s bullet momentum and intense acting--manages to land this one near the top of his considerable oeuvre.

De Leon keeps a firm rein on Salcedo’s tendency to act larger-than-life; his Padilla is a recognizable human being, vulnerable and charming. The filmmaker turns Salcedo’s rugged handsomeness (not for nothing was he nicknamed The Great Profile) into a heroic icon, and understands that icons achieve full nobility, full grandeur when desecrated--when they are spattered in their own blood. De Leon spatters plenty in Moises: the beating and whipping of Padilla may well be the longest, most intense torture sequence ever put into a Filipino film, a thirteen-stationed Passion of the Christ with (if anything) even worse mutilations and sadism, redeemed by the cool, distant, faintly Fordian beauty of De Leon's visual style.

Padilla may be the Christ figure, but the film's truly interesting performance belongs to its Judas, its Bob Ford--to former Philippine President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, who is both chief of the local police and Padilla’s best friend, and who is ordered to both capture Padilla and supervise his extensive and ultimately fatal excruciation. Estrada--who never quite impressed me as an actor--delivers here with a brooding intensity worthy of James Dean, and injects the pretty much straightforward narrative with a rich dose of anguished ambivalence that elevates the film above similar exercises of sadism (i.e. Gibson's aforementioned snuff flick). At a certain point it's actually impossible to determine who suffers more, the man being tortured or the man inflicting the torture; when by film's end he is cornered, Estrada actually looks relieved to have been caught.

It’s an elaborate and ironic joke on actor, film, and filmmaker: a scandalous killing practically ended Estrada’s career way back when; no producer would touch him, until De Leon asked for him in Moises Padilla with only one condition--that Estrada play the villain. The former president comes through with a performance of uncharacteristic complexity and sensitivity bordering on the miraculous; if only he could have reprised the role for his real-life Presidency...

Meantime we have this, an astonishingly eloquent film despite its strictly practical origins, sadly as mutilated and grievously lacerated as its eponymous hero. Are we to play silent Judas to Philippine cinema's Moises Padilla, standing by in impotence as time eats mercilessly away at its masterworks? Should we?

Reprinted and expanded from its original published version on Businessworld, 2.25.00

Sanda Wong (Gerardo de Leon, 1955)

And the yearlong celebration of Gerardo de Leon's centennial continues with an Oct. 12 at 4 pm screening of this film, at the CCP Dream Theater

Resurrection of a Lost Philippine Classic

Gerry De Leon's Sanda Wong, made in 1955, has been lost for years; only through the efforts of film historian-archivist-distributor Teddy Co, has a print been located in Hongkong, brought home to this country, and with the help of Mowelfund and SOFIA (Society of Film Archivists), restored.

Sanda Wong was a coproduction between Philippine and Hongkong filmmaking outfits (and where are the international co-productions to be found today?)--a strictly commercial venture, out to make a profit. It was conceived as shallow entertainment, and on its own purely mercenary terms, it's a success. This isn't a literary production like Manuel Silos' great Biyaya Ng Lupa (Blessings of the Land, 1959); it isn't even considered to be among Gerry De Leon's best works.

What Sanda Wong is, though--what's so surprising about it--is one of the most sheerly enjoyable Filipino films ever made. I mean--bandits and magic rings! Secret dens, hidden treasures, pythons that pop out of nowhere. This is in the great tradition of Gunga Din, The Thief Of Baghdad, The Adventures Of Robin Hood: gloriously irrelevant confections, filled with contrivances just a step sideways from real life, slightly larger than real life, and as entertaining as hell. I actually enjoyed Sanda Wong more than Thief Of Baghdad--heresy to the ears of a traditional film critic, until you realize that the director, Michael Powell, was hamstrung by a huge, problem-ridden production (input from other directors brought in to fix the problems probably didn't help). Powell's filmmaking in Thief was square in a big-budgeted, Important Picture way; De Leon was working with a larger than usual budget here, but by Hollywood standards it's miniscule--he still had to improvise, and his filmmaking is lean and hungry and evocatively imaginative.

But you don't have to be some kind of film expert to appreciate Sanda Wong; you don't have to exclaim "John Ford!" every time you see a figure framed dramatically against a brilliant white sky, or "De Sade!" every time Wong (Jose Padilla, Jr.) raised a whip against his beautiful Amazon beauty (Lilia Dizon, mother of modern-day leading man Christopher De Leon). Sanda Wong is gripping drama in its own right, a Jacobean struggle between rich landowner Liu Chen (Danilo Montes) and the eponymous bandit king--two men who meet as mistrustful antagonists and part as brothers in blood.

Wong believes he's done Liu Chen a favor by rescuing him from the clutches of a greedy general (Gil De Leon, husband of Ms. Dizon and father of Christopher) out to learn the location of Chen's treasure, but the man is more goading than grateful--the general had raped and driven to suicide Chen's freshly wedded wife (Lola Young), and he wants Wong's help in exacting revenge. Like a troublesome conscience Chen reminds Wong of promises unfulfilled, of deeds left undone, and suggests (without saying so directly) that Wong can be a better man than he thinks he is, that as is he's a heavy-breathing braggart and something of a coward (not that Chen is a paragon of virtue--played by Montes, he's a self-righteous prig and hothead).

De Leon sketches the blackly comic relationship between his two protagonists, two men who couldn't be more different (and couldn't be more conscious of that fact), yet are inextricably entwined; a pulpy romp like Raiders of the Lost Ark, by way of comparison, is a mere cartoon, a fairly well-directed one; you thrill to Jones' exploits, but never feel that Jones has struggled with anything deeper than an archeological dig, or suffered the loss of anything more significant than his floppy hat.

There are flaws--an outrageous one being the scene where Wong, in an extravagant fit of cruelty, strips the Amazon down to her leopardskin (Leopardskin! In China!) and forces her to dance a vaguely African dance choreography. This is a cheesecake scene, of course, designed to show off Ms. Dizon's superb figure (Dizon, incidentally, is sexier and far more sensuous in leopardskin than most Filipina softcore porn stars are in their birthday suits nowadays--one hundred percent natural equipment mind you, no plastic surgery involved).

But to point out historical and cultural errors is to miss the point of B movies (so called because they were (supposedly) a notch below the class-A pictures); it's denying the wild and anything-goes spirit in which these movies were made--and in fact, there is a psychological rationale behind this scene: some shameful act is eating Wong up inside, and he has to lash out at the nearest available scapegoat, in this case his favorite woman. Sadomasochism in a '50s Filipino-Hong Kong co-production? Absolutely.

I love the python, under the control of a magic ring; the python's scenes are entirely believable (this plus the crocodile attack in Noli Me Tangere suggests De Leon had a way with untamed creatures), with every appearance timed to cause the maximum number of gasps. Compare this to the snake scene in the recent magic-realist Sa Pusod Ng Dagat (In the Navel of the Sea): that sorry little reptile simply popped out of the woman's vagina--no attempt was made to prepare you for this unlikely miracle, no attempt made to do anything more with it. In effect the snake in Pusod was a huge bore, the snake in Sanda a small delight.

Sanda Wong is a mix of skillful storytelling, superbly staged action, and sumptuous production design--everything effortlessly balanced against each other, lightly held in the palm of De Leon's masterful hand. Not a great film, but definitely great entertainment.

First published in Businessworld, 3.6.98.

Article reprinted in Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema, available online

Lav Diaz's 'Melancholia' and the Maguindanao Massacre

Violence is a part of the Filipino political landscape no matter who is president, no matter what political system is in place; the Maguindanao Massacre (or Ampatuan Massacre, as it is alternatively known) is just the most recent and arguably most horrifying confirmation of this ugly fact.

Filipino films have on occasion reflected this reality. One of the earliest and most powerful examples would be Gerardo De Leon's The Moises Padilla Story (1961), about an honest man running for mayor who is kidnapped, tortured, and killed for his aspirations. Even today the film is capable of disturbing one's complacency as much for the violence (at one point the man is brutally blinded) as for De Leon's visual subtext, presenting Padilla as a kind of suffering Christ figure (think Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ only done with subtlety and a kind of horrifying grace), with former president Joseph Estrada playing an equally tormented Judas (Esrada's greatest tragic role, I submit, with his presidency being a kind of late, great tragicomic performance).

During the '80s, possibly no one has recorded government and military abuses with as much persistent thoroughness as Jose 'Pete' Lacaba--his scripts for Mike De Leon, Lino Brocka and Chito Rono managed to force three seemingly disparate Filipino filmmakers to conform to his strong auteurial voice. Sister Stella L. (1984), script realized by Mike De Leon, contains a scene which unblinkingly depicts the torture and 'salvaging' (the then-popular term for extralegal executions) of a political activist during the waning years of the Marcos administration. Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989), script helmed by Lino Brocka, went a step further, showing us the beating, rape, and murder of political activists during the Aquino administration. At one point, a character declares that Aquino was "worse than Marcos," that her lack of control over the paramilitary groups roaming the countryside created more corruption, more chaos, more occasion for atrocities, than was possible under Marcos' dictatorship--a brave statement, considering how popular Ms. Aquino was at the time. Eskapo (1995), script executed by Chito Rono, acted as a kind of prequel depicting the early days of Marcos' swiftly imposed Martial Law, when even the powerful political elite were easily taken prisoner, when Marcos' grip was terrifyingly absolute, when flight was the only sane response.

Mario O'Hara's Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, 2000) depicts atrocities done by the Negros military in alternately lyrical, historical, and supernatural terms. Seen through the eyes of children, the military is a nebulous creature hiding in the surrounding enchanted forests; growing up, these same children recognize the figures stepping out of their fabled past as all-too-real human monsters with a policy of (not to mention taste for) violent response (the atrocities depicted here, including a true one involving a man dropped from a helicopter, are some of the most baroque and sadistic I've ever seen). In the film's last act, the children finally realize that the monsters are inescapably inside them, inescapably themselves, and the only possible response to this bitter epiphany is a kind of agonized poetic cry.

Lav Diaz has done more than his share to depict political violence in the Filipino landscape, in films such as Batang West Side (2001), Hesus Rebolusyunaryo (2002), and Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2006).

Encantos might serve as a prelude to Lav's latest, Melancholia (2008)--where in the former it is hinted that military persecution was at the heart of the protagonist's anguish, here it is front and center the film's very theme. Three survivors of a military operation attempt to deal with the trauma of their ordeal and the experience of losing of their loved ones by staging a kind of psychodrama, where the three live in a provincial town (the beautiful Northern community of Sagada) under radically new identities.

One isn't sure exactly how this form of therapy might work, or even if it will work, but the conceit has its emotionally wrenching moments (one survivor's act of psychological cruelty towards the other two) and odd tender ones (an encounter between two women that develops into a profound friendship); it takes its eponymous mood and sustains it for the entire eight-hour running time, ringing slight variations in emotional tone by switching setting (from indoors to the wide outdoors; from bohemian to middle-class to desaparecidos; from Sagada to Manila to the unspecified forest in which the military hunt their leftist prey) and voice (from third-person impersonal to memory to nightmare fantasy) and time (from present to extended flashback to a kind of eternal present). The effect across generations is touched upon--one character is the child of disappeared parents, and her life and personality has been warped accordingly; another, the mother of one of the survivors, simply cannot comprehend the enormity of change in her daughter.

Perhaps Diaz's greatest tribute to his fallen comrades and all who have suffered and survived is the very existence of this film--the fact that it takes eight hours of intense lyrical storytelling to do the subject at least partial justice.There is no attempt at humor; there are few moments when the sense of loss does not hang heavy in the air; there is little possibility (nor does Diaz offer any hope otherwise) that this can ever be relieved. This may be Diaz's angriest, most anguished work yet, and the fact that it speaks with volume pitched barely above a whisper serves to intensify that anger, that anguish--like a blowtorch whose flame has been turned down from roaring yellow to an intense blue it hisses its absolute fury.


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100 Best Filipino Films

This is a late (very late) reply to AFI's 100 Greatest American Films of All Times (not to mention my way of defying the sense of loss felt from all the recent deaths); instead of coming up with a hundred American movies, though, I'd thought (for the sake of not repeating the work of dozens of perfectly good film blogs) of coming up with a hundred Filipino films.