Ninanais (Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song, John Torres, 2010)

Songs happen like revolutionary refrains

Early in John Torres' latest film Ninanais: Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (2010) we hear the following words (roughly remembered):

Do not look for us in history or in books written by victors. They are exact and precise; we are uneventful and in between.

Do not look for our story in myths, apparitions, legends filling the gaps. They are bridges; we stretch and fall. Listen to our faces; don't take our words. Our romance lies at the timbre of our voices.

In the end we will reject a revolution and arrive at love.

The words set the tone of the film, suggest what the film's about: not history or historical figures but the everyday people that make up history; not heroic myths or legendary epics but personal, intimate stories. The words even suggest how we should view their story and, in effect, the film: not as a literal, straightforward narrative but as a series of moods, images, metaphors, connections, to be made by heart and intuition, not logic (anyone looking for cause and effect in this picture will come away sorely frustrated).

After all is said and done though, there is a story; matter of fact, there are about three. It's about Nagmalitong Yawa, the beautiful maiden who disguises herself as a man and descends into the cavern named Kurundalan to free her imprisoned love, Humadapnon. Actually, this story (only the first part of an epic tale) is told by the binakod, beautiful maidens chosen when young by the Sulanon tribe in Panay to be set aside (the word 'binakod' literally means 'reserved') to learn the Hinilawod epic--their love story is her lifelong task. 

It's also the story of Sarah, who is looking for Emilio, who she has only met in her dreams; it's her last day as a debt collector, and she is making the rounds of the town of Guimbal, meeting with different people to settle accounts. At one point she is crossing a river--children see her, think she's walking on the water's surface, and mistake her for Nagmalitong Yawa. When she approaches her next debtor he immediately hands over his money, no fuss, no bother (we see her in the distance crossing the river, and for all you know she is walking on top of the water, she is Nagmalitong Yawa, an elemental seeking her lost love--it's this kind of offhand yet evocative imagery that Torres seems to be able to throw up on the screen, time and time again).

Sarah goes on to talk to Tatang Guillermo, who has mistaken her for his long-dead daughter, giving rise to yet another story: that of General Guillermo, leader of the Voluntarios, and General Tan Martin, leader of the Revolucionarios, two rival factions fighting for national independence against the American colonialists. Guillermo lost heart ever since his daughter Lyn died, and in Sarah he seems to have found her again, albeit in a different time and age.

Torres follows these storylines in and out, crossing and uncrossing in a complex weave, a mix of history, myth, personal reflection. He marries these stories and the occasional recited poem to images that, again, follow the opening lines in urging us not to follow the words, but instead listen to the timbre of our voices. We don't see faces so much as profiles, don't follow people so much as knees, elbows, backs of heads; like Robert Bresson, Torres doesn't seem to want to view people in the classic Hollywood manner--either close-up or in long shot, with faces front and center--but instead glimpse them sidelong, from skewed, puzzling angles. We're kept constantly on our toes, aware that we don't know who this is or what exactly is going on, while Torres grudgingly feeds us details, hints, clues.

Torres, by the way, does more than throw sidelong glances at his performers--he changed the names 'Sulanon' and 'binakod' from the original 'Suludnon,' and 'binukot,' taken historical names such as General Guillermo and General Tan Martin, and invented historical details about them as well. Why? Why--why not? If you've been following his opening adage, you shouldn't be listening to his words too closely, but instead to their faces, to 'the timbre of their voices;' you should be paying attention not to precise facts (which are half-fabricated anyway), but the stories of ordinary lives. 

Torres' words (despite his advice not to heed them) at times can be hilarious--as when Sarah describes a dream in which her legs and womb fly off and end up wrapped around a tree (Freudian symbolism, anyone?); his images at times can be threatening, as when intimations of war are spoken, and we see boys in dusty provincial streets selling huge, heavy blades, steel gleaming in the bright sun, of a heft and length and sharpness perfectly capable of lopping off a tree branch, or even a few human limbs. Torres seems to have developed a look; handheld and at times out-of-focus, with a bright palette of colors, the film has the feel of Super 8 footage being played on an ancient projector. Funny how the medium seems to be the default metaphor for old memories, how the blurring and unsteady ratcheting immediately suggests fading recollection. The film is obscure, yet feels somehow precious--like someone had found the rolls in a dusty cabinet locked away in the forgotten room of an old hacienda, lost inside a coconut grove; you thread the film into a projector, throw the switch, watch the flickering light open up the door into a world of ghosts.

Torres' films are intensely personal; the fact that he recites the narration in almost all his films make them so, even if you didn't know that was his voice. It speaks quietly, almost whispers to you, as if Torres were beside you reciting into your ear. This gave his previous films--Todo todo teros (2006) and Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008)--a confessional quality, the sense that Torres was cracking open his cranium for you to examine closely. Ninanais operates at a more ambitious level--history and mythology mediated through Torres' elliptical, inimitable filmmaking style. The title is of course a play on Nick Deocampo's film Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song (1987); where Deocampo refers to the circular nature of history, possibly Torres refers to the tumultuous effect--emotional, social, and political--melodies can have on our lives. At one point the possibly fictional Emilio declares that all wars are a story of love, echoing what had been said earlier and suggesting that the film doesn't so much end as it does arrive at its beginning and starts again, revolutions and refrains going round and round, ceaselessly. A difficult film to watch, yet unspeakably beautiful; needless to say, it's easily one of the finest I've seen this year.

Ninanais will be shown at the Cine Adarna Screening Room, August 25 at 7 pm.

First published in Businessworld 8.16.10

Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, John Torres, 2008)

(Note: The film was shown in the 38th Rotterdam International Film Festival, the 38th Berlinale's International Forum on New Cinema, and the 21st Singapore International Film Festival.

It received a glowing notice from Robert Koehler in Variety Magazine, and from our very own oggsmoggs when he saw an earlier version of the film, titled Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition (2007))

My own article as follows:

The telltale heart

John Torres' Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) starts out with the key event described in the film's title: the revelation that his father had another family, sired three children that neither Torres nor his mother knew anything about.

It's a traumatic enough an event for any family to endure; for Torres it was reason enough to leave home and try make sense of his life not through discussion, or diary-writing, or any kind of easy, tension-relieving dramaturgy (yelling at his father, or at the stars or something), but through some kind of cinematic digestion--taking bits and pieces of his life into himself, meditating over them for a time, then regurgitating them, transformed, on the big screen.

The result is, well, interesting, to say the least. He makes short vignettes, but pulls them together to form a feature; uses documentary techniques and found footage (albeit less than what I remember him using in his previous work, Todo todo teros (2006)) to weave a personal--possibly fictional--narrative; lets voiceover narrative and detailed titles introduce and link sequences together (but at the same time uses the same voice and text cinematically (the voice (mostly Torres) a soothing drone that sets the film's contemplative mood; the titles flashed on and off at precise moments, like exclamation points, the way Jean-Luc Godard would flash text in his film series Histoire(s) du cinema (1997-1998))); gives us a series of failed film projects that in the act of enumeration reveals a completed film. Several times Torres uses long monologues that either describe an episode or present a philosophical stance and you're asked to see through the monologue, past the screen of words the speaker is weaving to hide the vulnerability inside. At one point Torres admits "I'm not a simple person;" you can't help but agree.

One wonders at his filming methods--how much is actual revelation, and how much invented for purposes of the story? In an early scene he has a mother and father talking about how they were so busy with their jobs they would lock their daughters up in their rooms with educational tools. Father warns mother not to say that, adding "that's child abuse!" Mother counters by saying "but it's the truth!" Torres records the conversation, interested not so much in what they actually say, as in the thought processes involved in arriving at what they decide to say. If this is documentary footage then there's the disturbing element of exploitation in seeing them reveal themselves so frankly onscreen; if it's a script, then it's startling how Torres is able to make these non-actors deliver their written-down lines so naturally.

Likewise with the personal revelations: Torres has done this before, and the detail he's able and willing to dig out for audiences seems limitless. If he's simply pulling it out of himself, he's one kind of artist; if he's making some of it up, he's another; of course, he could also be playing one perception against the other, hiding his true self in the confusion. Or not.

Then there's the mixing of found and staged footage--one sensed a distinction, a kind of visual break between what was made for the film and what was archived fare in Todos; here I think the distinction has been blurred (or at least blurred to a greater degree)--it all seems to come out of the work of one cinematographer. Actually it IS just one cinematographer, Torres (he had Albert Banzon for his previous feature, and did additional photography himself)--it's just that the lighting and medium of filming (except for some moments in low-definition video) seems more consistent, less flashy, overall more beautiful.

As for Torres' use of colors--I love the look of contemporary independent Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz's films (Heremias, Book One (2006); Kagadaan sa Banwaan ning mga Enkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007), his austere black-and-white video sensibility, but sometimes there's something to be said of color, and the way it points up the beauty and variety of the Filipino foliage. At one point Torres films a tribal dance at long shot: the dancers in their gear (the ribbons of red and orange, the bright squares of yellow or white), stepping in that curious rhythmic gait at once awkward and graceful, surrounded by the tremulous, luxuriant green fur of forest around them, the sun waxing and waning at precise intervals (a brute arclight in the hands of an artist). the trilling, thrilling, bamboo music--it's a hypnotically lovely moment.

Then there's the endless tracking shot of two friends falling in love (perhaps). In black and white, with a little melody playing over the dialogue and a sampling of Torres' more heroic musings heard in voiceover, the scene plays off as poignant, romantic; the same sequence repeated in color, with discordant music in the background and the actual dialogue turned up, is revealed as a free-wheeling comic riff between two longtime friends on the subject of old memories and scoring drugs.

There's the nanny, saying farewell to her employers to work in the Middle East; there's the overseas worker, talking about the tape-recorded love letters she sent to her four boyfriends. There's even footage of Communist Party of the Philippines patriarch Jose Ma. Sison, singing (?!) some of his poetry (The Guerilla is like a Poet). As Sison himself is ready to admit, singing is not his forte.

Finally, there's Torres' long dreamt-of film about Christ.

What unites these fragments, these discordant notes in a life's symphony of sorts, is the idea that each was something Torres hoped to present--whole, complete--to his father. No matter what the subject or who is speaking, it all comes back to this mysterious, often absent, figure, what he might like, what he might not like. We may not come to know him (Torres might not know all that much about him, either) but we do learn things about him: the aforementioned affair, children; the fact that he once ran an empire built out of children's educational aids, now gone--and in fact we see the unsold children's aids piled high into crooked towers along cramped corridors, like abandoned apartment building. You think of a smaller-scale, third-world Kane, with his improvised storehouse full of past successes; you wonder if Torres wonders: while his father achieved and lost just as much, what does he (the son) look like, with all his failed films? As with Kane, what would all the educational aids assembled and put together spell out? What would Torres' own incomplete narratives spell out? The film is full of questions, hilarity, tenderness, confession, pain; it's a storehouse of memories and emotions that defy categorization, constantly inviting one to come, dive in, and lose oneself in its many wonders.

(First published in Businessworld, 6.17.08)

Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, John Torres, 2008)

John Torres' latest film Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) will screen at Mogwai, Cubao X, on June 17, 8 p.m.

The film was screened in 38th Rotterdam International Film Festival, the 38th Berlinale's International Forum on New Cinema, and the 21st Singapore International Film Festival. It also received a glowing notice from Robert Koehler in Variety Magazine. Our very own oggsmoggs wrote a nice review of an earlier version of the film, titled Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition (2007).

I've got an article on the film in Businessworld, coming out on the same day as the screening. A brief excerpt from the article:

The telltale heart

John Torres' "Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas" (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) starts out with the key event described in the film's title: the revelation that his father had another family, sired three children that neither Torres nor his mother knew anything about.

It's traumatic enough an event for any family to endure; for Torres it was reason enough to leave home and try make sense of his life not through discussion, or diary-writing, or any kind of easy, tension-relieving dramaturgy (yelling at his father, or at the stars or something), but through some kind of cinematic digestion--taking bits and pieces of his life into himself, meditating over them for a time, then regurgitating them, transformed, on the big screen.

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.

Todo Todo Teros (John Torres, 2006)

The spy who loved me

John Torres' Todo, Todo, Teros is, simply put, a lovely film. Part video collage of found footage, glued together with bits of poetry (by Joel Toledo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Torres); part espionage drama; part documentary look on the Manila of today (the sights, sounds, feel of it, the excitement, energy, jacked-up paranoia); part meditation on relationships and the impact one has on others, the film is by turns funny, disturbing, tender, erotic.