- Was there a film made on the Battle of Manila Bay?
- City, Nation, Cinema: Manila's Representation on Screen
CITY, NATION, CINEMA:
MANILA’S REPRESENTATION ON SCREEN
written by Nick Deocampo
Date published: June 13, 2008
The subject of Manila-as-city offers a cinematic shortcut in the collective imagination of the Philippines-as-country. The city becomes the country as the Philippines’ premiere capital synecdochically represents the ideals as well as the shortcomings of the country and nation through its imaging on screen. In this study of films made about Manila from the first time motion pictures were shot until the present, a diachronic view of the city is presented as we think through issues of identity, nationalism, national culture and the post-ness of all these. With valuable insights to be derived from watching a selection of films across the years including samples from the early American newsreels; World War II Japanese-made propaganda; a gem from the “golden age” of Tagalog cinema; down to the contemporary films of Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal as well as the internationally-acclaimed short films – this paper will explore the cinematic as well as ideological uses of film in conceiving and challenging the notion of the “Filipino nation” through films that are Manila-centric.
Cinema and the Filipino Nation. As a symbolic art, cinema has in most occasions congealed our abstract notions of the nation with our concrete experience at seeing visual representations of Manila on film. In this study of how the city has symbolized many of our national experiences and aspirations, we will try to find how the workings of the filmic imaginary have helped condition our responses to the production and consumption of the city on film.
This paper is divided into segments that correspond to historical periods when a great number of meaningful productions occurred. Not surprisingly, these historical moments correspond to periods of immense social stress such as periods of colonization, war, dictatorship, and now globalization. As if to record the social experiences Filipinos had gone through, film has been encoded with meanings that mirror our collective social experience.
In this cross-mirroring of the nation and cinema comes the conflation of the country’s political history with film history. Briefly said, the growth of the Filipino nation paralleled the growth of cinema in the country. Brought into the Philippines by Spaniards in 1897 (making this year, 2007, the 110th anniversary of film’s arrival), the birth of the motion pictures preceded by a year the birth of the Philippine Republic in 1898. (1) It appears like our future collectivity as a nation had been preordained by our collectivity that was already inherent in the motion picture medium when it was first shown.
But film’s Spanish episode was instantly replaced with the coming of the Americans. The established facts surrounding the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 are made more interesting with the little–known myth about an American filmmaker, James Henry White, with his British cameraman, Frederick Blechynden, who claimed to have been on board one of Com. George Dewey’s battleships, S.S. Baltimore, to film the historic war. (2) While no extant film has surfaced to prove the claim, the myth remains of how the arrival of steamships spitting fire came to our shores with a device that could throw light and release captured images onscreen. The first instrument maimed bodies as the second captured minds and imaginations.
The period of colonization that followed not only produced social trauma but spilled such trauma into motion pictures as they produced images of vanquished Filipinos. Even while film was yet a toddler during our nation’s infancy, it had become a vehicle for propaganda spouting patriotic messages in praise of America’s unrelenting rise as a world superpower. In the dawn of motion picture history, the Philippines was already a visible subject in early American cinema – no matter if Filipinos debuted into the cinematic world as America’s “enemies” slaughtered and massacred in full public view.
The American occupation of the Philippine Islands augured well with the global rise of motion pictures. The colony became America’s foothold in the Orient for its film products, foremost of which were the Hollywood films. The interest the U.S. had over its new colony went beyond market considerations. Its hold on the islands led to supremacy and domination resulting to an efficient visual cataloguing of the land and its people. Films made of the colony created a visual inventory of America’s newfound resources. The use of film also served as a form of surveillance of civilian life. The “other”-ing of Filipinos commenced as hegemonic values made by American filmmakers and exhibitors churned out screen images of natives as America’s “little brown brothers” – weak, uneducated and unable to govern themselves. In addition, with the rise of Hollywood as a global film power, the Philippines became a commodified subject in Hollywood pictures creating narratives of conquest set in the all-too-familiar theme of war.
Another major social cataclysm that led to a significant production of films was the outbreak of World War II. The Philippines in these films was shown as a battleground in the fight for democracy and independence. Under Japanese rule, the local film industry came to a standstill. Only Japanese-produced films were made creating another colonial layer over the earlier Hispanic and American influences. Done under the guise of liberating the country from American colonial rule, the Japanese imposed its own imperial designs for a united Asia and film came in handy hoping to win the support of natives.
The coming of peace after the horrifying war resulted to an avalanche of native-produced films basking on themes of independence, self-identity, and the social problems facing the young nation. The trauma of war became dislodged as social realism gripped the imagination of the country’s able directors. But in due time, this was to be engulfed by escapist and commercial values as the local film industry desperately struggled against the onslaught of an invasive Hollywood global film market. Yet towering above the native representations of the country and its premiere city, Manila, were self-reflexive cinematic meditations of Filipinos experiencing despair and frustration all swaddled in images of decay and corruption. Ironically, by capturing the Filipinos’ sense of loss, films made in post-war Philippines resulted to some of the country’s most honest and poignant views of itself on screen. In many films, Manila served as the locus of interest reflecting the national experience with what was happening to the city.
But to show that social trauma not only came from foreign colonizers, the imposition of Martial Law in 1972 also proved it could come from native rulers. This period of national distress produced a double-edged phenomenon that created a state-patronized film industry whose only interest was commercial exploitation while also creating a handful of serious filmmakers using film for social change. Implicated as it was with the political corruption under the Marcos dictatorship, an undercurrent of political films mirrored the social decay Filipino society underwent then.
While still smarting from the trauma caused by a repressive regime that was later overthrown, the country presently faces a new challenge brought about by globalization. In a world of transborder transactions, forces from outside the nation-state challenge the capacity of its filmmakers to compete globally with its film products. New forms of motion picture production as well as new strategies of market distribution are being conceived to respond to the new ways in which film creates a global web of human, transactional relations.
In this synoptic narrative of the past 110 years since the arrival of film and the birth of the Philippine republic, we see how the growth of motion pictures paralleled that of the Filipino nation. In its growth, it must be remembered that cinema from its birth to the present, has been predominantly Manila based. It was in Manila that film studios were found, technology and capital were accessed, expertise and talents abounded, and market headquarters were located. Added to this was the use of Manila as locale for many films that in symbolic ways represented the country. This practice had immense influence in shaping the narratives about the Filipino nation – a case of the city imagining the nation.
What follows are foregrounded moments in the history of cinema that parallel historical episodes when film rose to the occasion of documenting the social trauma experienced by Filipinos. It was during those moments when films were produced meaningfully and how in selected titles we may see how our notions of the Filipino nation have been implicated in the use of Manila in our collective desire to conceive a nation.
Views of Empire: Surveillance and Inventory (1898-1910s)
Representative Films: Early American Newsreels (The Films of James Henry White, E. Burton Holmes and C. Fred Ackerman)
The many “firsts” achieved in Philippine cinema were made against the backdrop of U.S. colonization. Before film was bestowed with a national identity, it was a colonial legacy. Motion pictures were not indigenous. If true, James Henry White’s claim of making a film while on board one of Dewey’s battleships during the Battle of Manila Bay would reveal the complicit relationship between film and war. Subsequent events proved this. The first documented American filmmaker to visit the Philippines and shoot films at the battlefront was the travel lecturer, E. Burton Holmes. (3) He came in June 1899 and, under cover by the U.S. military, he shot film footages which he used for his lectures in the U.S. mainland.
Fascinated by the new sights he saw, Holmes’ films were views showing America’s newly-acquired empire in the Pacific. While taking films and photographs, his views of the city while observing Escolta ran like this: the street was “rapidly assuming an American complexion” as “the natives seem to have caught the restless spirit of the conquerors…” (4) Having a moving picture camera was an advantage as he recorded his visual experiences. The moving pictures he took looked like a catalog of the exotic attributes of this Pacific territory. The films he shot combined images of the U.S. occupying forces with native life exuding their tropical charm: cockfight, fire-brigade, native bancas, Ninth Infantry on the Bridge of Spain, fourth cavalry, among others. (5)
In the hands of another American film pioneer, the earlier mentioned James Henry White, (6) Manila became a battleground where “Filipinos” were massacred in plain sight of the camera and to the delight of an American viewing public. Produced in the backlot studio of American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, White made films with titles like Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan. (7) It was a sham battle re-enacting a real encounter between U.S. and Filipino soldiers. While passed off as a newsreel, the film was actually shot at West Orange county in New Jersey with “Filipinos” played by African-Americans and the American soldiers by the U.S. National Guards. Caloocan, which in years to come became part of the present-day definition of Metropolitan Manila, became a site where American soldiers won their battle and elicited heroic acts cheered by viewers back home.
Now a city itself, Caloocan in White’s film may be seen symbolically as a site for America’s colonial advances. The film opens with “Filipinos” defending their piece of land as they shoot straight towards the camera, bullets spraying at unseen enemies. Soon, from the position of the camera, appears a phalanx of soldiers rushing towards the retreating “Filipinos.” Unable to defend their territory, “Filipino” soldiers are displaced by American soldiers who now colonize the film space. Symbolically considered, the triumph at dislodging Filipinos parallel the way Americans have won and colonized the Philippine Islands. In its short narrative, the Edison film becomes an allegory of the conquest of the Filipino people. The site of what is now part of the modern city of greater Manila area becomes a symbol for the entire country as it has fallen into the hands of the colonizing Americans.
In the hands of yet another American film pioneer, C. Fred Ackerman, (8) the city of Manila becomes once more a site for military rule as well as an object of visual commodification. Ackerman was a cameraman belonging to Edison’s rival film studio, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Following Holmes, Ackerman arrived in September 1899 to film actual scenes in the Philippines. Working under the protection of the U.S. military during the initial months of the Philippine-American War, Ackerman became an “embedded” cameraman as he donned military uniform and blended with the rest of the U.S. army as he continued his duty as a correspondent and photographer for the American journal, Leslie’s Weekly, and as a filmmaker for the AM&B.
Ackerman’s films may be divided into two categories: those depicting military activities and those showing civilian life. His films may be seen as early forms of ocular surveillance as they contain images of civilian life showing their means of conveyances, ways of dressing, climate, and patterns of living. His military films reveal more images of the country’s terrains and rivers, visually defining the contours of the land.
Images of the city include those of the city center, Escolta, where we see local conveyances such as the quaint tranvia, calesas and caretelas. While seeming to be naïve pictures of early transport as well as images of bridges connecting the city and bancas traversing the Pasig, these images when seen within the context of America’s colonial presence were images that measured local life according to the standards of the occupier’s values. For example, a shot of innocent-looking bancas speeding away in the Pasig river was titled Aguinaldo’s Navy. With no signs of any guns or armaments found in the frail-looking bancas, how could they ever be conceived to be naval ships, much less Aguinaldo’s wartime navy? Like in many other films made at the time, there had been much condescension by the American film producers over their Filipino film subjects.
Manila in the early American films like those made by Holmes, White and Ackerman became concrete visualizations of the imperialist fiction forming in the minds of the colonizers. A banca became a navy; haystacks became enemies; African-Americans became Filipinos; film space became symbolic of the territory to be conquered and occupied; and the city became the colony and the colony was the country. All these images of Manila and what were in them, became in the minds of the pioneer American filmmakers conflated with the idea of the Philippines as the vanquished territory that became America’s colony in the Orient.
Devastation of the City (1942-1945)
Representative Film: Dawn of Freedom
Manila as a besieged territory is the image emerging from the rubble of World War II. Films produced during this period by both American and Japanese filmmakers were dominated by an overwhelming portrayal of the city as a contested space between U.S. and Japanese forces battling over the hapless city.
From a promising start in the Thirties that saw Manila becoming a major film capital in the Orient with American-styled studios producing only next to India and Japan the most number of films in the region, film production came to an abrupt halt when war broke out in 1942. Under Japanese military rule, only Japanese propaganda films were produced. Eiga Haikyusa was the central propaganda arm of the Japanese military and it was they who produced films in the country.
With Manila as its base and under strict control by the Japanese military, it was there where motion pictures were made during the three years of Japanese occupation. Dawn of Freedom was one of the only three feature films made by the Japanese that luckily survived the war despite copies of the film being torched to ashes in Japan as war ended.
The film was touted as a Japanese-Philippine “collaboration,” although in very uneven terms as Filipinos were compelled to work on the film while American prisoners-of-war were forced to appear in the movie in violation of the Geneva convention regarding POWs. The film starred popular Filipino actors like Fernando Poe Sr., Norma Blancaflor, and Leopoldo Salcedo while Gerry de Leon served as assistant director to the film’s Japanese director, Abe Yutaka. Manila figured prominently as a setting of the film’s story.
One will understand why copies of the film were burnt as World War II ended. (9) What can be seen in the film are images of outright propaganda however cloaked in emotional melodrama and slick visual production. The film opens with the declaration of Manila as “open city.” U.S. soldiers fleeing with their cars and tanks provide initial images of a city that is vanquished. A defeated city: this seems to be what is being signified. The city is not a city victorious because no one is seen jubilating as the city’s colonial occupiers, the Americans, surrender Manila. Native Manilenos are seen to be lost, uncomprehending as to what will happen next. What comes next is Manila becoming a Japanese territory. While skirting the image of how the Japanese actually occupied the city – where images of horror and resistance would inevitably have been shown – the city is now seen with Japanese soldiers belonging “naturally” to the cityscape – soldiers seen against churches, American colonial buildings and city streets. Images show the Japanese occupiers settled in their new colony as if they had always been part of the cityscape. To the native viewer, however, images of Japanese soldiers against a cityscape create visual tension that make for uncomfortable viewing.
On the other hand, trouble is felt inside Filipino homes. Listening to the radio, families listen not to the coming Japanese occupation but to Americans abandoning Manila. This causes fear among families as they prepare their sons to war. The city is gripped with fear as it is plunged into darkness caused by what appears as a symbolic citywide power failure – bringing darkness to the entire city.
The film’s narrative instantiates in symbolic terms the way Americans have maimed Filipinos. As one U.S. truck is seen hurrying to leave the city, a boy who chases after a Japanese leaflet is sideswiped and crippled by the accident. Following his story, he is befriended by a Japanese soldier, who facilitates his leg operation and even offers his own blood to run in the boy’s veins so the boy can recover. It is to be expected that the boy will be able to miraculously walk, but get this: it was the American who maimed the boy and left him crippled and it was the Japanese who saved the boy and made him walk with his own two feet. The symbolism is not hard to decipher: If the boy is the Filipino people, and the American soldier is the U.S.A. and the Japanese soldier is Japan, one sees in the film narrative the greater mythology of Japan’s “saving” the Philippines from U.S. imperialism through its benevolent guidance and protection. As the realities of war proved this Japanese myth so distant from the truth, this film narrative cannot but be seen as merely a Japanese propaganda.
In making representations of the city, it is interesting to note how images of children have become the focus of visual attention while representing the city’s population. It appears as if children are all that are left of the city when men went to war and women remained inside their homes. This produces an effect of children standing in for Filipinos and what happens to them may be seen metaphorically as happening to the “Filipino nation.” While aiming to win the hearts and minds of Filipino film viewers, having children to stand in for Filipinos that needed to be converted to the Japanese way of life, was opportune as children are gullible and easy to convince. For the unwary viewer who may be taken away by the film’s melodramatic devices, he or she may get convinced by the propaganda that the film makes an effort to say. In the end, as children in the city get to be won over by the Japanese, in Corregidor, images of Japanese soldiers winning the war signify that the Philippines has fallen under Nippon rule. Conflating the two images as they run parallel to each other in almost seamless juxtaposition, one’s gets the idea that as the country falls under the Japanese bayonet, the city of Manila – with its inhabitants reduced to an infantile population – has become the seat of the country’s defeat and has installed for its new ruler the Japanese occupiers.
Death and Rebirth (1946-1960s)
Representative Film: Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
Manila after the cataclysmic World War II was no longer the city that it was before the war. All around were ruins. They were not just ruins of the material kind but ruins of the soul. Films made after the war had an elegiac tone in their sensibility. The sense of loss was overwhelming. Nothing it seemed remained except sadness and despair.
Manila in Lamberto Avellana’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (based on Nick Joaquin’s play) is the Manila symbolic of the pride that the city stood for as legacy of the Spanish era. But ruined after the war, the old city is in tatters, miserable in its plight. In this poetic recreation of Intramuros, the old city puts up a tragic fight to preserve itself amidst a world that is beginning to crumble at the grip of modernity. If, for anything, Avellana’s portrait of Manila is like an old, faded photograph of what the city once stood for as the seat of Spanish colonization, Catholic religion, and Hispanic culture.
Avellana is the eulogist of the Filipinos’ bygone past. The film laments the passing away of an era – the Spanish era. With its demise went the grandeur and pomposity of our colonial past. Of course, the theme of “paradise lost” is as much the working of Nick Joaquin’s imagination as of Avellana’s. The film director’s contribution lies in the way he has replicated this sense of loss in a masterful work that has been preserved for future generations to see on celluloid while the Intramuros itself has melted in our collective memory as a people.
The sisters, Paula and Agueda, become representations of a people who have lost so much during the war that they themselves have become lost. They have lost their material supremacy and even their spiritual survival is under threat. Members of the Marasigan family have left them with their invalid father who bequeaths them with a priceless painting. The painting is like a people’s heritage that for an opportunist like the young character, Tony – standing for materialism and modernization – means a fortune to be taken and squandered away. As the two sisters find themselves merely tossed around uselessly in the face of modernizing forces, they console themselves that they still have each other. Looking back to their tradition of Catholic religion and family values, they know they have a past that will survive way into the future. Contra mundum!
The film presents a new battle for Manila to face. After the war, while still unable to recover from the shock and devastation, the city faces the challenge of modernization. Nick Joaquin has drawn an image of the city in the most precarious of times. Unable to shed off the tattered glory of its Hispanic past, it now faces the challenge of vulgar Americanization. Intramuros is seen like a madwoman lost in the whirlpool of circumstance. It can not redeem its past now sinking deep into oblivion as it cannot yet reach out into the future as it is burdened by its past. The house of the Marasigans, like Intramuros – the old Manila – stands brave in the face of the collision between past and present, tradition and modernism. The pathos emerging from the film comes from seeing the two sisters (symbolic of the Filipino) being devoured by modern time. While remaining steadfast to preserve the past, their future remains uncertain. Like Manila after World War II, the film has vividly portrayed the dilemma faced by the city as the onslaught of modernization set in. Looking at Intramuros’ plight, one sees the Philippines descending into its future, bleakly.
City Under Siege (1970’s-1980s)
Representative Films: Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon?, Hellow, Soldier!
Manila in Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon? is a city that is caught in the grip of revolution. It is a city that is enflamed by the spirit of freedom. Manila circa 1898 saw the dramatic declaration of the city to be free from the tethers of Spanish colonization. The city’s native dwellers dreamed for themselves a “nation.”
Despite the dramatic scenario conjuring heroic personages from Dr. Jose Rizal to Andres Bonifacio, Romero gifts us with characters that remain under the shadows of History. Nicolas Ocampo is a country bumpkin who comes to the city to look for his fortune. He, however, wagers the fortune he finds with the ideals of finding a “nation.” In Romero’s film opus, cinema and nationhood find their most evocative union.
While Romero depicts a turn-of-the-century Manila, Lino Brocka’s Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag shows the city in its most abject state in the hands of a native despotic ruler – Marcos. Under the dictatorship and military repression, the city reels in poverty and cowers in fear. To all these, Brocka reacts to his social environment with films from the serious classic, Insiang, to the commercial flick, Hot Property, containing images of the city that, even if now under the hands of native Filipinos, is not yet free from its ties with the past. Poverty, corruption and exploitation are revealed in Brocka’s depictions of Manila.
Brocka’s verdict of his city comes out more succinctly in Hellow, Soldier!, the second episode in his trilogy Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa. The short film vivifies the city’s post-colonial experience. In very stark terms, the director offers the squatters colony as the contemporary image of the native territory. This is what has become of Manila, and if the symbol were to be extended, the image becomes symbolic of the country, the Philippines. As the film unreels, Brocka masterfully reveals how the slum becomes all that has remained of the Filipino nation. (10)
As the film opens, the camera surveys the horizon and what we see is the sight of the city ending with the image of the slum. It is such a dejected place that the character played by Hilda Koronel steps on shit while walking. She again stops during her walk because a boy sprays the air with his piss. The slum dwelling is dominated mostly by infantile children. Kids are everywhere. Even adults are shown like children.
Brocka does not only capture the visual sight of the city but also reveal its colonial mindset. There is an American character whose arrival in the slum is much anticipated by everyone. Even before he shows up, he has already colonized the minds and imaginations of the slum dwellers as they all speak of him. The American has become the fiction, the legend, of the squatters’ humdrum lives.
When the American finally arrives with his wife, he is welcomed like a returning hero. The scene of his arrival in the slum area is uncanny of how Filipinos treated U.S. soldiers during the liberation of Manila. Children crowd around the American as if he is a war-time hero. Despite what has earlier been established in the narrative that the American had left behind a laundrywoman with child, and abandoned them for seventeen years, his sins are forgiven and forgotten. In the midst of much rejoicing, any thought of the American as invader, colonizer, and capitalist exploiter – all these are annihilated from consciousness. The collective imagination thematizes the American as one who comes back as savior. With his return, all his sins are forgotten, the past is buried from memory.
Both the narrative and the use of filmic space define the film’s politics. The narrative, with its theme of the returning soldier, evokes racial memories of a people once invaded, subjected to war atrocities, and later “liberated.” The slum stands in for the city that was once invaded by an American soldier, gets a laundrywoman pregnant, and has now returned to “liberate” his half-breed daughter from the world of poverty that her mother has subjected her. There is a double-meaning going on as we watch the scenes unfold. The city assumes the image of a country once under American domination. The laundrywoman played by Anita Linda may symbolically be seen as the embodiment of Ynang-bayan who, after bearing the American’s bastard child, is left and abandoned in misery. The American soldier’s return is no different from a neo-colonial invasion that continued to suck away whatever economic life was left in the country long after American capitalists have bled the country’s resources dry.
Spacial politics is likewise evident in the way native notions of “loob” and “labas” are evoked by the entry of an alien personality into native territory. The American soldier who is a foreigner – therefore “taga-labas” (outsider) – is about to invade a “looban” (interior space) meaning the squatter’s area. This act of invasion results to another tragic encounter as mother and daughter become victims to the American’s second invasion.
The politics of space becomes more pronounced when, after Anita Linda becomes scandalously drunk, the daughter hides her inside her room. When the American father and his American wife arrive, Anita Linda could nowhere be found. She is erased from her space allowing the American couple to invade her territory. Ironically, it was her own daughter that kept her own mother away from out of a feeling of shame.
Anita Linda’s absence in the scene of the “great American arrival” is tragic. As the American father entices his daughter to go with them to the U.S., the mother is not there to intervene. The matriarch, Anita Linda, the mistress of the house, is being kept away like a slave in her own household. She is erased from her own space; repressed as memory. But no matter how hard one keeps memory away, it finds a way to come back. And when it does, there is no way of stopping the havoc caused by this repressed memory. It is the return of the repressed. Anita Linda creates noise from inside her room, the way the subconscious surfaces and unsettles one’s consciousness. When the American opens the door to find Anita Linda in such a pathetic condition, a catastrophic flood of memories and recrimination, guilt, anger, and love overwhelm and devour all the characters. No one escapes the sting of memory.
By entering Anita Linda’s room, the native’s last remaining space is invaded. But like a true Filipino, she offers the once American lover hospitality, and love. But things have changed. The love is gone and the American has his wife to prove it. He only comes back to take away what he had left behind – the child he has with the laundrywoman. By taking away his daughter, it is clear he wants everything taken away from her. He sees her as incapable of rearing the child. Being a drunkard and poor, she can not possibly give her daughter a bright future which he is able to do in America.
Taking away the child she begot, in the very space where she stands, is enough to send Anita Linda into a delirious fit. Her affection turns into anger, her warmth changes into rage. She drives the American and his equally pesky wife out of her slum dwelling. In doing so, Brocka seems to point to us the way out of our colonial mentality. Anita Linda’s ranting makes her the personification of Ynang-bayan – chasing the colonizer away. In the end, when all has been said and done, peace and quiet settles in inside the house of the martyr. When the drunkard mother wakes up, she finds that even her daughter is gone. She runs out of her dwelling and like Sisa in search of her sons, she scours the streets of her slum neighborhood – the only piece of land she can call her own, her native territory. Joyously, however, she finds her daughter going about her daily chore of getting laundry. Life goes on.
Anita Linda – the mother, abandoned woman, martyr, symbolic of Ynang-bayan, of Sisa, of the native Filipino – triumphs. Keeping her own daughter beside her and away from the invasive Americans, she triumphs! She keeps her space and her daughter. She has driven the American invader out of her territory. She – woman, native, oppressed – colonizes the screen. She wins her space.
Displacement and Decay (1980s-2000)
Representative Films: Manila By Night (City after Dark), Memories of Old Manila
With the rise of the dictator Marcos came the corruption of the city that was once looked up to in Asia as a beacon of light for democracy and progress. With poverty and insurgency enveloping Filipino society, the Philippines came to be regarded at one time as “the sick man of Asia.” National pride was at its lowest as hordes of contract workers left the country to find employment abroad and engage in menial jobs, even in prostitution. What diagnosis did our artists have of their society? How was their world depicted on screen?
Manila in Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (a.k.a. City after Dark) is a city that is caught in the dark of night and pulsates with the passion to survive despite the bleakness surrounding it. With all the sordidness shown, the film becomes Bernal’s poetic homage to Manila. As the film dissects the ills plaguing the city, it finds humanity shining through among its dark denizens – prostitutes, criminals, blind masseuses, pimps, addicts, homosexuals, and characters thriving under the cloak of night.
Following the coming-of-age-story of the character played by William Martinez, the city yields to his awakening a world filled with corruption and where every character is flawed. Following a long line of films that have lost their romantic view of the city as paradise since the Sixties with films like Joseph Estrada’s Geron Busabos to Gerry de Leon’s The Moises Padilla Story, and into the Seventies with Lino Brocka’s unforgiving depiction of Manila as slums in films like Insiang, Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Pasan ko ang Daigdig, or Manila as brothel in films like Celso Ad. Castillo’s Burlesk Queen and Chito Rono’s Private Show – Bernal’s Manila by Night delivers the penultimate depiction of Manila as living hell.
In the film, lives are intertwined among all characters, their past mesh with their present. The matriarch Charito Solis cannot leave her dirty past behind as a former prostitute no matter how much alcohol she washes her hands with; the taxi driver supports a family by day and offers his body for pay by night; the blind masseuse services customers and gets her high with a lesbian drug pusher who in turn peddles the forbidden drug to other characters like William Martinez; and there’s the gay couturier who sees all these events happen around him serving as a kind of omnipresent mind viewing the society from within.
I wish to hazard a guess that that omniscient consciousness was that of the artist, Bernal, who found his alter-ego in the gay couturier played by Bernardo Bernardo. With this character he articulates his thoughts and conveys his emotions about his city. It is the filmmaker who looks introspectively at his society, the film serving once more as the mirror to view the way things are. Bernal follows the distinguished list of filmmakers from before, Jose Nepomuceno, Vicente Salumbides, Carlos Vander Tolosa, Avellana, de Leon, Brocka, et. al. in uncovering the myths swaddling the city and reveal it for its complexity. If what we see is a network of corrupted morals, let us not blame the artist as the bearer of bad tidings. What he brings through his film is a mirror upon which we can look and see our soul. If we want to see the image in the mirror changed, it is us who need to change.
Manila by Night is a complex tapestry of decadence and corruption eating the very soul of the city, as it is of the nation. In its non-linear narrative, the film becomes a mosaic of lives that have been betrayed by the neon lights of the city and its deceptive promises. With the film, Bernal has etched the epitaph of the city. Yet while burying the city of our affections, Bernal wants us to liberate ourselves because what he offers his viewers is this: the truth of who we are. If we wish to improve our lot as a city and as a people, it must come from the recognition and acceptance of who we are. The film is one mirror where we can see ourselves.
To cap this line up of films depicting Manila, let me end with a film of my own. I have added my voice in creating my own view of the city where I was born. My film, Memories of old Manila, a short film, is both a homage to the city and a verdict of it. By making the film, I wanted to see reified on screen what has troubled me for so long and what has haunted our people for ages: the imperious past, contained in memory, clashing with the anger of the present, embodied in consciousness. Past and present, memory and consciousness, body and spirit – the aching dualities that forever recast our position as individuals and as communities in the march of time and in the shaping of this polis. They are dualities that create restlessness in our society. In the film, I sought this restlessness to assume its double on screen.
The film is an imagined journey into five centuries of recorded time. As I trace the beginnings of the city, undoubtedly, the film had to touch on colonization, war and other social stresses our society faced through years of struggle. Being a short film freed from the conventions of the Tagalog melodrama and seeking expression in “new” cinema, my film tread on a symbolic path where images stood for concepts that have shaped our lives as “natives” of this country – a galleon for Spanish colonization, the cross for Catholicism, a hollowed out cadaver as an emptied past, books for knowledge, a flag for American conquest, tanks for military rule…and a crippled child for my view of the contemporary Filipino. Standing in as my alter ego is a historian played by Behn Cervantes who articulates my thoughts of this city and the world I have known to love and hate.
Unknowingly, my film too did not escape the imagery of children to represent a “people” – the Filipino people. It is the children that I have bestowed my concerns for what the present and the future have become as they came out from a troubled past. My casting a handicapped child, walking with a crutch speaks volumes of how I see my own generation starting off in life limping as we go about fulfilling our own destinies. He is surrounded by other children who belong to gangs, burn crosses and are intoxicated in drugs. In the film, I ask questions about how the city has become the locus of our lives as Filipinos, who we are and what we have become. The film has become syncretic of the many images thrown on local screen as these images have been inspired by real events in our society. From the ancient walls of Intramuros, the film ends with a slum community; the fight with the conquistador culminates with anti-colonialism and dictatorship. In the end, as I drown the historian in a murky river, ranting about the loss of the past, only his hat remains. It is the hat that the crippled boy is able to salvage and as he wears it, I wish to think that he inherits a symbolic knowledge of his own past as he faces the break of a new dawn.
The City and the “Filipino” Imaginary
In case it has escaped anyone’s notice, I reiterate that this paper has made us journey through more than 100 years of cinema’s development in the country. In those years, the history of cinema paralleled the years of our nation-building. Cinema found its timely relevance with the role it found in the rise of the public sphere resulting to the establishment of an independent nation-state and endowing cinema the status of a “national culture.” As years of nationalist struggle yielded a self-governing republic, in the cultural sideline cinema played a major role in galvanizing the native public to believe in the mythos of the “nation,” no matter if compromised by an alien medium. Film assumed its mythologizing power by appealing to the people’s individual and collective imaginations – that they indeed belong to one nation.
This paper has focused our attention to a subset of films that is perceived to embody the efforts of cinema to conjure a “nation” while using the “city” as its symbolic metaphor. While this has proved to be effective in invoking in the public mind the concept of the nation through the specificity of the image of a “city” (Manila), it is this specificity that remains problematic and needs unpacking. As evidenced by the examples shown above, the history of these films’ exhibition proves the power of these films to galvanize in the minds of their viewers a concrete image of “the Philippines” by showing a chunk of its parts, the capital city of Manila. Once again invoked is the symbolic power of film to represent the whole with its visual part. What happens to the part provides meaning to the whole.
The films mentioned in this paper present a diachronic mosaic of how Manila was cinematically portrayed. Escolta created a powerful image in the minds of early cinema viewers of how America’s new territory looked with its quaint modes of transportation and in a film showing Pasig, frail bancas represent a laughable naval force. Manila became an “open city” and a site of defeat for both the retreating US forces and the local residents in a Japanese propaganda film. After the war, the country’s devastation is shown in the decay of Intramuros symbolizing the decay of the “Filipino” body and soul. During the time of the dictatorship, nostalgia is invoked when the city is seen as ground zero for the birth of nationalism but seen from a contemporary view, Manila has become nothing but a pile of squatter’s rubble invaded a second time by an opportunistic American. The sordid imagery reaches its lowest depth when the city is shown as a “living hell” populated by social deviants and, to cap it all, a crippled child stands in for a lost generation.
Watching these films about Manila, one sees that Filipino artists have rallied around the image of the city as the symbol for the rise and fall of the nation. In the city may be found a powerful image and evocative site where they can appeal to the nation to see that what is happening to the city is what is happening to their country. In this filmic representation, the imaginary plays a crucial role in the representation of the nation by a city. In this process, the city is fixed as a locus of imagination, finding in its iconic representation the symbolic meaning of the Filipino nation.
While these films have no doubt played a significant role in nation-building, this comes not without its problems. As the films thematize the nation to be visually absent in the film text, the city takes its place as an iconic, graphic emblem. The problem this poses is this: with the erasure of the real nation comes the erasure of the complexities of who comprise that nation that counts among it indigenous ethnic affiliations, religious communities, linguistic groupings and other kinship ties. One wonders, whose nation is conjured when these Manila-made films are shown? Who is the public that is invoked by these films? How do these films construct an ideological subject out of their viewers? In short, in what way is film used to invent a “nation”? Once again, may it be asked: whose nation is it we see in Tagalog films?
A general listing of the cinematic effects made by these films shows a nation that is Catholic, favoring hegemonic low-land cultures that are Hispanic, American and Tagalog; has urbanized sensibility; molded in imperialist imagination; and is culturally insensitive to the greater multitude of populations that otherwise comprise the true and real “Filipino nation.” Which makes us ask again and again: Whose cinema was it that we have been watching over the past 100 years? Who owns, better yet, who controls image production in the country? When did the Tagalog cinema become a “national” cinema? Have we already achieved a “national” cinema or, out of haste, have we miscalculated the use of an otherwise regional cinema as national? What elements of our national life are suppressed by making Manila-centric films?
As we acknowledge that cinema is still the youngest of all the arts and among the communication media, it is time we need to ask the question of how film may be made to serve the greater need of having a communication medium that will be for all and not just under the control of the urbanized and privileged few. With the new digital technology and the spread of technical knowledge and availability of capital in the globalized market economy, filmmakers must exert efforts in fulfilling the goals unrealized yet by a Manila-centric film industry over the past 100 years in making representative the Filipino society with its use of media. It is hoped that this dream may one day become fulfilled.
As new challenges will be faced, the post-ness of all that have been articulated in this paper – post-colonial, post-modern, post-Christian, post-city… shall make us brace ourselves for a fragmented view of our nation and ourselves. As the premiere city loses its hold on the collective imagination, its place will be taken over by other cities to capture one’s imagination – for good or bad. Cinema will become more contested as a medium with all sects and sectors competing for a chance to be seen and heard. Welcome to the age of “U Tube” and “I Cinema”!
The past 100 years have nothing been but infant steps for both the film medium and the Filipino nation. What lies a hundred years hence, will bring more excitement and challenges. In all these, the city films dominated by images of Manila may become a thing of the past as cities new and far will swarm our imagination and make us think of the “nation” as truly a composite of those that constitute it and not merely one fabricated to serve those who have the power to imagine it.
FOOTNOTES:
1.For reference on cinema’s beginnings in the Philippines, refer to my book, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines. (Manila: NCCA, 2003).
2.Read claims made by James Henry White in Charles Edward Hastings’ “A Cameraman Runs into a War,” Moving Picture World, January 29, 1927.
3.Herbert, Stephen and Luke McKernan. Who’s Who in Victorian Cinema. (London: BFI, 1996), p. 67.
4.The Burton Holmes Lectures (Battle Creek, Michigan: The Little-Preston Company, Ltd., 1901), p. 255.
5.This list only refers to films made in Manila. Holmes also shot films outside of the city as he accompanied U.S. military forces during their operations to chase after Filipino “insurgents.” Some films were made as “sham” re-enactments like the burning of a nipa hut for the benefit of Holmes’ camera.
6.Stephen and McKernan, p. 151.
7.Other films made by White were Filipinos Retreat from Trenches (c. June 5, 1899); US Troops and Red Cross in the Trenches before Caloocan (P.I.) (c. June 5, 1899); Capture of Trenches at Candaba (c. June 10, 1899); Rout of the Filipinos (c. June 10, 1899); The Early Morning Attack (c. September 22, 1899); Col. Funston Swimming the Baglag River (c. September 23, 1899).
8.Stephen and McKernan, p. 11.
9.Burning film copies of Dawn of Freedom in Japan was mentioned by Marcus Nornes in his essay on the film in Media Wars: Then and Now, a catalog for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 1991, pp. 257-263.
10.Also read my essay on the same films and the theme of the city-as-slum in “Edison vs. Brocka: Colonizing and De-colonizing the Filipino on Screen,” Pelikula, March-August 2000.