Lessons From The Metro Manila Fim Festival ( MMFF ) :

by Carlo Cielo

Moral lesson of the story :
The Filipino Film industry should be allowed not only during Christmas break. It should be allowed all days of the year.

A lot of films get ignored because you have an ENTIRE spectrum of a film scene being compressed within a short while. How can you properly appreciate, say, the intricacies of RPG :Metanoia ( and there are many ), or the poignancy of what appears to be Dolphy's swan song, when you don't have the latitude to appreciate each at their own time.

Instead, you are forced in a situation where you're deluged by a sturm un drang of Filipino product, showing their wares for a limited period before they are literally shooed off the streets. Naturally, the loudest ones get picked up first, and nothing else would be said of it. There is only so much you can consider and sift through. You do not have time to linger.

And often, the products aren't prepped for the long term. They had to make it as flashy and as noisy and as instantly consumable, or they're immediately passed by. Under the wretched market principle that defines their activity, they are left with no choice.

This is what you get when you have a neo-liberal economy that is slave to Western transaction, and is prone to dire straits. Obviously, we have to get a bit of self-respect now, and that this must not go on.

Filipinos shouldn't have to live by technocratic pipe dreams; they should be able to live by theirs, and they should be allowed to do that in their own cinema. And not be treated like insurgents/terrorists/traffic obstructions whenever they dare to frickin' do so !

Feel Good Sick :

‎" Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts & specialists, identify our problems & patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture becomes a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless & finally fatal optimism. "- Chris Hedges

The Killing Of Veronica Guerin

by Carlo Cielo

Judge has ruled that all truth will be fined guilty. Sentence is maximum intolerance for all the plaintiffs. Full gunshot blast through the head. The verdict is final. Objections overruled. No witnesses allowed.

So it goes.

And that is the state of 'truth-telling' nowadays. If you try to do so, you are labelled a terrorist. In the case of Julian Assuage, founder of Wikileaks, you are deemed a pederast. Invectives that carry in them a death sentence, that is ironically a form of rape. And so we get the sleazy, complicit 'media' we have nowadays, living in seems by their all-too-easy manifesto : “ If you cannot tell the truth, might as well make the news.” And the 'news' that they spurn and generate all throughout are the exact type of noise the powers just want, to obfuscate and blur what are otherwise their clear acts of menace. Throwing the whole 'gray area' blurb when they find it especially convenient. A bloated 'media' eager to earn their 'Fourth Estate' cred like a reserved seat on the table.

We have a Big Media today that goes like this, like we have children now that goes like this. Children who want exactly to do whatever the grown-ups say. I just had this conversation with an Anthropology Professor in UP CSSP, and she's complained about how talking to today's kids is like talking to their parents. While I agree with the geist of the conclusions, I do feel it masks a falacious argument that only serves to absolve for example the quasi-'rebels' who practically laid the foundations to their current 'surrender pose' with their Gloria vote in 2004. Moreover, this denies the nature of history as continuity, not as mere affectation or lifestyle. Because, what we're faced with isn't really an entire new breed naturally failing on their accord, so much as a downward trajectory humanity has been taking since it started doing away with social safety nets in the '80 - of simply hurtling into collective disembowelment. History, after all, has been deemed to have ended by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we're being geared towards sociological Big Crunch. All the apocalyptic hoopla of the '90s should account for this, as well as the continuing apocalypse in this era's more decadent minds, who now live and fester in the subcultures and the academe. Basically, this is what the chief industrialists and players mean when they launched the 'New World Order' worldwide with the rise of the first Bush and the formal aggression in Iraq at the start of the '90s. Before, it's all covert stuff and selling arms to pit nations against each toher. Now, the key plan is to plain wipe out everything for the free market.

This it seems, was why Veronica Guerin had to die.

First, they wage war against Communism and generalized rebellion & dissent. Then, they wage war against art & science and journalism. This kept most people and minds devastated, perhaps, as this growing allergy towards pro-people initiatives makes clear, so they could conveniently be taken out of the picture, and all their planes and landscapes be cleared - in the name of absolute capitalism. Such economic ideology has been taken to such a positivist extreme, disregarding all human factors and side effects, that it's become its own nihilist type of metaphysics in all its termination sequence. It can be said that adherers are simply sticking to its formula, the only promise it has for the world : namely, that all things human and natural be purged, until there is nothing left but 'supply and demand'. Pesky reporters and noisy types had to be eliminated to accommodate the transfer of goods, either in the form of oil, cannabis, or drugs. There will be outcry, and its govts. would try and save face, but amid scores of broken bodies and left traces of the disappeared, is the need to simply reposition the same product in another way. Sometimes, it takes the form of new wars; sometimes, new regimes. The macro-schema remains. It is sold as a finished stasis we are all holed up in. A punctuation mark that closes an axiom. A done deal.

****
Apocalypse frightens them, ennit? It really does, and yes, I do find it amusing. Which is why I feel the current impunity we are in is less a fluke of a worthless generation, so much as the fathers of a failed one returning to abandoned patriarchy, and calling on the sons of the new so they could help share in their shameful dearth and regression, & make them feel right about turning away from the march of progress that went right past them during their time. Apparently, there is 'no other sociological alternative'. So these louts of NAFTA, Softcore, and Duty Free, who were at the front row seat to the most awe-striking revolutions, could only grab the young, and tell the young to hold back Embracing as they both approach the fall, finding no shelter in or out of themselves, as they close their eyes and pray.

With this, they can only part us a single advice, as the motorcycle people approach with their guns :

Think fast.

Punishment Park ( 1971 ) - Peter Watkins

Readings Into Lino Brocka's 'Bayan Ko : Kapit Sa Patalim' :

by Carlo Cielo

And so we return to the scene of the crime.

Turing is down to his last set of chips. He’s taken all his bets as far as these could go. There is only just his gun, his bellicose pal, the bloated hostage, and a barrage of law enforcement agents waiting to lunge straight at them, while the media gadflies buzz around. Only the most futile of pedestals keep them from heading straight into judgment. The fort they’ve made of the factory has long been infiltrated now; his troops have all been taken out. Numbers are running thin, and there is a shot yet to be fired. Then, a plea. Few minutes ago, his former activist wife called upon him, through police blow horn, to desist. Beckoning him to pry open the last defenses his meager income has left him with: the wobbling doors and fortifications which maintain the protest in his head. Seems none of this was good enough, wasn’t enough seizure of a future that’s been long denied them. The rest cannot see that, or look past incident. They can only be intimidated by the action.

So, Turing relents, and lets her arrive. Some, however, ain’t so giving.

Quickly, his felon buddy grabs the well-stuffed Mrs. Tan, and sticks his gun into her temple. Within the few seconds the heathens land in their uniforms, it’s a free for all. He chucks his bullets onto that stout piece of crap, while Turing and his wife ducks for cover. Several blasts raze through tight air, as the multiple hits tear up every fiber of the brigand’s body. In a few seconds, he is dead. Turing is immediately held down the ground, his wrists tied together in cuff links. His wife walks beside him, smug and content that he’s gonna be kept safe by the type of ‘justice’ with which they mock the uninitiated, knowing full well he hasn’t seen the last of oblivion....

***

It is in this final sequence where the film really shows how it’s firmly held together, not just in terms of culminating narrative threads, but in the utter completeness of cinematic visions merging with sentiment – from the props, the focused sense of geography, right down to Turing’s uniform, as he marches into battle, and makes that climactic assault in the printing press. His dress evokes NPA, with the bandana and the ragged guerilla clothing and strut. The laborer attacking capitalist machinery's a shocking proposition enough as it is; his address to the Filipino people more so. While registering more as cheap satire 25 years on, that scene of him prior talking at length about worker’s rights and oppression while holding an AK-47 at his lap ( far as I remember ) is a sublime act of cinematic provocation buried underneath the proceedings, and could have been among the reasons why this film got banned by the Marcos regime in the first place. All these events occur in a tight room, with the principals up front and human collateral behind.

Yet this is where Lino Brocka breaks with posers exploiting terrorist chic mileage. Said scene is as much informed by revolutionary insight. It owes more than to mere petty theater, or bourgeoisie cynicism, that he had the goon guy take the mic from Turing as he berates him. Both he and Pete Lacaba know their politics enough to not entrust the uprising to these lumpen scalawags.

Even if it’s only on film. In fact, this unified sentiment informs the rest of the creative choices made all throughout. The people who make up the ragtag crew, for example, don’t act like they abide by any principle, and are anything but heroic, or even protagonist. They’re every bit the villainous henchmen in random Filipino action flicks, and to see these bumbling felons walk alongside the lead, and the lead, played by an action star, mind you, being so helplessly dependent on them, lends a filmic sense of tension to the whole ordeal, highlighting the utter recklessness of Turing’s actions, and giving it a palpable sense of believability. As if his mission is bound to crumble at any minute, with his buddies being creeping antagonists that run beside him, instead of charging straight at him, guiding him to his fall through a false sense of cathartic victory. Not just any sort of ‘achievement’. The punishing lighting brings this to bear; drenched in shadows, yet illuminated enough for us to see who exactly is messing with which – not sparing us from the total humanity of the guilty.

And you can find little that is as visceral a stand-in for capitalist machinery as the printing press. I am permanently reminded, for example, of a short story I read, where a worker gets so worn down by his condition, that he sleeps and falls into a printing machine, tearing him to bits. The film ‘The Machinist’ uses it in the same way as well, in the scene where a blue-collar fella gets his hand chewed up by it pretty bad. There’s just something inexplicable about the construction of these printing machines, their overall forms; a troubling oddness in these hostile shapes, where it’s not as comprehensible as say, the assembly line , where there is a conveyor belt, and a generally horizontal A to B trajectory where you know where the raw material goes to die, and where the product comes out to bury it into utility. Not so much in the printing machine’s case, which doesn't correspond as easily with the environment, with its twists and turns and convolutions, and some messed up parts of it suspended, while absent souls are forced to work its grind, even as it doesn’t know what its flowing into or where it's take them, and is as divorced from their conditions as it could get. The machines in this movie produce children’s books, happy shit that have zero relevance in their lives, this end-product being simply random and alienating. Among other things that make the usage of such, and the printing factory being setting, an accurate artistic choice relating to the purpose of the entire work.


The film also achieves wholeness through the rigorous significations of the character quirks and traits, both symbolic as well as functional : of suggestions which are brought in early and adequately pay off later ( you get to know why one of the goons is named after fecal matter ), or say, petty views which unexpectedly lead to, even hint at, grander progressive action, which then ironically drives its adherer to the sidelines. The latter would feel jarring at first, and risks turning such character into mere convenient mouthpiece for the both writer and director’s positions at a given time – in this case, the female worker and vice president of the union – but a closer inspection reveals that her actions indeed follow consistent logic. Albeit one that could potentially cloud any sense of nobility her actions exuded earlier; her proletarian affectations, while largely meant, largely serving as a means for her to reinforce her inexplicable fixation towards the lead character. Anything to drive Turing in a corner, and make him look like either an inordinate thug, or a wayward embarrassment that needs our ‘guidance’ and ‘understanding’. Which is to say that he can never do anything right on his own accord. And it’s ruthlessly exposed on live television, unhinged in all its ghastly pandering, dramatic sighs and all, even as the dullards behind the camera are tainted and compromised. Making that social point, and doing it right on celluloid, not only requires not only sharp sophistication, but also the effective integration of all collaborators’ efforts. That it is being noted at all points to the precision of the film’s mise-en-scene.


***
Saw this first in B&W VHS tape, and while a recent 33mm screening took some of the excellent rawness away, the film concludes beautifully all the same : with the Filipino teetering to the edge.

Family.

Question :  " What will be the influence of the communist order of society on the family? "

Answer :  " It will make the relations between the sexes a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved, and in which society must not intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of marriage up to now -- the dependence of the wife on the husband and of the children on their parents resulting from private property. And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moralistic philistines against the communistic "community of women."

Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it. "

- Frederick Engels, 'Principles of Communism'

The Absent Violence :

by Carlo Cielo

It's not the gash and wounds that repel; it's the contempt in the infarction.

There is this misconception about violence, that it is unacceptable to show it, because it's always gory, that it is always messy and blatant, with the blood splatters and spurts, and the membranes pried out like fruit pulp and such like. In the same way that sex is all in the copulation of the organs, so it is for that. And its not.

Basic communication is enough of an act of violence. When a neuron fires electronic signals on the nano level, and the nearest neurons is simultaneously threatened and responds, there's your brutality already there. Then, this gets replicated on a macro level, between two organisms with their own complex neural systems, in interpersonal affect. Man starts of singular and fends off for his own. Any outside stimuli is provocation. Whether it's unwelcome suggestion or transmitted message, it all does the same thing; it jolts, it starts off flight or flight albeit in small doses. Either you call these assaults premeditated or deem these accidental, it's up to you. It's what even keeps humans in a daily regimen of survival and persistence : the muscles suffer micro-tears so that its fibers can produce new striations to fortify, and it would be due to natures that hit these on a daily basis.

Sometimes, it would be simply encoded in the words that one speaks, in all the wide range of effects. So in terms of broadcast, how do you draw the line ? And where do you draw it ?

Well, someone tried. In Maguindanao. It led to the inexplicable deaths of 56 journalists. Deaths the rest of our elite, self-interest driven media can only honor, not in the lost lives per se, but in the magnanity of such type of reprisal; and its threat to go on under the terms of their common Yellow Banner - in all its feudalism.

It's not the gash and wounds that repel; it's the contempt in the infarction.