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I HAD
been watching Sine Totoo, but never really truly
understood its aim, or the wisdom of its direction.
Shown every Saturday on GMA, the presentation brings in
back the documentarist, with the producer this time to
talk about the process of their documentation. There
are, it appears, two major considerations for this act.
One is that the revisit of the presentation can focus on
certain portions of the documentary, in a sense allowing
us to look over the shoulders of the makers as they
red-pencil their old work.
Another
is built on the assumption that the documentarists have
one more level of articulation left, one that is not
given airing in the presentation. Under this assumption,
the documentarists now take the outsider’s perspective
and proceed to review his or her own work with less
passion this time. The author is to bracket his
impression about his impression.
The men
and women behind the documentaries are expected to be
acutely fluent and conversant about their past
experiences if they are to come out credible in front of
the footage they took, spliced and edited together to
form a coherent narrative. Where in the documentaries—in
my book anyway—they cannot be downright didactic, in the
aftermath provided by the forum of Sine Totoo,
they can now add the dialogues that were allowed to fall
on the cutting floor. They can also go to town putting
back footnotes up-front, fleshing out visual citations
seen as excessive during the act of editing.
Last
Saturday I saw Jiggy Manicad, as the documentarist, and
his producer “recite” their experiences. Nothing much
was really added to the documentary in terms of their
performance. If I am allowed to offer an explanation, it
must be because in front of cameras, documentarists are
like poets in pain as they explain their poetry and
their poetics. If one were to judge also the producer,
she got stuck in one “eye-opener” to another.
This
brings me back to why I really do not understand Sine
Totoo. It also brings me to what documentaries are
all about: it is about the phenomena being recorded and
not the one recording. In the phenomena can be found
already the phenomenon of this person going out saddled
and enlightened by his own personal psychology. He is
the person of K.O.L. Burridge, the anthropologist who
goes out into the field aware that he has his own
prejudices. He is the believable person even as we do
not see him. He is there in narrative of distant lands
and territories where our own values do not hold sway.
On islands forgotten by the nation that makes it an
existing territory.
For
Manicad, this island is
Fuga Island,
which he has visited and revisited and forever captured
in what I believe to be one of the most cogent and most
commanding travelogues ever done by any television
network. Where the documentarists—Manicad and his
producer—are almost timid in their reporting to the
“master,” Howie Severino, the presentation they produced
on the trip to Fuga Island embodies the best that a
documentarist can do on limited time—both temporal and
intellectual—on an island.
The team
was there because it did not know anything about the
island. From that perspective of blissful nonknowledge,
the team daringly sailed across the Babuyan Strait from
Claveria to that small community where there was “zero
crime rate.” There were other zeros on that island: zero
health service, zero food, zero awareness. Was it the
fortune of the island that above the zero social evils,
there was corruption in the community as evidenced by
the free medicine being sold to the people?
The
force of the documentary is that, in this season where
documentaries are used for directly political purposes,
it astutely elevates the issue to geographical and
cultural isolation first. Marvel at the raging sea and
the wind that seems to howl. When the team members got
stranded and they had to subsist on rootcrops (to ask
from the villagers would be to contribute to their
perpetual subsistence), the view of the documentarist
standing on a windswept grassy ridge trying to reach GMA
News and Public Affairs executive Mike Enriquez was pure
poetry, this time oozing with politics.
From
that vantage point, there is no other way but to let our
vision roam to catch the distance of national
governance. We see bureaucrats who do not know Fuga
Island holds a marine reserve. We hear a bureaucrat who
is not aware the island was privately owned. We see
stones on which are scribbled by paint the names of
political candidates. This island forgotten is still a
source of votes. We listen to mothers who tell us that
without any doctor, they just wait for death to claim
their loved ones.
The
documentary was made in 2005. It dates for us the
further evolution of the journalists/documentarists in
this land, that they do not end their fieldworks with
data gathering but with a solution of any kind. In the
case of Manicad and his lost island, the solution came
in the form of a medical mission. The outreach was made
after they had been informed by the Fuga Island
Holdings, the registered owner of the island, that they
could not be allowed back into the island. If they did
come back, they would be considered trespassers. In full
theater of the absurd fashion, the medical missionaries
had to resort to technical means: land on areas on the
island where they could not be considered vagrant
wayfarers.
Already,
there is a web site dedicated to the people of Fuga
Island. The site talks of a short film called The
Silent Natives of Fuga, produced by the National
Film Board of Canada. The group, describing Fuga, says
that “what is a dream location for visitors is really a
living nightmare for the natives.” Compare this with
what Manicad says at the end, about how one day the
people of Fuga will be saved because they have hope. It
is a perspective that is slowly developing to be a
favored one by Filipino documentarists, to put on the
place and the people their fate. While it is simplistic
and reductionist—as the other factors are ignored,
including the inept government officials—the stand
pushes the romantic notion to another level. Now, the
people experiencing deprivation become the agent of
their salvation. Like the teacher from Claveria
uprooting herself to teach the young pupils of the
island. This teacher says she is doing what she can to
help children reading their books in the dark, with a
small lamp to light the pictures and words of the book.
We cannot say anything to her because we know she,
without romanticizing anything, is bigger than anything
we can become.
At the
end, the documentarist is really saying: look at us for
we do not know our island. |
