WHEN does a film become a regional cinema?
The CineKabalen has just finished its celebration of films from Pampanga province. In Bikol, particularly in the Ateneo de Naga University in Camarines Sur province, “Pasale” (which means “a show or display”), the first local regional cinema in Kabikolan, was set for December 9, but was postponed to February 3 because of Typhoon Ruby (international code name Hagupit). Two more regional cinemas are set to be held in Mindanao in February. In August 2015 the National Cinema Rehiyon, a gathering of all the regional cinemas, will take place in Cebu province.
There is this phenomenon redefining Philippine films, and it is happening outside the ambit of so-called Metro Manila.
It is time to define regional cinema. But who defines it?
The country is divided into 17 regions. From those distinctive numberings, the easiest way to define the regions by which films will come to represent seems to emerge. But the issues involved are far more complex than mere regional representations. Cinema, by its technologies, can create what French metaphysician and philosopher Giles Deleuze calls “any space, whatsoever!”
Cinema can conflate time and compress spaces. A child is shown onscreen for one moment and then, in the next few seconds, is presented as all grown up. A few minutes can span 10 years, or a glance can take more than five minutes.
That place represented onscreen may not really be that place in its real location. Think of the studio shots in those old movies. The isle of Capri may just be a painted backdrop. The Heidelberg, in the operetta The Student Prince, may actually be a huge soundstage. The voice of the prince, played by Edmund Purdom, is not really his, but Mario Lanza’s.
Ang pelikula ay mapanlinlang (“The cinema can be deceitful”). Films can play tricks on the viewers, National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera said in his keynote speech during the second year of Pasale at the Ateneo de Naga. We can rephrase that in this way: Cinema can do things that can deceive—not that it wants to, but that it is part of the instruments of the film to cut across boundaries: creating gaps where there are none, constructing valleys where there are plateaus.
The deceit of cinema, however, does not remain on the ethical or moral level. It has also something to do with how films—and filmmakers—employ the freedom offered by the tools of narrative and visualization. This deceit extends, as well, to regional cinemas and the pictures of the places they proffer or prefer.
The problem of determining what constitutes a regional cinema is a problem in a postmodern and postcolonial globalized world. People are moving into different spaces and creating their identities there. Notions of authenticities are challenged and subverted. Does a Filipino poet remain that way if he lives in New York, but writes about his childhood and his pain, and poetizes about the self in southern Luzon?
Our questions are also the questions posed to films about Japan by Hollywood. Do you recall the controversy about the aesthetics of the kimono used by geishas in the film Memoirs of a Geisha? When those who know the kimono protested the color and design as not reflective of Kyoto traditions, those behind them reportedly responded: Who said this film is about Kyoto, about Japan? This is Japan as imagined by Hollywood.
Regional cinemas, for better or worse, suffer from the same perspectives. The geopolitics and ideologies of Manila still determine where the regions are and what films are emerging from those regions. It was said that, since the National Capital Region is one of the 17 regions comprising the country, then films from Manila and its environs are also regional cinemas.
The plot thickens; the definitions grow thinner.
How do we deal with an independent film about the Abu Sayyaf, which is set in Basilan province, but was shot in the hills of Tanay town in Rizal province?
Perhaps, language can be the determinant of a regional cinema. This does not make things any easier, though. When Richard Somes’s film Yanggaw (Affliction) was released, some viewers complained about the authenticity of the Ilonggo language used.
In Alvin Yapan’s film Debosyon (Devotion), there is a scene where Mando, played by Paulo Avelino, runs from what is presented as the Shrine of Our Lady of Peñafrancia in Naga to the forest, and arrives at a place with a marvelous view of the Mayon Volcano. To the non-Bikolano audience, there was no problem, but to the Bicolano who knows his or her geography, there was a problem that extended beyond language, for Avelino was using the piquant (an outsider’s modifier) Iriga language. Mando runs from Naga and reaches Iriga City, and faces Mayon, which is in Albay province.
The justifiable definition of a regional cinema is that it is an artefact of identity. It is time to celebrate the insider’s view after the colonizing, totalizing conquest of those based in Manila.
In the meantime, films will be made by those who live in the periphery, and the definition can be legalistic, boring and ineffectual. The places outside Manila—and the many ethnolinguistic communities who live there—will be as imagined by Manila-centric cultural workers, who, by refusing to see the differences outside them, have been underdeveloped with the stench of the capital’s constricted assumption of power.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano