LAST Saturday, February 18, a small band of filmmakers created their own history. Led by Kristian Sendon Cordero, they showed the director’s second work, titled Hinulid.
The film competed in last year’s Quezon City Film Festival. But if there’s any great news about the film, it is that Nora Aunor stars in it—and, for the first time on film, speaks her mother tongue. In this era of languages that are either fathered or mothered, that which I call Nora Aunor’s mother tougue is Rinconada Bikol by way of Iriga City. It is not the central Bikol language, again a domain highly questioned and much debated upon.
There is another first in Cordero’s book and this is the fact that, for the first time, emblazoned onscreen is the claim that Hinulid is a Bikol film. More than the issue of languages, an issue that will always be of main import in this nation, there is the theater, the site and location of the showing: Bichara Theater.
The group behind Hinulid had all the options to screen the film in audio-visual rooms in educational institutions in Naga City. There was, however, one more reason for the screening, and this was to celebrate cinema from the periphery. These are the films developed by filmmakers from the regions, utilizing the languages and cultures of the societies found at the political margins. And what better to rejoice at the rise of another cinema than recalling the days when moviehouses independent of shopping malls proliferated in provincial cities and even towns. These were the standalone cinemas.
Bichara Theater is not only an example of a standalone cinema; the name itself once stood for quality moviehouses The name may sound odd to audiences or moviegoers today.
One went to the moviehouse to watch a movie and not to shop. The experience of being in a moviehouse comes with the plan, a clear plan to be immersed in a movie. In other words, one does not stumble upon a cinema: one goes for it To Ridley Scott, the filmmaker who seduced us with many of his compelling words, is attributed the following: “In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.”
If size does matter, then people (mostly students) did marvel at the awesome theater last Saturday and Sunday. I recall now how the young viewers stretched their vision to better grasp the profound space they found themselves in.
Indeed, Ridley Scott is right. The director composes some of his scenes not only with walls and floors but with the horizon. One needs the awesomeness of the space and the sound that fill that space.
In that screening, the all-Bikolano audience went through the splendor of the variety of Bikol languages together with their nuances and inflections, and insofar as they recognized the sounds. Their enjoyment of the film was as rewarding as hearing the sound of their own language emanating from the screen and gaining loud laughter and applause as jokes and double-meaning take on shades deeper than grays and blacks.
What meaning would the location sites have had for those who recognized their hometowns, the bridges and beaches, the forests and farms? Are regional or independent filmmakers mandated to validate the location by shooting in the Bikol region, as the case may be?
To remind us: Films about particular places need not really use the actual locations. Actors need not be of the actual physical ethnicity of the character they are portraying. There are many cases of this situation. There are many reasons for this.
How many times has Canada doubled for states in the US? How many times did the landscapes of Spain became those of Greece’s on film? The latest case is the powerful film of Martin Scorsese on the Jesuits and the hidden Christians of 1600 to 1800. The film should take your breath away.
Deterretorialization, that difficult concept, saw its fruition that fateful day. The moviegoers were afforded the chance to examine the landscape and seascape of Bikol. At each shift of location, viewers tried to identify the places beaming from the silver screen.
Nora Aunor speaks!
There was a unison of whisper the first time the voice of Nora came out with epic tale of the Tandayag, the huge monster of mythic times, and how in its flight from eternal space to Earth, the Tandayag lost its child.
Even without the sight of the Tandayag crossing the sky with impunity. the vocal timbre of Aunor’s dialog presaged the divine eternity of the laws of the universe. From that opening scene until the last, Aunor’s voice did not lose the solemnity of one guiding us through the joys and sadness of Life and Death.
Hinulid, for all its flaws, mounts an epic tale where the vastness of the universe has become a given in the equation of loss and resignation. There is also the theme of a mother’s love now encompassing the open space where nothing is something because a storyteller has made it so. There is Death moving against the backdrop of green meadows, blue skies and the whiteness of clouds competing against the subjugation of black and gray.
The big screen works its wonders.
There is a scene in the film where Nora/Sita walks on a hanging bridge while, on the other side, Death also walks. Death is dressed in regal red and a woman shrouded in black pulls its bier. Nora/Sita walks with the urn bearing the ashes of her son, Lucas.
The camera sits not still during these moments. It looks at Sita walking from afar. The camera also catches La Muerte of Death. As they come closer to each other, the camera walks back and offers to us the bridge with the two individuals in poses that appear to lead to confrontation. But the camera moves to a closeup shot of the two persons who are both protagonist and antagonist in the simulacrum of Life and Death looking into each other’s gaze. Below them, the dark river of that afternoon flowed like love that could never end, like memories that go on forever—like Death alive in the world of the living.
Nora Aunor, in that scene on the bridge, looks into the face of Death in a multitude of expressions, releasing them because to keep them would be equal to dying. Death played by Delia Enverga, a stage actress and teacher in the city, looks with all the longing that a non-Life could assure the living.
The big screen made all the magic work.