If we are to consider the recent celebration of the Heritage Month, one notices no mention of cinema as part of the national heritage, if by heritage we mean the components of cultures that create the politics, sociology and splendor of a nation.
This gap in the reckoning of what we mean by heritage or national cultural legacy must be addressed.
I write this paper not so much as to convince any institution—because there should be no convincing as to the existing value of cinema—but to articulate the compelling presence and roles of cinema in the life of a nation and its people and all the ethnolinguistic groups that compose that aggrupation.
Hereunder follow my views of cinema as heritage:
Cinema compared to the other arts is ideologically, politically and technically a popular and populist art. Cinema does not have to grapple with the divides provided by class structures and education. Organic to cinema is its ability to reflect (a theoretical perspective inherent in the past decades) and refract (a way of seeing that diverts from what is widespread at present), subvert, interrogate, even merely indicate the questions, crises, and dreams of a group of people, whether they are at the center of a perceived urban civilization, as a dominant class in the socially stratified society or at the margin or periphery of a heavily centralized cultural renaissance and aesthetic inventions.
Cinema, despite being the youngest of the arts, is at the forefront of how arts can work with the rapid changes in societies and in people’s worldview and ethos. Cinema, at its very core, has been invented to question other arts and itself. When the Lumierre Brothers came up with the cinematograph, which allowed them to screen “moving pictures” to an audience of some 200 people, they initiated an art form that would evolve and shift not only from within but also from without—cinema being an art form that requires the audience actively sensing the images projected, extending the narrative with their reactions and responses, and—through radical shifts in film-viewing (death of stand-alone cinemas, end of the continuous screening among many other factors), giving rise to an art form that is radically and wonderfully transitioning in forms.
Cinema is nation-building. When Hollywood became a machinery and a technological dictatorship, cinema was reinvented into “national cinemas.” This historical development provides us an understanding how cinema comments on the identities, or the problems of the identification and definition of the same identities, and throw those words onto the world screen. Thus, there came to be “French cinema,” “Italian cinema,” “Japanese cinema.” All these labels were and are responses and counteractions to the aggressively marketed and arrogantly exhibited films from Hollywood. The Hollywood machine was helped in no small measure by colonization, when that nation taught the world how to speak and think in English. We are the prime example of this tacit conquest. While there is a critical stance that cinema is inescapably international, there is also the perquisition and inquiry that cinemas can be used to manifest the characteristics of the arts of a particular nation. That, in the end, cinema can have nationality.
Cinema is national arts. Contemplate these names: Gerardo de Leon, Lamberto Avellana, Manuel Conde, Eddie Romero, Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal and Fernando Poe Jr. They—together with the scriptwriters, musicians, cinematographers, technical men and women—at particular as well as specific historical points of the arts, in parts and of societies, as totality, commented, defined, engaged and imagined for us the issues and themes that were within the grasp of the literati and the illiterate and nonliterate, of the formally educated, the informally educated and the uneducated. Complicate this in a beautiful way: Examine the growth of regional cinemas and factor in the search and formation of the nation the contribution from below and from out of the center—the regional and local complexions of the other languages and cultures.
If we are to define heritage, we can examine the definition put forward by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) and appearing on its web site. It asks the question: What is meant by “cultural heritage?”
Its response: The term cultural heritage encompasses several main categories of heritage.
Under cultural heritage are the following:
Tangible cultural heritage:
- Movable cultural heritage (paintings, sculptures, coins, manuscripts);
- Immovable cultural heritage (monuments, archaeological sites and so on); and
- Underwater cultural heritage (shipwrecks, underwater ruins and cities).
Intangible cultural heritage: oral traditions, performing arts, rituals
Natural heritage: natural sites with cultural aspects, such as cultural landscapes, physical, biological or geological formations
The definition is not static because Unesco even indicates another category: Heritage in the event of armed conflict. This refers to places where heritage sites are ruined, destroyed or eradicated because of armed conflicts.
The definitions of Unesco further envisions the natural strength of cinema where it is able to document, preserve the vanishing discourses and scenarios of various ethnic groups, especially those that are threatened both by armed conflicts and perspectives that deny the persistence of certain communities and their practices and rituals.
National Artist for Film and Theater (in various documents, he is listed under Theatre) Lamberto Avellana has been quoted in the January 1985 issue of Filipino Film Review, as he answered the question: How would you evaluate the development of cinema in our country in the same manner that the Europeans have developed a cinema distinctly their own? To this, Avellana responded: I believe that there is a Filipino feeling for movies; a Filipino way of film making; and one day this will emerge, slower than usual, human, pathetic, touching the heart. On the screen, we’ll see the way we talk, the way we make love, the way we die. We are a unique people living in a unique place, and we deserve a uniquely Filipino cinema.
If Heritage—palpable and sensual, political and social—is to be counted, then cinema should be there within that definition, within that movement, within that celebration. Bienvenido Lumbera, national artist for literature and one of the original founders of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, considered to be the premier critics group in the country, states in his essay, “An Approach to Filipino Cinema,” how “a film is not merely an interplay of light and shadow, of movement and stillness, or of sound and silence. It is about something, and this something is rooted in the realities of the society, which produced the film.”
Those realities, aside from the lovely sights and visions, are part of our cultural heritage, and they, the legacies of the past we can all share and remember, are indeed rooted in cinema, the art form for a nation and all its wonderful permutations.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.