IS this the end of movies as we know them? Those huge productions, those lavish presentations costing millions of dollars for those made in Hollywood and pesos where produced locally?
The pandemic brought with it a pause, a long one. No production is happening. Where movies are already in cans, there has been no premieres and certainly no screening taking place.
The moviehouses have closed down. It is beyond the imagination of anyone to have a film being shown to viewers accommodated one seat apart.
The word “box-office” has long ago ceased to be a noun, an office where one buys tickets. In pre-coronavirus days and even presently, box-office has become a modifier. It conjures a queue. With blockbusters—that word sounds ancient, too—the line can be a shoving scene. People push each other just to be ahead of the crowd and relish the adventures that are way bigger than life.
Then the virus came. All these scenarios have been blotted out. The actors are gone, or don’t you
ever notice? Not that they perished from the affliction, but they vanished because no one is writing about them. What to write about actors when they are not about to do a film, or in the middle of a shoot, or finishing one? Where do we situate an interview of a director or a cinematographer when no production is being planned?
But filmmakers will never say die.
In a condition where tactility is suspended for health purposes, many filmmakers are looking to a culture of making films where actors may be in different spaces but are located at the same time. Monologues and confessionals later on spliced to create a conversation are being done. Nora Aunor, ever daring, was the first major actor to embrace the limitations of filmmaking in this age. She did it with her playing a middle-aged doctor, staying in the hospital, and conversing with her three grandsons. Imbued with the gift of transcendence, the actor was able to give us a new cinema.
But how long can we stay in this mode of production? Even Nora, supremely skillful as she is, would need the transfiguration of time and place, the manipulation of horizons and dynamics in order to conjure realities that will uplift the viewers.
We need therefore to go back to filmmaking and its products called cinema or movies as we know them.
A month ago, a confluence of filmmakers calling themselves the IGA (Inter-Guild Alliance) with the Directors’ Guild of the Philippines banded together to compose guidelines that, while addressing the limitations imposed by the pandemic, are seen as helping them restart the making of movies again. The document detailed the optimum number of people needed to run a shoot, the rules on quarantine and social/physical distancing, how to clean and disinfect the set, and the nitty-gritties now real under the present health climate.
For some reason, the Film Development Council of the Philippines was also drafting guidelines for the same reason as those of the guilds. Finishing the document, the FDCP submitted it to the Department of Health (DOH) and the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and had the two agencies agreed to the principles and regulations therein contained.
The IAG members were flustered. Protests were registered online by filmmakers. From the side still of the filmmaker, there is a sense there are no clarified guidelines on the guidelines. Which is official and therefore shall be deemed the map in this Covid-19 era for the filmmakers? Members of IGA are holding on to what they did, which was to submit the guidelines they came up with the hope that FDCP will incorporate it.
An Advisory 06, Series of 2020, which was released by FDCP, technically confirms the official status of the document submitted by the office. It now bears the title “FDCP-DOH-DOLE Joint Administrative Order 2020-001 on the Health and Safety Protocols for the Conduct of Film and Audiovisual Production Shoots and Audiovisual Activities During Covid-19 Pandemic.”
The advisory is the present source of irritant and conflict from the perspective of the filmmakers, especially those who are part of the IGA. The advisory contains the following “clarificatory guidelines” for production shoots that shall include any and all types of shoots including but not limited to the following: Film Production, Television Program Production, Advertising Content Production, Corporate Audiovisual Production (AVPs), Animation Production and Live Event Production, this last item explained as “without the physical presence of audience, patrons, or guests, including but not limited to concerts, live shows, variety shows, theatrical or stage performances, panel discussions recorded as content for various distribution platforms, like online streaming, the Internet [sic], television, and the like.”
The guideline further states that the “coverage of the order is nationwide.”
Offhand, filmmakers are questioning the guidelines as tacitly giving FDCP a regulatory power, which has been read as not existing in the present mandate of the organization.
In another situation, I am thinking of academics now preparing their syllabi for online presentations and artists coping with the pandemic by airing online, in a sweet subversion of time and space, conversations, talks and performances. Shall they be covered by this guideline?
Baby Ruth Villarama, a multiawarded documentarian and a member of the IGA, has this to say: “While we appreciate and support the good programs of the agency [referring to the FDCP], it is our conviction that the Joint Agreement Order [JAO] will not effectively stop Covid-19 from spreading as well as heal the agency’s consistent tendency to encroach on the industry.” Villarama stresses how the FDCP will “lose its credibility to represent the true interest and welfare of the film communities if it asserts the implementation of that ordinance.”
BusinessMirror through this writer will find a space for clarification and assure a hearing from the Film Development Council of the Philippines in the coming days.