NORA is finally a National Artist. Along the way, she made political positions that confused and conflicted her relationship with her admirers and supporters, a great part of this composed of cultural workers, critics and the academe. I must admit I am part of this sector.
The fact is we can never understand Nora Aunor. Which means, we should never understand this person. After a century, there will only be her arts and those footnotes that should include her errors, the personal psychology informing her politics, and many other things that will provide the caveat, the exemptions, the questions about this supreme artist. History will then judge her, if that discipline will still be around. People will judge her, but this will be a population separate from us, amused and angry perhaps now, because by then we will be an imagination of these days and the facts that made these moments.
When was it I was informed I should write an essay about her? The piece was expected to be included in the documents to be printed for that day when she was to be a National Artist. We know the story: the proclamation was aborted. It would take more years before the declaration happened and when it did, I doubt people remembered this piece, excerpts of which I now share here.
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HERE is the origin: Nora Aunor was born poor. Eustaquio Villamayor, the father, was a porter in the Iriga Philippine National Railways Station or PNR. Antonia Cabaltera Villamayor was the housewife who sewed on the side.
Nora never denied this beginning. This origin marks her career that is always moving from one point to another. Nora has always been on a journey. This journey is both a material reality and a metaphor. Not that travel as metaphor is solely her own. Far from it, Nora’s movement has represented art and its many dimensions.
The journey is short of epic, especially if one realizes that in this nation, social mobility is one of the many myths perpetuated by those in education.
Nora Aunor sold water at the train station in Iriga, Camarines Sur. At a time when water was not being bottled yet, water being sold in bus and train stations was suspect. They could be unclean; the bottles could not have been washed properly. Picture this very thin girl, dark-skinned, selling her merchandise. In a movie version, this girl could break into a song, the old men and women coming from more comfortable stations in life would tear up a bit and smile and buy the bottled water. The girl, in gratitude, would begin to sing, first in a soft voice and then, picking up, her song would soar above the train speeding away from her town.
That is cinema. In real life, then and now, people would shoo the girl away.
But, like in the cinema, the girl selling water she bottled herself from some mean faucet, she had a dream. This dream came from one fact that people around her acknowledged: She could sing.
She did sing when she was home and as she joined amateur contests. Then she traveled to Naga to join the “Liberty Big Show.” The whole of Naga listened to the amateur vocal singing contest through the radio. Many would go to Plaza Kiosko, now Plaza Quezon, to watch live the only regular entertainment then in the small city of Naga. Nora won and won big, in her mind. The take-home cash was big for this young girl who was earning little from her bottled water. The prize money, as the story goes, was used to pay the debt in a small sari-sari store near the railroad tracks.
Then Nora went to Manila. It could have been by train, on those railroad tracks. In the 1960s the bus ride to Manila was for the daring. The safest and the most regular was via the train.
In Manila, she joined Tawag ng Tanghalan. And won.
She was singing torch songs and ballads that did not match her looks and size. She was original. She was odd. Her voice was not sweet. It was a dark contralto, with a lower register that echoed the timbre of blues and jazz singers. The voice seems born out of pain, but there was always hope. No one could categorize Nora. Nora’s entrance to movies happened at a time when the actors and actresses recruited had faces that did not look regular and ordinary. The women were ethereal. Nora’s face would build a new model. The quotidian on her side, the phenomenon of Nora Aunor started to cause a shift, a tremor in taste, an alternative aesthetics.
Like the other newcomers, Nora was treated as almost a curiosity and her coterie an epidemic. In a category all by herself, Nora would be embraced by people who saw in her their own aspirations.
Nora would cease to be an actress and critics would reinvent for her a word, the actor. Deflected of gender, Nora the actor would start to move out of the mold made for her by fans. If in her early years, lines would snake down the lobby of glorious standalone cinemas and into the streets just so fanatics could watch her in films that were amusingly charming and nearly silly in titles. The attendance in her film screenings were good but not anymore stupendously massive.
And yet something else was happening. She put up a production unit and called it NV Production, the name to stand for Nora Villamayor, her real name. Was she saying, “This is my real person and this is the thing I want you to see?” As owner of a film company, instead of indulging in inane capers and commercial love stories, Nora would produce film after film that subverted her own persona and the histories upon which that persona was formed. Nora the producer was born. Nora’s politics by ascription was ready for criticism. Nora was 21.
Nora was this loyal and sweet actress fans loved to emulate. In a film that her NV Productions released, she played the role of a woman who was not enduringly loving enough to wait for her man. The man had gone to the mountains to fight the enemy. Nora’s Rosario would sleep with the enemy. Directed by Mario O’Hara, Nora would turn out a portrayal so complex and so contoured, it was a nightmare for her detractors who had declared her as merely popular, commonly commercial. The film was Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos. The year was 1976. A new critics’ group reeling from the crass practices of other award-giving bodies was formed. The Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, for that was their name, would award Nora their first Gawad Urian. Nora was 23.
The same year that Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos came out, Nora had another film in Premiere Productions. This was Minsa’y Isang Gamu-Gamo. The film treats a theme that is incendiary even now: the presence of American bases.
The film Bona would be the next outstanding film coming out of NV Productions. The story is about a fan fawning over a stuntman who thinks he is this big action star. The feast of the Nazarene is at the center of this tale. A crowd falling for the power of the Public Christ parallels the myth of a fanatic and her idol. Nora’s fandom was at its riotous best at this point. For the idol to play the role of a fan was strange, daring and subversive. For those who read films, Bona is Nora’s own cautionary tale about how the worst and the grand can come from being a fan, and how the bad and the evil could be with an idol who is placed beyond reach only for those who put her up there to declare that she is theirs. But Bona is not merely about the hagiographic in Nora’s life; Bona is about the profane and the dangerous, anomalous interstices that religion and doubt can fall into.
Critics have heaped praises on Bona. Still, the enjoyment of the film remains anchored to a performance of Nora who flirts with the most unattractive character there is. If there is a sympathy to be gained in this fan drawn by Nora from her own experience, it is in the distillation of the notion of human agency. When are we free from social relations? Individuated, Nora, in that scene where she goes to the wake of her father, tells us that, for all the ups and downs in her career, her recovery is not from that life but in the lives she essays and pays tribute to keenly, in comedy or in tragedy. Thus, when her brother batters her, Nora’s Bona careens and tumbles and finally falls down and out of the house and into the street of her own shattered dreams. Before that happens, we are witness to a thespian who knows how to act with her body, that even with her back turned to the audience, one senses the fear, the defiance, the last warning to oneself about how worshiping should be limited to the divine. Nora was 26.
The film Bona would go on to become one of the most critically celebrated Filipino films. It earned a berth in a listing of “One of the Best 100 Films in the World” by the Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, USA, in 1997.
There was no turning back, if one may use a cliché to define Nora’s career. Politics points to perspectives and paradigms. One turns left or turns right but there is no turning back. Nora’s films are Nora’s art and politics moving on and on.
This politics is in films that ask us to count stars in heaven, with class distinction a tremor caught in a romantic narrative. Her silence is politics. Her rant is politics. This politics bristles even in themes of incest. Recall the film Ina ka Ng Anak Mo, where Nora’s Ester Postigo discovers that the woman who has just given birth is her own mother. The father of the child is her own husband. Infertility is challenged; a barren woman is cursed by a male-ordained universe.
“Walang himala,” thus speaks Elsa. But, there is. That miracle is the film Himala. Ricardo Lee’s best screenplay and Ishmael Bernal’s mordant masterpiece is Nora’s monumental epiphany. Produced under martial rule, the film ironically is the most liberated of Nora’s work. Books and academic papers have been lavishly released about this film that once more isolated in the petri dish of colonized societies a piquant religiosity. When Nora’s visionary Elsa denies the existence of miracle, she opens the horizon to all possibilities of faith and worship. That which she does not affirm translates into the many lies of a religion that cannot visualize the true religion because it has no image of its own sin and condemnation. Nora captures the imperfection of an accidental prophet as she keeps the doubt and the sincerity close to her heart in an acting technique, already legendary, that relies mainly on the unsaid.
Himala was declared the Best Asian Pacific Film of All-Time, CNN APSA Viewers Choice Award.
A few excellent films is all that is needed to prove an act of genius. But Nora has produced films that are so numerous, her awards are not forebodings but almost like accomplished oracles. She is the entertainer mother with a vulgarity that is equal only to her love for a child. She is the NPA amasona caught between collective ideology and personal revenge. She has awards from all major award-giving bodies. Her films have participated in film festivals abroad, with her performances noticed and noted by critics.
At a time when the entire nation was bitter and raging against the injustice committed by its own bureaucracy and the justice system of another country, she went on to assume that woman, Flor Contemplacion. Again, like a hallway of mirrors, Nora is there in the reality, the depiction of that reality. There is also this unsettling trivia: the Flor who got executed was a fan of Nora.
In between films and singing, Nora makes a foray into theater and constructs that domain, which is always pitted against the illegitimacy of cinema, her own legitimate validation of her own competence. The play is DH. The piece is an assiduity of what she has always essayed—roles that are of the ordinary but not of the oppressed, characters that are at the margin but are never despondently marginalized. In theater, Nora acquires a class of her own that our class-obsessed society has denied her, not because she does not deserve it but because her arts have made them tremble at the truths she tenders and the discomfort that those gifts of veracity bring.
When Nora’s artistry is discussed, there are no debates brought against it. If there are, they are ideas of those who adhere to different politics. If there are, those commentaries are a judgment of Nora’s personal relationships, business decisions, and other sins of commission and omission. Those remarks are addressing elements, however factual, that have nothing to do with Nora Aunor’s art. Nora’s artistry is there onscreen, in CDs, in memories of great portrayals, in the radiant possibility that someone dirt-poor, born to an abaca stripper and raised in a makeshift hut along the railroad tracks, could rise, with such slow, sometimes imperfect, majesty to an actor whose genius defies explanations and summons intense emotions, and whose ultimate gift is in films, some with elves and impossibly cruel rich women and characters—from viragos to failed virgins, from NPA rebels with wayward ideologies buffeting personal revenge to singers whose songs are the only way to reality, from a Badjao woman who collects umbilical cords because she herself cannot produce her own to a woman whose choice of goodness and evil is matched only by the serenity and presence of mountains and mist—that teach us about everyday resistance possible for a nation, through the most populist and popular of art forms, the cinema and broadcast arts.