AS I write this, I am in Tagum, Davao del Norte. On October 17, I, with three other mentors, began a weeklong film literacy workshop. Bryan Jimenez of the Arts and Cinema Section of Tagum City, is responsible for gathering us—two directors, Arbi Barbarona and Bagane Fiola, and Buggy Ampalayo for production design.
“I want them, sir, to know how to tell a story,” Bryan was telling me. The program, called Altercine Filmmaking Workshop, aims to focus on story development even as it also aims to tackle the more regular elements in any film workshop—directing, production design and cinematography.
Tagum is some two kilometers from Davao; it boasts of what it calls the Historical and Cultural Center, a massive structure for us in the workshop business. It is also a sign of a burgeoning art scene.
Last month, I was also in the area, in Nabunturan, noted for their film festivals that draw in participants from all over the country, with foreigners serving in the board of jurors. Nabunturan is a municipality, first class, landlocked only in geography but with communities open to creative endeavors. For all its relative isolation and being non-urban, Nabunturan has developed quite a grand reputation, having sponsored a national event, the Cinema Rehiyon. This festival gathers all winning short films and documentaries from all the places in the country. Karen Malaki, a lawyer and film enthusiast, is one of the original moving forces behind the Nabunturan film festival. She works directly with Leah Calamba of the town’s tourism bureau. Part of the success of Nabunturan is the persisting support from previous local government administrations to the present.
When all that is said and done, how do you teach students how to “appreciate” films when it is assumed they always appreciate them? How do you communicate to them about film education when, basically, they think of films as entertainment, and to take these forms seriously could threaten their having fun with the medium.
In my sessions, which are structured to be between the modules on story development, film directing and production design, I begin the engagement by introducing (for these young students) the concept and act of reading a film, not viewing them.
Like all instructions, knowing the recipients of the lessons means very much to the teachers. In the case of Tagum, the presence of junior high school students meant overhauling the materials prepared way ahead. This means that Alan Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, which was quite a hit, to my surprise, among the participants of a film criticism workshop I did with the Negros Museum, could not be used this time. Considered a historical marker for the birth of the New Wave, Hiroshima mon amour could have been a nice exercise on art films using a violent aspect of war history to detail out the contradictions of love and guilt. The singular Pauline Kael has this to say of the film: “However, the setting itself explains another aspect of the film’s strong appeal, particularly to liberal intellectuals. There is a crucial bit of dialogue: ‘They make movies to sell soap; why not make a movie to sell peace?’ I don’t know how many movies you have gone to lately that were made to sell soap, but American movies are like advertisements, and we can certainly assume that indirectly they sell a way of life that includes soap as well as an infinity of other products. But what makes the dialogue crucial is that the audience for Hiroshima mon amour feels virtuous because they want to buy peace. And the question I want to ask is: who’s selling it?”
Well, enough of Pauline Kael. I cannot anyway use her contrapuntal remarks against popular taste.
What I do for my session is to give as many visual examples, and these I derive from my arsenal of compellingly singular short films.
Sensing that the generally young audience are into anime, I opted then to open my session, after just a brief remark from me, with an episode from Kurosawa Akira’s Dreams, certainly not an anime but imbued with a similar celebration of the ephemeral. If you remember, the film is a series of dreams that Kurosawa in his waking hours as an artist brought onto the screen. The “dream” we chose was the “Wedding of the Foxes.”
“The story begins on a most unusual day—the sun is out but it is raining. The boy’s mother warns the little one not to venture into the woods because it is during these days that foxes get married. And they do not want any mortals to see their ritual. The boy of course becomes curious and goes into the forest, and he does catch a sight of the enchanting wedding, the kitsune, dressed by the legendary Emi Wada, through the mist. The next scene shows the boy at the gate of their home, his mother telling him the foxes have come, very angry. They have left a tantō, the short knife for seppuku, for the boy so that he could kill himself to atone for his sins. The mother tells the boy he cannot go back home until he is forgiven by the foxes, with the mother warning that the foxes rarely forgive. We last see the boy at the foot of the rainbow, for that was where the foxes live.”
Would the foxes forgive the boy? If you were the mother, what would you have done?
There is no formula to effectively teach young individuals about cinema and the power to tell the story. If it is any consolation, some say they dread cliches.
There will be more videos to watch. They need to watch all kinds of films.
If Kurosawa got his stories from the kind of dreams he dreamt, where do these young people get their stories? Whose stories will they tell? And of what?