It was merely a few days before the world went on lockdown—we never knew a phenomenon like that would come in our lifetime—when independent filmmakers, mostly regional and unheralded, gathered in Naga City for the 12th Cinema Rehiyon.
Coming mostly from the peripheries, the filmmakers, curators and programmers were used to the non-mainstream kind of cinemas. Experimental, abstract, self-conscious sometimes, ponderous even, intellectual, subversive. Amid this interesting cast of characters was one glorified by many for being all that in his works—experimental and favoring abstractions and images over straight narrative, egregiously self-conscious sometimes, politically ponderous, intellectual (to critics but not to him), subversive.
RoxLee—can we call it a portmanteau of Roque Lee, or an attempt at cuteness (which I as a friend believe he desires as a trait and, to a degree, he achieves as only he in his capacity as a raconteur can achieve)? Roque Federizon Lee is RoxLee’s best kept secret, his humanity and ordinariness.
RoxLee produced animations in the period when the term meant “cartoons” and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. He got immersed in the making of short films when films then were meant to be long—an hour or more, and had stories and actors that looked good and mighty, and actresses who were willowy, sensual, or dumb but alluring.
But, as stories have beginnings, storytellers have provenance.
It all began in a small school in a small city, Ateneo de Naga in Naga City. In high school, RoxLee was a storyteller. His stories came out in the student magazine, called An Maogmang Lugar, a phrase which literally meant “The Happy Place.” It was a term coined by Fr. James O’Brien, SJ, a Jesuit English teacher who also developed a course on Bikol Culture in Ateneo de Naga High School, a rare pedagogical experimentation in the country’s secondary education in the ‘60s.
In Ateneo de Naga, he became popular as an illustrator/cartoonist for the Knight Literary Magazine in the late ’60s and ’70s. His works came in the form of rough-and-tough doodles, the lines going on and on like a madman’s idea of a picture. When Martial Law was declared, the literary magazine was banned. But student life continued and there, RoxLee’s life as an artist continued. Then he moved to Manila.
In the 1980s, RoxLee would do more animations mostly done in super-8. Despite being not a formal part of the animation industry, he would be credited as being one of the founding members of the Animagination, which evolved into Animahenasyon, a competition in Philippine animation. For this, RoxLee was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the group.
It was in 1984 when the world of experimental films noticed RoxLee. The piece was called The Great Smoke. The reference was to the A-Bomb and the aim was to call attention to disarmament and driving away the American bases from the Philippines. Collage, photos, stop motion and humanoids whose only signs of anthropomorphism were in bodily parts disembodied—noses, mouths, with skin connecting them in a network of bizarre kinship.
My introduction to RoxLee was via a film he wrote, Tronong Puti (The White Throne). Onscreen, a ritual is taking place. Men carry what looks like a small palanquin. Then bombs start falling. The trono turns out to be a toilet bowl. Imagine human waste inside the toilet bowl. Offensive. Dirty. But an incense is waved over it and bombs appear. Recognizable are clips from journalists documenting the Vietnam War and more wars. On the street, people are covering their faces with handkerchiefs. The world is polluted. Voices float over the scene. The chant reminds us of Gregorian music but the eeriness is gothic. Then words clearly say: the toilet bowl is a human invention that brings release and contentment.
In 1986, RoxLee did Juan Gapang. Historicised as happening in the period of the so-called Edsa Revolution, the film takes on the heavy politics of an advocacy film. Viewed in itself, Juan Gapang is both disruptive and meditative: think of how a man can spend all his days walking on all fours, a vestigial organ of a humankind that has already stood up. And yet, Juan Gapang is also the forgotten person, the ignored, the downtrodden, the regular beggar, the suffering of the quotidian. The cars whizz by. This is filmmaking at its edgiest: the actor’s weight teeters on the brink of tight sidewalk. The dangers of falling and being hit by cars are there but the camera is also there, confrontational, reckless, bold but not even heroic, a documentary of how we are as a population—uncaring, observing but also observed.
Juan Gapang would win the Gawad Urian in 1987 for Best Short Film.
Suffice it to say that there is more to cinema in RoxLee. There is more to him than the arts. The simplest thing that comes close to the obscurity of this artist is the fact that in what appears to be an organically nihilistic attitude to life is his love of that which he denies. What are these? Truths of all kinds and their inversion—lies.
To appreciate the films of Rox Lee is to see him in his other personas as painter, actor and performance artist. In the said domains, RoxLee is uncaring about traditions; he celebrates noise both of the invasive and abrasive kind; he is par excellence a saboteur of everything pleasant and acceptable. His short films are about memories of disaster, of identities in crisis.
RoxLee, who is considered by many filmmakers as their “godfather,” has inspired young artists to pursue narratives that question harmony and regularities, inducing a movement in cinema that urges experimentations which produce shapes that are absurd but closer to the realities around us.