‘El Conde’: Of vampires and undying dictators
Dictators never die; they just lie there entombed where admirers and sycophants can forever kiss their likeness behind glass cases.
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Dictators never die; they just lie there entombed where admirers and sycophants can forever kiss their likeness behind glass cases.
The debate in the House of Representatives continues. We are not there but we see them online. Our representatives. We have voted them in and in the game of politics in democracy, half or more than half of the population in each town, in each city, in each province may not be properly represented because he or she has not agreed that that person should stand for him or her. In a case where we, presently viewing the exchange of words, are fated to have our favorite/beloved politician standing at the tribunal, our life is sealed to witness our destiny crumble or shine—is our representative good or dumb? Or, does he or she care about us at all?
Who truly understands the working of the Internet?
IF, as Paddy Chayefsky puts it, television is democracy at its ugliest, then politics depicted by mass media and as allowed by democracy is most reprehensible day in and day out.
This Friday, the eighth of September, an age-old tradition is going to take place in Naga City, in Bikol. From the Basilica Minore where the icon of the Virgin of Peñafrancia is enshrined the whole year round, She who is endearingly addressed as Ina or Mother, will be brought to the Naga Metropolitan Cathedral by way of the Traslacion.
THEY called it Nakabuhi, which literally meant “released” or “let loose.” It could also mean “being freed.” The festival was founded in Buhi, a town noted for its Lake Buhi where once thrived the “sinarapan,” considered to be the smallest edible fish in the world. There are many stories about the lake and its origin.
WILL Lino Brocka’s film still make an impact on the students of cinemas at present? This was a question I have never asked before, convinced as I am of the power of the late director’s film. But generations change, aesthetics shift. Even theories about viewing and apprehending works of art go through a sea change.
“I saw Mama.” I was talking to my sister over the phone. She asked where. “Davao…during the Philippine Book Festival.”
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.—Pauline Kael
When the lockdown was lifted, the safest means of transportation for me in my first trip to Manila from Naga City was the bus. Even now and more than ever, the buses remain the most reliable mode of conveyance. Our buses survive the schedules even during typhoons. Compared to this, the planes are fragile. During cloudy days, the flights to this city are bound to be canceled.
Who shall make a great film about the great lockdown when it is over? Apparently, there is already one. Perhaps, “great” is such a monumental modifier it loses its kick when applied to a work that is acerbic. That film is called When This Is All Over—hope all over it but also hopelessness, a sigh here, and a sense of recklessness from beings who have seen the possibility of extinction.
“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”—Pauline Kael
Winds do not characterize the month of August. But I woke up on the first day of this month and noticed the crowns of trees around my home almost bending over. A low-pressure area was the quick explanation for that phenomenon. And yet, long after the storm had gone, the leaves were still buffeted by winds, rattling at eight in the morning, the clouds chased by some unseen forces above.
THE title intrigued me. The Minimalists. I thought it was interesting that a short documentary running less than an hour can be done about this art movement that is well abused and bandied around. I am referring to the aesthetics exemplified by the Bauhaus approach to design. Or, for example, to the achievements of Ludwig van der Rohe (who popularized the maxim “Less is more”). But I was wrong.
The only uncertainty now is peace. This essay, however, is about certainty. The certainty of memories. And the certainty that many of the men and women who figured in this past of mine are all gone. And with them as well is my youth, that unencumbered sense of idealism and bravado that once guided me through museums of peace and gardens of mothers swooning into the heavens as they cradled deaths and sufferings and monumental rendering of wars.
THERE are films that take your breath away and there are those that leave your breath intact, allowing you a modicum of control during the viewing times.
“Isn’t that Delia Albert?”
IT was the 1950s. The age of the baby boomers; the world was looking to a future of prosperity. Music was defining the shift. The rock and roll and the rebels without causes were just a few years away and a sweet tenor was filling the air. It was the voice of Tony Bennett, singing “Because of You,” his first: Because of you, there’s a song in my heart…
CAN science teach? Yes, it can. While we teach science; science can teach us as well. With a lot of help from communicators who do not believe in mystification, and networks that promote shows where people learn to listen because to do so is to survive.
In one of the poems of Jerry Gracio, a poet who is able to fuse grit, grace and rawness without missing a heartbeat, I met an old friend I have not seen for a long time, a word I have almost forgotten. The poem is titled Paglanat. The word is lanat.
TWO films surprised me this week: one was a South Korean series and another was a totally unexpected warm production of an old novel. The contexts: I have not developed a fondness for South Korean series, where men are pale and fragile and the women are horrendously harrigans at young age; the other is my taste for old-fashioned storytelling, amid the more ponderous obsession with non-linear narratives, a predisposition that seems to promise a production of art in the garden of mystification. So, there is my bias.
The fever has not gone down. The epidemic of concern from citizens continues unabated as they remain in shock at the official act of stealing scenes from other cultures, if only to make the campaign about the allure of this island-republic even more convincing. Does this mean we, with our own collection of landscape and seascape, forests and waterfalls, volcanoes and verdant valleys, cannot make a compelling case for our own beauty?
TAR is her name. Lydia, the first name is lost in the flamboyance and arrogance of that surname. There is the voice—elegantly mannish because it is coming from a woman. There is the face, the manner (mannered to a lovely degree; didn’t she portray one of the most mannered actors in show business, Katharine Hepburn, in The Aviator?). It is Cate Blanchett’s.
“Tourism has some aspects of showbiz, some of international trade in commodities; it is part innocent fun, part a devastating modernizing force. Being all these things simultaneously, it tends to induce partial analysis only.”
THIS should be about Bangkok memories. But to begin with the city and ponder on memories is to be stuck in the touristic, the cinematic about Thai culture. But just like all big cities, there is, outside of the language, a universality about Bangkok. Skyscrapers with some shaped like blue diamonds and others designed as if they are about to tumble down, are also present in megalopolis. We have them in tiny samples in Manila as well. They are ubiquitous in Tokyo.
To open a film with a Noh play is brave. To view a film that opens with a play that a wag once described as a theater form with no movement is to anticipate and endure a film in its slowness. To those who are aware of this theatrical tradition touted to be unchanged for so many hundreds of years, they must have prepared themselves to offer their concentration if only to honor the bravery and imagination of one filmmaker. But Michihito Fujii, the director of Village, or The Village as it has been renamed, appears to have really understood the pace of Noh for him to lean on the form for drama. And so what we see at the start of this film about outcasts, bullies and capitalists is a cut-to-cut presentation of the past interspersed with memories, the editing of the Noh happening onstage in a frenzy alliteration with madness and violence. No one has ever done this before: to rework a Noh theater so that its scenes deliberately slow and stately in origin now compete with the rush of destruction unfolding before our very eyes.
The towns we passed by were unmarked in the dark. Not out of romance but reality: we have highways with long stretches that were unlighted. In the daytime, we knew these towns but not that night. It was eleven in the evening when we decided to drive to Albay to view the volcano. Except for the delivery trucks most of which had bodies glimmering in blue bulbs, there were few cars on the road. Some 30 or 40 minutes later, we slowed down. Nabua. A few minutes after came Bato, its stores selling the phenomenal Pancit Bato were all glimmering in funereal, warm yellows. Business was brisk, as usual, at this town near the boundary. Polangui followed, a city elongated by 10 kilometers. It meant we were already in the province of Albay.
THE Hundred Islands Filmfest (HIFF) has found a template for holding a film festival by transforming the feast into a laboratory, a film lab. Headed by Raquel Rarang Rivera, the HIFF began the event by inviting established independent filmmakers, all products of independent and regional cinemas, to serve as mentors to the filmmakers that were gathered for the competition. These generous individuals were Zig Dulay, Jerome Dulin, Sef Arcegono, Arjanmar Rebeta, Tim Rone Villanueva, Carlo Encisco Catu and Victor Villanueva (not necessarily in that order). Between them are numerous awards and experiences in film laboratories here and abroad that make them ideal guides. How Raquel managed to put them under one roof is for another essay in the future. Dulin and Arcegono were also there for festival management.
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