IT is all over the newspapers, the Bells of Balangiga are going to be returned soon. Three bells. They were war trophies taken by the American colonizers because they represented the day the Americans suffered defeat in their colonizing adventures.
It is not all over newspapers but people are talking about another Balangiga. People over social media and, for lack of a better word, in alternative sites are talking not about the bells but the balls of this film that bears the title Balangiga. The film has nothing to do with history, as we are made to understand, but about histories.
There is, obviously, a problem with a fixation and canonization of a slice of Philippine history when there were and are histories to events in the lives of a nation.
As Clifford Geertz puts it: “Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them.” Reynaldo C. Ileto, the historian behind Pasyon and Revolution, finally reminded us how the Philippine Revolution, those grand themes in the narrative of the nation, had always been told from a particularly elite or Ilustrado perspective, using materials that are formal. Books were consulted but not the novenarios; memoirs were consulted but not the material aspects of charms and amulets.
For a long, long time, too, the Philippine-American Revolution had only one entrance: the perspective provided by Americans who kept archives, or American-trained historians who looked at those archives. We were continuously saddened by the fact of our nation not having kept archives.
We forget one thing: there is life outside archives. Indeed, there is life, lots of living, outside history.
The words of Anirudh Deshpande are particularly important: “The time has come to seriously examine the approach of historians to cinema, in general, and the historical film, in particular. Since history itself has proved to be a dynamic discipline, the habit of viewing films with an eye to ‘facticity’ should give way to a nuanced understanding of the historical potential of cinema.”
In a nation with deep colonial experiences, the idea of recovering stories from the past are is not only problematic but also requires problematizing.
Cinema has a task that is different from that of history. While historians generally are caught in the pressure of honoring archive, there are historians or thinkers of history who look at archives and question them first. They proceed to look for other sources and from there create temporal archives or sources of information, believing that the stories of a nation, for that nation to grow, is forever growing, changing. It cannot be held hostage by stories, most of which have been restrained by the plotting of conquering points of view.
Our nation and our communities can benefit greatly from historians who would rather struggle with, or against, archives and other constructed tales from the past.
Is history an art form? I wish I could write about that but this column does not have the space to tackle that ticklish question.
There is no question, though, that cinema is art. As such, it fulfills many things that art can do. It can illustrate historical events, imagine parts of those events, question the past, subvert the stories from the past, reconstruct and deconstruct them. Cinema can even invent histories when the stories of a particular nation, or even a human group, has been banished by conquering narrators.
Here is cinema serving that function in the film by Khavn de la Cruz. The film has elicited extreme reactions, as all true forms of art always do.
The film does not show the massacre in Balangiga. There are no bells being stolen in the film. There are no heroes or villains. Captain Smith does not shout that command to turn Samar into a howling wilderness. If you miss these pseudo-heroic scenes, go and excavate an old film. Perhaps, you want something like Sunugin ang Samar.
And yet, Khavn de la Cruz adds to the title Howling Wilderness. Does this mean we look for what the title claims to have? When the scenes from “history” are not there, who shall we blame? Not Khavn de la Cruz. The title announces “This is not the film by Khavn de la Cruz.”
There are many things that are not in this film Balangiga. But there are also many things in this
film that would not have been there had it merely stayed within the lore and legend of mainstream, national history.
The film shows a boy with his grandfather as they run away from the menace of the Americans. The boy, Kulas, begins his escape with the dream of a flying carabao. He passes through a massacred town, eats anything. When his grandfather cannot make it anymore, Kulas encounters a tiny boy who accompanies him in this mythical journey that brings him through three mountains and seven rivers. Chicken heads are severed, animals are disemboweled and our uncanny hero probes the universe and hope inside the carcass of an animal. The bizarre and the violent are crucial ingredients of the recipe that this film offers us. It is a feast for the identities that have been lost and are now found in languages of the colonizer. Only nostalgia can save us but the images of nostalgia are cruel and vicious. We can open the carcasses of our culture and still not find there any salvation about what were taken from us. So we reconstruct the past and the future and the realities. We can even let the symbols of our nation like the carabao fly!
We have lost everything. We are running away from the Americans but where are we heading? Do we find refuge in an obscene friar, whose presence interestingly shocks us even if the pages of histories are replete with these stories? Perhaps, we are happy with the other myths—of a religion that saved us from our own pagan worship, of universities that are considered to be the oldest in the region even if these universities had not educated the masses.
This article is not really about Balangiga the film. This is about how we are always victims of the histories we ennobled to prop our imagined nobilities.
The news says the Bells of Balangiga will be returned soon. My view is anti-history. What will the return of the bells serve? The bells of Balangiga are not in Balangiga: Howling Wilderness because the film is not about the history of the revolution. The film comments on what the histories of colonization have done to our imaginations. We are running from the histories that have remained dominant in our landscape, away from the sound of those bells that stand for another colonizer and a more fervent ideology. Here is a film that has the guts to spit on
the face of false historicizing with the poetry deserving of people unafraid to create its own archives, with the vulgarity that shameless conquests of the past, the present and, god forbid, the future represent. Young people should watch the film Balangiga because their generation can understand the irreverence that a small, poor country like ours can use to contest and subvert the colonial machineries in films and other arts, an action our generations and the previous were not equipped to handle, blinded as we were then, and perhaps even now, by the systems of educations and mis-educations that left us blind and scared and ignorant.
On the newspapers are news about centuries-old Spanish bridges that are rotting away in some provincial towns of the country. Heritage societies are scrambling to save these bridges.
I rest my case.
Khavn de la Cruz’s Balangiga: Howling Wilderness was adjudged Best Picture in the 2018 Gawad Urian by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, of which this columnist is a member. The same film was rated “O” by the Cinema Evaluation Board.