Filipino Cinema

[anonymous1980]

Here's Noel Vera's list of the 100 Best Filipino films of all time. Sad to say, I've only seen around a dozen of them.

[anonymous1980]

I'm glad classic Filipino films are slowly but surely being released into DVD. I wonder if the Manila By Night DVD is the complete, uncut version of the film. I recently attended a screening of it and the version that was shown is obviously edited with a lot of the profanity and sexual content censored.

You can get a bunch of those DVD's a hell of a lot cheaper over here. Batch '81, one of the masterpieces of another great Filipino director, Mike de Leon (he was once dubbed as the Stanley Kubrick of the Philippines because of his sparse filmography, perfectionist tendencies and being a semi-recluse) is available.

[Damien]

From today's New York Times:

CRITIC'S CHOICE
NEW DVDs: FROM THE PHILIPPINES

By DAVE KEHR

When the Torino Film Festival, in Italy, tried to mount a tribute to the Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka last year, the programmers were astonished to discover that only 5 of the 55 theatrical films he directed from 1970 until his death in 1991 existed in a projectable state. The others had been lost or allowed to deteriorate — a particularly grim situation, given that Mr. Brocka had been both the Philippines’ most internationally celebrated filmmaker and one of the leaders of the resistance against the Marcos government.

The situation can only be worse for the other, less celebrated directors of this financially impoverished but creatively rich national cinema. Where now to find the work of Ishmael Bernal, Mario O’Hara, Mike de Leon and the other filmmakers from this fascinating two-decade period, during which a broadly popular cinema of sex and soap opera transformed itself into a vehicle for strong social commentary and a political force to be reckoned with?

Part of the answer can be found at the ImaginAsian Theater at 239 East 59th Street in Manhattan, where the New York Filipino Film Festival 2006 began on Friday and continues through Oct. 19. (Four films by Mr. Brocka, some without English subtitles, will be shown on Saturday; information is at theimaginasian.com.)

Another part of the puzzle lies at the New York Film Festival, where one of Mr. Brocka’s best films, the classic mother-daughter confrontation “Insiang” (1976), will be shown at noon on Saturday at Alice Tully Hall in a print preserved by the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

But the most encouraging news may be a new line of DVD’s, the Cinefilipino series, to be released by Unico Home Entertainment. The first batch of films to reach retail stores (and the Web, where mail orders are accepted at cinefilipino.com) includes two enduring classics, Mr. Brocka’s “Mother, Sister, Daughter” (1979) and Mr. Bernal’s “Manila by Night” (1980), among a dozen other titles.

Mr. Brocka’s “Insiang,” set in the dense, labyrinthine shantytowns of Manila, may be a more representative example of Mr. Brocka’s political filmmaking. (Imelda Marcos decidedly frowned on it on the grounds that it displayed a wholly false picture of her happy country, full of joyous, singing children.)

But “Mother, Sister, Daughter” displays a fuller picture of Mr. Brocka’s talent. Based on a script by Mel Chionglo, the film could almost pass as a lost Warner Brothers vehicle for Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Emilia (Charito Solis) is the dutiful daughter who has stayed behind in the provinces to care for her aging father and the ramshackle colonial mansion he occupies.

Another daughter, the urbanized, emotionally reserved Pura (Lolita Rodriguez), long ago left for the big city, but as the film opens she has returned to claim both her father’s affection and a share of whatever inheritance there may be.

The small-town setting, the crumbling mansion and the sexual competition among the women — including another sister, who has found support as the mistress of a local businessman, and Emilia’s restless daughter, who has fallen in lust with an itinerant carnival worker — suggest a subtropical Tennessee Williams.

But Mr. Brocka seems less interested in psychosexual conflict for its own sake than as a reflection of the inequalities and injustices at the base of the Philippine system. The dilapidated mansion is a functioning remnant of a feudal past that can’t be shaken off (a family of sponging retainers still occupies the ground floor), as well as of a creaking institution on the verge of collapse as soon as the old man (and it is not difficult to guess that he’s a stand-in for Marcos) goes to his reward.

The Filipino critic Noel Vera has called “Manila by Night” the masterpiece of Mr. Brocka’s chief rival, Mr. Bernal, while acknowledging that Mr. Bernal did not have Mr. Brocka’s visual gifts. The film is an angry panorama, cutting across classes and neighborhoods of Manila in 1980; the characters range from a teetering middle-class family to a successful gay fashion designer and his paid, apparently straight lover to a taxi driver whose wife is working nights as a prostitute. Everyone and everything in this world is for sale, which seems not to bother the characters unduly: buying and selling is simply what you do to survive, and the body is only another commodity.

This time Mrs. Marcos objected to the use of “Manila” in the title — this was not the city she knew and loved! — and forced the title to be changed to “City After Dark,” perhaps in the hope it might be mistaken for Honolulu.

Both the Brocka and the Bernal DVD’s seem to have been taken from tape sources rather than prints (and the Bernal is masked on the bottom, presumably to hide the French subtitles that had been burned into the original print). Neither disc is going to show off your new 52-inch plasma to its best advantage, but the important thing is that these films have at least been stabilized (though “Mother, Sister, Daughter” has practically faded to a sepia tone) and put back in distribution.

Here’s hoping that Cinefilipino is able to continue its project. This body of work belongs not only to the history of popular art but also to the history of a resilient, heroic, admirable people. The discs are $17.98 each; none are rated.