#3: On Filipino Film Criticism Over Generations

A little bit about me. I spent most of my life moving around. In my 22 years of living I have stayed in countless apartments, houses and family homes. I used to be so jealous of the kids that grew up in the same house with the same neighbors their whole life. While I don’t have a childhood home that hasn’t already found new residents and I certainly lost a lot of photos in every move, I still have a (rather large) piece of my childhood that always managed to make a house a home.

My television set.

This is exactly what it looked like. *Tears* I’m getting emotional

Actually, “set” is a very bold word since it was missing a remote for the first half of its existence but we’ll still go with it. It was a pink Disney television. The speakers were in the shape of a tiara. Ariel from the Little Mermaid would appear and bubbles would go up or down with each press of the volume button. Cinderella was there alongside each channel number and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty rested in the menu screen. Suffice to say, it was something I should’ve outgrown sooner than I did. But that specific appliance had my pencil markings from each year I’d had it (12 years!) and little doodles done in permanent marker on the ears. Gathering around the television set with my family is a well-loved activity in my home. Most of our inside jokes come from the teleseryes and sitcoms that we’d watch together. Our understanding of Chicago culture came in the form of morning news and watching the Cubs play every game live. My own understanding of growing up, adolescence and romance came from episodes of George Lopez, The Nanny, Full House and my range of Saturday morning cartoons (which…says a lot about how dramatic my dating life tends to get…besides the point). Simply put, film and television plays a very strong part in my identity.

An important point I think most of the speakers brought up “On Poetics and Practice of Film Criticism in the Philippines” on Plaridel (2013) is the concept of identity. Decampo (2013) said it best when he said; “I am concerned with how cinema came to be Filipino, investigating its process of becoming in order to deduce its state of being.” It is a valid concern. The first step in scholarship of any medium is to deduce its origins. To learn from the greats, if you will. What is Philippine cinema’s separation from the broader umbrella of cinema and why do these distinctions matter? Moreover, where does it overlap with cinema as a whole?

Philippine cinema is not lacking in material. However, the mainstream media makes it appear as if all the Philippines has to offer are formulaic, derivative money makers. Every once in a while a film will pop up in theaters that sets itself apart in quality and content. Despite that, it’s still easier to run into a cynic spitting on the latest Vice Ganda cash grab than it is to run into a Filipino Film fan.

There is definitely something lacking in the films the industry chooses to produce and promote. The existence, distribution and critique of art is an acknowledgement of the stories worth telling. Its historical significances, the issues specific to the medium and its real-world significance shine a light on how Filipino Films can be a reflection of Filipino reality.

And here arises the always vexing question of identity. So what is identity? Is it native? Can it be global or planetary? Is it local? How does it become national and should it always be nationalist? Cannot it be intercultural instead? When is it post-colonial?

Patrick Flores

So…am I saying that we should get rid of the latest kilig-to-the-max movies and replace them with accurate and poignant period pieces? Am I saying that we should nix the cheesy comedy in favor of sharp portrayals of everyday Filipino life? Not even close. To claim that only a certain form of media must exist in order for Filipino Film to have validity places such a high and impossible standard on film itself. It’s as if Western media didn’t produce M. Night Shyamalan’s study on how weird Mark Wahlberg’s facial expressions could get —The Happening— and No Country for Old Men as well as the launch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the same year. Critically panned movies have existed for years without the death of cinema.

I’m not saying we need to stop making “bad” movies. I am saying that the industry owes it to its audience and its critics to produce films that are products of thought as opposed to simply being products. Filipino critics should also be given far more recognition than they currently hold. In my last post, I discussed how mainstream media paints the critic as a villain to the artist. However, I feel like mainstream media in the Philippines doesn’t even paint the critic to begin with. The immediate response of celebrities to criticism comes in the form of “clapbacks” that are highly publicized in favor of the celebrity themselves. Critics get little to no validation in the Philippines. I feel like the big companies just expect the public to like their films because they have a recognizable name, a charming cast that can do interviews well and a lot of promotional material. For this reason, there is very little attention placed on Filipino Film criticism. Which is definitely something we need to change because critics have never been the enemies of cinema. If anything, (and in our situation) they are the guiding hand of viewers. They are protectors, to put it in a grander light, of what cinema can be. And cinema can be a lot of sad, beautiful and tragic things (yes I did quote a Taylor Swift song title there).

For now, I suggest we focus on the possibility that cinema can have well respected critics that can hold filmmakers responsible for treating their audiences as mindless ATM’s.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

References

Campos, P. F. (Ed.). (2016). On Poetics and Practice of Film Criticism in the Philippines – A Roundtable Discussion. Plaridel – a Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, 13(1). Retrieved from http://www.plarideljournal.org/article/round-table-discussion-poetics-practice-film-criticism-philippines/.