Zero Degrees of Separation: My 2011 At The Movies

I am still, it turns out, terribly susceptible to the delirium of festival fever, and in 2011, the temperature cranked past even my own thresholds, with the demented overlap in the last quarter making matters even more grueling. At the end of that week and a half, I was down with a particularly vicious strain of influenza.

Cinemanila was still the sovereign colossus, as domestic festivals go, Cinema One Originals the squirrely daredevil, Cinemalaya the tasteful prude, although they seem to have grown an extra set of balls to let films like Amok slip through. All three had a robust year. And, despite the persistent and exasperating lament that local cinema is on a downward spiral, and despite bully tactics from the big studios, who got their ass handed back to them at one point, and by a delightful indie zombie film at that, things have settled into a groove of comfortable productivity. The year was copious with moments, still not enough perhaps, as it never always is. But at least now there's an envelope to push.

I flew to HKIFF just as the year begun and co-programmed the 4th .MOV a little after half of it had come to pass. And these were the twin piths of my festival year, the latter slightly moreso. I also curated an exhibit for it, designed posters, translated parts of the poetry anthology we launched, had a hand in marketing, got wrung through the logistical brouhaha, was as privvy, in as hands-on a manner as possible for someone a few jurisdictions away from the main team, to the exhaustion, and exhilaration, of running even a festival as small as ours, not to mention the spate of Club.MOV screenings leading up to it, abolished by default with the sudden, saddening foreclosure of Mogwai Cinematheque. After this, I vowed to never again grumble over another festival's snafus and glitches. But I'd do it all over again in a snap. And three years from now, if the world doesn't end as scheduled, I will be.

Movie-going, the communal experience of going out to a screening and watching a film with people, remained my advocacy. And I try, as much as I can, to disqualify torrents and DVDs from my list, charitably allotting one slot for it, with this year going to a film I almost saw in a theater. I did cheat a little with a couple of films I saw publicly, albeit in another country, but the rest of the list are films shown in Manila, never mind the nature of its run, never mind if it even had a run. As long as it wasn't at home on my TV, or worse, on my laptop. I did see a lot of films that way, and I imagine a few could've possibly made the cut. But with or without these rules, I suspect the list won't be too far off from this one.

I did miss Lav's Century of Birthing. I missed Adolf's Isda (Fable of the Fish), too. I missed Teng Mangansakan's Cartas De La Soledad. I missed Victor Villanueva's My Paranormal Romance. I missed Regiben Romana's Sakay Sa Hangin (Windblown). I missed Jewel Maranan's Tundong Magiliw. These are some of my sins of omission, if you will, prey to my usual deficiencies of stamina and time and resources and singled out because they're filmmakers I like. I did get to see nearly all the locally shown foreign product, arthouse staples and commercial tentpoles both, which ran the usual gamut of odious to tepid to fits of spunk here and there that tended to dissipate the further away you got from the works, with only Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, Wim Wenders' Pina, Justin Lin's Fast Five, Gore Verbinski's Rango and Tarsem's Immortals having sufficient traction and exuberance to deserve a shout-out, not to mention Todd Haynes' foray into longform TV, Mildred Pierce. I liked them all, sure. I liked a tremendous amount of films this year, mostly local. But for my 2011 list, anything less than love I had little room for.

1. 20 Cigarettes (James Benning, USA, HKIFF): James Benning asks 20 of his friends to smoke in their respective environments and films what happens to them in the time it takes to finish a stick. His first work that has to do with people rather than landscapes or architecture, has a strand of voyeurism that can't be helped but is also partially the point. As knotty to parse and even knottier to push, this, like all his films, behaves like an installation but it's the conditions of a theater that are conducive to what it ultimately asks of us: the acute observation of duration in stillness.

2. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, Cinemanila): As disingenuous, and as lazy, as it is to invoke the word "magical" for something shot through with secrets and lies and regrets and deaths and the banality of the everyday, regardless of how wryly funny it can sometimes get, no other word feels more apt, even if it's only to describe what random lightning turns the otherwise barren Turkish countryside into. The search for a dead body becomes, for a posse of crusty and haggard civil servants, a night, and eventually a day, of going round in circles, of straying off paths, of detours, the oddest and loveliest being a small village they repair to where the lights go out and an angel appears to serve them coffee.

3. Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy, HKIFF): Later on, when the nature of its metaphysics becomes apparent, you tend to marvel at the purity with which it was poeticized, not least with that single take everybody who's seen it is frothing in the mouth about, and rightly so, and with what is hands down the finest goat acting in the history of cinema. The four times of the title refers to the four lives that supposedly live within us and that we go through during rebirth: man, animal, vegetable, mineral. It is also, incidentally, the cast list.

4. Breather (Pahinga) (Khavn De La Cruz, Philippines, .MOV) : The cancer diary it started out as became something more after Khavn's father passed away during the editing, something closer to exorcism, to magical thinking, but not to eulogy, as it's loss is not so much given over to the part of nostalgia that aches but more to the part that exhilarates. A love letter, really, as much to the filmmaker confronting his own mortality as to the parent who left a hole when he succumbed to his, but also to that brief and immortal time they both spent in the shadow of their longest goodbye.

5. 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, Japan, Cinemanila): Having long parted ways with Seven Samurai as both my Kurosawa and jidaigeki touchstone, here, then, is my substitute, itself a remake but enthusiastically so. The density of the nihilism with which the enemy here is fleshed out demands such an outsize catharsis in his climactic taking down, that no less than half an hour of glorious comeuppance would seem to suffice. Miike knows this. And gives us 45 feral, bloody minutes of it.

6. Big Boy (Shireen Seno, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): A certain warm and often lovely and also familiar strangeness runs through here, as it's not only a film that's both about memory and like a memory, in the way it looks and feels and sounds and threatens to recede or disperse, but also about how every generation's experience of growing up has connective tissues that make them all kindred.

7. Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat (Ivy Universe Baldoza, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): Three girls grapple with the thorny changes their bodies undergo, as ghosts and portents pool in the luxuriant and poisonous forest around them. Ivy's polarizing but undervalued rumination on sex and death re-imagines the carnal processes of brutal youth as a creepily erotic , maddeningly obtuse horror movie.

8. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA, Domestic Release):

Pitched below the requisite volume of panic and spectacle, of course it's going to go over many heads spoiling for crackle, for racing against time and eleventh hour salvation. But its' grim, procedural sobriety has that low hum of unease and exposure. It starts with a cough in the dark, disembodied and nearby, as if saying here is your doom in small, the littlest of things you can't see, loosed now in a world that connects like a network of veins at the speed of god. If none of this makes you very nervous, you really ought to be.

9. Six Degrees of Separation From Lillia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, Philippines, Cinema One Originals):

If nothing else, for not being the one trick pony I always felt it was prone to becoming, at least on paper, cynical

as I was

a

t first about how deep the cachet of its subject ran and if it could sustain more than a couple of gags. Antoinette calls this a mockumentary but it veers closer to that freak overlap of documentary and fiction,

and in exalting

Lillia Cuntapay, the iconic bit player, certainly a phenomenon unique to us, it

subtly lambasts how stuck-up the showbiz industry is and how intolerably embarrassing, and distressing, our thrall to it remains regardless. That, and it's also a hoot.

10. Niño (Loy Arcenas,

Philippines, Cinemalaya):

Time's a goon, it's been said, and it is, and sometimes it wins.

Emptied-out desperate things palpitate against

obsolescence and all its useless beauties

, not least being the centrifugal matriarch whose opera star has faded but also the religious finery leeched of their divinities but for the wild hope she hangs on it.

Buenas Noches España (Raya Martin, Philippines-Spain, Spanish Film Festival): Raya's experimental opiate is a bit of a quandary for me, hence its position, as I do like the form, but I like the idea of the form even more, and absolutely love the idea of the form in the context of where his ouevre stands, on the cusp of either repeating himself into perpetuity or going so far out on a limb it's likely to wind a lot of people up, which it did, which it should. Painters and musicians get to color outside the lines the way he does here, sometimes to fanfare, sometimes to indifference, but filmmakers are routinely frowned upon, often by other filmmakers, for merely being curious as to what's on the peripheries of the three-act narrative convention we box the medium in, and are all but lynched when they act on that curiosity. This is also where our national cinema stands at the moment, trying to figure out what it is, and slowly fitting itself into safe absolutes in the attempt, when what it needs to do is to maybe wind a few people up. Cinema is the youngest art, and Philippine Cinema even younger. Too young, in fact, to get all wussy about going out on limbs.

Possible Lovers

Possible Lovers

Directed by Raya Martin
Sound Design by Teresa Barozzo

There's almost only one shot in the whole of Possible Lovers. That shot is a static single take of a young man staring longingly at another fast asleep on a couch. They are dressed semiotically, commoner and bourgeoise. You come to that from the found footage of 1919 Manila that came before it, as if grasping for echoes, or straws. It is not acting they do, these two on the couch, not really. It's performance art, almost. It's an endurance test, certainly. Possible Lovers is an experimental film. It's even more experimental than Raya's Next Attraction. But it's not bullish about its experimentalism, Raya's experimental films never really are. The label on the tape says, cheekily, Autohystoria 2. And like Autohystoria, there is an inertia and passivity about it. Unlike Autohystoria, it doesn't build up to anything but rather folds in on its own inertia and passivity. That can be terribly frustating for most people. It's the way an installation piece behaves and at first, it makes sense to come to it as if it were one, but not really. It fails as video art in that, notwithstanding a disregard for structuralist rigor, it's like a James Benning landscape film, and sound is where what little story it's telling is being told, making it co-dependent on the immersive properties of the cinema setting, demanding at some point that you close your eyes and prick up your ears. That may seem like a peculiar demand for a movie to make but it's not as if it hasn't been asked before. There are five ways you can react to Possible Lovers. You can be bored. You can be pissed. You can be at a loss. You can be heartbroken. You can be spellbound. You can go through all five, like I did. You have 95 minutes. There's enough time to run the gamut and back again. Every reaction is valid. Every reaction is correct. It is, in varying degrees, both conceptual hubris and avant mindfuck. It is also a love letter, not a valentine as the love is unrequited, and like all love letters, only one copy of it exists. That copy is on a haggard MiniDV. Every time it gets played, the image remains pristine as it can be but the sound goes to seed. This is the third time it's been played. And the rot is already a lot more profuse. The dropouts and glitches, they're almost like atmospheric conditions, ghosts. Break the title down and that's what this is about. The finitude of love and the cruel ecstasy of possibility and all the ghosts that flit in and out of that dreadful suspension between the two. I wonder how many more times the film will get played. And I think about how one day there will be almost no sound left at all. Almost no story, no love, no possibility. Only that pristine image of longing. And the empty, futile stasis that comes with it. * * *

Independencia

Independencia
Directed by Raya Martin
Written by Raya Martin and Ramon Sarmiento

The enchanted forest that predominates Independencia, set during the first days of the American occupation, is a spooky and exquisite fake and closer to delirium than setwork - - - pattern recognition with counterfeit rain and skies made from paint.

Into its verdant recesses repair a mother and her son bedeviled by invaders and forced to flee their home- - - Tetchie Agbayani in full-on voodoo seethe and stumblebum Sid Lucero - - - and later a young girl - - - slightly anonymous Alessandra De Rossi - - - raped by soldiers with Roosevelt handlebars, who begets a half-breed boy. The story it’s telling has the aura of vapor. A ghost story, really, like nearly everything Raya does. A story of an exile so utter, a freedom if you will, that everyone who undergoes it all but disappear completely, consumed, become like ghosts. And much as it may pulsate and tremor and eventually breach, from inside this tenuous adoptive Eden, history- - - erratic, rogue, malleable history , the conspirational lie we’re all complicit in - - - is all rumor and smoke.

What Raya is in the middle of here is his vividly referential historical trilogy with its deceptively simple and rather elegant conceit - - - run three specific periods of our history that have been colored by struggle through past pre-eminent, almost anachronistic cinematic vocabularies. Then mine the dissonance. Ignore, then, any dismissals - - and there are quite a few floating around, you’d be surprised - - - that it looks artificial, that in parts it looks half-finished, that it’s the pitfalls of not having enough money to shoot in an actual forest. That’s a little like whining that porn has too much nudity. That’s a little like missing the point. That’s a little, like, dumb.

Form has always been crucial to his aesthetic more than you think , making it always crucial to look at form squarely in the eye. And Raya is often at his most vivid and his most alive,and really his most joyous, when he indulges his fetish for manipulating form, which tends to shift shapes from one film to the next and with a perverse and devilish changeling glee, too, that juices up his manipulations. Not so much assimilating these archaic tropes as re-purposing them into vectors of postmodern strangeness. Like the silent film textures that blanket Maicling Pelicula Nang Ysang Indio Nacional, set during the last days of the Spanish occupation, once so quaint, now possessed of this eerie unsettling beauty, putting Raya on the map but loosing, too, a tumult of lazy if not entirely avoidable Guy Maddin parallels. And Independencia has its fairy tale soundstage of a forest, effervescent throwback to Masaki Kobayashi ,to FW Murnau, to Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies.

As taken as I am with the camcorder crudities of Now Showing and the way it evoked the fickleness and banality and warmth of nostalgia , not to mention the grimy and petrified snuff film sheen that bears out the claustrophobic nihilism of Autohystoria, the fever dream forest here has enough hallucinatory torque to thrust you whole into that immersive otherness, into that alternate reality, where tree gods bask in the rivers and you hunt for food dressed as bamboo birds and sometimes you lose your way and need to turn your shirt inside out to get back home.

Both allusion and illusion and throbbing with metatextual vigor, it could well be Raya’s most ravishing manipulation yet, and also his most disquieting, if only for how it’s both milieu and metaphor, and for its determined insistence that everything here - - - the very notion of independence alluded to in the title included - - - is nothing but a seductive, bewitching lie.
* * * *

*Originally published in UNO.

Now Showing

Now Showing
Directed and Written by Raya Martin
























"(Nostalgia) is delicate but potent. . . in Greek, it literally means the pain from an old wound.It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone." - Don Draper, Mad Men

Lovely Rita, the girl who leaps through time here, had a movie star for a grandmother who wore a dress spun from gold, that now hangs from a nail on the door, a yellowing ghost leeched of its exuberance much like Rita herself, making the rent as a teenager from the hawking of bootleg DVDs

Coming of age stories, the sugar pill of arthouse, tend to heighten the mythic in the banal. Raya Martin’s Now Showing, ostensibly a coming of age story, taps into these banalities, rather, for the despair and beauty of impermanence. The past is a forever fragmenting thing, forever slippery, forever changing shape, making every memory implicitly flawed and implicitly precious. Retro is what nostalgia is often mistaken for. But retro's passive - - -the weak shit of the time-locked. Nostalgia has a lot more at stake - --a rescue mission but always with casualties.

Of a throb with avant-garde diary films like Khavn’s Memory of Forgetting and Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost in the way it parses for mesh in disjuncture, teasing membranes of story from random found life vignettes, it's not as if Raya is splicing together his own found life - - -he's merely co-opting the syntax. Now Showing is a triptych bookended by the two halves of Rita - - -the prepubescent trembling with wonderment and the post-teen lost in space. But it is the middle third, a re-purposing of the weathered but resplendent remains of Octavio Silos’ lost film Tunay Na Ina into what seems at first mere connective tissue, that somehow bears the ore of the whole piece - - -that is, the corrosive vagaries of time. And like his Indio Nacional and Autohystoria, this is an historical autopsy, too, notwithstanding the shift in temperature, and as bothered by the futilities of retrieving the past without having to make up the parts mislaid to the blind spots of memory.

Chris Marker, in Sans Soleil, said “Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting but rather its inner lining.We don’t so much remember as we rewrite memory.” I'm with Chris and so's Raya.Now Showing is all remembering and re-enactment, if these are his memories or if these are even memories at all , but conceived with a naturalism so immersive, the seams melt. A fake passing itself off as real passing itself off as fake until you can't tell which is which anymore. With thickly familiar pangs of mood evoking a sense of deja vu that can't be right but never leaves you anyway.

Each of the three parts it divides itself into is queasy with a specific veneer of decay - - -imperfect failing memory and the imperfect failing platforms that foolishly try to capture and preserve them - - -but the first third, a love letter to childhood that's flush and agog with tiny incident and shot as if on a lo-res camcorder, is queasiest, opaque to the point of creamy, with that vague sense of torpor that someone else's home movies have in the way the interstitial shots linger- - -on a birthday party, on kids playing patintero at night, on a young girl singing mutely to the roar of the crowd in her head, on nothing much - - -past ambient and into tedium. But not without that murmur of peril, as if some fugitive magic will be forever lost if the pause button is pressed too soon. That's the lethal poignancy of nostalgia. And it leaks like blood into what these interstices connect, throwing shadows on everything. And a swatch of hope. There is nothing mythic to heighten in the lives we live. There is only the warmth and burnish of remembering , the flames that gnaw at the edges and the things we save from the fire. * * * * *

Independencia At Cannes

Raya Martin's Independencia picked for Cannes' Un Certain Regard together with Pen-Ek's Nymph, Bong Joon- Hoo's Mother and a new one by Cristian Mungiu.

And it has a trailer.

Beautiful stuff. And that song is a chill up the spine.

Autohystoria

Autohystoria
Directed and Written by Raya Martin (Now Showing, Next Attraction)







Projector issues
- - -that's likely. But there is the way the image in that opening long walk home seems to corrode before your eyes, the way the noise picks out shapes of things that aren't even there, the way it feels less like postwork - - -that is, premeditated but artificial- - -and more the risk you put yourself through shooting on analog then blowing it up to see what happens- - -that is, premeditated but organic. And the way what does happen counts as foreshadowing. For how it similarly obsesses on the active degrading of our collective memory, on history as something mutable and suspect, but not with the same elegaic prettiness as Indio Nacional tapping into silent cinema's textures of otherness to find eerie new con/subtexts - - - 1896's hard-won independence as a kind of cultural neutering, for one- - - in our beloved revolutionary saga.

That one opens, too, with a man walking, not home but down a cave. A returning to the womb, perhaps, also a descent into mystery. The mystery of our birth as a nation reflexively full-circling to our dying as a cultural entity and retold as ghost stories at bedtime so it gets feverish and hysteric with swaths of unease and swaths of whimsy and swaths of surreal imagery - - -the blessed virgin dogging a katipunero down a field , the sun rising from between a man's legs then giving him a wink, a plaster saint flirting with two women in church - - - where Autohystoria gets feverish and hysteric but only with unease and in more than mere swaths, it's nervy with it.

The death it gets under the skin of, after all, isn’t as abstract, as metaphoric, as philosophical. And is,in fact, bloody and viscous. Is, in fact, a murder- - -Andres and brother Procopio Bonifacio’s execution at the hands of Emilio Aguinaldo’s cohorts and the conspiracy to whitewash it, retold with microscopic agony and brutal immediacy as presentday salvage in real-time. Noble aims superseded by gleeful artifice means the pleasures of Indio are purer as mere cinephilic fetishism, nothing wrong with that. More nihilistic, more wounded, Autohystoria triumphs as surface, too, only with more seepage and tackle. Its subtext - - - that political homicide is in our blood - - - runs hardwired with marrow chill and black voltage, but its visceral jolt is the volatile that stays with you.
* * * * *