The long sleep

THE AIR-CONDITIONING inside Cine Adarna contrasted with the campus grounds, which already had more than a dry-as-summer whiff. Inside the cavernous Film Center of the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Diliman, I was in the audience, watching a silent film, “A Filipino in America”.

I had stayed up late writing, feeling an ant nest roiling behind each eye. The film was narrated in an unfamiliar language: silent scenes of two Filipino friends trying to make it in America, flashing a caption or two that expressed in English what the characters thought or said.

I dozed, woke up, nodded off again while the film rolled.

And yet, despite missing scenes during the movie’s approximately 30 minutes of playing time and patching sound quirks, scratched images, and disjointed storytelling, I found that Doroteo Ines’s 1938 pioneering silent film spoke volumes not just of the Filipino shuttling in the 1930s from being colonized to going independent but also of our people’s eternal suspension in the colonial, post-colonial, and neocolonial purgatory.

How does the colonial subject negotiate identity?

That was the tantalizing question raised by UP Film Institute professor Rolando B. Tolentino in the second part of the Pelikula Lectura 2019 at the Cine Adarna last Feb. 28. Entitled “A Filipino in America: 1930s Filipino Films, American Colonialism, and the Negotiation of Coloniality,” a revised title was presented by Tolentino that morning: “Lagi na kayong buntot sa kanilang pagsulong (you are always tailing their progress)”.

What do the centuries of being ruled by the missionaries and then Hollywood produce? Is it the colonized clinging to the hem of the colonizer’s robes? Or is it the independent and modern trajectory of a former colony that’s still shadowed by its master, who keeps the satellite within its sphere of influence no longer through military occupation but cultural domination and manipulation?

Tolentino discussed how film scholarship is challenged by limited extant materials. Poring over the same data because no other records survived or have surfaced, scholars must also contend with dwindling budgets and space that result in precious materials culled or junked.

“We can’t learn from history if we don’t save it,” Jacqui Banaszynski posted in Nieman Storyboard.

As great a threat is the pop culture we stay awake for and avidly consume without criticism and self-reflection. According to legend, Tantalus is a king condemned in Hades to stand neck-deep in a pool of water under boughs heavy with fruit. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, the fruits and water receded, leaving him eternally empty. As fraught as our search for identity.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in the March 3, 2019 issue of the SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”