Picturing the pictures

WHY do I watch movies?

L., a friend with whom I share a love for comic books, recently nominated me to post a movie I like every day for 10 days. The instructions she reposted included “nominating” a person each day to create his or her own list of 10 movies.

Also: no explanations are needed; just post the movie poster.

As I write this, I am on the fourth day of carrying out what seems to have become a series of complications. First, searching for a movie poster turns out to require more time than choosing the movie.

My immediate choice for day 1 was Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love”. There are at least three commercial movie posters, one of which was on the cover of the VCD I bought on regular price, without second thoughts, when I finally found a copy in the mall.

The movie is about longing, the unfulfilled desire that makes the best, the only possible love stories. (After consummation, everything goes downhill, which is true in fact and narrative arc.)

Lush and erotic, the American, Chinese, and Japanese movie posters, specially the ones showing Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung clinching, are misleading and predatory. The alluring cheongsam encasing Cheung in these posters are not cut from the same metaphor as the movie’s finger-hugging costumes engendering the tensile delicacy of the Hong Kong conventions of the 1960s that trap the couple.

I think the movie poster that preserves Wong Kar-wai’s elegy on the ghosting of love is a “fan poster” created by Janet Leigh, which I first read about in Adrian Curry’s article on mubi.com.

Leigh’s poster shows descending streaks of light and shade that still have the solidity of the walls of their adjoining apartments, which, like society, keep these two individuals close but never intimate.

Narrow door frames, thin walls that tremble with betrayal, constricting corridors, stairwells of darkness—Leigh’s “fan poster” captures the architectural details that, like the music, soak up the aches best whispered to a hole in the wall and smothered with earth.

A poster is created to promote the movie. If one likes a movie, the poster should be more than that.

The other movies I have chosen so far—“A Walk to Remember,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” and “The Road Home”—have posters that “competently” capture the movie plots.

Yet, as the late Anthony Bourdain pointed out, there should be no place for “competence” in storytelling.

Applying this rule means segregating the posters that aim to sell tickets from the ones that aspire to freeze “the pictures,” a term used in the past to refer to cinema, through one telling picture or image.

And I have not yet explained how I chose the 10 movies in 10 days.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 17, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Paper cuts

WHEN you write, you make an incision. You make a cut and think you know what follows.

Sometimes, the writing surprises. The sliver opens and a stranger looks out. You cannot look away. You can. You want to. You don’t want to.

Writing is pain. It should come with the standard warning for danger zones: DO NOT ENTER.

I should have said this when I was invited by the “Tug-ani,” the official student publication of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu.

Michelle Grace Cabrales, a Business Management student who’s the current Tug-ani EIC, and her team invited writers to discuss the craft and make a critique of articles submitted by the participants.

I chose covering human trafficking to jumpstart the talk on features, which two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jon Franklin likens to “news of the emotions”.

Students of UP and the University of San Carlos showed up for the Friday talk, which included fellow teacher and writer Joanalyn Gabales and our resident cat, Walter Stefano.

Our small group discussed after my talk our reactions to four articles written by “Tug-ani" writers. Claire Michaela Obejas, a Psychology major who wrote one of the articles, asked how one knew which voice to follow when a writer found herself shifting from one point of view to another in the course of writing an article.

During the workshop, my response addressed the question as a technical one involving planning and publication: on an assignment, a writer discussed with the editor the desired format, angle, length, and deadline.

If contributing an article, a writer has better chances of publishing if he or she scopes out the targeted section, the ratio of text to graphics, and the targeted audience.

Yet, Claire’s question went beyond the challenges of deadline and market. Striking out beyond the safe harbor of information and “verifiable” truth, a writer can wander without noticing into the quagmire of memory, introspection, and self-conflict.

When one finally notices the water rising, what act of self-preservation does one choose: retreating back to the shallows or going into the deep?

In a movie directed by Wong Kar-Wai, a journalist and a secretary discover that their spouses are having an affair.

“In the Mood for Love” is set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, which Wong depicts as a claustrophobic prison of cramped apartments, nosy neighbors, and double standards.

Albeit betrayed, the protagonists do not want to betray their spouses. Or think they don’t.

Not even his profession in dealing with truth saves the man from self-deception.

Beyond the tidy rules of grammar, writers learn that paper cuts are the deepest, “the most unkindest cut of all”.



*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 16, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)