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”

Breathing lessons

“WE tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

The line came back to me as I squeezed in a room full of students waiting to view documentaries. The University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu declared alternative classes for the Aug. 20 afternoon screening of entries for the 4th Cebu International Documentary Film Festival (CIDFF) 2015.

The following day would be a holiday. Twenty-eight years ago, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. came home after three years of exile. Instead of uniting the divided forces opposing the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, he ended on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport (MIA), shot in the head by Rolando Galman. The hired gun’s ties to Marcos were widely speculated but never definitely proven.

One can speculate, too, if Ninoy, alive, could have united the restless but cowed middle class and the militant Left. There is no arguing, though, that Ninoy as a bloodied white-clad body crucified on the MIA tarmac galvanized the country.

In UP Cebu, students declared “alternative classes”. An intolerant and impatient bunch, we did not appreciate the black humor of sitting inside classrooms, pretending that theory did not make us fall asleep, while the country was coming apart.

Last Aug. 20, the UP Cebu dean declared alternative classes. Unlike the walkout staged 28 years ago by our generation, clustered under the trees and plotting how to rewrite history, the students were released by teachers from their regular classes for the CIDFF screening. Can viewing documentaries substitute for learning?

Standing at the back of a darkened room illuminated by a screen replaying stories from Canada to UK, including the Philippines, I learned how Joan Didion, writing then as a California hippy struck by the precariousness of narratives in the 1960s, was timelessly prescient when she wrote in “The White Album”: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

For a storyteller, there can be no audience scarier than a room full of teenagers with smartphones and tablets. While Jethro Patalinghug’s “My Revolutionary Mother” traced a son’s rediscovery of his mother’s journey as a former community organizer, I watched for but did not see tiny subversive screens lighting up among the audience. The story dwelling on the personal sacrifices of a political activist triumphed over the well-known Millenial itch for Facebook updates.

This should reassure freelance film maker Joni Sarina Mejico. When Joni studied news writing and interpretative writing with me more than four years ago, she was enterprising but diffident.

Joni has found her voice. She wrote and directed “Abakada ni Nanay,” the story of Librada Gemal, 80, school gardener, “hilot (folk healer),” and oldest grade 4 student of Tisa II Elementary School. When the camera lingers on Librada’s face in the closing shot, I find that I have lost the ability to speak. The documentary runs for about eight minutes.

How many eight-minute classroom lectures can silence listeners into sentient inarticulateness?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 23, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”