By Noel Vera
RODRIGO DUTERTE on former President Ferdinand Marcos (italics mine): “President Marcos was a president for so long and he was a soldier. So that’s about it. Whether or not he performed worse or better, there is no study, there is no movie about it. It’s just the challenges and allegations of the other side which [are] not enough”
Well then!
In ascending order: my incomplete, unobjective, totally off-the-cuff list of titles that do in fact deal with Marcos’s Martial Law Era.
10 Eskapo (Escape, Chito Roño, 1995)
Follows the story of Serge Osmeña (Richard Gomez) and Geny Lopez (Christopher de Leon), one the son of a former president, the other the son of a media mogul, the film is rare testimony that, yes, even the upper classes were not immune to Marcos’s powergrab.
Beyond that it’s Chito Roño’s effectively noirish look at how things felt during those early days: the fear, the paranoia, the sense of helplessness as you’re locked in a room and don’t know what’s going on, what will happen to you, what will become of your family and friends.
9 Sister Stella L (Mike de Leon, 1984)
Mike de Leon working from a spare, elegantly structured Jose “Pete” Lacaba script about a textile factory strike, a nun’s political awakening, the forces of corporate capitalism and fascism in an unholy marriage. The film is short on incidental details in an almost Brechtian manner (the workplace could well be labeled “Factory,” the protagonist “Nun,” the protesters “Strikers”) but like the best of Brecht it’s riveting political theater, paring away what is extraneous to focus on a coherent and forceful message.
By film’s end our eponymous nun-hero (Vilma Santos in a beautifully understated performance) stands center screen (Center stage?) with a clear blue Brechtian sky for backdrop delivering a calm yet moving call for action: “If not now, when? If not us, who?” With this film’s release (a year after Ninoy Aquino’s assassination rocked the regime) you could feel the dictator’s grip on society that much loosened, the audience watching that much heartened.
8 Ka Oryang (Comrade Oryang, Sari Dalena, 2011)
Sari Lluch Dalena on a relatively neglected aspect of the era: the women incarcerated for political crimes.
Dalena’s film follows Oryang’s (Alessandra de Rossi) journey from University of the Philippines student to countryside doctor to incarcerated radical, but isn’t content to tell the story straight — her inner independent filmmaker insists on inserting documentary footage of Martial Law turmoil, time-lapse photography of overhead skies, unblinking passages full of mysterious forests, giant eye closeups and (à la Bresson) other body parts. The experimental trimmings serve as counterpoint to the horrific tortures (rape, brutal beatings of even the pregnant, long sessions tied naked to a block of ice). The insertions also suggest how the women were able to survive: by focusing on the world outside them, on the life inside them, on how this time of suffering (they hope, they pray) will also pass.
7 Batch ’81 (Mike de Leon, 1982)
Mike de Leon’s dark college noir functions both as allegory and psychological study, charting a frat pledge’s (the incandescent Mark Gil) descent from unfocused apathy to laser-sharp fanaticism. Along the way we see how a man can be stripped of his ability to question and care — his language reduced to basic responses (“Yes master!”) his thinking narrowed into memorized platitudes (“The beginning and end are one!”). Key of course to conversion is the blood sacrifice — in the film’s case the murder of a good friend (basis for an all-out frat war), in Marcos’s case the Plaza Miranda bombing (basis for the declaration of Martial Law). The film ostensibly borrows from Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian-future film A Clockwork Orange but I submit improves on its infamous source material in at least one respect: you still care about the dwindling down and drying out of this particular soul.
6 Bayan Ko (My Country, Lino Brocka, 1984)
The other overtly political film on the list is also from Jose “Pete” Lacaba. Less elegantly structured this time, the film follows a laid-off printing-press worker’s (Phillip Salvador) descent into poverty and desperation against a background of rallies protesting the regime (just showing footage of an actual demonstration — complete with anti-Marcos signs and slogans — was considered shocking at the time). Less analytical than impassioned, Lino Brocka’s realization of Lacaba’s script shows us what happens when a man fails to achieve political consciousness: he’s like a rat in a maze, running in helpless ever tightening circles.
5 Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon (From What is Before, Lav Diaz, 2014)
Lav Diaz, looking at origins in Philippine history, examines not just Martial Law’s first stirrings in a small village but the kind of paranoid, secretive, apathetic mind-set that allows for such a decree to be carried out in the first place, with few questions asked.
The film is one of Diaz’s most unapologetically black comedies, a Felliniesque cast of grotesques chasing after each other and groping each other and ratting out on one another, too obsessed with their own small-scale problems to notice the encroaching darkness. The menace approaches at first in the guise of myth and folklore — the necessity of constantly apologizing to forest spirits; the rumor of a killer aswang (vampire) hunting among them; the accusation that a young girl is a kapre’s (monster’s) daughter. When the military finally manifests itself of course it’s too late — and will continue being too late for the next 14 years.
4 Manila by Night (Ishmael Bernal, 1980)
As we go further and further back in time towards 1972 (when Martial Law was first declared) you’ll notice that the political references are more obscure, the films overall more metaphorical.
Even then Bernal’s film, by common consensus his masterwork, encountered considerable resistance: the release was delayed, the title changed to City After Dark (Former First Lady Imelda Marcos had insisted on removing all references to “her” city), nearly an hour was reportedly cut out, all profanity and references to Manila on the soundtrack (her city!) deleted.
As for the film itself? Gorgeous, with Manila a seductive malevolent wonderland in which druggies and prostitutes and hustlers and predators chase and stalk and screw each other silly. The city here actually looks cleaner than what I remember — but Bernal (unlike Brocka) wasn’t as interested in straightforward neorealist representation: he was after emotions, interplay, conflict, the humanity depicted herein as ugly (and honest) as in any urban hell. No wonder Imelda insisted on her deletions.
3 Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976)
Lino Brocka’s in my book masterpiece stuck in Madame First Lady’s craw almost as badly as Bernal’s; Ms. Marcos exerted pressure to prevent the film from screening in the Cannes Film Festival, the Board of Censors delaying their review process so that the film would miss the festival deadline (it was instead screened in the independent and parallel Director’s Fortnight). The censors also insisted on changing the ending, to which Brocka agreed (but changed on his terms).
Seen today it’s a devastating visual critique of Marcos’s New Society: garbage-choked canals, people mired in poverty, a vast mountain of trash. Insiang (a guileless Hilda Koronel) is oppressed not just by Dado (Ruel Vernal) but by her own mother Tonya (Mona Lisa). The sense of claustrophobia, of squalor up close and personal is such that each character comes across as both victim and victimizer, capable of the worse excesses, the worse acts of cruelty.
2 Kisapmata (Blink of an Eye, Mike De Leon, 1981)
For someone considered to be a social hermit, Mike de Leon was a surprisingly political filmmaker. His arguably greatest work traces the roots of the recent dictatorship not to the arrival of some upstart politician from a northern province but deep within, in the brutally patriarchal, oppressively corrupt emotional dynamics of the Filipino family itself (some say De Leon’s own family). De Leon’s film is powerful because it’s so relentlessly plausible, the same time it’s so intimately personal: the gap between his nightmare world and ours is as tiny, really, as the blink of an eye.
1 Bagong Hari (The New King, Mario O’Hara, 1986)
The possibly greatest Filipino action film ever made is also a startling political allegory — no, political fantasy — of one man standing up to the whole corrupt establishment. Mario O’Hara’s epic noir posits a point-by-point parallel world where an ambitious Mayor Aguila (Joseph Estrada’s popular screen persona) vies with a seemingly innocent governess (Imelda Marcos was governess of Manila) for control over a large and powerful province (the Philippines).
O’Hara fuses fantasy and reality in a witty stylized manner: yes, this is election season, complete with terror bombings and assassinations; yes, the betrayals, killings, political machinations implicate everyone, from the lowliest thug to the loftiest official. At the same time, O’Hara’s intricately choreographed cleanly staged-and-shot fight sequences lift the violence to a whole other level, an epic komiks saga where the good guy comes closer than at any time to winning. Note the tone, neither optimistic nor cheerful but sardonic — as if the film were saying: “This is as bad as it gets; it can only get better.”
