Vicente-Ignacio S. de
Veyra III's
Leaving Las Vegas
(Film Reviews, page 2)
IN 1997, Vicente was also assigned by The Manila Times to review an ongoing event at the University of the Philippines Film Center. This review, however, also had to give way to other articles in the editor's priority desk, thus its first appearance here -- two years after the event. Here's that unprinted review:
WOMANIZING TEN DAYS
The sad and lonely journey of the 7th U.P. International Women's Film Festival
While the SM Preview Studio was showing Dolores Claiborne, a readily-feminist story by itself, and some theaters showed Four Rooms, the first room of which was directed by one of the best women directors working in the West today, . . . for the 7th time the UP Film Center celebrated the National Women's Month of March with a festival of films on or by women -- this year running from February 29 till yesterday, March 15.
Started in 1990 as a collaborative effort between the Center and the Concerned Artists of the Philippines' Women's Desk, it continues to be a significant forum, albeit isolated in the UP campus, for consciousness raising among its few audience.
Where does it always fail, however? If we're to hope for a larger audience of even noisy macho cowards who need to be soaked in films like these, we can blame the high cost of marketing a festival. Press releases won't do.
Rowena Ulayan-Tuzcuoglu, a Center scholar, recently approached children-friendly (image-wise, at least) companies like McDonald's, Goldilocks', and others, for a sponsorship of advertising costs for an upcoming International Children's Film Festival. She places the cost at a half-a-million mark for a modest campaign. The problem is, companies would either demand locking the sponsorship to involve only themselves, or have a say on how to make the event bigger than intended. Ulayan-Tuzcuoglu says Goldilocks' wanted the festival to have a lot of Disney films to fit its upcoming promo, entirely in conflict with the festival's intention of showing alternative films for children. So there you go. University-funded festivals can't get notice.
I missed the opening, so I can't say how happy it was.
The following days showed a popular film that took in no more than 250 people and a roster of beautiful 16-millimeter films from Europe and Asia that invariably had an audience of between nine and four people. Rogelio, a maintenance personnel at the Center, says he has rarely witnessed a cancellation of a film showing since he was with the Center in 1994, even if it only involved four people in the audience. He says the well-attended films are those with sponsoring organizations. Fruto Corre, a Center staff since the early days, says sponsoring organizations are quite helpful in marketing the films. They have the time and the manpower to dispose the tickets to a potential audience.
And what about the films this year? Some of those shown can be found at the better video stores, the rest however you can probably get a glimpse of only at your friendly embassies and cultural centers.
The experimental docu Dancing in the Light can be borrowed or rented from the film's producer, ISIS International-Manila (a women's organization). The director, Avic Ilagan, already has to her credit a two-hour telemovie, a 10-minute animation film (as producer), a 32-minute video feature, a 10-minute film on a woman living alone, and has served as executive producer for Sige ... Sali Ka Na!, the 30-minute weekly show on Channel 5. She also directed a one-hour episode of the anthology Petabisyon (Ch. 5). Her first script had her as assistant director. It was a short film about an old woman remembering her past through her piano lessons.
Dancing won second place in the Docu category in the 1995 Cultural Center of the Philippines Alternative Film & Video Awards. The same CCP event also gave her the third prize in the short film category for her 1994 10-minute tale. But in 1992, the movie Tiempo which she scripted won the Best Short Film.
Dancing depicts dance as freedom, but also as an art while positioning art against the anti-art conventions of a rigid society -- be it a society of businessmen or a society of religious dogmatists. Art here becomes a "feminine" form of self-expression. Convention, rules, discipline are "masculine". Though the film is about the release from the shackles of a masculine society among the three women in the "story", it can also very well speak for all art, or other forms of self-expression -- e.g. protest.
Dance in the film first becomes a realization of the self's body. Then the realization of the Self, the reality of one's being (sexual, racial, linguistic, etc.). The realization becomes a celebration, towards pride. Counting the geographic origins of the dances here displayed, we could also very well allow the film as a metaphor for the Filipino's being tied to the "masculine" shackles of his/her inherited white race-worship, becoming merely awed at the whites' dancing instead of taking that dance for one's own.
Although the film is not that developed, still we are amazed by the elements: the light in the title, the significance of the spaces the dancers move through or with (e.g. dancer moves through white, steady architecture; then women dance around a fire; etc.).
A good first film outing from ISIS, an organization that hopes to come up with an award-giving body in the near future.
Now & Then, produced by Demi Moore and sisters Suzanne and Jennifer Todd under the aegis of the newly-formed "female-oriented female company" Moving Pictures, features no nude scenes save for some teenage boys skinny-dipping. Reverse sexist exploitation? Or were we supposed to laugh at this as a joke? The classic answer is, women have been so exploited since time immemorial, we must allow them the indulgence just this one time. But isn't allowing them that condescending? Therefore, sexist? No, it can't be a comment on exploitation, one might claim, merely a celebration of being able to tell male actors to strip.
So when it's advertised as having nothing closely impure, we may ask -- what stopped Moore and sisters from further celebrating? But we're talking here really of a forgivable tiny ingredient in the whole production.
This all-woman film involving also a large number of female crew is by itself a revolution. Ms. Moore has used her "hard-earned" clout in phallo-centric Hollywood to raise this project touted as a "tough sell" by itself. Later, all of female Hollywood, so the story goes, was clamoring for a part. Perhaps also that the project wasn't your typical women's film, but one geared for the younger set while already quite Hollywood-friendly.
Why was it in the festival? Apart from the history, perhaps because of its angle on friendship and female bonding. Then, like many feminist films, this one offers "ideal male" characters and even posits a coeval angle in paralleling boys' pranks with girls' own, boys' ignorance with one of the girls' own ignorance about the opposite sex. All this, delivered with humor. But finally, what it achieves for the festival is a standpoint on the universality of luck, liberating it from the genderized view of comparative suffering. Also the moral "don't close out the world despite all the evils," which develops from a hippie character's early sermon of "be proud of yourself, if you're lucky." How can feminists use this point of view? I can only think of a progress, from lostness and the seeking of peace towards the magnificent path of trying to know life as a whole, as the way to the ultimate liberation. Perhaps here was Demi's character's own problem, closing herself in the sureness of a career already won as a symbol of female triumph while fearing the uncertainty of a love yet to be seen as possible.
Patricia Rozema's When Night Is Falling, meanwhile, winner of a special jury prize at the last Cannes Film Festival among other plaudits in other fests, could very well be called "When the Light Sets In." A Canadian movie about a woman's latent (to her) dissatisfaction/discontent with the male environment surrounding her, the story leads us to the character's craving for a missing human tenderness. It seems the only tenderness she had hitherto found to be real was the one with her dog, no reading of human-beast sex intended (I hope). This craving leads her to an attraction, though unsure/hesitant/afraid, towards the idea of sharing some tenderness with an acquaintance lesbian (who's likewise of the black race, the lower class, and the "pseudo-art" circle).
A same-sex love story complete with illustrations of forms of lesbian tenderness depicted through dance, the trapeze act, etc., Falling also presents a homophobic religious sector theoretically so at the beginning, then not so, theoretically, later. It seems to point to hysterics of a media myth of a rampant homophobia, in effect seeming to say the coast is now clear for those in the closet to be out with it in this day and age in Canada.
Indeed the trapeze art here evokes the act of daring gravity, of hazarding the achievement of marvelous health, composition, and complementary assurance -- giving the argument that homosexual sex is as beautiful as heterosexual sex. But doesn't the film become "heterophobic" when somewhere in the flow the black lover utters, "Uh, no guns! Pl-lease." Or am I being paranoid with my, uh, gun?
Agatha is the 1981 90-minute film by the amazing French woman novelist, playwright and filmmaker Marguerite Duras. Well, the program lied. There were no English subtitles. A pity. I enjoyed it, even without understanding a word. When the show finished, only three noisy students remained.
To film students this would have been a glorious film to study. Because it uses "image and text separation": that is, first, steady compositional shots of architectural angles, of the surround, the sea, the soil, sometimes with steady or sullenly moving human figures -- all these almost like still-life pictures except for moving waves, a light fluttering of a grass leaf, a fly, or a feather on the table; then, to complement these shots and variations/developments on them that last through the entire movie, the narrations, including retorts in what sounded like letters.
The program says the story line involves a brother and sister who "arrange to rendezvous in the Hotel des Roches Noires in the seaside village of Trouville because the hotel reminds them of the house they grew up in." A film it is circling the theme of memory, desire, lost love, forbidden love.
Posters at the Center gallery note Duras's vision as "bleak, particularly of women's condition, which she describes as 'suicidal' . . . Hailed by French feminists but is by no means a conventional one herself. She's been hailed for her concentration on female desire and on women's experience, particularly in their relation to time and language. For Duras, silence is a form of female resistance. However negative such a world view, one could agree with Fr. feminist critic Francoise Aude that 'if Ms. Duras's characters are too intent on being engulfed in "submissiveness" for feminists to adopt them wholeheartedly . . . they painfully endorse the destitution which is at the heart of the feminist protest.'."
Therefore, despite the merely experimental effect of the non-subtitled film, it didn't not belong to the festival.
But what was Rory Quintos' Mangarap Ka doing in the festival?
Although with this, Quintos' second film, she becomes "one of the latest additions to the new breed of Filipino women directors," the program doesn't say why this feel-good, positive youth-oriented story on ambition and competitiveness (an ethical how-to to surviving in a democratic-capitalist society) should belong to the fest's roster. As an example of a directorial maternal caring? Notice that it's the father who can't encourage his son in the right way. It's not the competitor-friend who sacrificed his own schedule for our hero, but the girlfriend. Our "lost probinsiyano" is a boy. Girls in this movie are smarter. What's the message?
Huang Shugin's Woman, Demon, Human has every right to be in this fest. But even for a mere P15 a ticket, only eight UP students (no teachers) came to watch; late at that, the projectionist waited for more people in the audience.
The film, tagged a latest example of China's new "women's cinema" and considered the most interesting film to emerge from China's largest film studio, Shanghai, is a brilliant expressionist movie (expressionist only in the sense that the Chinese opera art is incorporated into the narrative discourse) about the hurdles and compromises, both political and social, of Qui Yun (Xu Shouli) before she attains success in the opera. Rich in criticisms (political, socio-cultural, and feminist), the process of hauling in all these plaints achieves for the director an escape from the specific-theme direction, ultimately accomplishing a human picture of an individual's -- in this case female -- struggle through life inside a rigid social setup befilled of mental provincialisms. That the director was able to churn out a feminist storytelling that is of "universal appeal", or a human movie with a "feminist element", is an achievement by itself worth more than the fleeting ceremonial accolades the film may have garnered.
Perhaps the 7th U.P. IWFF has to bear the cudgels of an audience that may be confused about whether a women's film fest should have films on women's welfare or films by women. I have no quarrel with the strength of presenting films on women's welfare by women filmmakers. But a film fest including women's films not on women's causes shouldn't be this little fest in March.
My larger quarrel, though, with the program is on a confusion with priorities. If the UP Film Center's prime motive is thematic success, let it do it well. But if it's the art first and foremost, let it present it better than it has been doing. Perhaps marketing help will readily come when all eyes have already been attracted to it. (VSV III)
-- uploaded March 8/1999
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Copyright © 1999, 2000 Vicente-Ignacio S. de Veyra III. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.