Mapang-akit (2011)

Mapang-akit (John Torres, 2011)

In 2009, directors John Torres and Frosti Runolfsson, participants in DOX:LAB which endeavors to partner Scandinavian filmmakers with Middle-Eastern, Asian or African filmmakers for a film project, ventured into rural Antique to document the hudas-hudas, a practice done in a small town in the province every Black Saturday where an effigy of Judas is hanged and burned in the town center. Mapang-akit, assembled from footage that was unused for the documentary, may be accused as a mere product of afterthought. Fortunately, it is as gorgeous as it is anomalous, an alluring and exhilarating mix of communal and personal mythology, of documentary filmmaking and fictional storytelling, and finally, of the overtly banal and the subtly sublime.

Mapang-akit owes much to Torres’ creative process in Ang Ninanais (Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song, 2010), where he made use of footage gathered while shooting in Panay Island. Everything, from people, stories, history, and language become separate components that are assembled to complete a whole that while reminiscent of its individual parts is clearly and convincingly different. Interestingly missing in the film however are Torres’ voice-over and poetry, marking a movement for Torres towards a storytelling style where he does not feature as a main element. What essentially remains is an idea that is just as personal as all the other ideas that populated all of his shorts and features, germinated from local myths and realized through astute artistry into a dazzling portrait of a woman adored and envied for her beauty and scorned for her being.

It is a lovely-looking film, relatable considering that what Torres primarily captures are random images of provincial life, but enveloped by some sort of supernatural gleam. People talk. Their discussions are kept secret, even to Torres, by the foreignness of their spoken dialect. With only the rhythms and melodies of what is heard from the villagers, Torres tells a very loose story of an alluring woman who has enchanted local men who mysteriously die through subtitles that do not correspond with what is actually being said.

Mapang-akit benefits much from the randomness of how things unfold, which seems rooted to the film’s formerly documentary intentions. The camera is curiously observant, reacting to the most delicate of details like the sudden gush of wind, the musical invites of a passing ice cream vendor, a random carabao that becomes curiously attracted to the act of being recorded on film. There is always that sense of being within the film as opposed to being mere unaffected onlookers, making the film unusually compelling despite the seeming mundaneness of everything.

While it is unavoidable that ethical questions are raised since the subjects are not actors who are portraying fictional characters, Torres never claims to tell the truth as most of the world normally sees it. Truth, after all, is sometimes overrated, especially when heartlessly removed from what should be a truly personal experience. Instead, he paints very personal dreams and visions on a canvas made from the visual and aural landscapes of hid footage, making the province’s dormancy irresistibly seductive and its unravelling mysteries oddly romantic.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Taon Noong Ako'y Anak sa Labas (2008)

Taon Noong Ako'y Anak sa Labas (John Torres, 2008)
English Tranlation: Years When I Was a Child Outside

“Have I made that film?” asks John Torres, reflective filmmaker and narrator to his most personal film to date. His question is addressed to his father, and indirectly to the audience. Taon Noong Ako'y Anak sa Labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside) is very humble piece, I thought. There is not an ounce of pompousness in the entire film. Torres' query refers to the Christ film the father has failed to finish, which again indirectly refers to the complete product of Torres’ follow-up to the beautiful Todo Todo Teros (2006). Taon Noong Ako'y Anak sa Labas could probably be the Christ film that the father could never have made. It aches with that eternal bond of both admiration and displeasure the son has for his father, or the several stories that similarly evoke silent suffering and sacrifices Torres’ many subjects reveal.

Torres’ film is bound by the volatile relationship the director has with his father. Like his previous effort, Voices is mostly composed of footages swimming in an almost invisible pool of repressed emotions and passive yet enunciated responses. It opens with filmmakers Khavn dela Cruz and Raya Martin as the two of them are consumed by inactivity, characterized by an uneasy mixture of boredom and homesickness. The film really begins when the narrator starts declaiming ten important points of his life, read like the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses, which strengthens my theory that Taon is a spiritual movie, although not essentially Catholic or Christian, in a way that it uses traditional religious concepts to release a much more relevant image of humanity and its so-called soul.

Torres’ camera then lingers inside a dwelling wherein bootleg VCDs are being labeled in a book-cramped storeroom, which also serves as the family’s dining room. His camera finds a subject to observe: a kid who is concentrated on his portable video game. The curiosity shifts to the kids' parents, more specifically the father, as the camera starts to examine the nooks and crannies of the father’s body. He zooms in on the aged curves, the bald spots, the hardened epidermis, and the enlarged belly. It's a very tender sequence, wherein Torres relates this very normal scenario to his extraordinary project. He divides the father into geographic regions, each relating to an unfinished business, alluding to an undelivered legacy on the verge of bursting with all its repressed hurts and pains.

Film is an art form that thrives on lies and illusions. It has survived since its creation by replicating life or completely coming up with tales that mirror life or, at least, takes away momentarily the burdens of real life through escapism. Torres seeks to revise this utilitarian philosophy of cinema. Instead of creating illusions and hallucinations to soothe the wary soul, or recreate reality which essentially binds cinema as a secondary source to actually experiencing life, he opts to use the cinematic medium as a messenger for truth, similar to a diary except that this diary is not kept private but is read in front of multitudes.

The several sections of Voices have a distinct similarity among them: they are all confessionals. The section about the banana planters and their plight against the land owners partake of a form of an expose, presumably of the little people we barely hear about in a nation more interested in the personalities that drive this wretched government. This is segued by a touching scenario about a Moro father and his prodigal son, who little by little warms up to the culture he dissents from. There is also the heartbreaking tale of the woman who betrays her boyfriend; and is then betrayed by the person she replaced her boyfriend with. This portion sits so uncomfortably close to reality that its raw emotionality is quite sublime and affecting. The casual footages of the Filipino filmmakers homesick in a foreign land is juxtaposed with the section on Joma Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, who is shown in his everyday routine while exiled in the Netherlands. The portion ends with a song that qualifies guerrillas as poets, which is a beautiful spin-off of Torres' thesis of artists as terrorists in Todo Todo Teros, capped later by the endearing tales of the overseas worker who confesses about playing with her pen pals' hearts to earn extra dollars.

Taon is a clear move to a new direction in cinema. There is no clear narrative structure, just a free-flowing evocation of personal truths and emotional burdens. The film feels like a heartfelt letter to a father he hasn't seen for years. By using the many footages, the interviews and poems, Torres has created his own confessional, which is in turn, for us, a heartbreaking elegy of an artist to the respect and affection that he once reserved for his father. It doesn't strike as deftly as the three-way terroristic romance of Torres' first film, but its enduring ache lingers and then blossoms until it is quite difficult to deny its lavish inflections.

I have to admit that I initially thought Torres can never replicate the cinematic sincerity he has professed in Todo Todo Teros, or that he can come up again with something coherent from found footages collected within a year's time. I was found wrong, very wrong. Taon is certainly a riveting personal masterwork. With its many layers that can be read or viewed in so many ways, Voices is a film that has gladly humbled this assuming viewer.

******
This is my contribution to the Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon at Unspoken Cinema.

Todo Todo Teros (2006)

Todo Todo Teros (John Torres, 2006)

I don't know much about John Torres. I know he has an editing house across the street from the university I graduated from. His four short films have been adamantly recommended by friends. I must admit that his win in the Vancouver International Film Festival for this film sparked my interest; and when I heard that this film was going to be screened in the Bagong Agos Film Festival, I knew I just had to watch it and see it for myself.

John Torres feels like the Southeast Asian equivalent of a less pompous Jean Luc Godard, or a more personal and intimate Chris Marker. Todo Todo Teros stems from Torres' video diary during his Berlin trip where he became enamored by his tour guide Olga Aliseichyk. Masterfully stitched together with improvised sequences, recorded performances of local independent musicians and performers, other pre-existing footages, the film morphs into something completely different. It is collage-like in the extent of information Torres jams. Aside from the video (DV most appropriately utilized), Torres elaborates with onscreen texts of poetry, made-up SMS, narrative-specific events, and subtitles. Torres' own narrative tops the dynamism of the feature --- his pensive vocal demeanor punctures the heart as the visuals provide for a throbbing ride to the Philippine underground; the sights and the sounds marry right before the end resulting in something quite extraordinary.

There's a lot of information here; mostly personal, which makes it doubly tasking to understand the film completely. At least Torres acknowledges that his film is partly masturbatory; most of his films are described as releases or outputs of his personal life, rather than substantial societal cues. It's absolutely delightful how Torres exposes himself in his feature; how he tricks Olga into saying "mahal kita" (Tagalog for "I love you") or his little conversations about nothing. More revelatory are the scenes with the front liners (Khavn dela Cruz and Lav Diaz) of the Philippine independent movement; in a supposed car ride from Manila to Berlin, they discuss pre-Spanish Philippines and how vibrators and orgies are already commonplace in society, as described by Magellan's chronicler, Pigafetta.

Torres, with co-writer Joel Toledo, posits the theory of the filmmaker as an equivalent to the terrorist. There's some other pretty interesting things Torres posits here. It's mostly improv stuff; he plasters travel advisories from different Western nations against Manila while showing a clip of a noisy New Year's celebration in the streets (and quite surprisingly, the celebration does look a bit like Baghdad being bombed). The idea of a somewhat dystopian Manila (the film is set in the present, but the premise can exist alongside is interesting; where everyone is being watched; the government takes an opposite stride by tightening foreigner visitation (Torres compares such paranoia to a church confession; absolutely inutile in its purpose and methodology); secret languages used in terrorist conversations; executions of planned movements; and finally the terrorist's art --- the videotape he made for Olga as his very own confession.

His art explodes like a bomb that's sure to evoke emotions from those who see it. The film unexpectedly u-turns when the film is discovered by the videographer's wife (Bughaw) --- the film, the artist's testament to his love for his Berlin tour guide, his exploits as an artist-terrorist, plays to the highly volatile eyes of the wife --- its heartbreaking. The wife then spreads the video through a local pirate; Torres knows how to pump up the poetry --- images of Olga are displayed all over Manila, seen by little kids, by revolutionaries. Torres sums it up with an eye-popping blast; he redefines terrorism, not from the point of view of the global American, but from the point of view of a real person. He contributes his personal aches, his worries, his unrealized aspirations and loves lost, his eros to the collective consciousness that defines what terrorism is; somehow removes the mundaneness George Bush has inflicted the word. Terrorism has never been this romantic.

******
This post is my contribution to 100 films: The Lovesick Blog-A-Thon.