This exchange was conducted from May 20 to December 3, 2020 via email. The messages were then compiled into a single document, edited, and sent to the participants for review before posting.
Like previous meditation threads , the goal of this exercise was not so much to form a consensus, but to bring to the surface observations, questions, and concerns regarding the filmic year 2019.
PATRICK D. FLORES
As you review the long list of the films for the YCC citations, what tendencies do you observe?
Without naming specific films yet, reflect on these tendencies in broad strokes in the areas of style or technique, for instance, or the kind of social material that is discussed in relation to the cinematic language through which it is fleshed out. In my mind, I notice a certain re-articulation of the documentary and its absorption in particular genres like the melodrama or the crime thriller or even the coming-of-age rites of passage form. It is an interesting mix between the sort of realism the documentary instills in our expectations and the industrial idiom underlying genres. And this might have implications in the depiction of what is perceived as the “personal” and the “political.” With this conversation, something idiosyncratic arises I think: a certain darkness that is deepened or mottled by sentiment, humor, practical intelligence, or just tactical survival in an overall atmosphere of dense uncertainty. One is tempted to revisit the Philippine noir or neorealism, as it were, in the interpretations of Avellana, Brocka, Bernal, O’Hara, and Gallaga. But I feel there’s too much self-conscious modernism in them. So I am prompted to look at the more folksy, more “popular,” more genre-inflected films of Gil Portes and Maryo de los Reyes. Or maybe I am looking in the wrong places, or a different historiography. Perhaps productive, too, is to review the films of Nick Deocampo, Ditsi Carolino, Nana Buxani, or even Raymond Red? Or maybe a mix of all these? Surely, Brillante Mendoza’s aesthetic can be discerned in some of these films and in this regard, since Mendoza worked with Chito Roño as designer, Roño might be a cipher, too. But I wonder if another trajectory of traces can be proposed in the shift to digital cinema.