Otac, kum, frontmen i lijevo krilo novog filipinskog filma.
Filmovi mu traju i po 11 sati.
Čudesan opus.
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Century of Birthing (2011)
Stories about a Christian religious cult and a self-involved filmmaker, are brilliantly intertwined in Lav Diaz's newest film, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, 2011. Century of Birthing also weaves different types of filmmaking together (documentary, fiction, film-within-a-film) to create a profound 21st-century exploration of the value of art, belief and commitment. Lav Diaz was present throughout the weekend to discuss his work with curator George Clark and critic May Adadol Ingawanij.
The Films Of Lav Diaz
Posted by Just Another Film Buff under
Lavrente Indico Diaz is a multi-awarded independent filmmaker who was born on December 30, 1958 and raised in Cotabato, Mindanao. He works as director, writer, producer, editor, cinematographer, poet, composer, production designer and actor all at once. He is especially notable for the length of his films, some of which run for up to eleven hours. His eight-hour Melancholia, a story about victims of summary executions, won the Grand Prize-Orizzonti award at the Venice Film Festival 2008. His work Death in the Land of Encantos also competed and represented the country at the Venice Film Festival documentary category in 2007. It was granted a Special Mention-Orizzonti. The Venice Film Festival calls him “the ideological father of the New Philippine Cinema”. As a young man, Diaz was particularly inspired by Lino Brocka’s Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, describing it as the film that opened his eyes to the power of cinema. Ever since then, he made it his mission to make good art films for the sake of his fellow Filipinos. His body of work has led critics to call him both an “artist-as-conscience” and the heir to Lino Brocka. Diaz has also been compared to other great Filipino directors such as Ishmael Bernal, Mike de Leon and Peque Gallaga, whose films examined the ills of Filipino society (Image Courtesy: Rotterdam Film Festival, Bio Courtesy: MUBI)
Filipino director Lavrente Diaz is a very versatile artist. He started out as a guitarist (He recently released a music album to accompany his latest film), then wrote plays and short stories for television (a period he seems to hate, as is made clear in his works), later started writing poems (the poems that feature in his films are written by him) and then, in the early 90s, decided that he’ll be a professional filmmaker. The later films of the director present the same kind of problem to both commercial multiplexes and film festival screens – their length. His last four feature films have a total run time of around 36 hours! Diaz believes the long length of his films is an extremely crucial part of his aesthetic and radically alters the way in which the audience converses with his films. There is another specific problem in screening Diaz’s films world wide. That he is a very “Filipino” filmmaker. All his works are deeply rooted in the country’s history and politics. Any attempt to view the films in a de-contextualized manner is only futile. That makes Diaz one of the most uncompromising of directors working today. Diaz’s greatest ambition, as it seems, is to change the Filipinos’ (and rest of the world’s) perspective of their country and culture (He tells: “For me, the issue is: if you’re an artist, with the state the country is in you only have one choice – to help culture grow in this country. There’s no time for ego, you have to struggle to help this country. Make serious films that even if only five people watch it, it will change their perspective. You may make big box office but what do the people get out of it?”).
What is really striking about Lav Diaz is how vocal and frank he is about his ideology and his works. Most of modern mainstream auteurs and even festival regulars shy away from commenting on their work or on the ideas they present. Some of them bury their political concerns so deep within their films that they may simply be overlooked. Diaz, on the other hand, is like an open book. In all his interviews, he is always willing to discuss his films and explain what they deal with. None of this actually dilutes the impact of the films or the complexities they contain. Instead, it only opens up a wider and more pertinent band of response to the film. Furthermore, Diaz is also very transparent about his political views and even his personal life (His story is exactly the kind of success yarn pseudo-liberal Hollywood studios are looking for. But one sure has to appreciate the man for what he’s gone through and what he’s become). To say that he feels strongly against the Ferdinand Marcos’s rule of The Philippines till about two decades ago would be an understatement (“He siphoned the treasury as well. He got everything. No matter what they say, he stole everything – the money, our dignity. It is true. Marcos is an evil person. He destroyed us. The hardest part was that he was Filipino”). Diaz is also very optimistic about the role artists play in a political revolution and this belief directly manifests in his films in the form of artist figures present in the narrative.
I’d say that Diaz’s aesthetic stands somewhere in between Contemporary Contemplative Cinema and conventional documentary. Like the former, he prefers long takes shot from at a considerable distance, avoids the use of background music, includes stretches of “dead time” in his narrative and relies on mood and atmosphere more than exposition or psychoanalysis. He employs parenthetical cutting that allows a shot to run for more duration than the length of the principal action, but cuts soon enough to avoid the shot to parody itself. Unlike Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, there are long stretches of dialogue in the vein of early Nouvelle Vague films and the politics the films deal with are much more concrete. All his recent features have been shot in black and white as if they are historical documents and as if the vitality of its characters has been sucked out. His use of direct sound goes hand in hand with his use of digital video, which enables him to experiment with long shots. It is only in a blue moon that he uses close-ups and all his medium and long shots come across as clinical observations of his characters’ lives. That doesn’t mean his films lack empathy or compassion. But the way he generates them is more distilled and uncontrived. He composes in deep space and allows the viewer to get a complete sense of the film’s environment and time. He says: “There’s no such thing as the audience in my work. There’s only the dynamic of interaction. And in time, that dynamic will grow. The greatest dynamic is when people want to see a work because of awareness and they want to experience it; and in so doing, they may be able to discover new perspectives or just put these perspectives into a greater discourse.”
(NOTE: I’ve written here about all the films of Lav Diaz that I could get my hands on. However, I haven’t been able to see any his earlier works or his short films. I’ll append the entries for the missing films here once I get to see them)
Serafin Geronimo: Ang Kriminal Ng Baryo Concepcion (Serafin Geronimo: The Criminal Of Barrio Concepcion, 1998)
Diaz’s debut, Serafin Geronimo: Criminal of Barrio Concepcion (1998), even without the burden of its successors, is a poorly made piece of cinema. It’s got all the trappings of a bad student film – laboured acting, ill-advised cuts, unwarranted zooms and an occasionally bombastic score – that only worsen its low production values. Very loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Serafin Geronimo chronicles the titular criminal’s act of sin and his subsequent confession and redemption. Diaz chooses to externalize the moral conflict of the protagonist through a dental infection whose pain seems to grow unbearable. Additionally, there’s a lot of gratuitous violence – graphic and described – in the film (even in the censored version) that underscores the savagery of the world Serafin (Raymond Bagatsing), like Hesus, is caught in. Evidently, like the Russian author, the film wants to observe human suffering in all its brutality. But what the film does not seem to understand is that human suffering can’t be captured on film by merely recording mutilated bodies or the physics of their destruction. Such documentation must attempt to record the death of the soul – the internal through the physical – as well (Compare this film with the sublime, genuinely Dostoevsky-ian passage depicting Kadyo’s demise in Evolution). However, the scenes at the countryside, set in the past, are executed with certain affection and restraint. Diaz pushes his political ambitions to the background as the quest for personal justice and redemption takes precedence here over national issues. The use of curious, hand held camera and the staging of action in deep space during indoor scenes are few of the traits that would be carried over and refined in Diaz’s later, superior works.Hesus Rebolusyonaryo (Hesus The Revolutionary, 2002)
Hesus the Revolutionary (2002) is set in the year 2010 and follows the titular resistance fighter (Mark Anthony Fernandez) whose loyalty and ideology are put to test when he is ordered by the leader of the movement to kill his cell mates and is subsequently captured by the military. The most noteworthy aspect of the film is that Diaz does not set the film in far future or alter the mise en scène to make it seem futuristic. The fact that the architecture and geography look very contemporary indicates that there has been no progress for quite some time. Additionally, he uses pseudo-newsreels as prelude to the narrative. All these moves aid Diaz’s vision of establishing the future as a mere variant of the past and the present. His intention is to provide a critical distance between the audience and the story and hence make them reflect on how the same kind of events have happened in the past and are still happening. The chiaroscuro driven mise en scène through which the protagonist secretly moves seems to have been derived from American noir films. Diaz films his characters in moderately long shots and uses a techno soundtrack (by the band The Jerks) that enhances the dystopian sense overarching the film. Even while working within the limits of the genre (thereby using some of its conventions), Diaz manages to suffuse the film with themes that he would progressively be concerned with. However, Hesus the Revolutionary, in hindsight, is only the tip of a gargantuan iceberg.
Thanks to West Side Avenue (2001), clearly Lav Diaz’s first major work, we now know what will happen if the Filipino filmmaker takes to genre filmmaking. Diaz takes the standard policier, blows it to a size beyond what the text can handle and, in essence, brings to surface the mechanics of the genre. Constructed as a (seemingly endless) series of interrogations and recollections, a la Citizen Kane (1941), the film presents itself like a sphere without a centre. (Like Charles Kane, the relationship of all the characters to the dead boy at the centre of Diaz’s film – which is developed strikingly with a plethora of parallels – becomes the guiding device.) The procedure becomes so routine and schematic, aided to a large degree by the repetition of spaces and compositions, that the lead detective (Joel Torre) becomes something of a Melvillian zombie trudging through generic structures. But then, talking about Diaz’s film in terms of the genre is not half as justified as reading it from a national and auteurist perspective. Firmly planted in historical and geographical particulars – Filipino youth living in and around Jersey City during the turn of the century – the film takes up the issue of disappearing Filipinos – a sensitive idea that would be pursued further in other forms the later films – and examines the historical deracination and alienation that marks these young men and women. The relationship between the various characters with the killed teenager reflects their own conflicted relationship with their homeland. The film, itself, is somewhat (and slightly problematically) neo-nationalistic in flavour, gently appealing for cultural consciousness, integration and a “return to one’s roots”. The narrative mostly involves the investigation of the murder of one Manila teenager, If one moves beyond its precise sociological ambitions, one also discovers the flourishing of to-be-familiar stylistic (and narrative) devices: Scenes in master shots, montage of long takes, monochrome passages in. video and use of total amateurs. (Oddly enough, my favorite scene in the film is among the most uncharacteristic of Diaz’s cinema: a breakfast scene cut with verve comparable to Classical Hollywood). However, the most unmistakable authorial trademark of West Side Avenue is also the feature that attracts me most to Diaz’s work: the candidness and enthusiasm about his politics and political engagement, in general, as well as that rare faith in and love for cinema. That is why, towards the end of the film’s five hours, when the detective and the filmmaker – two professions seeking to discover truth – catch up with each other and restore the hitherto-absent heart of the film, you don’t if Diaz identifies with the detective or the filmmaker. He’s both.Ebolusyon Ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution Of A Filipino Family, 2004)
Running for almost eleven hours and twelve years in the making, Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004), which many consider to be Lav Diaz’s greatest work, is kamikaze filmmaking of the highest order. Mixing film and digital formats (which might be an economic decision), splicing the real with the surreal and weaving together documentary and fiction, Diaz concocts a glorious and flamboyantly self-reflexive film that slips seamlessly from one mode of discourse into another. The film’s central character is Ray (Elryan De Vera), a child found on the street by the mentally ill Hilda (Marife Necisito) and who goes on to live with another family of gold diggers. One could argue that Ray is the stand in for a whole generation of Filipinos abandoned by their “parents” and left stranded (Diaz himself calls Ray as the Filipino soul). Also central to the film is Hilda’s brother Kadyo (Pen Medina), who helps the resistance fighters by stealing ammunition from dead soldiers of the military. Interspersed among the sequences that drive this fiction are newsreels depicting rallies and riots against the then-existing Ferdinand Marcos regime, interviews of the legendary filmmaker Lino Brocka explaining political film movement during the Marcos rule and footage of artists reciting sappy, exaggerated and hilarious radio serials that everyone in the fictional world seems to be hooked to. Evolution of a Filipino Family is, as the title hints, a document – one that studies and critiques a whole era and suggests what’s to be done.
Diaz shoots almost exclusively in medium shots (to avoid any sort of manipulation, he says) and some of his compositions carry the air of evocatively rendered still life paintings. His soundtrack is even more remarkable and he edits it in such a manner that fiction regularly overflows into reality. Diaz throws in everything he’s got into this film. Examining a number of topics including commercialism versus art, the class struggle, art versus reality and the inseparability of past and present, Diaz creates a dense and incisive film that seems to announce once and for all what Diaz’s cinema is all about. At heart, Evolution of a Filipino Family is a film about resistance – political and cinematic. While Kadyo and the farmer army he works for exhibit their resistance by taking up arms against the military, Lino Brocka and his cohorts manifest theirs in cinematic terms. The link is very important, as Diaz himself has pointed out, since it is through the machinery of cinematic propaganda that the Marcos regime (as any totalitarian regime would) had reinforced its position among the Filipinos. If Hesus the Revolutionary set a fantastical revolutionary movement in the near future, this film uses the one that took place for real in the past. Diaz’s intention is not just to capture the spirit of the age, but, as in the previous film, to use this piece of history to study the present and understand the state of affairs.
Heremias (Unang Aklat: Ang Alamat Ng Prinsesang Bayawak) (Heremias (Book One: The Legend Of The Lizard Princess), 2006)
Heremias (2006) was devised as the first part of a diptych (the sequel is yet to be shot) and follows the titular merchant (Ronnie Lazaro) who decides to bid farewell to the group of artisans he is a part of and go his own way. After a near-mythical journey against the forces of nature, he lands in a shady town where his ox gets stolen and goods burned. After he comes to terms with the fact that he is not going to get justice from the corrupt police department, he decides to observe the scene of crime himself, with a hope that the criminal would come back sooner or later. It is here that he learns that the local congressman’s son is going to rape and kill a girl. And it is here – almost towards the end of this nine-hour film – that there is a trace of any “drama”. Heremias, petrified, tries to convince the local police officer and the town priest to do something about it, in vain. Diaz apparently built the film on the idea of paralysis (“the metaphor of being numbed”) and it is only during this final dramatic segment, where, for the first time, Heremias shows signs of concern and empathy, that he comes out of this (sociopolitical and historical) numbness. In a way, Heremias is the Jesus figure of the story who, after a drastic spiritual awakening, realizes that there are people worst off than him and becomes willing to suffer for the sake of others (Diaz believes this quality to be quintessentially Filipino).
Formally, Heremias deviates starkly from its legendary predecessor. Diaz seems to have found a new alternative to suit his long duration filmmaking style in digital video, where there is no worry of wasting film stock. He shoots in extremely long shots but mixes in close up. Diaz’s compositions early on in the film embody both fast moving objects, such as automobiles, and Heremias’ lumbering oxcart as if providing temporal reference for his kind of cinema. However, he also seems to be in a highly experimental mode, trying to arrive at an aesthetic that he might build his later films on. As a result, Heremias seems a tad derivative and falls a notch below the preceding and following films of the director. Where in later films he would fittingly cut after three or four seconds before and after a character enters or leaves the frame, here he provides a leeway of over a quarter minute, unnecessarily making the shots self-conscious (There is an hour-long fuzzy shot of Heremias watching a bunch of stoned teenagers partying, whose length, I believe, is not justified). But many of these shots are also highly rewarding and some even emotionally cathartic (for instance, the sublime shot where the light from Heremias’ lantern pierces the screen gradually). Ultimately, the film comes across as a minor, transitional (but nevertheless commendable) work that has a lot going for it thematically.
Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto (Death In The Land Of Encantos, 2007)
Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto (Death In The Land Of Encantos, 2007)
Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) was made immediately after the typhoon Reming/Durian devastated the town of Bicol (where the director had shot his previous two films), killing and displacing many families. The nine-hour film consists of two disparate threads the first of which plays out as a straightforward documentary where a filmmaker interviews the people affected by the disaster and gathers their opinion about the causes and consequences of the typhoon. The second thread in the film follows a fictional triad of artists who too live in the region of Bicol. Benjamin Agusan (Roeder Camanag) is a poet who has just returned from Russia and has discovered that his ex-lover has been buried under the outpouring of the volcano Mt. Mayon that was triggered by Reming. Then there are his friends Teodero (Perry Dizon), the level headed ex-poet who is now a fisherman, and Catalina (Angeli Bayani), a painter-sculptor who uses the debris spewed out by the volcano for her art. Benjamin is mentally disintegrating and has visions of his childhood and of his stay in Russia now and then. He is also hunted down by the government, which seems to have an agenda of killing all the soldiers and artists involved in the resistance, for his contribution to the anarchist movement. Diaz uses abstract time when dealing with sequences involving Benjamin wherein his immediate past, distant past and present (and possibly nightmares) reside in the same physical space, at times, like in The Mirror (1974) and The Corridor (1994).
Like in many contemporary works from around the world, fact and fiction reside alongside in Diaz’s film, even interpenetrating each other at times. Although this does reinforce the reality that the film is based on, Diaz views the marriage as a purely ethical decision intended to avoid exploitation of his people’s miseries (He had shot the documentary part before even deciding to make the film). As a result Encantos is like a Herzog film that encompasses its making-of. A peculiar thing that one notices about the film is that it is so full of artists – painters, sculptors, poets, filmmakers and writers all over. On that basis alone, one could say that Death in the Land of Encantos is Diaz’s most personal film. The film is built largely around long conversations that invariably end up discussing the role of artists in a revolution. Through the contrast between the two sections of the film, Diaz may just be exploring the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between artists and common folk that, as Evolution had elucidated, exploitative, commercial media have occupied. However, he is also very hopeful about the work of artists. Mt. Mayon is apparently symbolic of everything Filipino – both its beauty and its ugliness. Catalina making beauty out of its ugliness is what Diaz, as a filmmaker, seems to be attempting too – to embrace the state of Philippines in its entirety and use his art to correct its blemishes and restore its glory.
Melancholia (2008)
If Evolution of a Filipino Family delineated the Filipino political situation through the eyes of common folk (some of whom aid the resistance movement) and Death in the Land of Encantos revealed it through the point of view of the artists, Melancholia (2008) confronts the issue head on and presents the struggle from standpoint of the resistance fighters themselves. One gets the feeling that this is the film that Lav Diaz was working towards all along. Melancholia is divided starkly into three segments each of which takes place in different time frames. The first segment is set in the town of Sagada and simultaneously follows three seemingly unrelated characters. Rina (Malaya Cruz) is a nun who wanders the streets of the town collecting charity money for the poor, Jenine (Angeli Bayani) is a streetwalker who seems to be having some trouble doing her job and Danny (Perry Dizon) is a procurer who also surreptitiously runs live sex shows for willing customers. It is soon revealed that these personalities are only characters being played by the three as a part of a rehabilitation program initiated by Danny (actually Julian) to cope up with the loss of their kith and kin in the resistance movement. The progressively elliptical second and third segments of the film respectively show the time periods following and preceding the trio’s stint in Sagada and gradually reveal the actuality behind these masks that the three have put on.
True to its title, Melancholia is a film that wallows in sadness. It is also probably Diaz’s most cynical work to date (although Diaz is staunchly against cynicism: “There’s hope even if we still have a very corrupt and neglectful system. We cannot allow cynicism to rule us.”). It is, in fact, the film non-linear structure that reduces the intensity of this pessimism largely. By presenting the consequences before the cause, Diaz sets up an extended, enigmatic prelude that is put into perspective only after the third part of the film plays out. It is after the film has ended that we learn that these three characters have embarked on a process of unlearning, of shedding the knowledge about bitter realities and settling down into a state of ignorant bliss, of repudiating the harshness of truth for the comforts of illusion. And it is during the very final shot of the film, when the shattered and disillusioned Julian and Alberta move away from each other and out of the now-empty frame that we feel the entire weight of the seven-and-a-half-hour film being exerted on us. Melancholia is a purgatory of sorts – a limbo between the states of resistance and defeat – whose inhabitants can feel neither the vigor of life nor the solace of death. “Many people are like Alberta” tells one of the characters early on in the film. And that is the most disheartening part.
Walang Alaala Ang Mga Paru-paro (Butterflies Have No Memories, 2009)
Walang Alaala Ang Mga Paru-paro (Butterflies Have No Memories, 2009)
The director’s cut of Butterflies Have No Memories (2009) is something of a misnomer. For one, Diaz had to shoot and cut the film so that it didn’t run for a minute more than the one-hour mark. As a result, it feels as if Diaz had one eye on his film and the other on his watch. There are shots that are abruptly drained off their life and some that feel perfunctory. But the film also seems to mark a turning point in Diaz’s outlook towards the Filipino people. Perhaps for the first time, Diaz portrays the common folk (and perhaps a particular social class) as being almost completely responsible for their misery. In Butterflies, an ex-Chief Security Officer at the mines, Mang Pedring (Dante Perez), blames the mining company, which has withdrawn production after protests by the church and activist organizations, for the economic abyss he and his friends are living in. But it is also starkly pointed out to us that, while they were getting benefited by the mining company, these folks did nothing to set up alternate ways of business and earning and, as a result, find themselves foolishly hoping for a past to return, even when such a regression is harmful it is to the collective living on the island. Mang misguidedly plans to reverse time and reinstall the factory by kidnapping the daughter of the owner of the mining company (Lois Goff), who has returned to the island after several years and who calls Mang her second-father. What Mang tries to do overrides personal memory and disregards the fact that it is he who has lived like a moth, inside a cocoon. As, in the final shot, Mang and his friends stand wearing those Morione masks (which bring in the ideas of guilt, remembrance, conscience and redemption – so key to the film), they realize that they’ve gone way too far back in time than they would have liked – right into the moral morass of Ancient Rome.
[Death In The Land Of Encantos Trailer]
http://theseventhart.info/2010/05/16/the-films-of-lav-diaz/
Lav Diaz: As Long As It Takes.
Lav Diaz: As Long As It Takes.
Guest blog by George Clark
"I believe that the greatest struggle in life is the struggle to become a good human being."
Lav Diaz[i]
The work of Lav Diaz, more than other internationally celebrated filmmakers, is discussed more than seen. Already his filmography has a nearly legendary status due to its remarkable length. His last five films have a combined running time of over 40 hours and he shows no sign of slowing down. His breakout film Batang West Side (2002) signaled both Lav's first exploration of uncommon duration (its five hours long) as well as his break from the established film industry. Since then Lav has produced one of the most remarkable and distinct bodies of work in contemporary cinema and in turn helped to inspire and lead the way for a whole generation of filmmakers across South East Asia and particularly in his home country.
Despite popular conceptions, the duration of his work is by no means the only story; Lav is a deeply committed political and literary film maker. In responding to a question about the length of his work he recently commented that he understands that “convention tells you that a film has to be two hours, mainly for commercial purposes. But I don’t have anything to do with commerce or the marketplace, I just make my films.”[ii] The duration of his work can maybe best be understood in relation to literature, his work often employs novelistic structures, overlapping stories and complex story lines that weave together the lives and fates of many characters. Lav’s early film The Criminal of Barrio Concepcíon (1999) was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and various critics have compared his recent epics to works of Russian Literature. Lav credits his parents for this influence “my parents are bookworms and storytellers and teachers. They read and read and read. My father was very much into Russian literature.”[iii]
His work is also framed by the traumatic plight of his country whose history has seen it pass from Spanish to American colonizers in the 20th Century before its tragic independence in 1946 which was dominated by military dictatorship of Marcos, who left a continuing legacy of corruption, military brutality and suppression of democratic and human rights up to the present. Lav's work is colored by a reflection and examination of this complex history, yet defiantly seeks to highlight the stories of those outside of the countries woes, to explore the abandoned and neglected, from the rural communities to artists and failed revolutionaries. As the Fillipino critic Alexis and early champion of Lav's work stated, "The shadow cast by Ferdinand Marcos’ imposition of Martial Law stills looms prominently over the country, nearly twenty years after the dictator’s reign has ended. Marcos created a legacy; not only of fame and wealth, but of stifled hands and silenced voices; a legacy of disempowerment."[iv]
It is within this context of the disempowered that Lav's work operates. His works encompass many suppressed stories and tales, outlawed revolutionary songs sung in the night as well as fantasies and nightmares that stem from the countries rich and diverse folk culture. His films are filled with richly drawn and complex characters, and the many stories they contain are expertly structured, often combining documentary and fictional material as well as a remarkable treatment of filmic time and causality. Lav's work is unlike anything else in cinema, its marries the aesthetic of Bela Tarr with the performance and conspiratorial narratives of Jacques Rivette, the existentialism of Dostoevsky with the levity and atmosphere of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. These unique films perhaps provide their own best companions; each work is distinct and equally innovative, displaying signs of a constantly exploring artist and a conception of cinema as a live and evolving entity still far from being defined and especially not restricted to the feature length norm.
His work is celebrated by festivals around the world (such as the Venice Film Festival that awarded Melencholoy with the prestigious Orizzonti Grand Prize in 2008) but so far has had little exposure in the UK. As such the upcoming screenings at the AV Festival represent the first real opportunity to experience his work in the UK and it’s hard to think of a better place to watch them. Within the lovingly built and run auditorium of the Star and Shadow cinema, a building that in itself stands for an understanding of cinema as a communal and non-commercial experience, Lav’s work will be free to run throughout the day and their generous duration will help turn the audience into a unique community. These films are made to be watched together, to be experienced, to be lived with. The community that coheres around any work helps to define and enrich it. To watch a film by Lav is to experience an essential and unique conception of time and space, a conception born of resistance and faith in cinema as a transformative art. They are as long as an honest day’s work and much shorter than a TV box set, once they begin and you allow yourself to be taken with their unique pacing and rhythms, they’ll reward your investment with something most cinema has forgotten is within its capacity to offer.- George Clark
Time, it’s on Lav Diaz’s side. “Malay time,” he said after the Toronto screening of his nine-hour-and-five-minute Death in the Land of Encantos. “I’m a Malay as much—maybe more—than I am a Filipino. We Malays are governed more by space and nature than conventional time.” What underlies the shattering and disturbing reality of Diaz’s new work is a stunning 2006 catastrophe: nature, in the form of the profoundly devastating Super Typhoon Durian, combined with the explosive power of the Mayon volcano, wiped out physical space—the Bicol region on the central island of Luzon—along with thousands of innocents. In the face of this, and in the experience of watching Death in the Land of Encantos from beginning to end, time itself dissolves. In fact, Diaz controls the sense of time to such a degree that it no longer matters. In his hands, we all become Malay.
This is just one of the paradoxes to ponder about Diaz’s cinema, which has helped frame—though not imperiously define—the new independent Filipino cinema over the past decade. In a group of relative youngsters, Diaz is the wise elder, and his work, starting with Batang West Side (2002), gave permission to a generation to radically question the precepts of an overwhelmingly crass and commercial film culture whose past rebels, like Lino Brocka, are so rare that they’re treated like mythical heroes.
Now that Raya Martin, John Torres, and the rest have come into their own—forming the most dynamic and daring national cinema anywhere—it’s thrilling to see Diaz graze deeper into his own Malay ecosystem, where viewer adaptation to local conditions is absolutely essential, where certain categories can be tossed out with the trash. This creates some vexing, even hilarious, situations as festivals don’t quite know how to classify and exhibit the wild and roaming Lav. In Venice, The Orrizonti jury gave Encantos a special prize, but Venice programmers had slotted it in Orrizonti’s documentary category, even though Encantos is emphatically not a documentary. Toronto programmed it in a comfy, small screening room where viewers could stretch out, have a small table for food, and co-exist with the movie for most of an entire day. But Toronto’s catalogue note tried to titillate with some bizarre nonsense about “a graphic, extended lovemaking session,” while the well-intended idea to include the film in the festival’s new “Future Projections” section was a mistake. Sure, one could wander into the Spin Gallery to catch some scenes (then wander back several minutes later and think you were watching the same scene, even though you actually weren’t), but the film was plainly not served well.
The only real way to be with Diaz’s cinema is to sit in a pitch-dark room, watch, and let the outside world peel and drop away. Besides, a genuine epic is being told. In Durian’s wake, a poet named Benjamin Agustan (Roeder Camanag) returns to his home village, Padang, to see if any family members survived and if there’s anything left to salvage. Significantly, Benjamin is a leftist poet, a victim of torture by ruthless state security police, an exile who has spent several years in Russia. He returns to a place of apocalypse and ghosts, where the landscape has become downright lunar and the few trees left are awkward sticks in the ground, but also where, amazingly enough, a pair of old artist friends—sculptor Catalina (Angeli Bayani) and fellow poet Teodoro (Perry Dizon)—are trying to continue to live and work.
Benjamin has to adjust and dial down from the metropolitan, civilized but also odd and dislocating life he’s led in Russia (“Russians,” he tells Teodoro, “are a strange race—they’re Europeans, and not Europeans”) to this utterly denuded and tragic world, in which one’s sense of home has been ripped out and tossed away. Benjamin’s poetic instincts are both fueled and burdened by the memories of past lovers; an ex-lover looks very real as she’s nude, lying on her bed, but recurring images also seem to make her into a spectre, while a strange nighttime Zagreb setting is the basis for thoughts of another lost love. (Here, Diaz does something that Torres specializes in, salvaging footage from another film—in this case, an unfinished short about Filipino ghouls adrift in Eastern Europe—using it for other purposes and altering its context.) Benjamin’s memories grow especially intense concerning his family, including a mother who had long ago gone insane.
As he had developed over the course of making Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) and Heremias (2006), Diaz establishes concrete reality and facts alongside a nearly mystical state of mind that at first occupies and eventually permeates the work. This shift precisely tracks the filmmaking process. Encantos did indeed begin as non-fiction; the former reporter Diaz dashed to Bicol (where he made his previous two films) two weeks after Durian hit to record the environmental and human conditions. Clearly, although he hasn’t said such, he discovered an extraordinary stage expressing a cosmic tragedy that called for some kind of narrative. The typhoon’s actual victims speak to Diaz’s camera, but the fictitious characters inside Encantos speak and walk inside a patiently conceived deep focus mise en scène, like somnambulistic beings out of I Walked with a Zombie (1943). They have enough time and space to ponder many things: the existence of a deity, the state of their country, the alchemy between nature and art (Catalina explains that she makes her sculptures from Mayon’s lava, as a way of taming it), how mortal beings become ghosts (Catalina to Benjamin: “You’re like a ghost—you go away, and then you reappear”).
There are many examples of how Diaz manages this interpolation of the concrete and ineffable, but one in particular stands out so impressively that it becomes a signature effect. His fixed DV camera, shooting in wide angle to better encompass a massive landscape, runs for minutes, sometimes even over ten, until something happens: a figure in the far distance appears. When does it appear? I’ve watched this phenomenon since Evolution, and despite intense concentration, I can never spot the exact moment when the character materializes on screen. It’s a cinema viewing experience without parallel, exactly recreating what happens if one were to stand in a large landscape and wait for a person to arrive from the extreme distance.
Several scenes have Benjamin suddenly emerging within such a space, reinforcing Catalina’s remark. By the seventh and eighth hours of Encantos, Benjamin is trapped between this reality and Bicol’s shadow world. Camanag stumbles around in a near-dead stupour, buffeted by the loss of his family, his failed attempts to make sense of his mother’s madness, and his inability to stoke some sort of love with Catalina, collapses in a heap as if the air’s been sucked out of him. Art has the last word: Catalina recites a vivid, stark chunk of Benjamin’s verse (written by Diaz, proving that he’s a poet of the first degree) that brings him back to life. Even a closing flashback of Benjamin being tortured doesn’t detract from the poem’s efficacy.
With such declarative expressions of art, Diaz is encouraging the viewer to free-associate with a basket teeming with cultural—mostly Western—associations. It’s impossible to consider his awed shots of the perfectly conical and gorgeously intimidating Mayon, in combination with Benjamin’s gradual dissolution, and not think of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Just as it is to gaze upon the impossibly rocky landscapes over stretches of extended time and not recall L’avventura (1960). Then there’s Rilke, whose apt quote, “Beauty is the beginning of terror,” opens Encantos. Images of Pudovkin and Tarkovsky tumble into the mind when Benjamin and Teodoro discuss Russia. And then there are the two great poles of theatre history, that are here elegantly folded into each other: Aeschylus’ voice of personal and national tragedy in the form of lament and pure grief, and Beckett’s existential comedy, the endless wait for the thing that will never transpire. But the wait, the wait…the bliss in that wait, the physical stamp—exhaustion, giddiness, discomfort—felt by watching that wait is the special, new thing that Lav Diaz has brought.
Spotlight | Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz, The Philippines)
Time, it’s on Lav Diaz’s side. “Malay time,” he said after the Toronto screening of his nine-hour-and-five-minute Death in the Land of Encantos. “I’m a Malay as much—maybe more—than I am a Filipino. We Malays are governed more by space and nature than conventional time.” What underlies the shattering and disturbing reality of Diaz’s new work is a stunning 2006 catastrophe: nature, in the form of the profoundly devastating Super Typhoon Durian, combined with the explosive power of the Mayon volcano, wiped out physical space—the Bicol region on the central island of Luzon—along with thousands of innocents. In the face of this, and in the experience of watching Death in the Land of Encantos from beginning to end, time itself dissolves. In fact, Diaz controls the sense of time to such a degree that it no longer matters. In his hands, we all become Malay.
This is just one of the paradoxes to ponder about Diaz’s cinema, which has helped frame—though not imperiously define—the new independent Filipino cinema over the past decade. In a group of relative youngsters, Diaz is the wise elder, and his work, starting with Batang West Side (2002), gave permission to a generation to radically question the precepts of an overwhelmingly crass and commercial film culture whose past rebels, like Lino Brocka, are so rare that they’re treated like mythical heroes.
Now that Raya Martin, John Torres, and the rest have come into their own—forming the most dynamic and daring national cinema anywhere—it’s thrilling to see Diaz graze deeper into his own Malay ecosystem, where viewer adaptation to local conditions is absolutely essential, where certain categories can be tossed out with the trash. This creates some vexing, even hilarious, situations as festivals don’t quite know how to classify and exhibit the wild and roaming Lav. In Venice, The Orrizonti jury gave Encantos a special prize, but Venice programmers had slotted it in Orrizonti’s documentary category, even though Encantos is emphatically not a documentary. Toronto programmed it in a comfy, small screening room where viewers could stretch out, have a small table for food, and co-exist with the movie for most of an entire day. But Toronto’s catalogue note tried to titillate with some bizarre nonsense about “a graphic, extended lovemaking session,” while the well-intended idea to include the film in the festival’s new “Future Projections” section was a mistake. Sure, one could wander into the Spin Gallery to catch some scenes (then wander back several minutes later and think you were watching the same scene, even though you actually weren’t), but the film was plainly not served well.
The only real way to be with Diaz’s cinema is to sit in a pitch-dark room, watch, and let the outside world peel and drop away. Besides, a genuine epic is being told. In Durian’s wake, a poet named Benjamin Agustan (Roeder Camanag) returns to his home village, Padang, to see if any family members survived and if there’s anything left to salvage. Significantly, Benjamin is a leftist poet, a victim of torture by ruthless state security police, an exile who has spent several years in Russia. He returns to a place of apocalypse and ghosts, where the landscape has become downright lunar and the few trees left are awkward sticks in the ground, but also where, amazingly enough, a pair of old artist friends—sculptor Catalina (Angeli Bayani) and fellow poet Teodoro (Perry Dizon)—are trying to continue to live and work.
Benjamin has to adjust and dial down from the metropolitan, civilized but also odd and dislocating life he’s led in Russia (“Russians,” he tells Teodoro, “are a strange race—they’re Europeans, and not Europeans”) to this utterly denuded and tragic world, in which one’s sense of home has been ripped out and tossed away. Benjamin’s poetic instincts are both fueled and burdened by the memories of past lovers; an ex-lover looks very real as she’s nude, lying on her bed, but recurring images also seem to make her into a spectre, while a strange nighttime Zagreb setting is the basis for thoughts of another lost love. (Here, Diaz does something that Torres specializes in, salvaging footage from another film—in this case, an unfinished short about Filipino ghouls adrift in Eastern Europe—using it for other purposes and altering its context.) Benjamin’s memories grow especially intense concerning his family, including a mother who had long ago gone insane.
As he had developed over the course of making Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) and Heremias (2006), Diaz establishes concrete reality and facts alongside a nearly mystical state of mind that at first occupies and eventually permeates the work. This shift precisely tracks the filmmaking process. Encantos did indeed begin as non-fiction; the former reporter Diaz dashed to Bicol (where he made his previous two films) two weeks after Durian hit to record the environmental and human conditions. Clearly, although he hasn’t said such, he discovered an extraordinary stage expressing a cosmic tragedy that called for some kind of narrative. The typhoon’s actual victims speak to Diaz’s camera, but the fictitious characters inside Encantos speak and walk inside a patiently conceived deep focus mise en scène, like somnambulistic beings out of I Walked with a Zombie (1943). They have enough time and space to ponder many things: the existence of a deity, the state of their country, the alchemy between nature and art (Catalina explains that she makes her sculptures from Mayon’s lava, as a way of taming it), how mortal beings become ghosts (Catalina to Benjamin: “You’re like a ghost—you go away, and then you reappear”).
There are many examples of how Diaz manages this interpolation of the concrete and ineffable, but one in particular stands out so impressively that it becomes a signature effect. His fixed DV camera, shooting in wide angle to better encompass a massive landscape, runs for minutes, sometimes even over ten, until something happens: a figure in the far distance appears. When does it appear? I’ve watched this phenomenon since Evolution, and despite intense concentration, I can never spot the exact moment when the character materializes on screen. It’s a cinema viewing experience without parallel, exactly recreating what happens if one were to stand in a large landscape and wait for a person to arrive from the extreme distance.
Several scenes have Benjamin suddenly emerging within such a space, reinforcing Catalina’s remark. By the seventh and eighth hours of Encantos, Benjamin is trapped between this reality and Bicol’s shadow world. Camanag stumbles around in a near-dead stupour, buffeted by the loss of his family, his failed attempts to make sense of his mother’s madness, and his inability to stoke some sort of love with Catalina, collapses in a heap as if the air’s been sucked out of him. Art has the last word: Catalina recites a vivid, stark chunk of Benjamin’s verse (written by Diaz, proving that he’s a poet of the first degree) that brings him back to life. Even a closing flashback of Benjamin being tortured doesn’t detract from the poem’s efficacy.
With such declarative expressions of art, Diaz is encouraging the viewer to free-associate with a basket teeming with cultural—mostly Western—associations. It’s impossible to consider his awed shots of the perfectly conical and gorgeously intimidating Mayon, in combination with Benjamin’s gradual dissolution, and not think of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Just as it is to gaze upon the impossibly rocky landscapes over stretches of extended time and not recall L’avventura (1960). Then there’s Rilke, whose apt quote, “Beauty is the beginning of terror,” opens Encantos. Images of Pudovkin and Tarkovsky tumble into the mind when Benjamin and Teodoro discuss Russia. And then there are the two great poles of theatre history, that are here elegantly folded into each other: Aeschylus’ voice of personal and national tragedy in the form of lament and pure grief, and Beckett’s existential comedy, the endless wait for the thing that will never transpire. But the wait, the wait…the bliss in that wait, the physical stamp—exhaustion, giddiness, discomfort—felt by watching that wait is the special, new thing that Lav Diaz has brought.
Beware of the Jollibee: A Correspondence with Lav Diaz
By Andréa Picard
Twenty years ago, when under the rule of a sole dictator, we knew well whose wrists deserved to feel the sharp ends of our knives. Today, in a society so quick to judge and pass blame, the only flesh that remains to be examined is our own. Diaz’s camera, steadfast, unwavering, reveals the truths only found beneath the surface, and points us on the path to deliverance.—Alexis Tioseco, 2006
In mid-April, Lav Diaz came to Toronto to attend the Images Festival with his most recent film, the six-hour Florentina Hubaldo, CTE. A work of profound emotional depth and stunning deep-focus chiaroscuro cinematography, it lingers in the imagination for an unusually long time; so complete and devastating is its wounded, weary, and wretched world. Its tale of a young, beautiful woman who lost her mother at an early age (“in unexplained circumstances”), is shackled to a rickety bed by her perpetually drunk, exploitative father, and is continuously raped by men as her battered grandfather is forced to witness her suffering, can hardly get more bleak. And yet, its sustained descent into a Tarr-like miserabilism is revealed as complex, multi-faceted, and paradoxical at every sodden turn, intersecting with a few other storylines and a tireless, unseen gecko providing some impressive diegetic sound from the natural world.
The film takes place in Bicol near the alluring but ominous volcano, which erupted as recently as 2008, decimating the region, its molten lava swallowing upwards of 3,000 lives. Still, people returned to live there, despite the fatal risk, as if a supernatural magnetism drew them back. But, as the film amply and relentlessly (at times, punishingly) demonstrates, home is not synonymous with safety and comfort; in Bicol, for Florentina Hubaldo, it’s a literal hell on earth.
She, of course, is the Philippines—a country that has endured war, colonial rule, civil strife, abject poverty, and merciless environmental disasters. (The independent filmmaking community in Manila has, significantly, also been tarred by tragedy. The violent loss in 2009 of film critic, educator, producer, and all-around mobilizer Alexis Tioseco—to whom Diaz’s A Century of Birthing [2011] is dedicated—is still being felt.) While devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in the Philippines have become all-too-common headlines, the punishing rainy season now extends from June to December, in great part due to global warming. With flooding rains and whipping winds, a plundering Mother Nature destroys homes, village infrastructures, and sweeps away lives and possessions in a perpetual cycle of destruction and obligatory renewal. These forceful downpours are recurring characters in recent Filipino cinema, from the dirty deluge in Brillante Mendoza’s Slingshot (2007), or the ominous omens in his controversial and unfairly maligned Kinatay (2009), to the dreamy rainfall in Raya Martin’s elegant and gorgeously stylized period piece, Independencia.
The rain, plaintive and plentiful, and Alexis’ generous spirit and truncated aspirations for a burgeoning Filipino cinema replete with a solid awareness of history and healthy discourse, were both wistfully discussed during a lazy, sunny day spent with Diaz, who is impassioned about culture and its global crisis. Like the CTE in the title (“Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy,” a progressive degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive blows to the head), Diaz frequently refers to the state of regression attending the majority of the cultural affairs in the Philippines. In no ways endemic to his own country, the crisis in culture (remarkably contradictory, from the rise of corporate marketing to the bulimia of curatorial studies departments and the logorrhea of their posturing, to the hegemony of jargon-laced criticism and its crutches, the shuttling to and from elitism to mass-media, the increasingly bloated museum admission fees, the prevalence of blockbuster shows, etc…) weighs heavily upon him as an uncompromising artist with fewer and fewer funding options, and an audience base that is loyal, but oh so small.
Invoking something (completely amorphous) along the lines of Glauber Rocha’s infamous “aesthetic of hunger,” Diaz returns to the notion of a petrified perception of art, both at home and abroad. That serious should be so readily mocked (Susan Sontag lamented this long ago and the disdain and intolerance have seemingly only grown) is no longer surprising or jarring given today’s cultural and economic climates, and yet, there is a sense of the irrevocable: what Diaz has dubbed “the Jollibee” phenomenon. Essentially the McDonald’s of the Philippines, Jollibee is a ubiquitous, enterprising chain of fast-food restaurants that has colonized youth culture and mass consumption. “A Triumph for and of the Filipino,” proudly declares its website, as the literally eye-popping mascot casts his spooky spell upon the nation. Today’s youth feed on “yumburgers” as they zealously pose for keepsake photographs with the frighteningly neon-coloured “Jollibee” and the gap continues to widen…
On the ubiquity of storms in recent Filipino cinema:
Lav Diaz: Resilience. We are the storm people. The storm could be the Filipino’s original Anito (God); we had so many gods before Christ and Allah came to our endless shores. On the average, the Philippines is battered by 28 storms every year, but that doesn’t make us a storm-battered race. In fact, we’ve become this storm-loving people. The storm is very much a part of our reality. Double that average, the Filipino can still take it. I wouldn’t call it a sado-masochistic psyche, but more of a resigned acceptance because you can’t do anything about it; it’s nature’s way. And you go back to the pre-Islamic and pre-Catholic Filipino Malay perspective—life is governed by nature. So, yes, the storm gives the Filipino a resiliency that’s uniquely Filipino because it’s become a metaphor for restarting, rebuilding, reconstruction, relocation, rebirth, recalling, renaming, resurfacing, reissuing, recurrence, reluctance, relapse, return, retain, remain, regain, resurrect, remiss, relief, rogue, rotten, rampant, relax, renegade, rob, run, rush, rip, ripe, rum, rug, rat, rut, retrogression, retro, rope, and rock ‘n’ roll. Amid a very corporeal history, there’s the storm, the Filipino’s god of all gods, which has somehow become the great paradoxical equalizer, giving the Filipino a complex logic/illogic cultural discourse, a philosophy founded on the patterns of nature; the meaning of existence is appropriated by nature’s ways. It’s so normal to drown in a flood, be buried by a landslide, to be sliced by debris from a billboard, and be twisted by 21 years of Marcos’ brutality. Hey, there’s a storm. I wrote this piece during the shoot of Death in the Land of Encantos (2007, part of the Benjamin Agusan poems, but I excluded the ones I wrote in English):
I shall sit on chairs clasped by dirty wind
I shall stare on empty skies and mud, and crushed houses
The smell of decay cripples all aromas of caffeine and grass
The trees are quiet now, devoured by the mightiest rains
The earth is sepia now, brown and black, even before dust
The street is still once more, blood had dried on concrete and waste
Worms roam the land, impregnable with their desires for rotten flesh
Worms are angels who eat the ones they could not save
What I have are pieces of sorrow, pieces of pain left by December,
And September.
What I have are days always undone
By absence—
Your perpetual absence.
On the impossibility of submitting a list of Top 10 films of all time to Sight and Sound…
Diaz: This is the most abused exercise in cinema. Top 10 films, or, The Greatest 100 Films of All Time, or, 1000 Essential Films. And why do we do it still, ad infinitum, ad nauseum? Honestly, it just feeds the ego of the ones who do it, and, of course, of the ones mentioned. They will actually kill or die for it. It boggles the mind. But then it’s a valid exercise. And I respect people who do it, no matter how idiotic their choices/discourses sometimes are. I’ll even defend them. Yes, the canon, like it or not, is a necessary evil. Canon-making built so many sects and churches of cinema. Godard ran away from it, scared shitless upon realizing that Narcissus is staring at him in his favourite mirror, himself. But then he’s a god who created cinema, so he can’t destroy it, and we dread the day when he will finally leave cinema because he is infinitely a part of the Top 10 and The Greatest 100 Films of All Time and the 1000 Essential Films. In North Korea, the cinemaniac and late megalomaniac Kim Jong-il actually imposed a canon, all films starring himself, waving, smiling, visiting troops and factories, kissing babies, hugging the blind, praising uranium in thickly clogged shoes and propagating hairmania. And we know what happened and what is still happening in sad, sad North Korea. The wisdom and analogy is never, ever trust the canon. Keep an open mind but always keep Kim in mind. By keeping an open mind, we understand that the canon is part of the greater discourse of cinema; that’s short of saying that it’s still relevant. And I don’t think it’s elitist. Greater discourse always begs the proverbial question: “Do we really know the real Socrates?” or, putting it in a direct way: “Do we really know cinema?”
I’m throwing back these questions to you, Andréa: “Is the canon a necessary evil? No longer relevant? Elitist?”
Andréa Picard: I’m guilty of indulging in this exercise and can certainly acknowledge that part of the impetus for this endless list-making inevitably comes from ego, but also, and most importantly, it derives from passion, desire, and a sense of responsibility. I agonized over my list, which was inevitably followed by a period of anxiety and regret. I still feel like I was unwise in my choices. But those sentiments have nothing to do with the fear of being judged or having anything at stake (subconsciously having little faith in the exercise, I guess) and stem instead from a relentless internal debate. The slippery adjective “best” does not help matters. Can personal epiphanies be measured against historical importance and great leaps in evolution? Don’t we all dodge the question of sensibility as it relates to our own discipline? Visconti’s Ludwig (1972) is an astonishing work of cinema. Could I honestly call it one of the Top 10 films of all times? I once did, but can no longer comfortably make this claim. One wants to upset the canon because it’s a barometer of normalcy, of quiet, comfortable “quality.”
And as you have rightly pointed out, there are countless films that will never be known to us, that have disappeared over time, during times of war, environmental catastrophe, or due to lack of preservation, or never emerged at all. The canon is inherently fallible, as we are. And should be ever-changing, as we change and the world changes. Re-evaluation can be an important exercise, but even more important is the need and curiosity to look beyond establishment, beyond what is accepted, praised, welcomed, studied, supported. Because of the nature of my work, I think a lot about what the term avant-garde means today. It’s not something that I can confidently or categorically answer.
Making a list is one thing, but taking risks in programming by promoting work that doesn’t appeal to the masses, that challenges our notions of art, that puts forth an unique vision, that questions film form, that takes a stance politically, that derails orthodoxy, is so much more critical today. Especially in light of how culture has become corporate commodity. Legacies are generated through lists and logs, but also through collective memory, and hopefully, enlightenment. Is that too naïve and old-fashioned? And let’s not forget that some of the films commonly referred to as canonic were derided and misunderstood in their time, too.
Why continuously mine the history of the Philippines in your filmmaking?
Diaz: I’m a part of this culture and every time I work on a concept, idea, or an inspiration, the struggle of my country, my people, somehow always comes out. Culture works that way. The subconscious has a way of dictating perspectives; once the creative process starts, the introspective being in you will mysteriously pull some reservoir of materials that’s been there, the one that you call history, or maybe suppressed stories and desires, not just personal but also collective; it encompasses the entire struggle of humanity. It’s not always a deliberate act. Man is a psychoanalytic being. The greatest artists on earth possess a repository of history and visions in their subconscious, sublime and transcendent, quite different from the very fragile and oftentimes biased and prejudicial oral and written histories. It’s just there. For lack of explanation, some call it madness or genius. Freud and Jung debated this, and realized that psychiatry has no concrete answer to humanity’s frailties. They ended up where they started: “Why?” And so, we continue to mine/examine/confront the histories of our cultures. Once, a friend made the mistake of giving the script of one of my still-unfinished works about a very important person during the Philippine Revolution against Spain and America to a history professor. He emailed me a lengthy attack telling me I got it all wrong. Who owns history?
Who are the filmmakers, artists, writers, or musicians who inspire you?
Diaz: Weeks ago, I went hiking with a friend in a mountainous town in the Philippines. We came upon a spider and his delicately made web house. We were stunned, speechless, in absolute awe. We sat there, almost in tears. What a great piece of work. The spider is even smaller than 1/8 of an inch, and beside a windswept highway, in the middle of two small trees, he built a formidable work. My friend and I made some geometrical analysis about it. We concluded, “Impossible, impossible!” Logic will tell you that, yes, a spider creates a web house. Simple. This spider created a masterpiece. Just embrace the mystery of aesthetics, beauty. And so we declared him the greatest artist of this century.
What place does art have in society today?
Diaz: Art remains marginalized in terms of accessibility; the so-called reach to a broader mass on issues of critical and practical applications, yet it remains the most relevant aspect of humanity’s cultural struggle. The only exception of course is rock music, whose reach is extremely phenomenal. Of course, commercial movies have the same reach. Rock music has achieved an utterly unique stature in that even the most aesthetically demanding works can easily captivate millions of people. That can’t be said with serious cinema. Art cannot escape the issue of gravitas, the issue of contradiction, and yes, elitism. A Cezanne that fetches millions can’t move a rice farmer in Thailand whose understanding of aesthetics is confined to a beautiful sunrise, the dinner prepared by his wife, the rain, the catfish, and a good harvest. The modern dancer in Berlin can always claim she is revolutionizing movement but the criminal Bashir al-Assad will continue to aim his guns and rockets at his own people. When the UN and the civilized world cannot liberate the Syrian people, what can art do? Art feeds and liberates the soul, yes, but the modern age has become the age of urgency. The zeitgeist tells us that we need to save the world now—from fundamentalism, from ignorance, from apathy.
In the face of the relentless barbarism in this supposedly very modern age, art becomes a stand, a political tool, an ideological line to maintain man’s sanity, or even to save humanity from an eventual retrogression and annihilation. Non-condescendingly speaking for myself, my faith in art remains the same. I am very stubborn with my aesthetic because I believe that the artist can still contribute to greater culture.
What role should film criticism play?
Diaz: Film criticism, as a discipline, often times can be more important than a film or works being tackled. Discourse. Articulation. Explanation. Reading. Interpretation. Application. Scholarship. These things can only be done under the domain of the discipline. No matter how subjective it is, it broadens the limitations of art praxis, it fulfills the vision through discourse, articulation, explanation, reading, interpretation, application, and scholarship. The filmmaker and the film critic are comrades, even in the face of diversity and differences in opinions and positions. It is an inherent co-existence. Including the curators and programmers.
Agonistes
Reviewed by: Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa
Editors Note: For a proper introduction to this writing, please read the editorial for Criticine 6.
They come from a long line of peasants, though they do not like to acknowledge this fact. They have already turned themselves into one of those tireless, anonymous construction workers in Manila. One morning after a heavy flood prevents them from reaching the site, tolerance runs dry for the world-weary Manoling and his friend Juan, who is tormented by the randomness of a friend’s plunge to death. Manoling suggests that Juan returns with him to his hometown, Bicol, a cursed land that can no longer be cultivated. His grandfather claims, however, that beneath its barren earth are buried treasures. For the men, to dig up those treasures would be better than toiling on worthlessly in the city.
Back in Bicol the men discover that Hector, Manoling’s cousin, has built a small hut on the land. He moved there with his daughter after she developed a lung disease, which meant she had to be removed from the community. All day and night the sound of the girl’s coughing strikes a terrifying note. The newcomers erect a simple canvas tent as their shelter, and immediately begin to dig with crazed concentration. In the evenings they would follow the father and daughter to the water’s edge, to sit listlessly, or they would stop by at the village stall to drink beer. Time passes in this rhythm until the girl dies, leaving the three men to throw themselves into an act that slowly turns hellish.
Having made several films of the length between 9-11 hours, Lav Diaz’s latest is comparatively short at five hours. The challenging aspect of the duration of this film, though, lies in the four hours or so of digging that viewers are asked to witness!
Diaz’s films can be grouped in this manner: Evolution of a Filipino Family and Heremias are twin portrayals of the masses – the peasants and the destitute from rural areas; Death in the Land of Encantos and Melancholia look at the Filipino intelligentsia and activists, especially their political roles and the psychological burden, or guilt, the individuals carry. With Agonistes, Diaz shifts his focus to observing those who have transformed themselves from farmers into labourers –who nonetheless remain desperate.
Agonistes begins with shots of the construction workers toiling under the pressure of erecting the tall building. From these sparse images of their physical burden, the film slowly builds up a picture of their wretched state, especially through their dialogues and long silences. Manoling and Juan make the long journey back to the hometown, carrying with them the hope of finding the ancient treasures buried beneath the arid land. There, Hector tells them they’re better off ploughing the land long accused of being cursed than digging blindly for treasures, guided only by an unfounded tale. Manoling and Juan reply that they are no longer peasants and have no interest in doing so.
They are no longer peasants, of course. The masses that once travelled from field to field selling their labour during the rice-harvesting season are no longer farmers; they have moved up in the world to become capital’s labouring force. Not only do they not wish to work the land, they can no longer sleep in humble huts as peasants do. (We could take at face value the implication that Manoling and Juan are nervous about contracting the disease from the girl, but that only serves to envelop the signification more deeply, especially when we consider that the men prefer to stay in the tent even after the girl’s death.) Being accustomed to transient abodes, to itinerant ways of living, seem to exhaust the advancement that they’d acquired as migrant workers.
To put it simply, the men in Agonistes are no different from those who have abandoned their peasant roots for a new urban identity. Although they are no better off than before, at least the mere fact of being a city worker places them a notch up the rung from that of the farmer. Now that they have returned to the homeland, they exert themselves as hired hands do. As rightful owners of this piece of land, they might have dug over the soil in order to grow things; but their relentless digging for treasures places them in exactly the same wretched state as they had been before, back on the construction site. Of the three, it is Hector who initially manages to hold onto a semblance of sanity, trying to dissuade Manoling and Juan from pursuing their blind quest. After the death of his daughter, however, Hector too begins to implode. Perhaps it is his form of realisation that the life of a peasant is one of endless suffering. At one point he says he has spent all his meagre savings on the medication for his daughter, but this was to no avail. After her death, the act of digging becomes his search for solace, his quest for a steady place to anchor his soul.
If Death in the Land of Encantos portrays the Philippines as a cursed land, it is probably appropriate to describe Agonistes as a story of its people lost in flight from their historical attachment to the land. Defeated by the city these people, the peasants, return to search for their original self – to reclaim an identity that is now reduced to a mythic image of buried ancestral treasures. They do not find that treasure, no matter how hard they dig. It is as if the notion of an original identity is a deception that is holding them captive. The meaning, the object, of their quest has been erased, and what remains is the ghost of a process that will consume them.
To describe the film this way is to dare to turn it into a mirror for Thailand. The more we try to unearth ‘Thai-ness’ (our absent origin?) the more we find ourselves caught in the effort to hold on to a spurious national identity that we have imposed on ourselves. We are now trapped in the blind excavation of something we naively believe will lead us back to our origin. What we have become, as a result, is a people who have forgotten our real history. We have thrown ourselves like fools into the frenzied defence of culture, of that emblem of our culture, and along the way we have become like those men who go on digging but can no longer recall why they are digging in the first place.
But then Agonistes leaves viewers to struggle with the duration of the digging – the long four hours which begins when the film abandons us at the mouth of the ditch, asking us to witness the barely perceptible pace of its deepening. Most of us at that screening found ourselves undone, merged eventually into the blunt thud of the spades cutting the earth, the repeated heaving sighs, the soft groans as the men’s bodies twist to lift the spades. Accompanying this is the rattling of plastic cups rested with their rims against the neck of large plastic water bottles, and of course there is the constant sound of rain. The images are still – the ditch slowly grows deeper until it is as if each man is digging his own hole. Each separate hole closes in on them in sharp lines like the contour of a cage, and the mound of earth grows between them. The earth dug up calls to mind two things: a vegetable bed that might have nurtured healthy plants had the men desired to grow them, or a graveyard whose newly dug, neatly lined holes are being prepared to bury the souls of the diggers. Every now and then punctuating the duration is the faint offscreen sound of music, perhaps coming from the stalls nearby. An invitation to dance, the music evokes the sense that life elsewhere has edged forward, but time is suspended for the diggers in their long days and nights. From darkness to light, from light to darkness, they carry on digging, resting in the tent when too exhausted to go on. Soon even Hector moves out of the hut to sleep outside. Eventually the holes are deep enough to bury the men standing. The camera slides down the side of the ditch, lower and lower until the bright sky, which appeared at the beginning of the film, slips out of sight. The camera observes the men’s sweat soaked bodies, engrossed in the demand of the endlessly repetitive gesture until it is as if in the last hour of the film the camera itself has passed on down below the earthly realm. .
All that they retrieve from this large, deep hole are the remains of a boot (a soldier’s boot?) and some unidentifiable bits of metal. These remnants seem to reference the Martial Law era - the rule of Marcos that has long past but lingers like a corpse rotting beneath the ground, leaving its stench of misery. The men also find a turtle in the hole; the creature slowly makes its way up to the surface, moving in the opposite direction, while the men dig further and further and show no sign of resurfacing. They tell each other secrets, in a scene that seems to equate this exchange with the erasure of history. In the act of telling, the secret that lies at the heart of world history, and Filipino history, becomes a lame joke, nothing more. The words evaporate into thin air, which passes by, and no one mourns their passing.
Why does each shot have to be so long? Questions such as this imply a certain criticism. Beyond the immediate reply that the challenging duration of his films is a matter of personal aesthetics, Diaz’s own way of seeing, Agonistes would seem to answer most readily to the charge the filmmaker is meant to be guilty of. The length of the digging sequences here slowly works on our unconscious. In the first two hours we might still cling to the hope that the men would find something, but the more time elapses the less hopeful their digging becomes. Eventually we too begin to watch them in a state of desolation, and it is only at that point that the mere movement of a leaf, or a bird taking flight, seems to transmute into a miraculous sight both for the men and for us viewers.
Compared to his previous films, Diaz seems to have made certain shifts with Agonistes. His earlier work rely on episodic narration to weave a complex tapestry of the characters’ fate, gently inserting his distinctive way of seeing into this structure. This time, however, Diaz has chosen to pare down all stories, leaving only those seemingly unending series of images, in the trust that the images themselves would furnish other stories.
Agonistes literally means to struggle, and implies a sorrowful experience rather than a heroic one. True to this word, Diaz’s film can be seen as a bleak portrayal of a struggle that can’t be resolved, a tale whose ending lies at the point where action loses connection with its past, and its future. Ultimately the film is about our human fate, the weight of guilt we carry - that which haunts us to our death.
Translated by May Adadol Ingawanij
Dostoevsky Variations
In Norte, the End of History (13) Fabian (Sid Lucero) is our brilliant yet alienated Raskolnikov and Magda (a wonderful Mae Paner) the avaricious pawnbroker Mrs. Ivanovna. Archie Alemania plays Joaquin, another of Magda’s clients, and while it’s not clear who his equivalent is in the novel, he’s as desperate as Fabian if not more so: he and his wife had planned to open a small diner but he has been disabled in an accident, sucking up their start-up capital.
The film’s first half feels like a direct transposition to a Philippine setting: Fabian is a top-notch law student who has dropped out for vague reasons, which hasn’t stopped him from eloquently and endlessly debating with friends and former professors. Like Raskolnikov, Fabian believes in a sentiment-hating, results-oriented, vaguely Nietzschean philosophy; like Raskolnikov, he longs to put his philosophy into practice in the most radical way possible: by killing an utterly irredeemable (in his mind anyway) human being, the heartless Magda, and stealing her money. The deed done, the film takes a quietly sharp turn: the false accusation of Joaquin replaces Dostoevsky’s relentless manhunt; and Fabian’s existential and at one point self-destructive quest is substituted for Raskolnikov’s desperate evasion of the authorities.
Why the departure? One can’t be sure—I suspect even Diaz couldn’t say—but one can hazard a few guesses.
Diaz, with input from Raymond Lee, Michiko Yamamoto, and, most significantly, playwright Rody Vera decided to drop Dostoevsky’s psychological cat-and-mouse game and offer up a more plausible scenario: a man wrongfully accused, convicted, and incarcerated for life. The omniscience, intellect, and apparent implausibility of a Petrovich is swapped for the impassive impersonality of the Philippine prison system, and the suspense of a detective thriller supplanted by the more thoughtful tempo of a Diaz film.
Joaquin, as it turns out, is the film’s equivalent of Nikolai Dementiev, a member of a religious sect that believes in salvation through suffering for another’s crime. Diaz takes Dementiev’s minor episode in the novel, retools the character (subtracting the crackpot fanaticism, which he saves for someone else) and sets up his narrative as a counterpoint to Fabian’s, incorporating a short story by another great Russian writer, namely Tolstoy’s “God Sees the Truth, But Waits,” in which a man is wrongly exiled to Siberia for murder. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov, Joaquin is basically a decent man; like Aksionov he’s beaten severely (tellingly Tolstoy emphasizes not the physical but the psychological toll of long internment: the shame, the sense of injustice, the prolonged separation from loved ones). Where Dostoevsky’s novel concentrated on one man, Diaz’s film is a study in contrast between a good man’s climb to redemption and a bad man’s descent into damnation.
Joaquin is on an eerily similar course, but whereas Fabian determines his own direction, the only thing Joaquin can determine for himself is the complete and uncomplaining acceptance of every adverse circumstance with which life confronts him. Fabian is a living example of the unholiness of an upper class bereft of any kind of ethical or social compass; Joaquin, by contrast, epitomizes the unholy grip of that compass on the lower classes, inflicting on the human spirit the resilience to endure above and beyond what most would consider possible, desirable, or even sane. Diaz poses two questions: should man be totally free of restrictions? And should man be totally selfless and submissive?
Joaquin doesn’t just possess a purely good soul, he possesses an unbelievably good soul. But the conviction with which Alemania plays the character, the straightforward simplicity with which Diaz films his scenes, and the fact that people like Joaquin actually exist in the Philippine countryside allows us to accept the character (plus the sneaking suspicion that he’s a closet masochist). You meet people like Joaquin mostly outside of Manila—which I practically consider a lost cause. They represent an aspect of the Filipino character so extreme that it should be considered a flaw, a sainted quality that’s more infuriating than inspiring, more blight than benediction. Joaquin is a glutton for punishment every bit as much as Fabian is for meting out vengeance, and just as monstrous. But the course of his life will lead to a different—not necessarily better, not necessarily more hopeful—conclusion. Fabian, of course, is easier to accept—the Devil isn’t just more interesting, he’s often more convincing—but Diaz’s moral conception of the world would be unthinkable without Joaquin’s trajectory, just as Dante’s scheme for his Inferno would be incomplete without the next two books of his masterwork.
Fabian isn’t just Raskolnikov; he’s also former Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos. Diaz made it a point to film Norte in Marcos’s hometown (Paoay, in the Ilocos Norte province). Like Fabian, Marcos was a brilliant law student who committed murder when younger. Marcos, however, was tried and convicted, then argued his own appeal and won an acquittal while still studying for the Philippine Bar Exams (for which he achieved the highest score). As Fabian makes clear in his discourses with friends and professors, he, like Marcos, admires competence, the ability to take decisive action against perceived evil. Fabian at one point openly professes his admiration for Marcos, declaring the former president as having been on the right track when it came to fighting Communism (he only got distracted in his later years). The parallels couldn’t be clearer.
That said, Fabian and Joaquin’s roles in the film aren’t entirely those of villainous and virtuous, victimizer and victim—Diaz doesn’t seem to want to think entirely in those terms. Fabian may embody upper-class decadence and arrogance (we’re special; we’re meant to act, to rise, to rule) but at the same time he’s an intellectual like Diaz, sharing the filmmaker’s contempt for Filipino inanities and social failings. Diaz’s camera gazes unflinchingly, leaving it to us to judge Fabian, but there are moments here and there where you suspect Diaz sympathizes with him: when his friends spout clichés, you root for him to shoot down their arguments; when Fabian’s sister Hoda (Miles Canapi) inflicts her relentlessly cheerful religious chatter on him (the fanaticism of Dostoevsky's Dementiev transplanted to another character to interesting effect), you wait for him to snap. Conversely it’s easier to love Joaquin—member of the heroic proletariat Diaz has championed in all his films—but there are times when you feel the director (seemingly channeling Fabian) growing weary of his martyrdom. Having imbued the characters with aspects of both himself and people he knows, is it any wonder that Diaz loves them and loathes them to varying degrees?
With these brief synopses one might have the impression that Diaz’s is a cinema of melodrama, full of violence and suffering, and that’s partly correct. Diaz doesn’t turn away from violence and suffering, at most refusing to close in and follow it, but he strips away the tumult as if trying to catch something that’s barely audible. Exactly what that is, Diaz is reluctant to say (it’s as if he were afraid he might frighten it off): an individual’s core consciousness, a man’s innermost spirit—the soul, maybe?
The film in which the faint fluttering cry of the soul (or spirit, or consciousness) is expressed most clearly is Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE. The premise is heartrending enough, and embedded in the title: “CTE” stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain condition that is eventually fatal, caused by repeated blows to the head and often found in football players who’ve been tackled once too often and boxers who have lost one too many bouts. Diaz firmly resists any suggestion or hint of melodrama in the portrayal of Florentina (Hazel Orencio, in what may be the role of her life). When she cries out and struggles, Diaz’s camera just sets down and gazes impassively—there will be no rescue for this girl, no last-minute salvation. Her only respite is through fantasy, through visions of gaudily clothed papier-mâché giants dancing around her—which may be merely another symptom of her brain’s deterioration or her one consistently successful act of imaginative defiance and transcendence.
With Norte Diaz has come full circle, from borrowing elements of the character of Raskolnikov for The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion to adapting the novel directly (although how directly isn’t easy to answer, actually). The new film feels like a capstone, a summation of everything Diaz loves about and finds so profound in Dostoevsky, a transmutation of the writer’s melodramatic genius into grist for his more distanced, more emotionally chilled films.
It’s also, I think, a kind of farewell. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is confronted by his sister Dounia and by Sonya, and between them they halt his spiraling descent. Diaz provides no such safety net for Fabian: he’s with a woman for a while, and then forgets her; he goes to his sister Hoda, who, like Dounia, is intensely religious, and—well, let’s just say Diaz doesn’t seem to think either love or faith are the answers to life’s problems, or at least to Fabian’s. Joaquin makes a somewhat more persuasive case for salvation with his Sonya-like wife Eliza (the quietly wonderful Angeli Bayani), but they don’t come out much better in the end either.
I’m overreacting, I’m sure; next year Diaz will probably come out with yet another epic-length digital-video effort, perhaps yet another Dostoevskian meditation on morality and violence (I’m still waiting for part two of Heremias, myself), and we’ll continue chasing Diaz’s elusive little rabbit down its hole. But for now this is all we have, and it certainly looks like a terminal point—or at the very least some kind of turning point. What happens next we’ll just have to wait and see.
Lav Diaz: Patiently Seeking Redemption
Lav Diaz is considered one of the leading filmmakers in cinema, yet Norte, the End of History
marks the Cannes debut for this fifty four-year old artist. His films
are audience-testing not only because of their meditative character and
Diaz’s unusual work methods, but also because of their length (at 250
minutes, Norte is not even his longest!). Why does patience
matter? What’s the relationship between time and space? Should the
viewer be free? Lav Diaz tell us all, and more.
Keyframe: You are not only a filmmaker: you also write poetry, compose music… does this interest in various fields of art reflect your concept of what cinema should be?
Lav Diaz: Yes, definitely. It enriches the work. All these media harmonize.
Keyframe: Are you a team player or a lone wolf?
Diaz: I work with people before the shoot, but once I am filming I prefer to do everything myself. On the set there are just two people with me. We often think that cinema is a very collective thing; maybe in the studios, but for the so-called alternative or arthouse scene it’s more solitary. We need people like actors, maybe some other help sometimes. But I write my own films, do my own camera, sound, editing, and I’m way happier with that kind of praxis. It gives me a sense of control and independence. It’s more liberating. Solitude can be very formidable, but it is very important.
Keyframe: It’s sounds like being metaphorically pregnant every time when shooting.
Lav Diaz: It’s a good analogy. Another one is that whenever you film, it’s like experiencing birth and death at the same time. Filmmaking somehow resembles motherhood: you struggle to find the meaning, truth in your work and you still doubt it at the same time. But you have to finish it.
Keyframe: The word ‘finish’ is not the first that comes to mind when thinking about your films. Your art redefines the perception of time.
Diaz: One of the greatest struggles in a human life is against time. We confine ourselves to some routines, we think it’s time—and it’s not, it’s just action. But if you think of time, it’s just about death and mortality and so are my films. I struggle with time but also respect space; they go together. For them to harmonize in my praxis I need to do long takes or one take. I’m trying to be truthful. I don’t want to manipulate time or space. I’m trying to subordinate the idea that [in cinema] we’re just following the characters. Look at the world, take your time! It’s all about seeing. Many young people don’t necessarily respond to that. ‘It doesn’t fit into my schedule.’ That’s a very important line nowadays. They think I don’t know how to edit, I’m ‘sloppy’ to them. I understand their ignorance. They’re too young to know how to create meaning, wherever you are.
Keyframe: Are you trying to challenge the viewer with your films? Teach them how to be patient?
Diaz: Patience. That’s the word.
Keyframe: How does the political and cultural heritage of the Philippines influence your work?
Diaz: We have a very rich history of being colonized for more than 300 years. Then more than a hundred years of Spanish and American intervention, four years of Japanese and then twenty one years of a very brutal dictatorship under Marcos. This is the present history of my country. If you have to contextualize this thing called ‘Filipino,’ even here you will notice that the very word is Hispanic: we were named after the king Philip of Spain. But we had our civilization before. The first missionaries that came to our lands to change our culture were Muslim, so they were able to impose some Islamic thought in some of the islands. Then in 1525 the Spanish came and started baptizing us, converting to Catholicism. They even changed our names, also in the Islamic areas. But we had this very rich Malay culture before that, where everything was governed by space, admiring the natural abundance. Have you ever had a chance to read a journal of Pigafetta, the guy who wrote a daily journal during Magellan’s journey? One line reads: ‘These islands can survive more than a thousand years, because they have a lot.’ It’s about the Philippines. And despite the years of colonization you can still feel how we live and view life. Space is still the dominant philosophy, not time. The concept of time was imposed by the West, the Spanish. Go to work at nine, go home at five… Filipinos don’t actually follow that. People think it’s indolent, or lazy. It’s not. This is our culture.
Keyframe: It’s similar to Middle Eastern perception of time: it exists only when something is happening…
Diaz: Waiting, waiting, waiting… You don’t rush things. We are forced to be a part of this consumerist culture now. We have to negate that at some point, because we are destroying the world. We should destroy the capitalistic notion of moving forward, because in fact we are not doing that. It’s culture that moves thing forward.
Keyframe: You often mention the influence your parents had on your perception on life. Did they teach you that as well?
Diaz: My parent are very idealistic people. They’re Christian. An island they live on is still pristine and untouched. When they graduated the government asked people to volunteer, and they went to this island where many pagans lived to teach and work. I grew up in this kind of environment, with total respect for education, total sacrifice of not having all the goods there were in Manila. I lived in the woods with all the deadly mosquitoes, snakes, crocodiles… When you’re young you resent that. I wondered: ‘What am I doing in this forest?.’ It’s painful for a young person when people in the cities are having television and all. But we had our books. My parents were fanatic readers who especially loved Russian literature, so we’d read a lot of Dostoyevsky. My father is a cine-addict, so he was kind enough (or cruel enough) to bring us to the city every weekend to watch movies. We watched eight a week. This was my film education. That kind of milieu created my perspective in life. Even in the seventies, when the tension between Muslims and Christians turned bloody, my parents stayed there, because they wanted to continue teaching. They are so focused and sacrificing. Commitment is important in their life.
Keyframe: We rebel against our parents when we’re young. Only later we learn to respect them as human beings.
Lav Diaz: We become our mother, our father at some point. I still look up to my parents and think I’m weak. I can’t commit the way they do. They know life means living only if you push culture forward. It’s the only thing that matters for them. My father, if he wanted to, could’ve been a good political leader or some government official with good salary. But they sacrificed everything, because they wanted to be with the tribes. It’s all about being selfless.
Keyframe: How much do you think your work technique reflects the philosophy you were raised in?
Diaz: I don’t have to answer, you said it already. I’m just translating the wisdom they gave me, the respect for life they taught me. The long takes… we stay in some islands for six months when shooting. The sacrifice… the waiting… Millions in a bank somewhere: it’s not what it is about for me.
Keyframe: Is this also why you don’t use close-ups so often?
Diaz: I can do close-ups. But this is a kind of manipulation. In the movies they tend to give you everything, spoon-feed the masses. Everything is manipulated, even the emotions, with a disrupting soundtrack, etc. You struggle to understand life, but also try to maintain its mysteries. The audience should be given freedom to try and embrace the canvas and have their own meanings and interpretations. Don’t underestimate them, respect them! This is what great art does.
Keyframe: Your films could then be treated as truly independent—not only made independently but also giving the viewer their independence of choice.
Diaz: An interaction between the audience and the film is the greatest. To let them understand and embrace it. Let go of the film and give it to them.
Keyframe: Some critic called your work ‘an endless search for redemption.’ Would you agree?
Diaz: Yes. There’s always this feeling of emptiness, it reappears every day. Every time you wake up there’s something missing in your life. You feel sad and melancholic, you don’t want to get out of bed. What finally forces you to do that is some king of routine or responsibility. But in the end of the day you’re just looking for answers, the meaning. Looking for redemption. Maybe life will fail us and we’ll never find it?
Keyframe: Do we need answers?
Diaz: I experienced near-death yesterday dawn, 3 a.m. I got cramps all over, everything started twirling, I stood up and immediately fell. How fragile can life be? You can be gone in a moment. Therefore we question the nature and direction of life; life: the most astounding paradox. And so we do with cinema. I start with that though every time I make a movie. But truth of the matter is we’re just little dots. In the end of the day my films won’t matter anymore.
Q & A: LAV DIAZ
Agonistes
Reviewed by: Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa
Editors Note: For a proper introduction to this writing, please read the editorial for Criticine 6.
They come from a long line of peasants, though they do not like to acknowledge this fact. They have already turned themselves into one of those tireless, anonymous construction workers in Manila. One morning after a heavy flood prevents them from reaching the site, tolerance runs dry for the world-weary Manoling and his friend Juan, who is tormented by the randomness of a friend’s plunge to death. Manoling suggests that Juan returns with him to his hometown, Bicol, a cursed land that can no longer be cultivated. His grandfather claims, however, that beneath its barren earth are buried treasures. For the men, to dig up those treasures would be better than toiling on worthlessly in the city.
Back in Bicol the men discover that Hector, Manoling’s cousin, has built a small hut on the land. He moved there with his daughter after she developed a lung disease, which meant she had to be removed from the community. All day and night the sound of the girl’s coughing strikes a terrifying note. The newcomers erect a simple canvas tent as their shelter, and immediately begin to dig with crazed concentration. In the evenings they would follow the father and daughter to the water’s edge, to sit listlessly, or they would stop by at the village stall to drink beer. Time passes in this rhythm until the girl dies, leaving the three men to throw themselves into an act that slowly turns hellish.
Having made several films of the length between 9-11 hours, Lav Diaz’s latest is comparatively short at five hours. The challenging aspect of the duration of this film, though, lies in the four hours or so of digging that viewers are asked to witness!
Diaz’s films can be grouped in this manner: Evolution of a Filipino Family and Heremias are twin portrayals of the masses – the peasants and the destitute from rural areas; Death in the Land of Encantos and Melancholia look at the Filipino intelligentsia and activists, especially their political roles and the psychological burden, or guilt, the individuals carry. With Agonistes, Diaz shifts his focus to observing those who have transformed themselves from farmers into labourers –who nonetheless remain desperate.
Agonistes begins with shots of the construction workers toiling under the pressure of erecting the tall building. From these sparse images of their physical burden, the film slowly builds up a picture of their wretched state, especially through their dialogues and long silences. Manoling and Juan make the long journey back to the hometown, carrying with them the hope of finding the ancient treasures buried beneath the arid land. There, Hector tells them they’re better off ploughing the land long accused of being cursed than digging blindly for treasures, guided only by an unfounded tale. Manoling and Juan reply that they are no longer peasants and have no interest in doing so.
They are no longer peasants, of course. The masses that once travelled from field to field selling their labour during the rice-harvesting season are no longer farmers; they have moved up in the world to become capital’s labouring force. Not only do they not wish to work the land, they can no longer sleep in humble huts as peasants do. (We could take at face value the implication that Manoling and Juan are nervous about contracting the disease from the girl, but that only serves to envelop the signification more deeply, especially when we consider that the men prefer to stay in the tent even after the girl’s death.) Being accustomed to transient abodes, to itinerant ways of living, seem to exhaust the advancement that they’d acquired as migrant workers.
To put it simply, the men in Agonistes are no different from those who have abandoned their peasant roots for a new urban identity. Although they are no better off than before, at least the mere fact of being a city worker places them a notch up the rung from that of the farmer. Now that they have returned to the homeland, they exert themselves as hired hands do. As rightful owners of this piece of land, they might have dug over the soil in order to grow things; but their relentless digging for treasures places them in exactly the same wretched state as they had been before, back on the construction site. Of the three, it is Hector who initially manages to hold onto a semblance of sanity, trying to dissuade Manoling and Juan from pursuing their blind quest. After the death of his daughter, however, Hector too begins to implode. Perhaps it is his form of realisation that the life of a peasant is one of endless suffering. At one point he says he has spent all his meagre savings on the medication for his daughter, but this was to no avail. After her death, the act of digging becomes his search for solace, his quest for a steady place to anchor his soul.
If Death in the Land of Encantos portrays the Philippines as a cursed land, it is probably appropriate to describe Agonistes as a story of its people lost in flight from their historical attachment to the land. Defeated by the city these people, the peasants, return to search for their original self – to reclaim an identity that is now reduced to a mythic image of buried ancestral treasures. They do not find that treasure, no matter how hard they dig. It is as if the notion of an original identity is a deception that is holding them captive. The meaning, the object, of their quest has been erased, and what remains is the ghost of a process that will consume them.
To describe the film this way is to dare to turn it into a mirror for Thailand. The more we try to unearth ‘Thai-ness’ (our absent origin?) the more we find ourselves caught in the effort to hold on to a spurious national identity that we have imposed on ourselves. We are now trapped in the blind excavation of something we naively believe will lead us back to our origin. What we have become, as a result, is a people who have forgotten our real history. We have thrown ourselves like fools into the frenzied defence of culture, of that emblem of our culture, and along the way we have become like those men who go on digging but can no longer recall why they are digging in the first place.
But then Agonistes leaves viewers to struggle with the duration of the digging – the long four hours which begins when the film abandons us at the mouth of the ditch, asking us to witness the barely perceptible pace of its deepening. Most of us at that screening found ourselves undone, merged eventually into the blunt thud of the spades cutting the earth, the repeated heaving sighs, the soft groans as the men’s bodies twist to lift the spades. Accompanying this is the rattling of plastic cups rested with their rims against the neck of large plastic water bottles, and of course there is the constant sound of rain. The images are still – the ditch slowly grows deeper until it is as if each man is digging his own hole. Each separate hole closes in on them in sharp lines like the contour of a cage, and the mound of earth grows between them. The earth dug up calls to mind two things: a vegetable bed that might have nurtured healthy plants had the men desired to grow them, or a graveyard whose newly dug, neatly lined holes are being prepared to bury the souls of the diggers. Every now and then punctuating the duration is the faint offscreen sound of music, perhaps coming from the stalls nearby. An invitation to dance, the music evokes the sense that life elsewhere has edged forward, but time is suspended for the diggers in their long days and nights. From darkness to light, from light to darkness, they carry on digging, resting in the tent when too exhausted to go on. Soon even Hector moves out of the hut to sleep outside. Eventually the holes are deep enough to bury the men standing. The camera slides down the side of the ditch, lower and lower until the bright sky, which appeared at the beginning of the film, slips out of sight. The camera observes the men’s sweat soaked bodies, engrossed in the demand of the endlessly repetitive gesture until it is as if in the last hour of the film the camera itself has passed on down below the earthly realm. .
All that they retrieve from this large, deep hole are the remains of a boot (a soldier’s boot?) and some unidentifiable bits of metal. These remnants seem to reference the Martial Law era - the rule of Marcos that has long past but lingers like a corpse rotting beneath the ground, leaving its stench of misery. The men also find a turtle in the hole; the creature slowly makes its way up to the surface, moving in the opposite direction, while the men dig further and further and show no sign of resurfacing. They tell each other secrets, in a scene that seems to equate this exchange with the erasure of history. In the act of telling, the secret that lies at the heart of world history, and Filipino history, becomes a lame joke, nothing more. The words evaporate into thin air, which passes by, and no one mourns their passing.
Why does each shot have to be so long? Questions such as this imply a certain criticism. Beyond the immediate reply that the challenging duration of his films is a matter of personal aesthetics, Diaz’s own way of seeing, Agonistes would seem to answer most readily to the charge the filmmaker is meant to be guilty of. The length of the digging sequences here slowly works on our unconscious. In the first two hours we might still cling to the hope that the men would find something, but the more time elapses the less hopeful their digging becomes. Eventually we too begin to watch them in a state of desolation, and it is only at that point that the mere movement of a leaf, or a bird taking flight, seems to transmute into a miraculous sight both for the men and for us viewers.
Compared to his previous films, Diaz seems to have made certain shifts with Agonistes. His earlier work rely on episodic narration to weave a complex tapestry of the characters’ fate, gently inserting his distinctive way of seeing into this structure. This time, however, Diaz has chosen to pare down all stories, leaving only those seemingly unending series of images, in the trust that the images themselves would furnish other stories.
Agonistes literally means to struggle, and implies a sorrowful experience rather than a heroic one. True to this word, Diaz’s film can be seen as a bleak portrayal of a struggle that can’t be resolved, a tale whose ending lies at the point where action loses connection with its past, and its future. Ultimately the film is about our human fate, the weight of guilt we carry - that which haunts us to our death.
Translated by May Adadol Ingawanij
Dostoevsky Variations
By Noel Vera
Norte, the End of History is the culmination of Lav Diaz’s long engagement with the Russian novelist
Norte, the End of History is the culmination of Lav Diaz’s long engagement with the Russian novelist
Melancholia
Dostoevsky has never been far from Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz’s mind. Crime and Punishment figures prominently in Diaz’s debut feature, The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion
(98), with the quietly impressive Raymond Bagatsing playing a version
of Raskolnikov as a kidnapper afflicted by a seriously inflamed
toothache. Like a persistent poltergeist, Dostoevskian themes have
haunted almost every Diaz film since, from the Regal Films production Jesus Revolutionary
(02), in which a Raskolnikov-like figure becomes a political fugitive
in the near future (i.e., 2011!), to his independently financed
black-and-white projects of epic length. In Batang West Side (01) a police officer searches for a youth’s killer; in Death in the Land of Encantos (07) a onetime political prisoner confronts his former interrogator; in Melancholia (08) political fugitives seek redemption. Diaz has also borrowed characters from Dostoevsky’s other novels: The Idiot’s hapless Prince Mishkin in Heremias (Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess) (06) and in Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (12); The Brothers Karamazov’s malevolent Fyodor Karamazov in Burger Boys (99) and Florentina.
At the very least, Dostoevsky has inspired the tone, attitude, and
sensibility of Diaz’s films: the gravitas, the unflinching philosophical
questioning, the melodramatic tendencies.In Norte, the End of History (13) Fabian (Sid Lucero) is our brilliant yet alienated Raskolnikov and Magda (a wonderful Mae Paner) the avaricious pawnbroker Mrs. Ivanovna. Archie Alemania plays Joaquin, another of Magda’s clients, and while it’s not clear who his equivalent is in the novel, he’s as desperate as Fabian if not more so: he and his wife had planned to open a small diner but he has been disabled in an accident, sucking up their start-up capital.
The film’s first half feels like a direct transposition to a Philippine setting: Fabian is a top-notch law student who has dropped out for vague reasons, which hasn’t stopped him from eloquently and endlessly debating with friends and former professors. Like Raskolnikov, Fabian believes in a sentiment-hating, results-oriented, vaguely Nietzschean philosophy; like Raskolnikov, he longs to put his philosophy into practice in the most radical way possible: by killing an utterly irredeemable (in his mind anyway) human being, the heartless Magda, and stealing her money. The deed done, the film takes a quietly sharp turn: the false accusation of Joaquin replaces Dostoevsky’s relentless manhunt; and Fabian’s existential and at one point self-destructive quest is substituted for Raskolnikov’s desperate evasion of the authorities.
Why the departure? One can’t be sure—I suspect even Diaz couldn’t say—but one can hazard a few guesses.
Norte, the End of History
After the murder Dostoevsky introduces Detective Petrovich, like
Raskolnikov a student of human nature and possibly his only intellectual
equal. Petrovich is no Dirty Harry; instead of a gun he’d rather fire
off questions in an ingratiating manner, allowing people to hang
themselves with their own line of reasoning—a brilliantly entertaining
gimmick and an influential one, as arguably every fictional detective
from Hercule Poirot to Columbo might demonstrate. But is the character
realistic? More to the point, is the overtly comical, covertly
subversive genius investigator convincing in a Filipino setting?Diaz, with input from Raymond Lee, Michiko Yamamoto, and, most significantly, playwright Rody Vera decided to drop Dostoevsky’s psychological cat-and-mouse game and offer up a more plausible scenario: a man wrongfully accused, convicted, and incarcerated for life. The omniscience, intellect, and apparent implausibility of a Petrovich is swapped for the impassive impersonality of the Philippine prison system, and the suspense of a detective thriller supplanted by the more thoughtful tempo of a Diaz film.
Joaquin, as it turns out, is the film’s equivalent of Nikolai Dementiev, a member of a religious sect that believes in salvation through suffering for another’s crime. Diaz takes Dementiev’s minor episode in the novel, retools the character (subtracting the crackpot fanaticism, which he saves for someone else) and sets up his narrative as a counterpoint to Fabian’s, incorporating a short story by another great Russian writer, namely Tolstoy’s “God Sees the Truth, But Waits,” in which a man is wrongly exiled to Siberia for murder. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov, Joaquin is basically a decent man; like Aksionov he’s beaten severely (tellingly Tolstoy emphasizes not the physical but the psychological toll of long internment: the shame, the sense of injustice, the prolonged separation from loved ones). Where Dostoevsky’s novel concentrated on one man, Diaz’s film is a study in contrast between a good man’s climb to redemption and a bad man’s descent into damnation.
Norte, the End of History
Several corollary consequences: no one pursues Fabian/Raskolnikov; he
is tormented only by his own moral sense, and as Diaz proceeds to
demonstrate, there is no more relentless—and no more perverse—adversary.
In the safety of his outsider status, in the privacy of his own
alienation, Fabian’s behavior grows erratic, and even violently
grotesque bordering on the monstrous. Every outrageous gesture only
serves to suggest the enormity of the pain gnawing away inside. As he
attempts to pay restitution for his crime, he is also punishing himself,
his family, anything and anyone he cares for or cares for him. He finds
himself engaged in a process of not just attempting to undo the impact
of his wrongdoing, but attempting to undo his own impact on the whole
world—erasing himself.Joaquin is on an eerily similar course, but whereas Fabian determines his own direction, the only thing Joaquin can determine for himself is the complete and uncomplaining acceptance of every adverse circumstance with which life confronts him. Fabian is a living example of the unholiness of an upper class bereft of any kind of ethical or social compass; Joaquin, by contrast, epitomizes the unholy grip of that compass on the lower classes, inflicting on the human spirit the resilience to endure above and beyond what most would consider possible, desirable, or even sane. Diaz poses two questions: should man be totally free of restrictions? And should man be totally selfless and submissive?
Joaquin doesn’t just possess a purely good soul, he possesses an unbelievably good soul. But the conviction with which Alemania plays the character, the straightforward simplicity with which Diaz films his scenes, and the fact that people like Joaquin actually exist in the Philippine countryside allows us to accept the character (plus the sneaking suspicion that he’s a closet masochist). You meet people like Joaquin mostly outside of Manila—which I practically consider a lost cause. They represent an aspect of the Filipino character so extreme that it should be considered a flaw, a sainted quality that’s more infuriating than inspiring, more blight than benediction. Joaquin is a glutton for punishment every bit as much as Fabian is for meting out vengeance, and just as monstrous. But the course of his life will lead to a different—not necessarily better, not necessarily more hopeful—conclusion. Fabian, of course, is easier to accept—the Devil isn’t just more interesting, he’s often more convincing—but Diaz’s moral conception of the world would be unthinkable without Joaquin’s trajectory, just as Dante’s scheme for his Inferno would be incomplete without the next two books of his masterwork.
Norte, the End of History
Thought of in these terms, the startling, seemingly random death that
occurs near the end of the film actually seems more “organic” (a
favorite Diaz term). Neither man is really capable of changing his
character. Racked by guilt, Fabian doesn’t embrace redemption, he can
only respond according to his nature, with anger and self-hatred; if he
attempts to help Joaquin, it’s more to restore an imbalance—a
readjustment to bring them both to more or less the same low level—than
out of any love for God or his fellow man, and definitely not out of
fear for his soul (which he subsequently and irredeemably damns).
Joaquin can only take it and take it and take it, and he’ll accept news
of this fresh tragedy (Diaz doesn’t even have to show it) with the same
unceasing resignation, struggling on the best he can. Both men are in
Hell.Fabian isn’t just Raskolnikov; he’s also former Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos. Diaz made it a point to film Norte in Marcos’s hometown (Paoay, in the Ilocos Norte province). Like Fabian, Marcos was a brilliant law student who committed murder when younger. Marcos, however, was tried and convicted, then argued his own appeal and won an acquittal while still studying for the Philippine Bar Exams (for which he achieved the highest score). As Fabian makes clear in his discourses with friends and professors, he, like Marcos, admires competence, the ability to take decisive action against perceived evil. Fabian at one point openly professes his admiration for Marcos, declaring the former president as having been on the right track when it came to fighting Communism (he only got distracted in his later years). The parallels couldn’t be clearer.
That said, Fabian and Joaquin’s roles in the film aren’t entirely those of villainous and virtuous, victimizer and victim—Diaz doesn’t seem to want to think entirely in those terms. Fabian may embody upper-class decadence and arrogance (we’re special; we’re meant to act, to rise, to rule) but at the same time he’s an intellectual like Diaz, sharing the filmmaker’s contempt for Filipino inanities and social failings. Diaz’s camera gazes unflinchingly, leaving it to us to judge Fabian, but there are moments here and there where you suspect Diaz sympathizes with him: when his friends spout clichés, you root for him to shoot down their arguments; when Fabian’s sister Hoda (Miles Canapi) inflicts her relentlessly cheerful religious chatter on him (the fanaticism of Dostoevsky's Dementiev transplanted to another character to interesting effect), you wait for him to snap. Conversely it’s easier to love Joaquin—member of the heroic proletariat Diaz has championed in all his films—but there are times when you feel the director (seemingly channeling Fabian) growing weary of his martyrdom. Having imbued the characters with aspects of both himself and people he knows, is it any wonder that Diaz loves them and loathes them to varying degrees?
Death in the Land of Encantos
Diaz’s own career seems to take after his characters, wandering restlessly over the Filipino landscape. After Evolution of a Filipino Family
(04), which traces three families across most of recent Filipino
history, Diaz narrowed his focus to an almost claustrophobia-inducing
degree, following one man in his quest to save a woman’s life in Heremias. His films have always betrayed a bleak sensibility but only with Death in the Land of Encantos
has he found a fitting landscape for that bleakness—the region had just
been devastated by typhoon, and the overturned trees, mud-flooded
fields, and crumpled houses became an apt met-aphor for the characters’
interior lives. Melancholia, Diaz’s most overtly political film
to date, deals with dissident fugitives trying to recover from the
trauma of torture and of life on the run through a radical form of
therapy in which they roleplay different characters in society in an
attempt to engender a sense of normalcy, purpose, and release.With these brief synopses one might have the impression that Diaz’s is a cinema of melodrama, full of violence and suffering, and that’s partly correct. Diaz doesn’t turn away from violence and suffering, at most refusing to close in and follow it, but he strips away the tumult as if trying to catch something that’s barely audible. Exactly what that is, Diaz is reluctant to say (it’s as if he were afraid he might frighten it off): an individual’s core consciousness, a man’s innermost spirit—the soul, maybe?
The film in which the faint fluttering cry of the soul (or spirit, or consciousness) is expressed most clearly is Diaz’s Florentina Hubaldo, CTE. The premise is heartrending enough, and embedded in the title: “CTE” stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain condition that is eventually fatal, caused by repeated blows to the head and often found in football players who’ve been tackled once too often and boxers who have lost one too many bouts. Diaz firmly resists any suggestion or hint of melodrama in the portrayal of Florentina (Hazel Orencio, in what may be the role of her life). When she cries out and struggles, Diaz’s camera just sets down and gazes impassively—there will be no rescue for this girl, no last-minute salvation. Her only respite is through fantasy, through visions of gaudily clothed papier-mâché giants dancing around her—which may be merely another symptom of her brain’s deterioration or her one consistently successful act of imaginative defiance and transcendence.
Norte, the End of History
It’s perhaps due to the lurid premise that Diaz’s glancing, painfully
attenuated storytelling style feels so energized, the filmmaker having
given the film an initial jolt of horror and then left the whole
ungainly construct to fall apart and collapse into itself, like a
kinetic sculpture working itself out on the big screen. It’s Diaz’s most
potent metaphor yet, the Philippines as a continually victimized woman
whose injuries are so severe she passes them on to succeeding
generations: Diaz struggles to control the metaphor and subsume it into
his oblique form of storytelling, and just barely succeeds; the film’s
power comes from this struggle.With Norte Diaz has come full circle, from borrowing elements of the character of Raskolnikov for The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion to adapting the novel directly (although how directly isn’t easy to answer, actually). The new film feels like a capstone, a summation of everything Diaz loves about and finds so profound in Dostoevsky, a transmutation of the writer’s melodramatic genius into grist for his more distanced, more emotionally chilled films.
It’s also, I think, a kind of farewell. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is confronted by his sister Dounia and by Sonya, and between them they halt his spiraling descent. Diaz provides no such safety net for Fabian: he’s with a woman for a while, and then forgets her; he goes to his sister Hoda, who, like Dounia, is intensely religious, and—well, let’s just say Diaz doesn’t seem to think either love or faith are the answers to life’s problems, or at least to Fabian’s. Joaquin makes a somewhat more persuasive case for salvation with his Sonya-like wife Eliza (the quietly wonderful Angeli Bayani), but they don’t come out much better in the end either.
Norte, the End of History
The answer isn’t really articulated in the film. Diaz poses the same
questions as Dostoevsky, yet he goes on to question Dostoevsky’s text,
picking it apart as he goes, until there doesn’t seem to be anything
left, at which point he simply stops dead. Norte ends, as so
many Diaz films do, in stasis and with little resolved, as if he has not
so much failed to find an answer as despaired of ever finding one.
Unlike with his other films, with Norte I can see Diaz stopping
and giving up filmmaking. The sense of finality is more than a little
unsettling, as if even his beloved Dostoevsky (of whose Crime he once declared “there are no flaws to that great novel”) isn’t enough to keep him going.I’m overreacting, I’m sure; next year Diaz will probably come out with yet another epic-length digital-video effort, perhaps yet another Dostoevskian meditation on morality and violence (I’m still waiting for part two of Heremias, myself), and we’ll continue chasing Diaz’s elusive little rabbit down its hole. But for now this is all we have, and it certainly looks like a terminal point—or at the very least some kind of turning point. What happens next we’ll just have to wait and see.
Lav Diaz: Patiently Seeking Redemption
The maker of Cannes film NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY, talks about taking time in an all-too-impatient world.
By May 23, 2013
‘Norte, the End of History’
Keyframe: You are not only a filmmaker: you also write poetry, compose music… does this interest in various fields of art reflect your concept of what cinema should be?
Lav Diaz: Yes, definitely. It enriches the work. All these media harmonize.
Keyframe: Are you a team player or a lone wolf?
Diaz: I work with people before the shoot, but once I am filming I prefer to do everything myself. On the set there are just two people with me. We often think that cinema is a very collective thing; maybe in the studios, but for the so-called alternative or arthouse scene it’s more solitary. We need people like actors, maybe some other help sometimes. But I write my own films, do my own camera, sound, editing, and I’m way happier with that kind of praxis. It gives me a sense of control and independence. It’s more liberating. Solitude can be very formidable, but it is very important.
Keyframe: It’s sounds like being metaphorically pregnant every time when shooting.
Lav Diaz: It’s a good analogy. Another one is that whenever you film, it’s like experiencing birth and death at the same time. Filmmaking somehow resembles motherhood: you struggle to find the meaning, truth in your work and you still doubt it at the same time. But you have to finish it.
Keyframe: The word ‘finish’ is not the first that comes to mind when thinking about your films. Your art redefines the perception of time.
Diaz: One of the greatest struggles in a human life is against time. We confine ourselves to some routines, we think it’s time—and it’s not, it’s just action. But if you think of time, it’s just about death and mortality and so are my films. I struggle with time but also respect space; they go together. For them to harmonize in my praxis I need to do long takes or one take. I’m trying to be truthful. I don’t want to manipulate time or space. I’m trying to subordinate the idea that [in cinema] we’re just following the characters. Look at the world, take your time! It’s all about seeing. Many young people don’t necessarily respond to that. ‘It doesn’t fit into my schedule.’ That’s a very important line nowadays. They think I don’t know how to edit, I’m ‘sloppy’ to them. I understand their ignorance. They’re too young to know how to create meaning, wherever you are.
Keyframe: Are you trying to challenge the viewer with your films? Teach them how to be patient?
Diaz: Patience. That’s the word.
Keyframe: How does the political and cultural heritage of the Philippines influence your work?
Diaz: We have a very rich history of being colonized for more than 300 years. Then more than a hundred years of Spanish and American intervention, four years of Japanese and then twenty one years of a very brutal dictatorship under Marcos. This is the present history of my country. If you have to contextualize this thing called ‘Filipino,’ even here you will notice that the very word is Hispanic: we were named after the king Philip of Spain. But we had our civilization before. The first missionaries that came to our lands to change our culture were Muslim, so they were able to impose some Islamic thought in some of the islands. Then in 1525 the Spanish came and started baptizing us, converting to Catholicism. They even changed our names, also in the Islamic areas. But we had this very rich Malay culture before that, where everything was governed by space, admiring the natural abundance. Have you ever had a chance to read a journal of Pigafetta, the guy who wrote a daily journal during Magellan’s journey? One line reads: ‘These islands can survive more than a thousand years, because they have a lot.’ It’s about the Philippines. And despite the years of colonization you can still feel how we live and view life. Space is still the dominant philosophy, not time. The concept of time was imposed by the West, the Spanish. Go to work at nine, go home at five… Filipinos don’t actually follow that. People think it’s indolent, or lazy. It’s not. This is our culture.
Keyframe: It’s similar to Middle Eastern perception of time: it exists only when something is happening…
Diaz: Waiting, waiting, waiting… You don’t rush things. We are forced to be a part of this consumerist culture now. We have to negate that at some point, because we are destroying the world. We should destroy the capitalistic notion of moving forward, because in fact we are not doing that. It’s culture that moves thing forward.
Keyframe: You often mention the influence your parents had on your perception on life. Did they teach you that as well?
Diaz: My parent are very idealistic people. They’re Christian. An island they live on is still pristine and untouched. When they graduated the government asked people to volunteer, and they went to this island where many pagans lived to teach and work. I grew up in this kind of environment, with total respect for education, total sacrifice of not having all the goods there were in Manila. I lived in the woods with all the deadly mosquitoes, snakes, crocodiles… When you’re young you resent that. I wondered: ‘What am I doing in this forest?.’ It’s painful for a young person when people in the cities are having television and all. But we had our books. My parents were fanatic readers who especially loved Russian literature, so we’d read a lot of Dostoyevsky. My father is a cine-addict, so he was kind enough (or cruel enough) to bring us to the city every weekend to watch movies. We watched eight a week. This was my film education. That kind of milieu created my perspective in life. Even in the seventies, when the tension between Muslims and Christians turned bloody, my parents stayed there, because they wanted to continue teaching. They are so focused and sacrificing. Commitment is important in their life.
Keyframe: We rebel against our parents when we’re young. Only later we learn to respect them as human beings.
Lav Diaz: We become our mother, our father at some point. I still look up to my parents and think I’m weak. I can’t commit the way they do. They know life means living only if you push culture forward. It’s the only thing that matters for them. My father, if he wanted to, could’ve been a good political leader or some government official with good salary. But they sacrificed everything, because they wanted to be with the tribes. It’s all about being selfless.
Keyframe: How much do you think your work technique reflects the philosophy you were raised in?
Diaz: I don’t have to answer, you said it already. I’m just translating the wisdom they gave me, the respect for life they taught me. The long takes… we stay in some islands for six months when shooting. The sacrifice… the waiting… Millions in a bank somewhere: it’s not what it is about for me.
Keyframe: Is this also why you don’t use close-ups so often?
Diaz: I can do close-ups. But this is a kind of manipulation. In the movies they tend to give you everything, spoon-feed the masses. Everything is manipulated, even the emotions, with a disrupting soundtrack, etc. You struggle to understand life, but also try to maintain its mysteries. The audience should be given freedom to try and embrace the canvas and have their own meanings and interpretations. Don’t underestimate them, respect them! This is what great art does.
Keyframe: Your films could then be treated as truly independent—not only made independently but also giving the viewer their independence of choice.
Diaz: An interaction between the audience and the film is the greatest. To let them understand and embrace it. Let go of the film and give it to them.
Keyframe: Some critic called your work ‘an endless search for redemption.’ Would you agree?
Diaz: Yes. There’s always this feeling of emptiness, it reappears every day. Every time you wake up there’s something missing in your life. You feel sad and melancholic, you don’t want to get out of bed. What finally forces you to do that is some king of routine or responsibility. But in the end of the day you’re just looking for answers, the meaning. Looking for redemption. Maybe life will fail us and we’ll never find it?
Keyframe: Do we need answers?
Diaz: I experienced near-death yesterday dawn, 3 a.m. I got cramps all over, everything started twirling, I stood up and immediately fell. How fragile can life be? You can be gone in a moment. Therefore we question the nature and direction of life; life: the most astounding paradox. And so we do with cinema. I start with that though every time I make a movie. But truth of the matter is we’re just little dots. In the end of the day my films won’t matter anymore.
MICHAEL GUARNERI / Militant elegy. A conversation with Lav Diaz
Lav Diaz (b. 1958) is a Filipino freedom fighter that chose the medium cinema as his weapon. Lav Diaz is a rebolusyonario that shoots films instead of shooting people.
A retrospective dedicated to this guerrilla filmmaker was held on July 6th and 7th 2013 at Spazio Oberdan in Milan: there I had the chance to meet him and ask him a few questions.
The following interview covers Lav Diaz's most recent work, from Century of Birthing (2011) to Norte, the End of History (2013). In sum, it is an attempt to chronicle the ethical and aesthetical struggle of a man with a vision and a digital camera.
I'd like to thank Lorenzo Ghilardi and Andrea Aglieri, whose kind help made the interview possible.
Michael Guarneri: Let's start with a curiosity: my friend Dario made me notice that the book The Tunnel by William H. Gass appears in Century of Birthing...
Lav Diaz: Yes, it does. I was reading The Tunnel at that time, I think I started reading it just before the shooting of Century of Birthing began.
The Tunnel took twenty, twenty-seven years for Gass to write and its protagonist is a writer in crisis, so there is a parallelism with the character Perry Dizon plays in Century of Birthing – Homer, the filmmaker in crisis who cannot finish his film. I'd say the appearance of the book within the movie is a good example of my “organic” way of working: I am reading a book and it ends up in the movie I am shooting... Anyway, I have to be honest, I haven't finished the bookyet. I have no time to reach the bottom of The Tunnel. [Laughs] I feel like I want to know William Gass, though. I want to know his oeuvre. I am intrigued by Gass' prose and basic philosophy.
MG: The “tunnel” is also a metaphor for the birth canal, and that leads us to the final sequence of Century of Birthing. After the late-night screening in Venice, me and my friends were discussing the enigmatic, abrupt ending of your movie: somebody said “The child will be born after all: there is hope”, somebody else said “The child will not see the light: suffering is never-ending”. Some other guy stated “The child is born: it is the film Century of Birthing itself”... The ending is so amazing because it is so open, and I do not intend to ask for explanations.
My question is actually about the assembly of farmers just before the very end of the movie: who are they? How did you meet them? Can you give me some background?
LD: I was living near the place where we were shooting Century of Birthing, a very desolate place. There was a very isolated village there, where I had shot some scenes previously. It was raining one day, so we went to this village to take cover from the rain. Suddenly, the place got crowded. We found out a meeting was about to start: the farmers from the village were having problems with a landlord and they wanted to organize themselves to face the problem.
I thought this real-life situation really merged well with the struggle of the characters in the film, and me being a very “organic” filmmaker, I said “Let's incorporate this!”. So I told the actors “Just join the farmers and I will follow you”. It happened like this: a very organic process. And it came out well in the editing, didn't it? Take the scene in which the farmer comes to the shed where Homer is sitting, for example: that happened by accident. Then, I stopped shooting and I told the farmer and his friends “Can you talk about the problems you are having now, and about the problems you had under Marcos?”. They replied “Oh, sure, we know a lot about that around here!”, and they started talking. Thus, the assembly became part of the very structure of my work.
This organic process allows you to see some lapses within the characters, within the story and within the other structures of the fiction film, and it works really, really well. That's the insanity of things like that, and it's pretty much obvious if you think about it: things are happening just… everywhere around you!
MG: Is it a movement of farmers spread all over the country or is it just a local thing?
LD: It is just this particular community of farmers – a village that is part of a town called Cuyapo, in Nueva Ecija, in the middle of the island of Luzon. These farmers are protecting their land from this greedy rich man, this landlord who tries to control everything: not just people's lives, the land and what grows on the land, but also the water of the rivers.
I originally chose to shoot in this area because of the storm, you know. I was in Marikina, the town where I live, near Manila. I was having coffee, and it was very, very early in the morning, like 6 o'clock. I was waiting for Khavn de la Cruz, a fellow-filmmaker and a friend of mine who wanted to take a walk along the river near my place. So while I was having coffee, I heard two guys saying “Hey, there's a storm coming in Central Luzon”. Suddenly, I found myself thinking “This could look great in the film”. I didn't really know yet, but my mind started working. I had this image in mind: the Mad Woman and the Artist meeting in the storm. I called the two main actors at once, “Please, come, let's shoot!”. Actress Hazel Orencio said “I am washing my clothes...” and I was like “Stop washing your clothes, come!”. Actor Perry Dizon said “I am going to Vietnam” and I was like “Cancel your trip, come!”. So we met at 7 o'clock and we went to Nueva Ecija, in the area where the storm was going to hit: there we stayed, waiting for the storm – I was ready to shoot, with my camera and an umbrella. [Laughs] And in the end, it was so good for the film. The collision between the two characters is really synchronized with the coming of the storm. I am very happy about it.
LD: And what about the film-within-the-film you incorporated into Century of Birthing? Does it exist as a standalone movie?
LD: It was intended to be a standalone movie called Babae ng Hangin [Woman of the wind]. I needed to shoot more to complete it, but main actress Angel Aquino didn't want to be part of the project anymore. It's all explained in the film Century of Birthing... The reasons why she quit, I mean: I incorporated them into Century of Birthing, in the scene in which Angel Aquino as herself talks with Homer, the director of the film-in-the-film. That is what actually happened between her and me. She called me up one day and she told me she couldn't continue working with me. You see, she is a very formalist actress: “We have a script and we should follow it” she complained. She resented the fact that I kept revising the script just before shooting. It was not the way she usually worked. She told me “If you revise the script over and over, I have to change my character over and over”, and I was like “Don't change the character, just keep it open”.
She is an actress very much in the movie-making industry, and we had this struggle in Babae ng Hangin, which is a film far away from the industry. She was great in the film, but she didn't like the idea of filmmaking as an open, organic process. So while I was shooting Century of Birthing, I prepared a scene based on the real-life discussion we had about her quitting the other project, and she agreed to play the part of herself. She was a sport and she's a great actress.
MG: About Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), why did you change the title? The original title was Agonistes – The Myth of Nation, right?
LD: Yes, it was. But then again, while I was working on the movie I did revisions and the story took a completely different turn, so I thought it wasn't right to use the title Agonistes anymore.
MG: You also deleted “The Myth of Nation”...
LD: I deleted “The Myth of Nation” and changed the title into Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, but I used the phrase “Nation is a Myth” in my latest film Norte, the End of History. So you see, it's really a continuum. I consider the films I make as singular works, and to me each one of them is unique and special in its own way... but at the same time the process of making them is a continuum, so the traces show: photos from Heremias (2006) can be seen in Century of Birthing, part of the title of Agonistes became a line in Norte, and so on... This is because all my films connect in terms of vision and political perspective, in terms of how I see life. It's just like a farmer, you know: the farmer sleeps at his house, he goes to work in the field, he goes to the gambling area, he comes back to his house... The actions are different, but they are part of one single movement, and this movement is the farmer's life. That's why I like cinema, that's why I chose cinema as a means of expression: I like “the flow”.
MG: In the excerpt from your novel you read yesterday at the award ceremony, one of the keywords was “dialectic”, the struggle between opposites. Talking about myth, I am interested in your dialectic use of myth. In fact, in your films myth is something that creates illusions and delusions that keep people enslaved, but at the same time characters like Heremias and Florentina are exempla, they have a “mythic dimension” that may help people realize they are slaves.
LD: Yeah, the use of myth. Myths are used. They can be used. You see, myths are tales. Myths are stories that at some point become undisputable truths. That's how religion as myth works: it starts as an apocryphal tale – a parable for example – and then it becomes the one and only Truth: it becomes your faith, it becomes your fate, it becomes your life... You can call it your own “ideology”. People are worried about their future: that's why they desperately cling on to religion. So people keep repeating these lies, and something that is not real becomes a fact. Myths are not real, they are not facts. We create myths in our lives. Every day. Everything we do and say is about mythologies. Everything we say we regard as the Truth: “I am right. It's just like I say, it is true”.
But how can you find the Truth? What is the provenance of Truth? You make a statement. You say it is true. But if you go back, you find out there is no Truth, just an apocryphal story that got repeated over and over until it became a myth, until it became the Truth. There is this vicious circle of creating myths and Truths: the myth justifies the Truth, and the Truth justifies the myth...
MG: Are you trying to break this “vicious circle”?
LD: Not really. I am still trying to understand the role of cinema in this myth-making. I don't pretend that I know. I am still investigating the nature of the medium I chose to work with. I don't really know cinema. The question is there, though: what is cinema, really? André Bazin keeps asking, and I keep making films to understand the nature of the medium.
One of the greatest texts about cinema I ever read is by André Bazin, The Myth of Total Cinema. According to Bazin, we don't know cinema yet, but every development, every progress in this medium is a step towards the origin of cinema. The technological progress seems limitless, but at the same time every development brings us back to the question on the nature and the origin of cinema – so “Where is cinema going?” actually means “Where does cinema come from?”. I don't have an answer to that question. The only thing I know is that it's up to us to find out: we have to find... cinema's DNA! [Laughs] So my idea is “embrace what is coming”, embrace the new digital technology. Digital is developing and developing: if we embrace it, maybe we will be able to understand cinema, and put cinema on the right side, in the front line of the struggle. To be able to put cinema in the forefront, we have to use it, to test it, to see what it can do. This is why I am always happy to change my gear and my approach to filmmaking, to experiment with new tools…
MG: Indeed, you have been upgrading your shooting gear lately, most notably in Norte. Can you detail about this recent upgrade in relation to one of the main ideas of your filmmaking practice – the “political” aspect of the aesthetic choice of using digital technology?
LD: I’d say “economic choice”: in filmmaking, technology is first of all an economic issue. For Norte, I used that kind of camera simply because I could afford it. I shot it with that gear for economic reasons: I was offered money from the production.
The film Norte wasn't my idea at all, in the beginning. It was an idea by other people and they wanted to shoot the movie themselves. But in the end, they thought it really sounded like a Lav Diaz film, so they asked me to direct it. One of the guys involved in the original project was a long-time friend of mine: he called me up and told me “Lav, we have this film we are supposed to make, but it's really material for you. Why don't we meet and talk about it?”. So we met up and they told me the story. I liked the idea very much and we began to develop it together. Then they told me “There's money, so you can rent a camera”.
MG: You rented the gear, you don't own it...
LD: Yes. I told the producers to buy the camera, I told them buying the gear was more practical: if we own the camera, we can shoot more – we can shoot whenever we want, instead of planning a tight schedule and rushing things.
There was so much money wasted, and this is a thing I didn't like about the shooting. We rented the camera package: very expensive... If we had bought it, the camera could have been used by me and by other fellow-filmmakers, or it could have been rented out by the producers to generate funds. Creating a flow of money and a circulation of ideas to develop film-projects and make more films in our country: to me this is a very important “political” aspect in filmmaking. It is part of the struggle.
So you see technology is an economic issue that has consequences on many levels. Clearly, it affects how the film looks: for example, Norte is a color film and there is much more camera movement than in my other movies. It is not the camera movement you find in commercial cinema, though. It is not flossy camera movement. It's more about quietly following the characters. It's still about duration and space as before, but at the same time it is something new for me.
MG: Introducing Norte this morning, you used the word “canvas” in relation to the frame...
LD: Yeah, the canvas is the idea. I chose the locations for Norte because of the colors, because of the sunlight: I like the way light keeps changing in the island, I like how light reflects and affects the mood of the people there. The light was really important for the film.
MG: Do you paint?
LD: Yes, I started as a painter. But as any other medium, painting asks for great commitment, so I don't like the idea of painting just because sometimes I feel like it. I respect real painters, I respect their total commitment. That's also why I don't call myself a musician: I like to play guitar and I like to paint, but I am committed to cinema and my time is dedicated to cinema.
MG: I just had this flashback of the woman burning the painting she made in Death in the Land of Encantos (2007)...
LD: Yes, that's how I deal with it: if you are not committed to your work, you might as well burn it. Otherwise it's a lie. If you are not committed to it, you are a fraud and it's going to be a curse.
MG: About An Investigation on the Night that Won't Forget (2012), I heard you had doubts about the idea of screening it here in Milan, because the material is so specifically Filipino...
LD: Yes. Yesterday, when they were talking about screening An Investigation, I told curator Enrico Ghezzi that the movie is so specifically Filipino, because it deals with the murder of Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc – two persons that are not very known outside the Philippines. But then it was decided to screen it anyway and it was the premiere of the film outside the Philippines. In the end, we thought people could understand the general idea: Alexis and Nika were murdered, police investigation brought to nothing, the murderers are still free.
MG: If you ask me, I think it was a good idea to screen An Investigation here in Italy, because here in Italy we are still trying to figure out who killed Pier Paolo Pasolini, what really happened and why.
LD: There is definitely a parallelism between the two murder cases.
MG: And I can also see a parallel between Alexis and Nika's case and the case of Benigno Aquino Jr., whose real death “caught-on-camera” was incorporated into your film Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004)...
LD: Like Alexis and Nika's death, the murder of Ninoy Aquino is considered a “cold case” by the authorities. Five hundred soldiers saw Ninoy Aquino being murdered at the airport. Five hundred soldiers saw who pulled the trigger. The tragedy is nobody is telling the truth. The mastermind – whoever he is, if he's still alive – is free. Three men suspected of the murder had a trial, but they were given amnesty by the former lady-president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
It is a staggering lie, you know: “nobody saw anything”. One of the supposedly greatest heroes of modern Philippines – Ninoy Aquino – was murdered in broad daylight, in front of five hundred witnesses, and nobody saw who did it? Even the camera that was there when the murder took place couldn't grasp anything: it is really amazing how truth gets blurred, until everything becomes dark and nothing remains. Only a “cold case”.
MG: Can you tell me more about An Investigation? I understood it is part of a larger project.
LD: I really want to pay tribute to my friends, Alexis and Nika. Ten days before the tragedy happened, they were together in Bangkok to present a retrospective. Alexis did the curatorial work together with the film critics of Thailand. Alexis and Nika had so much energy, they had so many plans, so many dreams: to create an archive for Filipino cinema, to publish a serial cinema magazine in the country, to set-up a small, intimate screening-venue to show their favorite movies from film festivals that year... Nika had already decided to relocate in Manila and she had left the Slovenian Ekran magazine – she was an editor for the magazine and she had resigned. A day before the tragedy happened, Nika was supposed to go up to Bosnia, just to study there for a few months before finally settling down in Manila. Then the tragedy happened: on September 1st 2009 Alexis and Nika were killed in their home. So... with all those interrupted dreams, young people dying a miserable death, and they were so brilliant… Suddenly this thing happened and cut down their vision, their perspective. I want to immortalize them, I want to immortalize their being relevant to cinema, even if they died so young.
An Investigation is part of an ongoing project, it is an ongoing work. I have already finished two films An Investigation on the Night that Won't Forget and Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution (2011), but the idea is making ten films about Alexis and Nika. I want to make a film every year about them, for the anniversary of their death on September 1st. September 1st this year is already too close – I don't know... most probably my next film about them will not be exactly on September 1st. Maybe I'll be able to finish another one this year.
MG: A film every year. Do you conceive the project as a “ritual” thing to do?
LD: Not really, not really. It's just that I am committed to finish it. It is called The Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc Project. I want to finish it for them. At the moment, I am still looking for a little fund for the next “episode”, the next part. But I am determined to finish all the ten parts. I am committed, even if as of now it is a dream.
MG: An Investigation reminded me of Wang Bing's He Fengming (2007) in its rigorous work on human witnesses and on digital cinema as a witness. There is this quote I like very much, it is from Shadow of the Vampire (2000) by E. Elias Merhige. It is a fiction film about silent film director Murnau directing a real vampire during the shooting of Nosferatu (1922). Anyway, the Murnau-character says: “We are scientist engaged in the creation of memory, a memory that will not blur nor fade”...
LD: We are, and if you have a good archive, maybe the memory will not blur nor fade...
MG: I was reminded of that quote by the fact that in An Investigation the witness Erwin Romulo says something like “It is a good thing that you are recording because my memory is already fading”. So I was wondering if, in your opinion, digital cinema is a memory so “perfect”, so flawless as it seems.
LD: I'd say that with digital we can transfer and transfer and transfer: it is easier than with film. Before going to Cannes, I was trying to remaster the original tapes of Death in the Land of Encantos, Heremias and Evolution of a Filipino Family because I found out they are already fading. The sound in particular is fading... I was like “Man, some music is gone here and there; in Ebolusyon [Evolution of a Filipino Family] some singing is gone. What's happening?”. I thought “This is dangerous, I have to do something, I have to go back to the tapes when they are still alive and remaster them”. So you see, even if you shoot in digital, your work is not safe: you have to remaster and remaster.
Luckily, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna is collecting my works. They recently restored the 35mm film negative of my 2001 movie Batang West Side (I revised the subtitles etcetera). The restored film is going to be screened in Locarno next month, and I wish to dedicate the whole work to the memory of Alexis and Nika.
MG: I wasn't aware that the digital master tapes could show signs of decay so soon. What are the causes of this decay?
LD: I don't know, really. But if you think about it, decay is not just about films. Decay is also part of human condition. So I guess life fades, memory fades... and then digital fades, too. Technology can only approximate what is approximable. As for cinema, I don't think something definite exists, you know, some kind of “ultimate memory”, an ultimate data-storage thing.
MG: Maybe films will survive on YouTube...
LD: Maybe they will put the films in some kind of rocket and they will throw them into Space, I don't know: have them fly around in the Universe, so even if the Earth is gone, cinema will survive. Maybe the aliens will find the rocket one day: “What is this thing?”. They will check out the movies and they will be like “Wow! This is the Earth-before. This is what humans called Earth!”. They will watch “Earth Cinema”, they will watch... Rambo (2008) by Stallone. [Laughs]
MG: They should watch Rambo III (1988) and see Stallone helping the Mujahideen revolution in Afghanistan. And talking about revolution... Revolution is one of the central themes in Norte, the End of History. Some lines of dialogue in your movie reminded me of this quote from Mao Sergio Leone incorporated into Giù la testa (1971). The quote says more or less: “Revolution is not a dinner party, revolution is an act of violence”...
LD: Sergio Leone quoted Mao?
MG: Yes, he did. In the opening credits of Duck, you sucker.
LD: Wow.
MG: I had that Mao quote in mind because your latest film stages once again a very interesting dialectic between opposites. On the one hand, things have to change, evil must be overthrown. On the other hand, the distinction between “good” and “evil” is blurred, if the supposedly “good” feels entitled to do anything to kill “the evil”.
LD: It is the big question: can revolution survive without turning into violence, without devouring its own children? I don't know. The world is changing, ideas change, ideologies grow. Some can be very dogmatic, but at the same time everything is valid: it's up to you to use these things, to interpret them. Application is always the key: in everyday life, in filmmaking, in politics... You can have all the ideas and perspectives you want, but if you remain quiet and do nothing, it remains a theory: to me, that's an uncommitted perspective.
MG: This morning you said you shot Norte in the north of the Philippines because the zone is dictator Ferdinand Marcos' place. I didn't get exactly what you meant, if he was born there or what. Can you detail about that?
LD: Norte was shot in the north of the country, in the Ilocos Norte province. Ferdinand Marcos Senior was born there, and the place is still Marcos' family place. I mean, even if Ferdinand Marcos Senior died, the Marcos are still there: the son Ferdinand Marcos Junior is the senator from Ilocos Norte, the daughter Maria Imelda Marcos is the governor of Ilocos Norte, the wife Imelda Marcos is a congresswoman... So they are still in control, the Marcos still have the power.
The place in which we shot the movie is the area where fascism started in the country: in the late Forties, Ferdinand Marcos Senior started his political career as a representative of Ilocos Norte. And today the politicians and the administrators of the place are very violent. If you make the mistake of fighting with them, you are going to die: they will have people ambush you, liquidate you, assassinate you. If you visit the place, it looks so peaceful, so beautiful, so calm... but you have this foreboding that beyond the shadows, there's violence hollering: beyond the façade, there's evil watching you. That's the psyche there. That's why I used the title Norte, the End of History, because Norte is the place where the history of the Philippines ended, when Marcos destroyed us.
MG: As a matter of fact, I was surprised by the title Norte, the End of History, because “the end of history” seems to run against one of the main ideas in your cinema – the idea of something that grows and grows...
LD: The idea of birth, possibly “re-birth”, yes. But you see, it is the aim of the film to warn people about fundamentalism, about fascism. To warn people about extremism, about the coming of people like the character played by Sid Lucero: here comes Fabian the evil guy, he's going to be a dictator in the future, he's a manipulator and he's going to be a corrupt politician. So the film is a foreboding about dangerous ideas lurking around. That's the vision of the film: Norte is a warning.
MG: Is there any chance of a distribution of Norte in the Philippines, outside the festival circuit?
LD: We haven't screened Norte in the Philippines yet. I don't know with the producers, but it is hard to get theatrical release in the Philippines. It is beyond us I think, so I don't know. It could be shown like Part 1 and Part 2: “Just don't destroy the film” I said... Actually, I had this idea, I said “Here's the situation: if you plan to show it divided into two parts in this or that city or town, at least find one theater that agrees to screen the full movie, so people have the chance to see it in one séance”. The movie will be split into two parts in one theater and, at the same time, it will be screened full-runtime in another theater. It is a mess having the same film playing differently in two theaters, but they said “We could do that”. It is a compromise, but it is a winning compromise, I think. You can see only the first half and maybe come back for the second – or you can see it full, if you like. People have the choice.
MG: And what about a DVD release in the Philippines?
LD: I think they are going to release it.
MG: What is the price of a DVD in the Philippines?
LD: It is very low because of piracy. Personally, I am not against piracy: piracy is part of the cultural revolution in our country. You see, there are a lot of films that circulate only on pirated DVDs in the Philippines, and the pirates are selling these DVDs for one dollar each. Among other things, you can buy Tarkovskij in the streets for one dollar. You can buy Sunrise (1927) by Murnau for one dollar, if you want. It's a cultural revolution, it is very socialist, very equalitarian. Pirates are granting the masses access to films, pirates are bringing films into people's homes. If it wasn't for piracy, how could these films reach people in the Philippines? So the DVDs sold for one dollar help creating awareness of cinema in our country: people now are aware of Tarkovskij, of Pasolini... Sunrise, Blood of a poet (1930), they are all circulating in the streets, I saw pirates selling them. The price is one dollar, so why not buying and watching?
But it is not just the idea of selling films to the masses for a low price... What matters is something more than money. What matters is that pirates are challenging the status quo by doing what they do: they are fighting the system. Feudalism and tyranny must be destroyed, starting from the streets where DVDs are sold for one dollar. It always starts from the streets, you know. That's why I love the pirates: they are more into cultural revolution than the people in the academy or the status quo critics in the country. And in Norte you can see Joaquin, the innocent wrongly accused, selling pirated DVDs in the streets: he is a poor man trying to feed his family, but he is involved in the cultural revolution, too.
MG: I remember that scene. However, my favorite scene in Norte is the one involving Joaquin's wife: a lawyer is explaining her “the law”, but she can't understand a word because she doesn't speak English...
LD: Law in the Philippines is written in English and it is a jargon-thing, so only lawyers and educated people who are really into English language can understand it. There are translations but they are not propagated, they are just kept somewhere – in some books, in some libraries, in some schools – while they should be given to the people as a journal, for the masses to understand that they have rights. The masses are usually blamed for being ignorant, but the ignorance is propagated and exploited by the system, because we live in a system that is not working for the people.- www.lafuriaumana.it/
A retrospective dedicated to this guerrilla filmmaker was held on July 6th and 7th 2013 at Spazio Oberdan in Milan: there I had the chance to meet him and ask him a few questions.
The following interview covers Lav Diaz's most recent work, from Century of Birthing (2011) to Norte, the End of History (2013). In sum, it is an attempt to chronicle the ethical and aesthetical struggle of a man with a vision and a digital camera.
I'd like to thank Lorenzo Ghilardi and Andrea Aglieri, whose kind help made the interview possible.
Michael Guarneri: Let's start with a curiosity: my friend Dario made me notice that the book The Tunnel by William H. Gass appears in Century of Birthing...
Lav Diaz: Yes, it does. I was reading The Tunnel at that time, I think I started reading it just before the shooting of Century of Birthing began.
The Tunnel took twenty, twenty-seven years for Gass to write and its protagonist is a writer in crisis, so there is a parallelism with the character Perry Dizon plays in Century of Birthing – Homer, the filmmaker in crisis who cannot finish his film. I'd say the appearance of the book within the movie is a good example of my “organic” way of working: I am reading a book and it ends up in the movie I am shooting... Anyway, I have to be honest, I haven't finished the bookyet. I have no time to reach the bottom of The Tunnel. [Laughs] I feel like I want to know William Gass, though. I want to know his oeuvre. I am intrigued by Gass' prose and basic philosophy.
MG: The “tunnel” is also a metaphor for the birth canal, and that leads us to the final sequence of Century of Birthing. After the late-night screening in Venice, me and my friends were discussing the enigmatic, abrupt ending of your movie: somebody said “The child will be born after all: there is hope”, somebody else said “The child will not see the light: suffering is never-ending”. Some other guy stated “The child is born: it is the film Century of Birthing itself”... The ending is so amazing because it is so open, and I do not intend to ask for explanations.
My question is actually about the assembly of farmers just before the very end of the movie: who are they? How did you meet them? Can you give me some background?
LD: I was living near the place where we were shooting Century of Birthing, a very desolate place. There was a very isolated village there, where I had shot some scenes previously. It was raining one day, so we went to this village to take cover from the rain. Suddenly, the place got crowded. We found out a meeting was about to start: the farmers from the village were having problems with a landlord and they wanted to organize themselves to face the problem.
I thought this real-life situation really merged well with the struggle of the characters in the film, and me being a very “organic” filmmaker, I said “Let's incorporate this!”. So I told the actors “Just join the farmers and I will follow you”. It happened like this: a very organic process. And it came out well in the editing, didn't it? Take the scene in which the farmer comes to the shed where Homer is sitting, for example: that happened by accident. Then, I stopped shooting and I told the farmer and his friends “Can you talk about the problems you are having now, and about the problems you had under Marcos?”. They replied “Oh, sure, we know a lot about that around here!”, and they started talking. Thus, the assembly became part of the very structure of my work.
This organic process allows you to see some lapses within the characters, within the story and within the other structures of the fiction film, and it works really, really well. That's the insanity of things like that, and it's pretty much obvious if you think about it: things are happening just… everywhere around you!
MG: Is it a movement of farmers spread all over the country or is it just a local thing?
LD: It is just this particular community of farmers – a village that is part of a town called Cuyapo, in Nueva Ecija, in the middle of the island of Luzon. These farmers are protecting their land from this greedy rich man, this landlord who tries to control everything: not just people's lives, the land and what grows on the land, but also the water of the rivers.
I originally chose to shoot in this area because of the storm, you know. I was in Marikina, the town where I live, near Manila. I was having coffee, and it was very, very early in the morning, like 6 o'clock. I was waiting for Khavn de la Cruz, a fellow-filmmaker and a friend of mine who wanted to take a walk along the river near my place. So while I was having coffee, I heard two guys saying “Hey, there's a storm coming in Central Luzon”. Suddenly, I found myself thinking “This could look great in the film”. I didn't really know yet, but my mind started working. I had this image in mind: the Mad Woman and the Artist meeting in the storm. I called the two main actors at once, “Please, come, let's shoot!”. Actress Hazel Orencio said “I am washing my clothes...” and I was like “Stop washing your clothes, come!”. Actor Perry Dizon said “I am going to Vietnam” and I was like “Cancel your trip, come!”. So we met at 7 o'clock and we went to Nueva Ecija, in the area where the storm was going to hit: there we stayed, waiting for the storm – I was ready to shoot, with my camera and an umbrella. [Laughs] And in the end, it was so good for the film. The collision between the two characters is really synchronized with the coming of the storm. I am very happy about it.
LD: And what about the film-within-the-film you incorporated into Century of Birthing? Does it exist as a standalone movie?
LD: It was intended to be a standalone movie called Babae ng Hangin [Woman of the wind]. I needed to shoot more to complete it, but main actress Angel Aquino didn't want to be part of the project anymore. It's all explained in the film Century of Birthing... The reasons why she quit, I mean: I incorporated them into Century of Birthing, in the scene in which Angel Aquino as herself talks with Homer, the director of the film-in-the-film. That is what actually happened between her and me. She called me up one day and she told me she couldn't continue working with me. You see, she is a very formalist actress: “We have a script and we should follow it” she complained. She resented the fact that I kept revising the script just before shooting. It was not the way she usually worked. She told me “If you revise the script over and over, I have to change my character over and over”, and I was like “Don't change the character, just keep it open”.
She is an actress very much in the movie-making industry, and we had this struggle in Babae ng Hangin, which is a film far away from the industry. She was great in the film, but she didn't like the idea of filmmaking as an open, organic process. So while I was shooting Century of Birthing, I prepared a scene based on the real-life discussion we had about her quitting the other project, and she agreed to play the part of herself. She was a sport and she's a great actress.
MG: About Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), why did you change the title? The original title was Agonistes – The Myth of Nation, right?
LD: Yes, it was. But then again, while I was working on the movie I did revisions and the story took a completely different turn, so I thought it wasn't right to use the title Agonistes anymore.
MG: You also deleted “The Myth of Nation”...
LD: I deleted “The Myth of Nation” and changed the title into Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, but I used the phrase “Nation is a Myth” in my latest film Norte, the End of History. So you see, it's really a continuum. I consider the films I make as singular works, and to me each one of them is unique and special in its own way... but at the same time the process of making them is a continuum, so the traces show: photos from Heremias (2006) can be seen in Century of Birthing, part of the title of Agonistes became a line in Norte, and so on... This is because all my films connect in terms of vision and political perspective, in terms of how I see life. It's just like a farmer, you know: the farmer sleeps at his house, he goes to work in the field, he goes to the gambling area, he comes back to his house... The actions are different, but they are part of one single movement, and this movement is the farmer's life. That's why I like cinema, that's why I chose cinema as a means of expression: I like “the flow”.
MG: In the excerpt from your novel you read yesterday at the award ceremony, one of the keywords was “dialectic”, the struggle between opposites. Talking about myth, I am interested in your dialectic use of myth. In fact, in your films myth is something that creates illusions and delusions that keep people enslaved, but at the same time characters like Heremias and Florentina are exempla, they have a “mythic dimension” that may help people realize they are slaves.
LD: Yeah, the use of myth. Myths are used. They can be used. You see, myths are tales. Myths are stories that at some point become undisputable truths. That's how religion as myth works: it starts as an apocryphal tale – a parable for example – and then it becomes the one and only Truth: it becomes your faith, it becomes your fate, it becomes your life... You can call it your own “ideology”. People are worried about their future: that's why they desperately cling on to religion. So people keep repeating these lies, and something that is not real becomes a fact. Myths are not real, they are not facts. We create myths in our lives. Every day. Everything we do and say is about mythologies. Everything we say we regard as the Truth: “I am right. It's just like I say, it is true”.
But how can you find the Truth? What is the provenance of Truth? You make a statement. You say it is true. But if you go back, you find out there is no Truth, just an apocryphal story that got repeated over and over until it became a myth, until it became the Truth. There is this vicious circle of creating myths and Truths: the myth justifies the Truth, and the Truth justifies the myth...
MG: Are you trying to break this “vicious circle”?
LD: Not really. I am still trying to understand the role of cinema in this myth-making. I don't pretend that I know. I am still investigating the nature of the medium I chose to work with. I don't really know cinema. The question is there, though: what is cinema, really? André Bazin keeps asking, and I keep making films to understand the nature of the medium.
One of the greatest texts about cinema I ever read is by André Bazin, The Myth of Total Cinema. According to Bazin, we don't know cinema yet, but every development, every progress in this medium is a step towards the origin of cinema. The technological progress seems limitless, but at the same time every development brings us back to the question on the nature and the origin of cinema – so “Where is cinema going?” actually means “Where does cinema come from?”. I don't have an answer to that question. The only thing I know is that it's up to us to find out: we have to find... cinema's DNA! [Laughs] So my idea is “embrace what is coming”, embrace the new digital technology. Digital is developing and developing: if we embrace it, maybe we will be able to understand cinema, and put cinema on the right side, in the front line of the struggle. To be able to put cinema in the forefront, we have to use it, to test it, to see what it can do. This is why I am always happy to change my gear and my approach to filmmaking, to experiment with new tools…
MG: Indeed, you have been upgrading your shooting gear lately, most notably in Norte. Can you detail about this recent upgrade in relation to one of the main ideas of your filmmaking practice – the “political” aspect of the aesthetic choice of using digital technology?
LD: I’d say “economic choice”: in filmmaking, technology is first of all an economic issue. For Norte, I used that kind of camera simply because I could afford it. I shot it with that gear for economic reasons: I was offered money from the production.
The film Norte wasn't my idea at all, in the beginning. It was an idea by other people and they wanted to shoot the movie themselves. But in the end, they thought it really sounded like a Lav Diaz film, so they asked me to direct it. One of the guys involved in the original project was a long-time friend of mine: he called me up and told me “Lav, we have this film we are supposed to make, but it's really material for you. Why don't we meet and talk about it?”. So we met up and they told me the story. I liked the idea very much and we began to develop it together. Then they told me “There's money, so you can rent a camera”.
MG: You rented the gear, you don't own it...
LD: Yes. I told the producers to buy the camera, I told them buying the gear was more practical: if we own the camera, we can shoot more – we can shoot whenever we want, instead of planning a tight schedule and rushing things.
There was so much money wasted, and this is a thing I didn't like about the shooting. We rented the camera package: very expensive... If we had bought it, the camera could have been used by me and by other fellow-filmmakers, or it could have been rented out by the producers to generate funds. Creating a flow of money and a circulation of ideas to develop film-projects and make more films in our country: to me this is a very important “political” aspect in filmmaking. It is part of the struggle.
So you see technology is an economic issue that has consequences on many levels. Clearly, it affects how the film looks: for example, Norte is a color film and there is much more camera movement than in my other movies. It is not the camera movement you find in commercial cinema, though. It is not flossy camera movement. It's more about quietly following the characters. It's still about duration and space as before, but at the same time it is something new for me.
MG: Introducing Norte this morning, you used the word “canvas” in relation to the frame...
LD: Yeah, the canvas is the idea. I chose the locations for Norte because of the colors, because of the sunlight: I like the way light keeps changing in the island, I like how light reflects and affects the mood of the people there. The light was really important for the film.
MG: Do you paint?
LD: Yes, I started as a painter. But as any other medium, painting asks for great commitment, so I don't like the idea of painting just because sometimes I feel like it. I respect real painters, I respect their total commitment. That's also why I don't call myself a musician: I like to play guitar and I like to paint, but I am committed to cinema and my time is dedicated to cinema.
MG: I just had this flashback of the woman burning the painting she made in Death in the Land of Encantos (2007)...
LD: Yes, that's how I deal with it: if you are not committed to your work, you might as well burn it. Otherwise it's a lie. If you are not committed to it, you are a fraud and it's going to be a curse.
MG: About An Investigation on the Night that Won't Forget (2012), I heard you had doubts about the idea of screening it here in Milan, because the material is so specifically Filipino...
LD: Yes. Yesterday, when they were talking about screening An Investigation, I told curator Enrico Ghezzi that the movie is so specifically Filipino, because it deals with the murder of Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc – two persons that are not very known outside the Philippines. But then it was decided to screen it anyway and it was the premiere of the film outside the Philippines. In the end, we thought people could understand the general idea: Alexis and Nika were murdered, police investigation brought to nothing, the murderers are still free.
MG: If you ask me, I think it was a good idea to screen An Investigation here in Italy, because here in Italy we are still trying to figure out who killed Pier Paolo Pasolini, what really happened and why.
LD: There is definitely a parallelism between the two murder cases.
MG: And I can also see a parallel between Alexis and Nika's case and the case of Benigno Aquino Jr., whose real death “caught-on-camera” was incorporated into your film Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004)...
LD: Like Alexis and Nika's death, the murder of Ninoy Aquino is considered a “cold case” by the authorities. Five hundred soldiers saw Ninoy Aquino being murdered at the airport. Five hundred soldiers saw who pulled the trigger. The tragedy is nobody is telling the truth. The mastermind – whoever he is, if he's still alive – is free. Three men suspected of the murder had a trial, but they were given amnesty by the former lady-president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
It is a staggering lie, you know: “nobody saw anything”. One of the supposedly greatest heroes of modern Philippines – Ninoy Aquino – was murdered in broad daylight, in front of five hundred witnesses, and nobody saw who did it? Even the camera that was there when the murder took place couldn't grasp anything: it is really amazing how truth gets blurred, until everything becomes dark and nothing remains. Only a “cold case”.
MG: Can you tell me more about An Investigation? I understood it is part of a larger project.
LD: I really want to pay tribute to my friends, Alexis and Nika. Ten days before the tragedy happened, they were together in Bangkok to present a retrospective. Alexis did the curatorial work together with the film critics of Thailand. Alexis and Nika had so much energy, they had so many plans, so many dreams: to create an archive for Filipino cinema, to publish a serial cinema magazine in the country, to set-up a small, intimate screening-venue to show their favorite movies from film festivals that year... Nika had already decided to relocate in Manila and she had left the Slovenian Ekran magazine – she was an editor for the magazine and she had resigned. A day before the tragedy happened, Nika was supposed to go up to Bosnia, just to study there for a few months before finally settling down in Manila. Then the tragedy happened: on September 1st 2009 Alexis and Nika were killed in their home. So... with all those interrupted dreams, young people dying a miserable death, and they were so brilliant… Suddenly this thing happened and cut down their vision, their perspective. I want to immortalize them, I want to immortalize their being relevant to cinema, even if they died so young.
An Investigation is part of an ongoing project, it is an ongoing work. I have already finished two films An Investigation on the Night that Won't Forget and Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution (2011), but the idea is making ten films about Alexis and Nika. I want to make a film every year about them, for the anniversary of their death on September 1st. September 1st this year is already too close – I don't know... most probably my next film about them will not be exactly on September 1st. Maybe I'll be able to finish another one this year.
MG: A film every year. Do you conceive the project as a “ritual” thing to do?
LD: Not really, not really. It's just that I am committed to finish it. It is called The Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc Project. I want to finish it for them. At the moment, I am still looking for a little fund for the next “episode”, the next part. But I am determined to finish all the ten parts. I am committed, even if as of now it is a dream.
MG: An Investigation reminded me of Wang Bing's He Fengming (2007) in its rigorous work on human witnesses and on digital cinema as a witness. There is this quote I like very much, it is from Shadow of the Vampire (2000) by E. Elias Merhige. It is a fiction film about silent film director Murnau directing a real vampire during the shooting of Nosferatu (1922). Anyway, the Murnau-character says: “We are scientist engaged in the creation of memory, a memory that will not blur nor fade”...
LD: We are, and if you have a good archive, maybe the memory will not blur nor fade...
MG: I was reminded of that quote by the fact that in An Investigation the witness Erwin Romulo says something like “It is a good thing that you are recording because my memory is already fading”. So I was wondering if, in your opinion, digital cinema is a memory so “perfect”, so flawless as it seems.
LD: I'd say that with digital we can transfer and transfer and transfer: it is easier than with film. Before going to Cannes, I was trying to remaster the original tapes of Death in the Land of Encantos, Heremias and Evolution of a Filipino Family because I found out they are already fading. The sound in particular is fading... I was like “Man, some music is gone here and there; in Ebolusyon [Evolution of a Filipino Family] some singing is gone. What's happening?”. I thought “This is dangerous, I have to do something, I have to go back to the tapes when they are still alive and remaster them”. So you see, even if you shoot in digital, your work is not safe: you have to remaster and remaster.
Luckily, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna is collecting my works. They recently restored the 35mm film negative of my 2001 movie Batang West Side (I revised the subtitles etcetera). The restored film is going to be screened in Locarno next month, and I wish to dedicate the whole work to the memory of Alexis and Nika.
MG: I wasn't aware that the digital master tapes could show signs of decay so soon. What are the causes of this decay?
LD: I don't know, really. But if you think about it, decay is not just about films. Decay is also part of human condition. So I guess life fades, memory fades... and then digital fades, too. Technology can only approximate what is approximable. As for cinema, I don't think something definite exists, you know, some kind of “ultimate memory”, an ultimate data-storage thing.
MG: Maybe films will survive on YouTube...
LD: Maybe they will put the films in some kind of rocket and they will throw them into Space, I don't know: have them fly around in the Universe, so even if the Earth is gone, cinema will survive. Maybe the aliens will find the rocket one day: “What is this thing?”. They will check out the movies and they will be like “Wow! This is the Earth-before. This is what humans called Earth!”. They will watch “Earth Cinema”, they will watch... Rambo (2008) by Stallone. [Laughs]
MG: They should watch Rambo III (1988) and see Stallone helping the Mujahideen revolution in Afghanistan. And talking about revolution... Revolution is one of the central themes in Norte, the End of History. Some lines of dialogue in your movie reminded me of this quote from Mao Sergio Leone incorporated into Giù la testa (1971). The quote says more or less: “Revolution is not a dinner party, revolution is an act of violence”...
LD: Sergio Leone quoted Mao?
MG: Yes, he did. In the opening credits of Duck, you sucker.
LD: Wow.
MG: I had that Mao quote in mind because your latest film stages once again a very interesting dialectic between opposites. On the one hand, things have to change, evil must be overthrown. On the other hand, the distinction between “good” and “evil” is blurred, if the supposedly “good” feels entitled to do anything to kill “the evil”.
LD: It is the big question: can revolution survive without turning into violence, without devouring its own children? I don't know. The world is changing, ideas change, ideologies grow. Some can be very dogmatic, but at the same time everything is valid: it's up to you to use these things, to interpret them. Application is always the key: in everyday life, in filmmaking, in politics... You can have all the ideas and perspectives you want, but if you remain quiet and do nothing, it remains a theory: to me, that's an uncommitted perspective.
MG: This morning you said you shot Norte in the north of the Philippines because the zone is dictator Ferdinand Marcos' place. I didn't get exactly what you meant, if he was born there or what. Can you detail about that?
LD: Norte was shot in the north of the country, in the Ilocos Norte province. Ferdinand Marcos Senior was born there, and the place is still Marcos' family place. I mean, even if Ferdinand Marcos Senior died, the Marcos are still there: the son Ferdinand Marcos Junior is the senator from Ilocos Norte, the daughter Maria Imelda Marcos is the governor of Ilocos Norte, the wife Imelda Marcos is a congresswoman... So they are still in control, the Marcos still have the power.
The place in which we shot the movie is the area where fascism started in the country: in the late Forties, Ferdinand Marcos Senior started his political career as a representative of Ilocos Norte. And today the politicians and the administrators of the place are very violent. If you make the mistake of fighting with them, you are going to die: they will have people ambush you, liquidate you, assassinate you. If you visit the place, it looks so peaceful, so beautiful, so calm... but you have this foreboding that beyond the shadows, there's violence hollering: beyond the façade, there's evil watching you. That's the psyche there. That's why I used the title Norte, the End of History, because Norte is the place where the history of the Philippines ended, when Marcos destroyed us.
MG: As a matter of fact, I was surprised by the title Norte, the End of History, because “the end of history” seems to run against one of the main ideas in your cinema – the idea of something that grows and grows...
LD: The idea of birth, possibly “re-birth”, yes. But you see, it is the aim of the film to warn people about fundamentalism, about fascism. To warn people about extremism, about the coming of people like the character played by Sid Lucero: here comes Fabian the evil guy, he's going to be a dictator in the future, he's a manipulator and he's going to be a corrupt politician. So the film is a foreboding about dangerous ideas lurking around. That's the vision of the film: Norte is a warning.
MG: Is there any chance of a distribution of Norte in the Philippines, outside the festival circuit?
LD: We haven't screened Norte in the Philippines yet. I don't know with the producers, but it is hard to get theatrical release in the Philippines. It is beyond us I think, so I don't know. It could be shown like Part 1 and Part 2: “Just don't destroy the film” I said... Actually, I had this idea, I said “Here's the situation: if you plan to show it divided into two parts in this or that city or town, at least find one theater that agrees to screen the full movie, so people have the chance to see it in one séance”. The movie will be split into two parts in one theater and, at the same time, it will be screened full-runtime in another theater. It is a mess having the same film playing differently in two theaters, but they said “We could do that”. It is a compromise, but it is a winning compromise, I think. You can see only the first half and maybe come back for the second – or you can see it full, if you like. People have the choice.
MG: And what about a DVD release in the Philippines?
LD: I think they are going to release it.
MG: What is the price of a DVD in the Philippines?
LD: It is very low because of piracy. Personally, I am not against piracy: piracy is part of the cultural revolution in our country. You see, there are a lot of films that circulate only on pirated DVDs in the Philippines, and the pirates are selling these DVDs for one dollar each. Among other things, you can buy Tarkovskij in the streets for one dollar. You can buy Sunrise (1927) by Murnau for one dollar, if you want. It's a cultural revolution, it is very socialist, very equalitarian. Pirates are granting the masses access to films, pirates are bringing films into people's homes. If it wasn't for piracy, how could these films reach people in the Philippines? So the DVDs sold for one dollar help creating awareness of cinema in our country: people now are aware of Tarkovskij, of Pasolini... Sunrise, Blood of a poet (1930), they are all circulating in the streets, I saw pirates selling them. The price is one dollar, so why not buying and watching?
But it is not just the idea of selling films to the masses for a low price... What matters is something more than money. What matters is that pirates are challenging the status quo by doing what they do: they are fighting the system. Feudalism and tyranny must be destroyed, starting from the streets where DVDs are sold for one dollar. It always starts from the streets, you know. That's why I love the pirates: they are more into cultural revolution than the people in the academy or the status quo critics in the country. And in Norte you can see Joaquin, the innocent wrongly accused, selling pirated DVDs in the streets: he is a poor man trying to feed his family, but he is involved in the cultural revolution, too.
MG: I remember that scene. However, my favorite scene in Norte is the one involving Joaquin's wife: a lawyer is explaining her “the law”, but she can't understand a word because she doesn't speak English...
LD: Law in the Philippines is written in English and it is a jargon-thing, so only lawyers and educated people who are really into English language can understand it. There are translations but they are not propagated, they are just kept somewhere – in some books, in some libraries, in some schools – while they should be given to the people as a journal, for the masses to understand that they have rights. The masses are usually blamed for being ignorant, but the ignorance is propagated and exploited by the system, because we live in a system that is not working for the people.- www.lafuriaumana.it/
Q & A: LAV DIAZ
By Jan Philippe V. Carpio
NO END IN SIGHT[i]
An
interview session with Lav Diaz on creative “dead ends”, quitting
filmmaking, self-doubt, creative rebirth, creative process, and the
inexplicability of cinema
Lavrente Indico Diaz was
born in Datu Paglas, Maguindanao, Mindanao on December 30, 1958.
“Dubbed the ideological father of the New Philippine Cinema”, he began
directing in the Philippine commercial film industry in the 1990s,
receiving attention for films with clearly independent, socially
conscious and artistic intentions such as Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcyon
and Hesus Rebolusyonaryo. After leaving the industry, Diaz sought to
create his cinema on his own terms. Beginning with the five hour Batang
Westside in 2001 which won the Best Asian Feature at the 2002 Singapore
International Film Festival, followed by later films, such as the
landmark near eleven hour Evolution of a Filipino Family, the nine hour
Heremias Book 1, Death in the Land of the Encantos and the seven hour
2008 Venice International Film Festival New Horizons Best Film,
Melancholia, Diaz has used his long form cinema to question the very
nature of cinematic time and space, the inherently commercial nature of
filmmaking, and most importantly as a possible tool for involvement,
investigation, mourning, healing, remembrance, meditation, confrontation
and action for his fellow Filipinos.
Actress Hazel Orencio (also
present during the interview) stars in Siglo ng Pagluluwal (Century of
Birthing, 2011), Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), and the upcoming
Oryang.
Desistfilm: I saw Siglo
a few weeks ago at U.P. (University of the Philippines Cine Adarna/U.P.
Film Center). It’s your first long form film in 3 years since
Melancholia (2008). Before Siglo, I know the pains and creative
struggles you’ve had with Heremias (Book 2), Babae ng Hangin (Woman of
the Wind/Corporal Histories) and Agonistes.
Lav Diaz (LD): (Laughs) Yes. They are all unfinished works.
Desistfilm: Aside from
the inclusion of scenes from Babae in Siglo, how did the creative
process manifest in each of the works? How did the unfinished works
relate to Siglo?
LD: If you study the
film well, there are three artists involved. Amang Tiburcio (Joel
Torre) was an artist before he became a sect leader. The Photographer
(Roeder) is an artist. The central figure Homer (Perry Dizon) is an
artist. It’s a discourse on my issues from the last three years that I
could not finish a work. I will have to finish this work based on this
problem: the chaos that happened to me why I couldn’t finish these
films.
For example, Heremias Book 2 has been a
work-in-progress for five, six years. I’m undergoing the same cross
again. The same experiences I had with Ebolusyon (Evolution of a
Filipino Family, 2004). It took me ten years to finish it. Every year I
was agonizing over it. One day, I just had to create these characters
with these issues. Homer is trying to finish Babae ng Hangin. Amang
Tiburcio has his distorted idealism on how to save humanity. The
Photographer has his twisted perspective of liberating somebody. These
are the three of the issues of being an artist. You work on things that
are not fulfilled and you want to fulfill them aesthetically,
politically, spiritually.
The beginnings of the character of Homer
came one day very early in the morning. Around six o’clock I was
sitting alone in Marikina in a Mini Stop[ii]
waiting for Khavn De La Cruz (filmmaker) to go on a hike. I heard
these two guys talking about a coming storm. Pham! That was the
inspiration.
I called up Hazel (Orencio) and Perry
(Dizon) and said come here fast, we’re going to shoot. So I forced them
to go with me to Central Luzon and wait for the storm there. When we
arrived there, I created Homer. I started creating this crazy woman
character like a King Lear type. This mad artist and this madwoman
would meet in the end, and somehow a liberating ritual would happen
there.
So I just wanted to play on that at
first. And it evolved some more after that. So the usual: it became an
organic process. I started with those ideas: Homer, the Odyssey of the
artist, the madwoman, where did she come from? How did their union
happen? How did their playing off each other happen? Rebirthing: I
want to have a rebirth as an artist also. How do I create that? How do
I articulate that visually? That’s the impetus of the film.
Desistfilm: How does it relate to self purging?
LD: Everything. It’s a purging: trying
to regenerate your creative juices, trying to find some kind of
rebirth. It’s not a dead end actually. It’s a really chaotic
perspective. One day you think about this thread and you follow it and
at some point, you’re no longer inspired to continue following it.
It happened that way with Heremias. The
shoot could not be sustained. Ronnie (Lazaro, actor) didn’t want to do
it. He became busy with other work. I lost interest. It was very
hard to regain momentum.
The same thing happened with Babae ng
Hangin. I wanted to extend things because I’m thinking of other threads
to improve the story. But Angel Aquino (actor) wouldn’t do it
anymore. She wanted to remain within the original script we talked
about. Of course Bart (Guingona, actor) wanted to continue but it was a
dead end with Angel.
With Agonistes, I didn’t like what I
saw. I didn’t like the film. Although there are moments in the film,
although some critics liked the rough cut, for me it’s so unfulfilled. I
was still looking for something. I had to reshoot it. The direction
of the film changed. It became Florentina Hubaldo (CTE, 2012). I was
able to fulfill what I wanted to fulfill in Hubaldo.
So somehow making Siglo started me
again. The issue of rebirth happened. Regeneration happened. But it’s
a long, long process. It’s a hard struggle. It’s painful at some
point. There was a time when I wanted to quit filmmaking. You feel
like a fraud. You ask yourself, what are you doing?
You have issues about the responsibility
of the artist: Are you art for art’s sake? Are you going to be an
artist where your perspective is that you’re going to be a cultural
worker? Are you an artist for your ego only? You keep working on these
issues.
Desistfilm: You think it is fair to say that this is also self criticism?
LD: Of course! It’s
very much self criticism. There is a big self critique. You inflict
those wounds to wake you up. The concept that the artist is always
creative is not true. The concept that the artist is like a god is not
always true. Artists can be demons sometimes. You’re a fraud. You
have to accept that you are like that. Your enemy is always your ego.
One of the biggest battles is with ego.
Desistfilm: I recall the scene with Sir Dante (Perez, actor) and Perry (Dizon, actor).
LD: Their long discourse.
Desistfilm: Yes. I know that’s the way that you talk and it seemed almost like you were putting yourself there in the scene.
LD: There was no plan.
I just write how things happen. Hey, memorize this. Then shoot.
Let’s not plan it like movie dialogue. It needs to flow naturally.
There are a lot of mistakes. Sometimes, the conversation goes somewhere
else. Make the characters real. They’re just talking, having coffee.
You’re not making a movie or what. They’re just having a discourse.
These are friends who are lost with the issue of being artists, the
issue of being. Can cinema be really a tool for culture? Can cinema be
a tool for interpreting life, articulating humanity’s issues? It’s
hard. What is the use of cinema? So I have to discourse on that but
not in a very intellectual way, just in the normal way of conversing.
He’s not a teacher or a philosopher. He’s just a fucking artist with a
camera. That’s how human the character should be.
Desistfilm: I’m not so
familiar with King Lear. I’m referring to meeting of the mad artist and
the mad woman at the end of Siglo. As I know how devoted you are to
Tarkovsky, the scene seemed to also recall the meeting between Andrei
Rublev and Boriska the Bellmaker.
LD: You cannot escape
Tarkovksy. It’s in the subconscious. We’ve been watching Tarkovsky
forever. He is our god. His praxis, his methodology, rubs off. It
comes off naturally. For example, you really like an artist, you like
(John) Lennon, you play him everyday. When you make a song, there’s
that nuance that’s evident. That nuance is Tarkovsky. That vérité is
Brocka. You can see things that have been influenced by other artists
and some works. That’s what happens.
Desistfilm: It seems
similar with Rublev because I feel Tarkovsky was also questioning
himself as an artist with that film. Boriska said that beautiful line
at the end, “I didn’t know what I was doing”.
LD: Regarding the bell,
he didn’t know. The kid pretended. Wow. That was magic. You did
something and you didn’t know what you were doing.
Desistfilm: So you were also talking about feeling like a fraud sometimes?
LD: Of course. The
best part of the creative process is when you are questioning yourself
and your work not just discoursing on some theories like cinema or
what. Most of the time, you do have doubts. I’m sure of this. Each
artist has doubts about what he/she is doing. There is this big fear
that maybe this is wrong. This won’t be beautiful. It might be a big
failure. You always have that. This cannot be avoided. This is the
battle: How to overcome that fucking fear? That feeling alone, that
state alone of fearing your work as to where you stand, is self
criticism already. You’re doing self critique because you stop and
think. It’s about your work, your methodology. It’s about your self.
This is the greatest battle sometimes in your creative process and
praxis. And it’s hard when you are beaten and overwhelmed by the fear.
You will stop creating. You will get blocked. It’s very frightening.
Desistfilm: Was this your fear during the period of the three unfinished works?
LD: Yes. I lost all
motivation to finish any of them. Venice (International Film Festival)
wanted Babae sa Hangin. I didn’t give it to them. I felt, fuck I don’t
like this film. Paolo (Bertolin, festival programmer) said come on
let’s show it. I said, “The film is not good.” The same thing happened
with Heremias. I said it wasn’t finished. Alexis (Tioseco, film
critic) said let’s show it. It was screened in London. And it worked.
The two hour cut. He said, “This is fine. They like it.”
Agonistes was shown in the film club of
Alexis here in Metro Manila. Some people wrote some good reviews. I
saw it as an aesthetically unfulfilled work. For me, it’s very
lacking. Wiwat (Lertwiwatwongsa a.k.a. FILMSICK) from Thailand made
this lengthy review about the film that was published in Criticine[iii]. And he really loved that five hour version.
That is a self critique. Even if others
like it and you don’t like it, you’re not quite sure. You doubt your
work. You doubt your praxis. You doubt your methodology. You doubt
your vision. And you doubt your own identity at some point. In your
eyes you’re just a motherfucking fraud. You might as well go and just
masturbate. (Laughter. Pause)
At least you’ll be able to get some
release and you rest after. You know, jerk off man. That’s all you
needed. You don’t need fucking art.
Desistfilm: Visually,
this the first time you used High Definition (HD) digital video. It’s
been a long time since I’ve seen you use shallow focus. Usually you use
deep focus.
LD: You can’t do
anything about it. Digital Video (DV) camera is deep focus. But with
the advent of these interchangeable cameras like these Micro 4/3rds, you
can use the old lenses again. And it’s exciting. With Siglo I was
using my old 35mm Canon lens that I used in the 1990s for still
photography. And I also have an 85mm lens. I also mixed in the new
with the Panasonic 14mm pancake lens. With Hubaldo I used the same and
the new Olympus 12mm. They blended well together, a blend of the old
and the new, deep focus and shallow focus.
Desistfilm: How did this help reenergize you?
LD: It’s a great time
for filmmaking again. You can articulate things again through
cinematography. Before, with advent of the Panasonic DVX and the P2,
the lens is steady, you can’t change things unless you go for lens
adapters. This time it’s free for all. The companies are coming out
with great cameras. It’s a revolution. It’s up to you how you use
them.
Desistfilm: Aside from
shallow focus, I haven’t seen you use close ups, full shots and medium
shots in a long time until Siglo. What prompted you to do this?
LD: The lenses.
Before, it’s just good to be just there. The DVX has that kind of
feeling where it encourages you to just be an observer. With the new
lenses and cameras, you become involved again. That was my experience.
Your mind starts measuring light, the sourcing of light, deep focus,
shallow focus. It helps. It inspires you to try new things or exercise
the old praxis at least.
Desistfilm: It was
quite interesting to me because your first shot is a tight full shot of
the cultists in the water in shallow focus. I like how you showed the
steadiness of the ritual, the repetitiveness, but the hands of the
cultists waving on top of the screen were breaking the top of the
frame. The eye would get jarred by the hands. Composition-wise, I
don’t know if you’ve done this before, the frame seems more open. In a
sense that, even if you’re focusing on Hazel’s character, there is still
an element that my eye is directed to and must acknowledge other
elements in the frame which I also notice in your previous works.
LD: That’s a Jacques
Tati influence. You have to look at the whole canvas. There’s still a
story on the left side and the right side although you have this main
action and main character here. The lizard and the leaf in the other
parts of the canvas have their own stories as well. You can wander and
wonder.
Desistfilm: Batang
Westside felt more like a self contained world. With Ebolusyon and the
later films, more and more you are allowing “real life” to mingle with
“reel life” – even if it’s just the vehicles cutting the frame, and for
example the scene at the convenience store in Siglo where a customer
sits in front of the camera right in the middle of a scene between your
actors. How do you see this element in your work?
LD: I call that praxis
“insubordination”. You do not subordinate cinema to the movement of the
characters. That is the tradition of Hollywood, the Philippine film
industry and any commercial movie where they’re just following the
movement of the characters. When I started doing these long takes that
was insubordination. You just don’t follow the action of the characters
only. You just let life flow. You can still see life there flowing
around the characters. It is insubordinating the canvas from the
movement of the subjects, the usual and conventional praxis of Hollywood
and the Philippine film industry. In essence it is an anti-movie
theory and discourse.
Desistfilm: How did this manifest with your earlier works?
LD: It was already
there in Kriminal (Ang Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcyon/The Criminal of
Barrio Concepcion, 1998) but it was not included in the screening cut.
The original cut was three hours. Even though you are following the
movement of the characters, you can still see life, things that are
moving apart and different from the film. If it’s just a movie, you’re
just following the action of the characters. If you’re just following
the subject, you don’t see the whole canvas. You don’t see spaces and
time.
Desistfilm: It’s funny
that you mention that one subject of Siglo is fundamentalism since there
is not really much information or study given to the cult in the film.
What I saw more was that the film’s form was a critique of
fundamentalism. It’s ironic because people actually label you as a
fundamentalist or extremist filmmaker.
LD: It’s a self
critique also. Fundamentalism will destroy you. When you become
dogmatic, you’re gone. You stay on one side, in one box, you’re gone.
It’s same thing with our praxis. My framework is not always the long
take. I don’t want to stay within that kind of framework. I will
adjust it to the story I need to do and to the characters I that I see.
Now you see a lot of close shots, medium shots, shorter takes, because
that’s what the scenes need. There will be long takes because it is
needed. It is not forced. You can’t be dogmatic and insist that all my
shots must be long takes with a big frame. I don’t want to be part of
that, becoming dogmatic within my own praxis, becoming stubborn. If
your cinema is liberated, you can use anything. Any praxis is valid.
We’re actually planning to do an action
film noir film which is so bloody (laughter). I don’t know what is going
to happen. And it’s a musical too where they will sing their lines,
stylized but also at the same time with all these elements of film noir:
a femme fatale, friends fighting over money, greed, fascism, revenge.
Everything happens at night in the darkness. I want to play with high
contrast, stark characters at the fringes and in the underbelly where
they just eat each other and kill each other. It’s all about hate and
blood. That would be a good film noir to do, but at the same time a
musical. There will be nuances of sadness. They will have
philosophies. The lines will be poetic. There will be contrasts. I
don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s an experiment. We are going to
shoot in Virac (Catanduanes) where the ocean waves are high. If
someone drowns, bahala na[iv]. (Laughter)
Desistfilm: How was the experience shooting on location in Siglo?
LD: I was hiding in a
sidewalk store in one of the shots. They didn’t think Hazel was acting
as a madwoman. They thought she was a real madwoman. She was lying
down and singing. There were two middle aged ladies right beside the
store. One of them was so angry. She was saying, “Who raped this
girl? She’s very pretty. The poor girl.” They really thought she was
crazy. I didn’t include that shot in the final cut.
Hazel Orencio (HO): A
traffic enforcer was very kind. He went up to me. He offered to help
me. He said he wanted to feed me. I was so surprised. I thought they
were going to tell me to leave. They were very helpful. It’s very
touching actually because you expect otherwise and you receive kindness.
The time that Lav cut the shot, I was thanking them for their kindness.
LD: (Laughs) There was
also a big part of the film that I didn’t include where Homer’s daughter
visited him. They discourse on being an artist, his neglect of his
family. You’re always away from your kids. I took it out because it
didn’t work. I tried putting it in. After I watched it, I realized it
wasn’t needed. You have to sacrifice that. It’s painful because there
were many good moments but you have to make tough decisions.
Even Babae ng Hangin has many wonderful
moments but I didn’t need to put them in. There were many wonderful
scenes with Bart and Angel. Even the great scenes of Joe Gruta (actor) I
couldn’t include.
Maybe later on I can cut together a ten
hour version of Siglo. Five hours of the madwoman. She keeps walking
and walking around the town, sleeping in the cemetery, dancing, standing
under the rain in the cemetery, standing on burned bamboo reeds.
Desistfilm: I recall
the scene where Homer (Perry Dizon) is buying vegetables at an open
market and film festival programmer calls him up just before he starts
haggling with a vegetable vendor. This scene seems very
autobiographical. I like it very much because it deglamorizes the
artist.
LD: We’re not fucking
gods man. There are artists who act liked gods and play gods. “I am
this and I am that.” As if they aren’t human anymore. I think this is
bullshit. If you get overwhelmed by your ego, I don’t know what’s going
to happen to your work. You might as well work on your ego.
Desistfilm: This is your first film Hazel. Your background is theater, but I could see no theatricality in what you did.
HO: Thank you.
LD: It was very easy for her to enter into character.
“It’s a great time for filmmaking again. You can articulate things again through cinematography. Before, with advent of the Panasonic DVX and the P2, the lens is steady, you can’t change things unless you go for lens adapters This time it’s free for all. The companies are coming out with great cameras. It’s a revolution. It’s up to you on how to you use them.”
Desistfilm: How was the process in working with him?
HO: The truth is, I was
washing my laundry when he texted me to come and shoot. I thought we
were shooting Oryang already. I got scared because I thought it was
Oryang already. He said, just pack your things and come here and we’ll
shoot. He had given me DVD copies of his films so that I would get an
idea of his creative process, but I ended up not watching them because
the call to shoot was so sudden. So I joined him and Tito[v] Perry (Dizon). It was just the three of us shooting.
For the first take, I was saying to my
self, “How come he’s not yelling cut? Isn’t my acting good enough?” Of
course, you’d be like that with your insecurities as an actress. You’d
be used to those directors who shout at you whenever you did something
wrong. I ended up being very happy working with his process. I felt
very fulfilled as an actress. When you’re used to limited time and your
movements are dictated, there is no artistry. I realized that working
with him, artistry comes when you work beyond your limits, when you push
your limits. You must give your all. You have to be in the character
completely.
LD: You don’t cut your character.
HO: One of things he
asked me to do was to count fifty counts or one hundred counts before
beginning a scene. When I first started doing it, as most actors who
work with him, I was wondering what it was all about. I was skeptical
about it. Why do we need to count one to one hundred? But after
several scenes doing it, I noticed that when I did the counting that’s
when I really got into the character. In the long run, I do the
counting whether he tells me to or not.
LD: Soliman (Cruz, actor) and the others underwent similar experiences using the counting to enter into their characters.
HO: But my fears were
still there because we really did not discuss things unless it was
during the scene. So after my very first day we really talked. He
asked, “How was my experience?” I said “Am I doing the right thing? Am
I doing something wrong? You’re not saying anything.” I needed to
hear it. Then it turns out, this really was his process. I later
became so enthusiastic about it. It’s being. I really enter into the
character. I appreciate myself as an actress and as an artist when I
work with him.
So I can understand when Kuya[vi]
Roeder and Tito Sol (Soliman Cruz), when he calls them to shoot, even
when they have other projects, they really make time just to work with
him because his process is so unique.
Before the Palawan shoot I was also
doing household chores when he said we’re going to Palawan, make your
preparations, I’ve already booked a ticket. I was surprised as to how
easy it seemed to just go and shoot. It was morning when he called and
we left for Palawan in the evening.
In the boat we were already shooting.
He planned that as soon as we get off the boat we were going to shoot a
scene where I was crying as the boat leaves. When we get off the boat
we rushed to a used clothing store to get clothes and costumes. Then we
had to rush back to the boat to get the shot. When we got back to
dock, he set up the shot and told me to act in the scene.
As a new actor working with him I was
expecting us to shoot in Palawan. But I didn’t expect that we were
going to shoot scenes on the ship. It’s great. It was an adventure.
There were only two of us shooting. He was doing everything:
cinematographer, director, location manager. I was designing my own
costumes and putting my own make up.
In Siglo, during my scenes with Tito
Perry, there were no more than three or four of us around at a time.
Everyone was multitasking. It helped that I had worked with Tito Perry
before in theater. Tito Perry is my senior. I was scared that he was
going to get mad at me if I did something wrong. But it didn’t happen.
He really pushed me. He really made me feel welcome as a member of
Lav’s team.
Desistfilm: I haven’t seen Florentina Hubaldo yet but how was the shooting experience with that?
LD: I was working on
the idea of CTE: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. During the process
of the film I was struggling as to how will I articulate the character’s
issue as well as contextually defining the struggle of our culture, our
people, our country? How do you articulate this malady from this
individual to the whole malady of the country without being didactic?
It worked well with her. She had a hard time. The film was very
physical for her.
Florentina was very fulfilling for me. I
think this is my most fulfilled work. I can say that. It was very
liberating. I feel so light. So far in my praxis and my methodology,
this feels like my most perfect cinema in my own opinion. I was able to
work with rhythm, repetition, dissecting, discoursing, dialectically
the problems of our country with an individual without it being
didactic. I’m not forcing the issue. This is the problem of the
country: Fascism. Totalitarianism. Animal Farm. It’s about
forgetting, the dialectics of forgetting. It’s about torment. It’s
about this long malady. Banging. Repetition. And you lose things, and
the struggle to remain sane amidst all this.
Desistfilm: Since your
early films you’ve explored the creative process, suffering, sacrifice.
Siglo seems to be one example of a synthesis of all these subjects.
What are your main interests in them?
LD: What is important
to me is the struggle of the Filipino, the struggle of the country. At
the same time I will include my struggle as an artist. Am I still
relevant? Is my process correct? You question the issues of your
country and you question your own issues. It’s very personal at the
same time you take into account the struggle of the culture you live
in. You have a dual responsibility to your art and self. You have to
question that process at the same time you place art in the context of
social work. You are a cultural worker. You have to tackle the issues
happening in your country and humanity as a whole. The issues happening
to the Filipino are universal. They happen all over the world. My
issues as an artist also happen to other artists. You involve all these
things in the struggle for the truth. You’re investigating. You’re
trying to explore things. Is this true? Is this honest?
Even with actors I want them to be very
honest that’s why I don’t want to cut them. I’m giving them that
freedom within the framework of the canvas. Sometimes I tell them to
look at the canvas. Look at it. This is where you will live. So they
know what to do but at the same time they are free. I’m liberating them
from the clutches of the conventions of cinema making. “We’ll do a
lot of cut to cuts. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of that.
Your emotion, I’ll take care of that. We’ll put music later. We’ll put
voice over.” I don’t want to do that. I want them to do it.
Give it to me. Surprise me. Immerse yourself in your character. It’s
better that way. It’s more truthful. It’s more honest for me. We go
back to theory of Kazan, the praxis of Jean Renoir, although
Eisenstein’s montage is valid, my praxis is different.
The actor can tell me that this is
lacking let’s do it again. There are actors like Pen Medina, Joel Torre
who are not satisfied. Even though you’re having coffee five days
later, they still question their acting. They feel they’ve done
something wrong. They become much more involved when you give them that
kind of freedom. But when you do a cut to cut, they will leave it up
to you as the director.
Desistfilm: They share the responsibility.
LD: Yes. It’s all
about articulating all these things and then, beneath it all, truth. Is
everything truthful? You throw away all the film theories. You can
see if the person who did this film is honest or not through that huge
canvas magnified onscreen. At the end of the day, is your work honest
or not?
JPC: I found some
scenes in Siglo predictable. For example I predicted when Hazel’s
character gets raped. I saw that coming but I what I did not predict
was the intensity of the rape. The structural, visual aspect of your
work, the use of time I love very much. Sometimes with the
characterizations, I find them problematic. Some parts of Homer I feet
didn’t really work.
LD: Of course there are
things missing. I’m not doing a full character study. I just let it
flow. I don’t follow the conventional where the character has a history
and everything is clear about the character. I don’t do that anymore.
We don’t even know these characters. They are just there. I want some
kind of abstraction to happen. Abstraction creates mystery or you can
just have emotion instead of articulating a lot of things in the film. “This is where the character came from. This is what the character wants. These are the characters mannerisms.”
Sometimes I just put down scenes of daily life. The character is
having coffee. The character was out with some friends. They meet on
the road. This is also part of insubordination: insurbodinating cinema
from the old convention where there are full fledged characterizations.
It’s easy doing things like Kriminal
(Ang Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcyon/The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion,
1998) and Hubad (sa Ilalim ng Buwan, 1999) where the characters are
full. But with the long films, things became different. It’s just a
discourse on life. I’m trying to understand life. I’m not so
interested in full fledged characters.
My argument is that cinema is still very
young. It’s a very young form. We can still do so many things with
it. We can play with a lot of genres, with a lot of structuring. We
can even change our praxis. At the same time it’s very powerful and
takes a lot of responsibility. You must be responsible about what
you’re giving, what you’re doing, what you’re creating. Even though
only a few people watch a particular film, the effect is still so
great. And I’m not just talking about cinema only. I’m talking about
all art, the cultural movement. Cultural works are more important than
politics, than religion. Art is more important in educating people, in
pushing people to greater heights.
Desistfilm: Are you trying to explore abstraction that will somehow be melded with the natural life of people?
LD: Yes.
Desistfilm: Because abstraction is in conflict with the actual.
LD: Of course. It’s
experimentation. Well I’m not going to abstract art. With abstract
art, it’s emotion first before intellect. This is a very difficult
contradiction. With this new cinema that I am going into, I am
following a genre but at the same time you are deconstructing the
genre. Maybe that’s the better word: deconstruction not abstraction. I
don’t know, but for now I want to use the word abstraction. To have no
control over characters, you’re just following threads. You always
have a thousand and one threads for one character, for a story, for an
image, for a plot, for a narrative. You can just choose and follow it.
Everything is valid. It will work depending on which thread you
follow. We were just having fun with the characters at first. Then
later we became serious about it.
HO: Actually the
original story of Siglo wasn’t about a cult. The original characters
and studies for the film were product promoters in malls. Later it
developed to preachers on the bus. The song used in the film also
started out as a joke. It was collaboration between me and Lav. I
contributed the chords. Lav contributed the lyrics.
LD: Sometimes I just
think about it one evening, I want to do this scene. I write it down
and I tell the actors, memorize this, we’ll shoot this tomorrow. They
themselves could not follow the flow. That was the reason I had fights
with Pen (Medina, actor) before. Pen wanted a history. He would ask
me, “Where did this come from?” I took that away from him. Let’s just
do this. He was so angry at me. We wouldn’t talk during the Ebolusyon
shoot. He wanted to know where things were going. It was just
organic. Tomorrow, we might go somewhere else. It was a long battle.
Pen was bad mouthing me because of that. He wanted to know what was
going on. He wanted to know what his character was. But I’m still in
control. This scene that I’m adding is still part of that fucking
character. It’s still part of the whole. There are a lot of
abstractions. It doesn’t seem to connect but it’s still connecting,
insurbodinating the canvas from the conventions. We don’t just follow
actions anymore.
Just look at the scene. That scene
might be something that you can experience as independent from the
film. That’s part of life. Everything is independent. Beyond that
space you’re sitting in, there are so many stories. And cinema can be
that. That’s the new cinema. I’m shooting you, but I can follow the
story of the person behind you because this is part of your flow.
You’re connected to that. You’re only separated from each other by two
feet. That’s still a story. I’m just using the words abstraction or
insubordination for lack of proper words for it, but it’s all about
space that is part of the whole. There are many holes and gaps. It’s
up to you as an audience member to fill them up. What you fill them up
with is your emotion. That’s abstraction. You don’t need a story. You
just need emotion. And it’s about you, your own struggles. Aside from
the struggle for the truth, all there struggles are actually struggles
against time and space.
But at the end of the day you still
don’t understand cinema. You’re like Homer. When they ask me about
cinema, I answer, “I don’t fucking know about cinema.”
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