Three bells, a beauty, a prewar film

The bells of Balangiga were finally returned after more than a hundred years. The return began with a photo of the bells flanked by two American soldiers. Then claims were made as to who caused their return. Names of historians were mentioned but how can academics survive a government PR?

The ceremonies had the president kissing one of the bells, according to the news. There were also talks that church officials were “excluded” or not given prominence. Masses were sad. And the institutional church—or some of its cohorts—announced that the event was a church event.

What about the people? I know what the priests would say: the church is people. Whatever.

A few days after the return of the bells, the Philippines would win its fourth Miss Universe. Its fourth what?

We are obsessed with beauty queens and pageants. We die with each loss in a pageant and with each win, we feel the world should look at us and applaud.

Even before the Balangiga bells made their journey, Thailand was in the mind of everyone. It was the site of the 2018 Miss Universe pageant and it seemed our entry, Miss Catriona Gray, was an early favorite. Or that she was there not to “play” but to “slay”—this, I took from one of the posts in Facebook. You see, beauty pageants have ceased to be a parade of beauties; it has become a warrior’s terrain. Beauties, if we are to believe the documentations, fight to get the crown.

Then people started to take note of the slow-mo turn. Naïve to these proceedings, I thought Miss Gray’s performance was aided by camera technology. No, she manually caused the slow-mo. Then came the costume competition: She walked with a parol on her back, a walking Christmas celebration until the lights failed her. Talks of our beauty queen being “sabotaged” circulated online. She wouldn’t win. The beauty from Lao PDR did her walk, with a contraption that made her look like she was connected to another human figure and with another behind her. When she moved her hands, the figures also moved. It was grotesque but who cares? The costume competition for Miss Universe has become a free-for-all design contest.

Then Catriona Gray won. Then the Balangiga bells were forgotten. Not even the move from one of the senators to put one of the bells in the National Museum would cause a stir. Put the bells anywhere, let us talk of something more pleasant.

Then the Bikolanos found Catriona Gray’s origin: Oas, Albay, Kabikolan.

Soon, online posts were calling Catriona Gray orag0n, a term once demonized by Spanish colonizers to mean lecherous but now recovered as indicating “power.” That is, if the historians are correct. On the one hand, a negative label can always be embraced as a form of resistance. Whatever.

The discourse online is now about this Bikolana beauty and all the terms coined about her walk is starting to make sense. “Lava” walk, a label given to how she sashays, is supposedly concocted by a fashion expert. But “lava” is now also seen as pointing to her being partly from Albay, where Mayon Volcano is. You know, “lava” and “volcano.” Even her gown, the one she used for that Final Three walk, is supposedly a reimagination of the lava flowing in all its incandescent and furious glory. Until another post showed details of the gown and compared it to the unmoving vehicles on Edsa, their lights red and yellow in sedentary anxiety.

When will this obsession with Catriona Gray end? We don’t know. She is set to come home and there will be a parade, of course. I’m not complaining: Catriona Gray smiling and talking and beautiful is infinitely better than Pacquiao coming home and promising to use his money for this and that.

My obsession, fortunately, has nothing to do with beauty pageants. With the onset of the celebration of the 100 hundred years of Philippine cinema— give and take its bias toward films from the central location of Manila—I have been looking for footages of Tagalog films online. Interestingly, YouTube has some of them. For one, there’s a 1939 film in full available online. It is called Tunay na Ina. Viewed now, the film is really a curiosity. It shows how films were made in those years.

Directed by Octavio Silos, Tunay na Ina stars two of the most ill-fated prewar idols of Philippine cinema: Rudy Concepcion and Rosario Moreno. Both died in their prime: Rudy got sick in the middle of a shoot and passed away the age of 28 in 1940 because of peptic ulcer; Rosario perished after her house in Sampaloc was hit by a bomb from the Japanese during the last days of World War II in 1945. She was 29 and pregnant.

It was with nostalgia and with much sadness that when I watched the film, we could see two actors just a few years from their demise.

The fashion of the times allowed them to act with big gestures and expressions. The screenplay, which still bore the influence of a zarzuela made the actors, especially Rosario Moreno, deliver lines straight to the camera. Songs were also interspersed in between serious dialogues making the drama almost a musical. Tita Duran, who would become a big star herself, is a child star in this film. Tita would sing while begging if only to tug at everyone’s heartstrings. But it is Rosario Moreno, playing a woman who was raped and who was forced by her father to give away her child, who gets to sing with bravura. She sings with Rudy “Buhat” while they are dancing for the first time. She sings “Ave Maria,” her face half shrouded in black veil like the Dolorosa, right at the grave of her father. Then she sings “Buhat” again when she is about to marry Rudy. Right, near the stream, while the adoptive mother of Tita Duran, played by Naty Bernardo bathes, Rosario Moreno sings “Buhat” again.

One could grin at how different filmmaking then was, but Tunay na Ina, has some gems in it. When Rudy Concepcion and Rosario Moreno sing, there is no false note, musically and in terms of acting. They shine with sincerity. When the two actors are just made to stare at the camera, in scenes without dialogues, one encounters actors who were natural before the new technologies of photography. They allowed the camera to do the work, and we, watching this film of two actors who, by fate, will remain young for eternity, are in gratitude for the accident of preservation. We wish though that restorers would look into this and other films. The students of cinema would benefit from the gilded memories preserved onscreen.

From Bagane Fiola, a multi-awarded filmmaker here and abroad, came this letter about a unique and significant project. This column wishes to endorse Fiola’s project, thus I am providing a space for his letter.

“Hi, I’m Bagane Fiola, I am a filmmaker from Davao City, in the island Mindanao, located in the southern part of the Philippines.

“In 2016, I directed Baboy Halas, Wailings in the Forest, a feature film that follows a family of the last forest people of old and how they cope with the unusual changes in their ancient environment. The film was performed and well-participated by one of the Lumad or the Indigenous tribes of Mindanao called the Matigsalug tribe, in their home—the Marilog forest. The Matigsalug people played a very important role of conserving their culture and traditional way of life in a cinematic form.

“Baboy Halas, Wailings in the Forest was selected under the Bright Future noncompetition section of the 46th International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2017. It won the Netpac Jury Prize and the Best Artistic Acheivement Award during its World Premiere at the fourth QCinema International Film Festival held in Quezon City, Philippines, last 2016. The film was also given a Special Newcomer Award at the 66th Internationales Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany in October 2017.

“After several screenings in Manila, Europe and, recently, in Thailand for its Asian premiere at Cinema Oasis, Baboy Halas, Wailings in the Forest has been receiving warm appreciation from movie enthusiasts, filmmakers and critics. Though the film has been screened in many places, we always bear the thought that one day, at the right time, we will be bringing the film back to the community where the Matigsalug reside, where the film was realized and shot, and where the rest of the Lumad deserve to see it.

“Through Spark Project, we hope to find backers, to connect with friends, with those who have already seen Baboy Halas, Wailings in the Forest from other parts of the world, and even with strangers as well, to help us achieve our goal of bringing back the film to its home, the Marilog forest. We would like to reunite with the rest of the cast and crew, the Lumad themselves, and share the film to their community in a proper and sacred manner, just like the way we made the film together. Through this crowdfunding campaign, we also hope to share the film to the rest of the world through an online film and with a cause.

“See you in Marilog!”