El tratamiento de los tonos por Andrés Lorente

National cinema has been traditionally known as being tied to the nation and the cinematic outputs that it produced. However, with the various definitions accorded to nation, as well as various other erasures that hegemonic ethnic groups and ideologies impose upon smaller and fringe cultures within the country, the idea of nation and the idea of a national cinema should not concentrate on homogeneity as its defining feature, but as a site of conflict that recognizes the multiplicities and the plural group of identities.

In 1983, Filipino historian Rafael Maria Guerrero proclaimed “The country’s cinema reflect the peculiarities of its society … and the moral worth of movies as a popular medium ultimately corresponds to a society’s collective mentality” (1983, 1). Guerrero, editing a book called Readings in Philippine Cinema which was commissioned and published by the state-sanctioned Experimental Cinema of the Philippines (ECP), was actually referring to Tagalog cinema when he talked about ‘society’ and ‘society’s collective mentality’. His essay paid little attention to the filmic cultures outside of Manila and other Tagalog-speaking regions of Luzon. Guerrero’s underscoring of the hegemony of Tagalog cinema as

representing the archipelago’s filmic cultures, points to the problematic assumption that cinemas outside of Tagalog-speaking regions do not have relevance in the country’s filmic traditions. According to Teddy Co, an essay was written in 1937 called Ang Pelikulang Tagalog38 was written to standardize and propagate Tagalog as the national language for Philippine cinema (Co interview, 2006).

Tiongson, who formerly served as chief of the Movies and Television Ratings

Classificatory Board (MTRCB), says that the concept of the nation and its attendant national culture has to be ‘rooted in the experiences of the people’ (2007 interview). He notes that the nation is a political construct, therefore the enlargement of the concept of ‘national cinema’ as constituting certain people, has to be unpacked. The Philippines gained its independence from the United States by becoming a republic in 1946. Tiongson claims that the idea of a nation in the case of the Philippines is a product of colonization or one that carries ‘a national opprobrium’ (2007 interview).

It is worth noting that it was in 1898 when the Philippines gained its freedom after more than 300 years of Spanish colonization that the idea of the “First Filipino” was declared

and instituted. This was a category created and consolidated by Spain for its own end. To the Spanish, ‘Filipinos’ are Christianized groups within the country that had been under Spanish rule and such citizens bear Spanish last names (Constantino 1978). The Moros in Muslim- dominated Mindanao and the Igorot highlanders in northern Luzon are not included in this typology and hence, are not ‘Filipinos’. Historian Renato Constantino explains the origins of the term ‘Filipino’ in his book Dissent and Counter-Consciousness:

It is important to bear in mind that the term Filipino originally referred to the creoles - the Spaniards born in the Philippines - the Españoles-Filipinos or Filipinos, for short. The natives were called indios. Spanish mestizos who could pass off for white claimed to be creoles and therefore Filipinos. Towards the last quarter of the 19th century, Hispanized and urbanized indios along with Spanish mestizos and sangley mestizos began to call themselves Filipinos, especially after the abolition of the tribute lists in the 1880s and the economic growth of the period. (Constantino 1970, 136-137.)

If 1946 is the benchmark year when the country became an independent country and was proclaimed a republic, then the national cinema would officially use that year as its originary timeframe. Nick Deocampo contends that whether it is 1898 or 1946, it is worth considering that cinema as older than the Philippines’ formation into a nation. The film output of Thomas Edison in 1899 up to the 1912 and the films about Jose Rizal created by American filmmakers all bear closer scrutiny, if we are to understand how the present films that carry a Filipino signifier have been influenced by the colonial powers that occupied the country. The bestowal of a national identity in films is problematic because the term

‘Filipino’ has to acknowledge the colonial underpinnings for which it was framed. Filipino cinema should not be limited to Tagalog-speaking films but to the plurality of voices that originate from other regions across the country.

Deocampo likes to call early Filipino films the products of ‘Hispanic natives’. He was contesting the assertion of Filipino film scholar and filmmaker Clodualdo del Mundo about the so-called native resistance in Filipino films. Who was that native and what forms of film resistance were these? Although zarzuela and moro-moro were the earliest resistance to Hollywood films that were screened and produced in the Philippines, one must realize that

zarzuela and moro-moro are themselves colonial products from Spain. Deocampo derides the inadequacies of empirical information that led film historians to assume that early Filipino filmic resistance to Hollywood takes the form of indigenized zarzuelas, moro-moro and

sinakulo. Resistance also can take the form of formal and thematic resistance. The former, he insists, inverts the form of the film medium, while the latter deals with the inversion of the ideological status quo. More importantly, native resistance in films had to be framed in the cultural milieu that understands who is ‘native’.

Controversially, film historian Teddy Co notes that for him, while a Filipino film means that it is done by a Filipino and about Filipino life, he is willing to expand the

definition and claim that “a foreigner can also make a Filipino film as long as s/he immerses in the local culture” (Co interview, 2006). This immersion in local culture is also underscored by film scholar Patrick Flores, who dismisses the film programmers from film festivals abroad who “parachute in the country and take away the interesting, the curious and the strange” (Flores interview, 2006). The lack of film research about film contexts and very little acquaintance with the culture that Flores attributes to film programmers, assisted in the perpetuation of the image of the country’s cinema as curious and strange.