Cinema: Its Impact on Human Society
Address of President Marcos
First Manila International Film Festival 18 Jan 1982
To play the part of host to a felicitous occasion like this, at a time when our world in the words of a contemporary historian is so deeply marked by "infelicity," is a great privilege for our people and our country, so permit me first to add my words of appreciation and welcome to all of you who have journeyed so very far from your homelands to our capital.
No one believes, though it would be nice if it were so, that this very first International Film Festival to be held in what is sometimes called the Third World, will do anything revolutionary to the art of the cinema in our time. Art, we are always reminded, is not impressed by awards.
But there is that part of the world of the cinema that is inhabited by our all too human needs: by the need of. filmmakers and craftsmen for some sign of recognition that their work touches the life around them; by the need of film producers, distributors and financiers for a global audience that can sustain a multi-billion dollar industry; and by the need also of those of us who, while not makers of films, are no less intense in their devotion and love for the cinema, to give recognition to what deeply affect and move us.
It is for this, if for nothing else, that film festivals might be said to have relevance and meaning.
It is the great paradox of art and literature that what is accomplished in solitude and even in seclusion from the public must also be the most public of creations. There is perhaps in our time no medium more powerful or immediate in its impact on human society as the cinema.
The historian Barbara Tuchman not long ago suggested that if we pause to record mankind's greatest moments against our present despondency and pessimism, we must count among the milestones man's ingenuity to entertain and amuse himself, and
to create works of great brilliance and delight. And she regards entertainment and art 'as among mankind's greatest achievements, which balance what sometimes appear as the severities of human experience today.
In the long arc of history, we can surely say that the discovery of printing and the discovery of the motion picture belong with the splitting of the atom and the discovery of the wheel among the highlights of human achievement. We can debate which of the two-print or film, the world or the image -has had or continues to have the more profound impact on world culture, but there is no question that contemporary times have been shaped and are shaped in part by what we do with the world and the image.
In this is underlined the intense interaction between art and society, and between artists and publics. Just as without a live reader, what a man writes can wither on the page; so without an audience, what a filmmaker creates can veritably die on celluloid.
It also can be put in another way: that our world, without its writers and artists and communicators, to interpret experience and to help us understand, could dissolve into virtual incoherence and confusion. And it could well be that our time more than any previous era-with all its challengers and its burdens, its anxieties and presentiments-has never been in greater need of the artist to provide illumination and insight.
Filmgoers want to laugh and cry. But perhaps even more truly, they want to see the human person shaping his destiny, or at least as has been suggested, struggling with it.
In an impressive number of films being made all over the world today, we can surely note this great ability of the cinema to extend the range of our sense of wonder and understanding. But we should also note the particular problems for the artist in an age like ours, which sometimes limit or stifle this high role we recognize.
Ours is a time that finds its most sterling exponents in the image of the loser and the anti-hero, and it has sometimes appeared as though our art today is predominantly consumed by unremitting experience of ugliness.
Now perhaps more than yesterday, artists appear to be torn between the call of truth and the call of beauty. And because its seems more fashionable to choose truth, there sometimes is a tendency to think that by making things so ugly nobody can therefore doubt "its virginity."
Not being artists, we can only hope and believe that the artist is not necessarily reduced to such a dilemma that it should be possible to cloth one in the other. For just as in the greatest literature, and yes, the greatest films, the experience of loss and tragedy can have great meaning and profundity, so we think it possible that the tragedies and foibles of our time need not just appear foolish or repellent in our creations, but something from which man and society can learn.
This is a challenge to all who would embrace the difficult vocation of art and literature; and it is surely no less so for the makers of film.
In a medium so unparalleled in its reach and capacity to move audiences, it is surely not vain to hope that the cinema might help us to understanding and even to bring our world together. This is a hope that has been worn from overuse, but the need does not diminish from repetition.
There is in history a pendulum of culture that serves as our strongest bridge between nations and peoples. This is surely true in the fact that the printing revolution which began in the East lighted the entry of the West into modern times. This could also be true of film.
Can we not learn from the cinema, as we should from other media, the insight and the will to face up to the problems of our time, so vividly etched in the weird paradox that we are simultaneously challenged by "too many people in the world and too much power to destroy them?"
To put this to you, ladies and gentlemen of the cinema, is not a case of passing the buck to artists what we politicians must surely bear as our primary responsibility. It is just a way of saying that solutions to our problems today cannot be sought alone in politics and government, but in the common effort of all, including those like you who uniquely shape the contours of culture in our time.
It is a fact unique to the cinema that its invention occurred simultaneously in several parts of the world. Questions still remain as to who really invented the moving picture, but perhaps.
it is' more true to say that the cinema began with the coincidental discoveries of different scientists working apart from each other.
It is a curious point that forms an apt prologue to an industry and an art that transcend the boundaries of nations and belong to all humanity.
And what better proof is there of this than that here in our city, the filmmakers of the world gather today to speak the language of film.
We can perhaps open this festival of films with no more fitting words than those of an inveterate filmgoer who said: "Reality is a movie."
I thank you.
