FILIPINO vs. FILIPINO
by Arlene Babst (Reprinted from Bulletin Today, 5 January 1983)
The film ORO PLATA MATA certainly deserves to be discussed for its artistic achievements which are many. Those of you who've already seen it and the crowds were always SRO during its run at the Film Center have noted its meticulous attention to detail, its consistently professional photography, and the superb control exercised by its director Peque Gallaga, control evident in practically every frame of the three-and-a-half hour epic.
The film is in fact, so successful that it must inevitably be viewed on the multi-dimensional level, where not only its artistic accomplishments come to fore but also those achievements in other fields-the historical or political, to name two others.
The film centers on two wealthy family (
hacienderos) and how it survives the Second World War and the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.
But viewed in a historical or political mood, the movie practically screams out this vision: there was only one Japanese soldier ever shown in the entire picture. The rest of the time, only the Filipino was depicted, the Filipino's way of life whether he was the rich haciendero or the exploited farm hand; the Filipino's manner of coping with disaster, whether by resisting, collaborating or adding to the disaster; the Filipino's way of preserving his human community, or else destroying it with his own greed and bestiality.
The vision is precise, merciless. At last we have a film brave and enormous enough to zero in on the Filipino man and woman alone, without the crutches or scapegoats of external influences, no matter how powerful. Here at last we are given the Filipino as a self-sufficient cosmic being, self-sufficient even in his deficiencies and therefore self-sufficient in his salvation.
Naturally the Spanish influence is there, and heavily. Of course, America as savior is there, too, obviously it is the Japanese invasion that wrecks the idyllic pleasures of life on a plantation (idyllic that is, if you owned the plantation; as oppressive as a war if you merely worked on it.)
But all throughout the film, the vision focuses upon the Filipino driving home the fact that upon the Filipino and the Filipino alone rests the fate of the Filipino way of life, the Filipino family, the Filipino individual. We see the family flee to the forests and there try to rebuild its shattered way of life, and we are made to understand that in such apparently helpless flight , there is still the fierce determination of that Filipino family to maintaon itself, to live the way it wants to live, and eventually, to fight all those who treaten to destroy it.
And who is the greatest threat to this family of average Filipinos, average in their greed, their sloth, their thoughtlessness, as well as their resilience, their capacity for merriment in the face of hell, their stoicism? Who is their greatest enemy? Fellow Filipinos. Not the Japanese or the war, but fellow Filipinos; in the film, a band of vicious
tulisanes bestial enough to kill their own sons and wives, or to torture their own compatriots.
The film coincedes wiht history and politics in this bitter realization. Filipinos have always been the greatest destroyers of fellow Filipinos over centuries of collaborating with foreigner fevered with the desire for profits and power. And by the same token, Filipinos must become------when? the greatest protectors and defenders of fellow Filipinos, and of this beautiful, beloved land which so many have already tried to destroy.
