Was searching for a Mike de Leon film in the net, instead I found this article. If I'm right this is the one Noel had mentioned in his posts early in this thread. This was previously published in Film Comment. Read on:
A Season of Philippine Cinema.
This past summer's festival of Philippine cinema at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater was haunted by many ghosts. Most obviously, there was that of the Lino Brocka, the eminent director who died only a few years ago and whose work was retrospectively spotlighted. Ghosts figured prominently as well in the exhibition of three films directed by the elusive Mike De Leon, underscoring both the process of production and the precariousness of the medium.
First of the De Leons to be shown was The Rites of May/Itim (76), presented in a decent print from the British Film Institute that has only just begun to turn red. Jun is a young urban photographer returning for a visit to his rural home. He wanders the village snapping photos, including one of a beautiful young woman. He develops the photo and gives it to her when he encounters her again the next day in a church. The woman, Teresa, is understandably surprised, but they talk and soon become friends. He visits her home, where he sees a picture of her sister Rosa who has passed on; she visits his home, where she has a strange encounter with his ailing father.
Shot in a sparse, long-take style, Rites boasts a drifting soundtrack composed of equal parts oozing strings and psychotronic keyboard, mixed with just a dash of talk and freaked-out screaming. The film, too, drifts leisurely as Jun and Teresa's friendship develops, interspersed by the rush of a few short flashbacks, then breaks in a tidal wave of emotion and flashbacks when everyone comes together for Teresa's invocation of her sister's spirit, when all the secrets come out. It is a film worthy of comparison to those masterpieces of the precise long take and religious/philosophical reflection on the photographic image championed by the world cinema critical guard -- which is to say, the works of directors such as Dreyer, Ozu, Tarkovsky, or Kiarostami. I saw it one afternoon with about seventy-five Filipinos (including the film's writer, Gil Quito, who answered some questions afterward), Filipino-Americans, and others. It was an experience that will haunt at least one of us for some time to come.
De Leon's Batch '81 (82) was shown in a print housed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines whose colors have swirled into a light mahogany. A group of college students -- the "batch" of the title -- enlist in a fraternity and are submitted to an extensive hazing that is a clear allegory for the indoctrination effects of modern life. Things start out innocently enough. The guys are blindfolded and stripped before the senior members and, apparently, a group of women. Then they are paddled, blindfolded, sent running through the streets in their underwear, and instructed to call their seniors "master." The film gradually accelerates into pure mayhem. Scissor-pinches are applied to nipples, a number from Cabaret is performed in drag, a pledge is given electric shocks in front of an American observer (implying that the fraternity is a training ground for foreign powers), there is a drowning and finally an interfraternity rumble that leaves several dead.
In addition to Cabaret, Batch '81 is haunted at moments by such other intertexts as Potemkin and (according to Robert Stam) German director Volker Schlondorff's early film Young Torless. But the most obvious point of departure is Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. One character dresses like Alex and his droogs, and the electroshock scenes recall the Ludovico treatment. During brawl scenes the camera breaks free from the customary austere long-take style, and moments of extreme violence are captured in stylized slow motion. The drone of a synthesizer creates an ironic counterpoint to the image, rather than an emphatic underscore. In both films, modern education is presented as a stripping of individuality, an accession to totalitarianism. Both are misanthropic, thinly disguised condemnations of their surrounding political environments, and scenes of violence and torture in both have provoked astonished cries from the audiences with whom I've seen the films. (An overhead light near the screen kept flashing on and off during the showing of Batch I attended; it seemed appropriate, as if the film's madness had infected the theater's wiring.) I would need to know Tagalog and be more familiar with Filipino cultural history to be able to truly judge De Leon's accomplishment against Kubrick's, but that the influence can be considered as more than doting hommage should suggest what a wallop the film packs.
The third and final print, also from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, had faded the least. Hardly a ghost story and not directly related to any film I know, Sister Stella L. (84) stands firm on its own as a solid, gritty piece of filmmaking. Workers at a cooking-oil plant have gone on strike; they are joined by two nuns, both named Stella, and a reporter who was once the boyfriend of one of the nuns. The nuns are threatened with excommunication, and the reporter's stories are barred from the magazines where he customarily publishes.
The style of Stella differs sharply from that of the previous two De Leon films. Instead of consistently long, steady takes roughed up by moments of swift montage, Stella is mostly standard shot-reverse-shot the whole way through. A few moments stand out, such as a woman's suicide, the subsequent mourning, and her burial conveyed in an elliptical series of five or so shots over about fifteen seconds; some public speaking events presented in very brief shots, jumping about at abrupt angles; some didactic direct-to-camera addresses against a plain white background. The film ends with such a shot, an explicit call to action for the Filipino people. The Walter Reade audience responded with cheers. Not as stylistically audacious, yet just as rigorously constructed as the previous two films, Sister Stella L. communicated its message effectively and elegantly to an audience of around two hundred Filipinos, Filipino-Americans, and others, fourteen years and tens of thousand of miles away from where it was made. That is quite an accomplishment.
One of the fundamental difficulties in writing about non-Hollywood cinema is a lack of materials, and when the films are from a land that has been as embattled over the first century of cinema as the Philippines has, the difficulty is compounded infinitely. Ephraim Katz's indispensable Film Encyclopedia, the first reference for every dedicated cinephile I know, has no entry on De Leon or on Philippine cinema in general. There is a brief note of one hundred or so words on Lino Brocka, as there are for other Third World auteurs who have shown regularly in Euro-American film festivals, such as Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, Satyajit Ray of India, or Youssef Chahine of Egypt. Other standard references, including recent single-volume histories of cinema, are necessarily selective. Of these, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction offers the best overview of many Third World industries, including that of the Philippines, merging industrial and stylistic concerns. More focused accounts, such as John A. Lent's The Asian Film Industry, are often invaluable industry surveys, but details of personal history or film style are necessarily limited. When searching for such details, the critic or historian is fortunate to be in contact with people personally linked to the industry, such people as I was able to meet during the festival, and who provided me with some more extensive background.
(continued in the next post)
