(cont'd)
O'Hara admits that editing is often an act of "salamangka" (black magic) for him. He's able to trick the audience into thinking a poor effect works, or a bad shot is less than awful (because it doesn't last long), or a poor performance is actually good (because all the overacting has been trimmed). At the same time, this rapid-fire editing style often gives his films a nervous, unsettled quality--as if they were the work of a restless storyteller, trying to pull a tale together from various disparate elements.
O'Hara has said he edits his films like radio shows…and you can see this from the deft use of transitional voiceovers, bridging musical cues, sound effects; you also see this from the swift way his scenes begin, develop, end (in radio, silence [not pauses in dialogue, there is a difference] is called "dead air"--not a good thing). When asked what he thought of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (Welles, it must be remembered, also worked in radio and theater before coming to film), O'Hara had only one comment: "It's so radio!"
O'Hara spends part of his time writing for television, radio, theater, and film; he spends part of his time earning bread and butter in either radio or television (for one year he directed "Flordeluna," a well-known Filipino TV soap opera). Rarely, he acts; even more rarely, he directs a film (he shot "Babae sa Bubungang Lata" and "Sisa" back-to-back in a gruelingly sleepless period of thirty days). The rest of his time he spends walking (he has been known to wander the streets from Binondo to Luneta Park for a distance of several kilometers) and talking to people. He claims that most of his stories and characters are inspired by people he encounters while walking the streets; in fact, the conceit of his "Sisa" is that Jose Rizal could not have created so vivid a character without knowing (or falling in love with, or making love to) her in real life. He claims that the story of "Insiang" was inspired by what happened to his back-yard neighbors in Pasay City, and that the one false note in Brocka's otherwise excellent film was in setting it in Tondo, Manila. Hilda's beauty would have been instantly recognizable in Tondo, while in Pasay, which is full of red-light districts, she would have been taken to be just another prostitute (Brocka made the switch because he wanted the visual drama of Tondo's slums).
O'Hara has been linked to Lino Brocka, particularly in the early years when they worked in collaboration; it's wrong, however, to call him Brocka's imitator. While he's every bit as capable of the social realism that is Brocka's specialty ("Babae sa Bubungang Lata"), he is also adept in other genres--historical epic ("Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos"); horror ("Halimaw sa Banga" [Monster in a Jar, 1985]); and gothic drama ("The Fatima Buen Story," 1994). He is also Brocka's superior when it comes to making noir ("Condemned'), and action pictures ("Bagong Hari")--there is a fluidity. coherence, and visual imaginativeness to his action sequences that Brocka never quite managed to achieved.
A final difference: Brocka tended to paint the world in Manichean terms of "us vs. them," "good vs. evil." This was true in "Maynila Sa Kuko Ng Liwanag," where the hero's innocence ultimately remained unsullen, and only intensified in his later films--in "Bayan Ko" (My Country), and "Orapronobis" (Fight For Us), the central figures were mere walking allegories, making ideological points for the audience. It was, however, not true of O'Hara's scripts for Brocka; they retain a many-sided complexity Brocka lost as his cinema grew increasingly political.
In "Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang," the leper played by O'Hara is first seen as a rapist, while the film's villainous patriarch (Eddie Garcia) is given his moments of nostalgia and regret. In "Insiang"--possibly Brocka's finest work--the line between good and evil disappears completely; by film's end, you can look at each of the three main characters--Insiang (Hilda Koronel), her mother (Mona Lisa), and her mother's lover (Ruel Vernal)--and honestly say you don't know who was wronged, or who the wrongdoer; who was the victim and who the rapist.
It was ever so in O'Hara's work; he never follows trends, never goes for what is politically or culturally fashionable, never makes films for the international film festival circuit. "Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos" was attacked when it came out for its sympathetic portrayal of the wartime Japanese. "Fatima Buen" was controversial for its unlikable, almost irredeemable heroine. "Bagong Hari" was rated "X" by the Board of Censors not just because of its violence, but also because everyone in it was morally repulsive--even the hero, a modest and caring young man, is an accomplished killer with a long list of victims. "Pangarap ng Puso" failed in the boxoffice presumably because it was dark and uncategorizable--the shy, sensitive boy (Alex Alano) becomes a feared terrorist (who somehow retains something of the boy deep inside him) while the equally shy girl (Matet de Leon) finds herself picking up a gun by film's end and using it. If, as Renoir once famously put it, "everyone has his reasons," O'Hara's films demonstrate Renoir's proposition in intensely dramatic, unmistakably Filipino terms.
A final word: Jolicco Cuadra, an elderly maverick of an art critic and a formidable (some say impenetrable) prose stylist, considers O'Hara the finest Filipino filmmaker he knows--this having seen the films and met the likes of Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Eddie Romero, even Gerardo De Leon (not to mention--or so he claims--Orson Welles and Vittorio de Sica, way back when he was a young scholar in France…but that's another story…). One of Cuadra's favorite films of O'Hara is "Bagong Hari," and of the lead star of "Hari," Dan Alvaro, he had this to say: "(Dan) was perfect. So quiet! Real killers are like that. The loud man walking down the street, threatening death, I don't notice. I'm afraid of the quiet man." That's an observation he might just as easily have made of the film's maker as well.
(Article originally published in the 14th Singapore International Film Festival catalogue, as part of the tribute to Mario O'Hara)
(With thanks to Philip Cheah)
(Singapore International Film Festival website located at
http://www.filmfest.org.sg)
