Two iconic pioneers of Filipino indies

(Mike de Leon and Kidlat Tahimik are two of six pioneering Filipino independent filmmakers that the Philippine Daily Inquirer is honoring in its 2nd Indie Tribute on Thursday, December 15.)

KIDLAT TAHIMIK

Kidlat Tahimik. INQUIRER file photo

Kidlat Tahimik (a.k.a. Eric de Guia)—together with the late Lino Brocka and perhaps Brillante Mendoza—is the most famous Filipino filmmaker abroad. His reputation rests on a small but distinguished body of work, starting with “Mababangong Bangungot” (1977) which—ahead of Brocka’s “Jaguar” becoming an entry in the competition category of the Cannes Film Festival in 1981—broke into the competition of the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, where it won the International Film Critics’ Prize.

Deceptive primitivism

That film embodies the Kidlat Tahimik aesthetic: a deceptive primitivism that hails both from the crude home-film technology utilized by the filmmaker as well as his choice of material—the clash between modernity and tradition in Third World societies. Three decades later, one realizes that “Bangungot” and Kidlat’s other movies prefigured the rise of independent cinema amid the wages of globalization.

In 2008, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, the society of respected Filipino film critics, bestowed its Natatanging Gawad for lifetime achievement in filmmaking on Kidlat Tahimik, proclaiming him “the father of Philippine indie cinema.”

Kidlat was thrust into global prominence when “Mababangong Bangungot” (international title: “Perfumed Nightmare”), made on a shoestring budget, won in Berlin. It was the first time a Filipino film was exhibited in an important world festival, played in competition and won big.

The movie was released in the United States in 1980; it was distributed by Zoetrope Studios of Francis Ford Coppola who, along with German director Werner Herzog and other artists, recognized Kidlat as a trailblazer.

“Bangungot”  defies classification: a comic semidocumentary that is both fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and real, autobiography and social history. Himself playing the protagonist in the movie, Kidlat tells the parable of a Filipino everyman enamored with all things American. From scraps of World War II American army jeeps, he puts together the jeepney, symbol of both Pinoy ingenuity and enslavement to the American dream, “perfumed nightmare” of the Filipino’s diurnal life.

The film was ahead of its time. It was a funny but cautionary tale on the wages of globalization, back when the phenomenon was still to be detected and named. It was an ecological fable, social satire, postcolonial parable, and hallmark of guerrilla filmmaking—the film was all of this, all at the same time, and more.

With unassuming artistry, with “quiet thunder” (English for his nom de plume), Kidlat Tahimik would hammer his thesis on globalization more penetratingly in his next movies—“Turumba” (1981) and “Why Is Yellow Middle of Rainbow?” (1994). His film on the wanderings of Enrique, perhaps the first Malay to circumnavigate the globe, remains unfinished; in its length and inconclusiveness, it seems to have prefigured Lav Diaz’s 10-hour movies.

Born on Oct. 3, 1942, in Baguio City, Eric de Guia was the son of the first woman mayor in the Philippines. He went to the University of the Philippines, where he became president of the student council. He went to Wharton for his MBA and worked for a time at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

He seemed headed for an executive career in government or multilateral institutions abroad until he discovered filmmaking. Some have surmised that, had De Guia continued on his technocratic beginnings, he would have become president of the Philippines. For some inconceivable reason, De Guia chucked the suit and tie of a technocrat for the shabby chic of artist and filmmaker.  Advocating the return to native roots, Kidlat often wears the Ifugao G-string in key gatherings and carries around a wooden replica of the camera that symbolizes his vision to record life with an authentic Filipino point of view, shorn of western pretensions or western Orientalism.

In 2004, Kidlat lost his four-story ancestral house in Baguio City to a fire and, along with it, film stocks and a collection of art and artifacts. But he continues to shoot films and threatens to cobble up a new movie soon—like his “Bangungot” character, who recycles US metal scraps into the jeepney.

A member of the thriving Baguio arts community, Kidlat nowadays seems content on playing second fiddle to his artist-sons, Kawayan and Kidlat Junior, who have won prizes here and abroad for their works. He refers to himself as “the father of Kawayan de Guia and Kidlat Tahimik Jr.”

But Kidlat continues to be a revered name in world cinema. When “Bangungot” was shown in the San Francisco Cinematheque in 2007, a critic wrote, “Almost 30 years later, Kidlat Tahimik’s ‘Perfumed Nightmare’ remains an unlikely classic.”

Path-breaking struggles

Top American Marxist critic and author and Duke University professor Fredric Jameson has written papers analyzing Kidlat’s movies. Recently, a Filipino religious priest, Fr. Antonio Sison, successfully defended his dissertation at the Catholic University of Nijmengen: “Political Holiness in Third Cinema: The Escathology of Edward Schillebeeckx and the Films of Kidlat Tahimik.” The book has been published in Great Britain.

In the Philippines, Kidlat remains the paragon of independent filmmaking. Because of his path-breaking struggles, the way has been cleared for independent cinema to flourish.

MIKE DE LEON

Mike de Leon  made his last film, “Bayaning Third World,” more than 10 years ago (in 2000) and there’s no indication that he’ll make a new one soon. For all he cares, he may not be making another movie for the next 20 years. But, for his admirers, De Leon’s legacy is secure, distinguished by such solid masterpieces as “Batch ’81” (1982), “Kisapmata” (1981) and “Sister Stella L” (1984).

To some extent, De Leon embodies both the bridge and the rift between mainstream cinema and independent cinema. Scion of the clan that owned LVN Studios, De Leon struck an independent path by forming Cinema Artists in the 1970s. The studio produced Brocka’s “Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag” (1975) and De Leon’s directorial debut, “Itim” (1976). These are now considered high points of the second golden age of Philippine cinema.

For all of his maverick qualities, De Leon’s career shows respect for his seniors. If he wasn’t making his own film, he would be aiding other important directors in making theirs. Aside from being Brocka’s cinematographer for “Maynila,” he photographed Eddie Romero’s “Aguila.”

Also characteristic of his career is his taking on a tired genre and reinventing it—a sure sign of the indie spirit.

“Itim” adapted the features of the horror genre to fashion a technically well-crafted movie that capitalized on the tropical gothic features of the traditional Filipino cuaresma (Holy Week) to come up with a tour de force moral fable on the horrors of abortion.

“Kakabakaba Ka Ba?” is a comedy of errors that is also a political satire against drug trafficking and Japanese imperialism in the 1970s and, as it turns out now, a caveat against rising Chinese global economic dominance. In “Kakabakaba,” De Leon reinvented genres and, in the penultimate sequence, paid tribute to classic LVN musicals in an outrageous climax with a singing pseudo-samurai drug lord, his Chinese nemesis, drug operatives disguised as nuns, and the heroes and heroines caught in the middle.

Provocative, reflexive

Anticipating the postmodern tenor of indie cinema, De Leon made “Bayaning Third World” at the closing of the second millennium, around the time when the Philippines was marking the centennial of its independence. What was to be a tribute to Rizal and Philippine nationhood became a highly provocative and reflexive take on the national hero as well as the struggle for a national identity. Looking back, the movie, with the political questions it raises, its defiant use of black and white, and even with its interrogation of the legacy of Rizal, served as a precursor to the third golden age of Philippine cinema that is now obtaining.