Thoughts on the Early Cinema and Filipinization of Movies in the Philippines: 1897-1941

This period of Philippine cinema invites a challenge to film historians due to a dearth in material and documentation. Viewing (Filipino) films from this time can only evoke excitement and enthusiasm as one charts out the story of a well-loved art form of today. Being a foreign medium, the film has found its way to the very core of Philippine popular culture which signals relevance and formal effectivity in promoting social cohesion to a certain degree and resistance against foreign dictates, ironically, on another. This nature of film as a medium creates for a valid theoretical foundation for any critic vying to locate the Filipino in Philippine Cinema. It is also a site of interest in dissecting the downcast colonial enculturation that transpired during this time.

This piece seeks to reconcile the problematics of colonial resistance and Philippine co-optation by means of indigenizing the film medium as local. The intention is to identify the setting at which Philippine cinema is crystallized as an art form having both the resistant and the co-optive qualities at the same time.

This attempt shall be limited to the short films of Thomas Edison and The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (1899-1902), Octavio Silos’ Tunay na Ina (1939), and Manuel Conde’s Ibong Adarna (1941).

Colonial Representation (1899-1902)

The colonial pursuit of territory is the subject of the short films of both Thomas Edison and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Being a few of the first representations of the Philippines in film, these short films provide relevance in understanding the roots of Philippine cinema (as it is periodically in direct succession to the time when Auguste Lumiere et al. brought the mechanism to the Philippines) and the concept of nation in the Philippines.

The Thomas Edison films are re-enactments of what actually happened during the Filipino-American war. Burdened with colonial iconology, the films represent how Americans would like to write their history reinforcing the American image of strength under the concepts of salvation and rational subjugation.

The films used elements that invoke nationalism such as waving of the American flag ensuring loyalty and identification with its audience, obviously, the American public. This iconology of the flag displaces the evil character of war with that of national pride and allegiance. The representation of the American troops as the advancing force versus the Filipino troops as the retreating force assumes a backdrop of weakness of the Filipinos assuring the perceived superiority of the Americans over the Filipinos.

The Thomas Edison films, considering they are re-enacted, have more dramatics and symbols than that of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (AMBC). Bordering uninteresting, the AMBC films consist of nothing more than a pack of mule crossing the Agno River, a boat passing the Pasig River, and the passing of a troop of soldiers. This shows that Edison’s re-enacted films consciously wanted to achieve a specific type of representation whereas those shot on-location, probably because unavailable, had less to no success at the same level of depiction.

The colonial representation through these short films prefigures a situation in which the Philippines is a subject. The films are for an American audience by Americans seeking a gaze of the other. This othering, at an early start, endowed the Philippines a weak character in cinema. Though not directly influential to Philippine cinema (because the films were more military tactic than an artistic attempt) the films are significant in understanding how iconology played (and will) play a role in the years that followed.

Octavio Silos’ Tunay na Ina (1939)

Evidently borrowing from the theatrical and stage tradition, this film has a pleasantly muted feel that overcasts an intense plot of a child torn between two mothers, the one who gave birth to her and the one who raised her.

t is interesting how this film reveals so much of the film industry from way back and how the iconologies resound the cultural difference of the Philippines before and now. The film reflects a culture where a woman is worthless without a man. The start of the movie involves a dramatic confrontation between Magdalena, a woman who just gave birth to a fatherless child, and her father who takes away her baby and gives it away to another woman. This confrontation exposes the dominance of male over female in decision-making and other social norms of that time. This type of morality and social code is translated into film creating a dynamic relationship between art and society where these codes are represented by film and the film reinstates and modifies these codes.

Presenting normality for identification, the film does not shy from presenting new ideas as well. The image of Magdalena, in the biblical sense, is transformed into a relatively more positive representation of a woman when the main character overcomes the “tragedy” that befell her when Antonio left her. To a certain degree, the movie becomes a critique of established norms notwithstanding the dependence of a woman’s happiness to a man.

Political relations are also presented in a matter-of-fact way. As opposed to today’s trend of rags-to-riches plots, this film does not encourage romantic flings that cross economic status.
Technically, a viewer from today will notice the difference in acting. While today, actors go through a separate training for theater and film, actors in 1939 just had theater as background which shows how far movie-making has gone as far as the development of the skill of acting is concerned. Lighting-wise, the shadows of the characters are inconsistent making it difficult for a viewer to achieve suspension of disbelief. It’s like watching a theater production being caught on camera. The film also boasts of an impressive set of melodic songs that provide another dimension of interest.

This film was created during a time when studios were already in control of the art of movie-making. Compared to the short films of Edison and the AMBC, this film is conscious of artistry. However conscious, the film is still not independent of economic and political constraints as it is still a business run by capital and labor. It is a time when the industry has adapted the technology to suit the Philippine market and audience. Furthering this adaptation is the 1941 film Ibong Adarna by Manuel Conde.

Manuel Conde’s Ibong Adarna (1941)

Taking the story of the popular Komedya, Conde’s Ibong Adarna excites the senses by translating into film a familiar story through a lavish yet sensitive ensemble. The film takes the audience to a totally different but recognizable world through the use of magical elements borrowed from traditional folklore.

Like Silos’ Tunay na Ina, the film is an attempt at Filipinizing the medium by endowing it local elements and customary moral code. The universality of the concept of good and evil is explored by the film securing relevance to its audience while the concepts of love and heroism, doing the same, also humanize the story making it more palatable to the viewer. Although utilizing universal concepts, the film is localized by the fact that the story of the three brothers in search of a magical bird to heal their father is a deeply imbedded story in the Filipino tradition.

Technically, the film extravagantly tells the story using (during that time) modern visual effects, which was important in establishing the supernatural feel. The time and place are determined by the brilliant use of costumes adding another stratum of visual interest. Still within the theatrical acting tradition, the film evidently is still under the auspices of an industry hooked in the form.

Also created during the rise of the studios, Ibong Adarna is a film that indigenizes a foreign medium. This indigenization of the form contrasts the locality of the story (which ironically, to a certain degree, is also foreign) and this meaningful blending furnishes the film successful story telling. The significance of this film in the history of Philippine cinema is undeniable as it, among other films, attempted to bring the film medium closer to the hearts of the Filipinos.

Resistant and Adaptive

The films mentioned are pieces of a whole that depict the Filipinos resisting foreign dictates in both form and content while adapting the art form to the cultural specificities of the Philippines. Linked with Philippine history as a history of colonialism, the history of film in the Philippines suffers from the same dilemma as that of its culture where colonialism is inevitably present. By way of resisting this tendency, the film industry was able to succeed in its indigenization and in blossoming into an art form a step closer to being Filipino.

While the films of Edison and the AMBC subdued the Philippines as that of a subject, the medium found its way to the country by means of other foreigners (Lumiere et al.) seeking business to make money out of it. Like with any other cultural product, the Philippine culture was not immediately over-the-edge crazy about films but was economically inclined to take it. Because there was a market for the new technology, the producers-businessmen made films and because there was production there was consumption. The consumption of films were not instantly high but eventually, like any other business, it grew.

The colonial nature of film was stripped off the form (although not entirely) and made to suit the taste and moral standards of Filipinos. This is the site of crystallization where the foreign form, by way of resisting and adapting, is transformed into a local form that speaks about Filipinos even though its culture itself is burdened with colonial tendencies. Although the film industry has gone a long way from the time of Tunay na Ina where characters would sing in the middle of the film, the problematic of colonial resistance versus co-optation presents itself strongly today as the film industry (and other arts) looks back to the past hoping to find its identity.