During the 2021 Metro Manila Film Festival, many Filipino moviegoers were enraged after the postponed theatrical release of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) to make way for the film festival’s entries. They called out filmmakers to do better for the Filipino people to freely appreciate pelikulang Pilipino instead of depriving them of “quality” Hollywood films. This rage involved citing the formulaic plots and mediocre productions of the local industry, ultimately asserting the death of Philippine cinema.
While the statement is a hasty generalization of Philippine movies, it nevertheless has a grain of truth. This can be attributed to the proliferation of commercial movies in Metro Manila that are, more often than not, devoid of artistic quality compared to the standards of Hollywood. Consequently, this dominance of Manila-centric films in the mainstream has shaped the image of the national cinema as “cheap,” “mediocre,” and “dying.” This leads me to my point that this identity of pelikulang Pilipino is flawed.
It is inaccurate to view Philippine cinema based merely on a Manila-based film festival and unfair to compare the compromised productions of our mainstream media from the privileges of foreign studios. We have classics and promising contemporary ones that were and continue to be recognized locally and abroad, many of them are products of the digital new wave of independent filmmaking referred to as regional cinema.
Regional cinema will be the focus of my paper vis-à-vis nationalizing the identity of Philippine cinema. First, I will provide a brief overview of the history and development of Philippine films. This will be summarized according to the different periodizations determined by sociopolitical, economic, technological, aesthetic, and thematic aspects that continue to shape the identity of the local cinema. This will be followed by a discussion of the theoretical framework based on Zeus Salazar’s pantayong pananaw. Finally, the last sections will focus on regional cinema and the application of the framework in nationalizing Philippine film.
After several years of experiments and developments of cinema in the West, the emerging medium was introduced by foreigners in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, during the last days of Spanish colonization in the country (Sotto, 2017).
In September 1897, Swiss entrepreneurs, Leibman and Peritz, brought the Cinématograph and showed several Lumière actuality films in Manila. But it was only after over two decades when the first Filipino feature film, Dalagang Bukid (1919) by Jose Nepomuceno, was made. The early Filipino silent films, albeit amateurish compared to Hollywood, had the advantage of using Filipino stories and local languages (Sotto, 2017). Most stories were patriotic in theme and drew inspiration from local theater traditions (e.g., sarswela, komedya) and Filipino literature (e.g., Florante at Laura, Noli Me Tangere, El Filibusterismo).
With the advent of sound technology in the late 1920s came the rise of the big studios—Filippine Films, Parlatone Hispano-Filipino, Sampaguita Pictures, LVN Pictures, and X’Otic Films—responsible for the abundant production of Filipino films, the flourishing of the industry, and its patronage among Filipinos. However, this was impeded during the Second World War with the arrival of Japanese invaders. During this period, the Japanese would hire local filmmakers to create propaganda films such as Dawn of Freedom and Tatlong Maria, both created in 1944 (Sotto & Lumbera, 2017).
After the Pacific War, the Big Three Studios—LVN, Premiere, and Sampaguita—dominated the film industry. But labor problems in the 1960s caused the decline of the studio system. Notable in this period are the local counterparts of the Western and Asian action films, i.e., the localized James Bond motion pictures, the martial arts films based on those in Hongkong and Japan, and the cowboy movies of Fernando Poe Jr. (Sotto & Lumbera, 2017).
The decades-long administration of the Marcoses was a double-edged sword to the film industry. On the bad side, regulation through censorship was imposed to filter out stories that were critical to the fascist government. Moreover, commercialization and heavy taxation compromised the artistic ambitions of filmmakers. On the other hand is the generation of New Cinema directors including Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, and Eddie Romero whose artistry and social activism reshaped the Filipino filmic landscape to one that was artistic and nationalist.
By way of supporting the film industry, the incumbent administration established the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines and expanded the Manila Film Festival into what is now known as Metro Manila Film Festival (Lumbera, 2017). There was a spike in the production of films during this period despite the fact that the majority was bereft of artistic quality due to the demanding commercialization and deteriorating economic conditions.
Although the deteriorating economy and political conditions after the martial law reduced the number of film outputs, filmmakers like Mike de Leon, Nick Deocampo, and their contemporaries continued to make sociopolitically relevant films.
Subsequently, the invention of digital cameras made filmmaking more accessible and convenient among small, independent, and individual filmmakers including Sheron Dayoc, Lav Diaz, and Kidlat Tahimik. This democratization ultimately led to the resurgence of regional cinema which will be discussed in the latter section of this paper.