Rebel
without Marx: A Desperado’s Flight to Perdition
by "Manunuri" Mario A. Hernando
An old newspaper item about a man’s
hijacking a plane and dropping from the sky 5,000 feet below has intrigued
filmmaker Raymond Red well enough to imagine the circumstances and details that
led the desperado to take this extreme course of action. The result is
“Himpapawid,” a well-crafted social drama and thriller that takes us into the
life of the wretched of the earth, without wallowing in melodrama and voyeurism
that characterize most films about poverty and the downtrodden.
By no means a socialist or ideologue,
Red nevertheless sees the futility in venting one’s rage and exasperation without
a higher purpose or the guiding hand of comrades. That hijacker is Raul, a
loner and oppressed laborer who seems to get the lower end of the bargain at
every turn. The first time we see him, he is pleading with his boss at a
construction site not to fire him. He wants to visit home in the province but
wants to get his job back later. The foreman wouldn’t budge. This early we see
a steaming human volcano, ready to explode
On the way home, he passes by a
striking workers’ campsite. Clearly here, the laborers’ action linking up with
one another is a viable option for him, but he does not see any potential in
this. If the strike has any use to him, it is to steal, stealthily, one of the
streamers on which are painted fighting words. He is collecting these fabrics for
something he is setting up. Small, nasty incidents pile up in his
consciousness, even that TV news showing a man taking his own son as hostage, a
precursor to a grand scheme he is hatching. Meanwhile, an airplane whizzes by seemingly
just above his head, as though to suggest another option.
Sights and sounds above and below heighten
Raul’s worsening condition and loneliness: a coin that drops into a sidewalk
drainage appears so precious. He jerks off watching a neighborhood hussy from
his bathroom. When his camera focuses on a disgusting rat or cockroach, we see
there are creatures smaller than the budding criminals they are turning out to
be, though in terms of worth, they are equal.
His room is surrounded by the striking
laborers’ banners and streamers. There is irony here. A Marxist solution is at
hand, but instead of empathizing with their cause, Raul chooses to link up with
the wrong guys——neighborhood “istambays” (street toughies) and drinkers with a
common ax to grind: exploitation in the workplace, deception, injustice. They
are not taking it any longer and they have a plan to strike back. But things
are bound to go awry, and when the attempted heist boomerangs, he finds his
companions dead. Which drives Raul back to his original plan: he will hijack a
plane armed with a gun, grenade and his improvised parachute, and jump down to
his hometown.
The actors, regulars in the
independent movie scene, make up a wonderful ensemble. Leading them is Raul
Arellano who makes a deteriorating mind look normal, if a bit disturbing at
times, he is self-absorbed and high-strung, reminiscent of De Niro’s Travis
Bickle. A person like him who tries to hijack a plane cannot by any means be
considered “normal.” This final act of Raul’s brings the film to the realm of
the extraordinary.
The gang is expertly played by actors
especially Raul Morit as driver of the getaway cab, and Soliman Cruz as the
eventual captive and torture victim. John Arcilla as the group’s leader Crispin
strikes awe. If Crispin is authoritative at all, it is only because he is
talkative, the whiner and proselytizer without the ideology. But in fact, they
are all bumbling fools giving larceny a try. In three roles are Marissa Sue
Prado——the neighborhood harlot, insensitive clerk, and beleaguered flight
attendant. The different characters partly represent Raul’s confused state of
mind, and Prado is almost unrecognizable with each portrayal, truly a different
character.
In handling these actors and dramatizing
the moments that lead to Raul’s climactic desperate act, Red has shown that he
has mastered the art of storytelling as well as the other elements that
constitute brilliant cinema: striking visuals, well-calculated pacing, detour
into the extraordinary, and the naturalistic and top-caliber acting by the
cast.
More than this, he has progressed a
great deal as artist——enfant terrible with fascinating experimental
short films in the first phase of his career, name director who continually
embraces new technology in filmmaking while doing commercials and feature work
that deal with history and social realities. In this second phase did he do his
Cannes-winning work “Anino.”
Embarking on what could be the third, current phase of his career, Red has unraveled “Himpapawid,” his most mature and substantial work. Like his previous work, there is painterly quality to every frame but this time it serves the story well and oddly, helps make it move. There is grandeur in Red’s vast landscapes, pictorial beauty in the intimate shots, and a curious, almost elegant contrast of light and shadows. With “Himpapawid,” Red takes the local indie movement thousands of feet higher. He soars.
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NATIVE
SPEAKER : The Cinema of Raymond Red
by Roger Garcia
Raymond Red started off his artistic life as a painter, a formation that has profoundly affected his film work and its development. Painters work on their own, construct their own worlds, and work with a narrative of images rather than words. Red has brought all these approaches into his cinema.
As a teenager Red was recruited into the school for highly talented artistic youths that Imelda Marcos set up in Mount Makiling. The experience at Mount Makiling with its supportive training, open skies and lush vistas away from the urban squalor of Manila, gave Red a visual grounding that has underscored his aesthetic.
Red’s next defining experience was at the Mowelfund Film Institute workshops in the early 1980s, where he began making super 8 films in earnest. Led by another seminal figure in independent Filipino cinema, Nick Deocampo, the Mowelfund was ground zero for all young aspiring filmmakers who were part of the burgeoning counter-culture and political awareness that grew up in the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship. The Mowelfund “workshoppers” were a new generation of indie filmmakers, interested as much in experimental and animation forms as narrative films. Their work – mainly short films – created the New Filipino Cinema which gained momentum when Cory Aquino’s People Power revolution toppled Marcos in the mid-1980s.
Red’s early works – all super 8 short films - are striking in their visual sensibility, but also notable for their occasionally ambitious narratives. His first film ANG MAGPAKAILANMAN (THE ETERNITY,1982) is like a handheld camera record of a nightmare (crucifixion, abuse by authority) in both sleep and waking life. ANG HIKAB (YAWN, 1983) is still one of the best super 8 films ever made, balancing an impressive visual style with a narrative/situation that is perfectly suited to the short film form. Against a sky filled with cloud and light (a motif that would become a signature of the Red style) two men occupy a bunk bed (one on top, the other below) and argue constantly about life, sleeping and waking. It is a situation written, filmed and directed with as much mastery and absurdity as a Samuel Beckett piece – a discourse on the symbiosis of human relationships set against the larger universe of nature. It is a startling mature work, made when Red was just 18.
These two themes play out in Red’s other major works of the period. In KABAKA (ENEMY), a group of young men are trained as “Guardians of the Stars” and fight off an enemy represented by blinding white light. As with many of his generation who came to cinematic consciousness in the mid-1970s, Red was impressed by STAR WARS and for a while called himself Raymond “Lucas” Red. KABAKA is something of a response to the STAR WARS experience, not in the way of today’s Youtube geeks whose only talent is the shallowness of their imitation, but in trying to make some sense of the cinematic effect – the light itself is seen as mysterious, threatening, dangerous yet strangely attractive. Indeed, something like cinema itself…
KAMADA (the super 8 version of 1984; the film was later remade in a longer 16mm version for television) develops the dialectics of the other two other works. Red moves away from the future and into the past – a kind of evocation of the 1950s where a musician rents a room whose other occupant seems to sleep a lot and have respiratory problems.
As THE ETERNITY signaled, sleep plays a recurring role in these early films. The filmmaker sleeps, dreams and wakes to film the dream. It is an interior world with the artist in dialogue with his art, an artist who refuses to compromise his vision. The outside world of social relationships is seen as unavoidable but an encumbrance, conversations seem pointless.
These themes of the misunderstood artist, the refuge of the artist’s interior vision, the pleasures and freedoms of solitude, all come sharply into focus in Red’s first 16mm film MISTULA (SEEMING, 1987). The short film tells of a young violinist who is nagged by his unsympathetic father. The young man leaves home, walks through a city teeming with jeepneys and crumbling buildings to reach the countryside where alone, he can play his music with an exuberance that communes with nature, represented by gorgeous skies and embracing trees.
MISTULA, which advocates a withdrawal from society, was the last film to directly engage the contemporary world that Red was to make for more than a decade. Red himself of course did not withdraw from the world – he screened his films at many international film festivals and brought attention to the independent Filipino film movement of which he had become the de facto leader and inspiration to many aspiring filmmakers.
His films of this period show a maturing of vision and a search for a way to engage reality on his own terms. In the Kafkaesque PEPE (1989), a man is shuttled around a bureaucracy housed in a spiraling old building. The film’s architecture and clothing indicate some indeterminate past. STUDY FOR THE SKIES (1988) is set in the Spanish American war (turn of the 20th century) as a man tries to fly with a contraption that could have been designed by Leonardo Da Vinci.
This use of history as a way to speak of the present is found in Red’s first feature, BAYANI (HEROES, 1991). Financed by German broadcaster ZDF, the film focuses on Andres Bonifacio who started the Katipunan revolutionary group against the Spanish colonialists. Their struggles could be seen to reflect the fractious state of Philippines politics at the time. In SAKAY (1993) Red tells the story of Makario Sakay who fought the Americans in the late 19th century. The films show the strengths and weaknesses of transitioning from a visually-based short film aesthetic to the complexities of feature narrative. Striking chiaroscuro lighting models bodies into exciting living tableaux, but for those unfamiliar with Filipino history, the navigation through the politics, allegiances and betrayals of the time and their use as metaphors for the present, are less accessible.
SAKAY was not the happiest of experiences (fortunately the film has now been restored closer to Red’s vision) and for the rest of the 1990s, Red busied himself with commercials either as director and/or cinematographer. He developed the World War II project MAKAPILI (the first Filipino project to win a Hubert Bals Award in Rotterdam in 1993) but it remains unrealized except in a silent super 8 black and white draft.
Finally at the end of the 20th century, he began production on a short film ANINO (SHADOWS) that was the first (and to date, only) Filipino film to win Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival. Shot on 35 mm, the film brings Red back to the contemporary reality of the Philippines. Ronnie Lazaro plays a photographer who encounters different people (all facets of the human condition) while wandering through Manila. The episodic nature of the narrative, and the city’s visuals were well suited to Red’s short film approach as found in MISTULA.
ANINO offers themes that would preoccupy Red in the current state of his career – the abuse of power, the gap between rich and poor, the desperation of the deprived, but the possibilities of inner strength and the hope of the innocent. Solitude is still an overarching frame but now it is adumbrated with some desire to reach out. Ronnie Lazaro’s photographer is a lonely man who reaches out but is rejected. The idea of “reaching out” is also reflected in his contribution to the portmanteau film IMAHE NASYON: PORTRAIT OF A NATION AFTER 1986 (produced by elder brother Jon Red). MISTULANG KAMERA OBSKURA (shot on HD video, a first for Red) was originally conceived as a longer piece about a man who lives in a darkened room, pokes a hole in the wall and sees the images of the real world projected (camera obscura style) into his room. Some of Red’s ideas for this fascinating concept are also found in the MECKAM music video he made for major local rock group Wolfgang where the real world is meshed with animation of action figures (robots, monsters etc).
The theme of the lonely man fighting against an uncaring world is brought to the fore in Red’s latest feature film HIMPAPAWID (MANILA SKIES, 2009). Raul Arellano plays a desperate man in desperate circumstances – pushed to the wall by unemployment, the frustrations of bureaucracy, he is driven to commit transgressive acts. At one level it is Red bearing witness to some of the inequities of his time. At a deeper level Red faces the question (or the reality) of how the artist reaches out to society. Is this only possible through transgression?
Red’s career has so far spanned almost thirty years, run the diversity from experimental shorts to narrative fiction films shot on a variety of formats from super 8 through 35 mm to the RED camera. His work has been recognized at all levels up to Palme d’Or. Throughout it all Red has remained one of those rare artists in cinema – from the very beginning, a natural, uncompromising filmmaker whose every work adds to the vocabulary of the native tongue in which he is most fluent – the language of cinema itself.
Roger
Garcia