Mainstream Care Work Films: A New Filipino Genre as an Assertion of Contemporary History
Article
The paper proposes a postmodernist framework that can be used to analyze the development not only of care work films that emerged from the Filipinos’ role in the global care work chain and their increasing power to sustain the Philippine film industry but also of other social phenomena that arise from mass production and mass consumption dynamics. The framework derives from theories of Bakhtinian “dialogism,” Foucauldian “discourse,” Gramscian “hegemony,” and Gladwellian “tipping point” and an assertion that care work films, taken as a “new” film genre, is a valid starting point in the study of contemporary Filipino history shaped by globalization.
A Brief History of the Baguio Sine
Article
The establishment, growth and death of the stand-alone movie theaters (sine) in Baguio City is narrated from the 1900s to the beginning of the 2000s, noting the context for their establishment and the reasons for their rise and decline. Using Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, the Baguio sine is then analyzed: first, as a social space initially reflecting the Baguio locals’ resistance and accommodation of the American colonizer who developed the city as a resort town; and second, as a site of negotiation where the colonized developed their own hybrid identity and culture. This study on the independent movie theaters in Baguio is circumscribed in a domestic setting, allowing for the inclusion of vernacular memory in the construction of history.
Camera EDSA Obscura
Article
Twenty years after the EDSA uprising, 20 independent filmmakers created 20 films showing different images of the country. Ending the project with the film Mistulang Kamera Obskura, the omnibus film project self-crtically staged its representation of the social and the political. The camera obscura has a long and fraught history as a metaphor of ideology, most prominently broached by Marx in his discussion of being, consciousness, and ideology. This paper discusses the relation of the camera obscura to discourses of visuality, knowledge, and ideology. Reading the moving images as concretizations of ideas, it seeks to limit those ideas as constitutive of the various ideologies of the EDSA uprising which the filmmakers represent in the process of “depicting truthful images of the nation.”
