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A WELCOME CHANGE
Avellana’s Portrait stands out from the current crop of films mired
in triviality, copying, and
sensationalism.
By Ophelia San Juan
IN AN age of fast guns, tasteless sex, and sick
humor, the advent of Lamberto V. Avellana’s film version of the lyrical,
evocative, compassionate, and beautiful play by Nick Joaquin, A Portrait Of The
Artist As Filipino, is a welcome change.
It is a noteworthy artistic product of men recognized as the best in
their respective fields.
Portrait
is set in Intramuros – the old Manila, the original Manila, according to the
author, where the erstwhile splendid townhouses of the principal families “had
come down in the world” and were “no longer splendid, no longer the seats of
the mighty, abandoned and forgotten, they stood decaying all along the street;
dreaming of past glories, growing ever more dark and dingy and dilapidated with
the years; turning into slum-tenements at last” – in the destruction and the
horror it would bring, “the year of Hitler for Europe – but for us over here,
it was the year of the Conga and the Boogie-Woogie, the year of practice
black-outs, the year of the Bare Midriff.”
Unique Setting
More
particularly, however, Portrait is set in the stately old house of the painter
Don Lorenzo Marasigan, the only house on Intramuros’s Calle Real that never
became a slum-tenement, that remained as well-kept as the dignity, the
individuality, and the nobility of the old artist and his two spinster
daughters, Candida and Paula. The world
of the three hold-outs of Intramuros’s vanishing grandeur and regality is a
world “where all’s accustomed, ceremonious,” and while “outside, the world was
hurrying gaily towards destruction,” in the Marasigan house “life went on as
usual; unaltered, unchanged; everything in its proper place; everything just
the same today as yesterday, or last year, or a hundred years ago.”
The
play, as well as the film, dwells on the grace and the beauty of a past age,
and on the drama of lives passionately caught in the harsh transition to a new
one.
A
Portrait Of The Artist As Filipino, on film, has beauty, high drama,
significance, originality, polish and that requisite of all art creativity,
which makes of it the product of only the most intelligent and artistic men
involved in the filmmaking in the Philippines today.
It
takes three, to make a film: a writer, a
producer, and a director. All three have
to share something in common, a passion for art not unlike the aching of a
woman for her lover, or of a seedling for the sun, only in this instance their
individual passions or daemons must be complimentary, and in harmony and
consonance, to be able to create, not individual pieces but a totality of
ideas, feelings, attitudes and actions.
Such
three lovers came together for Portrait, the initial film of Diadem
Productions.
Celebrated Figure
Nick
Joaquin, the author, is the most celebrated figure in the Philippine literary
world today. This year’s winner of the
Palanca Memorial Award for short story, who was also the recipient of a number
of major literary awards and fellowships in the past, has been called “the most
distinguished living Filipino writer,” “the first literary artist of the
country,” and “the only Filipino writer with a real imagination – that
imagination of power and depth and great metaphysical seeing – and which knows
how to express itself in great language” – he has been called those by critics
and other writers, among them the poet Jose Garcia Villa and the UP professor
and creative writer Francisco Arcellana.
Teodoro M. Locsin, writing the introduction to Joaquin’s Prose and
Poems, says: “No Filipino now writing
matches his stories in power and beauty; their wedding of primitive emotions
with sophisticated treatment is beyond the power of local practitioners of the
art. Here are the dark, instinctive
drives of men and women caught in a cage of glittering words. Here is the shapeless sub-conscious given
significance and form.”
The
only play he has written so far, A Portrait Of The Artist As Filipino, is
nonetheless the best Filipino play in English.
It has body, depth, meaning, scope, universality, timelessness, and,
most important of all, that grandeur and loveliness of expression that comes
only from Nick Joaquin – “agrifted stylist,” in the words of Manuel A. Viray.
The
English language is used as the medium of expression in the Portrait film, just
as Joaquin himself used a “borrowed” language, but one he uses with felicity,
beauty, and grace, to produce some of the best Filipino literary works. In fact, not English alone is used in the
film, but Spanish phrases as well may be heard being uttered by some of the
main characters, specially the older ones.
Explaining the incorporation of foreign languages other than English in
Portrait, the film-makers said that our ancestors were not only bi-lingual like
us, but in most instances were even quadri-lingual. And presenting them in the film in the way they
actually talked is one more step toward achieving realism, which is what the
producers of Portrait aim at.
Their Record
The
producers of Portrait are the same producer-director team of Manuel de Leon and
Lamberto V. Avellana that made the two best Filipino movies in the Asian Film
Festival competitions: Anak-Dalita and
Badjao. The former won the grand prize
of the Festival in 1956; the latter the ad hoc prizes for best direction, best
screen play, best editing, and best actor in 1957. These same films have also been entered in
non-competitive film festivals in Europe and the Americas, been exhibited in US
art theaters. They have given the
Philippines its initial claim to international cinema.
De
Leon, who has been a loss to the Philippine movies industry since the shutdown
of LVN, is making his first tentative comeback to film financing. He is doing it with an eye to the big
international market, reasoning that if a film can be good enough for worldwide
viewing, it logically is good for the Philippine segment as well. This should come about automatically, but De
Leon is going even further and is insuring his sizable Philippine patronage by
accepting Avellana’s proposal to make a film that has significance for Philippine
life in addition to its universal values.
Such
a film obviously is A Portrait Of The Artist As Filipino, which is rich in the
elements of Philippine cultural heritage and a-glitter with the human verities.
Manny de Leon
A
well-educated, well-brought up young man, Manny de Leon can be expected to
favor the production of films that would not be an insult to the intelligence
of its audience and a slap in the face of common decency.
As
an astute businessman, he must also know that the doubtful appeal of mediocre
films will not be for the greater part of the population, nor for long.
He
also knows that his producer-friends in the Federation of Motion Picture
Producers in Asia, the organization that sponsors the annual Asian Film Festival,
regard him as a serious and responsible producer. And it would be unworthy of him to make, as
his comeback picture, anything less than the excellence promised by the basic
material of Joaquin’s play.
He
knows, too from the experience of Anak-Dalita and Badjao, if not also from his
intimate discussions of the problems of Filipino films with Avellana that only
the director of the only Grand Prix-winning film of the Philippines would be
suitable for the direction of Portrait.
Avellana Is Best Qualified
In
the first place, the Joaquin play is set in the old Intramuros, a place that
Avellana became familiar with as a student at the Ateneo de Manila, when this
exclusive school for boys was still located in that “ever loyal and noble
city.” The period, the years before the
war, was also a familiar one with Avellana.
And the types of characters in the play are individuals whose manners of
dressing and ways of talking, whose big dreams and deep-reaching problems, were
nothing strange to him, since he himself had known friends and relatives with
the same cultural heritage and social attitudes as the Marasigan family’s.
This
insight into Intramuros life possessed by Avellana is not unlike the insight of
Joaquin’s. It makes the film
interpretation of the play easier for the film-maker.
And,
in going into the task of making Portrait into a film, Avellana has the
educational background, the sophisticated understanding, to translate the
elegiac play into an equally evocative film of mood, atmosphere, and pervasive
sense of physical decay and moral triumph.
Can
one think of any other Filipino director with as rich an educational and
creative background as Avellana’s; a director who could as properly read
Joaquin, with the inner eye of experience and the outer heart of knowledge?
Is
there any other Filipino director who has proved his ability to communicate so
lucidly, so articulately, and so brilliantly with foreign movie audiences,
particularly with the critical ones, the movie critics and writers and
directors who usually attend the international film festivals?
All Three Of Them
Only
Avellana has had pictures, of both the narrative and the documentary types,
exhibited and praised at film festivals and in art theatres in the United
States and Europe.
Furthermore, since Portrait is a play written in English, and for its
purpose or objective of drawing and attracting intelligent and critical
audiences both local and foreign, needs to be made with English dialogue,
Lamberto V. Avellana is ideal for it, since only he among all the directors in
Filipino movies today, is truly capable of handling English not just fairly but
with compelling authority.
With
Manuel de Leon’s resources as producer, Nick Joaquin’s creative talent as
writer, and Avellana’s rich experience as director, A Portrait Of The Artist As
Filipino has all the chances to emerge as the best Filipino picture ever made.
Filipino films have reached such a nadir of deterioration that it is inevitable,
as a law of nature, that a counter force or reaction should burgeon into the
making of a film that will, in effect, elevate the Filipino film to a new
stature of artistry richer than ever before.
That
film is easily De Leon’s presentation of the Diadem productions of Nick
Joaquin’s A Portrait Of The Artist As Filipino, a film by Lamberto V. Avellana.
Source: The Weekly Nation, September 10, 1965
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