Film: American Influences on Philippine Cinema

By Nick Deocampo

This book is a sequel to Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines, and part of Nick Deocampo’s extensive research on Philippine cinema. Tracing the beginnings of motion pictures from its Spanish roots, this book advances Deocampo’s scholarly study of cinema’s evolution in the hands of Americans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712728969

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Introduction

Colonial Beginnings of Native Cinema

This book is about the formative beginnings of cinema in the Philippines. Its reconstruction of the past looks back at a major historical juncture that saw significant events happen¹ —the decline of Spanish rule, the birth of the Filipino nation, and the advance of American imperialism. In this whirlpool of change, cinema was introduced, and its growth paralleled historical events surrounding and shaping the formation of the Philippine republic in the coming century. Born as twin to the nation, cinema mirrored historical conditions shaping the destiny of the emerging nation-state. Like its prequel, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines,² this second volume in a five-book series accounts for the colonial foundations of what would one day become known as Philippine cinema. The road towards knowing this formative phase has been a long and winding one, with many originary paths long forgotten, if not forsaken, from collective memory. This volume reveals another layer buried underneath what may be considered as a sedimentary foundation on which our present-day native cinema stands. While many of us in the present see this cinema as Filipino, and take pride in regarding it as such, very few realize how this local cinema—cherished as our national cinema—had its beginnings in the colonial, in what was foreign. Little do we know that what we consider as Philippine cinema had for its foundation our colonial past, our American past.

Responding to the urgent need for the newly independent country to define a culture that would befit its status as an independent nation, both the identity and the history of cinema were conceived and defined with the nation as the guiding paradigm, bestowing cinema its national identity. This left cinema’s colonial episode deleted, consciously or not, from the historical memory that came to be constructed in order to satisfy nationalist demands.³ It is only recently that film historians addressed this sense of historical lack, making references to an American past that helped give clarity to issues that continue to create contradictions, if not confusion, regarding the identity of our present cinema and the problems that arise regarding its history, nature and origin. Through their essays, Agustin Sotto and Lena Pareja bring out details regarding American film pioneers who founded the native film industry, while Clodualdo A. del Mundo and Ernie de Pedro provide accounts of early film productions of itinerant American filmmakers.⁴ Recently, American film historian Charles Musser has given his scholarly contribution in re-defining early Philippine film history by bringing out little-known details about the role played by the early American filmmakers (such as Edward Meyer Gross) in the formation of native cinema and the implications of their pioneering activities in the formulation of Philippine film historiography.⁵ Their piecemeal writings, however, still leave a yawning gap in our knowledge of the past as it relates to our present notion of what has become known as the Philippine cinema. There remains much to be written about the subject as this colonial period became the bedrock of what in time became the Filipinos’ national pastime.⁶

The emergence of cinema comes with the birth of the Filipino nation.

In defining this unwritten history, this book seeks to achieve several things: establish a unique historical period of early cinema where the prevailing condition was colonial rather than native, and film was to be seen as internationalist in operation and business rather than nationalist; re-evaluate cinema’s American past which, together with its earlier Spanish one, provides local cinema with its formative years of development and, in doing so, find out what in their influences helped shape the cinema that we know today; and finally, problematize what may be termed as a "trialectic" of cultural influences referring to the interplay of three cultural forces and ideologies that shaped this cinema, counting among them the two hegemonic cultural forces contained in Hispanismo⁷ and Anglo-sajonismo⁸ battling each other for dominance over local cinema, and the third force, Filipinismo,⁹ which resulted from the Filipino people’s struggle for independence and self-determination, including what they tried to achieve in cinema. All these three forces came into an encounter, or perhaps a collision, and then a synthesis to provide cinema the cultural framework that helped define the medium and its social use. It is through this encounter between what was foreign and what was native that cinema saw its beginnings and took its first steps to become what would later turn into a national culture, a Filipino cinema. While the Filipino character of this cinema eventually overtook the more dominant two due to political realities leading to the country’s independence—also making it easy to dismiss and forget the foreign two due to this emerging cinema’s claim to a totalizing national hegemony (although this can be contested)—this book revisits the past to uncover the reasons behind the phenomenon of Filipinizing cinema: what overwhelming odds were faced and how negotiations (and co-optations) were waged against the more controlling and resilient foreign cultural forces.

Language provides a clue to the layered identity of native cinema—from Hispanic to English to Tagalog—as seen in these movie ad titles.

A Trialectic of Cultural Influences Define Early Cinema

Let us start our journey towards knowing cinema’s formative beginnings with the cultural encounter that happened when a foreign device called a motion picture was introduced into the native society. Its arrival was signaled by novelty and exclusivity as the imported equipment was first introduced to the Western community in the coastal community of Manila at the close of the 19th century. The expatriate residents knew of its invention through newspapers and word-of-mouth (all in a language, Spanish, that both defined and restricted the spread of knowledge about the spectacle). When film (the popular term motion picture would come later, after a host of other names that reflected the inventions that used and then displayed it¹⁰) was introduced to the native population, many questions can be raised about this initial encounter. At what level did the natives recognize the medium? Was it at the level of the technological, cultural, or personal experience? Was there an acceptance of film, and if so, on what terms: a technological invention, an entertainment spectacle, as magic, as an unwelcome form of Western intrusion? How did local audiences view the spectacle happening before them? Was there a homogenous reception of it across the archipelago among different ethnic tribes and communities? As film progressed, how did this foreign device become native entertainment, later occupying the lofty position of a national culture, displacing all other forms of traditional entertainment and cultural forms such as the Spanish zarzuela (and its native offspring, sarsuwela), dula, or awit? How, indeed, do we account for the cultural encounter between the foreign film and its native audience?

The situation in the Philippines regarding the entry of motion pictures into the local domain is far from being a simple case of a monolithic foreign apparatus making its entry into a native society. Manila, being a cosmopolitan center at the time of film’s arrival, was already in a colonial struggle with Spain, which for centuries imposed its Eurocentric influences on the native population, when another Western colonial power—the United States of America—came to wrest the control of las islas Filipinas (later renamed The Philippine Islands after the Americans colonized the country, and eventually known as The Philippines).

America’s arrival would complicate film’s eventual development, as it shared common interest with European businesses in introducing and exploiting the medium. Unable to dislodge centuries of Spanish and European cultural influences over the urbanized native society, America’s aggressive entry into this society would affect the promotion of European cinema locally, and the competition would reflect the conflicting cultural influences of America and Spain/Europe. Consider, too, that film arrived at the time when nationalist forces were fighting a bloody and determined struggle to depose foreign forces on native soil. Under such a condition, the nascent film would be drawn into a vortex of cultural contestations, turning the infant cinema into a site for nationalist yearnings, which created on screen visions of native cinematic desire.

Considering the complexity of the social condition when cinema first came to our shores, is there a framework upon which we may be able to understand cinema’s formative beginnings? The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel devised a method of logic called dialectic to explain observable social and economic processes, which, plainly described, works on the principle that an idea or event (thesis) generates its opposite (antithesis), leading to a reconciliation of the two (synthesis) when the conflict is overcome by arriving at a higher level of truth.¹¹ This new thesis generates its own opposite, arriving at a new synthesis, and as the same process progresses, it results in intellectual or historical development. Looking for a model to explain the events surrounding the emergence of cinema in the Philippines, we may see the same dialectical process at work, although using this process, as this book argues, may provide a reductivist view of cinema as shaped merely by two colonial forces (Spanish and American) acting on each other. This dualistic view tends to ignore the greater reality, where there were three forces (including the nascent Filipino)—although unequal to the two in its degree of influence—which acted upon the infant medium and simultaneously shaped it during its crucial formative years. One cannot ignore the growing native participation/resistance that has also had its share of influencing the medium through its engaged reception/repulsion of motion pictures that could only in later years develop into other ways of taking control of the medium, i.e., exhibition, distribution and production. Looking at three cultural influences at play gives a more realistic analysis of the complex colonial and native forces influencing cinema’s early years. In considering this three-cornered configuration of early cinema, is Hegel’s dialectical principle enough to explain what shaped Philippine cinema? Or can we devise a new model that is better suited to address what appears like a complex origin of cinema, where three influences interacted to shape the growth of that cinema? Can we suggest a trialectic of forces as a way to describe the three-way conflict and synthesis between cultural forces shaping cinema’s infancy and early growth? Each of these forces with its attendant ideology—the Hispanic (Hispanismo), Anglo-American (Anglosajonismo) and the latent native (later to develop into Filipinismo)—actively advanced its own agenda of identity and growth:

(1)  the retreating Hispanic culture found tenacity in casting its receding influence on native society by seeking refuge in the latest technology, cinema;

(2)  the incoming Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-American culture aggressively shaped native cinema in the heat of U.S. occupation, and;

(3)  the emerging Filipino consciousness sought ways to shape cinema through its active reception of or resistance to motion pictures and their advancing influence, in order to insist on its own native aspirations.

This trialectic of forces best describes the complex nature of how early cinema in the Philippines took shape in the hands of those who wielded power and those who devoured the medium. These forces were not of equal dynamism, as the first two were fighting for dominance and the third was barely visible, save for the power it exercised as a collective body of consumers and movie patrons. They all, however, asserted each other’s claim for control over the infant cinema. Interactions between them—their tensions and co-optations, their inadequacies and gains—would make them leave lasting marks on the cinema that would develop. Building on a process similar to Hegel’s dialectic, each of the cultural forces had its own logic of development, although this was challenged by the beliefs held by the two others, who in turn opposed each other and tried to appropriate the medium into its own. Similarly, like in Hegel’s logic again, the end-game showed a cinema that would contain a synthesis of the three, overcoming each other’s inadequacies and resolving the overall conflict resulting from their separate cultural agendas. What came about was a cinema that, even if called Filipino, did not only speak of the triumph of the native but also contained elements of the two colonial agents that left their indelible influences on this cinema’s identity and development.

Considering the above trialectical view, this book (and those belonging to the series) draws up several questions to guide each volume in addressing the various layers shaping Philippine cinema: How did cinema come about, as shaped by each of these cultural forces, and what conflicts resulted from their interaction with each other? In the light of the strong colonial influences brought about by the two earlier cultures, when did cinema become national, i.e., Filipino? If cinema was not yet considered Filipino during the early years of colonization, what identity did it assume? Conversely, when cinema became Filipino, how and where did it begin and did it cease engaging itself with the colonial? Was the national a stage where we may consider cinema to be an identity that was adequately autonomous? If not, what dynamics shaped the forming of the national cinema in the light of colonial influences impinging on its growth and identity?

To focus on this book’s concerns, we will look at how the U.S. occupation of the Philippine Islands provided an opportunity for motion pictures to be imported and to flourish, considering that the United States was not only emerging as a world political and economic superpower during this time but also as a global film power aiming to dominate the international film market. This book tries to account for the American influences that would shape its colony’s emerging cinema and in the process serve U.S. imperialist and colonial interests.

In brief, this book considers six areas where American influences were cast on the emerging Tagalog (later to become Filipino) cinema:

technology and capital—providing material and financial influences in all aspects of the film business, including production, distribution, promotion, and exhibition;

language—referring to the use of the English language in dialogue and promotions and also to film’s audio-visual language, which favored the use of the classical Hollywood narrative as the dominant film language to be used in local filmmaking;

aesthetics—introduction of popular genres such as the western, melodrama, action, comedy, and horror and the conditions for their production such as the adoption of the studio and the star systems, use of styles such as realism or fantasy, and use of conventions such as feature-length duration or adherence to the line-of-axis in film editing;

reception—shaping audiences to assume viewing practices that made them a captive Hollywood market and an object for its collective escapist fantasy; and

ideology—creating beliefs that upheld the dominance of Hollywood cinema and the American way of life.

These are the six areas in which the emerging cinema was shaped by the overpowering American colonial presence and which, in turn, also helped to vernacularize the Western medium, through a shared, if contested experience of the moving-picture apparatus with the natives. The power relations that a film casts between the filming subject and the filmed object, as well as between film commodity and audience, between film producer and market, symbolically speak of the shared, albeit contentious, colonial relations Filipinos experienced under their American colonizers. It is these relations that inform the twelve chapters comprising this volume. Chapter I defines this book’s core theme of cinema and colonization, which lays down the historical and political premise of the evolution of motion pictures after the Americans occupied the Philippines. Chapter II identifies the pioneer American filmmakers who introduced moving pictures to the colony and made the first filmic representations of the country and its people. Chapter III presents the first wave of films made about the colony belonging to several genres from newsreels to documentaries to fiction films. Chapter IV reveals a pre-Hollywood Manila, when the capital city was Eurocentric in its business and conducted its film affairs by looking towards Europe, rather than America, for its film needs. Chapter V speaks of a nascent film industry when the project of Americanizing the local motion-picture business entrenched U.S. business interests in the country, allowing film to spread and flourish (along with American colonial interests) across the archipelago. Chapter VI discusses the early American film productions that saw resident Americans embark on film production and produced the first locally made films, thus providing the foundations for a native film industry to one day grow. Chapter VII details the roots of Hollywood dominance after it assumed global supremacy, showing what elements in its popular medium and industrial practice became part of the emerging local film industry. Chapter VIII discusses the rupture caused by the outbreak of World War II and what responses America made with regard to cinema in the Philippines. Chapter IX shows how the deep ties between the U.S. and the Philippines turned Hollywood into a mecca for Filipinos aspiring to break into Tinseltown. The last three chapters summarize in thematic ways the influences cast by the Americans on the native cinema. Each of the remaining chapters has been made to tackle two themes regarding the said American influences. Chapter X discusses the themes of Technology and Economics as they provided material bases for cinema to technically start and what economic conditions made possible the growth of such a cinema. Chapter XI inventories American contributions in the Material Production of local films and what Aesthetics emerged from them. Finally, Chapter XII closes the volume with a discussion of the influences that the Americans made in forging local cinema’s Ideology and the Language this native cinema would speak, orally and cinematically. In all these chapters, the cultural encounter between a foreign medium and its local host is historically instantiated, although this empirical writing is not yet occasioned by a deeper theoretical mediation that would best be left to a later volume, when the reading of history will yield a useful theory to understand this native cinema. Likewise, the application of the idea of trialectic, although presented in this volume, has hardly been engaged in seriously with the discussions, nor applied meaningfully, as this is still a volume that uncovers a layer, and therefore favors, that which is deeply concentrated on American influences. The notion of the trialectic serves, foremost, as a framework of thinking about the layers of influences that acted on the formation of native cinema, and this will become helpful for our final reflections on the matter. The author accepts these limitations not merely as his own but as a reality that we all need to address coming from the nature of this book being published in installments (with their attendant limited resources) and, most of all, from the difficulty of producing books on Philippine film history, particularly about its obscure beginnings.

Cartoon photo of Uncle Sam with magnifying glass looking at a globe showing the Philippines.

Imperialist and Colonialist Discourses

Compared to other forms of representation coming from a similar historical period, film compares marginally in terms of the studies made about its formative beginnings, although parallel concerns may be found. This is quite surprising if one considers that cinema was regarded as the country’s national culture during the past century, a period coinciding with the birth and formation of the national body politic. In revealing how cinema developed during its early years under U.S. colonial rule, this book finds kinship with similar works made by other scholars focusing on the same period and expressing the same (anti)colonial concerns, although the media considered by them were photography, political cartoons and paintings. Writings of scholars such as Vicente Rafael, Benito Vergara Jr., and Sharon Delmendo provide a robust discussion of how, for example, photography (and also of film, in the case of Delmendo) was used by U.S. colonial powers to advance their interests, allowing the ruling powers to regard the Philippines not only as a political possession, but a visual possession as well.¹² Benito Vergara Jr., reflecting on the mass production and circulation of photographs depicting the Philippines and Filipinos at the turn of the century, remarked how photographs made of the country (u)ltimately…constituted what was known to the American readers as ‘the Philippines.’¹³ While Vergara and other scholars have problematized the role that photography played in legitimizing the American colonial enterprise in the Philippines, we ask, what took so long for a similar study to be made involving the more popular motion pictures? If photographs were a privileged mode of obtaining knowledge and expressing reality and it became unusually effective for the representation and justification of colonialist ideology,¹⁴ how much more can be said of moving pictures, whose verisimilitude with reality makes the viewer almost mistake the moving picture for reality itself?

Locating film’s early formative years at the time of U.S. occupation (while also keeping in mind film’s initial arrival under the Spaniards), the shared interests found in this book with the earlier writings allow it to unpack major events related to U.S. colonization, the development of cinema, the birth of the Filipino nation, the plight of the natives, who were both subjects of colonialism and of cinema, and most of all, cinema’s embodiment of the dominant ideologies spurred by the colonizing agents. No different from photographs, although perhaps more real to those who viewed them, early films made about the Philippines and its people became visual representations that would constitute the Philippines for American viewers. From the first mention of the country in the Thomas Edison film Troop Ships for the Philippines, produced in 1898, to later films like The Battle of Manila (1898) and Aguinaldo’s Navy (1900), the Philippines and its unruly inhabitants began to enter the American public consciousness. Knowledge about the country and its people was provided by the truth seen through those motion pictures, even if many were shot as fabricated scenes in American studios, not in actual locations; and the so-called Filipinos were not real natives but rather actors dressed up and made to act like natives. As Sharon Delmendo wrote, Putting the Philippines on Americans’ cognitive map secured the Philippines’ position on the U.S. map of territorial possession.¹⁵ This helped facilitate what she refers to as the larger American colonizing mission (while referring to the Philippine Reservation in the 1904 St. Louis’ Fair, where natives were displayed for public viewing and were photographed): to naturalize the territorial acquisition of the Philippines so that the archipelago seemed to have been always already a part of the United States.¹⁶

It is interesting to see how early films made about the country and its people were products of both the imperialist and colonialist minds shaping native realities to fit their respective ideologies to govern and rule the islands. One may call imperialist films those that were made outside of the colony and shot in a distant location (i.e., in the U.S.) to fictionalize events happening across the Pacific Ocean.¹⁷ Filmmakers brought to the screen stories that may perhaps have been true accounts from the battlefields but were now re-staged or re-constructed to become fictional works. Colonial films, on the other hand, were those films shot in actual location (the colony) after the foreign ruling power had set up its seat of government in the conquered territory. With the power to rule now situated in the land it sought to administer, the films produced under an implanted administration became products of the colonizing powers governing the occupied land. Films made under this foreign regime contained the marks of colonial mandate as they conformed to the demands of the ruling power, or even in the way they reacted against it. In this way, colonial films served no better purpose than those photographs taken during the American period whose aim, as Vicente Rafael describes it, was to convert the colonized into objects of foreign interest and subjects of colonial accounts that historically has lent to photography a predatory and cannibalistic quality.¹⁸ Motion pictures made at the same time that Rafael describes were bestowed with the same imperialist and colonialist ways of looking at native subjects. This may be seen from the films made by travelling American filmmakers who were the first to shoot films in the country, such as the travelogue filmmaker E. Burton Holmes and the American Mutoscope and Biograph cameraman C. Fred Ackerman. Their films not only documented the country and its native affairs, but also appeared to be early forms of film surveillance in a country that was placed under strict military rule from 1899 until 1901, the very years when the first motion pictures were taken by these filmmakers. Their films could not be dissociated from the conditions which allowed them to be produced—a time of martial rule where everything, including the showing and watching of movies, had to be approved by military rulers. We can only agree with Rafael when he declares, like the gun, the camera has been part of the technology of subjugation,¹⁹ only this time, the camera to which this book refers is the moving-picture camera.

A Need to Define Early Cinema

Considering the need to understand cinema’s beginnings without being distorted by our present-day understanding of it, or mistaking its past with its contemporary identity, another contribution this book seeks to introduce is a new way of historicizing cinema’s beginning that will be more true to the actual events that happened then, not only to the medium itself but to the social context that made film’s arrival and growth possible. It suggests the recognition of a period which we may call early cinema.²⁰ It is a period in film history typified by conditions far different from when cinema outgrew this period and whose traits will be discussed in this book. The early cinema is a special period characterized by filmic elements born out of the technological progress obtaining at the time. These also includes its film language favoring what Tom Gunning calls cinema of attractions,²¹ rather than the more linear classical Hollywood narrative we now find in commercial films. Moreover, this period had qualities of unstable market conditions, lack of sound and color, dominance of Europe as the global source of films, and other factors that will be discussed.

Conceiving a separate period for early cinema in the Philippines may be significant in several ways. It provides an opportunity to re-think the way Philippine cinema has been held dear by many of our film scholars as nation-centric when its early episode clearly shows that it was not—it was colonial and internationalist. Acknowledging this early phase also requires us to reconsider when to date the beginning of our film history, to whom do we attribute its origin, which set of motion pictures do we consider as seminal representations made in and of the country and its people, and what cinematic practices were in place that laid down the foundations for cinema’s future growth? These and other historical issues that can be found only with a serious study of early cinema may help us to reassess how motion pictures belonged to a period whose realities were different from our own.

In defining early cinema, one question greets us immediately: What historical period does it cover? While no precise dates may determine its exact timeframe, certain conditions may suggest its temporality, although its beginning may be easier located in time than its end. The period may be said to start at the time when motion pictures were first brought into the country—including its prior period of promotion in newspapers—and it may be suggested that this period ended at the time when the global film condition went through a major realignment as a result of the outbreak of World War I.

Early cinema in the Philippines may safely be said to have begun in late 1896, although film would only be shown on January 1, 1897. The early appearance of words related to motion pictures in newspapers such as the Spanish-language El Comercio would mark the time when cinema in its early form, known as kronofotografo—also called cronofotografo and later, referring to another device, cinematografo, which was shortened to cine and its local equivalent, sine—was brought to local public awareness and vocabulary through articles in Spanish newspapers that announced its arrival.²² From its early beginning, which contained markings of its Hispanic past, cinema developed attributes that would reveal the conditions prevailing at that time—films were made of foreign technologies imported from the West; their subjects were of foreign interest although locally consumed; public presentation was combined with local theatrical shows; films were silent but with musical accompaniment and were colorized rather than with natural color; and other unique conditions. This period developed different sets of cinematic practices that would set it apart from later film developments. As mentioned, film language was more in the form of cinematic attractions rather than the narratives that would become the Hollywood standard in storytelling in later years. The technology for producing and the manners of exhibiting motion pictures also belonged to a different era. Admission prices, theatrical venues, promotional campaigns, advertisements, and ways of watching films bespoke of a bygone time that is so different from the digital, multiplex film culture we presently enjoy.

If early cinema began in 1896, when did it end? While there may be no exact date when this period stopped, one may suggest that it may have ended immediately following the end of World War I, as Charles Musser suggests.²³ This suggestion makes sense when one looks at what happened in the Philippines around this time. As this book will show, the outbreak of World War I in 1914 caused European film industries to collapse, resulting in their failure to sustain the film markets they once dominated globally. Major studios such as the French Pathé, and even relatively smaller ones like the Danish Nordisk, wilted in the scathing devastation that brought Europe to its knees. This end of European dominance provided a golden opportunity for Hollywood. With its star on the rise, America’s film capital soon filled the world market with its products. By war’s end, the world awakened to a new order in film: Hollywood ruled.

This turn of events was felt more dramatically in the Philippines than in any other part of Asia. As an American territory, the colony experienced the brunt of this sudden change of fortune, with the takeover of the local film market almost becoming immediate. Accounts in local newspapers appeared more frequently in the years following World War I reporting of local film distributors and exhibitors switching to New York and Hollywood in sourcing for films to show in their theaters as a result of shipments from Europe drying up.²⁴ What came after World War I and how it ended the early cinema period in the Philippines is best described by the following:

A seismic change happened after World War I ended in 1918. It became a pivotal year for film history as film industries in individual colonies (in Asia) started changing their market allegiance from Europe to Hollywood. More importantly for this year, native film productions began to be made causing a dent in foreign film importation and dominance, although minor in market effect. By designating the period after 1918 as a dividing line for Asia’s colonial cinemas as they entered a new period, the following years offer to film history meanings that have yet to be mined for their historiographic significance.²⁵

With major structural changes happening in the world film market, those changes were felt locally when the film products being used and consumed changed from European to American; new players dictated the market; and fresh ideological allegiances were propagated. All these set the post-World War I period apart from the phase regarded as early cinema (pre-World War I). Instead of European interests dominating the early cinema screens, Hollywood film businesses overtook them. Musser described what happened to the Philippines in post-1918 as one where the country became part of what he calls the Hollywood system of world cinema.²⁶ This came about after Universal studio set up a distribution branch in Manila in 1918, followed by other American studios.²⁷ It is important to point out, too, that it was in 1919 that the first Filipino film outfit, Malayan Movies, produced the country’s first native film.²⁸ Jose Nepomuceno, the first Philippine native film director, made his feature-length film debut, Dalagang Bukid (Country Maiden) and opened the path for other native-produced films. The end of World War I therefore came as a neat demarcation line for cinema in the Philippines, as it provided a period whose qualities were made differently from the early cinema phase. This period offered a beginning to a new film order and saw the start of the native industry, even if it was dominated by Hollywood. With the early cinema period finally coming to an end, a new era in local filmmaking started.

Honorata Atang de la Rama, star of Dalagang Bukid.

Finding an end to early cinema is not without its problems. Musser points out one in what appears like a contradiction between Hollywood’s newfound ambition to dominate world film markets (in particular, the Philippines) and the subsequent rise of native filmmakers. Are the two events contradictory? Musser says no. Rather they are to be seen as a form of dialectic. The parallel growths of Hollywood cinema on native soil on the one hand and the rise of native filmmaking on the other provided the two a chance to engage each other in a creative tension, producing benefits and not mere disadvantages. What came out from this tension yielded interesting results for the cinema that was to develop. In hindsight, we see that Hollywood, serving as the master cinema, gave local productions a template to follow in content and form, even as the practice, when abused (as indeed it was), put the native film industry in a state of market, material, and creative dependency.

Looking at it another way, however, the native film market provided viability to Hollywood products, although this resulted in a market monopoly that put the local industry on the short end of the bargain. In examining what happened in the past, this study of early cinema helps to find the reasons why American influences on local cinema were not easy to dispel, along with reasons why they are tenacious even up till now. We shall find out in this book that the influences have been systemic, substantial and ideological, and their efficacy deep and pervasive, although not without resistance and subversion from the natives, who soon had a hand in running the country’s cinematic establishment.

Having established the timeframe of early cinema, perhaps it might also be proper to ask: Why is the study of early cinema important? In another book,²⁹ this writer outlined its importance, which should be reiterated here. Of major significance in the study of early cinema is the knowledge it provides regarding the colonial relations that made possible film’s introduction to host societies like the Philippines. Such a study may also provide insights into modernity as a motivating influence for Filipinos to break away from their traditional past with regard to entertainment; technology as a revolutionizing agent that re-defined native culture and shaped the definition of collective social space with its notion of what is public; identity of many educated and affluent classes who struggled to attain self-determination and from whose ranks emerged local film’s pioneers; economic power, as capitalism offered enticing profits and economic advancements through the film business; and film reception, as motion pictures appealed to viewers whose sheer volume as a consuming market made the Philippines a major base of the American cinematographic empire in the Pacific. It is through the mediation of native audiences that cinema became widely accepted, paving the way for film’s entrenchment as a wildly popular public entertainment. This acceptance and patronage would one day have strong consequences for ideology formation, as film produced a public collective that would also be the source and strength for nation-building.

In thinking about early cinema, does the term also mean pre-national? One may be misled to think that the years before cinema became national comprised of a period of colonial cinema (or pre-national) while the following years became one of independent, anti-colonial (in short, national) cinema. This is far from the truth. In reality, colonial powers continued to remain cultural hegemonic forces, as foreign film agents exercised their colonial control over local film businesses despite the initial production of native films. The Americans continued to be in control of the colonial Filipino society after 1918, and so it was with the developing cinema. Coincidentally, the post-early cinema period also saw the start of the production of native symbols and practices signifying the Filipinos’ national identity while under the strict and watchful eye of the U.S. colonial government. National institutions, i.e., the National Archives, National Library, and National Congress, were all set up under the supervision of the U.S. government, which even designated what bird, flower, and hero to adopt as the country’s national symbols. But despite all these appearances and flourishing of national symbols, the country sunk deeper into the American influence.

To explain this apparent paradox, Filipino historian Resil Mojares reveals how the U.S. colonial government was, in theory, supportive of establishing national institutions, which appeared to be contrary to its colonial interests in the country.³⁰ Native-produced films may be included among those that fostered the expression of national representation in a very public way (although such expression met with immediate censorship when expressions of patriotic sentiment were shown in the films). Censorship was put into active use in the same year when the first narrative, dramatic films (not actualities anymore) were produced in 1912. Surprisingly, and paradoxically, American filmmakers were the first to show themes of nationalist significance with their premiere productions of the life and martyrdom of Dr. Jose Rizal, or nationalist plays like Walang Sugat (Not Wounded),³¹ or about the three martyred priests³² who inspired the Philippine Revolution of 1896. It was also their films that fell victim to the earliest acts of film censorship in the country. The colonial government was quick to censor anything that threatened or subverted their colonial rule, even if they were committed by their fellow Americans.

Beyond the veneer of political control, however, it was obvious that film was allowed to flourish by the colonial government for the obvious economic profit that came from the colony’s dependence on the expanding U.S. film market. Film products were major U.S. export commodities that produced huge profit, from the sales of raw celluloid to film equipment to the finished films themselves. The Philippine market became a monopolized source of revenues when European products were drastically displaced by war after 1918. Adding to the U.S. studios’ advantage was the imposition of highly disadvantageous tariff laws that allowed American products to enter the Philippine market tax-free. Despite the conducive environment for establishing the local film industry (with the native elite undergoing their business apprenticeship under their American partners), it was clear that the period after 1918 witnessed America’s continuing colonial dominance. Likewise, there was a boost in the sale of other U.S.-made commodities as a by-product of the popularity of Hollywood films, prompting one U.S. official to remark, Trade follows film.³³ Hollywood films provided the best advertisements for American goods that appeared on screen from cars to fashion. As will be shown in the following chapters, America’s political supremacy highly favored the economic interests of its businesses, particularly that in cinema.

The Native in the Colonial

While the period covered by this book provides the groundwork for the formation of Philippine cinema, an in-depth historical study of how this cinema eventually evolved will be reserved for a future volume. The colonial period from which this native cinema would begin is the main focus of this volume and its period overlapped with the forming of the national cinema, although this would first pass through a period of the Tagalog cinema, owing to its formation in the country’s Tagalog region, particularly in the country’s capital, Manila, where Tagalog is the language spoken. This period of liminality was a special time, when there appeared in cinema competing interests led by dominant foreign cultures aggressively aiming for control over the medium. But while questions are posed about the colonial beginnings of Philippine cinema, what happens if the question is reversed, and we ask: What is native in the colonial? While this may sound absurd because it will be hard to answer such a question, a rephrasing of the question to What is the process of ‘nativizing’ the colonial? may yield a better reply. Finding it hard to provide clear answers to the first, in the second question we may find answers that will help us reflect on the process of how a foreign technology like motion pictures came to be appropriated by the emerging Filipinos to become their native cinema, a Philippine cinema.

Reflection of Hollywood glamour on the native: from Dorothy Lamour to Gloria Romero.

Rather than delve deeply into issues of Philippine cinema’s "native-ness," this book lays down the foundations for this native-ness to have manifested itself in the thick of colonial domination in order to find opportunities for form and expression. As mentioned, it happened during the period of encounter between the foreign and the native. Happening at the time of the country’s period of Americanization, cinema became a medium of popular choice that cut through the cultural divide between the foreign and the native by bridging the motion-picture device and the local public that would patronize the films and who would one day make their own films. What happened in the process is what this book tries to uncover. Although efforts to have cinema under Filipino control would be decades away (and will be the subject of a future volume), native influence on this emerging cinema first found expression through its reception and patronage of foreign motion pictures. Although the first film viewers may have been foreign residents living in urbanized Manila and also in Cebu and Iloilo, and not actual natives of those coastal communities, the sheer number of native audiences in the years to follow would validate the popularity of motion-picture entertainment. If not for their growing viewership, the imported entertainment would have simply died and vanished like many other lesser devices, e.g., stereopticons, as hordes of colonials left the country at the first sign of social disruption caused by the revolution and the wars that erupted.

It was the natives who found in the colonial medium something that they could identify with—perhaps it was the native in the colonial—which made them patronize the medium and make it their own. For who was the Filipino native at the time when motion pictures came to the Philippines? Speaking of the lowland, coastal communities that provided film’s initial viewers, the local population was a cosmopolitan lot, having been exposed to centuries of Western culture from the language they used to communicate, to their dinnerware, to the operas that entertained them, or to the flimsy camison that their females wore next to their skin. While not all of the population shared the same Westernized culture, the initial contact of film entertainment was with this sector of the local population, the elite. This would only change in time, when the elite, becoming the conduit of film entertainment to the greater mass of ordinary natives, would provide a native face to this foreign medium by appropriating it to make it their own. The time when this elite class took over from their American and European predecessors the role of film owners, producers and distributors that was the time when cinema began to find its native form and expression, but as we shall find out in the future, even this native-ness would be found wanting.

For unlike its Asian neighbors, the Philippines did not have (at the time of film’s arrival in the late 19th-century) a thriving indigenous moving-picture tradition, e.g., the wayang kulit or the shadow play dramas, puppetry, or similar moving- image-based storytelling conventions from which the native film reception would find resonance in its cognition, naming, and, inevitably, acceptance.³⁴ Manila, where film first made its touchdown, was a cosmopolitan city that had little of its indigenous past flourishing in the midst of a highly Westernized society. Still, we must ask: What was it in the foreign medium that the urban natives saw that created resonance for them to accept and later own the foreign medium? What bridged the gap of cultural difference? Taking away the possibility of an indigenous moving-image/storytelling tradition, one has to consider the sheer fact that, having been Westernized for three centuries and hence cosmopolitan-ized in their regard towards novelties that came their way, film was just another device that came naturally to their attention, and from there became part of their lifestyle, as the Catholic cross became their symbol of faith or as oil became an ingredient upon which to cook their food. Manila natives simply had no hang-ups about inventions. It may perhaps be outside of the urbanized city where, if we wish to find out, we may find a more dramatic (perhaps exotic) reception of film as spectacle. And there are several of these anecdotes.³⁵ But it was not the other-ized reception of film that made it possible to become the country’s popular and national medium of expression. History would show that film became accepted, rather than rejected, by the natives, no matter what its imperfections or other-ness were. This makes more pressing the question of how film journeyed to become nativized, and to see in its odyssey what elements appealed to native sensibilities. And going beyond its initial acceptance, when film already became "Filipino (as when we say Filipino film or Philippine cinema), it may also be interesting to ask: How did film behave in the hands of the Westernized local elite who inherited the medium from departing Western film pioneers? Looking back, we would see how movies were embraced as the Philippines’ pre-eminent cultural form. It did not take long for the natives to internalize the medium that was also an instrument of their own colonization. In fact, in its most popular expression, cinema also became an object that, in the hands of the Filipino elite, became a device to exploit and even demean other Filipinos (non-Tagalogs especially). In Manila, where cinema came to flourish phenomenally, film turned into a medium that became a trade commodity for commercial exploitation in the hands of native businessmen. The Tagalog cinema, especially during its early phase before the outbreak of World War II, embodied, in its so-called native" form, the Western inspiration and iconic images that made representations of native life on screen. Consider for example the mestiza (half-breed) aesthetics that became the standard of beauty in Tagalog films. The Tagalog movie industry, as an industrial cultural institution, became in its early years a mirror of the colonial social structures and ideologies inherited from centuries of Western colonization. All these Western influences came to a new level of expression when the Americans, both as a conquering agent and as a film influence, made use of film as a popular medium for entertainment, communication and, somehow, for culture.

Wayang kulit provides Asia its proto-cinema.

While this book tackles the foreign in our country’s native cinema, it is wrong to think that the early cinema and the formative period being referred to is not part of Philippine cinema. On the contrary, this book insists that the American past being discussed and nuanced here is part of Philippine cinema’s past (if not its fundamental base), despite the foreign identity of its beginning. The historical development of cinema, this book argues, saw no sudden rupture from its colonial past to establish its present-day identity of being Filipino. (Even if it did, the process of rupturing or disengagement happened over a long period of time, involving a process which this book will discuss.) What is more complex than what otherwise is a seemingly reductive way of saying that Filipino cinema simply broke off from its colonial beginning at the time of independence is the historical process by which cinema was shaped to assume the identity of the native from out of its colonial origin. The native was already in the colonial, waiting to be born and developed over time and in a process that is worth investigating.

To conceive of this historical process is a more difficult task than to say, simplistically, that Philippine cinema has no use of its colonial past because it was not Filipino. This can only lead to a false assumption that local cinema was always Filipino and that all that was required was to eliminate its coincidental foreign beginning. In that past of conflicting forces and events may be seen how native cinema began to emerge and seek its own identity, like the nation that it was fated to represent. There is no doubt that it is difficult to see through this past that has been blurred by time. But in looking back, it is not right for us in the present to impose on that cinema the knowledge we have of it now. The conditions found in the early cinema are too different from our present condition. The same goes with the identity of that early period’s cinema.

One caveat this book has for readers is to understand that while explaining cinema’s American past, it does not offer apologies for things that happened before, nor does it wish to justify what came out of this colonial beginning. By looking at cinema’s colonial past, it is this book’s intention to find answers to a question that it considers essential in understanding Philippine cinema’s history: What in cinema’s colonial past contributed to the making of Philippine cinema to become a local, native, national cinema? Perhaps this book may not be able to provide all the answers. The journey to find answers will still be a long way ahead, and that is why separate volumes have been conceived to address this problem. While the road ahead is still long in our investigation of What is Philippine cinema? this book’s contribution lies in presenting, as best it can, the colonial beginnings of this cinema. It is the aim of this book to see through the murky past how a foreign medium such as film made its entry into native society and find out what relations and processes made it possible for the foreign to one day become native. In coming face to face with the past, we might be surprised to find out that the colonial could not have flourished if the natives did not see their own reflection in it, nor find use for it. What the natives saw in the colonial is worth pondering.

The Filipino’s Hispanic past remains evident in this film by Gerardo de Leon, Ang Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo (Python at the Old Dome), through the film’s visual iconography and narrative. The film stars Efren Reyes and Anita Linda.

The musical genre reveals Hollywood’s strong influence on local films.

NOTES:

1. The historical events referred to are the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution against the Spaniards in 1896, the declaration of the short-lived Philippine Republic in 1898 and, also in the same year, the Battle of Manila Bay, which led to the Philippine-American War in 1899.

2. Nick Deocampo, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2003; Pasig: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2007).

3. Early discourses regarding the emergence of a native cinema pointed towards a nationalist perspective as evolved through the terms used to describe locally produced films. During the early American occupation, Spanish words were the first to describe cinema as national like when one magazine bannered Jose Nepomuceno’s Kalupitan ng Tadhana (Fate’s Cruelty, 1936) as " Filmando una pelicula filipina " (Filming a Filipino Movie) printed in the Literary Song-Movie Magazine (LSMM), October 1936. A film producer, Don Pedro S. Carriedo, was described as " Un magnate de la cinematografia nativa " (A magnate of the native cinema) in LSMM , December 1936. This nation-centric viewpoint, although written in Spanish, gained popularity during the period of the Commonwealth in the 1930s, with the use of phrases such as " cinematografia nacional , industria local del celuloide , industria naciente en Filipinas , peliculas locales , peliculas en estas islas , cinematografia local , and cinema local ." These Spanish terms were contained in popular magazines like LSMM, Excelsior , and Renacimiento Filipino . When Tagalog-language magazines became popular, they referred to local films in similar nation-centric terms like " pelikulang Pilipino " as written in the bilingual Philippines Free Press and Popular Movie News . When English became the prevalent language, local films carried the same national reference like Philippine cinema, Philippine photoplays, Filipino movies, and Filipino film as seen in the pre-World War II writings of A.E. Litiatco in Philippine Magazine or Filemon Tutay in the Philippines Free Press . During the post-war era, the same discourse could be found in essays written in newspapers and magazines like Graphic, Philippine Daily Express up to today’s Philippine Daily Inquirer. This nationalist perspective would reach its highest peak in the writings of the Manunuri, a critics group founded in 1976, as typified in the essays of Bienvenido Lumbera (" Kasaysayan at Tunguhin ng Pelikulang Pilipino /The History and Prospects of the Filipino Film), Nicanor G. Tiongson (Four Values in Filipino Drama and Film), and Petronilo Bn. Daroy (Social Significance and the Filipino Cinema"), whose mentioned essays are included in The Urian Anthology, 1970–1979 (Manila: Manuel L. Morato, 1983).

4. Several contemporary writings have belatedly recognized the pioneer contributions of American film personalities in developing the native cinema as found in the essays of Agustin Sotto, The American Pioneers of the Filipino Cinema, Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema , vol. II, no. 1, March-August 2000; Lena S. Pareja, Philippine Cinema: The Silent Era, 1912–1932, Kultura, A Quarterly Forum for Artist, Critic and Audience , vol. III, no. 4, 1990, 2–13, and The Rise of Movie Studios, 1934–1941, Kultura …, vol. V, no. 1, 1992, 2–14; Clodualdo A. del Mundo, The ‘Philopene’ through Gringo Eyes: The Colonization of the Philippines in Early American Cinema and other Entertainment Forms, 1898–1904, printed in The World Cinema Centennial Celebration catalogue, published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1995 and Native Resistance: Philippine Cinema and Colonialism, 1898–1941 (Manila: De la Salle University Press, Inc., 1988); and finally, Ernie de Pedro, The First Movies in the Philippines, Diamond Anniversary of Philippine Cinema catalog, published by Mowelfund Film Institute, 1994.

5. Charles Musser is a leading film historian of early American cinema and a professor of American Studies and Film Studies at Yale University. He is the author of important books on early cinema mentioned in this book. He became engaged in the study of early cinema in the Philippines when he delivered the plenary presentation in the Origins of Cinema in Asia Seminar organized by the author through the Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Fellowships in Manila on July 27–29, 2005, where Musser presented his seminal paper, Nationalism, Contradiction and Identity: or, A Reconsideration of Early Cinema in the Philippines, included in the forthcoming publication, The Origins of Cinema in Asia , to be published by the Indiana University Press.

6. The subject of cinema as the Filipinos’ national pastime is discussed in Joel David’s The National Pastime: Contemporary Philippine Cinema (Metro Manila: Anvil Publishing Inc., 1990).

7. Hispanismo is the persistence of Spanish cultural influences embodied in the Spanish language. As defined, it is "(t)he existence of a unique Spanish culture, lifestyle, characteristics, tradition, and values, all of them embodied in its language ." (Italics in the original.) Refer to Jose del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman (Eds.), The Battle over Spanish between 1800–2000 — Language Ideologies and Hispanic Intellectuals (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 7.

8. Anglo-sajonismo , although, strictly speaking, translates into Anglo-Saxonism, was once used in the Philippines as " sajonismo , referring to the influences, particularly in the use of the English language, brought about by the U.S. colonization of the Philippines. Nick Joaquin defines sajonismo as the desire to become American in speech, in manners, in costume, in tastes, in way of life and even, if necessary, in religion. Quijano de Manila (a.k.a. Nick Joaquin), La Salle: The Recapturing of the Gentry," Language of the Street and Other Essays (Metro Manila: Gryk Ortaleza Book Publications, 1980), 190.

9. Filipinismo is the assertion of Filipino identity in the native Philippine society heavily influenced by Spanish and American colonial culture, particularly in language. Resil B. Majores makes references to the formation of this native movement in The Formation of Filipino Nationality under U.S. Colonial Rule, 1900 – 1940, paper delivered in the Sangandaan 2003 Conference on Arts and Media in Philippine-American Relations, 1899–2002 held in Quezon City, 2003.

10. During its early years, the motion-picture apparatus was baptized with odd-sounding names, such as Actograph, Andersonoscopograph, Animatograph, Biatograph, Biograph, Bioscope, Cameragraph, Choreutoscope, Chronophone, Chronophotographe, Cinematograph, Cineograph, Eidoloscope, Eknetograph, Electrograph, Fregoligraph, Iconograph, Kineopticon, Kinetograph, Kinematograph, Kinetoscope, Magniscope, Motograph, Mutoscope, Optigraph, Panopticon, Phantascope, Phototachygraph, Polyscope, Projectograph, Scenematograph, Vitascope, Zooscope , and more.

11. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. He revolutionized European philosophy with his historicist and idealist account of reality. Among his influential conceptions are of speculative logic or dialectic, absolute idealism, Spirit, the Master/Slave dialectic, ethical life and the importance of history.

12. Benito M. Vergara, Jr., Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century, Philippines (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 1995), 81.

13. Vergara, 82.

14. ______, 4.

15. Sharon Delmendo, The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2005), 58–59.

16. Delmendo, 51.

17. Wimal Dissanayake describes categories that may be considered as imperialist, colonialist, and nationalist film in Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).

18. Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000), 77.

19. Ibid.

20. The subject of early cinema has become a recognized discipline in Western academia with its teaching as a course in film studies departments. This subject has also produced academic publications dedicated to its study such as the books by Musser (which have become inspirations for this author) and Elsaesser. This author has also contributed to CITE: Western discipline on this subject). While not committing to exact dates, Musser’s thoughts on early cinema becomes clearer when he defines it in contrast to the period that came after it: Early cinema was predominantly syncretic, presentational, and nonlinear, while later classical Hollywood cinema favored consistency, verisimilitude, and a linear narrative structure, particularly in its dramas and light comedies. Charles Musser. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1990), p. 4. Outside of the Manila seminar, the author and I had the chance to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema , where we find a clearer definition of early cinema, although precise years again remain undesignated. Edited by another distinguished early cinema scholar, Richard Abel, his Introduction defines the period as "the first 20 or 25 years

Reviews for Film

[Marcelino Decena · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very informative and contains elaborate chapters on the influence of American culture in Philippine Cinematic Universe.