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Perfumed Nightmare:
Religion and the Philippine Postcolonial
Struggle in Third Cinema
Antonio D. Sison
Se esta ultimando la instalacion del cinematograco para der sessiones
dentro de pocos dias. With this announcement of the inauguration of the
rst Lumiere cinematographe in a salon in Escolta, Manila (the installation
of the cinema is almost nished, and sessions will start in a few days), the
Philippines had its rst acquaintance with the silver screen, in January
1897, just two years following the invention of the motion picture in
Europe.1 Curiously, it was also the nal year of three centuries of Spanish
colonization before the fraudulent cession of the islands to the United States
for U.S. $20 million in the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The colonial conspiracy
would have disastrous consequences in the shaping of Filipino culture:
Filipino identity and consciousness now faced a concerted threat from the
new colonizer. The colonial traits inculcated by the Spaniardsthe legacy of
ignorance, superstition, hierarchical valuesall these still existing beneath
the surface of the dynamic new revolutionary consciousness provided the new
conquerors with a convenient basis for imposing their own norms. The
counter-consciousness that animated the struggle for independence had
hardly developed into a new consciousness before the consciousness was
again being modied to suit the needs of a new colonial system.2
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From the perspective of this unique, albeit complicated postcolonial scenario, I set out to explore how religionexpressed in the colonially infused
Filipino folk Catholicism, and later, as recongured in the American
Dreamhad been worked out in a Filipino lm entitled Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong Bangungot). The thoroughly original, satirical comedy was lensed by Filipino independent lmmaker Kidlat Tahimik (a.k.a.
Eric de Guia) in 1976, at the apex of the U.S.-sponsored Marcos dictatorship. Completed on a shoestring budget of U.S. $10,000, Perfumed Nightmare became a cult phenomenon as it went on to win the coveted Prix de la
Critique Internationale and both the Catholic and Ecumenical Jury prizes
at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and, soon after, found U.S. distribution
through Francis Ford Coppolas Zoetrope company.
I choose Perfumed Nightmare as my case study for two reasons. First,
because the lm captures the trajectory of the Philippine postcolonial
struggle and its contradictions from a distinctly Filipino perspective. Second, because it is widely acknowledged by scholars as an example of the
research category known as Third Cinema, an aesthetic movement and
critical theory that provides me with the theoretical framework and optic to
posit an ideological analysis of the lm. I discuss Perfumed Nightmare as
Third Cinema in some detail later in the essay. At this juncture, a summary
is instructive.
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the Hollywood model) and Second Cinema (mainly represented by European auteur cinema).
Reecting the paradigm of decolonization proposed by Afro-Caribbean
thinker Frantz Fanon in his 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth7 and
fueled further by their involvement in the production of the radical
documentary La Hora de los Hornos (The hour of the furnaces, Argentina,
1968), Solanas and Getino saw Third Cinema as a virtual revolutionary
weapon in the struggle for liberation and a strident challenge to the unequal
symbolic exchange between Western lmmaking and the marginalized
cinematic input of the third world. As such, The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24
frames per second.8
Later developments in Third Cinema, particularly the critical, comparative method of Teshome Gabriel, have become less stridulent and more
methodical. Gabriel, an Ethiopian lm scholar, is credited for his
groundbreaking work on the development of a critical theory of Third
Cinema in a third-world context.9 Gabriel eloquently summarizes the
Third Cinema experience as moved by the requirements of its social action
and contexted and marked by the strategy of that action.10 He launches
into a critical inquiry of Third Cinema by elaborating on the link between
style and ideology, contending that a study of style alone will not engender
meaning. . . . Style is only meaningful in the context of its usein how it
acts on culture and helps illuminate the ideology within it.11 Gabriel also
underscores the role of Third Cinema as the custodian of subversive
popular memory, a resource for third-world peoples in the face of colonially
infused ofcial versions of history. Thus Teshome Gabriel elevated the
strident polemics of his Latin American predecessors into the level of
critical theory. In its present evolutionary turn, Third Cinema critical
theory is not so much a demolition order against the input of the American
and European lm industries as it is a requisite dialectical initiative that
seeks to give voice and visibility to socially resonant lms that spotlight the
third-world experience and perspective, which have thus far been accorded
only token attention in world cinema and in academic debates.
With Third Cinema providing heuristic touchstones, my task at this
point is to examine how religion nds lmic representation in Perfumed
Nightmare.
PERFUMED NIGHTMARE
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mean the ongoing quest for national identity on all frontssocial, cultural,
political, economicby third-world countries in the aftermath of colonialism and all its ongoing ramications. This is, in fact, the sense of
postcolonial mirrored in Perfumed Nightmare.
In the Philippine context, the experience of multiple colonizations
contributed greatly to the misshaping of national culture and the atrophy of
national pride. In classic colonial cultural conditioning, the colonizer/
colonized dualism had been translated in terms of superiority/inferiority:
The foreign culture is presented as the authentic, normative culture from
which the indigenous culture, falsely identied in negative categories as
inferior, must be patterned. Thus, the civilizing process itself was predicated on the very notion that something was lacking in the colonial subjects
(maturity, education, technology, salvation, and more) that only colonizers
could provide, because of their superiority.12
That the Philippines is predominantly Roman Catholic is a Janus-faced
statement. It can be an assertion of pride, the distinction that the Philippines
is, in fact, preciously unique, the only Catholic nation in Asia. On the
ipside, it is also a statement that recalls the national trauma of three
centuries of oppressive Spanish rule, during which religion became a tool
conveniently used by the colonizers to buttress and legitimize the wholesale
ownership of a country and culture not their own. The systematic racial
exploitation committed by Spanish frailes (monks) against Filipino nationals, justied under the mantle of the Catholic Church, is immortalized in
two nineteenth-century novels, Noli Me Tangere (Touch me not) and El
Filibusterismo (The subversive), the major literary works of Philippine
national hero Jose P. Rizal. Rizal experienced untold suffering and, eventually, execution at the hands of the colonial church authorities who had
mastered the art of deceit and religious-political intrigue.13
In Perfumed Nightmare, the representation of religion is rst seen in the
modication of colonial Roman Catholicism into folk Catholicism, a
fusion of ofcial Catholic practices and popular piety. As a former Spanish
colony, the Philippines had preserved and perpetuated much of its erstwhile
colonizers religious traditions, at times, marrying them with indigenous
religious forms rooted in animism and superstitious beliefs. Filipino theologian Benigno P. Beltran notes, As the popular religious form of expression
of the inarticulate, the unlettered and the disenfranchised, Folk Catholicism
is a complex, amorphous phenomenon which does not admit to easy
explanations.14 Nonetheless, the phenomenon is worth examining for its
indexical value for a Third Cinema ideological analysis. Folk Catholicism
has implications for the way reality is perceived, constructed and maintained by the masses.15
Perfumed Nightmare provides glimpses of Filipino folk Catholicism in
the Lenten practice of self-agellation. The corporal mortication rendered
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ANTONIO D. SISON
Figure 9.1 Perfumed Nightmare provides glimpses of Filipino folk Catholicism in the
Lenten practice of self-agellation. . . . In one disturbing cut, [Kidlat] is shown agellating
himself at ve years old.
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While the American civil religion embodies the most cherished principles of
American nationhood, Bellah rightly points out that like all religions, it
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has various deformations and demonic distortions.22 The idea of manifest destiny, a core concept of the American civil religion posited on the
moral conviction that America was a nation set apart to spread across the
globe as the godsent vanguard of democratic principles,23 was used as a
signet of divine approval for the U.S. expansionist incursion in the Philippines. In the years shortly after the colonial turnover sanctioned by the
1898 Treaty of Paris, between 200,000 to 500,000 Filipinos, many of them
innocent civilians including women and children, were summarily killed by
the Americans to quell a popular independence movement in what was
described as an orgy of racist slaughter.24
The impact of the colonial trauma on the indigenous culture was no less
devastating, with its aftershocks still felt by generations of Filipinos until
the present. Centuries of living as an oppressed, colonized people in their
own homeland ingrained a colonial mentality among Filipinos in which
things western are almost always taken to connote superiority. Renato
Constantino maps the cultural malaise that plagues his own people:
As a people, we always depreciate what is ours. Local products are discriminated against in our own country. Local talent is largely unappreciated, and
whatever is recognized as local talent is merely the best imitation of American
artistry, proudly labeled as such. There are brave attempts to rediscover our
cultural heritage and to reestablish our ties with the past, but our cultural
corruption is so pervasive that the job of rediscovering ourselves is a difcult
one. Meanwhile, the majority avidly imitate each new fad of the West.25
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Figure 9.2 . . . we see a surrealist rendering of the face of the American on a stained
glass window. The backlit window gives the image an ethereal, divinized radiance. Kidlats
face, more softly lit, is seen in the foreground, frame left.
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cal tension between the human quest for justice in a world that is running
short of it. Schillebeeckx argues that it is the very experience of injustice
that yields cognitive power when it brings about indignation and protest,
the refusal to acquiesce to situations of meaningless suffering and disordered relations. The experience of a positive moment found within the
crucible of critical negativity provides the oil for the rekindling of human
hope and for the possibility of praxis.
Additionally, I am convinced that Perfumed Nightmare does not discount the role of divine agency as a catalyzing force toward the fulllment
of the utopian vision and the desired social change. The last frame of the
lms closing credits shows a postage stamp, a childs artwork depicting
Kidlat sitting by his magical spaceship in some cosmic environment. This
cinematic clue validates that Kidlat had reached some celestial destination.
Taken in conjunction with the several allusions to liberative cosmic powers
in the lm, for example, the liberating typhoon, the supernatural breath
that enables Kidlat to y to the heavens, I equate this quasireligious hint
with what the lmmaker Tahimik refers to as the precolonial value of
Bathala Na.31 Translated as May Gods will be done, Bathala Na holds
utopian signicance because it is posited on the belief that when one offers
his or her best efforts to a worthwhile endeavor, the divine cosmic forces
cooperate. As such, Bathala Na represents the marriage of human and
divine agency. Perfumed Nightmares open-ended ambiguity is not nearly
as graphically mystical as that of Stanley Kubricks anti-positivist science
ction opus 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but it is no less cosmic; the
allusion to a divine power greater than ourselves undeniably factors into
the utopian vision of the lm.
Thus it becomes clear in the postcolonial universe of Perfumed Nightmare that authentic religion is a verb as much as it is a nounit is the
empowering ground principle that enables the Filipino to break free from
the enslaving cocoon of colonially infused religion into a new, emancipative
sociocultural vision. It is the rediscovery of the divine presence in the eye of
the liberative storm. Reverberating in the voice of the wise Filipino guru
Kaya, Gods interlocution quickens the Philippine postcolonial quest
Where is your true strength, Kidlat? Where is your real strength? The
sleeping typhoon must learn to blow again.
Notes
1. Clodualdo del Mundo, Philippines, in The Films of ASEAN, Jose F. Lacaba,
ed. (Manila: ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 2000), 89.
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hands of the divine. Bahala na is the resultant attitude shaped by centuries of
colonial conditioning that contributed to the legitimization of the unequal
master-slave equation that characterized the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Tahimik, Midlife Choices: Filmmaking vs. Fillmaking,
in Primed for Life: Writings on Midlife by 18 Men, Kalaw-Tirol, ed. (Pasig
City: Anvil Publishing, 1997), 41.