The Great Cosmic Detour

When Kidlat Tahimik was named as one of the recipients of the Prince Claus Awards in 2018, I

felt two contradictory reactions when I was asked to write a short biographical note about him

for the Nikkei Asian Review. On one hand, for a filmmaker who has produced mostly

unbankable films–no stars, low budget, thirteen years to release–the occasion was certainly a rare

opportunity to boost his international profile from a cineaste's best kept secret to an enduring

figure of Third World cinema and the personal essay film. On the other, I thought that an artist

who is offered a Prince Claus Award might well think twice before accepting since it is given to

an artist who work in regions stifled by a lack of resources or opportunities for cultural

expression. Resources and opportunities for filmmakers are certainly hard to come by in a poor

country like the Philippines and my slight hesitation at writing a biographical note was borne out

of a lamentation that the country that kicked out a dictator through a peaceful revolution on the

year I was born, is fast declining into another authoritarian regime, thus garnering the attention

of the award-giving body.

I was with a group of college friends in 2008 when I first met Kidlat Tahimik in his

vegetarian cafe Oh My Gulay! (Oh My Vegetables!) in Baguio City, once a hill station for

American soldiers and diplomats where he was born at the onslaught of World War II. The place

was about to close for the night when the figure of a man with white long hair emerged from a

dark corner. Kidlat Tahimik is what you would imagine Gandalf would look like if he lived in

the tropics. When I approached to shake his hand, I noticed that he has carrying a book in his

arm. Ninotchka Rosca's State of War. Naturally, our conversation revolved around the book and

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how the Philippines has been in a permanent state of war and political crisis. Somehow most

people, especially those who come from countries that award the Prince Claus Fund and the

Nobel Prize, think when they encounter artists like Kidlat Tahimik, that it is precisely a state of

war and political crisis that refines genius and keeps artists productive.

I argued, inside my head, as I wrote the biographical note, that it is despite, and not

because, of turmoil that Third World countries abound in creative talent. Four centuries of

colonial subjugation has torn our connection to the past and left the Philippines scrambling for

what it may call its own after losing much of its history to colonial gaslighting. The arts has been

the greatest weapon to reclaim that past if not imagine it back to life. And film, which came

around the same time we declared independence from Spain in 1896, has been instrumental in

visualizing a nation that would emerge from the long dark years of colonization. Philippine film

culture began with the Lumiere Cinematograph that showed documentaries at the turn of the

century; its first indigenously-produced feature film, a drama entitled Dalagang Bukid (Country

Maiden) directed by Jose Nepomuceno was released in 1919.

An American colony for close to fifty years, the Philippines saw the emergence of an

indigenous film industry modelled after Hollywood. Philippine movies aped Hollywood fare,

from silent movies to the costume dramas, musicals and westerns of the so-called Golden Age,

when a handful of studios presided over the production, distribution and exhibition of an

indigenous cinema even as the government kept an open door policy to film imports. The Golden

Age, then, is a highly problematic term. Although Philippine cinema gave the appearance of a

highly coordinated and mature studio system with some prestige productions gaining distribution

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in international markets as far as Bangkok and Rome, local films actually played second fiddle to

foreign films even within domestic theaters.

The industry norm of copying the latest Hollywood hit remained in place until Kidlat

Tahimik, then an unknown Filipino filmmaker made Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed

Nightmare), which won the International Critic's Prize in the Berlin Film Festival in 1977.

Tahimik was followed by young filmmakers who founded experimental film festivals and

distanced themselves from the traditions of mainstream cinema. This independent film

movement which lasted until the close of the millennium raged against a moribund Philippine

cinema which produced mostly Die-Hard style action movie rehashes and softcore pornography.

Though it did not dismantle the hegemony of commercial and foreign films, it certainly posed a

challenge, one that is currently being contested by a revitalized independent film circuit.

Kidlat Tahimik whose name roughly means Quiet Thunder, cleared another path for

filmmakers so that their creations would be appreciated and studied. Not only did Perfumed

Nightmare steal the thunder from Hollywood, it showed the possibility of using film as an

emancipatory medium. This artistic vision is as clear in his writings as they are in his films. He

lectures at the University of the Philippines, speaks at various conferences, and contributes

articles written in a mix of Tagalog and English to national dailies. Through these various extra-

filmic engagements, he has articulated the possibility for cinema to exist outside the prevailing

system controlled by Hollywood imports. His first writings published in the United States came

out in 1986, and it is gratifying reflection of a Filipino filmmaker who has been accorded well-

deserved recognitions in an age notorious for rewarding the conventional forms that govern

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marketable mediocrity. I have seen eight more of Tahimik’s films that have appeared in special

screenings and film festivals. The constant recognitions, no doubt, encouraged programmers to

keep his films in theaters.

In a journal article entitled “Cups-of-Gas Filmmaking vs. Full Tank-cum-Credit Card

Filmmaking,” an essay by Tahimik that he presented at “The Challenge of the Third World”

conference hosted by Duke University in September of 1986, he declares that much of his

filmmaking is left up to chance and believes that his “lack of resources can become a blessing

because his time frame escapes this deadline obsession, and allows him to discover motifs." By

choosing not to profit from Perfumed Nightmare’s success after his film debuted at the Berlin

Film Festival in 1977, Tahimik established his dedication to a filmmaking style that often works

without a script and resists commercial modes of movie production, a decision that he writes is

“partly a necessity dictated by Third World realities and partly a choice to avoid the formulas

dictated by bankrollers” who finance studio production in Hollywood. After Francis Ford

Coppola's Zoetrope picked up Perfumed Nightmare for screening at the James Agee Cinema in

New York, he invited Kidlat Tahimik to make another feature film with the assistance of better

production and editing facilities. Tahimik initially took on the invitation but felt alienated even

within an innovative art house production company like Zoetrope. He was pursuing a kind of

filmmaking that was radically mischievous. This is clearly evident in Tahimik's stylistic

signatures: haphazard editing, dubbing over footages, layering bilingual dialogue that often

resulted in humorous clashes of discourse between Tagalog and English. It was clear to him that

he didn't want to be a big shot filmmaker, not in Hollywood (that goes for both the commercial

and art house circuits). He just wanted to make his own movies according to his own rules and

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schedule, that necessitated and permitted him to speak to and be embedded in his indigenous

culture.

In his acceptance message upon receiving the Fukuoka Prize in 2012, Tahimik said,

“Many people think I'm an eclectic filmmaker, but I'm really a holistic artist and a cultural

observer.” With a sense of retrospective despair and grateful relief that he was finally getting

recognized, he added, “The award is a chance to tie things together.” The same could be said of

this publication that compiles his writings. In the same speech, he recounted a writers'

conference in the US where he first met Japanese novelist, Kenzaburo Oe. "He invited me to

take a walk in the park. He said, 'Tahimik-san. You are Kurosawa of Philippines.' 'But Kurosawa

is a perfectionist!' I protested knowing my film is so imperfect. 'Tahimik-san, your works open

windows. Kurosawa films open windows to the Japanese soul. Films open windows to the

cosmos.' Tahimik quipped, "I did not know what he meant." The line is a rhetorical move of

studied self-depreciation that is consistent in both his films and his writings.

What is astonishing about Tahimik’s eleven films is that unlike other filmmakers from

the Third World, he seems not to have needed to experiment to discover the forms that would

embody his personal style of filmmaking, for he hit upon his own unique vision with the very

first one, Perfumed Nightmare. From the start, he established a singular voice and style and then

proceeded to sustain his method through ten succeeding films without the voice ever losing its

freshness and the style its distinctive power. He says that "it is perhaps because I am tracking the

two worlds of scriptfull scholars and scriptless tribal people [...] a kind of cosmic detour that has

allowed me to rediscover my Asianness."

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 Kidlat Tahimik began interrogating his neo-colonial identity while pursuing an MBA at

Wharton. In an interview for a local business TV channel, he recalls: "I passed all my exams but

it felt like something that I just had to do. My heart was not in it". After five years as an

economist in Paris, he tore up his MBA diploma in 1972, and joined a commune in East

Germany, and embraced the anti-Hollywood school of filmmaking. He returned to the

Philippines in 1975.

While other filmmakers develop their style as they amass a corpus of work, Tahimik

instead began with a big bang. He is like a composer whose ninth symphony has a strict

structural resemblance to the first, and yet the variation in the orchestration and the new sources

of melodies drawn mostly from the collective memory of a people. Tahimik writes about a time

when he showed a rough edit of his film to Werner Herzog. He recalls how the latter was

surprised and said, “Ah, Kidlat, you are best at your detours. Your cosmic surprises make your

film most interesting and crazy.”

Each of Tahimik’s films has a thematic core based on an intellectual premise or some

historical fact or on an outrageous but surprisingly credible proposition—as in Memories of

Overdevelopment, in which Tahimik based his tale upon historical records according to which

Magellan is said to have bought a slave as an interpreter during his initial landing on the “Spice

Islands” in the Malay Archipelago in Malacca and christened him Enrique de Malacca. When

Magellan was killed in 1521 by the tribal chief Lapu-Lapu, Magellan granted Enrique freedom in

his will; there are no further reports about his subsequent life thereafter.

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 Tahimik, concludes in his writings about the film, that because of Enrique's

multilingualism that he must have been originally from the island of Cebu and that he had come

to Malacca, where Magellan bought him, either as an immigrant or as a slave, hence the central

conceit of the film's narrative: when Enrique eventually returned to the place of his birth, he

became the first person to circumnavigate the globe.

With some mischievous interpolations revised by Tahimik, the film ends up having little

to do with the fictions of history and everything to do with the timeless verities associated with

transnational suffering and the human cost mindlessly expended by the vanity of European

imperialism. As juror at the Philippine independent film festival, he echoes this lesson when he

issued a strong statement for young cineastes to “slay the cultural father” (Hollywood movies) by

filming their local story.

Kidlat Tahimik has talked and written about the "Sariling Duende," which is the

imaginative invention of reality that is truer than what is easily perceived by the senses, but is

often subsequently discredited. This process of “introspection on celluloid strips” is his way of

digging out creative power buried in the “education” process. In the earlier mentioned

conversation with Tahimik at his vegetarian cafe, I recall this to be the most striking account of

the duende: that it is another version of yourself trapped inside the body that you have lost as you

grew up, and it has the capacity to see intentions. It fuels relationships, collects the wills from the

people that then powers anything that you create.

The conversation is one of the most memorable and serendipitous in my formation as a

young writer. Tahimik is both magical and wholly credible without being another mechanical

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reformulation of magical realism or folkloristic shamanism. His words cut through as a

metaphorical ascendance of truth that one experiences even when overwhelmed by the day-to-

day realities of globalization. The duende could easily be a character straight out of Perfumed

Nightmare, a creature that is sacred, but filled with pagan bliss.

Though Perfumed Nightmare is a delightful introduction to his work, a cineaste new to

Tahimik could start with his personal essays and become charmed by the voice and be captivated

by his style. While his images retain their peculiar force, Tahimik's paratextual writings make the

meaning of his films more apparent and personal especially since they speak to his people, his

ideal audience. His speeches, such as those delivered for the funeral services for his friends–and

there have been several in recent years–read like narration in his films that are long but

uncomplicated. In his later writings, Tahimik has taken to terse recollections of moments in his

life. The blanks and pauses have become more pregnant, that one almost hears another voice

speaking in between. Despite the gaps, the whole seems perfectly natural, as if one sat across the

table from Tahimik, hearing him tell the story and having the impression that he is talking to

himself. Tahimik has written in one of his essays that he sharpened his focus on “breaking out of

the colonial cocoon” through passionate debates with his mother, Virginia Oteyza.

Sometimes the core idea of a Tahimik film generates imaginative and historical content

by combining two realities, that of an abstract puzzle posited by an intellectual hypothesis and

that of an observed concrete world in which the story advances. This is best exemplified by Why

is Yellow at the Middle of the Rainbow, in which “yellow” refers to the color that was to become

the standard color of protests against the Marcos regime. Completed in 1994, this prototype of

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the never-ending documentary film, was actually compiled from several essays that had

previously set the tone and direction for the shorter works that Kidlat Tahimik later produced.

Instead of the plot-based works from the late 70s and early 80s, what now emerges are episodic

and no longer narrative-driven movies, which assembled associative essays drawing upon

everyday events, family scenes, random observations and travel documentaries.

In the essays that make the film, the personal is political, and both are equally significant:

the assassination of the Philippine opposition leader Ninoy Aquino which triggered protests

against the regime of the dictator Marcos, and the story of Tahimik’s hometown Baguio, as well

as his sons growing up, Tahimik’s attendance at an American film festival and the natural

disasters that regularly devastate the Philippine archipelago. Tahimik can engage the reader in a

perception that is simultaneously authentic and duplicitous, a reality that dissolves in the very

moment it is seen to be solid: these elements pull the narrative towards the telling of old-

fashioned tall tales. His later writings, most prominently the speech he gave when he was

elevated to the Order of National Artists, marks a consciousness of his deeper engagement with

the indigenous communities. In that speech, his narrative suddenly shifts to the expression of

transcendental ideas, like entering a wormhole into a strange world where everything can be

misconstrued. Tahimik writes in the book Philippine New Wave, “My best friend always

mispronounced the word ‘indigenous.' He’ll say ‘indigenius.’ I would always call it a cosmic

mispronunciation. The genius of the indigenous culture is still within us. We just have to

recognize it, and let it flow out.”

The premise of Memories of Overdevelopment has been articulated in advance of its

premiere during his retrospective at the Berlin Arsenale in 2016 through several of Tahimik's

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interviews, in which he recounts how his life and work constitute a great cosmic detour from the

world order. Tahimik writes that his words “offer another interpretation" of his films. The

possibility of some latent contradiction, an evident plot outside his intention, promise for both his

reader and audience an uncanny exclusive interpretation. In compiling his written essays,

speeches, and lectures, one discerns a lifelong political position as an anti-imperialist, anti-

Hollywood and pro-indigenous advocate. He once expressed apprehension at being labeled as

part of the Third Cinema movement because his politics were not as ideologically aligned as

others included in the list but his writings prove this to be a mere refusal to be categorized. I am

certain that many of his critics are now left worrying if their assessment of his films were not

mistaken. Tahimik's writings results in high intellectual entertainment, with the impressive

parade of ideas alternating with absorbing nostalgia, tempered by his philosophical interest.

Tahimik confronts the facts of history with a curious imagination and recovers from a remote

time those passions of ordinary humans that make them our contemporaries.

In compiling his writings, we are given another look at his films refracted in the thought

bubbles of his characters—mostly humble laborers and artisans—who leave behind corporate

ambitions and set out for their own cosmic quests, exposed to the hazards of a treacherous

capitalist world because, compared to an urban graveyard of broken dreams, any life is

preferable in which the voice of the duende can still be heard.

Geronimo Cristobal

December 05, 2019 Ludlow St., New York

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