Maynila: Sa Kuko ng Pelikula

Manila is the favorite city of Filipino filmmakers because it is the microscope through which we see what is happening in the country. Many of the best Filipino movies were either about or set in Manila. Who can forget landmark films like Lino Brocka’s Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag that made a star out of Christopher de Leon, Ishmael Bernal’s Manila After Dark, Lamberto Avellana’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino or Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon? Critics acknowledge these films as masterpieces of Philippine cinema.

In a paper presented at the Far Eastern University-sponsored International Conference on Managing Megacities in the 21st Century held at the Manila Hotel recently, Rolando Tolentino pointed out that in a survey of the 10 best Filipino films up to 1990, film critic Joel David’s top two choices were not only depictions of life in Manila, but had the city as their central focus – Brocka’s Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag and Bernal’s Manila After Dark (also called City After Dark).

There must be something about Manila that lends itself so easily to the art of storytelling on screen. It must be because it is one of our oldest cities, founded with the colonization of the country five centuries ago. Its age bestows on it a sense of drama and history that no other city in the Philippines has. It is also because Manila is a city that with its tall buildings, prostitutes and poverty, creates a picture in people’s minds, however unpleasant. "When we talk about the city, we talk about Manila," said filmmaker and film critic Nick Deocampo in his paper "Imagining a City: Parables of the Filipino Nation on Film.

Deocampo says that although seeing Manila and the Philippines as one and the same is not new, the idea of "the city as country" became more pronounced with the founding of the nation and the rise in the popularity of movies and moviemaking. Manila became the capital of the country and the center of its film industry.

In many of the best films ever made by our own filmmakers, Manila played a prominent role and helped tell the story of the Filipino nation. One example is Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, based on a pre-Martial Law novel by Edgardo M. Reyes. Tolentino says the film "foregrounds the city‘s transformation from an insulated world of Spanish feudal residuals to an Americanized transnational domain."

Tolentino observes that the film engages in "double talk," meaning that the message of certain scenes extends far beyond what is actually going on onscreen. It is actually a commentary on social realities prevailing in the Philippines at the time – for instance, in the crucial moment when Julio Madriaga decides to avenge sweetheart Ligaya Paraiso’s death, the parting scene with a squatter friend is situated in the background of an ongoing mass action on the streets. This is a statement on the people’s movement, a fixture of the ’70s, the era in which the film takes place.

The film also draws parallels between Julio’s experience in the city and the ideals of the Philippine revolution of 1896 that fought for independence from Spanish colonial rule. The film, according to Tolentino, emphasizes the existence of similar forms of oppression, whether urban or rural. The intermittent job of a peon worker on construction sites reminds us of the similar conditions of sacada and migrant work in countryside plantations.

Deocampo also sees these parallels in Brocka’s Hellow, Soldier!, the second episode in the trilogy film Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa. He says that in very stark terms, Brocka offered the squatters as the native territory. "This is now what has become of the city, and if the symbol were to be extended further, symbol of the country. As the story unfolds, Brocka reveals how the slum becomes all that has become of our nation."

In his paper, Deocampo sums up the relationship between film and the megacity that is Manila thus: "These films have given us a tapestry of images about the city, Manila.

They tell us of a city whose depictions onscreen serve as parables for our national experience as a nation."

Further, Deocampo makes the point that film, which are works of fiction, have symbolically constructed our notion of nationhood through the representation that were made – cinematically, of the city, Manila. Manila somehow takes on the character of the Philippines in these films, weaving their two stories and struggles together and making them one and the same.

Deocampo says – and rightly – that in the end, what we get are films that try not only to liberate the screens from the bondage of colonization but also to liberate the Filipinos from their own colonization.