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The Years of Permanent Midnight and Other Essays
Hello I remember I promised over at Facebook that I’ll be reissuing this book in Print by the end of June, turns out self printing and publishing is not really a viable choice in the kind of situation that we’re in. So, instead, I’ll be putting this book out here on the internet, again, for…
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On-Gaku: Our Sound (Japan, 2019) [JAPAN CUTS 2020]
Kenji Iwaisawa’s debut film, On-Gaku: Our Sound, responds positively to the youth-oriented, music-centered movie checklist. This animated adaptation of Hiroyuki Ohashi’s manga is lively, electric, infectious, and hopeful. What the film uniquely adds is a character – a tone – that affects you both visually and aurally. We follow Kenji (given life by the voice of…
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We once had two cats
We used to have a cat named Petpet. We had him ever since some stray decided to give birth to him and two of his siblings at a shelf near our bed. (We had a make-shift double-deck bed, and we (my sister and I) used to sleep on the top bed when we were in…
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Honeygiver Among the Dogs (Bhutan, 2016)
Dechen Roder’s debut feature Honeygiver Among the Dogs is quite a unique film whose particular charm depends on its blend of seemingly incompatible approaches. Present in the film are enduring elements of neo noir (femme fatale, myths that construct the world and surrounds it with more mystery) but unevenly paced story telling may drive some audience members…
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Shadowplay (Malaysia, 2019)
At first glance, Shadowplay is conceptually shambolic. Co-written and directed by Tony Pietra Arjuna, it takes a stylistic approach to noir which pushes the neon-drenched aesthetic of recent films by Nicolas Winding Refn down a Lynchian rabbit hole. Shadowplay crosses between two waking lives as if the other is a daydream, tipping into the realm of the supernatural based…
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The Aesthetics of Confinement
The title is misleading, or perhaps tautological. Essentially, aesthetics has always been dependent on a certain sense of confinement. Sensual experiences depend more on the space that surrounds us, not the ones we occupy. What we see in front of us, what our ears capture, what can be smelled from meters away, etc. Cinema, if…
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Words (for Edel Garcellano)
(photo by Karl Castro, taken from his post at the Edel Garcellano Study Group Facebook Page) Yesterday flowed in a rather strange way. Very early after midnight, my faculty colleague, the scholar Led Villafuerte, who was formerly an aide for poet and critic Edel Garcellano back when he was still teaching at the Polytechnic University…
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Non-Blind Items for a Safe Quarantine
Repeating some old ideas which still make sense, even today. Below are unorganized notes of thoughts I’ve been trying to organize for days now. It still came up unorganized and I apologize for it. Honorary fathers are often times weird. Especially, Godfathers. Bourgeois history is often concerned with founders, or, Godfathers. Whether or not the…
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Theses on Terrorist Cinema
The greatest invention of the 21st century is not the iPhone, but the terrorist. Of course, the “terrorist” as a concept has been around for a long time. But it is only recently that terrorism has been translated materially (as an ideological apparatus). Terrorism is a discourse of the state. Terrorism as an ideology necessarily…
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Film and Ideology
This note is something I used for my culminating lecture on an Introduction to Film subject I handled last semester. I apologize for the lack of citation, but I have noted from who does the ideas I mentioned came from. The semester started by looking into the Feature-Length Film as our object of study, with…