On Cinema and Parapolitics

photo taken from the facebook post of Lee Joseph Marquez Castel

If there’s anything that the cancellation of the GMA Public Affairs’ Lost Sabungeros Cinemalaya premiere reveals to us, it is the nature of the Philippine parapolitics. If you have been following the writer-peasant rights advocate Jayvene Timblique in his socials, particularly in his twitter, you will recognize where we intersect in this topic. Jayvene introduced me to this concept some years ago (I think during the height of the pandemic), and has since fruition to some very productive conceptualization. 

Jayvene would sum up this nature of parapolitics in the country as part of the semifeudal and semicolonial superstructure. Unsurprisingly, of course, since politics of any kind is within superstructural formations for each state’s mode of production. But he is keen on this being insisted otherwise because, as a concept, parapolitics had its formal attributes in parapolitical studies in the West and so, initially, appears to the consciousness of those in the know within the limitations of that context. To bring the idea of parapolitics within the context of Philippine realities would need a very serious reconfiguration, similar as to how the frameworks of capitalism, imperialism, and neoliberalism differ in our condition as they are in other nations. 

There is no deep state in the Philippines, Jayvene would insist. The criminal aspect of political power in the country – as the baseline of any parapolitical framework – was never covert. (Although Jayvene would muse about Juan Ponce Enrile’s deep state as if a joke sometimes). A country whose economic base is (over)determined elsewhere, configures its superstructure from the demands of this base – we’re talking about imperialism here, which determines the semicolonial superstructure. The existence of American military bases on Philippine soil ensures this setup. The local elites and ruling classes require a similar arrangement to secure whatever is left of the power for them to hold. This is why, even after the Marcos Dictatorship, the existence of paramilitary death squads is not contradictory to imperialism. Their existence is necessary to demarcate the interests of the local ruling classes from the imperialists. 

But the Philippines maintaining the composure of a democratic society maintains its own armed forces and law enforcement, how does this fare in the setup between ruling class paramilitary and imperialist military presence? Contemporary history will show how many of these paramilitary entities are also members or associated with the state’s armed forces and law enforcement. Take Senator Ronald dela Rosa, for example. Dela Rosa was the chief of the Sagrado Corazon Señor, more popularly known as the Tadtad, during the 80s. Tadtad is a far-right paramilitary cult that sought for its mission the eradication of communists and moros and has effectively launched terrorist campaigns, mutually being supported by the Corazon Aquino administration after the Marcos dictatorship. Dela Rosa then became part of the Philippine National Police, even becoming its chief during the Duterte administration, and then the Bureau of Corrections chief, before becoming a senator in 2019. During his term as the police chief, dela Rosa seemed to deploy the same terrorist tactics of the Tadtad (along with the Davao Death Squad’s) to implement Duterte’s War on Drugs, claiming almost 30,000 lives. 

With these in mind, it’s easy to lump paramilitary terrorism with official police activities in this setup. The question that no one seems to ask is what is this violence for? The fear that taking the humanity away from the crimes to expose the economics behind them might be “disrespectful” to the victims. But it must be understood also, that these crimes are done not out of respect for the victims, it is as Neferti Tadiar noted in 2012, comes at an actual cost through channeling “state of emergency” declarations that “legitimated and financially and militarily aided” these killings.” There’s a pattern of exposing supposed crises in every administration that justifies funneling public funds toward killing their own citizens. Word on the street speaks of how much of these funds go towards paramilitary and extrajudicial executors – which may or may not be police and army officers themselves, but are nonetheless affiliated and coordinating with one another.

There’s an ease to killing, and it’s easy money – even liberal narratives would state this. Death is closer to those living under former colonies (whether they get postcolonial or semicolonial) and this proximity with death makes deceiving narratives all the more part of daily affairs. It is no accident that the deepening crisis in human rights coincides with the crisis in disinformation, distraction, and attention-deficit through the means of contemporary media technologies. The formation of these deceiving narratives through disinformation and distraction is the role of what the philosopher Francois Laruelle calls “media intellectuals.” These kinds of intellectuals, for Laruelle, are not necessarily academics, but shapers of public thought, and they are embedded in media. Laruelle formulated this first and foremost as part of his criticism of leftist ideations of events and victims, as such, left within his idealism of “genericness” and “underdeterminism.” We’re lifting off from Laruelle because the notion is useful in the same genericness. 

In the context of the Philippines, often, shapers of public opinion and ideas are similarly, figures of authority – signifiers that exude fear and compliance. Paralegal influencer, Raffy Tulfo is as much a media intellectual himself as Rodrigo Duterte, Ronald Dela Rosa, Fabian Ver, Jovito Palparan, Lorraine Badoy, and Eduardo Ano on the side of fear-signifiers; while Benigno Aquino III, Corazon Aquino, Kris Aquino, Leni Robredo, Risa Hontiveros, Chiz Escudero, Francis Pangilinan on the side of compliance-signifiers. These figures mediate between merely two kinds of engagement with the state as their way of interpreting what “democracy should look like”, as the media scholar Jodi Dean has proclaimed, a communicative kind of social relations. The political landscape of the mainstream “democracy” – that ultimately ends with the elections – often falls between these two sides of media intellectualism. Outside of these are the criminal figures that define the outside politics – parapolitics – that also may, or may not be the same people listed above. 

Cinema is no stranger to this, and this brings us back to the canceled premiere of Lost Sabungeros. There’s violence, and there’s an information hurdle through violence.  While the statements of disappointment must be acknowledged, it seems quite unfair for Cinemalaya alone to take the heat. What this makes us realize is that outside of the idealism of independence in this perceived independent cinema, there is a greater power that may force this perceived independence to take a back seat, making it seem that whatever discussions we had about “independent cinema” before this incident is nothing more than media intellectualism interpellating the audience towards the state apparatus. Looking at the trailer for Lost Sabungeros – itself is sensationalist in tone – it is not that hard to recognize what’s going on, even if we take it with a grain of salt. 

This is the kind of conversation that the debates on the nature of “independent cinema” seem to have missed decades ago – that the independence of independent cinema itself depends upon the capacity of each and every citizen to live independently. While valid conversations about artistic freedom contra censorship are and should be taking place, most of the conversations about this tend to demarcate social conditions that enable/disable artistic freedom, or freedom of any kind.

The incident also brings the debate about independence in independent cinema in a different light. Even before the main festival, candid conversation about Cinemalaya’s choice to temporarily partner up with a mall chain brings to question this “independent” branding – even more so the involvement of GMA – now the country’s biggest media network – in this so-called independent film festival. But this will just remind us how Cinemalaya itself started as a content-feeder for ABC 5 (TV 5 when it was still owned by the Cojuangcos), and not in itself made to be a festival to “celebrate independent cinema.” But throughout the years, the scene is keen to avoid that conversation and proceeds with their delusions and obsessions instead. This is the kind of attitude that is best represented by the Goebbelsian logic of Jerrold Tarog’s and Ruel Antipuesto’s Confessional (2008), where the filmmaker (performed by Tarog) found an ex-politician keen on exposing the truth about a local corruption but never really took empathic and serious investment on this truth-seeking and rather settled himself to a defeatist attitude where he can no longer reach the truth but at least, he shot a great sequence. This same kind of attitude of valuing this so-called artistic expression within this so-called “independent cinema” throughout the decades brought us non-committal narratives, cynical open-endedness, and the pointless glorification of the petitbourgeoisie, making the scene unable to deal with parapolitical violence in any meaningful and militant manner. 

For the most part, before the Duterte administration, militancy and presentness were frowned upon. Save for the few films that dealt with the War on Drugs, rare are the works that engaged with indigenous people’s struggles against militarization (save for Arbi Barbarona’s Tu Pug Imatuy (2017)), the urban poor’s struggle against violent displacement in favor of the enterprises of the ruling classes and imperialists (save for a few documentaries done by alternative media outlets and some student short films), or even the intricacies of neoliberalism and its violent effect in people’s lives. While I may have mentioned some exceptions, those exceptions rarely appear in a broad platform like Cinemalaya. In fact, in recent years, Cinemalaya (and GMA Network) became home to state militarist propaganda by platforming a film like the NTF-ELCAC-backed movie, Children of the River in 2019. The Lost Sabungeros incident seems to drag the scene towards a position it’s never been before – rattling the powers that be (again, taken with a grain of salt). Cinemalaya is an institution, it cannot afford to antagonize the very structure that found and supported it – it was never independent to begin with. Suppose that the cancellation was done at gunpoint making Cinemalaya itself the victim, this is just to reiterate and reproduce this structure. 

Some other reactions seem to get it correctly: miraculously, Cinema Bravo gave the proper hint (“May Banta? May Pumigil?) that someone may be behind this cancellation and that someone does not want the “truth” to come out, granted that the documentary may have reached the truth about its subject matter. These suspicions give us the idea about the nature of parapolitics here: that the ruling class, the elites, and their corresponding criminal associates (who may or may not be the same people) will not shy away from terrorism just to protect their interests. This also brings us closer to the truth Mao Zedong proclaimed long ago: political power grows out of the barrel of the gun. Truth can never come out without any kind of power, political or otherwise. Artistic expression, as history will tell us, is limited and would also require an actual revolution for its ideas to come to life. If the state’s parapolitical figures resort to their terrorism just to hide the truth; the independence of the independent filmmakers may have to depend not on artistic expression alone to defend their truth. Perhaps, when Jean-Luc Godard suggested years ago to not make political films but to make films politically, it is to hold a gun on the other hand while holding the camera on the other. Maybe, the idea of having an armed wing of this “independent cinema” that’s supposed to be a “movement” is not a bad idea to protect our interests? What should we call this armed wing, the Cinema People’s Army?

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