Missing Codec

Thinking about the future of cinema is, at the same time, deciding which aspect of cinema (or which cinema) will have a future. The thinking man, the man who thinks of the future, is the limit of this decision. The grasp of the foreseeable future is only as far as one’s own sight or context of emergence. Thinking about the future remains aesthetic in a sense that it remains in the limits of the senses. Projections are also curations. Speculating the future of cinema is as curatorial as canon-making, as far as canon-making and programming are also decisions.

There’s a speculative case from a real event that we can witness this decision-making process: sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, a strike happened in one of the biggest film studios in the country. The pretext of the strike is a demand for a wage increase for down-the-line film industry workers and for the regularization of workers who’ve been at the studio for more than six months. The strike took place for days, with the studio bargaining with the union heads.

Sometime during the strike, a fire happened at the studio’s compound. Sources are divided into what really is damaged in the fire. Some say that the fire damaged a film set and some of the studio’s equipment; some say that the fire also took out a lot from the studio’s makeshift archive, effectively burning most of the prints of that studio’s works.

The incident affected the studio’s future, and depending on what we value, affected how people from the future see the history of Philippine Cinema. A sense of loss and regret might be felt by some by losing all those prints. Over time, whenever we hear of the twilight of the so-called “golden age” of Philippine cinema, the same kind of regret is repeated. Most popular insight that scholars and connoisseurs offer about this period is how blame is placed against film workers on why film studios from the so-called Golden age closed.

But let us shift perspectives and turn the insights on their heads: that the arson against that unnamed studio I wrote above is a protest to the overwhelmingly unjust conditions of work – that it must have been so cruel that strike got extended and that businesses eventually earn so much hate that the workers saw it more fitting to destroy the very place they sought to fix if only the capitalists worked with them. That whatever those films that were lost in fire – made with dire exploitation – no matter how masterfully done, are markers of the very condition the workers sought to eradicate, and so, very apt that they be burned.

Those lost films are caught within the future the workers decided for themselves.

The future, as we see it now, presents a conflict between several interests. The big studios closed after the mid-1960s – with the most prominent one performing self-sabotage just to not give its former workers any backpays. Independents rose from the remnants of the studios and despite being mostly run by film workers themselves, the former demands for a just working condition was never addressed. Unions dissolved in the intensification of the cold war as the 70s approached. More and more film workers work under egregious conditions as the pakyawan system (a work arrangement that only incentivized the worker if they agreed to work on a specific number of projects) normalized in the independent productions.

The cycle repeats: studios get established, some more established directors or actors begin their own independent thing, then studios die down, then get reestablished, then independents rise again. The scale tips between studios and independents where film critics clamor at the next masterpieces, produced momentarily by both – most leaning towards the independents. But as the cycle rolls, the demands for a just working condition for film workers stray farther and farther.

The earliest departure of directors and artists from the so-called Golden Age era studios to establish their own independent productions seems more of an escape from bureaucratic control that never really addressed the root of such control. The consequence was a repetition of the conditions that they were trying to escape in the first place. In a conversation with an old film worker, he noted that working with actor-producers during the late 60s to the early 70s was much easier from studios, but generally, they have the same measly pay, only they are paid on time. The precarity of the workers at the time was also exploited: since you get paid in time, you can work in another production within the same week.

Same stories can be heard from workers across eras. It’s not a rare story that you hear film workers hustle between projects at the same time, even working without a contract, to make ends meet. And this is at the time of the burgeoning of independent film productions. It’s as if there’s a correlation between the proliferation of independent film productions and the rising precarity of film workers. I always had this thought in mind: that independent film productions in this country seem to historically betray the workers’ movement.

Of course, again, strictly, historically, it’s not the independent film productions’ fault. In the first place, the existence of independent film productions here is weirder than it seems. The condition of semifeudalism and semicolonialism ensured that no industry can ever be established here. There are productions, but we can never call what we refer to as the “film industry” an industry, since industrialization does not just depend on mere production. It is expensive to make movies here precisely because there is no industry: all primary equipment and materials, since the beginning of cinema, are imported. No one has attempted to reverse engineer a film camera and reproduce it here. Much less, a studio light, a sound recorder, or even a fucking clapboard.

Bulk of the sales from film screenings generally go towards supporting imperialist production of film technologies as “recoupment” of cost and materials. From a profit-motive perspective, it is logical to have wages lowered for local bureaucrat-capitalists to keep a lump sum. Historically, the existence of an independent film production, at least in successful film industries in the global north, rely on the surpluses of their own respective industries. In this case, independent film productions burgeoning at the twilight of the film studio era in the Philippines was weird: where do they get their capital? Most of them came from life-savings: actors-turned-independent-producers were generally rich and that their captive fan-markets ensured the profit return. But this is a fragile model, and, as history would tell us, never really “revitalized” the industry to be an industry-as-such and only addressed the needs of having a title out.

This history repeats, albeit in ever deteriorating condition. Clodualdo del Mundo Jr.’s lamentations against the film industry in favor of his so-called ‘Filipino Cinema’ never really helped and perhaps, sentiments similar to his demarcation between “Filipino Cinema” and “Film Industry” contributed to the ever-deteriorating condition of working in film production in this country. Such sentiments culminated in Regal Films’ Good Harvest Productions: series of critically acclaimed works done under very rigid conditions of productions, the scheme often referred to as “pito-pito” (seven days of photography, seven days of post-production). The scheme was replicated in the independent productions of the early phases of digital filmmaking. Over time, what was just addressed in these schemes are the needs of having a title-out, and as historically displayed by the independent film productions of the early digital filmmaking era, it’s not really a case of addressing the need for a film to be consumed by an audience.

All along, what both sides of the so-called industry – the mainstream and the independent – are concerned with is just producing films, with one of them thinking that they are producing better work than the other. It is a decision, again, that they took for themselves for a future of themselves. This decision leaves out the worker who, as more “independent” productions come out of the niches, the more that the worker becomes captive of their own precarity.

The condition is so extreme that it pushed the ruling classes to address the needs not just of film workers, but also of other workers of the so-called “creative industry.” But, then again, a blunder: where is this “creative industry” that they are talking about? How, for example, do we classify our “fashion industry” when, as remarked by a comrade, we don’t even have any capacity to produce a needle? Where is the “film industry” within this “creative industry” landscape when we can’t even produce our own… SD cards?

But the motive here is transparent enough to know that whatever this is, the bureaucrat-capitalist politicians and their supporters rally for the so-called “creative industry” was never for us, but for the benefit of imperialists. What are those proposed “special economic zones” for? To establish “creative spaces” wherein intellectual properties are bought and sold for content production? To establish employment agencies to pool “creative workers” for migrant work?

“The future is creative”? Again, a blunder. For all that is ever thought about is still, that notion of “creativity” outside of “industry.” This recent motion towards “creative industry” will never be of any use for anyone but imperialists if it does not count for its core policies the welfare of the workers. This, time and again, thinking of the future as a decision: a decision for imperialism.

In light of this recent dilemma, to even think of the future of Philippine Cinema is really, to think which of it has a future. As sketched out above, to merely think of the history of Philippine Cinema as a history of ever developing style or content and to establish a thought of its future merely from those criteria, is also to replicate the very dire condition that made the production of those styles and content possible. It’s been a long history of exploitation with an incomplete class struggle from the workers as possibilities of organizing film workers get slimmer as years go by, a difficulty abetted by the mainstream – and now the greater portion of the independent film scene – and its long history of colluding with the reactionary state.

As what the radicals repeat to us: history is a history of class struggle. And there is no future but the future of the success of the workers. It’s not that it is inevitable, as the future is a decision. However, no real historical progression can ever happen without the workers deciding that it is time to progress. This decision is what the reactionary state and their apparatuses will inevitably push back against since they benefit from the maintenance of the present. Until then, whatever happens that does not fundamentally change the conditions of production, will never be any sort of a proper history or a future.