One of nine films in the 2010 Cinemalaya Film Festival’s retrospective exhibition of LVN studio classics,1 the 1961 crime thriller Sandata at Pangako (Weapon and Promise, dir. F.H. Constantino) was made at the threshold of the old and the new. Sandata was LVN Pictures’ last release and its only film featuring action icon Fernando Poe, Jr. (“FPJ”), the wildly popular box office king whose decision to break his studio contract in favor of independent producers’ larger talent fees heralded the studio system’s demise.2

The enthusiastic audience at Cinemalaya’s retrospective screening of Sandata had come for a glimpse of the late star in his youthful glory, but we left savoring other pleasures: the technical polish of a well-made studio film and the bright-eyed, incandescent “screen personality” of multi-awarded actress Charito Solis, cast alongside the legendary FPJ. (The action king was rumored to have been her first real heartbreak).3

At the end of the screening, a college student filing out of the theater remarked—“We should have just watched all the LVN films!”4 —confirming that Cinemalaya, known for fostering independent filmmaking, is also creating an audience of young film buffs eagerly rediscovering older films.5 This emerging cinephilic encounter results in a horizon of retrospective reception that counters easy dismissals of studio era films as hackneyed formula pictures made solely for profit. More importantly, moviegoers who may have come to see how familiar stars once looked end up discovering how familiar places once looked as well: a registering of historical time inscribed in the Philippine cityscape of the forties, fifties, and sixties. This is cinematic remembering, one enabled by the archive.

Established in 1938, LVN was among the Big Three studios whose output accounted for 65% of the films produced from 1946 to 1960, a period roughly coextensive with the Golden Age of Filipino filmmaking.6 The commercially profitable star vehicles crafted by executive producer Doña Sisang7 at LVN were an admixture of nationalism, commercialism, and escapism. Director Lamberto Avellana recalls her saying, “Why remind audiences of their hardship?”8 Studio era escapism was most often achieved by predictable happy endings. Yet in Gregorio Fernandez’s 1955 melodrama Higit Sa Lahat [Above All]9, the obligatory narrative resolution is undermined by the film’s trenchant critique of postwar materialism.

Based on a serialized radio play, Higit pursues the tragic consequences of the idea that money is the highest expression of love. The film’s critique of the emptiness of the postwar culture of acquisitiveness comes through in an early scene when Roberto (studio icon Rogelio de la Rosa) and his wife Rosa (Emma Alegre) go window shopping in Manila. If the similarity between cinema screen and department store window rests on their ability to sell the pleasures of the gaze to consumer-spectators,10 then the onscreen shop window in Higit attempts to do the reverse, exposing the moviegoer’s complicity in conspicuous consumption.

When an accidental fire razes the warehouse, everyone concludes that Roberto is dead, despite the fact that he was not killed in the fire. Deciding that the windfall from his life insurance would give his family the future he could not otherwise provide, Roberto embraces self-imposed exile from his family. The intricately plotted story forces Rosa to mourn her living husband thrice over: first, when his necklace is found among a co-worker’s remains; second, when his wallet and a family picture are discovered on the person of a dead thief; and lastly, when Rosa spots him being run over by a car. When the dust from the near-collision clears, Roberto and his family are reunited at last. People are more important than money, Rosa maintains throughout the film, but Roberto is convinced that providing for his loved ones is more important than being with them (his situation is chillingly prescient of the conundrum of overseas Filipino workers today, who are forced to leave their families in order to sustain them).11

Like Higit, Sandata also contests dismissals of LVN as churning out nothing but “antiseptically rigid”, “wholesome” films. The film’s plot centers on organized crime, drug addiction, and pedophilia, surprising present-day spectators expecting a stereotypically “chaste” studio product. The plot traces a hapless couple’s involvement with a crime syndicate: Mando (FPJ), an ex-gang member, successfully helps his sweetheart Dolores (Charito Solis) overcome drug addiction.
Scene transitions are conspicuously marked by graphic matches, dialogue bridges, and matches on action. In one effective transition, a match on action across two scenes underscores the thematic of filthy lucre.

The numerous editing flourishes ended up eliciting laughter from the Cinemalaya audience, whose campy response signaled not ridicule but affection.12 At one point, a form of call and response among Sandata’s viewers seemed to be taking place, with comments by a group of girls in the front of the theater provoking good-natured replies from spectators in the rear. Affectionate laughter greeted the action king’s impossible action feats as well.

Watching LVN films several decades after their initial release invites a retrospective horizon of reception. More than camp enjoyment, retrospective reception also provokes a spatial sense of the uncanny, as evident in another narratively gripping and technically polished Gregorio Fernandez film, Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo [If You Love Me, 1960].

A spurned suitor’s attempted rape of Lydia (Charito Solis) along Highway 54 is foiled when Ramon (Nestor de Villa) responds to Lydia’s cries for help. In the ensuing scuffle, Lydia drives off, so Ramon is alone when the villain inadvertently shoots himself. In the absence of the woman he claims to have saved, the police disbelieve Ramon’s protestations of innocence. His worsening plight at the hands of the justice system is intercut with shots of an impeccably dressed Lydia en route to her flight to the US the next morning. In an LVN version of the vanishing lady motif,13 Lydia’s failure to appear results in an innocent man’s conviction. Years later, unaware of their shared past, socialite and mechanic fall in love. Delayed revelations dilate the plot’s progression towards the inevitable happy ending, when all is forgiven and the lovers are reunited at last.

For contemporary viewers, scenes of the lovers against the backdrop of Balara are unexpectedly startling. When Ramon says of Balara, “The sights here are beautiful!”14 the scene triggers a kind of spatial uncanny, an unfamiliar, because forgotten, evocation of familiar urban space.15 I was amazed by Ramon’s line because I went to high school near Balara and remember it as a bustling jeepney stop and the far from scenic site of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS).16 My mother recalls Balara as an idyllic picnic spot in the late forties; in Fernandez’s 1960 film, it is a scenic resort.

In Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo, the LVN logo and opening credits are superimposed over a crane shot of Highway 54, site of Lydia’s rescue by Ramon. For contemporary viewers, however, Highway 54 is best remembered as the pre-sixties name for Metro Manila’s most vital artery, E. de los Santos Avenue (EDSA). Today, EDSA’s north- and south-bound thoroughfares are crammed with cars, people, buildings, and billboards. Onscreen, Highway 54 in 1960 is above all a long dangerous stretch of darkness, the undeveloped real estate between Guadalupe and Buendia, notorious in the fifties for roadside robberies.

Footage of Ramon and Lydia driving around Luneta Park along T.M. Kalaw inspires an uncanny sense of spatial recognition, of presence and absence. To the right rear of the 1960 shot is the Manila Hotel, built in 1909. In the left rear is the Manila Army and Navy Club, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1911 along Luneta on Dewey (renamed Roxas Boulevard in the sixties). Invisible, offscreen and to the left of the frame, would have been the now-abandoned Luneta Hotel, built in 1918; most strikingly, the expansive, grassy foreground in the lower left of this 1960 shot calls to mind the same spot today: a tangle of condominiums and storefronts, a Shell gas station and a 7-Eleven among them.

For Vivian Sobchack, the inscription of history in film is not metaphoric but literal: in her well-known analysis of film noir, history inheres to the visible places of the story world, the “concrete locality” of the mise-en-scène.17 In these LVN films, the visibility of historical time as place is owing to location shooting: the orderly expanse of Baguio’s Burnham park in Susana de Guzman’s Sumpaan [Vow, 1948]; Balara and Luneta in Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo. The pleasures of the archive are to be glimpsed not only in the faces of stars as they once looked but also in the forgotten visage of the Philippines’ urban iconography.

I am grateful to Vicky Belarmino and Nestor Jardin for graciously agreeing to be interviewed for this piece. This essay was made possible by the place-memories of my mother, Dr. Felicidad Cua-Lim, and the spatially-attuned cinephilia of Joya Escobar. This is dedicated to both of them, with profound thanks.

Image Credits:
1-11. Author Provided Screencaptures

Please feel free to comment.

1. According to CCP film archivist Vicky Belarmino, she and film historian Nic Tiongson chose the films for the Cinemalaya LVN retrospective from a dozen relatively well-preserved LVN titles with good image and sound quality (see my prior Flowtv.org column on the archive crisis in Phlippine cinema.) They adopted the following criteria in choosing nine films for the retrospective program: good copies must be available in digital format; the titles must be rarely exhibited; and the program as a whole must comprise a mix of genres. Personal interview with Vicky Belarmino, July 23, 2010.
2. Coincidentally, FPJ’s father, Fernando Poe, Sr., starred in LVN’s very first film, Giliw Ko [My Darling, 1939]. Two years after FPJ broke his contract with mother studio Premiere Productions in 1960, he founded his own production company, ushering in the post-studio trend of independent superstar-producers. The decline of the studio system meant that by 1965, a handful of top stars were getting paid six times their normal asking price in comparison with their usual fee in 1960; the film industry as a whole was producing almost 200 films a year, double the annual number of films produced in the studio era. See Ross F. Celino. “Busiest Stars of 1965.” Weekly Graphic 32, no. 28 (January 5, 1966): 38-39; and “Sandata at Pangako (1961)”, http://fpj-daking.blogspot.com/2008/09/sandata-at-pangako-1961.html
   FPJ’s film career began in the mid-1950s and spanned almost five decades; he was a contender in the 2004 presidential elections but was defeated by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. FPJ is widely believed to have won more electoral votes than Arroyo, but Arroyo was never impeached despite proof of her direct involvement with large-scale vote tampering.
3. According to Baldovino, Charito Solis received twelve acting awards and thirteen nominations over the course of a forty-three year career in movies. As a young actress, Solis was quiet and introverted, despite the “incandescence that showed in her eyes”. (Tirol, 46) She possessed what LVN studio chiefs called a “screen personality”, “that indefinable ‘something’ that causes the audience to rivet its attention” on her. (Torre, 11) See Gypsy Baldovino’s two-part article, “Charito Solis: Empress of Drama,” and “Charito Solis: a Tough Act to Follow”, Manila Bulletin, July 14 and 21, 2009; Lorna K. Tirol, “The Starmaker,” in Doña Sisang and Filipino movies, ed. Monina A. Mercado (Metro Manila: A.R. Mercado Management, 1977) 46; and Nestor U. Torre, “Doña Sisang: Her Times, Her Studio,” in Doña Sisang and Filipino Movies, 10-16.
4. “Dapat pala, puro LVN na lang ang pinanood natin!” All translations from Tagalog to English are my own.
5. Businessworld reports that, from 8,000 attendees at the first Cinemalaya in 2005, “the audience turnout for the film event has shot up by as much 54% every year. Last year, Cinemalaya’s box-office attendance ballooned to 42,000, from about 30,000 a year ago. For this year, Mr. Jardin said organizers hope to attract an audience of 50,000.” Jeffrey O. Valisno, “Old hands join newbies in Cinemalaya,” BusinessWorld July 8, 2010. Available http://www.bworldonline.com/weekender/content.php?id=13910.
6. LVN is an acronym for the surnames of its three founders: Narcisa Buencamino vda de Leon, Carmen Villongco, and Eleuterio Navoa, Jr. Tiongson writes, “The 1950s and early 1960s have been described by many writers as the Golden Age of the Filipino film… [because] most of the films churned out by the Big Three Studios of this period – Sampaguita Pictures, LVN, and Premiere Productions… achieved a higher level of technological expertise and artistry in filmmaking.” Nicanor Tiongson, “The Filipino Film Industry,” East-West Film Journal 6.2 (1992): 29.
7. Known simply as “Doña Sisang,” LVN Executive Producer Narcisa Buencamino viuda de Leon was the preeminent female auteur of the studio period. Film critic Nestor Torre credits Doña Sisang’s “painstaking attention to every phase of moviemaking” with creating the studio’s legendary house style. “Doña Sisang read scripts, decided on projects, supervised casting, designed costumes, viewed rushes, all down the line. This helps explain why LVN pictures tended to look and sound alike (“the LVN style”) despite the fact that they were filmed by many different megmen.” Torre, “Doña Sisang,” 14.
8. “Bakit mo ipapakita sa tao na mahirap sila?” Quoted in Paulyn P. Sicam and Babsy Paredes, “The Director’s Director”, in Doña Sisang and Filipino Movies, 78.
9. This film won Best Director and Actor at the 1956 Asian Film Festival FAMAS awards for Best Actor, Picture, Story, Editing, and Sound.
10. Anne Friedberg, Window shopping: cinema and the postmodern (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1993) 3.
11. Almost 10 million Filipinos work abroad, accounting for nearly 10% of the total Phlippine population. For the Philippine economy’s reliance on ever-increasing remittances by Filipino migrant worker E. San Juan, Jr. “Overseas Filipino Workers: The Making of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora,” The Global South 3.2 (Fall 2009): 99-100.
12. Susan Sontag’s appraisal of camp applies here: she calls it “a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy…People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “camp”, they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.” Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”, Against Interpretation (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967) 291-292.
13. For the disruptive figure of the vanishing lady in cinema, see Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
14. “Ang gaganda nga pala ng mga tanawin!”
15. I am thinking of the Freudian notion of the uncanny as the unfamiliar in the unfamiliar: “In general,” writes Freud, “we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny (1919),” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, General ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. xvii (1917-1919) ‘An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works’. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955) 224-225.
16. A The Balara Treatment Plant receives water sourced from the Angat Dam via the Novaliches Reservoir; it supplies the eastern half of Metro Manila. See “Metro Manila Water Supply System, http://www.mwssro.org.ph/publication_mm_watersupply_system.htm
17. Vivian Sobchack, “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory ed. Nick Browne (University of California Press, 1998) 130, 157-159.

The lack of a national audiovisual archive—a problem rooted in a dearth of funding, a lack of political will, and the deterioration of archival storage formats—is a pressing question for Philippine film and media studies.1 Many important films are unavailable on VCD or DVD; in some cases, the last known prints or master negatives of canonical Filipino films are available only at the British Film Institute or the Cinémathèque Française. When no extant 35mm or 16mm prints survive, a poor-quality Betamax or VHS copy suffices; failing that, a lost film must be reconstructed through secondary sources alone.2

The only national audiovisual archive ever funded by the state, established by the Marcos government in 1981, was shuttered with the regime’s ouster in 1986. The Philippine Congress has since failed to pass a bill developing national print and audiovisual archives. The lack of a national audiovisual archive has resulted in “pockets of archives”, the most important of which is privately owned by television and cable corporation ABS-CBN.3

On my first visit to the ABS-CBN Film Archives in 2005, I was told that their holdings represented roughly 2,400 of the mere 3,000 titles that survive from the inception of Philippine cinema (some 8,000 films are estimated to have been produced locally since the cinematographic apparatus was introduced in 1897).4 Maintained for broadcast content, the ABS-CBN Film Archive is not a public research collection; special permissions are required for visiting scholars. The archive’s temperature-controlled vaults, designed to preserve access copies on broadcast-quality video for the medium term and film prints and master negatives for long term storage, represent the best archival conservation measures in the Philippines. Temperature controls are able to arrest, but cannot reverse, the degeneration of films previously subjected to improper storage in a tropical climate. Such limitations notwithstanding, the ABS-CBN film archive is presently the most significant bulwark against the encroaching loss of the majority of Philippine cinema.

The fragility of the Filipino audiovisual archive–much of it on video–is primarily a problem of media obsolescence.5 In the 1980s, deteriorating studio era classics were transferred to Betamax by Mike de Leon, a major director of the Philippine New Cinema and grandson of the LVN studio founder, Doña Narcisa “Sisang” de Leon.6 In some cases, these flickering Betamax tapes are now the last extant copies of lost LVN films, themselves objects of restoration on digital video.

Marita Sturken observes that analog video was never intended to be an archival medium. Video was designed to allow consumer recording of television’s simultaneous transmission, offering the immediate pleasure of instant replay.7 So the irony of Philippine cinema’s pocket archives, like others around the world, is that works in the older medium of celluloid were archived on video formats that were newer but also inherently ephemeral. In the Philippine context, then, film history was first preserved and is now endangered as videotape history. VHS, Betamax, and three-quarter inch U-matic tapes, as well as their respective playback technologies, are already archival artifacts as carefully preserved as celluloid.8 I vividly recall, on a visit to the short film archives of the Mowelfund Institute in 2005, seeing a roomful of old audiovisual equipment that had been cannibalized for parts to keep a single U-matic videocassette deck in working condition. Such archives are not only invaluable collections of media; they are also little “museums of obsolete technology,” in Alexander Stille’s apt phrase.9

Nor is the archival problem reducible to analog video. Given the short-lived nature of technological formats in an era of accelerating media obsolescence, Lucas Hilderbrand’s emphatic warning bears repeating: “digitization is not preservation.”10 Clay tablets and medieval parchment are more long wearing than modern acidic paper; black and white photographs are more stable over time than color photographs; the shelf life of celluloid motion pictures exceeds the twenty year lifespan of videotape, which is double the estimated decade-long stability of digital storage.11

In an age when media obsolescence is more recognizable than ever, the pressure of impending archival loss provokes a demand for historical reckoning. The Philippine archival situation is grim, but the response of historically-minded film buffs can sometimes take an inspired, playful form. This is the case for the campy period film Pepot Artista (Pepot the Movie Star, 2005), an independent digital film written and directed by Philippine film critic, historian, and archivist Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr.12

Pepot Artista recreates the movie-mad culture of the early 1970s, a milieu dominated by the superstardom of Nora Aunor (affectionately referred to as “Guy” by her fans) and Tirso Cruz III (nicknamed “Pip” by his devotees), who were romantically linked both on- and off-screen. The child protagonist Pepot (Elijah Castillo) is the impoverished moviegoer-as-dreamer: a little boy who sells komiks (comic book-sized movie magazines) on the street, Pepot dreams of emulating his screen idols: the action star Fernando Poe, Jr. (“FPJ”) and teen icons Guy and Pip.

Pepot’s story in the 1970s is framed by the retrospective voice-over narration of a present-day movie writer. As the Narrator (Noni Buencamino) realizes his lifelong dream of telling Pepot’s story, the film’s three-tiered structure, built on the motif of cinephilic dreaming, is laid bare. Pepot’s dream of superstardom and the Narrator’s dream of recounting Pepot’s tale parallel the filmmaker’s offscreen archival dreams: del Mundo’s important 2004 monograph, Dreaming of a National Audio-Visual Archive, had drawn attention to Philippine cinema’s archive crisis a year before the film’s release.13

Archival footage is central to the film’s appeal. Excerpts from the Manuel Silos classic Biyaya ng Lupa (Blessings of the Land, 1959), the FPJ action flick Alas, Hari, at Sota (1971), and the Nora Aunor teen romance Lollipops and Roses (1971) address knowing film buffs while offering cinematic pedagogy for moviegoers who have never seen these films. Pepot’s contagious cinephilia, then, can evoke a longing for films one has never seen, initiating spectators into the popular pleasures of the archive. This, in fact, is the important work Pepot does for my own teaching of Philippine Cinema.14

The joke of an early scene is that an unnamed motorist who buys a magazine about Guy and Pip is the actor Tirso Cruz III himself. The joke plays on deliberate anachronisms: the actor as he looks in 2005 makes an appearance in the diegetic world of the seventies, and archival footage of Guy and Pip as youthful matinee idols are juxtaposed alongside the visage of the older actor in the present day. Pepot’s buddy fails to recognize Pip, but Pepot and the offscreen spectator do. Pepot’s cross-generational, anachronistic gaze of recognition at Pip functions as an inside joke, both a cinephilic homage to pop icons and a self-reflexive jab at the film’s nostalgic recreation of the seventies.

The interspersed footage from Guy and Pip (1971) features Maria Leonora Teresa, a three-foot-tall ceramic doll to whom the teen stars croon a hit ballad. Guy and Pip’s famous white “love child” is parodied in a later scene. Pepot fantasizes that he has been adopted by Guy and Pip impersonators; he joins their act, playing the transvestite part of their doll-daughter.

Pepot’s gendered and racialized impersonation of the inanimate blonde doll is also a form of temporal drag.15 Retrospectively inscribed onto the cross-dressing body of the young boy’s fandom is the foreknowledge that Nora Aunor’s gay male following would grow steadily in the years to come. In a kind of temporal condensation, the nostalgia of our own decade and a foreshadowing of 1980s films thematizing fandom are rear-projected onto Pepot, a queer child of the early seventies.

In the context of Philippine cinema’s fragile and fast-declining film and media archive, Pepot Artista’s inside jokes and archival footage fold the old into the new, enacting the survival of nearly-forgotten popular pleasures. Pepot’s wellspring is the affective archive of a filmmaker-preservationist, a fandom steeped in history.

My thanks to Vicky Belarmino and Mary del Pilar, both members of SOFIA, the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film. See http://dev.martinisantos.com/sofia/.

Image Credits:
1. Author Screencapture of Guy and Pip
2. Author Screencapture of Pepot Artista
3. Poster for Pepot Artista
4. Author Screencapture of Biyaya ng Lupa
5-7. Author Screencaptures of Pepot Artista
8. Author Screencapture of Guy and Pip
9. Author Screencapture of Pepot Artista
10. Author Screencapture of Himala

Please feel free to comment.

1. See Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr.’s pioneering work on Philippine film archiving, Dreaming of a National Audio-Visual Archive, a SOFIA monograph for Ukay-Ukay: Where’s the Archive, a Festival of Restored Filipino Film Classics in Celebration of SOFIA’s 11th Anniversary, July 2004.
2. A print of Manuel Conde’s 1952 Genghis Khan, shown at the Venice Film Festival, is at the Cinematheque Francaise; the British Film Institute holds the original negatives to Lino Brocka’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila In the Claws of Neon, 1975). See del Mundo, “Dreaming,” pp. 3-4.
3. del Mundo, 12-13, 28.
4. For a historical overview of Philippine cinema, see Nicanor Tiongson, “The Filipino Film Industry” East-West Film Journal 6.2 (July 1992): 23-61; and Bien Lumbera, “Philippine Film (1897-1992)” CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art vol. 8: Philippine Film (Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1994) 18-27.
5. For a discussion of cinephilia and media obsolescence in relation to VHS and recent analog history, see Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
6. Del Mundo writes, “There was no budget for telecine transfer, so [Mike de Leon] merely projected the films and recorded them off the screen with a Betamax camera and recorder. The improvised recording was not able to get rid of the flickering effect.” Del Mundo, 8-9.
7. Marita Sturken, “Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form: Great Expectations and the Making of a History,” Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide To Video Art. Ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York : Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990) 103-105, 120-121.
8. U-matic is a three quarter inch videocassette format first marketed by Sony in 1971; a high-band broadcast U-matic format was introduced in the 1980s. Sony still markets this recordable format and the Library of Congress has significant U-matic holdings for access copies and proofs of copyright.
9. Alexander Stille, “Are We Losing Our Memory? or The Museum of Obsolete Technology”, The Future of the Past (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 299.
10. Hilderbrand, 21.
11. Stille, 302.
12. Pepot Artista won Best Picture and Best Editing in the Full-length film category of the 2005 Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival. It was completed within the shoestring budget permitted by the Cinemalaya Foundation’s seed grant of 500,000 pesos (about $10,000); such financial grants are awarded to 10 full-length feature films selected to compete in the Best Full-length film category of the festival. See http://www.cinemalaya.org/about_partners.htm
13. See full citation for Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr., Dreaming of a National Audiovisual Archive, note 1 above. The narrator who revives a thirty-year old dream of telling Pepot’s story clearly functions as a diegetic alter-ego for director del Mundo himself: “The idea for Pepot Artista first lit up more than thirty years ago. In fact, it was Del Mundo’s first screenplay. ‘I did Pepot Artista during my tutorial course under Nestor Torre,’ shares Del Mundo. That was way back in 1971. He continues, ‘Pagkatapos, natabi lang siya. [Afterwards, it was put aside.] But it was one of the projects I really wanted to do.’ Meryll Yan, “Doy del Mundo: Debuting at 57,” http://www.pepotartista.com/director.html
14. Course website available at: https://eee.uci.edu/10w/26207/.
15. For a fascinating conceptualization of “temporal drag” in relation to queer temporality, see Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(Er)Ing Generations.” New Literary History 31 (2000): 727-744.