Classics

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

Now you know why these two films are called classics. Over 30 years since they were shown on our screens, they still have the power to engage us who live in the present, with our own present concerns. Even the compromises the filmmakers had to do to the realities of the time when they made the films enhance rather than distract.

Good Friend R Friday night sent me copies of Lino Brocka’s “Gumising Ka Maruja” and Ishmael Bernal’s “Nunal sa Tubig”, two of the outstanding movies made in the late 70s. And so I spent the last weekend in a movie marathon – just two films, several screenings – and came out of it with a fuller appreciation and understanding why the era was called the golden age of Philippine cinema. It was a time when our filmmakers relied mostly on their creativity, when things started from their fertile minds and executed using heavy duty, bulky film equipment.

I was amazed thinking how they did the scenes in this movie. The simple walk around the old house in “Maruja”, for example, must have taken several set-ups, each used to shoot several angles, and a lot of time to achieve the desired effect of showing how big the place was.

In “Nunal…”, that sequence of a gathering storm at dusk, which eventually falls as a heavy rain on a fishing village, and showing its effects on the various characters must have been a tedious undertaking – moving the camera here and there, waiting for the right lighting, triggering the water hoses for the rain, setting the light clap for lightning effects and who knows what else.

Sure these can be done again, but I doubt if they can be made an integral part of a beautiful whole, as they did in these two movies.

“Maruja” was shot in Negros Occidental, mostly at the Claparols mansion in Talisay and the long steel bridge in Murcia going to Mambukal. The first time I watched this back in high school, we were too preoccupied to identify the local people and places that made it to the movie. This time, three decades since, I had the pleasure of fully appreciating Brocka’s story within a story, a gothic tale of unrequited love that goes on beyond death. The scenes of ghosts from the Spanish times that were woven in the present were visually delicious. They looked like carefully composed photographs from the past, especially the wake at the private chapel.

“Nunal”, on the other hand, is wrenching story of life in a remote island and how this life was slowly being disturbed by modernism, represented by science: how government was setting up a station to study the fishing grounds and by the herbolaria’s daughter studying to be a “certified” midwife.

Bernal, master of sweeping, visual scenes, captures the slow, almost lazy life in the island, but punctuate them with foreboding that something was about to disrupt the neat little order of things here.

The opening scene of dark clouds and heavy winds was one of these. The “inspection” tour of the government functionary and scientist, marked by the menacing speedboat cutting through the waters is another.

Sadly, the copies of “Maruja” and “Nunal” are not well-preserved. The colors have faded, with “Nunal” turning black and white in most of the sequences. We can only hope some well-preserved copies of these films are kept somewhere, or perhaps as they have done to “Himala” somebody can start restoring them now.

These are part of our artistic heritage, and they should be seen in their glory, 30 or a hundred years from now.*

For feedback, go to www.lifestylesbacolod.com, check Bacolod Lifestyles on Facebook and follow @bacolodtweets on Twitter

back to top