Allegory

Telling the forbidden story through a permitted one. A tyrannical father stands in for a tyrannical state. A fraternity’s hazing stands in for what the state does to people who join it. A city that sprawls and rots cannot be named as Manila, so it is not named at all.

It was the dominant formal strategy of Philippine cinema under martial law, and the films that used it are among the best made here. Reading them is real critical work.

The trap it sets is a familiar one, and this course refuses it. Because allegory is beautiful and censorship produced it, people conclude that the pressure was good for the art. That conclusion is only available if you count the films that got through and ignore the ones that were cut, the director who was jailed, and everything nobody attempted, which is a set that leaves no record at all.

Source: The films are the evidence: Kisapmata and Batch ‘81 (Mike de Leon, both Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes 1982), read as figures for state violence in Mike de Leon, Wikipedia, and Manila by Night (Bernal, 1980), whose entire critical dossier is free in Kritika Kultura issue 19. The refusal to romanticise the constraint is this course’s own position, argued from Brocka’s sixteen days in detention in 1985 and the cuts imposed on Bernal’s film. Joel David’s free “A Second Golden Age” is the scholarly companion.

First used in: 3.4 · The golden age a dictatorship paid for