Exhibition

The business of owning the room and selling the seats. Everything about a cinema that is not the film: the lease, the projector, the schedule, the door, the cut.

It is worth keeping separate from production in your head, because the two have almost never been owned by the same people here. Exhibition arrived in the Philippines in 1897 as an imported business run by foreigners, showing foreign films on foreign machines to a paying local audience. Filipino production arrived more than two decades later, into a market whose rooms were already spoken for.

The exhibitor decides three things a filmmaker cannot: whether your film gets a screen, on what date, and for how long. That is why a Filipino film that underperforms on opening day can be gone by the weekend, and why the oldest unsolved problem in this industry is not how films get made.

Source: The dated sequence comes from the standard chronology of early Philippine cinema, summarised in Cinema of the Philippines, Wikipedia and taught in this course from Nick Deocampo’s lecture “Gunita: Mga Alaala sa Pinilakang Tabing” (TVUP, free). The topic is owned in print by Deocampo, Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines, NCCA, 2003, which is paid and Philippine-published. The framing of exhibition and distribution as the captured links in a chain is this course’s own compression, not a quotation.

First used in: 3.1 · The movies got here before we did