Trialectics

Nick Deocampo’s term for how to read the forces at work in early Philippine cinema. Not a two-sided struggle between Spanish inheritance and American power, but a three-sided one, with native forms as the third party.

The third party is the point. In most tellings, Filipinos are what happens to Philippine cinema rather than a force acting on it, and the story becomes a handover from one coloniser’s influence to another’s. Deocampo’s version has a native current running under both from the beginning, weak at first and eventually strong enough to take the medium over and make it national.

The method has a consequence he presses hard: if the native force is real, then the Manila-centred version of the origin story is a choice rather than a finding, and regional cinema is not a late arrival but something that was there and got written out.

Source: Nick Deocampo, in “A Life in the Archives: An interview with Professor Nick Deocampo,” Frames Cinema Journal, free, where he describes the three-way contest and argues that “the myth of the Tagalog cinema as the lone, unchallenged national cinema is broken.” The full argument is in Film: American Influences on Philippine Cinema, Anvil, 2011, which is paid and has not been read from the source for this course.

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