The ontological journey of Kidlat Tahimik: Memories of Over-Development

 

Kidlat Tahimik’s films read as critical text of neo-colonialism, and his film has been associated with the Third Cinema movement. His latest film, Memories of Over-Development (MOD, 189min, Kidlat, 1979-2014) began producing on the late 70’s when he was also filming his maiden feature Perfumed Nightmare (93min, Kidlat, 1979), after over thirty years later the film completed in 2014. Since the film has been produced through entire his filmmaking career, the film shows how the style of Kidlat’s film has changed. This essay analyzes the piece from few different angles.

 

The earlier period of Kidlat’s film can be judged as anti-documentary[i] art practice that He performed a fictional character that represents his alternative identity: Perfumed Nightmare and Yo-Yo Who Invented Moon Buggy (93min, 1979). The style of his ethnographical documentary changes in later period, instead he performs himself in front of film camera, he set his position as an observer of his family’s micro-history: I am a furious Yellow (174min, 1994), Orbit 50 (84min, 1992). The title of the film Memories of Over-Development, imply another third world cinema from Cuba Memories of Under-Development (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) and it tells where the cultural context of the film has originated. When the incomplete version was unveiled in the early 80’s, as being indicated by the title to associate with the Latin America’s the third world culture, Kidlat tried to bring a discourse of the counterculture of the Caribbean region, into the Southeastern Asia’s context. When the first 20-minute film was released as an uncompleted version, the film ends with reenactment of the historical moment when Ferdinand Magellan got killed by a Pilipino tribal chef. Kidlat performed Luis Enrique, the slave of Magellan in the film.

 

Kidlat didn’t complete the film for more than thirty years but, the character, the first Pilipino slave became the subject of his film and possibly his ontological persona. He didn’t finish the film but, he ardently documented his daily life and his family, visual footages used allegorically in the final version of the film as a visual representation of the film subject. Christopher Pavsek thought that post-colonial rule still the central context of modern Philippine and Kidlat's films[ii]. In Kidlat’s works, even though colonial regime never appeal as a clear signifier in films, a discourse of post-colonial context of today’s Philippines remains consciously and unconsciously while undergoing the colonial rule for a long time[iii]. It is difficult to observe the impact of long-standing colonial rule in the Philippines in a short term because colonial history of the Philippines cannot be examined by one phenomenology, so it is worthwhile to study on his long observation works such as I am a furious yellow, and his recent work MOD, for socio-anthropological perspective to see how the colonial rule has influenced the people.

Pavsek once said that Kidlat delivers the ethnographical narrative of modern Philippines through dialogism of father and son[iv]. If launching of spacecraft to the moon represents symbolically a technology of the Cold War in the first world, political turmoil in Southeastern Asian countries due to the confliction of bipolar system, represents another phenomenology of the Cold War. Kidlat often represents history through micro-history of his family. In MOD, Kidlat tells a story to his son that spacecraft’s landing on the moon of U.S and Pilipino dictator Marcos's recession that they just experienced is not different nature of contemporary event, and there is no outside and inside of the world[v]. Here, long duration of observation of his family affair is Kidlat’s documentary strategy of investigating micro-history.

 

In the beginning of the film, Kidlat calls the Philippines as a “Tierra del Fuego” which a Spanish word of the "fire land", it also means an archipelago of the southernmost tip of the South American mainland. The beginning part of the film contemplates a historic moment when Magellan discovers Southeastern Asian islands for the first time in Western history. "Tierra del Fuego" is the keyword of Kidlat that reveals long colonization history of the Philippines. According to Kidlat’s view, regardless of the territory’s size, the imperialistic view of considering the Caribbean region as a minority ethnic group is the same as the view of considering the Philippines, consisting of 7104 islands. As Christopher Pavsek said, if the essence of Kidlat’s film is to create a material in the new order by recycling the existing order’s materials[vi], then MOD is recycling the memories documented during half of his lifetime. The film is divided into two parts. The first part starts with the setting where today’s Enrique is living in the same period of Magellan. The film shows a fictional story that Magellan is looking for Enrique who became an old man, who is living in harmony with indigenous people. The ending credit shown in the middle of the film, the least half part mostly comprised by visual footages that he documented during entire his filmmaking career. Visual footages are various different formats: 16mm film, analogue video and toy camera. As David Teh mentioned, the consideration of modern and contemporary history in South East Asia’s visual culture is closely related to the history of media’s popularity[vii]. Given that the quality of visual image is closely related to system’s order, low-definition image of the film has a political meaning as a minority country accordingly. In the film, not just image quality, but the screen’s aspect ratio and random sequence juxtaposition mean a mosaic amid disorder. The latter part of MOD appears to be Godard’s Histoire du Cinema (267min, Godard, 1998) given that, the film tries to form a cinematic system for meta-history from a colonial's lens. While Godard’s work is defining meta-history with the arrangement of found footage, MOD does not follow the memory system of the archive, rather has a structure of narratives the way the Genesis is being remembered in oral narrative.  The same story is repeated and a story’s meaning is based on a narrative structure, so the story is being transferred to the next generation as wisdom to make all society members are aware of the story. That can be said as a narrative way.

 

Pavsek also said that, the Brechtian inversion of the First world and the Third world is one of the significant factors in Kidlat’s films[viii]. At the end of MOD, such factor incorporated into a performance to reflect the meaning of traveling all around the world in his life. From the last sequence of the film, Kidlat plays a performance of language communication with the people around the world who are using a different language: German, English, Italian, Russia and vernacular tongue of northern Philippines. As mentioned above, Kidlat considers that the West sees the Third world as a new continent where native culture is dominant, and the West has destroyed their existing production system and culture by forcing them to be developed. The language issue related to cultural identity comes from Philippine’s territory, which consists of 7,104 islands and cannot be uninformed into one. At the same time, such condition became a factor where native’s culture still persists against today’s dominant creolized[ix] culture. In analyzing the cultural essence of Creolized culture as a community culture of Malaysian-language countries; Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, the narrative-cultural identity of the ethnic minority is the essence of their ethnic groups, not just for the Philippines, and such identity also comes from a language difference as well. From modernistic perspective, in the history of colony, language difference has created a hierarchy between the ruler and the ruled, and also was used as a tool for controlling. The language difference and reality as the ruled, which are the Philippines’ cultural identity have seen their relations inverted in the context where Kidlat giving and receiving words with people around the world who are using a different language. Here, Luis Enrique, attempts to communicate fundamentally by inverting the existing relations in language relations.

 

 

 

[i] Anne Anlin Cheng, “Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée”, Culture and Criticism Vol. 23, No. 4, (Winter, 1998), 122

 

[ii] Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Filim, (Columbia University Press, 2013), 80

 

[iii] Pavsek, The Utopia, 87

 

[iv] Pavsek, The Utopia, 85

 

[v] Kidlat Tahimik, The script of Memories of Over Development, 32

 

[vi] Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Filim, (Columbia University Press, 2013), 85

 

[vii]  Teh, ‘Recalibrating Media,

 

[viii]  Pavsek, The Utopia, 007

 

[ix]  Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation”, Framework, 36 (1989), 68

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity & Cinematic Representation, p705-707

[2] Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik, Columbia University Press, 2013, p80

[3] Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik, Columbia University Press, 2013, p85

[4] David Teh, ‘Recalibrating Media: Three Theses on Video and Media Art in Southeast Asia’,

[5] Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik, Columbia University Press, 2013, p117

[6] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1992, p202