ORBIT 35
Messages from the Future
The Messages From the Future marked the pinnacle of the Gawad ALTipunan. Past and present Gawad Alternatibo filmmakers were invited to write on the banners their reflections on alternative filmmaking and Gawad Alternatibo, prompted by the following questions: How do you identify your role as filmmakers? What characters and values must you carry forward over the next 35 Orbits of Gawad Alternatibo?
The banner writing is the first iteration of Messages from the Future—a regular harvest of letters from Filipino alternative filmmakers in the next years with an end goal of producing a manifesto that is representative of every imprint and impulse that has contributed to the enduring legacy of Gawad Alternatibo.
What is a manifesto? University of the Philippines Film Institute Associate Professor Patrick Campos introduced manifesto writing as a form of power to create change.
I.
The film manifesto is as old as cinema itself.
In his manifesto “For a Metahistory of Film” (1971), American structural filmmaker Hollis Frampton quotes and restates as his own Louis Lumière’s 1895 inaugural declaration, “The cinematographe is an invention without a future,” which suggests paradoxical meanings: that of a halt and a movement, that the technology of cinema is now and that its tomorrow is ever postponed.
In 1898, only three years after the invention of the cinematographe, Polish pioneer cinematographer Bolesław Matuszewski called for establishing the archive in his manifesto, “A New Source of History,” underlining the significance of film and the film manifesto as historical documents.
By 1911, Italian music theorist Ricciotto Canudo had elevated the status of cinema in his manifesto, “The Birth of the Sixth Art,” an idea he would later revise by calling it the seventh art after reconsidering dance.
Thus, film manifestoes appear to embody three modes of temporality.
It is a historical document that, even in its brevity, contains the zeitgeists and contexts of the past.
It is always written in the present, often born out of new insight or impelled by a sense of urgency.
And it imagines a future that it also seeks to conjure or prophesy by its very writing.
II.
The discontent in the present and the drive toward a utopian future inherent in the form are palpable in the most influential film manifestoes, such as Satyajit Ray’s What Is Wrong with Indian Films? (1948), Guy Debord’s Prolegomena for All Future Cinema (1952), Maya Deren’s A Statement of Principles (1961), The Latin American manifestoes of the 1960s: The Aesthetics of Hunger (Brazil, 1965), For an Imperfect Cinema (Cuba, 1969), and Towards a Third Cinema (Argentina, 1969), Jean-Luc Godard’s What Is to Be Done? (1970), Manifesto of the Palestinian Cinema Group (1973), Lino Brocka’s Philippine Movies: Problems and Prospects (1982), Jonas Mekas’s Anti-100 Years of Cinema (1996), Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme ’95 Vow of Chastity (1995), Ciné Institute of Haiti’s Jollywood Manifesto (2008), and Jia Zhangke’s The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return (2010).
These manifestoes came at watershed moments in film history, or they insisted on rupturing and reorienting the flow of history.
From hindsight, they serve as markers we can look back to to inquire if their call to change cinema that would, in turn, change society did, in fact, change anything in cinema or society.
If not, then writing a manifesto is without a future in that it must always be rewritten.
III.
Besides marking historical conjunctures, manifestoes call forth new subjects and create new formations.
That is to say, in important ways, we are not alternative, the people gathered here, but are gathered here nevertheless to expect, to call upon, the coming of the alternative.
Two examples closer to home are worth remembering.
In 1989, at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Asian filmmakers and cinephiles discussed the situations in their respective countries of Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines and their frustrations and obstacles. Recognizing their similar plight, the group wrote a manifesto based on the final remarks of Kidlat Tahimik, which alluded to the Oberhausen Manifesto of the 1960s, connecting the moment to a deeper international history. The other Filipinos present were Nick Deocampo and Teddy Co.
Co-signing the manifesto is historic in naming the common aspirations of the representative countries and encircling them together into a new formation poised to make art that is theirs, together, as Asian advocates of new documentaries.
Another example of marking historical conjunctures and summoning new formations is the Indonesian I-Sinema Collective’s and Khavn de la Cruz’s manifestoes, written separately but coincidentally at the cusp of the 21st century, after the Dogme ’95 Dekalog.
The former signaled a new era in filmmaking after the fall of Suharto, and the latter marked the coming of “filmless films” amid a slump in industrial filmmaking.
In hindsight, they were foretokens of the rebirth of Indonesian and Philippine cinema and the eventual strengthening of regional ties, which are now blooming after many years.
IV.
However, and here I must speak as a scholar rather than simply a participant in this exercise, the film manifesto is, in many ways, a paradoxical document.
First, the manifesto is paradoxical in that while it may crystallize as dialectical, especially in retrospect, mediating the past and present and calling into being a new future, it is monologic in expression and extremist in disposition.
It must demand perfection for it to fuel the engine of change. Otherwise, why write a manifesto?
Lars von Trier, with his Nazi fascination, and ascetic Robert Bresson, have claimed the impossibility of perfectly adhering to it. Von Trier finds pleasure in breaking vows, while Bresson writes of forging “iron laws if only to obey or disobey them with difficulty.”
A productive way of regarding this paradox is to use it as a map and measure of cinematic development and social change. To go back to it time and again and ask, where are we now, and what did we miss?
A recent example is the productive manifesto written by Jason Paul Laxamana in the 2010s, which served as the impetus to form the Kapampangan Cinema Movement, some of whose members continue to thrive today, but which Laxamana himself and a few others in the group could not uphold for its strictness.
Perhaps the most subtle paradox of the manifesto for those who abide by it rests in its radical form.
Its vision of the future can be revolutionary, but it can also be reactionary because both sides aspire for their version of utopia to come to pass. For every manifesto, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s The Method of Making Workers’ Films (1925) in the USSR, there is one like Joseph Goebbels’s “Creative Film” (1935) in Nazi Germany.
In short, we must participate in this exercise, to prepare for eventually writing a new manifesto, aware of the power and paradox of the form to document and create change.
And of course, any would be manifesto should be powerful and paradoxical, untethered from its previous and current schematization, just as CCP’s Gawad Alternatibo is foundational to the establishment of Cinemalaya while also necessary to coexist, to be distinct from, and always more radical than Cinemalaya that is inclined to move toward the center, and equally, just as Gawad Alternatibo and Cinemalaya must be measured against how they can continually critique themselves as institutions and CCP and its functions and direction at any given historical moment, especially today.
Gawad CCP para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video, or Gawad Alternatibo for short, is the longest-running independent short film festival in Southeast Asia.
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