Faculty Publications - Cinema Studies Institute

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“A Brief History of Archival Advocacy for Philippine Cinema"
(National Film Archives of the Philippines, 2013) Lim, Bliss Cua
In what follows, I sketch a capsule history of the archival advocacy that strove to respond to the impending loss of the Philippines’ imperiled national cinema. The capsule history I present here will be non-linear and interpretive. My goal is not chronology so much as an attempt to grapple with where we are now and how we got here. Walter Benjamin cautions that in writing history, we have to honestly recognize those moments when the past’s horizon of expectations have not been fulfi lled by the present. To take stock of the past’s “unfulfilled future” is part of the task of remembering. What were the dreams and expectations of fi lm archivists of the past, and have our present-day archival efforts fulfilled these? I hope this capsule the history of Philippine audiovisual archiving helps us to better understand the long-term context of how we come to the conversations we’ll be having today. Archives don’t just preserve history: archives have a history too, and in the Philippines, various attempts to preserve our audiovisual past have been marked by vicissitude: changing presidential administrations and our fickle political culture. Decades of state negligence, as we all know, imperiled the precious little that is left of Philippine fi lm history. That is the daunting task the NFAP faces: the task of turning away from a Philippine media culture marked by negligence and ephemerality towards a culture of sustainable preservation.
“Analysis and Recommendations in the wake of the 2013 Philippine Cinema Heritage Summit"
(National Film Archives of the Philippines, 2013) Lim, Bliss Cua
Nearly 25 years after the closure of the last state-run audiovisual archive, the establishment of a new National Film Archives of the Philippines (NFAP) in 2011 means that we are at a turning point in the effort to preserve what survives of Filipino fi lm and media history. The following analysis considers the existing situation of the country’s longstanding archive crisis, the internal strengths and weaknesses of the NFAP and other players in Philippine audiovisual archiving, and the external threats and opportunities relating to the archive movement’s goals. The recommendations for strategic planning I propose here grapple with these factors while attempting to build on the real gains of the Philippine Cinema Heritage Summit recently convened by the NFAP in January 2013.
"Toward an Autonomous Philippine Audiovisual Archives"
(University of the Philippines Film Institute, 2021) Lim, Bliss Cua; Olgado, Benedict Salazar; Roque, Rosemarie Olmes
The article includes two position papers: “A Position Paper on the Substitute Bill Regarding the Creation of a National Audiovisual Archive.” June 7, 2021. Submitted to the Joint Technical Working Group of the Special Committee on Creative Industry and Performing Arts, House of Representatives, Philippines. Co-authored with Benedict Olgado (School of Library and Information Sciences, University of the Philippines Diliman) and Rosemarie Roque (Department of Filipinology, Polytechnic University of the Philippines). Published in Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema 6 (2021): 233-239. “A Position Paper on the Interrelated House Bills (1745, 2320, 3442, 8171, and 8924) Regarding the Creation of the National Film Archive of the Philippines.” April 15, 2021. Submitted to Special Committee on Creative Industry and Performing Arts, House of Representatives, Philippines. Co-authored with Benedict Olgado and Rosemarie Roque. Published in Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema 6 (2021): 229-232.
“Crisis or Promise: New Directions in Philippine Cinema”
(2000-08-14) Lim, Bliss Cua
"Celebrating Philippine Cinema: New Directions 2000," the second Filipino Film Festival at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater , is a follow-up to the historical retrospective of Philippine films held at the same venue two years ago. The 12-day festival, which finished its run on August 8, focused for the most part on key films made in the late 1990s. The festival screenings, most of which were made in the last three years, represent a diverse industry's attempts to resolve the crisis of Filipino cinema, which began in late 1995 when the steadily dropping box office returns of Filipino films, the currency devaluation brought on by the Asian economic crisis, and prohibitive government taxation caused the industry to flounder against Hollywood fare. The artistic merit of some '90s Filipino films is one reason why several industry insiders maintain that, far from breathing its last breath, Philippine cinema is alive and well, reinventing itself in the hands of new directors working on smaller productions. These new filmmakers had never been given a chance to work in the industry before the crisis hit.
“In the Navel of The Sea Shines at Filipino Film Showcase”
(1998-09-09) Lim, Bliss Cua
Aptly titled " Looking Back, Moving Forward," the recently concluded Filipino film retrospective at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan featured 29 films spanning about six decades in Philippine film history, commemorating the centennial of Philippine independence. The 20-day festival, which featured a special program of films by critically acclaimed directors Lino Brocka, Gerardo de Leon, brothers Octavio and Manuel Silos, Ishmael Bernal, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Mike de Leon, Chito Roño and Mario O'Hara. Important contemporary directors, whether long-time independents like Gil Portes or respected commercial directors like Joel Lamangan, Joey Reyes, Olive Lamasan, and Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, were also represented in the festival selection. Director Marilou Diaz-Abaya sat down with indieWIRE following the successful opening night screening of her 1998 film, "In the Navel of the Sea."
“Perfumed Nightmare and The Perils Of Jameson’s ‘New Political Culture’"
(National Commission for Culture and the Arts [Philippines], 1995) Lim, Bliss Cua
The essay critiques Fredric Jameson's concept of all third world texts as national allegories through a discussion of Kidlat Tahimik's Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare, 1977).
“The Politics of Horror: The Aswang in Film"
(Asian Cinema Studies Society, 1997) Lim, Bliss Cua
The aswang, a monster of Philippine lower mythology, takes on various forms. She is alternately seductive: a vampire who craves blood; terrifying; a viscera-sucker who consumed internal organs; confounding: a werebeast who transforms into a pig, dog, cat, or human; horrific: a witch who causes illness; and disgusting: a ghoul who preys on corpses and the phlegm of the sick. The aswang-complex resurfaces in contemporary Philippine cinema in the oeuvre of directorial team Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes, whose prolific output of six horror films in almost as many years, from 1984 to 1992, distinguish them as the premier auteurs of the genre. The aswang in its many guises, as vampire, viscera-sucker, werebeast, and witch, graces Philippine screens in all four of the immensely successful Shake, Rattle and roll movies, apart from being the title figure in Aswang, made in 1992. The first part of the essay analyzes spatialized encounters between protagonists and aswang in these movies as a mapping several sets of relational forces in the Philippines: the urban center and its rural peripheries; the middle class and the “throng of indigents” that alarms it; and Christianity and science vis-à-vis primitive and profane magic. Using the ideas of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, I show that the aswang – impure, polluting, and abject, blurs the borders between those categories. The second issue I attend to is the aswang-accusation, directed to the disadvantaged, that is, women and the poor. The aswang accusation is related to social power structures in two ways: first, the aswang-figure personifies a traditional ethic of reciprocity supplanted by a modern ethic of acquisition; and second, the aswang’s ambiguity is expressive of the contradictory patriarchal regard toward women’s traditional place in the private sphere.
“American pictures made by Filipinos”: Eddie Romero’s Jungle-Horror Exploitation Films"
(University of Southern California Press, 2002) Lim, Bliss Cua
Over a span of nearly two decades, Eddie Romero served as director, producer, or writer for over twenty low-budget films made in the Philippines for distribution in the U.S. These films ranged from war and action films made in the fifties for general distribution in indoor theaters, to exploitation horror films made in the sixties with drive-ins in mind, to women-in-prison films with blaxploitation elements (notably, Black Mama, White Mama, 1973) in the seventies, as well as occasional forays back to the horror genre. This paper focuses on Romero's horror exploitation fare intended for U.S. distribution in drive-ins and second-rate indoor theaters. In this study, I situate the low-budget horror output of Eddie Romero (in collaboration with Kane Lynn, John Ashley and Gerry de Leon), made in the Philippines and intended for American distribution, within a matrix of intersecting discourses. In interviews, Romero refuses to characterize his B-film output as Filipino-American co-productions, asserting instead that they are wholly American films (in ethos, in audience address) which happen to be made by Filipinos (who have successfully ''left out'' their ''Filipino-ness'' during filmmaking). I begin by unpacking the neocolonial underpinnings of Romero's fantasy of making ''American'' films in the Philippines, then go on to consider historiographic approaches to the exploitation film. The texts I explore in this study are the early Terror is a Man (1959), directed by Gerry de Leon for Lynn-Romero Productions in the fifties; and the first two of three Blood Island films produced by Hemisphere Pictures: Brides of Blood (1968) and Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), both co-directed by de Leon and Romero, and Beast of Blood (Four Associates/Hemisphere, 1970), written and directed by Romero. The Blood Island films are strongly indebted to the generic legacy of other jungle-horror films: the colonialist nightmare embodied in the Dr. Moreau narrative; and the beauty-desired-by-the-beast premise of King Kong. Drawing from these two intertextual axes, the Blood Island films figuratively engage anxieties over miscegenation and colonialism, anxieties which are the enduring province of jungle-horror films. The centerpiece of my analysis is a delineation of several recurring motifs of the Blood Island films, themselves longstanding tropes of the genre: in an anonymous jungle island, an interstitial white heroine is menaced by a monstrous, human-but-bestial ''mimic man'' created by a mad scientist. Though not every Blood Island film plot hews exactly to this formula, each involves most of these elements to a greater or lesser degree. My analysis of Romero's B-film work is not confined to narrative analysis. In terms of production decisions, I discuss the role of ''whiteface'' in casting, that is, the casting of mestizo Filipino actors to play the recurring role of the monstrous mad scientist. The last sections of the paper also depart from textual analysis and explore the promotional strategies surrounding the films (ranging from print advertising to in-theater gimmicks and film prologues) and the question of exploitation film audiences (from teenagers at drive-ins to the lowbrow rural audiences of what Romero calls the U.S. ''exploitation belt'').
“Cult Fiction: Himala and Bakya Temporality”
(University of Southern California Press, 2004) Lim, Bliss Cua
Star discourse pressures ideas of textual boundary. Paradoxically enough, the movie star, that paradigmatic “invitation to cinema”, that invitation to spectatorial absorption, also invariably points off-screen, outside the borders of the frame. Filipino film scholars have astutely pointed out that in Philippine cinema, Nora Aunor, the Superstar, is herself the super-text of her films, her star discourse the very genre in which the diegetic worlds of her films unfold. In this light, Himala [Miracle] (Ishmael Bernal, 1982), a melodramatic story of a woman’s deification, has been read as a reflexive allegory thematizing Nora’s own fandom. In what follows, I’d like to pursue cult as the crucial hinge in the dovetailing of diegetic divinity and extra-diegetic fandom in Himala. There is not one cult but three in Himala, a film which strives, not to occlude, but to capitalize upon the star discourse of its lead actress, Nora Aunor. First, the cult of Mary (a Marian apparition is the catalyst for the narrative action); second, the cult of Elsa, the protagonist, a heretical saint; third, the cult fandom of Nora Aunor, often read as exemplifying the characteristics of Filipino masscult. I begin by discussing the figure of Elsa as a heretical saint and then go on to talk about how the cult following of Elsa in the film points off-screen to the cult star following of Nora Aunor, the actress who plays Elsa, and to the ways in which this cult following is typically construed as a snapshot of Filipino mass culture in general. On each of these collocated levels, cult functions as a fascinating, disparate, yet discernable through-line. In Himala, cult makes visible the movement of devotion across various registers, from textual to social, from divinity to cinephilia. Cult fandom as masscult symptom also opens up questions of cultural hierarchy and temporality in trashy popular taste — what has been dubbed the bakya sensibility in Filipino popular culture.
“Remade in Silence: Silvia’ Kolbowski’s ‘A Film Will Be Shown without the Sound"
(College Art Association, 2007) Lim, Bliss Cua
Like any remake, the valence of Silvia Kolbowski's 2006 A Film Will Be Shown without the Sound (Hiroshima mon amour, 1959, Dir. Alain Resnais) turns to some degree on its precursor text. Resnais's 1959 Hiroshima mon amour, based on a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, twins love and death, love and war, pain and place. It bewails the recalcitrance of memory: the horror of forgetfulness, of forgetting either world-altering atrocity or life-changing passion, and the “aberrations of memory,” the ways in which the pain of remembering can come upon us unawares, inconveniently, when memory and lived history will not let us go, will not let us forget. Resnais tells the story of romance between citizens of nations at war: in occupied France, a young girl's first, “impossible” love is the enemy, a German soldier Decades later, in Hiroshima, impossible love comes upon her again, unawares, as she falls for a Japanese man who is also a double-in-memory for her German soldier. Framed by war, patriotism, and the ruinous power of the state, the romances at the heart of the film are defiantly cross-national and cross-racial, attesting to the ways in which subjectivation by the nation-state are always real but never uncontested—or at least lived under the rubric of profound disaffection. To this precursor text Kolbowski's video projection piece, A Film Will Be Shown without the Sound, intervenes with silence. But for spectators already familiar with Hiroshima mon amour, the silence is not empty but filled with remembering. Dispensing with sound and speech, the silence of Kolbowski's remake disrupts the linguistic, national, and racial asymmetries of Resnais's film. Silence loosens the metonymic yoking of Hiroshima's historical pain to the white heroine's interiority and suffering; unmoored from her orienting voice over narration, we notice the film is built, visually, on tracking shots of the city and the force of the two-shot, the interracial lovers fully sharing the frame. Kolbowski projects the film without sound but also without subtitles. Silence obviates the importance of music and the primacy of dialogue, especially the heroine's voice-over narration, for securing meaning; this primacy of the verbal is not reinscribed by turning on the subtitles.
“Pepot and the Archive: Cinephilia and the Archive Crisis of Philippine Cinema"
(Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, 2010) Lim, Bliss Cua
The lack of a Philippine national audiovisual archive—a problem rooted in a dearth of funding, a lack of political will, and the deterioration of archival storage formats—is a pressing question for Philippine film and media studies. The only national audiovisual archive ever funded by the state, established by the Marcos government in 1981, was shuttered with the regime’s ouster in 1986. The Philippine Congress has since failed to pass a bill developing national print and audiovisual archives. In an age when media obsolescence is more recognizable than ever, the pressure of impending archival loss provokes a demand for historical reckoning. The Philippine archival situation is grim, but the response of historically-minded film buffs can sometimes take an inspired, playful form. This is the case for the campy period film Pepot Artista (Pepot the Movie Star, 2005), an independent digital film written and directed by Philippine film critic, historian, and archivist Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr. Pepot Artista recreates the movie-mad culture of the early 1970s, a milieu dominated by the superstardom of Nora Aunor (affectionately referred to as “Guy” by her fans) and Tirso Cruz III (nicknamed “Pip” by his devotees), who were romantically linked both on- and off-screen. Pepot’s dream of superstardom and the Narrator’s dream of recounting Pepot’s tale parallel the filmmaker’s offscreen archival dreams: del Mundo’s important 2004 monograph, Dreaming of a National Audio-Visual Archive, had drawn attention to Philippine cinema’s archive crisis a year before the film’s release.
“On Retrospective Reception: Watching LVN Pictures at the Cinemalaya Film Festival"
(Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, 2010) Lim, Bliss Cua
One of nine films in the 2010 Cinemalaya Film Festival’s retrospective exhibition of LVN studio classics, the 1961 crime thriller Sandata at Pangako (Weapon and Promise, dir. F.H. Constantino) was made at the threshold of the old and the new. Sandata was LVN Pictures’ last release and its only film featuring action icon Fernando Poe, Jr. (“FPJ”), the wildly popular box office king whose decision to break his studio contract in favor of independent producers’ larger talent fees heralded the studio system’s demise. The enthusiastic audience at Cinemalaya’s retrospective screening of Sandata had come for a glimpse of the late star in his youthful glory, but we left savoring other pleasures: the technical polish of a well-made studio film and the bright-eyed, incandescent “screen personality” of multi-awarded actress Charito Solis, cast alongside the legendary FPJ. (The action king was rumored to have been her first real heartbreak). At the end of the screening, a college student filing out of the theater remarked—“We should have just watched all the LVN films!” —confirming that Cinemalaya, known for fostering independent filmmaking, is also creating an audience of young film buffs eagerly rediscovering older films. This emerging cinephilic encounter results in a horizon of retrospective reception that counters easy dismissals of studio era films as hackneyed formula pictures made solely for profit. More importantly, moviegoers who may have come to see how familiar stars once looked end up discovering how familiar places once looked as well: a registering of historical time inscribed in the Philippine cityscape of the forties, fifties, and sixties. This is cinematic remembering, one enabled by the archive.
“Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory"
(Duke University Press, 2001) Lim, Bliss Cua
Daisies [Sedmikrásky] (Vera Chytilova, 1966) was initially banned in Czechoslovakia and the director barred from filmmaking from 1969 to 1975. This essay argues that Daisies can be read multivalently as enabling both a critique of the heroines’ excesses (corresponding to the state-approved screenplay and Chytilová’s declared intentions) and a latent feminist delight in the heroines’ ability to effect reversals in the patriarchal order. This study espouses a counter-reading of Daisies that corresponds neither to the director’s account nor to the censors’ ill-considered objections to the film. While my allegorical reading of the film might be at variance with declared authorial intent, it remains appreciative of that strong chord of defiance in Daisies that government officials were quick to impugn and Chytilová eager to gainsay. My counterreading of the film discerns, beneath Daisies’s apparent condemnation of its heroines, a feminist allegory in which the doll metaphor is retooled as a celebration of female recalcitrance. Furthermore, the essay focuses on Daisies’s thematic and formal preoccupation with collage and fragmentation in relation to an ironizing of gender performances. Daisies’s surrealist motifs of montage and collage are epitomized in striking images of the heroines’ bodies splintered and recomposed. These formal strategies suggest an appropriation of surrealist tenets—incongruity and surprise, the denial of mimetic representation, and the revelatory power of fragmentation—by a Czech feminist filmmaker. Collage as a formal strategy serves to unmask gender attributes as naturalized masquerade. The formal devices of fragmentation (in sound, image, and spatio-temporality), as well as the narrative depiction of cutting and dismemberment, underscore the film’s allegorical presentation of the heroines as transgressive assemblages of gender attributes.
“Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory"
(Duke University Press, 2001) Lim, Bliss Cua
Ghosts call our calendars into question. The temporality of haunting, through which events and people return from the limits of time and mortality, differs sharply from the modern concept of a linear, progressive, universal time. The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles the boundaries of past, present, and future, and cannot be written back to the complacency of a homogeneous, empty time. There is a tension involved in films that use ghost stories as a provocation to historical consciousness. Ghost films that are also historical allegories make incongruous use of the vocabulary of the supernatural to articulate historical injustice, referring to “social reality” by recourse to the undead. Such ghost narratives productively explore the dissonance between modernity’s disenchanted time and the spectral temporality of haunting in which the presumed boundaries between past, present, and future are shown to be shockingly permeable. In Rouge [Yanzhi Kou] (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1987) and Haplos [Caress] (dir. Antonio Jose “Butch” Perez, 1982), ghostly women embody a strong notion of spatiotemporal nonsynchronism—the existence of noncontemporaneous aspects of social life that cannot be fully translated into modernity’s disenchanted time. The ghost narratives in Rouge and Haplos function as an allegorical frame in which an almost-forgotten history becomes newly meaningful as a kind of haunting or ghostly return. These ghost films draw from their respective cultural discourses in order to vivify the “present’s” accountability to the concerns of the “past,” and in so doing call into question the ways in which modern homogeneous time conceives of those very temporal categories.
“Sharon’s Noranian Turn: Stardom, Embodiment, and Language in Philippine Cinema"
(Wayne State University Press, 2009) Lim, Bliss Cua
This essay seeks to understand the racialized allure of the two most important female stars in Philippine cinema’s post-studio era: Nora Aunor and Sharon Cuneta. The essay opens by tracing decisive shifts in racialized star embodiment in popular Philippine cinema. Since the studio era, matinee idols were invariably mixed-race actors whose light skin and European features allowed them to be packaged as local approximations of Hollywood stars. In the post-studio, Nora Aunor introduces a decisive break in the regime of mestizo/a stardom. “Noranian embodiment” refers to a film-historically significant, oppositional form of valuation that coalesced around the star persona of Nora Aunor in the late sixties and early seventies, one that defied a racialized politics of casting that enshrined tall, fair-skinned mestizo/a performers as the apex of physical beauty and cinematic glamour. This performative defiance was enacted not only by the star Nora Aunor, but also brought into being by her massive fan following, derisively labeled by the middlebrow as the “bakya”, a lower-income, tacky, and provincial mass audience. This essay juxtaposes the affective resonance of Nora’s rags-to-riches mythology and the aesthetic-political charge of Noranian embodiment with the attempt of Nora’s mestiza successor of the 1980s, Sharon Cuneta, to re-tool her image of mestiza glamour in light of Nora’s populist, kayumanggi-identified appeal. I argue that Nora Aunor initiated a change in the racial terms of Philippine stardom so profound that Sharon Cuneta, another elite-identified, mestiza star, resorted to an appropriation of Nora Aunor’s biographical mythology in her bid to become the next Filipino superstar. This translative refashioning, which I call Sharon Cuneta’s “Noranian turn,” points to important shifts in the logics of what Vicente Rafael calls “mestizo envy” and “white love” in Philippine cinema, as well as transforming the nationalizing function of popular Filipino film, a nationalizing function grounded in language. In the early eighties, Sharon Cuneta was Filipino cinema’s most visible figuration of a subcultural, Taglish-speaking mestizo elite. As an auditory cue for mestizaje in Philippine cinema, Taglish also indexes the vexed debates on national language and American imperialism in the Marcos era during an important period of emergence for Philippine film criticism. Finally, the essay illuminates the ways in which the disruptive form of star embodiment Nora Aunor actualized and Sharon Cuneta appropriated led to an unexpected convergence of class-stratified bakya and mestiza audiences.
"Introduction: The Afterlives of Embodied Translations"
(Wayne State University Press, 2009) Lim, Bliss Cua
This special issue -- on Translation and Embodiment in National and Transnational Asian Film and Media -- brings together interdisciplinary scholarship by young feminist scholars working on Asian film and media from a variety of nationally-inscribed and transnationally-imbricated perspectives. Four of the six essays gathered here focus on Southeast Asian film and media -- contemporary Philippine cinema, Burmese transnational media, 1990s Thai sakon cinema, and Vietnamese diasporic filmmaking -- areas that remain profoundly under-researched in the discipline of Film and Media studies. Two of the essays focus on the transnational uptake of a South Korean media celebrity and a Hong Kong martial arts genre, attesting to the new market proximities enabled by globalized neoliberal economies. Though each case study is singular, the interdisciplinary textual, cultural, political, and industrial critiques of the various scholars assembled in this issue are thematically interrelated and cohesive, which makes the breadth and variation of their contributions all the more exciting. Read together, the essays in this issue affirm the inherent “errancy” of translations, their tendency to wander from or undermine the uses to which they are put. The unifying thematic for the papers gathered here is the conviction that translations are possessed not only of inordinate drift but also of intractable errancy, especially when the site of translation is not confined to language but opens to the irreducible specificities of bodies at the coordinates of gender, sexuality, nation, class, race, cultural and economic policy, spiritual belief, technical history, and generation. In framing the drift of translation as embodied drift, several of the essays demonstrate what happens when body and transformational reinscription are deployed together. On the one hand, the body is the enabling condition, the prior corporealized forestructure that grounds our very experience of social relationality. On the other, embodiment is itself produced by the social and markedly inflected by cultural mis/translations. The variegated essays in this issue tease out the resonances of embodied translations on the agentive personhood of Vietnamese diasporic women as collaborative storytellers; on the alluring-yet-decaying body of a legendary Thai female ghost; on a South Korean transsexual model commodified as brand icon; on Burmese transgendered ritualists who exceed a secular U.S.-based LGBT lens; on a New Zealand stunt performer whose body inherits techniques of bodily display rooted in Hong Kong cinema; and on the racialized star embodiment of a brown-identified Filipino film superstar as translated and appropriated by her elite mestiza successor.
“Archival Fragility: Philippine Cinema and the Challenge of Sustainable Preservation"
(Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2013) Lim, Bliss Cua
The urgency of Philippine cinema's archival situation is well-recognized: it is estimated that only 37 percent of domestically-produced films survive (3,000 titles from approximately 8,000 works) since the introduction of the cinematograph in 1897. Only a handful of feature-length Filipino films from the pre-war era remain: Tunay na Ina [True Mother], Pakiusap [Plea], Giliw Ko [My Beloved] (Figure 1.)—all from 1938—and Zamboanga (1936), a "lost" film discovered at the U.S. Library of Congress some years ago. As of 2005, only one nitrate film print survived, Ibong Adarna (1941). The fragility of the Philippine audiovisual archive is all the more ironic when we consider that the Philippines, in partnership with Australia's National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), pioneered Southeast Asian media archiving initiatives in the early 1990s. Since outpaced by its SEA neighbors, the Philippines, an early pioneer of the regional archive movement in Southeast Asia, would become a late implementer of the archive dream, waiting another 15 years before its own national film archive was set up in 2011. Measured against the 116-year span of our country’s AV history, state-funded national film archives have existed in the Philippines for less than a decade. Research on Philippine cinema is thus circumscribed by the acute temporal pressures of archival crisis. A dearth of funding, a lack of political will, and the deterioration of media storage formats conspire against a dwindling number of films.
"Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp"
(Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015) Lim, Bliss Cua
In recent years, the aswang—a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity and patriarchal misogyny—is being flamboyantly queered across a range of media. The aswang is a centuries-old transmedial, transgeneric figure whose monstrosity has been interpellated by gender-essentialist agendas while nonetheless epitomizing disruptive gender instabilities. In the handful of texts that comprise queer aswang transmedia—a 2011 Filipino novel (Ricky Lee’s Si Amapola sa 65 na Kabanata [Amapola in 65 Chapters]), mainstream film (Mga Bata ng Lagim [Children of Terror], dir. Mar S. Torres, 1964), and amateur digital video (Amabilis 2, Napoleon Lustre, 2011)—the aswang, an iconic female monster, is being destabilized and reimagined. Gay men (or more accurately, bakla subjects) are occupying the place formerly reserved for monstrous women. This queering of aswang transmedia is a forceful, funny, yet undeniably risky reapproriation lodged in language (swardspeak) and a kind of pinoy [Filipino] camp style. This essay attempts to theorize a distinctly Filipino camp sensibility in relation to queer time. It wrestles with queer aswang transmedia’s implications for both temporality (since anachronism underpins the cultural figures of both bakla and aswang) and visibility (queer scholars argue that the bakla, stigmatized as effeminate and lower class, is increasingly the object of forcible bourgeois erasure in the face of the urban gay scene’s aspirations toward an imagined gay globality.)
“Fragility, Perseverance, and Survival in State-Run Philippine Film Archives”
(University of the Philippines Press, 2018) Lim, Bliss Cua
The contours of Philippine cinema’s archival crises are alarming: of over 350 films produced before the outbreak of World War II, only five complete Filipino films from the American colonial period survive in some form.The dwindling number of surviving Filipino films has everything to do with the historically short-lived nature of the country’s government-funded audiovisual (AV) archives. Historically, permanent sustainability is both the most urgent and the most enduring problem for state-funded Filipino film archives. The focus of my ensuing discussion are the dissolution of the Philippine Information Agency’s Motion Picture Division (PIA-MPD) and the posthumous fate of its film collection after the MPD’s internationally prominent Film Laboratory and Film Library were shut down in 2004. Using a cultural policy approach alongside the insights of archival theory, feminist epistemology, and postcolonial historiography, the essay draws on an array of sources—archival films, legislative records, PIA documents, oral history interviews, and personal papers from members of the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film and the Southeast Asia Pacific Audiovisual Archives Association. The aftermath of the MPD’s abolition underscores the drawbacks of a narrowly financial, profit-driven perspective on state film archiving that devalued analog cinema in relation to digital media while also ignoring the unique demands of AV archiving by conflating it with paper-based librarianship. This study affirms the Filipino AV archive advocacy’s repeated calls for legislation to safeguard the institutional continuity and autonomy of Philippine film archives from the vagaries of political whim. I conclude by conceptualizing archival survival as not only involving the material preservation of analog or digital AV carriers but as also entailing exhaustion and persistence on the part of film archivists who persevere in institutional archival conditions they work to change.
"Global Spectres"
(2021) Lim, Bliss Cua
Though increasingly marketable since the turn of the millennium, “Asian horror” is neither a homogeneous category nor a regionally inclusive label. “Asian horror cinema” largely refers to scary movies produced by a handful of East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, erasing crucial cultural and historical differences between these film traditions and overlooking the emergence of noteworthy occult media in regions like Southeast Asia. Rather than taking the term Asian horror at face value then, a brief historical foray into a particular subgenre – films and TV shows featuring female ghosts – reveals tensions between cultural specificity, cross-cultural influence, and accelerating globalization as domestic media industries both compete — and (grudgingly?) cooperate — with Global Hollywood.

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