“A Brief History of Archival Advocacy for Philippine Cinema"

Abstract

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.