THE KALAMPAG TRACKING AGENCY:
AN EVENING OF FILM FROM THE PHILIPPINES
SPANNING THE PAST 30 YEARS
Dir. Various, 1985–2015
Various, 67 min.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 8:00 PM ** ONE NIGHT ONLY! **
Spectacle is pleased to host The Kalampag Tracking Agency for an evening of film from the Philippines spanning the past 30 years. Filmmaker Gym Lumbera and guest curator Lian Ladia will join us for a Q&A after the program.
The Kalampag Tracking Agency is a curatorial and organizational collaboration between Shireen Seno and Merv Espina. Overcoming institutional and personal lapses to give attention to little-seen works—some quite recent, some surviving loss and decomposition—this program collects loose parts in motion, a series of bangs, or kalampag in Tagalog, assembled by their individual strengths and how they might resonate off each other and a contemporary audience. Featuring some of the most striking films and videos from the Philippines and its diaspora, this initiative continues to navigate the uncharted topographies of Filipino alternative and experimental moving image practice from the past 30 years.
Click to view slideshow.
All works in this program are screened with the kind permission of the individual artists, the Mowelfund Film Institute and the Ateneo Art Gallery.
DROGA!
Dir. Miko Revereza, 2014
Philippines/USA, 7 min. 21 sec.
DROGA! is a Super 8 tourist film about the LA landscape through the lens of Filipino immigrants. The film closely examines cultural identity by documenting the intersections of American pop culture and Filipino traditions.
Miko Revereza was born in Manila and grew up in the San Francisco bay area. Since relocating to LA in 2010, he’s worked primarily on music videos and live video art installations for LA’s experimental music scene. His personal films explore identity and the Americanization of the Filipino immigrant.
MINSAN ISANG PANAHON
Aka ONCE UPON A TIME
Dir. Melchor Bacani III, 1989
Philippines, 4 min.
An experiment using a handcolored collage of found film material including Super 8 home movies.
Melchor Bacani III was an active staple of the Mowelfund Film Institute (MFI) film workshops in the late 80s and early 90s, creating several film works in the process. Minsan Isang Panahon (Once Upon a Time) was a product of the influential Christoph Janetzko workshops, conducted in 1989 and 1990, in collaboration with MFI, Goethe Institut and the Philippine Information Agency.
ABCD
Dir. Roxlee, 1985
Philippines, 5 min. 22 sec.
An experimental animation, decidedly crude in approach, part sociopolitical commentary and surrealist whimsy, advocating for a new and personal take on the alphabet.
Roque Federizon Lee, well known as Roxlee, is an icon of independent and underground cinema in the Philippines. An animator, visual artist, musician and filmmaker, working with the barest of materials to conjure powerful images. Apart from making animated and collage films, he is also a comicstrip artist, drawing such strips as Cesar Asar and Santingwar. His book Cesar Asar in the Planet of the Noses, a collection of his cartoons and short stories, was published in 2008. In the late 80s, he was already featured in retrospectives in Hamburg and Berlin. In 2010, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Animation Council of the Philippines.
BUGTONG: ANG SIGAW NI LALAKE
Aka RIDDLE: THE SHOUT OF MAN
Dir. RJ Leyran, 1990
Philippines, 3 min. 20 sec.
A montage of found sound and imagery commenting on Filipino on-screen macho culture.
RJ Leyran’s BUGTONG: ANG SIGAW NG LALAKE (RIDDLE: SHOUT OF MAN), was a product of the last Christoph Janetzko film workshop, with a focus on experiments with optical printers, held in 1990. Active on-screen and off-screen among the late 80s and early 90s independent film communities, this is one of the rare surviving films he produced in his brief career.
VERY SPECIFIC THINGS AT NIGHT
Dir. John Torres, 2011
Philippines, 4 min. 29 sec
A mobile phone film shot in Mahiyain Street (Shy Street), Sikatuna, a stone’s throw away from the house of Chavit Singson, who also led the masses to bring then President Estrada out of the presidential palace.
A poet among Filipino filmmakers, who work outside the commercial film industry, John Torres has developed an idiosyncratic cinematic syntax, in which on or off-screen spoken texts, including poetry of local authors are of great importance. The imagery and narrative structure of his feature films is not prosaic, but associative and fragmented. Torres realizes his projects, supported by staff in personal union as a producer, screenwriter, director, cinematographer and editor.
JUAN GAPANG
Aka JOHNNY CRAWL
Dir. Roxlee, 1986
Philippines, 7 min. 18 sec.
A man crawls the streets of Metro Manila wearing only a wig, white lights, and white body paint.
Roque Federizon Lee, well known as Roxlee, is an icon of independent and underground cinema in the Philippines. An animator, visual artist, musician and filmmaker, working with the barest of materials to conjure powerful images. Apart from making animated and collage films, he is also a comic-strip artist, drawing such strips as Cesar Asar and Santingwar. His book Cesar Asar in the Planet of the Noses, a collection of his cartoons and short stories, was published in 2008. In the late 80s, he was already featured in retrospectives in Hamburg and Berlin. In 2010, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Animation Council of the Philippines.
CHOP-CHOPPED FIRST LADY + CHOP-CHOPPED FIRST DAUGHTER
Dir. Yason Banal, 2005
Philippines, 1 min. 54 sec.
A tongue-in-cheek poke at our own culture and recent history. The First Lady is none other than Imelda Marcos, the First Daughter none other than Kris Aquino. Both women’s lives and antics juxtaposed with gory evocations of the highly-publicized chop-chop lady murders that were exploited by those 90s slasher films Aquino herself starred in.
*This was piece was last shown as a two channel video installation at the Ateneo Art Gallery (AAG), and is reformatted as split screen for the purposes of this screening program, with kind permission from the artist and AAG.
Yason Banal obtained his bachelor’s degree in Film at the University of the Philippines and an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Different institutions in Manila (such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Metropolitan Museum of Manila and Lopez Museum, among others) have presented his works through solo and group shows. He has also exhibited works at the Tate, Frieze Art Fair, Guangzhou Triennale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, AIT Tokyo, Singapore Biennale, Oslo Kunsthall, Christie’s, IFA Berlin, Shanghai Biennale and Queens Museum of Art.
THE RETROCHRONOLOGICAL TRANSFER OF INFORMATION
Dir. Tad Ermitaño, 1994
Philippines, 9 min. 33 sec.
Pursuing the work of Chandrasekhar, Inoue et al (1967), the scientist builds a machine to transmit a picture of the present back in time. His target: Philippine National Hero, Jose P. Rizal, who was executed in 1896.
Tad Ermitaño is part scientist (he studied biology and has begun working in elementary robotics), part media artist (experimental filmmaker, installation and sound artist), part writer (brilliant essayist).
ARS COLONIA
Dir. Raya Martin, 2011
Philippines, 1 min. 13 sec.
A conquistador counts his blessings in this hand-colored effigy evoking old, silent war iconography.
Filipino filmmaker Raya Martin is one of the most distinctive emerging voices in world cinema. Born in Manila in 1984, he has more than a dozen films to his credit: an ambitious, constantly evolving body of work consisting of fiction features, documentaries, shorts, and installations. The youngest artist on Cinema Scope magazine’s 2012 list of the 50 best filmmakers under 50 years old, Martin draws on a wide array of sources—combining pop culture references, archival material, and avant-garde structuralism—in his radically lyrical works. This daring, restless filmmaker with a sensibility all his own suggests entirely new ways of approaching film, personal, and national history.
CLASS PICTURE
Dir. Tito & Tita, 2012
Philippines, 4 min. 41 sec.
When alone with but the sound of surf, old memories haunt like short ends of a film.
Tito & Tita (Manila, Philippines) is a collective of young artists working mainly with film and photography via an enthralling transformation of images and disarming practicality, amidst all the symbolism, surrealism, and a variation of experimental techniques. As individual filmmakers, their works have been featured in various film festivals and art fairs. As a collective, they have exhibited in Manila, Singapore, and Tokyo.
ANITO
Dir. Martha Atienza, 2012
Philippines/Netherlands, 8 min. 8 sec.
An animistic festival Christianized and incorporated into Folk Catholicism slowly turns into modern day madness.
Martha Atienza lives and works in Rotterdam (NL) and Bantayan island (PH). her work is a series mostly constructed in video, of almost sociological nature, that studies her direct environment. Atienza understands her surroundings as a landscape of people first and foremost.
HINDI SA ATIN ANG BUWAN
Aka THE MOON IS NOT OURS
Dir. Jon Lazam, 2011
Philippines, 3 min. 31 sec.
On the itineraries of lost love, and the all-consuming luminosity of our eventual sadness… Shot with a consumer-level video camera over a holiday in Bohol, the film is completely without sound and in black and white. It is mostly footage of travel, chaotic and rapid at first before settling into a more relaxed pace, relaying feelings of distance, resignation and sadness.
Jon Lazam is an experimental filmmaker based in Manila. His works have been screened abroad in key cities such as Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal, Paris and San Francisco. His most recent work, Pantomime For Figures Shrouded By Waves, was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation and premiered at the Sharjah Biennial. It also screened in competition at the Cinemanila International Film Festival where it was awarded Best Short Film.
KALAWANG
Aka RUST
Dir. Cesar Hernando, Eli Guieb III & Jimbo Albano, 1989
Philippines, 6 min. 33 sec.
Fascism inevitably leads to global annihilation.
KALAWANG (RUST) was a product of the first Christoph Janetzko experimental film workshop, held in 1989. Cesar Hernando is best known as production designer on several important films including Mike de Leon’s Kisapmata and Batch ’81. He has made several award-winning short films, is an active member of Society of Filipino Archivists for Film (SOFIA), and currently teaches design at the University of the Philippines. Eli Guieb III is filmmaker and award-winning fiction writer. He currently teaches media criticism, broadcast research and creative writing in the University of the Philippines. Jimbo Albano is one of the Filipino artists that noted German filmmaker Ingo Petzke will never forget. For one of his films he walked for several days to completely encircle Manila, coming up with a marvel of structural film in single-frame shooting.
This program would be impossible to put together without the kind support of the individual artists, the Mowelfund Film Institute, UP College of Mass Communications, UP Film Institute, Ateneo Art Gallery, Green Papaya Art Projects, Terminal Garden, and the National Film Archive of the Philippines.
The screening prints of the 8mm and 16mm films created in the 80s and 90s that are featured in the Kalampag Tracking Agency are mostly unavailable, missing or completely decomposed. Some of the lucky ones have negatives and/or preservation copies left. The screening versions of the older works in this screening program come from crude U-Matic, VHS and Betamax transfers. The curatorial team is still in the process of tracking down the surviving prints.
An expanded version of this program was previously shown in EXiS Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, August–September 2014.