Images from the Margins

Images from the Margins:
the Mangyan struggle against dispossession
in the documentary-photography of Raymond Panaligan


Raymond Panaligan's images are postcards from the peripheries of the Philippines: intimate snapshots of daily scenes from Mangyan communities in southern Mindoro. Panaligan presents portraits of a people dispossessed by colonial and contemporary incursions into their ancestral lands, disenfranchised in their own communal territories, and left behind in an archipelago surrounded by crisis.

The Mangyan documentation is an ongoing project of his. Using photography as a means to document their presence, Panal igan has chronicled the day to day lives of Mangyans through the years since 1993, during his excursions to their communities in southern Mindoro. He has documented most closely the lines of Hanunoo Mangyans, one of the seven existing tribes populating the peripheries of Mansalay and Bulalacao at the southeastern fringes of Mindoro Island. Panaligan has journeyed back and forth from Manila to Mindoro since then, capturing their images through community and individual immersions, fact-finding operat ions and peace missions.

Panaligan's documentation is relevant because of its historical value and from its political import. While documentary evidence related to the Mangyan tribes can be accessed through archives and libraries, existing visual evidence of Mangyan communities is sparse and rare. Panaligan engages in a cultural practice that charts and recreates their existence in collective and public memory, a kind of assurance against transience and forgetting.

The conscious political import of Panaligan's choice to present images from the margins is evident: as a recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship for Photography in 1999, Panaligan could h ave chosen to continue producing photographs of New York's grim realities. Or shots from his stints as a Manila-based freelance photojournalist. Yet the Mangyan photo-documentation project has remained a sustained and continuous endeavor for more than a decade, something that Panaligan committed himself to on a long-term basis.

The difference of Panaligan's images from that of existing documentation of different Mangyan tribes lies in their affinities with their subjects. Unlike colonial-age ethnographic studies and shots for foreign tourist consumption, the images are not voyeuristic tokens of the 'savage natives': taken as samples of the exotic and uncivilized under the lying assumption of cultural and material inferiority.

Instead, Panaligan's photographs are intimate and straightforward depictions of the Mangyans from their point of view. This can be inferred from the way the images are taken by the photographer: instead of staged frontal or profile poses of the Mangyans intended to document their details of clothing or physique, Panaligan unobtrusively captures spontaneous scenes and details from their day to day lives, setting his lens whenever and wherever his subjects feel comfortable in. The subjects behave naturally even as the lens captures their images, perhaps indicating a degree of familiarity or ease with the photographer's presence. This is a significant clue that points to the photographer's affinity for the Mangyan way of life and struggle, considering the persistence of pre-modern superstitions that believe cameras 'capture' a part of a person's soul and the grim paranoia over military surveillance through technological equipment, such as cameras and videos.

The photographs attest to how the Hanunoo Mangyans have adhered to their traditions, kept alive in the handicrafts and personal ornaments they produce by hand. Panaligan's images of Mangyan mothers and their children document the various communal crafts, such as basketry, which they engage in during their spare time between kaingin farming,child-rearing, and other chores. The photograph of a smiling Mangyan baby, for instance, is laden with the beaded bracelets, basketry,and textiles that Mangyan women have also started to produce as for commercial, as well as personal, consumption over the years.

Yet, the images also document surface manifestations of how Mangyans have been systematically isolated from the mainland economy, politics, and culture. A photograph of three tribes people wandering through a commercial area with a few handwoven wares remind the viewer of their struggle to survive in an economy and society that refuses to integrate their specific needs into the whole. This dislocation and juxtaposition of differing cultural and material differences is seen in a photograph of a young Mangyan girl at a hand loom, weaving their traditional blue and white textile while wearing a t-shirt with the acronym 'USA' (donated as a relief good or bought with precious cash, perhaps).

Images of Mangyan children populate Panaligan's works, perhaps as a metaphor for the emergence of a new generation of dispossessed national minorities who grow up in the ways of their ancestors but who are also systematically deprived of their basic rights and needs up to the present.

The image of a lone Mangyan child, crunched up in hunger before three empty calderos, sums up the stark reminders of the contrasting reality in Philippine society: in spite of all the state's proclamations of economic development and 'progress', fundamental economic and social problems continue to ravage national minorities such as the Mangyan tribes. The photographs, simple depictions of deprivation they may seem to be on the surface, attest to the painful persistence of problems that are so basic: hunger, landlessness, terror wrought by militarization and counter-insurgency campaigns, displacement by foreign multinational incursions into potential mining sites, lack of access to basic social services such as health care and education.

The photographs document the serenity and composure with which the Mangyans face their trials, but much more lies beneath the black and white images. These silently harbor the Mangyans testimonies of their perennial
problems with the lack of irrigation, and damaging floods when the river overflows during the rainy season. The images of Mangyan families eating together hide the reality that people in this part of the archipelago are forced to eat only once or twice a day. They subsist mainly on bananas and eat rice only once or twice a week. While their harvest of mangoes and bananas is abundant, the literal fruits of their labor remain underpriced. One sack containing around 300 mangoes can be easily haggled local traders for only thirty to forty pesos, for instance.

The images of Mangyan children foraging in foliage underscore the fact that they are not in school. The rare and far-flung schoolhouses in Mindoro's interior areas (where most Mangyans live) stop at the grade school level due to the chronic lack of teachers. Even then many children are forced to stop their studies because they have to find food or work for their families. Even medical and relief missions are rare, as compared to the seemingly non-existent government health facilities scattered in a few towns. Tuberculosis, long eradicated in developed countries, still remains a scourge in these parts. There is little electricity and potable water sources to speak of.

What the images do not depict are more sinister. These are rarely documented through photographs, but human rights violations by the military are common occurrences, especially even since Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan was assigned to head the counter-insurgency campaign in the Southern Tagalog region, with special and bloodthirsty focus on Mindoro. Undocumented by photographs are the murders and tortures of Mangyans suspected to be New Peoples' Army (NPA) members or supporters. Soldiers actively recruited for CAFGUs among Mangyans, promising a few thousand pesos per month and a free coffin in return for their roles in the counter-insurgency campaigns.

Yet, at the same time, the photographs stand as a testament to their struggle against neocolonial and military exploitation and adherence to the values of their ancestors. Their traditional and communal values of cooperation and togetherness are seen in the photographs of Mangyan families having their humble meals together in their cramped and handmade huts. At a time when many other Filipino families are forced and encouraged by the state's labor export policies to live apart in order to survive and stay together, these images remind us that the Mangyans, among the most systematically deprived in this nation of the exploited, have no little choice but to find strength in unity and struggle.

In the end, it is the photograph of a Mangyan child wielding a bolo and struggling to get through through the thick foliage that provides the compelling metaphor for a peoples' will to survive, stay true to their ancestors, and fight amidst the hardships they face. Panaligan's photographs provide and revive our memories of the disenfranchised in our land, and in doing so, raise awareness of their conditions and struggle to survive. #

Brocka in a brave new world

It's time to feed the hackneyed scripts and copycat plots to the shredder. At a time when many mainstream local productions start to smack of the same telenovela or fantaserye sequence, young directors such as twenty-nine year old Sigfreid Barros-Sanchez are clearing a path through the repetitive rubble for the brave, new world of Philippine independent cinema.

His tools are works such as “Ang Anak ni Brocka” (finalist in the Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival 2005) and “Lasponggols” (finalist, full-length feature category of the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival 2005), previously screened at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the University of the Philippines Film Institute.

Mockumentar(t)ist

Sanchez was into varsity basketball, political science, writing, and alternative/underground music (not necessarily in that order) when he first viewed independent shorts by Jon Red and Roxlee in Humanities class way back when the peso was not as severely devalued as now. By 1999, he forayed into film after joining the 11th Ricky Lee Scriptwriting Workshop and studied directing under Marilou Diaz-Abaya in Ateneo. In 2000, he joined the 10th Cinema-As-Art Filmmaking Workshop at the UP under Tikoy Aguiluz and Raymond Red. In between, Sanchez also worked as a script reader for Viva Films, wrote and acted for TV shows and indie films, and took on advertising jobs while raising three kids.

These varied influences would later on define the 'feel' and vision of Sanchez' works, which (like that of many other indie film-makers) defy easy categorization. “Lasponggols”, a black comedy about two small-time film workers masquerading as cinema bigwigs in a remote barrio, is also an observation into the Philippine mainstream film industry. Meanwhile, Sanchez uses fiction to draw out truth in the mockumentary entitled “Ang Anak ni Brocka”. Here, A TV documentary crew pursue possibly the biggest gamble of the ratings game: an investigative report into the supposed existence of the celebrated and controversial Lino Brocka's son.

Their frenzied search for the late director’s missing progeny yields interviews with an array of reel and real-life characters: Brocka's province-mates, family, slum dwellers, unsuspecting 20-something college coeds, tambays along the street, co-workers in the film industry, and comrades in the activist movement.

The speculative—and protracted-- search for Brocka's elusive son takes them from Nueva Ecija (Brocka's hometown) to the University of the Philippines in Diliman, from stuffy offices of cinema workers to the slum areas of Brocka's films, from picket lines to gay bars and alleys. The protracted search also sheds light into many other details of Brocka's life, details that are largely lost to the twenty-something, post-EDSA 1 generation: the director’s homosexual orientation, his promdi roots at a time when UP was more socially “stratified”, his early exposure to theater and cinema as a stage-hand and actor, his quirks and ethics as the legendary film director, his being gay, his endless compassion as a sibling, and his passion for the masses as a fiery cultural worker and aktibista.

While the investigation and cut-throat competition from a rival network station yields an unexpected but equally intriguing conclusion, Sanchez's characters realize that the search has not been that futile nor foolhardy at all. They may have lost a scoop, but found themselves and a little bit more of Lino Brocka instead.

Brocka in every Pinoy

In 'Anak ni Brocka', Sanchez makes clever use of the “mockumentary”--mock documentary--format as a narrative means of telling the various truths about Brocka's life and work. Sanchez manages to intersect scripted satire and spontaneity, parody and preaching: raw reactions and carefully-scripted performances, clips from the director's films with present-day shots of these same sites, sound bytes and pontifications. Sanchez juxtaposes the actual and the contrived and finally ferrets out truths through fiction.

The film is certainly not a glossed-over eulogy nor something akin to a commemorative plaque: it tries to depict Brocka complete with all his flaws and foibles. But what makes 'Anak ni Brocka' more compelling for the contemporary crowd is its power to bring us back to the maw of what the late director stood for. Sanchez reclaims Brocka for the masses by bringing his memory back to the ordinary Juan dela Cruz, by bringing the film back to the alleys and slums of Manila which formed an integral part of the director's landscapes.

Sanchez democratizes Brocka. He makes his memory accessible and tangible not only to his colleagues in cinema, but to the ordinary person. Brocka is not only for the intelligentsia, the bakla, the tibak, but for all those who know how it is to be lost, poor, fatherless, oppressed and vulnerable. The beauty of Sanchez's film is that it makes one realize that Brocka's struggles are not exclusive to a small coterie of connoisseurs, but to every person who knows how it is to live with passion and pride: how it is to stand by being Filipino, and gay, and militant; how it is to side with the masses; how it is to demand nothing but the best; how it is to call for change and indignation in the face of injustice and lies.

Sanchez' way of representing the late director's life is certainly irreverent and witty, bordering on the blasphemous for some. But what better way to pay tribute to a great man—better than laying laurel wreaths or creating marble busts-- than to infuse an awareness of and passion for the same things Lino Brocka stood for in life in one's audience?

In the end, the entire search for Brocka's lost progeny reaches its conclusion in its metaphorical, rather than biological, roots. The point of it all is underscored in a scene where the weary reporters trudge through a demolition-prone squatters area, searching for the twenty-something man named Angelino dela Cruz who held a megaphone to his mouth and rallied the urban poor to fight for their rights. A local who claims that the boy has since then left the slums to wage a “higher level of struggle” reaffirms his faith that the guy was indeed a child of the late director. “Madaling pekein ang histura, pero hindi ang ugali at buhay ni Brocka,” he says.

It's the 'little people' that count

The success of 'Anak ni Brocka' is based on its sincerity of intention. Sanchez belongs to a brave, new generation of Filipino/a film-makers who are out to tell the truths of our time, although not always through the direct and straight-to-the-point interrogation of documentary film-making (another of the notable developments in contemporary Philippine film).

For all the tongue-in-cheek parody and street-smart satire they exude, 'Sig's' films are out to represent the realities of the marginalized and to document the peripheral. For Sanchez, the practice of independent film-making was a venue to give the little people of Philippine cinema and society a time to be represented on their own terms.

While he has also directed popular music videos (such as Kyla's 'Til They Take My Heart Away' and Sugarfree's 'Hari ng Sablay', for which he was named the Best Director at the recent Awit Awards), Sanchez frankly admits that he has no illusions of these being the penultimate product of artistic expression and vision.

“Sa films na ginawa ko, I feel I have an obligation na na gawin siyang pangmulat ng mata. Sa music videos, busog sila sa pisikal na aspeto. Sa films ko I want them na mabusog sa utak at mas lalong magutom pa at mauhaw na maghanap ng mga ganitong klaseng pelikula,” he explains.

Sanchez is aware of the limitations of his forays into indie film-making as a form of social commentary. “My films will not change the state of the film industry kasi malaking sindikato na ang mainstream cinema...pero [they] can create an awareness sa mga nangyayari sa loob ng industriya, lalo na doon sa mga hindi nakakapasok,” he said.

The highest affirmation of one's vocation comes from the very people the artist intends to reach out to. In Sanchez's case, it came from the twenty-somethings of today, the generation that which was practically non-existent when Marcos was booted out and which was barely into puberty when EDSA 2 came around.

“The best feedbacks I got for Brocka were from the students themselves who tell me after the screening na 'salamat po, kasi hindi namin kilala si Lino Brocka until we watched your film', he says.

It also came from the appreciation from the “little people” of the Philippine industry: the technicians, the utility boys, the clappers, the writers and artists, the entire collective crew of labor that makes big productions possible.

“The biggest comment I got [for Lasponggols] was when they were showing it sa Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) during Cinemalaya. The projectionist, his crew, and even the ushers of CCP thanked me for making a film that [voiced] out the concerns of the little people like them. Hindi man sila taga-pelikula, nakaka-relate sila dun sa problema ng mga characters na taga-pelikula na mabababa ang suweldo, walang SSS, at pinaka-inaabuso,” he said.

Of course, the avowal to reach out to this audience necessitates the use of strategies to popularize film as a public practice. Sanchez is aware of the cultural and economic barriers that bar the masses from viewing movies, and sees the need to go “indie” in terms of the distribution of cultural products such as films. If one can't bring the man or woman in the street to the cinema, then take the cinema to the streets.

“Tayo na mismo ang lumapit sa audience. Dalhin nating sa mga squatters area at mga eskwelahan ang mga pelikula natin...hindi sila pupunta sa mga sinehan kasi wala silang pera o may mas mahahalagang paggagamitan nito,” he said.

“The Indonesian, Malaysian and the Korean young film-makers, isasampa lang nila sa pick-up van nila mga gamit nila at ipapalabas ang mga pelikula sa iba't ibang towns at schools na madadaanan nila. Naniningil lang sila ng pang-gas at pantsibog tapos larga na ulit. Dapat may ganoon tayong attitude,” Sanchez enthuses.

Such a practice is being done, for instance, by progressive and equally independent film-makers from groups such as Southern Tagalog Exposure, SIPAT, and TUDLA. Their documentaries--on issues ranging from human rights violations arising from militarization, urban poor youth, and the Hacienda Luisita massacre—are being projected on makeshift screens in picket lines, plazas, and classrooms.

“Punk's not dead”

For Sanchez and other indie film-makers, the recent recognition and support for their works is positive in the sense that may inspire another generation of artists who will continue with the vision and spirit of indie film-making. He encourages younger film-makers to “watch as many films as they can, listen to as many good songs and lyrics as they can, shoot films with their cameras for as long as they finally create their own obras, and finally be sensitive to the things around them because they are part of society and not just mere lookers”.

But more than being just reflective of what they see in society, Sanchez challenges younger film-makers to be critical, to question the status quo and its aesthetic and even political standards of Philippine cinema in order to come up with new ways of seeing.

“Siguro, kailangan mo lang ilabas yung “punk” in you, the activist in you na 'anti-' sa halos lahat. Then you'll see and discover new things in film-making,” he says.

[An]d don't forget the kid in you, the passionate kid in you,” he adds.

Despite the current state of the film industry, Sanchez looks forward to the day when Filipinos will begin to define more clearly and more explicitly a national aesthetic for Philippine cinema, when we will see “younger filmmakers who will be armed with very, very good and original stories that will tell very, very Filipino films to the world,” he said.

“We just copy trends now. Asian horror, Iranian films, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Korean love stories, etc,” he enumerates. “Kung may sampung indie filmmakers na magkukuwento ng mga istoryang very honest sa totoong kalagayan ng bansa...we'll really see a new wave of films na bumabangga talaga sa sistemang nakaugalian na,” he says.

“Takot na tayo sa katotohanan. Nakalimutan natin na hindi natapos ang laban nung mamatay sina Brocka at Bernal. Nagsisimula pa lang,” Sanchez asserts.

“Andami pang tulog. Andami pang hindi mulat,” he says, referring to the current state of the nation. But for as long as film-makers prevail in the conviction that images can be used to change the world, however futile it may sound to the jaded ear, we can always wager that Philippine cinema will continue to be relevant to its audiences in the same way that Brocka's opuses delivered their own slaps back at the dictatorship back then.

In a time when fleeing a politically and economically-unstable country seems a tempting option, Filipinos can always find strength in the fact that film-makers such as Sanchez will always be there with their cameras and scripts as part of the struggle: to direct, to act, to write and speak, to clear the cluttered path of images lying ahead of us and to clean up the mess left behind. He may not always be seated in the director's chair or standing in the spotlight, Sanchez foresees. But like the little people of Lasponggols, he will always be on call when needed.

“Kahit taga-timpla ng kape at taga-serve ng tubig gagawin ko. Basta kasama pa rin sa gera,” he ends. #

Raoul Rodriguez: An Artist for the People

The bulk of Raoul Rodriguez’s artistic works are composed of drawings and communal projects with UGAT-Lahi artist collective and various peoples’ organizations.

As an individual, Rodriguez's peregrine and diverse itinerary as a full-time cultural worker compels him to create on transportable formats: such as sketchbooks and small-scale canvases or paper that can be transferred from place to place.

His studio is wherever the struggle to 'serve the people' takes him: picket lines, urban poor and peasant communities, churches, and other arenas of cultural intervention.

His observations and wanderings are chronicled in the series entitled mga kwento mula sa ibaba – an ongoing visual journal of ball-point pen drawings on paper and studies on acrylic. The artist utilizes ball-point pens because of the inexpensive, unobtrusive, and accessible character of the medium.

Mga bagay na kadalasang nakikita pero hindi nabibigyang pansin as the artist terms them, comprises the artist's imagery and subjects. In a country where poverty and political disturbances are a prevalent sight, the artist goes beyond the act of documenting and reflecting grim social realities, and proceeds to interpret them through figurative expressionism. In this way, Rodriguez captures complex historical phenomenon that may not always be easily represented through a naturalistic depiction of perceivable reality.

Rodriguez produces vistas or postcards from the periphery: a visual anthology of histories from the marginalized. Images recalled from various sites of dissent populate his works. His subjects are the people with whom he directly interacts with, listens to, and organizes: downtrodden workers and farmers, the disenfranchised and unemployed, the individual faces of the poor majority and the convoluted throng of crowds.

Conversely, Rodriguez juxtaposes these sympathetic and intimate depictions of the masses with representations of oppressive entities. He frames the entire landscape and narrative of struggles between them. He makes tangible the enemy, makes their faces known to the viewer: landlords, local elite, the agents of US imperialism.

Rodriguez has also participated in collective installation works with UGAT-Lahi since 1999, and started producing individual installations since 2004. These installations and performances have encompassed themes such as transnational breeding of docile labor forces Hybrid (2004), the Hacienda Luisita massacre of November 16, 2005, the appalling disparities between consumerism and mass starvation Mc Pagpag (2004), and contemporary Philippine fascism Acolytes (2005). He has also explored producing “collages” of mounted and painted plywood cut-outs since 2004.

From 1994 up to the present, the bulk of Rodriguez' artistic energies have been channeled into the collective productions of UGAT-Lahi: in its effigies, street murals, collaborative paintings, and workshops.

The artist believes in the power of collective effort, whether in politics, or art. Rejecting the notion that art is created solely for its own sake, by a solitary genious in a space devoid of context and audience, Rodriguez and other cultural workers strive for the community’s involvement in each process and part of art-making.

For Rodriguez and other cultural workers, the masses are not mere subjects of static works of art. They value and aspire for the audience’s participation in art, not as mere awed spectators but as active collaborators.

The artist believes that the consummation of protest art lies in its ability to strategically intervene in the struggles of its day: whether as moving images of social realities or interactive works in popular forms.

Rodriquez also engages in instructional work through art workshops for children, mainly in cooperation with the Children’s Rehabilitation Center (CRC). Such workshops comprise part of the CRC’s program of psycho-social therapy for children victimized and traumatized by militarization in the countryside. In these sites of learning, the artist aims to infuse more than mere rudimentary technical knowledge and attempts to aid in the healing process.