Growing up, I remember not having a dull TV viewing moment during Holy Week, even if ”Holy Week” itself throbs with the reality of regular programming being out from Maundy Thursday to Black Saturday (because we’re Catholics like that). ABS-CBN Ch. 2 especially offers an array of Pinoy film classics ranging from Lino Brocka’s social realism to Mike de Leon’s well-crafted horror. It’s a grand feast of local flicks reliving the Golden Age of Philippine Cinema, and as a kid I initially had no choice but to ingest them, much like own cross to bear. There’s nothing else out there anyway.
This was way before cable TV became a quintessential feature of middle-class homes; it preceded Cinema One’s household-name status, especially for the pop culture aficionado (a little code name for “jologs”). After a humble merienda of guinatang mais and halo-halo and cheesy ensaymada, I would retreat to my room and commit to my own holy hour(s) with the film masters. I probably saw Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Are Weighed But Found Wanting), Itim, and Maynila: Sa Kuko ng Liwanag at age 8 or 9. I was terrified by Insiang’s dreary little slum world at around the same time. After seeing Kisapmata, too, Vic Silayan became my own personal version of a living monster.
After a year or so, Batch ’81 became a rather amusing break from the hardcore social reality in the other canonized works. The musical score and Mark Gil proved to be worthwhile, a welcome complacency held against the ideal picture of visita iglesia or the beach. Pepe en Pilar and ‘Merika, too, were among the memorable ones.
I actually watched these alone, as my father would prefer Ten Commandments and Rasputin to the cinema world I grew in at that time. He, obviously, aimed better proximity to the Caucasian counterparts of my virtual heroes.
These movies, I believe, served as the springboard to my being a closet jologs in high school and openly a pop culture savant in college (the time when I discovered there were many others like me, we weren’t a dying breed at all). In an alternate universe I would had devoted myself to video games and Nickelodeon and Disney movies (I actually did, though not substantially), not to these local masterpieces whose sensibilities and adul t lessons proved to be eons ahead of my generation. It was largely reinforced by that one week a year, that annual religious holiday opening up a sinkhole of silence and contemplation inside me as a God-fearing child (hah).
In fact this level of cinema literacy ran parallel to my earliest taste in literature: I actually preferred reading N.V.M. Gonzales, Manuel Arguilla, and later Nick Joaquin and F. Sionil Jose. I was propelled towards these agricultural issues, domestic dramas, and grim images of life and the hard grind behind it.
Which leads me to wonder where all my grownup-cinema friends have gone, now that the two local stations prefer syndicating international series (mostly of the juvenile, Upper East Side-type) and rerunning their own cheesy drama series every Holy Week? What has become of this great service to humanity, this preservation of the best there is in local cinema? Ch. 2 still has Himala this year, but where are the other greats that used to complete my definition of Holy Week?
Having followed last night this teleserye called May Bukas Pa, I’m not really complaining; the old virtues are still there, selflessness and the old sense-making within the realm of miracles and all, but the old self pines for the old offerings on the tube. Why the fuck do they deprive kids of today from rethinking the world in Brocka and Bernal and Aguiluz’s terms? And mind you, it’s not as if there’s an abudance of these films in the messianic Cinema One cable channel.
Santino, the small boy performing small to grand miracles in May Bukas Pa, converses ever so closely with his bro, Jesus Christ himself, in this one scene where dark forces starts getting the upper hand in the small town. I can imagine many Internet-age 8-year-olds watching the same moment freeze before their eyes, and I almost wished they don’t have much of the luxury of choice they have now. I wish they were as bored as I was, the disinterested TV set my only redemption. I want to imagine them driven towards TV and the still-coiffed Bembol Roco and the juvenile romance of their own country’s slumdogs (Hilda Koronel the coy labandera maiden, before Ate Vi was all the rage). This is what they missed out on, and what my backward self misses, too. Small wonder what nostalgia does to people: shooting for himala at the very core.
