The Utopia of Film by Christopher Pavsek

Author:Christopher Pavsek
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

With this parting advice, Tahimik recalls the central metaphor of his first film, Perfumed Nightmare: that of the bridge. We have thus come full circle in Tahimik’s life as an artist, and I Am Furious Yellow now appears to be a continuation of his earlier work, as if Tahimik had indeed managed to realize his long-standing fantasy of creating a never-ending film, of taking a journey and making a film whose conclusion cannot be foreseen, one cup of gas at a time. This unending story is simultaneously a sign of a deep perseverance, a recognizable continuity found in Tahimik’s style, thematic obsessions, and personality, and of an inescapable transience. Not only does this film (or rather films) document Tahimik’s own passing and the passing of a whole host of worlds, from the village life of the rural Philippines to the urban culture of Paris, but its very form, which embodies a sheer provisionality, changing constantly as Tahimik edits and reedits its various iterations, refuses the comfort that any final, definitive product might offer. And in this revisiting of his earliest work, Tahimik finally comes to terms with the failures of which I spoke at the beginning of this chapter: he does not finally fulfill the promise of revolt that comes at the conclusion of Perfumed Nightmare, nor does he succeed in completing the nativist project of Turumba. But neither does he close the book on them. Though I Am Furious Yellow does not keep the promises made in his earlier works, it keeps their promise—their liberatory anticipation—alive.

And it is telling what Tahimik does not show at the end when he suggests that Maestro Lopes might help the young Kidlat discover a “bridge that will reconnect us with the spirit of the land”: we do not see serene landscape images of Kidlat’s beloved cordillera or images of the Igorot tilling their terraces; we do not see images of typhoon clouds gathering over the bay or images of an undisturbed bamboo forest. Instead, we see a man using his hands and his tools, helped by his friends and neighbors, surrounded by dirt and dust and rust, the essential elements of the Third World, working scrap metal—springs from an automobile’s suspension, truck parts, etc.—working the decaying castoffs of a global capitalism, as the blacksmith Pati did in Turumba and as the workers at Sarao Motors did in Perfumed Nightmare, transforming the metal from old Japanese war vehicles, converting them into the tools of life. This metal, this rust, and this dust and all the by-products of human history make up “the land,” the environment to which Tahimik wants us to connect, more so than any sublime and sacred space of a conventionally beautiful landscape.

And perhaps, in the end, the greatest lesson in Tahimik can be found in this idea, this gently suggested plan for living out a finite existence in a finite world (mostly) of our own making, but one possessed of an infinite array of possibilities. The utopian hope of Tahimik’s films is to become just such a “bridge that will reconnect us with the spirit of the land.

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