Unspoken Cinema

The Aesthetic of the Meandering Camera : An Analysis of Three Filipino Independent Films by Alvin B. Yapan Paper read during the 5th Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference Ateneo de Manila University, 22 November 2008 Aesthetically, we could say that Philippine independent cinema positions itself, consciously and or unconsciously, in opposition to mainstream. Instead of staged mise-en-scene, we find a production set-up with the most minimal intervention. Whatever the location provides will do. Instead of well-known actors, we have locals acting in the film. Instead of polished lighting and audio design, we find available light and live sound. Dialogues are not dubbed. Instead of film negatives, there is digital filmmaking. These aesthetic choices seem to be more borne out of necessity rather than by any political stance. Independent would mean that filmmakers do not rely on the studio or network system to finance their production. But there is still a need on their part to earn a pr...

"Gaston Bachelard would have been excited by Omirbaev's allegiance to the grain of lived experience, his devotion to a precise accounting of the machinery of perception, his insistence on a film form that actually does achieve vertically without lapsing into strict ordinary time. [..] Omirbaev does not appear to "arrive" at any moment with ease : each one of his films feels worked, brooded upon, every choice and move endlessly mulled over, albeit with the purpose of staying here to the instant, the sensation of being awake to the life of the world while the humdrum continuum of linear time plods on and on and on around you. Nonetheless, Bachelard could be describing almost any given film or scene by this artist of intensified quietude." [..] "The tension between inner and outer experience, between their distance on the one hand and their intimate proximity on the other, is painfully felt throughout every Omirbaev film. He is constantly exposing the gulf bet...

Faces, faces of beautiful, sensible, excitedly moved women fill the film of Kiarostami , unveiling their deepest sensations, exposing unabashedly their compassion with the heroes, under their veiled head. They are living through the love story of an ancient-classical epic, a melodrama, written by the Iranian poet, Nezami, 800 years ago, in which passion, desire, divorce and death occur to the bitter end. And they follow these trials with total empathy, identifying with the protagonists’ suffering and joy – without ever seeing a moment of the events. If there exists radical, defying, yet mostly efficient evocation of nude human emotions on the screen, Kiarostami dared to venture into this extreme simplicity. He deliberately omitted everything that could be considered as “illustration” or plain visible explanation. Instead we have allusion, fine signals through the sound and spoken text in order to justify the impact, the events that call for reactions. "The actresses were looking...