Slowly reclaiming (my) Filipino history with Lav Diaz
It’s a difficult task to write about Lav Diaz, the bastion of Philippine independent/arthouse cinema, whose new film Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon (When the Waves Are Gone) is set to premiere in NZIFF in the coming weeks. It’s very difficult for me to write about him without resisting the temptation to splay out my entire life’s story and the lengthy, ongoing process of self-actualisation and decolonial thinking I’ve been consciously and subconsciously participating in ever since arriving in Aotearoa as a Filipino immigrant. But first, I’ve gotta make sure you know who the hell this “Lav Diaz” is, and why he deserves the attention and acclaim you may or may not have heard about.
Lavrente Indico Diaz (mans was named after felled Soviet politician Lavrentiy Beria) was born on December 30, 1958, in Maguindanao—the now-divided province located in the southern islands of the Philippines (Mindanao)—where most of the country’s Muslim population reside and operate as an Autonomous Region outside of the Philippines’ centralised state. Unlike most of his Filipino filmmaker contemporaries, hell, even when compared to ‘traditional filmmakers’, I don’t exaggerate when I say that Lav Diaz’s films are very, very, very long and very, very, very slow. It’s an admission of delight and defeat to say, amidst the consistent quizzical looks received from my close peers and those unassuming persons who are unfortunately trapped in a one-sided conversation with me; as they cannot escape from my petulant fan-boyishness.
To put this in context, Diaz released two films last year. When the Waves Are Gone is listed at 187 minutes. His other film, Isang Salaysay ng Isang Karahasang Pilipino (A Tale of Filipino Violence), is 409 minutes (6 hours, 49 mins). His longest film, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family), is 647 minutes (you do the maths).
Before you groan at my pretentious film bro masochistic posturing of naming every single runtime of every Lav Diaz film I’ve sat through and subsequently stop reading, I want to emphasise that this seeming “barrier of entry” holds no hidden malice towards the average viewer. In fact, his stylistic and ideological draws as a filmmaker point to his desire to dismantle said barriers and liberate viewers curious enough to look. In the words of Diaz, when asked about his 11-hour epic:
“In Ebolusyon, I am capturing real time. I am trying to experience what these people are experiencing. They walk. I must experience their walk. I must experience their boredom and sorrows. I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the paradox that is the Filipino… I want the audience to experience the afflictions of my people who have been agonising for so long – under the Spaniards for more than 300 years, under the Americans for almost 100 years till now, under the Japanese for four years, and then under Marcos for more than 20 years till now too. I want people to experience our agony.”
And it makes sense on the surface why Diaz’s films have such long-ass runtimes: it’s a form of rebellion. His films reject hegemonic film industry conventions of standard 90-120 minute runtimes, commercial distribution (he’s started his own independent production company, Sine Olivia), and, most crucially, subject matter. Duration becomes a counter-revolutionary tactic. Diaz chooses to tell stories that eschew forms of escapist decadence propped up by Hollywood and its universal vice grip on filmmaking ideology. In favour of this, his minimalist yet dense narratives span across the vast spectrum of human triumphs and hardships, specifically within the context of the collective Philippine experience.
I don’t recall how I first learned about Diaz, but I do remember arriving at an epiphany on how little I knew about Philippine cinema—aside from stray blockbusters peppering the multiplex cinemas back home. Diaz felt like scorched earth, burning away every cinematic convention I’d known and leaving brand new, more confrontational, challenging, and significantly more rewarding ones. “Slow Cinema” became my new obsession, my chapel. It kickstarted my path towards more radical forms of cinema— beyond the “narrative structure” and into more meta-cinematic, self-interrogatory, avant-garde modes of viewing.
And speaking of ‘self-interrogatory’, I also came across Diaz during a period of heightened personal strife, alongside my heightened engagement with movies as an art form. I’m a concerning paradox: I was born and raised in the Philippines, but you could say I’m of a specific generation and class of Filipino youth who lived a relatively privileged life without any sustainable capability or interest in speaking my native tongue, Tagalog. People like me have often been lumped under the label conyo, a Filipino with western, upper-class sensibilities often derided and identifiable in how they speak: a broken, bro-speak/Regina from Mean Girls grammatical orgy of Tagalog and English; Taglish. Moments of my consciously choosing to avoid speaking Tagalog towards my yaya (maid) or manong driver (manong being a polite honorific) were in abundance, settling instead to reply in full English.
I’m undoubtedly a product of American culture/media oversaturation encouraged by a cancerous national culture that over-prioritised English-speaking proficiency in exchange for the possibility of upward social mobility. What instead resulted was a generation of conyos like myself, who have been unintentionally sheltered and alienated from the harsh, impoverished realities of their country, seeking instead to pursue white-collared, English-speaking jobs that further divide the working class that should be benefitting from domestic reform, but aren’t.
My journey with cinema, with Diaz, has offered me an awareness that has led me to reconsider the relationship between my Philippine heritage and the diasporic heritage I occupy. I no longer feel inferior about my national identity compared to my compatriots back home because I know we are together, as a collective, in this ongoing struggle. We all fall under the essence of what it means to be ‘Filipino’, the name Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan coined for this 7,641-island archipelago, in honour of King Philip II of Spain. Filipinos are invariably defined by their colonial history, but this is only part of our complete history. For Diaz, his films offer a much more robust and encompassing historical representation of the Filipino identity that harkens back to our pre-colonial Malay roots. In fact, Tagalog derives much of its vocabulary from Malay. The word ako (I, me) sounds and means the same in Malay, aku.
Ako ay Pilipino (I am Filipino).
The films of Diaz are an amalgamation of hidden fragments, invisible remnants, and histories of past Filipinos whose presence has been historically ignored and omitted by censorship and violent oppression from Ferdinand Marcos’ raping of our sacred land for any “subversives” refusing to kowtow to his authority. Lav’s images are haunted by ghosts—by the past—and duration allows the audience ample time and due diligence to engage in the multiple layers of his films.
It doesn’t matter how fast or slow, long or short, a film can be. In Lav’s own words:
“Art is free, man. Why confine it to a two hour thing… Be free, man. Liberate cinema—the way you want it. There’s no short cinema or long cinema. It’s just fucking cinema, man.”
