Like few other Filipino film directors, Lav Diaz has brought worldwide attention to the Philippine cinema. He has been in the movie-making business for some twenty years now. It was the film “El Norte” (2013) that earned him international recognition, especially in film art house venues around the world. Diaz has since garnered numerous awards from all over the globe. Particularly distinguishable destinations such as Berlin, Locarno, and Venice have become standard film festival sites for placing Diaz on a multinational pedestal. Foreign captive audiences have witnessed the directorial skill and craftsmanship with which the director has translated the Philippine historical record into distinctively stark black-and-white visual images.
Artistically and stylistically influenced by some of the great cinematic auteurs, Lav Diaz---an auteur in his own right---has become one of the most avant-garde, profound, captivating, and recognizable Filipino movie directors of his generation. Diaz has become famous for rejecting the inevitably formulaic works of mainstream Philippine cinema and its mass consumerist appeal. In doing so, he has displayed a greater concern for theme than narrative, the measured appreciation of time than brevity, and a creative tone of poetic languidness than wasteful, superficial briskness.
Born in 1958, Lav Diaz is representative of what is known as the “slow cinema” genre. Making films that in some cases easily last for more than three or four hours at a time, Diaz’s films are practically marked out to follow Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic manifesto, “Sculpting In Time.” Tarkovsky epitomized the use of the slow cinema as a driving force in getting viewers to look past appearances and to diligently appreciate the quotidian aspects of life. On a deeper level, Tarkovsky also believed that cinematic art entailed the close consideration of reality. It was important to the late Russian cinematic master that an artist’s vision was in keeping with his own individual reality and perspective.
Anyone familiar with the Tarkovskian style and method will see and experience his influence all throughout Lav Diaz’s oeuvre. In Diaz’s most well-known Philippine New Wave work, “Norte, The End of History,” Tarkovsky’s cinematic poetics, pacing, and imagery are there for all to see. They circulate in the body of the movie, thereby creating access points to Diaz’s quest for the truth and his philosophy on everything from life to history to society to politics.
A constant factor in Diaz’s movies is how they allude to the divide between Philippine cinema for the sake of sheer entertainment and fleeting diversion from the harsh realities of life, and Philippine cinema for psychologically confronting the social and political challenges that have inflicted untold pain and suffering on the country. The idea that art---in Diaz’s case cinema---should be produced with an unrelenting social message or lesson in mind has piqued the director’s creative imagination for years. It is what has motivated Diaz to make viewers not settle for laughing hysterically or shedding tears melodramatically or for leaving the theater happy and contented.
If for Socrates the unexamined life wasn't worth living, then for Diaz the unexamined film isn’t worth watching. What Diaz wants as much as anything for people to take from his films is for them to think, to contemplate, to examine what they’ve just seen. Few directors have as a mark of their virtue the setting in motion of an affecting narrative telling of poverty, pride, injustice, and repression.
For Diaz, it is his first duty as a film director to try and summon his audiences so as to inspire them to inquire, to ponder, to question the “truths” they’ve been fed by the powers that be. Diaz has grown tired and frustrated with how his fellow countrymen and women have for too long followed social, political, and religious charlatans thoughtlessly and impulsively much to the detriment of the country.
To return again to Andrei Tarkovsky, the definitive influence of a lifetime for Diaz: Tarkovsky’s and Diaz’s gracefully shifting cinematography and subtle utilization of space is designed to draw viewers into the labor of interpreting their films for themselves. Diaz’s atmospheric, almost ghostly images and austere compositions combines his visual art with an expressionistic intimacy with audiences.
But Diaz expects that this intimacy comes at a price for viewers in that he wants them to establish a habit of mind in which they will necessarily trigger their social conscience and consciousness and get them to engage in the process of seeking dormant, and not merely apparent, meanings in his films
For Diaz, there is nothing that is simple about life. Therefore, there should not be anything simple about the signs and representations that he conveys in his movies. In Diaz’s films, art imitates life however stressfully, however painfully. His works require thought, hard thought at that, something that most moviegoers tend to be averse to when sitting comfortably in a darkened theater.
Diaz is not in the business of peddling popular motion pictures intended to bust box office proceeds. In commenting critically on what is considered to be commercially oriented Philippine cinema, Diaz hit the nail on the head when he said, “You look at the industry; they’re distorting everything, it's very escapist. It’s all about vanity, about making money, about seeking fame and fortune.”
With the scope and ambition of other extraordinary slow cinema maestros like Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Michelangelo Antonioni, Lav Diaz derives a great deal of his situational contexts and onscreen modalities of thought, expression, and activity from the Philippines’ complex web of historical relations linking notions of power, exile, resistance, and dispossession. It is the personal and public palette from which the director captures the inchoate desires and yearnings of a people trying to make themselves worthy of living in a free country.
ALLEN GABORRO
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