Counter/Public: The Politics of Committed Film in the Philippines

The “new cinema” was a loose film movement in the Philippines in the 1970s-80s known for combining nationalist and social themes with melodramatic form. Film scholarship in the Philippines has traditionally historicized the “new cinema” through an affirmative, national lens. More recent approaches problematize the nationalist frame through critical transnationalism, discourse analysis, cultural memory studies, and affect and genre theory. Yet, these studies overlook the ideological relation between cinema and the global Left. This dissertation emphasizes national cinema as a historically specific ideology. It situates the “new cinema” within shifting regimes of global capital accumulation through cinema’s politicization—that is, in terms of political ideas and aesthetic conceptions on the Left. This progressive discourse was committed to the political and economic autonomy of the Philippine nation yet regarded the artist’s freedom with ambivalence. The same ambivalence characterized the “new cinema’s” opposition to Hollywood—with which it was always face-to-face. In this respect, national cinema was not an idée fixe but a battleground where the nation-state was both abettor and enemy.This dissertation asks: what are the roots of debates on political art in the Philippines? What was at stake in the conflict between the “new cinema” and the filmmaking industry built by the preceding generation? What was the aesthetic self-understanding of independent filmmakers and collectives during democratization? After the 1986 revolution, in what sense did the media cartel inherit the “new cinema’s” nationalist and pedagogical concerns? It concludes that while a nationalist self-understanding led to novel aesthetic results, a progressive narrative limited the “new cinema’s” critical interpretation