Photo by Julius Drost
Genius and Garbage: A Testament
by Jessica Zafra
Venerando Palacios, the Mad Maestro, only made two kinds of movies. The first, works of insane and utter genius, inspired orgasms in asexual cinephiles and baffled moviegoers who tried to make sense of the non-linear narrative. The second united cinephiles and philistines who identified it as exploitative garbage. I have spent the last decade hunting down prints of his movies, and I agree.
I was seven or eight when I saw my first Palacios film, a sex-drama called Goddess of the Island. It is remembered largely as the film that popularized wet T-shirts in Philippine cinema. My parents, whose tastes were solidly middlebrow, snuck me into a screening marked “Strictly For Adults Only”. They wanted to see what all their friends were talking about. The bobbing brassiere-free breasts of the lead actress riding a horse on the beach while waves crashed on the shore repulsed me, as did the clean-shaven chest of the strapping actor who played her lover. I was more impressed at the chaos wrought in the tiny seaside village by those same breasts: the local maidens transformed into jealous hags, the wise healer into a salivating voyeur, the young parish priest chucking his vows. The wages of lust. So this was what my religion teachers were warning us about, that mythical ticket to hell.
Palacios’s next movie, Taxi Dancer, was a succes de scandale, our local version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring or Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Set among the floozies, dreamers and derelicts of a dingy burlesque hall, its ten-minute climax featured the titular actress dancing while having a miscarriage. The guardians of public morality had conniptions, the critics went into ecstasies, and the censors gave it an X rating, ensuring that everyone would go to see it. Whether real or feigned there is nothing like outrage to draw audiences to the cinema. Or to motivate a kid to disobey the good advice of his elders and become a film archivist. Who worked in an ad agency, because the bills must be paid.
I did not see Taxi Dancer until I was in college, on pirate DVD. The muddy copy, the tinny soundtrack, and the filmmaker’s excesses could not conceal its brilliance. Philistines only saw a woman in a skimpy dress shaking her booty while blood and gore flowed down her legs. I saw life in all its messy glory, or at least I thought so. Often I can’t tell if I’m seeing what’s actually on the screen, or projecting an image from my head—assuming these are two separate things.
Of Palacios’s vast and unwieldy oeuvre, I had a particular fondness for Summer Rain, a romantic melodrama that I saw many times on TV as a child when I was supposed to be taking my afternoon siesta. It’s a Romeo and Juliet love story, though the lovers are not from feuding families, but the same one. First cousins. Oh the agony. Oh the guilt and hysterical passion. In the end the girl’s parents, upstanding bourgeois, take the girl away. The boy runs after the car, sometimes nearly catching it at a red light, sometimes almost losing it at a green light, but running and running while the credits roll all the way to the end. I had not seen Summer Rain in many years, and assumed there was no existing print of the film. But I remembered it in minute detail, down to the pink sandals the girl was wearing as she walked in the rain with tears streaming down her face. In all likelihood my memories bore no resemblance to the movie, but in the absence of a copy even on ancient Betamax, our memories of the movies we loved are all that remains of them.
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In 2010 Noel and I went to Siniloan, Laguna to interview Celso Ad Castillo for the Cinema One catalogue. It was wild. This story was inspired by that meeting. The plots of the movies in the story are exaggerated, weirder versions of Castillo’s movies.
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