Film Appreciation 101

Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's tale of the power of imagination in the midst of fascism, opened in Manila theaters today. Most prolly it will find its way to Davao after Spidey's opening next week (my colleague told me that the tickets for the April 30 premiere here is sold out).

I'm really looking forward to seeing it on the big screen. In fact, I was a bit surprised that it would finally be commercially released here. In the US, the slew of Oscar-winning indie films like The Queen, Last King of Scotland, and Pan's were widely released after they bagged their respective accolades. Though not one landing at the top spot, each got a fair share of box-office success. But that's the US.

I'm sure people who will go to see Pan's will be annoyed at the fact that they should have known the entire film was in Spanish. Letters from Iwo Jima opened yesterday in one of the theaters and people who already went and will go to see it would be similarly surprised that the entire film is in Nihonggo. When I walked out of the theater after seeing Babel, I heard the same reactions from people who were obviously annoyed at practically reading subtitles almost the entire duration of the movie.

It will come a long way before we appreciate the beauty of foreign films, especially with the viewing public who's accustomed to watching movies with stories that do not require much thinking even with the constant trips to the restroom. But I hope we get there.

I learn to watch and appreciate foreign films during college when we had an elective on film appreciation. But the most the ironic part is that our professor never screened a single foreign film. It was my own volition that I went to discover that the other professor has scheduled screenings for foreign films. It was then that I learned of Alfonso Cuaron's brilliance with I guess one of the most popular Mexican films in this generation.

In our opening screening, our professor let us watch X-Men (of all!) and he was like, "Oh look at the cinematography, class. Look at the camera angles. Look at the expressions on their faces. See how significant that is." Yeah, like we are such film experts already. Good grief. Throughout the entire semester I never saw a single foreign film -- a Francois Truffaut, a Lars von Trier, a Jean Luc Godard, a Sergei Eisenstein, an Akira Kurosawa (though I can vaguely remember watching Seven Samurais), a Bernardo Bertolucci, a Luis Buñuel. No Wong Kar-wai or Zhang Yimou. Even no Hitchcock and Kubrick. No Brocka or Bernal. While the other third class were discussing the theory of castration and feminism in cinema, our lectures were solely confined to discussing the cinematography and editing shit of this and that film that I bet even my classmates didn't fully comprehend. No cultural context or the evolution of the film medium whatsoever. The good: Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Or even that Richard Attenborough biopic Chaplin which starred Robert Downey Jr.

The famous Odessa steps from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin,
which was used in Brian de Palma's The Untouchables.
We digested De Palma's film as part of our finals.

Whatever very limited knowledge I had, I got it from Saturday readings in the library. (And there were very limited books also, in fact there was just one book on world cinema I fondly remember.) I guess it was that lack that has prompted me to discover the beauty of cinema. There was this one director who said that cinema being a reflection of reality, a mirror of society is in fact even more likable than reality itself. I guess that works for me.