#gym lumbera

Language as a means of assimilation and indoctrination, language as a means of resistance.     In Gym Lumbera's hauntingly fascinating but ultimately sorrowful Anak Araw, the Thomasites are long gone: it is apparently the 1950s, but the enduring residue of American occupation seems manifest through the institutionalization of English as a medium of instruction. The film, in monochrome, begins with a litany of English words flashed one by one like vignettes (a kind of Letras Y Figuras devoted to this foreign tongue) on the screen. Then the film segues to images of live animals -- the dog, the cow, the goat -- captioned in English, followed by their Tagalog equivalents, like entries in a English-Pilipino dictionary. Simple and rudimentary enough, as if this is for the purposes of a child's education. In truth, this is for everyone and the learning curve can be steep, excruciating and unnatural. Full of whimsy, heart and humor, Lumbera intersperses proceedings with documentary footage of the well-attended funeral of Togo, one half of that Laurel and Hardy-like comedic tandem that flourished in the 1940s (to the despair of Japanese colonizers) and the early 1950s. Lumbera seems to associate this elegiac moment to the end of some prelapsarian golden age. Pugo and Togo after all were vaudevillians and movie comedians who entertained us in crisp vernacular. With them, a national three-ring circus lapsed into history. But this could be simply misdirection, an objective-correlative about lost innocence. Lumbera is in the act of adding temporal textures and signposts. Meanwhile, his own staged footage is seamlessly period-like, what we might imagine of this era. Bringing us to an insular Tagalog hinterland -- haunting with its crepuscular lights and a shadowy overhang of bamboo and acacia trees and masses of people framed in the photographic manner of Robert Flaherty -- Lumbera dramatizes the hard and perhaps futile reception of English...

ANAK ARAW

Dir-Scr Gym Lumbera. Prod Allison Jalina Lumbera, Roger Basco, Ronald Arguelles. With Jay G De la Vega, John Griffiths, Feliciano Lumbera, Rodrigo Magpantay, Franco Guiseppe Cuozzo. Philippines-USA 2013. 63min. Prod Co Jim Jasper J Lumbera This magical realist fable tells of a Filipino albino searching for his identity while, believing that he is the son of an American, trying to learn English through reading translations and definitions from a Tagalog-English dictionary. With surreally arresting imagery and a monochrome Anak Araw looks at times like it has been salvaged from the sea, the dreamlike narrative seamlessly mixes archive film with crepuscular footage evoking classic ethnographic filmmaking. While circling around big themes of language, colonisation and national identity, the film is filled with much humour and whimsy, underlined by the ironic inclusion of Nat King Cole’s phonetic rendering of the classic Filipino love song ‘Dahil Sa Iyo’ in its final scene. Benjamin Cook