Four by Lino Brocka

In the early years of that decade, Brocka, who had made a name for himself as a director of theater and television, was more or less on board with the relatively new Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos. Beginning in 1970 with his first feature, Wanted: Perfect Mother, Brocka made crowd-pleasers and picked up awards, but when Marcos declared martial law in 1972, Brocka broke with the president-turned-dictator, and as José B. Capino has written, “vowed to create films that were more substantive and relevant to the national experience.”

Returning from a restorative hiatus, Brocka made Weighed but Found Wanting (1974), which critic Noel Vera has called “a panoramic view of society in a small provincial town, from its wealthiest citizen to its most wretched outcast.” But it’s Manila in the Claws of Light (1975) that is, as Capino notes, “widely regarded as his magnum opus.”

Julio (Rafael “Bembol” Roco Jr.) is a twenty-one-year-old fisherman whose girlfriend, Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), has left for Manila to study and support herself with domestic labor. But she disappears. Julio heads to the big city to find her and his journey takes him from construction sites “to cramped boarding houses, decaying cinema houses, and red-light districts,” as Tito Ramos Quiling Jr. traces it for Senses of Cinema. “Julio’s movement charts Manila as a geography of entrapment rather than a site for opportunity.”

Before Manila screens on Wednesday, the Cinémathèque will present Insiang (1976), the first Philippine film to be invited to Cannes (it was Pierre Rissient who brought it to the festival). Before he died in a car accident in 1991—he was only fifty-two—Brocka made more than sixty features, “many dealing with taboo subjects such as injustice and torture under martial law, government corruption, murderous militias, and prejudice against gay people,” as Phillip Lopate pointed out a few years ago. “It must be said that the artistic quality of his films varies widely, and that may explain why film preservationists and festival curators keep coming back to Insiang as Brocka’s one unassailably compelling masterwork.”

Hilda Koronel stars as Insiang, the young daughter of Tonya (Mona Lisa), who takes her husband’s philandering ways out on his family, tossing the bunch out of their tumbledown house—all of them, except for Insiang. Tonya’s new boyfriend rapes Insiang, and then her own boyfriend betrays her. For the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, “names that rise like vapors amid the film’s sweaty lovemaking, its convulsive violence, and harshly discordant flute trilling [include] Roberto Rossellini, Samuel Fuller, and Fannie Hurst, whose wildly popular novels (Imitation of Life and Back Street included) provided golden age Hollywood with some of its most memorable sob sister agonies.”

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has found Brocka’s approach in Insiang “unflinching: filming on location in a slum neighborhood in Manila, where work is scarce and even backbreaking jobs are coveted, he fills the drama with the desperate striving of its residents and the steady film frame with the elements of their subsistence. Open sewers, outdoor plumbing, gambling tables, and smoking garbage dumps are as much the agents of destiny as the characters whose existence they define.”

On November 5, the Cinémathèque will screen Bona (1980) and Cain and Abel (1982). In the recently rediscovered and restored Bona, Nora Aunor, the superstar of Philippine popular culture who passed away earlier this year, plays a teen whose obsession with a bit player in the local film industry leads her to throw herself at the lout. She cooks, washes up, bathes him, and pretends to put up with his lovers—until she doesn’t. “As mordant in its way as the slyly subversive movies Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, Brocka’s two-fisted melodrama is a hellish, compelling work,” wrote J. Hoberman in the New York Times last year.

Cain and Abel pits Lorenzo (Phillip Salvador) against Ellis (Christopher De Leon), their mother’s favorite. When Olaf Möller presented Cain and Abel in Rotterdam two years ago, he noted that it “offers the total Lino Brocka experience: an acerbic commentary on the Philippines’ rural proprietor class and its ongoing internecine struggles in the shape of a flamboyant melodrama with some grim and glorious violence. It’s an entertainment that pulls no punches.”