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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
A Revolution in Time: History and Identity in Raya Martin’s Autohystoria
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2017-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Renato Loriga
2017/03/01
Università degli Studi Roma Tre
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A Revolution in Time: History and Identity in Raya Martin’s Autohystoria
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17
A Revolution in Time:
History and Identity in Raya Martin’s Autohystoria
Renato Loriga, Università degli Studi Roma Tre

                           All history is masturbation. It’s just a matter of who you fantasize
                           about.
                                                        (Raya Martin, Autohystoria pressbook)




Raya Martin and New Philippine Cinema

   The recent string of awards won by Lav Diaz put Filipino cinema under the
spotlight.1 Diaz is the central core around which younger Filipino filmmakers
started to build their efforts: Raya Martin, Gym Lumbera, John Torres, and many
others have worked in close contact with Diaz, forming a wide but heterogeneous
group, which I call New Philippine Cinema. Each director has a unique and
individual style, but their goal converges into one big theme: what does being
Filipino mean? Through different ways, each one of them explores the history
of Philippines and the way in which colonial power still affects its culture and
cinema. These movies are distant from the neorealist aesthetic in the likes of
Lino Brocka or Brillante Mendoza. They are, instead, purely cinematographic
fantasies that enable the renegotiation between history and identity through acts
of subversive disarticulation.2 This is an act committed both against colonial
heritage and against cinema itself. The films share a pure anti-cinematic approach
that goes against all the most common traditional conventions of film language.
They often lack anything resembling a narrative or a plot, preferring a mixture of
fiction, documentary, found footage, and guerrilla filmmaking, thus thinning the
border between genres, life, and cinema.
   Raya Martin, one of the youngest and most prolific filmmakers of his
generation, has directed twenty titles in the span of ten years, radically changing
style from one another, to the point that his cinema can be labelled as anti-style,
symptomatic of a refusal to recognize himself as an author by his own admission.3
Among Filipino filmmakers, he is the one who more explicitly clarified his
postcolonial and metacinematic thoughts, meshing the two together while also


1
  Diaz firstly gained recognition in the experimental section Orizzonti at the Venice Film Festival,
and recently won the Golden Pard for Best Movie in Locarno in 2014, the Silver Bear in Berlin and
the Golden Lion in Venice, both in 2016.
2
  Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. xviii.
3
  See Alessandro Stellino, ‘Alla ricerca del tempo perduto. Intervista a Raya Martin’, FilmIdee, 3
(2012), <http://www.filmidee.it/archive/31/article/265/article.aspx> [accessed 10 July 2016].

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                         Renato Loriga


retracing chronologically the history of the Philippine nation and its cinema,
showing how the remains of colonial powers still erupt among the textures of
national imagery.
   Filipino identity is still highly debated concept. As Rafael explains: ‘[A]ttempts
at establishing a clear and undisputed fit between the Philippines and Filipinos
are far from complete, and in fact, may never be realized.’4 This is mostly due to
a fundamental asynchrony between the geopolitical creation of the Philippines
and the raise of a nationalist sentiment.5 Thus:

         [T]he identification of ‘Filipinos’ and the ‘Filipino nation’ proceeds experimentally,
     pursuing an unsettled and intractable course. The narrative script constituting the
     nation remains sedimented in fragments of scenarios from memory, customary rituals,
     idiomatic speech-acts and recursive practices. Until the coordinates are specified, we
     can only handle the ‘interpretants’ [...] of those signifiers provisionally.6

   For the same reason, Joel David states that ‘areas of postcolonial concern
in Philippine cinema should therefore be presented as questions rather than
statements, or rather as statements that are not so much inconclusive as they are
tentative, premised on the interested of the same (postcolonial) subject’.7

   At the age of 21, Martin shot Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg Indio Nacional (A
Short Film about the Indio Nacional, 2005), his first international success.8 Divided
into two stylistically different segments, it starts with a 22-minute scene, shot in
DV, while the rest of the movie is comprised of silent vignettes shot on 35mm film
that replicate the earliest examples of movies shot at the beginning of the century
(fig. 1). Of about three hundred movies produced in the Philippines from 1919
until 1944, only less than ten have survived to our days. The lack of a national film
archive in the Philippines has led to an almost total erasure of an entire cinematic
heritage.9 Indio Nacional thus becomes a film about a nation whose cinema is not
only lost, but that could never be in the first place. Martin is projecting a pure
fantasy of what early Filipino cinema could have been, drawing heavily from the


4
  Vincente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000), p. 7.
5
  Ibidem.
6
  E. San Juan, Jr., ‘Reflections on Academic Cultural Studies and the Problem of Indigenization in
the Philippines’, TOPIA, 29 (Spring 2013), 73–93 (pp. 84–85).
7
  Joel David, ‘Philippine Film History as Postcolonial Discourse’, in Geopolitics of the Visible:
Essays on Philippine Film Cultures, ed. by Rolando B. Tolentino (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2006), pp. 3–12 (p. 8).
8
  Produced also through the Hubert Bals Fund and released in 2006 among many international film
festivals (Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nantes, Thessaloniki and Pesaro, where it won first
prize).
9
  See Bliss Cua Lim, ‘A Brief History of Archival Advocacy for Philippine Cinema’, in 2013
Philippine Cinema Heritage Summit: A Report (Manila: National Film Archives of the Philippines,
2013), pp. 14–20, <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gx6w8ff> [accessed 9 August 2016].

62
                                        A Revolution in Time


episodes told by Reynaldo Ileto in his seminal book Pasyon and Revolution.10 The
stylistic choice to combine digital and film is related to the choice of subject itself,
but also creates a visual time-gap that prompts a reflection on the cinematic medium
itself. Postcolonial thought is then entwined with the filmic support and what it
brings in historical as well as cultural terms. Indio Nacional is a reconfiguration
of history, an ‘invention of a reality that had to be there but has been suppressed in
historical mediation’.11 The bond between history and metacinematic reflections
will characterize every other movie by Martin.
   In 2009, Martin directed another period piece, set in the 1930s, during the
US occupation. In those years, the Philippines were a leading force in southeast
Asian cinema, producing hundreds of movies per year within a productive
system that was closely inspired by Hollywood. With Independencia, Martin
does not merely set the plot in the past, but tries to replicate the same means of
production from that time, with a high budget film,12 shot on 35mm film, with
a crew of almost one hundred people and actual in-studio shootings with hand-
painted backdrops and artisanal special effects (fig. 2). The act of realizing an
independent movie with the means of a mainstream one is thus a political gesture
in itself. It indicates an awareness of Martin’s part of being a director involved in
the system of international film festivals, a system that sustains and dictates the
so-called arthouse or independent cinema, and the will of confronting this reality
by questioning what is expected from a Third World director such as himself.


Autohystoria

  In 2007, Martin shot what probably is his most radical and personal film.
Autohystoria still deals with Martin’s interest in Spanish colonial rule in the
Philippines, but the narrative aspect is now close to zero, while his experiments
with long takes and duration are almost taken to an extreme. For a length of ninety
minutes, it is composed by only fifteen shots, which I will briefly summarize:

        1. [2’5”] A black screen accompanied by a love song played on acoustic guitar
           (‘And this space between us/What distance is possible/To traverse/For this
           forgetful heart of mine?’).
        2. [36’17”] The scene is abruptly interrupted, as well as the sound, which now


10
   See Reynaldo C. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998, first publ. 1979). The book deals with the
active role of common people and their beliefs during the years of the revolution and after. Ileto’s
book is a prime example of ‘history from below’ and close to what can be defined postcolonial
studies at an early stage, since it was published in 1979, just one year after the fundamental Said’s
Orientalism.
11
   Jonathan Beller, ‘Iterations of the Impossible: Questions of Digital Revolution in the Philippines’,
Postcolonial Studies, 11.4 (2008), 435–50 (p. 442) [emphasis in the original].
12
    Indio Nacional was shot in five days with a budget of 700.000 pesos (circa $15.000), while
Autohystoria was shot in two days with a budget of 10.000 pesos (circa $200).

                                                                                                    63
                                          Renato Loriga


           becomes live recording of a trafficked street. The scene is shot with a hand-held
           camera, in really low resolution and in b/w. The camera follows a man from
           the other side of the street, until he reaches a house. This uninterrupted shot is
           longer than half an hour. In the last seconds, some lines of text in Tagalog are
           superimposed on the image: ‘Last night, I read about Andres Bonifacio. He
           was killed with Procopio Bonifacio. I messaged my brother asking how he was.
           No answer. Soon after, I fell asleep.’
        3. [12’] This scene is in colour, and shot on digital video. The shot is still, fixed
           on a tripod, and it frames a trafficked roundabout. The only steady visual
           reference is a monument. A police van is going in circles around it, its loud
           siren dominating all the other traffic noises, although no particular visual
           emphasis is given to the car.
        4. [6’] The camera is inside of a vehicle, with a close-up of a scared young man.
           We hear the same loud siren from before. We are inside the police van that is
           circling in the roundabout. This shot is connected to the previous through the
           sound of the siren, being the first time in the movie in which two shots follow
           each other diegetically.
        5. [2’56”] A close-up of another boy on the verge of tears, while the car keeps
           going in circles.
        6. [1’12”] Hand-held camera. Outdoor shot of the moon covered by the dense
           vegetation of the jungle.
        7. [13’22”] We see the two young men from behind, walking in the jungle. We can
           now be sure that this is not camera footage, but a POV shot of the kidnapper(s).
           The men walk with great difficulty, sometimes turning their heads towards the
           camera. One of them is covered in blood. He stops and asks: ‘Will you shoot
           us?’ There is no answer.
        8. [1’27”] A short insert depicting the light of dawn filtering through the
           vegetation.
        9. [5’] Still camera. The two men are at the centre of the shot, their faces are
           swollen and bloody, one of them has his arm in a sling. The two are trembling
           but don’t utter a word. During the last seconds, a gunshot is fired. One of the
           guys drops dead, while the other tries to run through the jungle.
       10. [4’] Bucolic shot on a fixed camera. The sound of a waterfall can be heard.
       11. [2’] Fixed shot of the sky tinted with the colours of dawn.
       12. [1’] Fixed shot of a waterfall.
       13. [50”] Another stylistic change. An old black and white film from the silent
           era.13 Two soldiers are crossing the river followed by a pack of donkeys.
       14. [40”] Another silent film, this time introduced by its title: Aguinaldo’s Navy.
           Some small ships peacefully sail on a river.
       15. [50”] A third silent film, with no title. American soldiers are parading along
           with the infantry.14


13
   Martin does not introduce the film by its title. It is An Historic Feat (Raymond Ackerman, 1900),
also known as Gen. Bell’s Pack Train Swimming Agno River. The film depicts a real incident, where
the American’s army mule pack ended in the waters of the Agno River, in Luzon, by accident.
14
   Again, without title. It is 25th Infantry (Raymond Ackerman, 1900). It shows the 25th Infantry led
by the generals Frederick D. Grant and A.S. Burt returning from mount Arayat. All three movies
were shot by Raymond Ackerman, for Biograph.

64
                                    A Revolution in Time


      16. End credits, written upside down and rolling from bottom to top. Among the
          others, we can read the names of Lav Diaz, Khavn de la Cruz, John Torres and
          Alexis Tioseco.

   In what way does Autohystoria concerns Filipino identity? What kind of
subalternity is at stake? I will answer these questions by fragmenting the multi-
layered structure of the film, while bearing in mind that, in Bhabha’s words,
‘identity is claimed from marginality.’15
   First of all, let us consider its (non)narrative content. As we can see by this short
summary, the movie gives very few hints on what is actually happening. Only one
line of spoken dialogue and some text provide the context to understand the
historical references. Autohystoria, in a way, regards a fundamental episode in
Philippine history: the homicide of Andres Bonifacio (named at the end of the
shadowing scene), leader of the Katipunan secret society and of the Filipino
revolution of 1896. He was killed, along with his brother Procopio, under the
order of Emilio Aguinaldo, which soon after became the first President of the
Philippines Republic. Despite being a people’s hero while alive, shortly after his
death both American and Filipino politicians and historians distorted and altered
Bonifacio’s memory and legacy, which is still debated nowadays. The monument
shown in the movie, the Balintwak in Caloocan City, is dedicated to him. The lack
of historical context given by Martin, except for the many references that still
goes unexplained for the misinformed viewer, seems to echo the programmatic
erasure to which Bonifacio has been relegated for years, until recently.16 Thus,
Bonifacio’s story cannot be labelled as a minority history, it being a ‘narrative of
a group or class that has not left its own sources’.17 The erasure, or downgrade,
of his memory has been entirely and voluntarily political.18 However, this kind of
knowledge is not available to every spectator, especially to Western audiences,
which represent the majority for this kind of film, mostly in film festivals such as
Turin or Rotterdam (the venue of its international première). We must then look
at how Martin deals with history through cinematic means.
   For this purpose, I will conduct my analysis by relying on the concept of
postcolonial critique of time as theorized by Filipino scholar Bliss Cua Lim
(specifically regarding the concepts of multiple temporalities, anachronism, and



15
   Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004, first publ. 1994), p. 254.
16
   See Ileto, ‘Knowing America’s Colony. A Hundred Years from the Philippine War’, Philippine
Studies Occasional Papers Series, 13 (Manoa: University of Hawaii, 1999).
17
    Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 97.
18
   See Teodoro Agoncillo, The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan
(Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1996, first publ. 1956); Renato Constantino,
The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Quezon City: Tala Publishing Services, 1975); Ileto, Pasyon
and Revolution; Floro Quibueyn, A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony, and Philippine
Nationalism (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999); Ambeth Ocampo, Bones of
Contention: The Bonifacio Lectures (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2001).

                                                                                            65
                                          Renato Loriga


untranslatability), while also referring to the works of Chakrabarty and Bhabha.19
Today’s time, as Lim argues, is determined by capitalism. Homogenous time,
around which Bergson developed his ‘corrective critique’, does not exist in
nature, but is the result of the world-historical project of modernity that hinged
on colonialism.20 To counter the concept of homogenous time Bergson, and
Lim after him, developed the notion of heterogeneous time or ‘pure duration’,
which cannot be spatialized nor calculated. What makes Autohystoria stand as
a deeply political film is the way in which Martin deals with time in all of its
aspects. ‘The project of a repossession of the new subjectivity goes through the
act of taking back the violent dispossession of time and of itself as a historic
being’,21 and Autohystoria configures itself as a way of repossessing time through
different means. Martin refuses to follow a narrative plot or any dramatization,
thus structuring the film around different temporalities, namely the historic
temporality, the personal temporality, and the time of the event.
   It is in fact immediately noticeable that the Bonifacios’ story is set in the present
day. The film’s main episode is the murder of the two young men, which only
happens near the end and is not shown in its full effect (fig. 3). We, as spectators,
may identify the guys as the Bonifacio brothers quoted by the text, or with the
narrator and his brother, or both. Martin refers both to the historical fact (the
Bonifacios’ murder) as well as a personal occurrence (his failed correspondence
with his brother). The two subjects converge, merging the personal and the
political aspect into one. Once again, Martin uses two different image-bearing
media: analog video and digital video. But the gap between the two is less evident
if we compare it to Indio Nacional. What matters more to Martin in this movie
is his work on time, or duration, and the ways in which it can bring back from
memory a controversial historical episode. There is no re-enactment — such as we
see in the silent vignettes in Indio Nacional — but rather we see a transposing of
history in a contemporary setting. This transposition allows the viewer to connect
emotionally with the fate of the two brothers, despite their (lack of) knowledge of
Philippine history. The shadowing scene, lasting for thirty-seven minutes and shot
on low quality analog video resembles the looks of camera surveillance videos (fig.
4), a kind of image that proliferates in the post-9/11 era and functions as a ‘highly
disciplinary image’.22 It is an image that is intimately tied with contemporaneity,
translating the Bonifacios’ story to our days through the looks and technology of


19
   The debate on postcolonial temporality cannot, of course, be analyzed extensively in these pages.
An interesting take on its various aspects can be found in Stefan Helgesson, ‘Radicalizing Temporal
Difference: Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory, and Literary Time’, History and Theory, 53 (2014),
545–62.
20
   Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2009), p. 13.
21
   See Marco Scotini, ‘Governo del tempo e insurrezione delle memorie’, in Politiche della memoria.
Documentario e archivio, ed. by Elisabetta Galasso and Marco Scotini (Rome: DeriveApprodi,
2014), pp. 7–18.
22
   Ivi, p. 12.

66
                                       A Revolution in Time


a society obsessed with control. The following scenes, where the two are being
detained in a police car, implicate the government in the death of the Bonifacios,
as well as creating another link with contemporary history.
   However, Autohystoria should not be reduced to an experiment in
mockumentary, since the POV shots that most resemble a documentary aesthetic
are linked with the contemplative shots of nature, as well as with the found
footage fragments. These brief shards remind us of the author behind all of this,
and of the movie’s fictional nature. Without them, the snuff-like aesthetics of the
stalking, kidnapping and execution of the two brothers (which constitutes the
time of the event) along with the unusual length of the shots would end up being
a full emotional and emphatic dive.
   From a stylistic point of view, Autohystoria is made of time-images as theorized by
Deleuze, where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable
with the one they have in space.23 The extended duration of the shots functions as
an act of resistance in and of itself, something that breaks the empiric running of
time, creating a non-chronological time instead. This goes against the homogenous
time described by Bergson and Lim. The lack of spoken lines makes Autohystoria
a movie built predominantly on sound. The refusal to use language to articulate
a critique of time is again found in Bergson, since ‘all attempts to articulate pure
duration are betrayed by language, [which] can only express time insofar as it is
past, accomplished, and objectified (time flown, not time flowing)’.24
   What we call ‘mainstream cinema’ is also opposed to the concept of pure
duration, since it is mainly based on plot, thus revolving around a linear
narration (which even if fragmented can be put together in a mathematical way)
which we might consider an example of homogenous time.25 Produced in total
independence, shot on a $200 budget in two days, it is a product that avoids
the restrictions not only of mainstream cinema but of independent cinema as
well. From the point of view of the film’s production, Martin is debating his
identity from the marginality of experimental cinema. Being a prime product
of modernity, cinema is in itself bounded to imperialistic and colonial logics of
power and dominance, a legatee of modern homogenous time with a tendency
toward the technical denaturalization, homogenization, and standardization of
time.26 Cinema is then an allochronic gesture, a tactic of temporal distancing
that translates heterogeneity into the terms of homogeneous time, that which
Chakrabarty describes as anachronism, the temporal hiatus imposed by colonizers
on colonized, the ‘not yet’ to which the colonized nationalist opposed his or
her ‘now’.27 It is exactly this ‘not yet’ that is manifested explicitly in Aguinaldo’s
Navy (Raymond Ackerman, 1899), the silent film used by Martin at the end of


23
   Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 39.
24
   Translating Time, p. 17.
25
   See Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
26
   Translating Time, p. 43.
27
   Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 9.

                                                                                                   67
                                         Renato Loriga


Autohystoria. This film depicts small fishermen’s boats but labels them as general
Aguinaldo’s navy, thus creating a false image aimed at projecting the Philippines
in a defenceless backwardness: ‘[E]thnographic cinema and photography [is] a
“time machine” that transports indigenous subjects into a “displaced temporal
realm,” converting performers who share a space and time with the filmmaker
into native specimens from an earlier age.’28
   The filtering of history (the Bonifacios’ murder) through a contemporary
setting (todays Philippines) and by contemporary means (the video-surveillance/
digital aesthetic) questions every temporal gap imposed by colonialism. The pure
duration engaged by Martin can be read as a ‘“survival of the past”, an ever-
accumulating ontological memory that is wholly, automatically, and ceaselessly
preserved’.29 By crafting a mise-en-scène that conjoins past and present in the
same shot, with its climax during the execution scene where the viewer can finally
juxtapose the historical ghost of the Bonifacios on the beaten up flesh of the two
guys, Martin resets the colonial distance between what is contemporaneous and
what is not in the eyes of the colonizer. Autohystoria might thus be read as a
refusal of anachronism, of a past left behind, impelling us to think in terms other
than the present in order to see beyond seeming obsolescence.30 The execution of
Bonifacio functions as a fundamental point of intersection of the many trajectories
that animate and complicate the meaning of Filipino identity and history, an
episode that mobilizes the memory of both Spanish and US colonialism, as well
as Filipino civil violence. The multiple temporalities triggered by the mise-en-
scène converges in this crucial moment which, to return to Bhabha, stands at the
margins of modernity. It is a ‘projective past’, through which:

         [The discourse of modernity] can be inscribed as a historical narrative of alterity
     that explores forms of social antagonism and contradiction that are not yet properly
     represented, political identities in the process of being formed, cultural enunciations
     in the act of hybridity, in the process of translating and transvaluing cultural
     differences.31

   The subalternity questioned by Martin is that of the historical self, personified by
the Bonifacio brothers, relegated to the marginality of history. It is properly a time-
lag where ‘objectified others may be turned into subjects’.32 The two protagonists
are, in fact, objects at the mercy of unknown perpetrators, who endure their
(historical) fate without being the possibility of escape, along with the spectator
who is bound to watch, helplessly. However, the representation of their agony,
and the pure duration of their persecution, is where the postcolonial agency lies:


28
   Translating Time, p. 87.
29
   Ivi, p. 15.
30
   Ivi, p. 16.
31
   Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 361.
32
   Ivi, p. 255.

68
                                       A Revolution in Time


         It is the function of the lag to slow down the linear, progressive time of modernity
     to reveal its ‘gesture’ [...] This slowing down, or lagging, impels the ‘past’, projects it,
     gives its ‘dead’ symbols the circulatory life of the ‘sign’ of the present, of passage, the
     quickening of the quotidian. [...]. Time-lag keeps alive the making of the past.33

   The personification of the Bonifacios as present-day men has a double
postcolonial value. On the one hand, the co-presence of past and present
underlines that colonial power dynamics are still alive in today’s Philippines.34
On the other hand, this epistemic violence funnels on Andres Bonifacio, the
unsung hero of the revolution of humble origins that, as opposed to the ilustrado
José Rizal which is probably the most famous Filipino historical figure. Bonifacio’s
beaten and dead body may be a metaphor for the Philippines as a gateway for
‘the ghosts of 19th- and early-20th-century aborted or coopted revolutions’.35
Postcolonial time thus highlights the irreversible hiatus caused by anticolonial
revolts in contemporary history. These revolts, despite their negative outcome,
have forever disarticulated the idea that time and space in the colonies were
qualitatively ‘other’ compared to the cities.36 It is precisely on this disarticulation
of time that Autohystoria is constructed.
   Lastly, the silent movies at the end of Martin’s movie have a radically different
function that those expressly created in Indio Nacional. These are three movies
shot by an US operator during the Philippines-American war. They are not
introduced as such because the images already speak volumes in terms of
colonial violence. These images have survived to our days, merely because they
belong to the colonizer, while the entirety of Filipino cinema until the 1940s and
beyond has been wiped out, destroyed permanently, forgotten. The reason why
we can still look at these images is the same reason why Bonifacio was murdered.
Only the second film maintains its title, Aguinaldo’s Navy, and it is the only one
depicting actual Filipinos instead of American soldiers. And yet, these images are
anachronized by the title, which distorts their content and temporally situates it
in an aprioristic before.
   Autohystoria condenses in a simple but disarming way the many heterogeneous
flows that inhabit Filipino identity. Among all of his other films, this is the one
that uses all of Martin’s common interests in their purest way: the conjunction
of personal and political; of past and present; of postcolonial questioning and
identity fragmentation in a way that is highly anti-cinematic.




33
   Ivi, p. 364 [emphasis in the original].
34
    See San Juan, Jr., Toward Filipino Self Determination: Beyond Transnational Globalization
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).
35
   ‘Reflections on Academic Cultural Studies’, p. 79.
36
   See Stefano Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale (Verona:
Ombre Corte, 2008), pp. 27–28.

                                                                                                  69
               Renato Loriga




     Fig. 1.                   Fig. 2.




     Fig. 3.                   Fig. 4.




70
