The Wily Filipino

Random Links and Responses.

1. Oh my god. Who are these people???

2. Don't give kids crappy presents!

3. Barbara has an entry on Apocalypse Now, which happens to be my favorite movie of all time, up there with Wong-Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love. The French plantation scene restored in Redux unfortunately slows down an already slow film, and adds little to the narrative. (Interesting how two of the big scenes excised pretty much had the only speaking scenes for women.)

What the scene does do, however, is to underscore the fact that the film was, consciously or unconsciously, never about Vietnamese, and, by extension -- to make a gross generalization -- neither was the Vietnam War.

You should have gone for that Apoc Now / Platoon doubleheader -- both flicks were filmed in my home province of Laguna.

4. Leny and Barbara are asking about language. What -- no one wanted to check out Aswang? =)

I re-read my previous post and I guess it wasn't very clear. The students did write answers regarding the importance of "minority" languages, challenging the authority of English, language as ethnic inclusion/exclusion (i.e., you weren't supposed to get it), etc. (In an interview Wayne Wang said something to the effect that he thought it was important for viewers to hear those languages.) One student rightly wrote that the lack of subtitles made people pay more attention. One of my takes on the question was that the (non-Cantonese / Mandarin-speaking) viewer would have to work hard -- and be frustrated -- in perhaps the same manner as the two cabbies looking for Chan.

No one answered anything on untranslatability, though this did come up in our discussions of Barbara's poem; there would be a couple of native speakers of Tagalog who would say, "Well, it means this, but not exactly -- it's hard to translate," and so on. And sure, they could grab a Tagalog dictionary and look up the words, much as I could have photocopied the part of the Chan Is Missing screenplay with the translated sections, which I later did. But I also wanted to make a point about the text (both poem and film) resisted translation or, at the very least, refused to give up its meanings so easily. I think the students (some of them, anyway) later appreciated how Zack Linmark's book, through narrative form alone, could be read as resistance to the standard coming-of-age text, as well as Standard American English -- a refusal to unroll the Rs, so to speak.

(Barbara: A Latina student of mine, who obviously could understand the non-English words in your poem, commented in her essay that you seemed to be "shouting" by the seventh line ("where all the words are Tagalog"), and "exhausted" by the last (where "the Tagalog words become more and more spread out"). She also observed that "Katolika" "has a stronger meaning in Tagalog in this poem because it brings about the idea that she's not just a Catholic woman, but a Catholic Filipina woman." She also addressed my previous question to you about why the non-English words weren't italicized. Great, great stuff about going to a California grocery store and not finding it odd that one could hear three languages -- so why did it seem so disjunctive on the printed page? Her words: "So why should it seem odd when put into writing?" Okay, enough quotes from my student.)

Posted by the wily filipino at December 20, 2003 12:27 AM