Unruly Excesses

An Ethnographic Sketch of Early Film Audiences in the Philippines

Abstract

Early film writings open up paths of historical investigation that shed light on the conditions of early cinema in the Philippines, but what has remained elusive, even in current studies of cinema, are substantive, empirically-grounded studies of the Filipino film audience, or the moviegoing masses or masa, who are constantly invoked in sociopolitical and cultural discourses yet remain uniquely produced as they are addressed by such. Many writings relay audiences’ sensorial experiences of film-viewing: how real a film feels, how hot a theater is, how noisy the crowd; however, these have been given little, if any, critical attention in academic scholarship as, historically, film theory and criticism have tended to focus on the film-text itself, its language and representations, as the nucleus of film knowledge, even as the substantial amount of sensorial discourses surrounding cinema indicates that they cannot be so easily discounted from the historical production of film knowledge. To revalue the role of the audience in producing knowledge of cinema in the Philippines, this study assembles ethnographic evidence from sensorial discourses in early film writings drawn from two periodicals, Renacimiento Filipino (1910- 1913) and Cultura Social (1913-1914). In these writings, it seeks the points of intervention in which acts of agency and power disrupt the production of hegemonic knowledge about cinema and cinema cultures. Through historical anthropology, audiences may be imagined beyond their discursive production and we might begin to articulate the ruptures that may point us to alternate histories of, and thus alternate possibilities for, Filipino audiences.