(First of two parts)

(Editor?s Note: In February 1986, when Filipinos introduced the world to People Power, poet Virginia R. Moreno, then head of the University of the Philippines Film Center, shepherded a group of about six student filmmakers, plus some workshop participants, to document the unfolding Revolution, instructing them to capture every detail??from fishballs to rosaries to leis? and relating the event to the 1896 Philippine Revolution. The films have remained unreleased but, in 2000, Moreno wrote the following essay, which won Hollywood executive David Poveda?s ?Creative Planet Prize.? The award was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, where the short feature ?Anino? by Raymond Red, one of Moreno?s UP Film Center wards 14 years earlier, won first prize in the competition for new filmmakers.)

WE LIVE IN an ?electronic global village? omnipotently ruled by media men of radio, television and film. How are the poets coping? Surviving, we trust, as more than automatic recording machines. I speak of the poet as one who must recover the original Greek idea of a poet as maker and the oriental sense of him as enchanter and prophet.

The Somali tribal men, Unesco Paris reports, have transistor radios slung from their camels? backs during long desert rides to their oasis stops with other camel herds, traders and lorry drivers. They hear, day and night, the chanting of Somali poets. Somali, thus, has become a nation of poets, having no equipment for any other performing art. As nomads, they carry few worldly possessions so that a transistor radio tuned in to the daily incantation of poets, instead of trivial singing commercials, serve as austere but spiritual refreshment.

Movie within a movie

Poets and the electronic media in my country had not been friendly, pure subjects or sublime users to each other as yet, we thought. Until [they were] faced with a Revolution, two Revolutions actually. The first is a memory of our grandfather?s Revolution in 1896 against Spanish colonizers. The second, a hundred years between them, the war of the grandchildren against the Chaplinesque Great Director [in] February, happening before us like a movie within a movie. We are subject-rich, with two unique Revolutions. Mabuhay!

Pictures of the 1896 Philippine Revolution, the first in Asia, had gory, one-sided scenes mostly shot by foreigners and military photographers. Kept and sealed in the Spanish war archives and US vaults, some photographs still hurt and thought not fit to be seen or used by even the liberated heirs of the Philippine Revolution. Intimate portraits of the Revolutionists on the eve of battle, and who did not return alive, were usually taken by the natives in studios and pasted lovingly in family albums. To make a rounded poet?s film of this historic photo gallery and connect it to the serendipity of day-to-day events in the latest Revolution, need the total filmmaker. Nothing must escape his human and camera fisheye?the subtlest whisper of feelings of one woman left by a Revolutionist, as well as the outcry of a whole nation in revolt. Our young, one-camera student filmmakers on foot in the ?battlefield? coveted the rolling electronic gear on Toyota vans or Land Rovers of Japanese, American, German and French film crews etc? crashing in on us to get this home-grown Revolution to their 7 o?clock film news via satellite worldwide. ?We?ve got only the scraps, the out-takes,? the natives lamented.

Hidden meanings

I consoled the beginning filmmakers, rich with material of Revolution yet feeling deprived. The foreign film crews will remain outsiders, I predict, to our Revolutions, except, when they use the instincts of a poet armed with, say, the Chinese trigram?a clear mind, a feeling heart and a knowing hand. Then, he must know how to connect the hidden meanings of the first Revolution to the other, and foresee, as a practical visionary, the next one. Beginning as a cold technical realist, he must end up as a man so enamored of this Revolution that, in spite of the cloying sampaguita leis and smoking fishballs, he will grind on. The ABSs, the BBCs, the NBCs and Nippon News have only to satisfy the short appetites of the 7 o?clock news watchers. Very few, however affluent, stay as long as we do. Theirs is a day-to-day service, ours is a lifetime stretch. We are the watchers of a wake, staking out a Revolution. It is ours.

(Conclusion tomorrow)