Home 
Metakritiko Indie Files An epic death in the land of Encantos
Metakritiko Indie Files An epic death in the land of Encantos | An epic death in the land of Encantos |
|
|
| Written by Raissa Falgui | |
| Saturday, 11 October 2008 | |
 Viewers
did not even seem to mind the length of Lav
Diaz's black-and-white film Kagadanan
sa Banwaan ning Mga Engkanto (international title: Death in
the Land of Encantos) (over 9 hours), even though it was
shown without any intermission, just as Diaz says he means his
lengthy works to be watched. "My films are really meant to be seen
in one sitting para may tamang immersion," he said in an interview
for the Inquirer
on August 28, 2008, "People
who really follow my work do not like breaks," he claims. Clearly
such a devotee, Petra Slatinšek of Slovenia quoted on Angeli
Bayani's Multiply site
contends, "Nine hours were hardly enough. This experience was not
just any kind of film experience. It could last 24 hours and it still
wouldn't be enough. Because the story leads us into the land of
prodigious thoughts, sometimes from everyday life, and rises up to
the level of philosophy; in both instances, we were merged with ideas
through elevated storytelling, [for] which we are ravenously
hungry...."
Diaz's main inspiration in making this "philosophical" film was the footage he took of the destruction caused by super typhoon Reming (international name: Durian) on November 30, 2006 when it ravaged the Bicol region, where he had filmed earlier works. He was horrified to see the very areas he had captured on film just weeks before devastated. As he told the Philippine Entertainment Portal (PEP): "I didn't realize the magnitude of the devastation till I had gained enough courage to visit the place a week later. The places where we shot scenes were all in ruins; the roads were gone, the houses were either buried or torn to pieces, structures collapsed. It was unbelievable, horrifying. Gloom and sorrow were all over the place. The smell of death was hovering in every corner, even in sleep and in dreams." Olaf Moller of Film Comment reports that because of this, "...the filmmaker went back and began filming, although with no clear game plan. Eventually he developed a narrative about a generation broken by their country's seemingly inescapable corruption: an assortment of the living dead wandering a landscape filled with the grief-stricken." In the film, the devastation is viewed through the eyes of a fictional Filipino poet named Benjamin Agusan (Gawad Urian nominee Roeder Camanag), who has just returned from Russia, where he had been residing for the past seven years, teaching and writing. In those years, he fell in love, had a son who died, and almost went insane. In an apparently manic-depressive state, he returns to his hometown following the typhoon. As summarized in PEP: "He came back to face Mount Mayon, the raging beauty and muse of his youth. He came home to confront the country that he so loved and hated, the Philippines. He came back to die in the land of his birth. He wanders around the obliterated village meeting old friends and lovers." As observed by Ronnie Schieb in Variety, with its devastated and devastating scenery the movie is appropriately "headlined with a quote from Rilke: ‘Beauty is the beginning of terror.' Indeed, the region's Mayon Volcano -- which, under the onslaught of the storm, poured out mountains of rocks and debris, killed hundreds and buried whole towns -- remains one of the most majestic, perfectly cone-shaped structures in nature." Conceptualized over a span of six weeks, Death in the Land of Encantos was filmed mainly in Bicol and partly in Pila, Laguna. Its cast consists of non-professional actors: Roeder Camanag, Perry Dizon, Angeli Bayani, Sophia Aves, and Gemma Cuenca. Low budget though it is, the movie has created a strong impression among viewers and judges at the film festivals due to Diaz's skill in filming with his simple equipment. "Diaz's stark black-and-white digital compositions frame a landscape so bleak and boulder-strewn, so empty of habitation that it is hard to believe the land was not barren from time primordial. Painful flashbacks to the region's past resurrect a lost Eden. The only thing more shocking than the extent of the damage is the ages-deep acceptance in the eyes of the survivors," says Schieb. Moller pays it tribute in Film Comment, saying: "There remains but one film to celebrate, among the greatest in Venice...Lav Diaz's monumental memoir to suffering, Death in the Land of Encantos , a modern mosaic cobbled together from the modest of means." The film was awarded the Orizzonti Special Mention Award in the Venice Film Festival. It also competed for the Artistic Innovation Award in the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and was screened in Ljubljana International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival 2008, Hong Kong International Film Festival 2008, Singapore International Film Festival 2008, FICCO 2008, and Cinema du reel 2008 (as part of a tribute to Lav Diaz), and was praised all around. From Slovenian film critic and editor of Kino Magazine Jurij Meden, come these words of praise quoted in Bayani's site: "Watching Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto ... surpasses a "mere" (nevertheless still absolutely unique) experience of cinema and becomes a fully fledged experience of life, an almost unbelievably sincere and courageous exploration into the heart of three grand existential matters: the meaning of love, the importance of hope, the redemptive power of art. All things of beauty--in a film of terrible beauty..." Lav Diaz's body of work is apparently known and admired in Slovenia. Andrej Šprah, a film publicist and writer from Ljubljana , wrote several articles about Lav Diaz in Slovenia. Of Kagadanan, he says: "In his latest adventure of images, gazes and words, Death in the Land of Encantos, he strokes again with enormous artistic power and unsurpassable poetic vision. He proved once more that art as such, irrespective of form it takes to realize its ideas, can be as dangerous weapon as any kind of firearms to fight against the terror of all kinds of oppression." For the film not only shows the destruction caused by the ravages of nature but presents the deterioration in the social and political aspect; as Moller explains, it is "a narrative about a generation broken by their country's seemingly inescapable corruption: an assortment of the living dead wandering a landscape filled with the grief-stricken." The protagonist's own emotional and mental instability would seem to reflect the state of the Bicol Region and the Philippine government. While the poet Agusan is meant to be afflicted by a kind of madness, the presentation of the peculiar workings of his mind may have been overdone occasionally. Schieb of Variety feels that "Other visions haunting the poet are less explicable, like the nondescript street where the viewer finds himself stranded for stretches as Agusan stalks the Russian woman who left him after their child died. More disturbing still are scenes of his mother's psychotic breakdown and his father's desperate attempts to drive out the evil spirits with loops of twisted wire hung from trees." But for most part the unusual juxtaposition of images-Moller called it "a massive tapestry, here incorporating documentary footage of typhoon survivor speaking out about government's neglect of their plight, as well as fragments from an unfinished short horror film shot in Zagreb in 2003"-has been found intriguing and thought-provoking. For all its depressing subject matter and the depression as well as insanity suffered by the main character, PEP contends, "Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning Mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of the Encantos) expresses an inexhaustible belief in the regenerative power of both nature and art." At the very least it can inspire nationalism in Filipinos, as in a Filipino expatriate viewer Diaz described in his Inquirer interview: "a young man, in his early twenties, [who] came to me after the showing of ‘Encantos.' Almost in tears, he told me that he is a Filipino who has never been to the islands, that he became really a Filipino after watching the film, and that he wants to go ‘home.'" It is a pity though that the length of the film could make it less accessible to the general public, especially in the Philippines. Though one might argue that nine hours is already a greatly abbreviated form to represent a lifetime. Moller notes that the film, with its length and intricacy was both "emotionally exhausting and exhaustive," feeling other film at the Venetian festival was, "as rich an experience and as crushing." This dual nature is indicates how complex and thought-provoking a work it is. But for all its complexity, its theme is an age-old familiar one. Lav Diaz points out in a September 6, 2007 interview in the Inquirer: "Benjamin's journey is familiar terrain for the aesthetic traveler-the search for beauty, real love, redemption and for answers that could push humanity to greater heights." No wonder the film is able to touch a universal chord. Photo of aftermath of Typhoon Durian in Bicol, by lolay ; licensed under Creative Commons License BY-2.0. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
|
| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 25 November 2008 ) |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Movie Lines
'The Tales of Beedle the Bard' is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years.
-- J.K. Rowling on her new book. Quoted by CNN.com
Ultimate Countdown
Here are the freshest and most played tunes on your radios. Check it out and see if your favorite songs made it to this week's chart of the Ultimate Music Countdown gathered from the top FM radio stations in the metro.Kriti-Ko, Kriti-Mo
USA Weekend Box-Office Chart
|
|
Amazon.com: Bestsellers in Books
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Philippines