I am resurrecting this blog to address the Young Critics’ Circle’s
accusations of plagiarism on acclaimed Filipino film blogger Jojo Devera. Apparently, he already admitted to the crime,
and the subsequent shutdown of his blog just proves the guilt more so, but I’m
not here to defend him for that. What
I’m here is to celebrate what Jojo has done and what the YCC has failed to do:
make me give a damn about Filipino movies.
My first interaction with Jojo and his blog came around 2007, right
before I graduated from college with a degree in film and right when I
consciously decided to be interested in Filipino movies. I remembered as a young boy watching Darna
and Captain Barbell and weepies with Maricel Soriano and wanted to know more
about the cinema I grew up with but then forgot about. Jojo’s original writings were unpretentious
and sincerely came from a man who loved them.
It was a far cry from the dry and anemic style that academic film
criticism tends to sound like (a style that, admittedly, I used when writing
much of the entries on this blog), and it inspired me to want to watch these
movies and ultimately to love them.
After reading more of his reviews, I started to exchange emails with
Jojo and found him a passionate enthusiast of Filipino movies, less interested
in the socio-political and psychological abstractions and more on the very
basic pleasure of watching and sharing these movies with others. He was also a tireless curator of these
forgotten gems, collecting even the lowliest and trashiest of them with no
haste or judgments in saving even the most commercial and formulaic from
rotting Beta and VHS tapes. His
encyclopedic knowledge of production trivia is inspiring and inspired in me the
desire to go out there, too, and save these treasures before they are
completely lost. Once or twice we
exchanged copies of movies that filled holes in our collections, and once I
even went to New York to watch a retrospective of Filipino movies and felt
giddy watching Tubog sa Ginto, a Lino Brocka film Jojo saved from a shuttering
Chicago video store encased in a deteriorating Beta cassette.
Jojo’s passion and dedication helped me to slowly love the beauty of
this cinema that he so badly wanted others to appreciate. His stories of discovering lost films
recorded in unassuming Beta tapes gave the whole enterprise the excitement of a
treasure hunt, of rediscovering something that was not lost but cruelly
forgotten. More than love the Brocka’s
stories, or O’Hara’s lighting or Celso ad Castillo’s mise en scene, Jojo’s
fervor made me want to save these movies too and feel heartbreak when I hear of
another roll of film turned to vinegar or another memory of a film the absence
of which leaves a gaping hole in a master’s cannon. It would not be undeserving
to say that Jojo’s work inspired not just me but many others like me to bring
Filipino film to the fore and to have the courage to talk about Ishmael Bernal
and Truffaut in the same breath.
I do have to admit that Jojo’s writing did however start to change
during the last few years: it became stilted, dry, overly academic and lacking
the passion it once had. It made
references to Marxist interpretations, socio-political meanings and
over-analyzed symbologies. Freudian
analyses replaced reflections on what made stories sad, character dynamics
effective, or resonance to personal experiences of history. He even started to write in English. His blog posts became confusing, not because
the frameworks of interpretation became overly complex or the web of references
became too thick. It’s because he
started to sound like my college professor who wrote a critique of Pasolini’s
Mamma Roma as a representation of Italy’s growingly destructive bourgeoisie
rather than as a mother who was trapped by her country’s unforgiving march to
modernity. His writing lost the
immediacy of a devotee’s plea for others to see the beauty of his much maligned
and much disregarded love.
Therefore, I am glad to hear that the last few years were mere a result
of plagiarism and not some cruel joke that Jojo was playing on us. Hearing the news felt like waking from a bad
dream where one of the most impassioned advocates of Filipino cinema had been
silenced by academia’s stultifying need to feign importance.
Because the truth is Jojo achieved far more for Filipino cinema with an
underdesigned Blogspot, a Youtube channel and hours on end in video stores than
the YCC has done with their pompous critiques and “intellectual honesty”. In their apoplectic condemnation of Jojo,
YCC’s contrived indignance shines through as they crucify Jojo for doing “this
community a signal disservice”. True, he
may have done YCC a disservice for stealing the text, but Jojo did us more harm
for ever thinking that his voice was not effective in endearing us to the
pleasures of our cinema, and that he had to assume the voice of a critical
organization the writing of which was as agreeable to read as a thorough
enema. In losing his own voice to assume
that of YCC’s, Jojo denied us the unfailing passion that drew us to our
country’s movies and to love them like they are our own. Jojo didn’t gain credibility because he was
some sort of interdisciplinary expert on Filipino cinema’s golden age. (Although in hindsight, the screenshots of
Jojo’s comments section does reveal that the guy actually kind of knows his
shit.) He gained credibility because he
was unfraid to show that he loved these movies and refused to speak about them using
academia’s funerary vernacular.
(By the way, this excerpt from YCC’s condemnation is interesting: “Where
he did not simply substitute his name for that of the author—as in the case of
the post on Nunal sa Tubig (1976), which is wholly drawn from
an essay by Eulalio R. Guieb III—he went a reprehensible leap further by
producing reviews on films that combined excerpts from materials contemplating
or assessing completely different issues—as in the case of the post on I
Love You Mama, I Love You Papa (1986), which patches together parts
from essays by J. Pilapil Jacobo, Nonoy L. Lauzon, and Patrick D. Flores, none
of which discuss the Maryo J. De Los Reyes picture.” Reminds me of Guy Debord: “Ideas improve. The
meaning of words has a part in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary.
Progress demands it. Staying close to the author’s phrasing, plagiarism
exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct
ideas.”)
So in the end, I wish that Jojo survives this challenge because it
would be an absolute shame if one of our cinema’s greatest advocates fade into
obscurity because some academics (who are far too pleased with their own
critical contributions) got their honor tarnished. Personally, the choice is clear between them
and a man who was instrumental not only in rescuing many of our films from the
dead but also in expanding our appreciation of Filipino cinema not only as a
critical object but as an object of pride and admiration.
