Project framework: context, research questions, summary of research insights

This multicomponent output combines curatorial research, film theorising and criticism to explore the material, institutional and discursive challenges of exhibiting the very long films of radical Filipino independent artist Lav Diaz. The components are: Ingawanij’s curation of an exhibition of six films by Diaz, each running from nearly four hours to nine hours in duration, taking place in a university art school gallery and a cinema theatre, accompanied by a series of conversations and one of the first academic symposia dedicated to the artist’s works; and two single-authored journal articles.

The exhibition-making component adapts the migratory model of exhibiting radical films and artists’ moving image. Its curatorial method is underpinned by an understanding of histories and practices of artistic and participatory agency in contexts of fragile and at-risk arts infrastructure, and an attentiveness to the question of the legacy of artistic and cultural vanguardism in the Philippines. The curatorial method also draws inspiration from Southeast Asian genealogies of performative practices, informality as curatorial praxis, and spectatorial participation and experience. The first article component of the output explores the aesthetic and political forms of Diaz’s long films. The second article draws on the curatorial conceptualisation and process of exhibiting Lav Diaz: Journeys to analyse the vexed exhibition history of the artist’s long films, critically highlighting the tensions shaped by the persistence of the western modernist paradigm of art film spectatorship in advocating the value of global contemporary art or radical films, especially through the idea of “slow cinema”.

Context  

Independent Filipino film-maker Diaz describes himself as a storyteller who makes films about the long struggles of his people. Starting out in the 1990s as a scriptwriter and director for a studio producing low-budget B films in the Philippines, Diaz shifted to developing an artisanal mode of digital independent film-making while living and working precariously as a migrant in the USA. On the completion of his second very long film, Evolution of a Filipino Family (2005, 625 mins), which began to circulate in semi-public, informal or peer-to-peer contexts of non-theatrical screenings organised by cinephiles from the mid-2000s, Diaz caught the attention of aesthetically radical film programmers and cinephiles, and the emerging field of practice and academic research in Southeast Asian independent cinema. Ingawanij has been playing an influential role in the formation of this research area.

Shot largely in black and white, Diaz’s durationally extreme films tell quiet, elliptical tales of everyday sorrow and resilience, and of the existential quest of a people betrayed by the postcolonial nation state. They radically rework the affective mode of melodrama and draw inspiration from modernist Russian and Filipino anti-colonial literature, and they combine elements of documentary realism, poetic images, landscape and theatrical tableaux, musical improvisation and ritual intensity and duration. Up until the mid-2010s, very few major film festivals, art cinemas, national film theatres or art spaces risked presenting his films. At this point Diaz’s films tended to be regarded by these institutions as indulgent in length and too difficult to programme.

Ingawanij has been researching the artist for more than a decade, initially in an effort to challenge the perception of Diaz’s works as “difficult films” and to explore their significance as examples of independent Southeast Asian digital cinematic practice. In her co-edited book on Southeast Asian independent cinema (Ingawanij, M.A. and McKay, B. (ed.) 2012. Glimpses of freedom: independent cinema in Southeast Asia. Ithaca, NY Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, submitted to REF 2014) she commissioned a study of his early long films. In 2008 she curated a Southeast Asian independent film weekend and international symposium in London, which publicly exhibited Diaz’s work in the UK for the first time. In 2009 she co-curated a counter-retrospective of Diaz’s films in Bangkok and Phuket, working with Diaz and grassroots curators in Thailand and the Philippines to subvert the film exhibition format of the director-auteur retrospective, usually the preserve of powerful film exhibiting institutions.

Diaz’s global artistic status began to change with his winning of a major prize from Locarno Film Festival for From What Is Before (2014, 339 mins). Institutional recognition and widespread visibility across film festival and art cinema circuits since then have come at the cost of a problematic framing. His oeuvre now came to be discursively framed via the idea of slow cinema, combined with the language of appreciation and exhibitionary apparatus traceable to the legacy of 20th-century western modernist art cinema. This framing now turned Diaz into “the Filipino master of slow cinema” (London Film Festival, 2020). This is the discursive and institutional context that Ingawanij’s multicomponent output challenges.

Slow cinema is now the most common term used by English-language film theorists and journalists to describe Diaz’s films (see de Luca and Jorge, 2016; Mai, 2015), causing the artist to shoot back during a film festival press conference: ‘It’s not slow cinema, it’s cinema’ (Berlin Film Festival, 2016). Ingawanij’s curatorial and publication project displaces this framing, recognising that the idea of slow cinema is a restricted tool with which to engage with Diaz’s works, mainly due to its unquestioned epistemological boundary. Its theorisation of cinematic form is overly preoccupied with the long take, the legacy of theorising cinematic realism of canonical mid-20th century French critic André Bazin, and the institutional power of film festivals (Flanagan, 2012). While its framework of critical contextualisation tends to be preoccupied, above all, with affirming so-called marginal cinema’s potential for resisting the neo-liberal capitalist apparatus of accelerated productivity, extraction and the normalisation of precarious life in western post-industrial societies (Schoonover, 2016). Instead, Ingawanij’s research is guided by a different set of questions and concerns. Her starting point was to approach Diaz’s works via conceptual and curatorial itineraries routed through historical and contemporary practices in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, especially histories of vanguardist artistic and cultural practices (Hau, 2000; Roces, 1993), and informal or independent curatorial initiatives in the present (Butt, 2015), rather than defaulting to the canonising discourse and epistemological legacy of western modernist art cinema.

Key questions 

1 What would be the curatorial and theoretical outcome of situating Diaz’s films and methods in proximity with Southeast Asian artisanal, ritualistic and socially engaged artistic and curatorial praxis?

2 How do the durational and expressive forms of Diaz’s long films, and his mode of artistic practice, relate to the 20th-century artistic and political vanguardist legacies of the Philippines, and more broadly to the vanguardist legacies of third world political and cultural independence movements?

3 What ways of understanding the durational forms of Diaz’s long films might emerge from situating them in relation to the long history of performative practices across Southeast Asia, in other words, to durationally extended rituals, festivities and performances that some art historians (see Flores, 2018) are reframing in genealogical terms as precursors of the region’s artistic mediums of performance, installation and the audio-visual?

Summary of research insights 

Ingawanij’s output challenges the theory and underlying exhibitionary apparatus of slow cinema, and develops a de-westernising curatorial method and concepts for thinking about the radical implication of Diaz’s oeuvre, the expressive and temporal forms of his films, and the historical contexts and legacies shaping his mode of artistic practice.