Citation
Nora Villamayor, better
known as Nora Aunor, began her life in the late 60s as a singer, singing songs
of varied sources and initiating the resurgence of different vocal music. She knew hunger before her golden voice
brought her to the attention of the nation.
Her journey from a young
girl selling water in the train station to someone providing the wishes and
hopes of the nation’s masses is no less than epic.
Nora Aunor would join TV
and cinema with that entry, she would change our colonial perspective about
physical beauty. She started in musicals
and melodrama that served as escape for the many looking to her as
inspiration. Soon, she would make films
that subverted politics and politicize subversion. In her many films, she helped us escape from
stereotypical women as she fleshed out the possibilities of Filipina womanhood.
Aunor would perform
theater pieces proving the legitimacy of that genius. In plays and movies, she played characters
that were current to the country’s crisis and concerns – migrant labor, rebels,
and ambitious lovers.
Aunor’s acting styole
would create a massive shift in the performance traditions that were already
entrenched. She would change all that
with her portrayal of characters that were marginalized but, with the strength
and conviction of her skills, became central in the nation’s imagination.
For an ordinary person
transformed into an extraordinary thespian whose legacy to the performing and
media arts are the expressions of a magnificent face that can show triumphs and
defeats, pains and joys all at the same time in a silence and subtlety that is
as disturbing, as enduring and as endearing as the struggles of the nation.
The Gawad CCP para sa
Sining (Film and Broadcast Arts) is given on this 17th of Septem,ber
2015 to Nora Villamayor.
By
Tito Genova Valiente
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Source:
Gawad
CCP para sa Sining
Pages
70 -74
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Poverty and politics are
the birthright of Nora Villamayor, more popularly known as Nora Aunor. It does not matter really when she was
born. That she was born very poor
matters because, like in the many narratives of her films, she would rise from
that squalor into a status that symbolizes and, at the same time, subverts
social mobility in this nation. This is
where politics enters into Aunor’s birth: her person will form an actor and an
acting style that may not be always explicitly but are a subtle and succinct
commentary on how power is used and misused in the societies of the republic.
In the summer of 2015,
Aunor was honored with the honorary Nagueña Award. It is her fate that Aunor would alweays stand
for something bigger than where she physically came from, the town of Iriga
then.
Geography and genius
would explain the influence of Nora Aunor on the cinema of the
Philippines. Iriga was a small town when
she joined the amateur contest in the city of Naga. That town is part of Rinconada, a term which
means “corner.” In her career as an
actor, Aunor would portray characters who were either outcasts or t the
outskirt of social groups. By being born
in a town that was at the periphery of a region that was also not mainstream in
the thought of the dominant culture of this country, she would have in her
spirit a marginalized that is beyond compare.
In her speech in Naga
City in March of 2015, Aunor would share with the audience how they were so
poor that they, as family, would take turns borrowing from the neighborhood
store. Born to Antonia Cabaltera ans
Eustaquio Villamayor on May 21, 1953, Aunor remembered a childhood not sad but
extremely subsistent. She knew hunger
before songs. She was the most patient of
the siblings to wait on her father who worked as a stevedore in the train
station. At the sound of the train
whistling, her father, Aunor recalled, would wake up immediately because that
sound meant work, and work meant food on the table.
Who would ever think
that I, an ugly girl, would ever be an “artista”? Aunor asked will all candor that night. She would not ask the question that the
critics would ask later: Who is this woman and why is she able to alter the
cultural landscape of cinema in this land?
That question was no question but a defiant answer to a query on art
made relevant and new.
Nora Aunor would sing
first and win a national singing competition: the respected Tawag ng Tanghalan. Gone was the girl who had to stretch out her
neck to listen to the songs played over the radio of a neighbor.
Gone was the girl who sang for food.
On that stage, the wisp of a girl sang “Moonlight Becomes You”,
defeating singers more educated and with more capital to fund a better
dress. She looked at the sky only she
could see with those searing eyes and sang to the moon and the night and the
music.
In career that spans
almost half a century and continues to this day, she has made more than 170 movies,
numerous TV shows and concerts, three plays, and more than 50 music album. Her TV show Superstar was one of the longest
running. The word Superstar would mean
nothing without her. Her numerous vinyl
albums would revitalize the Filipino music industry at a time when foreign
artist dominated the recording scene.
Her drama anthologies on television, like Makulay na Daigdig ni Nora, served as a spawning if not training
ground for directors who would become master filmmakers.
Then there was the film
industry beckoning her, machinery that was built on actors and actresses that
had the Caucasian features, the so-called mestizos and mestizas whose images
resembled Hollywood celebrities. And
yet, she would conquer this terrain and win over to her side a newly formed
critics’ group called Manunuri ng
Pelikulang Pilipino. In 1976, she
won the first Gawad Urian for Best Actress, a star and a thespian vanquishing
those who ever doubted her. The film was
Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, where she
played lead but thematically a villain.
She was not only an actor in the film; she was also the producer.
She would produce more
and act in the films she funded: Bona would join other films as the best in the
world, to cite one example. She would
portray Elsa, a reluctant faith healer, in Himala,
a film that would be declares the best in Asia by CNN-Asia Pacific Screen
Awards in 2008. The role has been lauded
by film scholars attributing the mystique of the performance to the fact that
Aunor’s fandom parallels the fanaticism and faith of people. Iconic is perhaps the most abused term
writers can give to a celebrity but in Himala,
Aunor was Elsa becomes the icon around which doubt and belief circumnavigated,
in which religion becomes not a refuge but a refutation. One can safely say that if an actor can give
a hundred shades of black and white, a magnificent canvas of chiaroscuro
describes Aunor’s Elsa – timid, manipulative, victim, aggressor, confronting
and retreating, in sorrow or in joy – an art to behold and trial to witness by
those who believe that cinema is not merely images on the flickering silver
screen.
Nora Aunor would win
awards in several continents. The label
“Superstar” is never ridiculous when attached to her name. Lately, she is being called “The Grand Dame
of Philippine Movies”’ indicating not her age but her wisdom, not really her
longevity but the amazing perpetuity of the acting acumen that has brought
forth women whose decisions about loyalty and love, self and nationalism have
been questioned. In Aunor, these women
responded back.
Formidable are the
characters that Aunor has fleshed out through many decades. She slept with the enemy in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos and lived in
the home of the enemy she planned to kill in Bakit May Kahapon Pa?. She
lived in Merika and made us think of
those decisions to stay in a foreign land all for economic survival; she
offered us the terrible options to go to America even if some soldiers of that
land could mistake our brothers for pigs in Mina’y
Isang Ganu-Gamo. She looked at the
eye of the storm in Taklub and only
saw our sense of self; she collected umbilical in Thy Womb because she could not produce one herself. She, in fact, played mothers and lovers whose
duplicity enabled us to gaze not at morality but at the complexity of humanity.
She has won all the
acting awards. She has been elevated to
the many Halls of fame. The world has
seen her, and bestowed the accolade on her because she holds the oar and she
freely navigates the sea of humanity, ferrying us from shores of ignorance to
some afterlife of knowledge through a genius in performance that could only
come from poverty, politics and geography – the schools of acting that have
given her the boon to share with the many who believe in her.
