By: Jason Pilapil
Jacobo
Part I
There is a scene
in Kristian Sendon Cordero’s sophomore film “Hinulid” that emblematizes the
predicament of mourning that the narrative seeks to work through in its
iterations of how forlorn the human can be when abandoned permanently through
that event: death. It is dusk in Iriga. Sita Dimaiwat (Nora Aunor) traverses
the cemetery arch on which the Latin phrase “Via Omni Caris” is painted; the
bodiless cannot trespass. Sepulchres are built not to hold the remains of the
departed; the funerarium is such a place, because we are all alone, we fear
ourselves also fading. Do not leave me just yet; here, a monument. Through a
labyrinth of tombs fortified by cement and marble, Aunor blends in with the
shades of a tropic crepuscule: ochre, as the waning sun; obsidian, like the
cloak of night. When she finds her son Lucas (Jesus Mendoza) weeping before the
tomb of his priest-guardian (Raffi Banzuela), she participates in a frame of
grief: she sees the one she has yet to mourn for, mourning. That the rhythms of
sorrow commingle in this instance points to the opportunity where the film
locates the time where one is entitled to grieve---memory, that interregnum in
the mind where one labors too hard to come to terms with passage: what has gone
is not only lost; it is foregone to be found as missing. Even when the injury
is not total, the site of ruin tells us: here lies all the hurt, every inch
speaks of an insufferable damage. So, one asks: Did it happen? Was he here?
Were all of it true? The act of yearning is that moment of provenance.
Part II
Cordero is most
anxious to pursue this cusp of thought that he conjures the testimony through a
mode of retrieval that reduces the quadrant of interpretive possibilities
someone like Dante Alighieri has offered to a mere if not a modest proposal.
The mourning is grounded in a cosmogonic myth of how galactic light is split
into maternal brilliance and cherubic luminosity and how the earth registers
this scission upon a meteorite isle where fireflies surrender their final
blaze. This autochthonous basis is inlaid with a colonial narrative of
christological interment: the Messiah is dead, yes, but thrice, as a statuary
of identical eburnean figures clothed in vermilion radiance and encased in
cuboid glass. The triplication is a mnemonic to refuse the telos of a sorrowful
mystery, much like the melismatic ululations of the folk which decorate elegiac
enjambments of the Pasyon quintilla, preventing the lyric from punctuating
itself quite predictably, in sheer loneliness. It has to be said that while
this aspect of colonial idiom is now read as an act of sufferance and
revolution, what remains to be articulated is how dolorous maternity intervenes
in activating intransigence. Sita in "Hinulid" could have fulfilled
that post-passional reading.
Part III
It is quite
strange that while it is Sita who is portrayed as sorrowful, the dolefulness is
not demonstrated according to her lamentational terms. Instead, the agony is
projected upon her through this Christ thrice interred. This puts into question
the memory that her consciousness is supposed to verify as the truth of her
mourning. Sita needs to mourn a dead son thrice: as child, adolescent, man.
What is amplified by this triplication? I’m trying to remember Nora’s face
through the three hours of Cordero’s Rinconada mock epic and for the first
time, after all those years, Aunor registers vacancy. There is magnification,
yes. Mourning becomes Nora, and thrice so. And yet, each time this is staged,
in distinction or in simultaneity, the dolour, because of the imposition, is
not pithy.
Part IV
This peculiar
Santo Entierro will only make sense if its triplication can be argued to
originate from the Mater Dolorosa herself, and in a relation of correspondence
that is less reaction than receipt. The peculiarity of this Pieta must also be
mariologically immanent. If Christ could die thrice, of course, Mary should
mourn in the same time signature. However, the cinema of “Hinulid” must
elaborate how dolorous maternity is thrice possible from a Marian perspective.
After all, the narrative is told by Sita, not by her son dying through three
ages.
Part V
Fray Marcos de
Lisboa’s "Vocabulario de la lengua Bicol" defines “holid” as
“recostar al niño en el regazo, o en la cuna.” To lay a child on one’s lap, or
in his crib: these are acts of maternal nurturance. But this scene also makes
sense as the Pieta inasmuch as it alludes to the Nativity. If Sita must inter
her son thrice, it is because his death reminds her of the emptiness of her
womb through his childhood, boyhood, youth. His death affirms the terminus of
her being a woman. Hollowed out by loss, she embodies a desert longing. This
must be Aunor’s late style thesis. My well of loneliness has been depleted. I
am nothing. I have known all manner of fatigue. I was all womb before. Now, let
me be his sepulchre.
Part VI
Sita mourns the 1)
body of her son: 2) the memory of the body she has reared; 3) and her own
obsolescence, which she must remember and grieve in advance. Pace Blanchot, one
is never present at one's own death. If his son has faded ahead of her, the
hour of her own death looms large in solitariness. Nora's eyes are vacant to
honor the imminence.
Part VII
If one's mourning
of the memory of the dearly departed can only be worked through intimately, the
privacy of grief must not be reduced to the domestic. Memory is not stronger
than justice. Memory is as strong as justice. If Cordero has written a screed
against the capillaries of power through a matrix of institutions which plot
the murder of its most thoughtful activists, then an autopsy of power must be
demanded, perhaps not through the parabolic distensions of folklore, but within
a critical ethnography similar to Nancy Scheper Hughes study on "death
without weeping" among mothers in a Brazilian necropolis.
