The early initiation of the nation-building project by the Philippines and its subsequent "custody" under the United States finds a distinct result in the creation of the "national" film. Against this Hollywood hegemony, then, we can understand the fantasies that gave birth to Laranas' Sigaw and The Echo and the rise of horror film production in the Philippines after the centennial period of the Philippine revolution and independence. The proliferation of horror films in the Philippines at the turn of the century coincided with what Lim describes as "the craze of Asian horror remakes."
As Lim writes about the horror cycle configured according to the logic of “generic repetition”. 2 and 3: (Left) Clash, a Filipino film in the "Asian horror" vein, was the top-grossing film in the Philippines in 2006. Right) Pasukob was a Sukoba scam that indicated the saturation point of the local market. It is this "remake time" that distinguishes the timeliness of Laranas' celebrated Sigawa from 2004 and the late (non)arrival of The Echo in 2008 to the US market.
The constant turmoil begins to worry him and affect his relationship with his girlfriend, Alyssa. On the right, she suddenly disappears and yet none of the people see or feel her presence/absence.
Global Fantasies and Regional (Trans)nationality
The arrival of The Echo could therefore be understood as a return to history and a call for "historical accountability", which is "a question of being responsible, not only to the past, but also to non-contemporaneity, to the ghosts , disrupting the present with their simultaneous presence and absence, making a simple fenced-in present impossible" (Lim 180). This celebration of The Maid's "breakout" is based on its being a "Singaporean" (i.e., nationally branded) film, understood in the unique context of Singapore's "young" and "small" transnational cinema (cf. But even with such a resurgence, not least because it is a cinema of a "small" nation, as See Kam Tan and Jeremy Fernando perceive that, Singapore cinema in the last decade has been decidedly transnational.
In 1998, the same year as the establishment of the Singapore Film Commission, Raintree Pictures was founded as the film-making outfit of state-controlled media company MediaCorp, with a stake in the state's fantasy of making Singapore a "Global City for the Arts". ” and a “Renaissance City” (K. Since then it has (co-)produced more than 30 films, accounting for about 40 percent of the national cinema production since 1991 and dominating the domestic market share with about 60 percent (S. Tan) and Fernando 132). An example of the former is the films of Jack Neo, while of the latter is The Eye, a 2002 Hong Kong co-produced horror film shot mainly in Thailand and Hong Kong by the Pang Brothers, co-starring Taiwanese actress Angelica Chan and remade in Hollywood in 2008.
I would say a film is Singaporean if at least a quarter of the investment is from here and/or there is significant involvement in front of or behind the camera. Producer Yun sees The Maid as bearing the mark of the nation, even as it remains transnational, when he proudly declares, “After producing over 15 films, including the successful The Eye and The Eye 2, we feel confident about worked with a local director. in a local story to produce our horror genre. Director Tong himself also believes that The Maid is a "uniquely Singaporean horror film" but, at the same time, a "universal story" that can draw "audiences everywhere into the rough eyes of the maid and see the terror that tears her apart her. inside" ("The Maid 女代 Media Reports").
The Maid begins with the arrival of 18-year-old Rose Dimaano (literally, the rose that cannot be defiled) in the dilapidated house of the Teo family in Singapore. The Handmaid's Tale centers on a transnational figure, the figure of Rosa, who is familiar and imaginable at the heart of Philippine-Singaporean international relations: for the Singaporean, she is the eponymous maid; for a Filipina, she is an “OFW” or “Overseas Filipino Worker”. One online user review on TrashCity.Org notes confusion and sarcasm at the seeming gap in the film's narrative motivation. Such perseverance is commendable.”17 Such a comment fails to understand the tragedy of the maid as an OFW.
Seen from the point of view of the Filipino, the basis of Rosa's cinematic conflict is a major determinant of the uniquely Filipino genre that has come to be known as the "OFW movie," another movie genre that began its proliferation in the 1990s. saw. until the 2000s.
The OFW Film Cycle
The OFW film is based on dramatizing and visualizing the impact of the diaspora on the daily lives of Filipinos inside and outside the Philippines. An example of the OFW film that grew in productivity in the 1990s, The Flor Contemplacion Story is also one of a series of films about Contemplacion. Rose's character and story are emblematic of the "feminized" condition. not just "female") OFW, and the fact that she exists in the narrative of a Singaporean hit film distributed worldwide is an indictment of the Philippine state.
Remarkably, De Rossi herself, who is an Italian-Filipino mestiza, was first noticed by Tong in a Philippine 'rural' film, Mga Munting Tinig [Small Voices] (Gil Portes, Philippines, 2002), supported by the logic of the OFW. movie. De Rossi next starred in Homecoming (Gil Portes, Philippines, 2003) as a "balikbayan" (returning to native country) from Toronto, Canada, who unwittingly spreads the SARS epidemic at home and becomes the object (through popular media) of the scorn and terror of the nation. Due to its affluence and proximity, Singapore has been one of the top destinations for OFWs for the past two decades; it was the third largest importer of labor exports from the Philippines in 2011 (Senate Economic Plan Office, "Overseas Filipino Workers").
The Maid prefigures this rapport in the scene of the bizarre and inexplicable drive of Wati, another imported but non-Filipino maid in the film, to climb a building and jump to her death in broad daylight for all to see. But Tong himself and the local press confirm in interviews posted on his blog that richly document the reception of The Maid in 2005, implicitly and explicitly the HRW report, locating the Filipina maid in the imaginary Singapore cinema and explaining the narrative motifs, that drives his film. I don't know for sure, but maiming maids is one of the more unusual features of our otherwise colorless tribe.
Rosa, who has migrated to Singapore to earn for the medication of her seriously ill brother, unwittingly arrives at a time, a season, unknown to foreigners like her - the Chinese "month of hungry ghosts," when the spirits of the wronged are unleashed in the material world. As a haunting allegory of two nations, the film's spectrality runs in multiple directions and is branched by the interior and exterior of the text. Towards the end of the film, Rosa learns that this woman is Esther, her predecessor, who mrs.
The image of the hanging, then, alludes to a historical past outside the film and foreshadows Rose's fictional future. The penultimate revelation in The Maid, before the climactic unraveling of the heterogeneous space, involves the thematic and dramatic entanglement of Rosa, Ah Soon, and the shadowy appearance of Esther, the specter of the unjustly unjust and violently silenced Filipina. By attempting to kill Roza, the Teos are forcing the conflation of the unjustly killed Filipino and the Filipino still brimming with vitality.
Hauntings and Homecomings
The narrative ambiguity – whether or not he recognized his violation and whether or not he recognized Rosa as separate from Esther – remain the haunting uncertainties of the film. In the other story, a racially and nationally marked body departs—never arrives, never returns, but reappears as an apparition to be unveiled. The ghost in the films is so fundamental that it makes both stories interchangeable, but the ghosts haunt moments and spaces so specific that they are singular, even if generic.
Contemporary transnational cinemas, through turns of discursive recessions and revivals, are enthralled by non-contemporary temporality – in some cases, as with The Echo and The Maid, we find colonial history rehearsed, regional transgressions remedied and abuses sustained and condoned. in the name of nation/cinema is revealed; and all from within the very (neo)colonial spaces, above the underside of modernity, which makes them hideous, but true. Tadiar's idea of "fantasies", which are "hegemonic forms of expression of our desire-actions" and "the abstract forms in which work undergoes within the world-system of production" (6). She further delineates “the international media system” as “the source of many of our interpenetrative representations of the world, [which].
In short, such fantasies, in insidious and insidious ways, animate the transnationality of film cultures, as illustrated by the activity in the blog of Laranas. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and quotations from reviews and interviews published in the Singapore press about The Maid are taken from Kelvin Tong's blog, especially the page "The Maid 女代 Media Reports" Information quoted and cited from this blog page is indicated in parentheses as "The Maid Media Reports". In contrast, contemporary rhetoric about Philippine cinema, if one notes the current lionization in critical circles and popular media of the rise of the "indie". Although this "self-motivated" emigration can be considered, as Espiritu convincingly argues and as I mentioned in the first section, as first initiated by colonial contact. For an illuminating discussion of the background of Flor Contemplacion and the "cycle" of films that fueled her life and death, see Guillermo. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Philippine International Labor Migration in the Past 30 Years: Trends and Prospects. Philippine Institute for Development Studies Discussion Series 2009-33.
