Cups-of-Gas Filmmaking vs. Full Tank-cum-Credit Card Fillmaking

Kidlat Tahimik, Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III (still), 2015.

This week, Film Notes shares Kidlat Tahimik’s 1986 essay contrasting a cinema governed by investment and deadlines with “cups-of-gas filmmaking,” a practice in which time becomes a co-director and the work remains open to changing course. Read today, Tahimik’s challenge to the logic that “time is money” is a defense of form discovered in the making rather than determined in advance by the demands of financing.1

Author’s Note: While writing this paper, I made a typographical error: instead of “filmmaker,” it came out “fillmaker.” A cosmic message—perhaps the core of this paper. So let the cosmic typographical error be an objet trouvé of the visual artist trying to express himself in a paper medium.

Making a film is like taking a long trip. The film voyager can load up with a full tank and bring a credit card along to insure completion of the voyage in as short a time as possible. The voyager can also load up with a few cups of gasoline and drive until he runs out and scrounge around for subsequent cups of gas to get to his destination, without worrying about how long it takes to complete the voyage.

Completing the artwork is the voyage all artists set out to do, whether painter, writer, or filmmaker. The length of the trip, TIMEWISE, is a matter of choice depending on the combination of ingredients—inspiration, resources, tools, and working materials available, personal circumstances like family or emotional disturbances, etc.

Assuming the filmmaker has the optimal mix of these ingredients to complete a filmic work of art, he can still choose the time frame: either to follow the dictum “time is money,” and battle with the clock to finish his artwork in the shortest period, or to allow time to be his ally and open up to cosmic inspirations provided by a relatively free time frame.

The efficient path (i.e., timesaving) is the usual mode of commercial productions, whether one is doing a Hollywood Cecil B. de Mille film or a Third World box-office hit. This is dictated by the laws of the investment world, where films are mainly a consumer product to be served like McDonald’s hamburgers. (The McDonaldization of films is a reality I accept and do not want to waste energy fighting it.)

The inefficient road (i.e., time-indulging), full of detours and explorable nooks, is a choice which can be a luxury of artistic filmmakers in the richer countries (i.e., the First World) and can be a matter of necessity in the case of Third World filmmakers.

As a filmmaker, it takes me usually two or four years to complete a film, partly a necessity dictated by Third World realities and partly a choice to avoid the formulas dictated by bankrollers. Some can look at it as a lack of discipline, but discipline is always relative to preconceived “laws” of fillmaking learned in film schools.

Perhaps because film is the most expensive, most technologically dependent art form, there is a need for some form of discipline. One has to discipline oneself to save up for the next cup of gas, to buy a roll of film. One has to have the discipline to have enough light to enter the filmshutter, or to focus to register a good image.

But the discipline of time required in Hollywood is not an essential in the making of a good filmwork, especially if one chooses the discipline of allowing time to be one’s co-director. It takes a sort of discipline to resist the emperor’s-new-clothes perception that time is an adversary always to be contended with (i.e., finish as many artworks as you can in your lifetime).

My film being made now might just be an extension of a “film” I lived in some previous life, or just a transitional sequence to a “film” I will experience in my next life. So why rush this life’s scenario? And if I don’t finish the film in this life ... it’s only a film. So my cups-of-gas drifting can continue into the next several lifetimes.

The Full Tank-cum-Credit Card (FTC) method of filmmaking is not confined to Hollywood, of course. If we consider Hollywood a process determined by an infrastructure, then one can say the FTC fillmaking is also done in the Third World. The result of this FTC fillmaking is the same formula films (formula: sex, violence, crashing cars), only with Filipino actors, and a more awkward way of crashing the cars.

With hindsight, I can say I have taken a detour from clichés because I have avoided the FTC= using OPM, or Other People’s Money formula, which makes the real director of the film the comparative cost of capital in time deposit. Who directs the big budget films?

The efficiency required by the OPM formula dictates time, deadlines, schedules like a taxi meter. Time is money. My lack of resources can become a blessing because my time frame escapes this deadline obsession, and allows me to discover motifs. The film becomes an interaction between me and the cosmos, because I have escaped the straitjacket of FTC fillmaking.

Sour grapes? I could conceivably look for some FTC funding in my own country, with the credentials that Perfumed Nightmare has picked up. But looking back, I am beginning to discover ten years after I started making my first film that the shadow side of establishment fillmaking is not worth making twenty blockbusters in a decade.

Of course I could use a little more money to give me elbow room, but the drug of big budgets can restructure my whole way of expressing myself. For instance, originally (or, looking back, not so originally), I had conceived Magellan in my current film, Memories of Overdevelopment (the story of Magellan’s voyage from the viewpoint of his Filipino slave, the first person to circumnavigate the globe and return to his place of origin), to buy his slave in a Malacca slave market, examining him like a horse during the transaction—a traditional, clichéd view of the slave-master encounter.

The cups of gasoline for that scene came six months later. I happened to gather odd furniture from different friends’ houses to fill a market stall. Instead of the original scene, what now happens is that Magellan, while buying furniture for his cabin, discovers the slave hiding in the chest from his angry Chinese master. In the process, the slave ends up in a buy-one-take-one deal. Time and the cosmos provided this new sequence. So who is to say that time is my adversary?

To take another example, trying to create a castle scene in Memories, I could have hired topnotch production designers to make a cliché-acceptable, “realistic”-looking chateau. Instead I used a little chapel in my neighborhood, whose main richness is a beautifully tiled floor. (I had to avoid framing the chapel wall which looked modern.)

Many spectators would be disturbed by a floor-dominated chateau visual, but the suggestion is enough. And by permitting an objet trouvé to determine a scene, I manage to break out of clichés of what the royal courtroom should look like. What may provoke viewers to feel that Kidlat Tahimik is caricaturing “reality” is actually a free act of shooting the tile floor that was beckoning to be filmed.

Another example: the American boss in Perfumed Nightmare in my original conception was to look like a Madison Avenue executive going to the Philippines for a Miss Universe beauty pageant. But in shooting, the only Caucasian available was my clumsy-looking cameraman. So I forced him to go in front of the camera in a Boy Scout suit—the Boy Scouts are a very big movement in the Philippines—since that was what was available. And now film buffs say, “What a great caricature.”

In Perfumed Nightmare, little Kidlat, the hero, is fascinated by Werner von Braun’s world and Cape Kennedy and hi-tech society. He comes to realize that his strength is in his own Filipino identity. For the music in Perfumed Nightmare, I had a Kidlat theme. It’s a piece from the Koran. I had been provided with tapes of ethnographic music, including three tapes of Muslim music from Mindanao. But of so many tunes I instinctively chose a particular tune, without understanding the Arabic text, and repeated it throughout the film. After my first screening in Paris, an Egyptian student excitedly asked me how I had chosen the music and said that the words were so relevant. Then he explained that in the song, after Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his son, he is confused about why God would ask for blood. In trying to understand God he sees the moon and asks, “Is that my God?” The moon disappears; he is disappointed. Likewise the sun provokes him to ask “Is that my God?” The sun rises and sets. He continues questioning. The stars come and go. Finally, he concludes that God is within himself.

Many professionals tell the beginning filmmaker, “You should not take too long to finish a film, because too many changes happen within the individual filmmaker.” That is a great rule for time-efficient FTC fillmaking. But allowing oneself to be capsulized in the cocoon of time-is-money means closing out the cosmic offerings.

***

Time incorporated as an ally into one’s filmmaking brings a different dynamic into the film. And therefore the film should be viewed with non-Hollywood filters and should be appreciated and criticized with different criteria. Third World films are perceived as slow by the fast-cutting habits we are used to. Perhaps we have to learn to use a time frame similar to the never-ending story of ramayanas or odysseys.

But of course in America one doesn’t have the luxury of time to watch a forty-eight-hour film, like an Indonesian watching shadow-puppet theater for several days. What I mean here is accepting the time frame of the Third World filmmakers even if watching a standard two-hour-long film.

Watching films or reading novels is a matter of habit. The visual excitement pumped and overstuffed into FTC films, which today is equated with quality in films, may in fact be a crutch to disguise the lack of any inner quality, any profundity of spirit.

Formula films probably get the kinds of audiences they deserve, and even condition them to accept these as the only valid style of filmmaking. And I might add that the filmgoing public also deserves the kind of films they support.

Producers call for a sex scene or a mugging about forty-five minutes into a film, because scientific studies of ass-behavior show that Western butts get restless at this point. But when you think about the Indonesians squatting for days on end, is it possible that the quality of the performance affects the restlessness? Should butt-habits determine the quality of the film? Cups-of-gas audiences have to be developed over time. Those who have learned to accept the filmmaker’s time framework have probably learned to depose the butt-dictator.

These audiences will continue to grow, because the McDonaldization of films will sooner or later—probably much later—call for new menus coming from the world of Rochester [home of Kodak] spaghetti. Hollywood fast foods will succumb to the Third World lariat (slo-mo banquets). What would you like to order, sir? The Purple Couscous of Cairo? or The Yellow Big Mac of Texas?

1986