Gregoria de Jesus: Madonna of the Revolution
By Joel David
The biggest still-to-be-resolved controversy about the Philippines’s anticolonial revolution, the first in Asia, centers on the status of Andres Bonifacio, founder of its liberation army, the Katipunan.
Most adequately schooled natives would be aware that recognition of his stature as head of the country’s liberated territories was wrested by a faction that derided his status as uneducated and low-born, despite overwhelming evidence that he’d attained higher levels of historical and political awareness, a result of persistent self-education, than his critics. As a result of duplicitous maneuvering, he and his brother were subjected to a mock trial and summarily executed, their bodies never found despite an arduous month-long search covering two mountains by his widow, Gregoria de Jesus.
Also known as Oryang, de Jesus specified Lakambini as her nom de guerre, in acknowledgment of her husband’s position as Lakan or ruler. She accused agents of the usurpation forces of rape and was warned that she could be targeted for assassination.
Julio Nakpil, one of her late husband’s lieutenants, married her and kept her safe, enabling her to survive nearly a half-century after Bonifacio’s death. A lesser-known fact is that Bonifacio had appointed her his vice president, which would have made her his successor if the revolution had not been betrayed by Emilio Aguinaldo.
Oryang not surprisingly lived out the rest of her life as a traumatized and oppressed figure, although she drew enough inspiration from her years of struggle to be able to codify the lessons she picked up. The challenge for anyone attempting to accomplish a feature film about her would be manifold enough to discourage profit-oriented entities such as the Metro Manila Film Festival, which refused to provide financing for Lakambini (not the only prestige project it turned down in a long history of more questionable entries than memorable ones). Aside from the whopping budgetary requirement of recreating scenes over a century in the past, an extensive millennial-era release had also tackled the same biographical narrative – Lav Diaz’s eight-hour Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (2016).
As if these travails weren’t enough, the Lakambini project suffered from scheduling complications as well as a surfeit of newly uncovered information and insights provided by contemporary historical developments, duly documented by the production team. The feature was initially meant to be a joint project of Jeffrey Jeturian and Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, with the latter eventually deciding to assume creative producer functions. The final film credits Arjanmar H. Rebeta as director, but also makes use of the aforementioned interview materials as well as subsequent footage where a new actor, Elora Españo, replaced Lovi Poe; still one more actor, Gina Pareño, portrayed Oryang as an elderly citizen.
To be sure, the use of multiple actors to portray the same character had already been attempted in earlier films, notably in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Luis Buñuel’s well-received last film. But where Buñuel’s purpose was to illustrate the central male character’s shifting perceptions, Lakambini’s turn (as articulated in the film by its director) serves to impress on the viewer the possibility of Oryang representing not one fixed type, but the fuller array of Philippine womanhood. The film’s purpose is further heightened by the actors’ capabilities, with Pareño, a full array of her own share of well-publicized trauma and triumph behind her, ushering the text’s literal mergence of fiction and fact in a remarkable final sequence that will be permanently imprinted on the memory of anyone who watches it.
The only possible hesitation for most audiences, apart from the film’s formal novelty, would be the unremitting sadness of Oryang’s story: not only was she, like the revolution, violated by the very people expected to support her cause, she also lived through all three periods of vicious colonization, dying during World War II before the country attained any form of liberation. She allows herself some consolation in hearing the news that the fraudulent president’s attempt to legitimize his power-grab via national elections failed, but issues perhaps the most important historical principle ever made by any Philippine political entity: that history, in its own time, will unmask hidden iniquity (preceding by a few decades Martin Luther King’s much-quoted statement on the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice).
Yet the filmmakers involved in the project had been capable in the past of creating difficult reflexive material with light-handed, even comic applications. The daring with which they packaged the narrative of Gregoria de Jesus has not only accurately represented her as a polysemic figure, capable of addressing folks from several generations and persuasions and possibly even nationalities; it has also made her recognizable to millennial audiences, with their preference for experiencing multimedia banter and tolerance for crisscrossing various levels of reality. Lakambini has enabled her to step into the here and now, and the pleasant surprise is that her messages continue to resonate.
Joel David is a retired professor of Cultural Studies at Inha University and was given the Art Nurturing Prize at the 2016 FACINE International Film Festival in San Francisco. He has written several books on Philippine cinema and is finalizing Canon Decampment, a listing of the best Filipino films throughout history. He maintains a blog at amauteurish.com.
