Manila by Night

A Queer Film Classic

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by Joel David

Type: Essays
Subject: One Film > Manila by Night
Keywords: Ishmael Bernal, Philippines
Publishing date: 2018
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Collection: Queer Film Classics
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 208 pages
4 ¾ x 6 ¾ inches (12 x 17 cm)

ISBN

978-1-55152-707-9

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Book Presentation:
A Queer Film Classic on Ishmael Bernal's 1980 film that follows a dozen characters, all denizens of Manila's sordid yet exuberant underworld, as they pursue life, love, and pleasure. Upon completion, the film was banned in the Philippines by the Marcos regime, beginning an arduous journey through repression and censorship before finally being released by the government as proof of its more tolerant policies on the eve of the "People Power" uprising of 1986. David's book explores the political, cultural, and historical ramifications of this important film.

Joel David is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Inha University, Korea.

About the Author:
Joel David is Professor of Cultural Studies at Inha University, Korea. He holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University. The author of several books on Philippine cinema, he had won the Manila Critics Circle's National Book Award for Film Criticism, among other prizes. He was founding Director of the University of the Philippines Film Institute and winner of the Art Nurturer Prize of the Filipino Arts & Cinema International (FACINE) Film Festival in San Francisco, Calif.

Press Reviews:
"Nearly forty years after its initial release, Ishmael Bernal's film remains a provocative portrait of Manila's myriad cast of characters as well as its spirit, rhythm, and grit. In his monograph, esteemed film and cultural studies scholar Joel David treats it as such.

"David views Manila by Night as underappreciated and misunderstood, and his analysis here emerges as the only book devoted entirely to the film. While much scholarship has highlighted Manila's significance as a cinematic or queer text, or as emblematic of the cultural milieu of Philippine dictatorship, David's book discusses these ideas together to capture the 'world' of the film. The study, with its careful attention to the film's aesthetics, style, and context as well as to Bernal's own biography, offers a solid foundation for analyzing present-day queer, third, and Philippine cinema....

"David's book is an attentive and sharp study of Manila by Night as well as Bernal's artistry that reinvigorates the continued importance of the film almost 40 years after its release. In 2019, as the global right takes shape in old and new ways, David's analysis urgently insists upon the importance of cultural production, queer technique, and historical analysis to identify avenues for materializing grounded criticism. In other words, David commands an understanding of Bernal's film as a composite of strategies for working through and battling against the repressiveness of authoritarianism. David points to Bernal's film not as allegory for any universal truth but as a project in ingenuity, an attempt to illustrate the complexity of Filipino life. Or as David explains, the film explains that 'for all its broken dreams, Manila will continue to endure as it has in the past.'"

―Josen Masangkay Diaz, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media

"It is unfortunate that great works of art in the Philippines usually remain understudied. A critic can count on his/her fingers the single-authorship books on the works of Philippine National Artists like Manuel Conde, Ishmael Bernal, and Lino Brocka. That is why the publication of Joel David's Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic ... is auspicious news. After all, Ishmael Bernal is undisputedly one of the country's finest directors―and Manila by Night, one of his most outstanding works.

"Divided into five main sections (three chapters plus introduction and conclusion), Manila by Night: A Queer Film Classic provides an in-depth look at the relevant contexts of Bernal's film. It situates the work within the history of Philippine cinema, gives adequate biographical information about the auteur, discusses the tradition (both local and foreign) to which Manila by Night belongs, and raises key points about the film's aesthetics which had not been remarked upon by other critics. The book contains three special sections as well: a quick discussion of queer Filipino films; a list of multi-character movies; and an interview with the late Bernardo Bernardo.

"While the detailed discussion of Philippine cinema and its contexts gives one the feeling that the audience is primarily Western, the information David provides his readers―Filipino or non-Filipino―is valuable. For it gives the readers a crash course on Philippine cinema and, more important, it enables them to read the film in its proper historical and cultural contexts, which are necessary to a deeper appreciation of the film....

"Informative, theoretically non-daunting, and lucid, David's homage to Bernal's Manila by Night is certainly a gem of a little book. After all, a masterpiece like Ishmael Bernal's Manila by Night deserves nothing less."

―Ronald Baytan, Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society

"Most of the industry's output prior to the Second Golden Age featured singular heroes, but eventually, the viewing public also accepted the presence of several other characters. One reason David indicates is the resemblance of theaters to the churches set up during the Spanish colonial era. This is an interesting and enlightening proposition, more so because of its several implications―that audiences remain obedient, observant yet defiant in the same instance (only one God yet several saints, only one altar yet several objects of worship)―juxtaposed against his reading of Manila by Night's productive deconstruction of our traditional notions regarding character.... As he writes, 'the constant shifting of identification from one subject to another without any singular subject predominating enables the envisioning of a social formation―an abstract super-character that is literally socially constructed.' From this point, David proposes the radical potential of this super-character, whose queer manifestation is distinctly lesbian, and how this might depose, if not continually haunt and confound, the dominant order."

―Chuckberry J. Pascual, Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema (translated from Filipino)