IN MANILA, FILMS FEEL THE MARCOS GRIP

It was a steamy evening, punctuated by thunderstorms. Destitute figures, clad in rags, slept under the remote porticoes of the government’s Manila Film Center. Out front, hundreds of the more fortunate paid 35 pesos (about $1.75) to get in, more than four times the going ticket price at privately owned movie theaters. Soldiers stood on guard against possible terrorist attack.

Inside, dozens of formally dressed cineastes, civic leaders and members of the press heaped Philippine delicacies on their plates from a lavish buffet. Nervous anticipation charged the air--tonight’s event was the hottest ticket in town.

The crowd had come for the premiere of “Scorpio Nights,” an erotic thriller about a young man’s adulterous affair with a nubile neighbor. It would break boundaries here in terms of sexually-explicit sex: Graphic sequences of lovemaking culminate with a scene of simultaneous orgasm and death--footage that would earn the movie a quick X rating in the United States.

By morning, “Scorpio Nights” would be the talk of Manila, on its way to becoming a box-office smash.

The most notorious Philippine movie of 1985 would eventually gross 8 million pesos (about $500,000 at the time)--shown exclusively in a film center conceived by the Philippines’ First Lady Imelda Marcos, funded by the government of President Ferdinand E. Marcos and run initially by their daughter Imee.

In this politically oppressed and economically bleak country, such cultural contradictions seem absurdly logical.

“The Film Center makes its money off the sex movies so it can show the good ones,” said director Tikoy Aguiluz, whose sexually charged (and critically praised) “Boatman” was a big hit at the center. “It’s like the mother who sells her daughter on the street so the next child can go to the university. It is crazy--but it’s the Philippines.”

Cinema here mirrors the chaos and cultural schizophrenia endemic to this former U.S. possession of 7,000 islands and 50 million people, a $26-billion foreign debt and a government flirting with political disaster.

Although Marcos is said to have little personal interest in movies, his wife considers herself both a patron of the arts and a cultural “protector of the children.” So while child prostitution, corruption and political murder flourish, government censors--recently replaced by a ratings board--do their best to keep messages of protest or reform off the screen. Most of the 150 or so movies made here each year fall into the exploitation genre, shot for $100,000 to $200,000, full of bloody violence and machismo or lots of heated clutching and soapy melodrama.

But a handful of more serious film makers struggle to make movies with a social conscience, or at least some social realism.

“We have been given police powers,” Maria Kalaw Katigbak, the grandmotherly chairwoman of the government’s board of censors, told Calendar matter-of-factly before the board was recently dismantled. “We have a team of police soldiers who get authority from me to confiscate films and close theaters.” Although the board had once been preoccupied with sexual content, Kalaw said, “Now, we have the problem with the movies that are propaganda against the government. We have to be firm in interpreting what is subversive and what is not.”

Late last year, Marcos declared that he had “abolished” both censorship and the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines (ECP), the government agency that administrated the Manila Film Center.

Created as a sanctuary for film makers from the government’s own censorship laws, the ECP generated widespread controversy when it began exhibiting the most sexually explicit films ever seen in the Philippines. (Observers point out that Marcos’ presidential acts coincided with his announcement of a snap presidential election to be held in early January--now set for Feb. 7.)

Marcos replaced the ECP with the Film Development Foundation of the Philippines (FDFP) to “pave the way for the establishment of a foundation aimed at encouraging private-sector participation in the movie industry and the uplifting of the people’s aesthetic values.” It operates with the same staff in the same offices as did the ECP.

At the same time, Marcos replaced the board of censors with the Movie and Television Classification and Review Board, a mix of 15 film industry representatives and 15 prominent citizens that will ostensibly classify movies but not censor them.

But a local film industry reporter contends that members of the new ratings board “are the same dog with a different color. They are still cutting film. They want to make it appear that they are only classifying films, but by giving an X, they can keep a film from being shown commercially. The board controls the creative process.” The censors, he said, have always been “less concerned about sex. Sex entertains the people. What they are really worried about are political themes, because they might raise the consciousness of the people.”

The showing of sexually oriented films at the Film Center stopped shortly before Marcos announced the new election.

“Since elections are so near, they want to keep a low profile, because of (the center’s) association with Mrs. Marcos,” the reporter said. “It is a matter of image.”

He said that the new ratings board was already attempting to classify films produced by and for the FDFP.

The six-level, state-of-the-art Manila Film Center has become a target of populist scorn, as did the ostentatious Manila International Film Festival (MIFF) it was built to house (the festival was abandoned in 1983 after two years). Like the nearby Manila Cultural Center, another pet project of the First Lady’s, the Film Center is built on land reclaimed from the sea, which makes it appear to some even more symbolic of the shaky Marcos regime.

“The people are beginning to get angry,” about “pornography” at the center, said the matronly Kalaw before the ECP sanitized its program. “And they are blaming the First Lady, the poor woman.”

While the Catholic Women’s League expressed outrage over sexually oriented films at the center, members of the political opposition raised issues of cost, waste, questionable accounting and class privilege.

John J. (Johnny) Litton, deputy secretary general of the ECP and now head of the new FDFP, could not tell Calendar how much the center cost (“I couldn’t give you that figure--so many departments were involved”), but another high government official did: about 53 million pesos (about $4 million in 1982) for “basic construction.”

A leading wheeler-dealer in private Filipino film exhibition, the dapper, diplomatic Litton is unapologetically pro-Marcos: “I don’t see a better alternative. May I be blunt? I’m riding in a Mercedes. You say: ‘I’ll give you a bicycle.’ What would my answer be?”

Although the Manila film festival has been abandoned, Litton manages to stage retrospectives and an annual local festival (this December he showed eight new foreign pictures, ranging from “Mishima” to “Commando,” and 15 classics). The center also houses archives and a film library, holds film classes and school tours. Facilities are rented for weddings, awards shows and other private events to bring in extra revenue.

“To be very candid,” said Litton, “it’s still too early to say whether the Manila Film Center was a good or bad decision.”

Several ECP-financed productions, all non-erotic, have largely been commercial failures. Sexy films like “Scorpio Nights” and “Boatman,” privately produced, took in millions of pesos. The ECP, which administrated the center, kept half. Without erotic attractions, some claim, Imelda Marcos will never be able to pay for her expensive white elephant.

One hears assertions in Manila film circles that Litton requires a quota of sex scenes be put in --while touchy political content be kept out (“Film must be free,” he said, “but you can’t have propaganda”).

Director Lino Brocka has long boycotted the ECP since the first Manila film fest, claiming it “legitimizes pornography.” The issue, he said, is not aesthetics. “I have nothing against sex films. The issue is that when the Film Center was built and the ECP was organized, it was to be for the encouragement of serious Filipino cinematic art, to fight for the integral version of films. We didn’t know it was going to be used like it has been. The word is mockery , and they do it so blatantly.”

Brocka claims that after the ECP broke barriers two years ago with “Isla,” featuring nudity and sex and starring a former Miss Philippines, producers came to him “with cash to make skin flicks for the Film Center. A producer told me there’s only one requirement: that I show pubic hair, the sex organs, one or two shots close up of the female private parts. For 35 pesos, the public won’t pay to see a Bergman film, or a ‘Bayan Ko’ (Brocka’s Oscar contender). But to see a nude former Miss Philippines, the taxi driver and the government worker will pay 100 pesos because of the censorship that exists in the regular theaters.

“One producer said that as long as the ECP is stealing from us (private exhibitors), we might as well steal from them. I said, ‘No, you’re stealing from the Filipino people.’ I don’t mean to be bitchy and fussy, I said, but I have certain values.”

A round-faced, mild-mannered man, Brocka has made about 50 films since 1970, the first Filipino director to have his work shown at the Cannes Film Festival (three times altogether). In recent years, his trademark has been the socially conscious melodrama.

“Bayan Ko,” made in 1984 but held up until last fall by the censors, portrays a poor laborer who refuses to join a union strike because he needs the wages to pay his wife’s hospital bills, realizing “too late that his immediate solution means avoiding a solution to a larger problem.” The censors demanded cuts Brocka refused to make, including scenes of anti-Marcos demonstrations. When “Bayan Ko” was finally distributed Nov. 6--with an R rating by the new board--it fared poorly at the box office.

Brocka blames the socially conscious content of his films for his arrest by the government last January. He was detained after a rally of striking jeepney (small bus or taxi) drivers and charged with illegal assembly and citing to sedition (strikes here are virtually forbidden).

“They only did it because I made the films,” Brocka said. “It’s their way of harassment.”

At first a director of comedies, Brocka’s politicization began when Marcos declared martial law in 1972. It was “a private and individual commitment” that became more outspoken with the assassination of democratic opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. at the Manila airport on Aug. 21, 1983. “That was the turning point for a lot of people. It shocked the country. The moderates, the silent, the indifferent were so shocked, it brought us together.”

Now free on bail, Brocka faces years in prison if he’s found guilty and has been effectively silenced as a film maker.

“The films I became famous for touched on certain social realities--the slums, low wages and working conditions, certain problems the government is touchy about. Films that the First Lady particularly does not like. They go against what she calls the good, the true and the beautiful. They do not want films about exploitation, oppression, repression--films that raise questions, that disturb.

“Ever since my arrest and detention, the producers have made it clear--no more serious films. I cannot make the films I want at the moment.”

Tikoy Aguiluz crossed an exhaust-choked street in downtown Manila to an old movie theater converted for live sex shows, bought two tickets for 20 pesos (about a dollar) each, and led a reporter inside. Forty or 50 men sat on hard benches arranged around a bed-sized platform. A corpulent couple entered, disrobed and moved mechanically through a 15-minute sexual performance, utterly expressionless. Each made a few dollars.

The “toro” show, as it is known, is a key element in Aguiluz’s “Boatman.” Veering from lyricism to gritty exploitation, the film tells of a young man who escapes rural poverty by starring in porno films and then live sex acts in Manila, falling in love with his female partner. He finds fame and fortune as Manila’s “boy toro ,” but learns too late that he has been tragically exploited by affluent Westerners and upper-class Filipinos.

After causing a sensation at the Film Center last year because of its subject matter, brief frontal nudity and a disturbing castration scene, “Boatman” was submitted to the censors before general release. Maria Kalaw entered the government editing room to personally order additional cuts because, in her words, “It’s my job to see that the Moviola office cuts what is supposed to be cut.”

Producers of “Boatman” filed a lawsuit, then released the picture last summer with compromise trims. It won a critic’s prize--based on its original form--as the second best film of the year in the Philippines and has recently been selected to be shown at Filmex ’86.

Kalaw contends the film is “pornography,” because it has no theme, no purpose.

“ ‘Boatman’ is not a great film,” Aguiluz conceded, “but it’s an important film. It explores the classic theme of the corruption of the provinciano in the cities. You have the theme of a character trying to find human dimensions in an inhuman environment.”

Said Kalaw: “It was filthy. It offended me. Why would anyone want to see this?”

Aguiluz, a stocky, outgoing film buff, founded the cinema department at the University of the Philippines and made documentaries before “Boatman.” Since the film’s success, he has signed to direct three more low-budget pictures in his home country.

Although he speaks with an artist’s vision, he confesses to being “a B-movie freak.”

“The best of our movies are a weird combination of Italian realism and Roger Corman,” Aguiluz said, over bottles of San Miguel beer in a Chinese cafe not far from Manila’s notorious Red district. “We grew up on a diet of B movies. So there’s no escape from sex and violence. The audience wants and maybe even needs the sex and violence. As I made ‘Boatman,’ I even felt myself falling into the exploitation trap. I hope it rises above that, but I could still feel that mentality taking over.

“When I decided to make it, I knew it would lead to problems (with the censors). But the worst problem was self-censorship--you find yourself censoring your own work, which is the most dangerous thing for an artist. It’s hard enough to just make a movie without having to deal with the censorship problem.”

Outwardly apolitical, Aguiluz said he would be content making movies that are pure entertainment, but finds it difficult.

“It’s the curse of every Third World film maker that these social issues automatically crop up. It’s good and it’s bad. It’s like feminist film makers--they have to take a stand, deal with the issue. I’ve only made one movie, yet I feel this curse, this burden.

“But how can you make a film in the Philippines and not deal with social problems?”