Postmodern Reading of Selected Contemporary Filipino Films

The idea that films can be philosophical lies at the very core of this study. It has been observed that readers/ philosophers can utilize aspects of the story in a work of cinematic fiction, particularly popular movies to illustrate a philosophical problem or theory. Watching popular films can help students take certain arguments in the theory of knowledge more seriously. Such claims bring to fore what the postmodernist critic and philosopher Frederic Jameson (1998) refers to as the erosion of distinction between high culture (as represented by philosophy and the act of philosophizing) and mass or popular culture (embodied by popular films) as when these products of mass culture are used as texts for philosophical and literary studies. The present study was designed to analyze popular Filipino films as text, in order to achieve the researcher's aims: one is to prove that movies can truly be philosophic and literary, and more importantly, to participate in the effacement of the line between high art and pop/commercial art, demonstrating in the end that le postmoderne has finally reached the Philippines, through the postmodern reading of selected Filipino motion picture.

As an attempt to read Filipino film texts from the perspective of postmodernism, this study involved different phases in order to specifically shed light on the dominant features of postmodernist fiction discernible in the selected contemporary films, and how these dominant features were related to the over-all narrative structure, characterization, and thematic content of the film texts. To address the research questions that were raised for the present study, the researcher divided the analysis and interpretation of the selected contemporary Filipino films into three parts: one is providing a glimpse on what makes the films worth "reading," two is the scrutiny of the dominant features of Postmodernism in the films, which involved looking into the fictional elements of the film texts to bring to fore what exactly makes them postmodern, and three, the highlighting of the postmodern in the contemporary Filipino society, which called for the attempt to situate elements of the postmodern in the present Filipino way of life. The postmodern reading of the selected contemporary Filipino films yielded that the postmodern Filipino films operate on the notions of disruption of narrative, transgression of genre boundaries, and uncertain or unreliable fragmentary recollections of events, and that the postmodernist features of temporal disorder, intertextuality/ pastiche, nostalgia, and nfragmentation, among others are discernible in the films under study. More importantly, conclusions can be made on the presence of the historically western body of thought referred to as the Postmodern: that it has indeed reached and is now being felt in the country, as shown in the elements of mass media/ popular culture, particularly the motion picture. Hence, as an offshoot of this study, a number of activities may be engaged in to curve the tide of le postmoderne in the Filipino classroom, including a postmodern reading of Filipino literature fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and dramatic works, and instructional materials, including lesson plans/ instructional guides and worksheets may be prepared. Moreover, further studies may be conducted to highlight other postmodernist features not included in this study to account for a more comprehensive postmodern reading of film and/ or literature.