by Vicky Huang
Born into a working-class Filipino family, Lino Brocka ascended to fame by shooting studio films—often comic book adaptations—at a dizzying, Fassbinderian pace.1 Although it raked tremendous success, his commercial trajectory sharply careened in 1972 after President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. Under the dictatorship, all art perceived to incite subversion, center criminality, glorify promiscuity, or challenge state narratives, was banned from the public eye, leaving only reactionary schlock untouched.2 The regime aimed to replace the ‘ugly’ images of poverty and political repression with a hyperreality: to overwrite the existence of grimy slums, frail beggars picking at litter, and thousands of missing person posters with the fantasy of a luxuriated Philippines. Instead of aligning with the Marcos regime, as many studio filmmakers did, Brocka took an oppositional stance. His images, exemplified by his two most acclaimed works, Manila in the Claws of Light (1975) and Insiang (1976), expose the immense suffering that characterized the martial law period—a truth now threatened by Marcos Jr.’s campaigns of historical revisionism.
Manila in the Claws of Light tracks doe-eyed Julio (Bembol Roco) on his quest to find his missing girlfriend Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), who left the province after being ‘recruited’ for work. The film commences with black and white documentary footage of Manila’s odious streets, modern cars juxtaposed with traditional carriages, and rural migrants who desperately seek work. Among them is Julio, standing in front of a torn-up poster that reads ‘Mabuhay Ang Mga Manggagawa’ (Long Live the Workers). A slow fade imbues the frame with colour, signalling the start of Manila’s story. However, even after the inauguration, the border between fiction and non-fiction remains troublingly blurred.
The opening tableaux sets the tone for the rest of the film’s narrative. With days spent meandering in Chinatown and nights wrapped in the red light district’s lonely neon glow, Julio’s only source of stability are his friends: the ‘dirty’ social vagrants—workers, slum dwellers, prostitutes, and gleaners—whom Imelda Marcos once said required both moral and literal sterilization.3 Yet, in Manila, the real villains are diamond-clad bosses who exploit their workers to death and glamourous madames who prey on pastoral piety. In contrast, the city’s sordid scum are framed as kind and generous despite their impoverished material conditions, proferred with close-ups that cathect photogenie, and sexually worshipped through long shots of their labouring bodies, adorned with crystals of sweat. Using techniques conventionally reserved for the bourgeoisie, Brocka treats the urban poor like the big studio stars from his earlier projects. This humanist depiction of the invisible masses—those marked for erasure—powerfully inverts state narratives.
In Manila, the configurations of sociopolitical and geographic space are deeply interrogated. Julio’s first job in the city is as a construction worker, building modern condos and scintillating skyscrapers. The prescient question is: who are these developments for? Certainly not for village boys like Julio, who earns less than 2.5 pesos a day—barely enough to buy breakfast—or displaced farmers such as Atong (Lou Salvador, Jr.), who lives in a congested slum. Through long shots of the sprawling city, Brocka reveals how rapidly and extensively urbanization has spread across Manila’s planes. Yet, despite the concomitant creation of new homes, many must sleep curled up in alleyways with newspaper blankets. The irony invoked here is not simply a narrative device, but a real critique of the visual dissonance of the Philippines’ supposed Golden Age: an era marked by sumptuous construction projects that gave the nation an illusion of wealth. The Marcos’ ‘edifice complex’ stunts—such as the Manila Film Center and Cultural Center of the Philippines—may have bedazzled and stunned the world, but, as Brocka shows, they contributed nothing to the destitute masses. 4 Decades later, these sites are now abandoned, hollowed spaces that serve as a haunting reminder of martial law’s failures.
As a result of their labour exploitation, Julio’s friends are murdered one by one. Brocka, embodying the capital’s rapacious tempo, leaves no affective space to pause and mourn these lives. For example, when a metal beam suddenly falls and smashes a worker in the head, their boss yells at everyone to return to work; or when Atong dies after being set up by a former employer, his wife is intimidated out of pressing charges. Violence is so pervasive that it becomes ingrained in the worker’s daily existence, another quotidian part of his routine.
Simmering beneath each frame is a volatile, proletarian anger that grows in intensity with each passing tragedy. Visibly restless, Julio wants to react but is too disempowered to fight his boss or bribe the cops to investigate: in a world where money buys justice, he can only endure. At times, his fury erupts as misdirected violence at fellow members of the underclass—situations which are ultimately resolved with Julio bowing his head or inertly clenching his fist. Brocka teases these moments only to let them fizzle out and sublimate. Julio becomes a ticking time bomb, bound to explode. When Ligaya is killed by her abuser, Julio’s immense torrent of emotions finally rise to the surface. Embarking on a suicidal mission, Julio stalks his girlfriend’s murderer and stabs him in an act of rhapsodic revenge. Unlike the deaths of Julio’s friends—which happen off-screen or are barely framed—blood splatters everywhere when the petty-bourgeoisie die, a necropolitical signifier of proletarian dehumanization.
Brocka’s Manila and Marcos’ vision tell two very different stories of an urban city undergoing economic and political transition. While the regime claimed that martial law brought wealth and prosperity, the director shows that it actually turned Manila into a destitute hellscape.5 Brocka’s thesis becomes explicit in the last sequence; a harrowing ten second freeze frame of Julio’s Baconesque howl blended into an image of the province. The violence, exploitation, and suffering of the city has eclipsed the naive country boy.
In filming Manila, Brocka spent months working with impoverished communities, witnessing the devastating human impact of economic shock policies. The disturbing experiences inspired him to produce Insiang: a dismal character portrait starring Hilda Koronel as the eponymous protagonist. Less overtly political than Manila, but with prescient social commentary nonetheless, Insiang is a gritty, neo-realist peep into the lives of those trapped in the bottom caste of Philippine society: an exposé into the world of slum dwellers, who reside in shoddy shacks that are likely to topple before the state can even begin bulldozing. The film’s depiction of urban life was so dialectical to Marcos’ narratives that it was nearly banned on several occasions.6 Ruby Tiong Tam, the head producer, had to smuggle Insiang’s print out of the Philippines for it to screen at the 1978 Cannes Films Festival.7
Opening media-res in a squalid slaughterhouse, the camera is splashed by blood and entrails from pigs who are hung upside down by merciless butchers. A cut transitions the film into a documentary montage exploring the slums—a tactic Brocka recycled from Manila—ending with a zoom-in on Insiang walking across a polluted river, tarred by tears of the working class.
Insiang is the divine incarnation of Catholic Filipino gender roles. She is demure and responsible; chaste and selfless—in possession of every value a Tita could want in a daughter. Yet, Insiang is still loathed by her despotic mother, Tonya (Mona Lisa). The two live with extended family in a shanty home—made of scrap metal, cardboard, and fishnet—with rooms segregated by flimsy, makeshift partitions that offer no privacy. Here, physical boundaries are as collapsable as interpersonal ones.
In a raucous scene rife with petty bickering and slapping, Insiang’s entire extended family is driven out and replaced by Dado (Ruel Vernal), Tonya’s much younger boyfriend and a lecherous bully who has his eyes locked on Insiang. Although the number of residents has been whittled down to three, the house becomes more claustrophobic and restricted with Dado’s predatory presence than it ever did with children running around the corridors. Dado’s wandering gaze and his subtle, perverted winks toward Insiang may have been overlooked by Tonya, but not by Brocka’s perceptive camera, which exposes the whole affair through lingering close-ups.
A former theatre director, Brocka had excellent command over his actors and could draw out their best performances without much rehearsal, containing the film’s shoot to just 11 days.8 Koronel, a seasoned member of Brocka’s troupe, was especially attuned to the director’s vision. The two worked in perfect synchronicity to produce some of the most brutal moments of Brocka’s oeuvre—such as Insiang’s gruesome rape. In the harrowing scene, Dado attacks her nubile body from behind, muffling her mouth, as she cries out like a pig slaughtered in the film’s opening. Her distress is heightened by the shaky camera which throws the whole frame into nauseating tumult. Though not shy about violence, Brocka is tactful in depicting the assault, ending the scene with a suggestive shot of Dado lifting Insiang’s supine body. The rest is to be inferred.
After this, Insiang comes to the chilling realization that no one will rescue her but herself. Late-night shots show her plotting in a cold wash of moonlight. Something horrid is on the horizon—like in Manila, the question is simply a matter of when. Insiang’s approach to Dado subsequently shifts; soon, she returns his lurid gazes and innocuous petting, trapping him into her web of desire. The reverse seduction culminates on a sweltering summer night when Dado walks into Insiang’s room, their sweaty flesh separated by a mere strand of mesh. At Insiang’s subtle, welcome nod, Dado lifts the divider and enters her space, signifying an obliteration of the fragile boundaries that Brocka initially tried to erect. The scene’s play on space and trespass reads as a microcosm of the flimsy borders that divide oppressor and oppressed in Manila. Brocka’s message is abundantly clear: the imagined and real lines, fences, barriers, and enclosures that segregate the urban poor in the city will be crossed in time.
Insiang’s maneuvers are eventually discovered by Tonya, driving her to kill Dado in a fit of histrionic rage. The camera cuts between Dado’s bloodied hand, Tonya’s repetitive stabbing, and Insiang’s satisfied smirk, skirting around the sight of the murder. Despite the lack of overt depiction, Insiang’s violent apex resonates more viscerally than Manila’s slaughter. Whereas Brocka’s emphasis in Manila was on Julio’s act of vengeance, here, the focus is on Insiang’s spiritual redemption—the catharsis, the twisted pleasure, the subtle exhale from witnessing her abusers destroy themselves.
Insiang’s ending was changed due to pressures Brocka received from the Film Censorship Board.9 Ostensibly, it depicts a moment of bittersweet reunion between Tonya and Insiang, but upon closer review, it is clear that Brocka rejects the possibility that the mother-daughter duo can ever return to a plane of normalcy. In the film’s parting shots, Insiang is seen returning to the trash-filled slums, as Tonya silently cries out from behind bars. It’s clear that they both still cling to their resentments. Brocka’s choice to leave the tension intact is undeniably a politically-charged one. In an era where films were forced to depict civil harmony and reconciliation, Brocka’s ending is a trojan horse that secretly delivers outrage about Philippine reality.
There is a Marxist sensibility to Brocka’s cinema. As seen in both films, his preferred story involves innocent characters—a provincial country bumpkin in Manila and a virgin in Insiang—who are sullied by their environments, driven out of sheer desperation to commit violent acts. Crime is not rendered one-dimensional and teleological, but a matter that is influenced by one’s material conditions. This is precisely why the Marcoses are implicated in both films, whether they are embodied in the mise-en-scene or not.
Working within censorship limits, Brocka had to practice restraint by encoding critiques of the regime through stand-in characters, or subtly contradicting state narratives around the marginalized working-class—as seen in both Manila and Insiang. Although his films are not explicitly revolutionary, they are still works of resistance that speak to Brocka’s political leanings. In an era where journalists who exposed the truth were unlawfully arrested or even killed, Brocka’s refusal to capitulate is an ultimate testament to his dedication to serving the Filipino people.
- Criterion Collection, “Bringing the Grit to Philippine Cinema,” The Criterion Collection, 2018, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5748-bringing-the-grit-to-philippine-cinema. ↩︎
- Jonathan Beller, “Directing the Real,” Third Text 13, no. 45 (December 1, 1998), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829808576761. ↩︎
- Imelda (Unitel Pictures, 2003). ↩︎
- Deni Rose Afinidad-Bernardo, “Edifice Complex,” Philstar.com, accessed March 21, 2024, https://newslab.philstar.com/31-years-of-amnesia/building-spree. ↩︎
- Glenda Gloria, “Undoing ‘false Nostalgia’ about the Marcos Years,” Rappler, February 24, 2023, https://www.rappler.com/voices/thought-leaders/analysis-undoing-false-nostalgia-marcos-dictatorship/. ↩︎
- Mowel Fund, “Insiang: A Cautionary Tale from the Past – Mowelfund,” Mowel Fund, 2018, https://www.mowelfund.com/insiang-a-cautionary-tale-from-the-past/. ↩︎
- Mayenne Carmona, “‘Insiang’ Revisited,” Philstar.Com, August 18, 2007, https://www.philstar.com/lifestyle/modern-living/2007/08/18/13638/lsquoinsiangrsquo-revisited. ↩︎
- Pierre Rissient, “Insiang,” Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival, 2015, https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/proiezione/insiang/. ↩︎
- Criterion Channel, “Pierre Rissient on INSIANG,” The Criterion Channel, 2017, https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/pierre-rissient-on-insiang. ↩︎
Vicky Huang is a Fourth Year Cinema Studies student at the University of Toronto. When she’s not overloaded with assignments, she writes on a whole gamut of issues – with a special emphasis on film, electronic music, and left-wing politics. Her Twitter can be found here.
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