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by Diego Morra
The Behn Cervantes film “Sakada” is etched in the mind of a longtime journalist who was the first to review what was decidedly the most relevant feature film of 1976, a jarring depiction of exploitation and oppression that burdened hundreds of thousands of farm workers in Negros Islands. It is good that the University of the Philippines Film Center is screening the film today.
The journalist recalled that a copy of the film was secretly screened before small crowd of students and members of the dreaded Board of Censors for Motion Pictures (BCMP) in 1976 and it became the topic for reviews by graduate students at the then University of the Philippines Institute of Mass Communication (UP-IMC) in the class of the late film critic TD Agcaoili. It was Agcaoili who was responsible for submitting a review written by one of his students to the Evening Express, actually the afternoon edition of the Daily Express, a newspaper that championed the Marcos Sr. dictatorship, mangling the news and pushing the propaganda promoted by Malacanang. Unaware of Agcaoili’s action, the review came out, and with it came an avalanche of attacks on “Sakada,” Behn Cervantes himself and the critics who wrote glowingly of the film.
The most vicious ad hominem assaults came from Simeon del Rosario, a career Red tagger who demanded that the author of the Evening Express review of “Sakada” be arrested, charged and prosecuted for illustrating the exploitative nature of the hacienda system, the slave wages for seasonal workers and the shackles that doomed workers to die in the noon of their lives because of the “tiempo muerto.” Del Rosario slammed the reviewer, fulminating against his appreciation of the Cervantes work, its dark opening scenes defining the contours of social upheaval and the tight control of the news (like the arrest of Hermie Garcia IV and Mila Garcia of the Dumaguete Times which killed any meaningful coverage of the sugar barons, their follies and foibles, the control of the sugar over much of national politics, media and the compradoracy.
Del Rosario was a curious case inasmuch as his passionate anti-communism was rooted in his rivalry with the former political prisoner Sammy Rodriguez, the longtime backer of Zarzuela Foundation, and mentor to younger activists imprisoned in the early years of martial law at the Ipil Reception Center (IRC), which was a euphemism for a prison. Call it unrequited love or simply pagkatalo sa panunuyo, or in short, nabasted. Rather than fade into the sunset or woo other ladies, del Rosario became a professional witch hunter, following in the bloody footsteps of US Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was slammed by Edeward Murrow, and Sen. Margaret Chase Smith as well as a counsel for a military officer tagged as a communist who asked McCarthy if he has any sense of decency left.
The young journalist was surprised no end why del Rosario would quibble about an academic paper that tackled not the love story doomed by class divisions but the irrationality of an entire system that punishes the creators of value and panders to the bourgeois demands of the idle rich. Satur Ocampo and the late writer Gelacio Guillermo also knew about the unjust system in the sugar haciendas and a visit to the cemeteries of Hacienda Luisita and the sugar estates in Negros, Laguna and Batangas would show that many graves host children, an indication that poverty eats not only the old but also the young.
TD Agcaoili must have been attracted by the comprehensive review of “Sakada” for his class and thought it wise to share it with a broader audience, telling the author that the work reminded him of Dwight McDonald, an American film critic noted for reviewing films with razor-sharp analysis at a time when the nouvelle vague was the rage in the global film industry, with Jean-luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Lelouch and even Louis Malle doing their bit to expand beyond what Sergei Eisenstein had set decades earlier, never mind the vicious attacks by Roger Ebert. No Pauline Kael is needed to deconstruct the language of film or what auteurs really mean. In “Sakada,” you see what you have to see, the unrehearsed Menggie Cobarrubias and Cris Michelena, both dead, along with Robert Arevalo, who is fondly remembered for his role in “Sakada” but also in “Hubad na Bayani” and others.
It was Lenin who said that film is the most important of all the arts, to which Eisenstein subscribed, and it explains why Eisenstein had to make the Red flag red in his black and white films. Eisenstein developed montage and the French auteurs succeeded in making films as the world’s most beautiful fraud, 24 frames per second. The violence inherent in the hacienda system, which never really developed into industrial enclaves that processed sugar cane into dozens of goods for the domestic and foreign markets, is illustrated vividly in “Sakada,” as bloody as it was 50 years ago as today, when sugar workers are “exported” to Luzon to resume their seasonal work as slaves.
Surely, the critics who now pan ”Sakada” miss the point entirely. It was a strong denunciation of an exploitative system that hewed strongly to institutionalize the abuses of human rights, basic economic rights, muzzle people’s minds and detain their hearts, and prevent them for questioning the machinery that made both the dictatorship and the hacienda system maintain their stranglehold. Behn Cervantes certainly knew about the conditions of the people in the industry since he lived in Negros, sang “Amazing Grace” at a Methodist church and knew for a fact that “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was originally written not to celebrate imperialism but rto demand the abolition of slavery. “Sakada” is about slavery, too. How to beat it? The Romans had a clue: Arma in armatos sumere jura sinunt.” Its English rendering is “The law permits us to take up arms against the armed.” #
