1961 | English subtitles | 3 hr | Directed by Gerry de Leon | Screenplay by: Gerry de Leon & Jose Flores Sibal from the novel by Jose Rizal
Followed by a Talkback on Rizal, the historical background, and Gerry de Leon, with: Prof. Luis Francia, historian, essayist, poet and playwright; and writer and Panawin curator Gil Quito
Date: Friday, March 24, 2023 | 6:00 pm
Venue: NYU King Juan Carlos Center | 53 Washington Sq S, NYC 10012
Open to the public; proof of vaccination required
RSVP link: https://bit.ly/panawin2023
Synopsis
Epic screen adaptation of Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal’s first novel, Noli Me Tangere (1887), set in late nineteenth century Philippines. The story follows Crisostomo Ibarra who comes back to his hometown, after seven years of study in Europe, and finds himself and other townmates reckoning with the corruption and depredation of the Spanish colonial rule.
Notes on the Film, Director, Novel, and Novelist
Gerry de Leon (1913 – 1981) was intimately exposed from birth to the rudiments of theatrical production. His father, Hermogenes Ilagan (1873 – 1943), was an actor/singer and playwright/impresario who gained renown and eponym as the Father of the Philippine Zarzuela, a theatrical genre, inherited and adapted from the Spaniards, that alternated between spoken and sung scenes. Going back further, de Leon could trace his family tree to Francisco Balagtas (1788 – 1862), the celebrated poet laureate and playwright who wrote in Tagalog, contrary to the literary practice at the time of publishing in Spanish. The children and grandchildren of Hermogenes themselves became famous filmmakers and actors, including the Lino Brocka regular Jay Ilagan.
De Leon, who used his mother’s surname for his stage name, started his film career, a young teen in short pants, as piano accompanist for silent movies at the Cine Moderno. He also acted in his father’s stage productions, dubbed early Spanish and American talkies to Tagalog, and in 1937 made his first film appearance as an actor, before transitioning to directing the following year. He was also studying medicine at the time and went on to land among the top 5 in the medical board exams. However, the call of the theater proved far stronger.
Toward the end of WW2, he was conscripted by the Japanese occupiers to direct propaganda films. After the Japanese defeat, he was condemned for treason to imminent execution but was pardoned at the last minute when proof came to light that he had at the same time been helping the resistance. The executioner’s loss was art’s gain. He became the most awarded director ever by the Filipino Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, nominated 14 times and winning 7, with his films also winning Best Picture all the 7 times. Along with Lamberto Avellana, he became the leading director in what is now called the First Golden Age of Philippine Cinema from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. He was posthumously declared a Philippine National Artist for Film. (Another eventual National Artist, Botong Francisco, was the Production Designer of Noli Me Tangere.) Several distinguished Filipino filmmakers from Lino Brocka to Lav Diaz have counted him as a major influence.
Working in all kinds of genres, from fantasy to political drama, from horror to komiks adaptations, even Hollywood B-movie sexploitation with Roger Corman (Women in Cages), de Leon also maintained a lifelong passion for the works of the polymath — surgeon, painter, sculptor, linguist, playwright, essayist, poet, novelist — Jose Rizal (1861-96), whose novels (written in Spanish), Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (1891), were banned by the authorities for expounding on the corruption and abuse of the Spanish colonial rule. Copies of the books were nevertheless smuggled from Berlin and Ghent, where they were successively published, into the country where they were passed along in whispers. Though firmly and repeatedly advocating peaceful reform over revolution, he was executed, age 35, five years after the Fili, a tragedy that became explosive fuel for the Philippine Revolution against Spain.
The 1956 Rizal Law made the Noli and Fili required reading for all college institutions and thus the novels, in English or Tagalog translation, have become even more part of the Filipino DNA. Timeless in their satire and denunciation of injustice and corruption, they were also products of their time in the way they necessarily had to move the focus away from the more felicitous aspects of the Spanish era to the destruction it had wrought on indigenous soul and culture. A great writer of a later generation, Nick Joaquin, would revive an interest and appreciation of the Spanish colonial past in his essays, fiction, and classic play that contrasted the splendors of the Spanish heritage to the crass modernization occurring in post-war Manila, even as he continued to celebrate Rizal and the youthful anti-Spanish Revolutionaries.
Gerry de Leon’s abiding interest in filming Rizal’s novels first came to fruition in the 1951 Sisa, based on the character of the madwoman in Noli Me Tangere. He followed this up in 1961 with this more expansive adaptation of Noli Me Tangere. He then adapted Rizal’s sequel to the Noli, El Filibusterismo, in the 1962 film of the same name. At de Leon’s death in 1981, he had already shot some 70% of Juan de la Cruz, a multi-generational saga that would serve as prelude to the events in the novels, and had another Noli-inspired film, Elias, in the planning stages.
That de Leon’s three finished Rizal-based films have survived is as much a matter of luck as anything else in a humid, flood- and fire-prone country where archival consciousness only began to develop, and very slowly at that, in the 1970s. Thus many of de Leon’s works, including some of his most acclaimed and awarded films, are irretrievably lost. Noli (despite some dated elements like the thunderously florid musical score typical of its time) and other surviving films of de Leon reveal a poet of visual composition and chiaroscuro whose mise-en-scene and rapport with actors possess masterful economy and directness. This Noli Me Tangere itself would have been one of the lost films had not its sole extant, decaying print been found and salvaged by plucky archivists in the Philippines and Germany (where the original novel was first published) before it had decomposed and congealed beyond recuperation
— Gil Quito
Curator
Awards
FAMAS (Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences):
- Best Picture, Director, Story, Musical Score, Supporting Actor (Oscar Keesee), and Supporting Actress (Lina Cariño)
- nominations for Best Actor (Eddie del Mar), Best Actress (Edita Vital), and Best Supporting Actor (Johnny Monteiro)
