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Traces of my colonization persist in the underlying politics behind the collective memories we have of our indigenous alienation and historical trauma. These manifest in ways my heritage is commodified by cultural institutions–forces commanding meaning-making–that are under the clutches of capital. As film and photography deliberatively frame the human experience, they stand as representations of their subjects, the material world in which they exist, and the appropriations of these, enabling me to confront what reflects the producer’s gaze on a more visceral latitude compared to other art forms; that is why, I said, it would be fruitful to examine Khavn dela Cruz’ film, Balangiga: Howling Wilderness to pilgrimize a discourse that ruminates how the Filipino confounds and negotiates colonial modernity. So much of our tragic histories have remained in the dusty pages of books that never transcended into the Filipino consciousness because of inadequate memorialization and unstable historical representation, alongside the foreign media and values we continue to adopt. Hence, the scope of my ruminations shall navigate a glimpse to the various “representations” of Philippine culture, who “benefited” from this representation, what was included and excluded from this representation, why I find this representation problematic.

An Overview of the Film

Balangiga: Howling Wilderness is an arthouse experimental film that incites the audience to reminisce a wartime United States-occupied Samar amidst indiscriminate attacks targeted at Filipinos by the American military days following the Battle of Balangiga. The spectator perceives the film from the gaze of 8-year-old Kulas, drawing you to follow his exodus throughout the countryside with his grandfather Apoy Buray, their caribou Melchora and their pullet Salvi, and a toddler they name as Bola, salvaged from what remains of a town burnt to the ground after an uprising. As they journey towards Quinapundan, their encounters with others–Filipino or Spaniard–color the spectrum of attitudes inhabitants have towards the Americans; these include–but are not merely limited to–apprehensive relief within the liminality of evading their presence, masochistic attraction, nihilistic nonchalance, and complete condemnation. As the land falls into the grasp of these imperialist aliens, we lament with Kulas as he loses all that he cherishes: Salvi is grilled as food for their survival; Apoy Buray later dies of illness; Melchora, from the orders of a soldier who caught them at gunpoint, is slaughtered by Kulas heartbreakingly; Bola starves to death; his grandfather’s memento, an anting-anting, is stolen by a couple who took him in and eventually betrayed him; his innocence to the ravages of war that taught him how to pull the trigger and to see straight into the eyes of an American hacked to death by townsfolk. With glimpses momentarily obscured from the real and the surreal, the film ends with Kulas seeing Melchora “fly” as he lies by the shallow end of the river–a euphemism for his passing.

For Whom the Bells Toll? Who Benefited from the Representation?

I am proud to say that the representation in question brought benefits, however fleeting, to the Filipino people. By capturing our struggles on film, the work has served to immortalize them, even amidst the turn of events in our histories that transpired beyond the film’s ending.

From a previous reading in a class on culture in high school, Susan Wright inculcated within me that heritage and the processes of meaning-making have traditionally been sites of power; whoever subjugates institutions that establish and maintain meaning reigns triumphant. The land I stand on perennially witnessed the deliverance of my country from one imperialist overlord to the next and disheveled the meaning-making processes that essentially preserved my identity to debris, now inadequate to reclaim the authentic anatomy it had from precolonial societies. While the philosopher David Hume ushered discernment that my identity is an arbitrary social construct, what I grieve most, however, is the total liberation we may have had in our thinking if it were not for the Americans introducing education with a high-risk and high-cost expense: subjugating our minds for their conquests. It may be what former generations needed, but the cognitive dissonance in ruminating the roots of such ‘legacy’ from them reverberates to this day at a personal level.

Perhaps this is why I found it disillusioning the moment I became aware of the story behind Balangiga, especially when snippets of its realities never made it into my elementary and high school classes for social studies.

The film transcends what our history classes failed to teach us, giving us a bare view of what really happened in the past. While academics and cultural authorities face constant pressures to preserve mementos in archives, the film proceeds to democratize new ways of seeing and of looking for other information sources to excavate the lesser-revealed stories of a nation held hostage by the politics of memory and the dominant voices that puppeteer our (mis)education which often restrains us from conquering alternative truths and uplifting our critical thinking.

Filipino by the Margin, Justified: What and Who Are Included and Excluded from the Narrative? Was the Representation Problematic?

Khavn dela Cruz provided us glimpses of war, its effects on innocent lives, and how it is mainly driven by political powers who may never feel the consequences of their decisions firsthand. For a country constantly grappling with nuanced political problems on memory and representation, I believe that the portrayal of Khavn of our past was justified and not problematic. I have come to understand through Susan Wright the culture is often used to terraform communities. 'Culture', which had seemed an impediment, now appeared as a resource to negotiate their coexistence with the dominant society. This makes sense, therefore, when we consider the following:

Until 2018, I want to point out that the Balangiga Bells were with the US for more than a hundred years and it was excessively tedious for us to retrieve them.

In 2012, Governor Matt Mead of Wyoming–where the Balangiga bells were then–made clear that:

“I strongly oppose any efforts to deconstruct our war memorials that honor our fallen soldiers. The Balangiga Bells symbolize the valor of American soldiers fallen in a massacre.”

Then Philippine vice-president Binay replied:

“While we respect the fact that the Bells serve as a war memorial for US soldiers who were killed in Balangiga, I hope that the United States will take into consideration that the Bells are a memorial as well to the many innocent civilians who were murdered in the wake of the indiscriminate retaliatory attack ordered by General Jacob H. Smith.”

It was lip-service in the way the government addressed the “special meaning” of the bells for Filipinos then, airing lackluster sentiments of remembrance for the heroes of Balangiga in the name of reclaiming those treasures of the nation which really are just another legacy of another colonizer. In that interview, Binay recounts the atrocities incited by the US. I realized eventually that the disillusionment I felt was palpable at a collective level since even those acquainted with the massacre incident the bells now symbolize are just as confused as to which side of the nationalities involved have been “massacred”.

This version of truth then obscures the massacares American troops sieged not only to Balangiga but in the region of Samar and the greater genocide experienced by the entire archipelago. There, we failed to explicitly bring to light the conquest of US imperialism and the local ruling class they negotiated with who mechanized war against the Filipino masses in the past that was constituted by mostly peasants.

Even after a century, it is worrying that we neglect questioning American authorities who proliferate and overlook sustained violence against other nations whose machineries, powers, and resources are not as strong as theirs. I noticed that this is a trend in great power conflicts where bilateral or multilateral parties do not only engage in armed confrontation, but also in the aggressive distortion of a nation’s identity and history that coercively shapes the public psyche to favor class interests.

The destruction of lives, the impunity towards memorabilia, and the perversion of Filipino narratives has since been a shared history between the colonizer and the people and places they terraform. Hence, scholars of culture and history must strongly engage in debunking deleterious mythologies made by others for their interests. Beyond this, we owe history to realize the wisdom it imparts from our past experiences.

Before Khavn’s films, the Amerians used public diplomacy as soft power to overpower Filipino academics who often have been confined within the [ivory] towers of academia. The unsuspecting description of the Filipino siege as “unprovoked” is a trivialized repetition of the more assertive discourse forced upon us since we were subjugated to their imperialist conquests from the last century. Local historians lamented the popular association to Balangiga’s history of becoming a howling wilderness as a “massacre”. The US brands it with repetition the moment this part of the history is brought up as an “affair”, or an isolated conflict that is painted to be detached from the war they stood as its kingpin. The thing is, these narratives confuse and neglect the reality that the siege led by the Filipino patriots against the Americans was an admissible intervention of resistance against US conquest.

Representation is not an either-or proposition. To truly understand film and society, we must be willing to question long-held beliefs and traditions. It is paradoxical that we continue to write stories that reinforce the very notions we seek to challenge. As a Filipino, I believe we must reclaim our narrative from the clutches of colonialism, post-colonialism, and neocolonialism. These forces have left an indelible mark on our society, and our stories must reflect that reality. But we must also be mindful of the machinery of film production, which often perpetuates the same injustices we seek to upend. In short, our art must be a reflection of our struggle to break free from the chains of the past and forge a new path forward. It is only by challenging the status quo that we can hope to effect meaningful change in our society.