Mapping Resistance: Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light

Morning seeps into the alleys of Manila’s Chinatown. Vendors open their stalls as kalesas rattle and trash is swept away.¹ The air thickens with the scent of incense wafting from temples, blending the sacred and the ordinary. Julio Madiaga (Rafael Roco Jnr.) stands on the corner of Ongpin and Misericordia streets, his eyes wide with longing and apprehension. These sepia-toned vignettes end and colours appear, marking Julio’s entry into Manila’s harsh reality.

Lino Brocka’s Maynila, Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Light, 1975) (hereafter Maynila) follows Julio, a young fisherman from the rural island province of Marinduque who travels to Manila in search of his beloved Ligaya Paraiso (Hilda Koronel), who was recruited by their neighbour, Mrs. Cruz (Juling Bagabaldo), to study in Manila. But Ligaya has vanished into the city’s shadows. Julio’s desperate pursuit takes him through Manila’s underbelly – from construction sites in Binondo as the film’s locus, to cramped boarding houses, decaying cinema houses, and red-light districts.² 

As he navigates the city, fellow migrant workers Atong (Lou Salvador Jr.) and Pol (Tommy Abuel) guide him through Manila’s working-class districts and managing survival networks. His journey culminates in the devastating discovery that Ligaya has been forced into prostitution. Ligaya’s name, “Ligaya” meaning ‘happiness’ or ‘joy’ becomes ironic as she is contained within the brothel’s monitored interior. Julio’s movement charts Manila as a geography of entrapment rather than a site for opportunity, which exposes how the city ‘corrupts’ its rural migrants.

Brocka’s Counter-map of Manila

Maynila is one of Philippine cinema’s most searing portraits of urban decay under authoritarian rule.³ Released three years after martial law (1972-1981) was declared, this neo-noir film confronts audiences with images that the dictatorship sought to suppress. While Imelda Marcos promoted her vision of the Philippine capital city as a gleaming “City of Man,”⁴ complete with cultural edifices, manicured boulevards, and sanitised tourist zones, Brocka exposes Manila’s harsh realities, where urban citizens’ survival depends on precarious labour, makeshift housing, and shadow economies. 

In Manila’s slums, construction sites, and brothels, Julio’s passage becomes Maynila’s true subject. Cultural geographer Tim Edensor explains how “ruins offer opportunities for challenging and deconstructing the imprint of power on the city.”⁵ Edensor’s framework reflects how Brocka weaponises Manila’s decay against state propaganda. Julio’s traversal of Manila punctures the Marcoses’ glossy projections, and a simple act like walking becomes subversive – an embodied critique that reveals the brutal inequalities the regime sought to conceal.

Walking as Insurgency

Julio’s wandering threads Manila’s disparate districts into a geography of dispossession. Boarding houses register the claustrophobia of working-class existence, where density erodes privacy and intimacy. Construction sites promise modernisation but are overseen by corrupted foremen who withhold wages, exposing development as a mechanism of exploitation. Brothels and red-light districts mark the commodification of desire, and the narrative crux reveals Ligaya’s coerced sex work. Ligaya and her body are a spatial endpoint, while Julio is a mobile subject. This gendered spatial division reproduces a patriarchal urban geography where women’s spaces (brothels, boarding houses) are sites of containment, while men’s spaces (streets, construction sites) enable movement, however precarious.

The construction site in Binondo is a liminal space – neither a completed structure nor an empty lot. Julio and fellow workers labour within the scaffolding that promises modernity, but delivers only debt and wage theft. The site’s constant motion (workers moving and materials shifting, overseen by supervisors) contrasts ironically with its structural stasis. Buildings rise but workers remain trapped in cycles of exploitation. Brocka’s camera lingers on corrugated metal, exposed rebar, and temporary shelters. The film utilises images of construction as a visual metaphor for incomplete modernisation. The Marcos regime’s developmentalist promises are perpetually ‘under construction’ – they are never fulfilled.

These urban spaces become sites for articulating counter-memories of narratives that contradict the regime’s glossy portrayal of Manila by documenting the survival strategies, spatial displacement, and everyday violence experienced by the urban poor. Maynila makes visible those who are “banished to the periphery of social graciousness” by recording histories that official propaganda deliberately obscured.⁶ These spaces are nodes in a system of urban extraction, which illustrates how the city consumes its inhabitants: labour, shelter, intimacy, and sexuality are stripped down to precarious exchanges. Julio’s route binds these spaces together, revealing how Manila’s modernisation depends on the disposability of rural migrants like himself and Ligaya.

The marginal spaces Julio traverses become what Edensor describes as areas that create “unfamiliar contexts for improvised performances” that respond to chance encounters and facilitate alternative pathways through the city.⁷ The politically-charged act of walking in Maynila challenges the Marcos regime’s vision of urban modernity. Under Martial Law, the Board of Censors for Motion Pictures (BCMP) regulated film content to suppress depictions of urban squalor, sex, and dissent. Brocka navigated censorship by disguising social critique within melodrama’s “safe” conventions, framing Maynila as a tragic love story. By 1975, his work circulated in global film festivals, making outright suppression politically costly for a regime seeking international legitimacy.⁸ Brocka’s insistence on showing these forbidden images transforms Maynila into a cinematic testimony and political defiance.⁹ 

Julio’s walking subverts the sanitised façade through his presence in spaces that were supposed to be invisible. When Julio enters cramped tenements, the harsh textures of exploitation surface: petty trade, sexual labour, and covert exchanges. Walking is a form of resistance and inscription, which records neglected temporalities of waiting, enduring, and the survival of the working class, inscribing their experiences onto the screen. 

City of Ruins vs City of Man

Imelda Marcos championed the “City of Man” and its development through massive construction of buildings to project an image of prosperous, modern Manila; her fervour exhibiting signs of an “edifice complex.”¹⁰ Brocka frames Manila with overlapping historical layers: Quiapo’s throng of vendors and devotees (Spanish-era Catholicism blending with folk religiosity); Escolta’s decaying cinemas (erected during the American Occupation of the 1900s-1940s); the grand churches of Intramuros (from the Spanish period of 1565-1898); the old homes in Santa Cruz (belonging to the 19th century merchant class); and the Port Area’s industrial monotony (20th century maritime capitalism). The film utilises the city’s architecture to embody class struggle, as Manila’s slums are rendered in full density: crowded dwellings, the cacophony of noises, and stifling heat. 

For Edensor, ruins are fragmented allegories of memory: incomplete and resistant to full interpretation.¹¹ Contrasting with the Marcos regime’s state architecture, images of the proposed “City of Man” are sporadic in the film’s diegesis – the absence of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines, Folk Arts Theatre, and Manila Film Centre gestures to Brocka’s refusal to validate their utopian image. The film replaces authoritarian monumentalism with structures of exploitation and survival. Julio’s path, from unfinished scaffolds to crumbling tenements, neon-lit cinemas and shadowy brothels, embodies the tension between authoritarian fantasy and precarious living, echoing centuries of uneven modernisation and interrupted progress.

Spatial Closure and Entrapment

The film’s ending shows Julio cornered in an alley after killing Ah-Tek (Tommy Yap), Ligaya’s captor, before being cornered by the police in an alley. The alley, as an archetypal urban crack, is where Julio’s wandering ends. Brocka refuses a melodramatic and redemptive ending: there is no escape, no return to rural Marinduque, no reunion with Ligaya. The spatial logic remains unbroken. Rural migrants enter Manila but cannot leave, becoming absorbed into the city’s machinery of exploitation. The final shot with the police closing in as Julio is trapped against crumbling walls concretises the film’s spatial argument. Manila becomes an active agent, a carnivorous space that consumes its dispossessed.

Mapping Resistance

Unlike the sanitised spectacles of urban development, Manila’s spaces resist easy commodification or transformation into tourist attractions. Its marginal areas become sites where different ways of understanding the city can emerge, as spaces that foster critical consciousness about urban inequality and state power. Maynila initially appears as a melodrama of lost love, but becomes a cartography of urban insurgency. Through Julio’s wandering, Brocka stages Manila as a disputed space, fractured between the authoritarian vision of the “City of Man” and as a “City of Ruins.”  

In Brocka’s counter-map, Manila’s lived realities appear through the footsteps of its dispossessed. Julio’s journey testifies to the precarious conditions endured by the poor and the violent system that consumes them. Spectators accompany Julio, Ligaya and the city’s neglected citizens through these spaces, who experience the weight of systemic exploitation. Maynila’s documentation of spatial dispossession remains urgent as Manila’s urban poor still face displacement under successive regimes’ infrastructure projects. Contemporary housing rights activists and film artists reference Brocka’s spatial politics when contesting Manila’s neoliberal redevelopment, which mirrors the Marcos-era contradictions between state monumentalism and working-class precarity that Maynila exposed. Like the steady glow of neon lights in Manila’s darkest corners, the film holds an unblinking focus on lives that no regime can eliminate, reminding viewers that cinema, too, remembers what power seeks to erase.

Maynila, Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag/Manila in the Claws of Light (1975, Philippines, 125 mins)

Prod. Co: Cinema Artists Philippines Prod: Miguel de Leon, Severino Manotok Dir: Lino Brocka Scr: Clodualdo del Mundo Jnr. Phot: Miguel de Leon, Clodualdo Del Mundo Jnr. Mus: Max Jocson Ed: Edgardo Jarlego, Ike Jarlego Jnr. Prod Des: Alfonso Socito, Soxy Topacio

Cast: Rafael Roco, Jnr., Hilda Koronel, Lou Salvador Jnr., Joonee Gamboa, Pio De Castro III, Danilo Posadas, Joe Jardi, Spanky Manikan, Edipolo Erosido, Pancho Pelagio, Tommy Yap, Juling Bagabaldo

Endnotes