Negotiating truth and beauty: Lino Brocka’s Insiang

During an interview discussing first world and third world cinemas, filmmaker and scholar Hamid Naficy asked Filipino auteur Lino Brocka about the genre of films that had the biggest impact on him. Brocka referenced “musicals, especially the MGM films made in the late 1940s and early 1950s” as playing a significant role in “creating the ambition of going into movies”.¹ In particular, Brocka invoked Esther Williams’ resplendent underwater sequence in George Sidney’s musical romance Jupiter’s Darling (1955) as a personally defining cinematic moment. For a young Brocka, who initially had ambitions to pursue acting rather than directing, Williams’ performance in a pool replete with magically animated sculptures was the source of playful imitation. In transposing the fantasy scene from Jupiter’s Darling to his own experience in the Philippines, Brocka was not dissuaded by the limitations of his immediate reality: 

I would go swimming in the irrigation canals and trying to copy Esther Williams, I would smile and dance under water. I would open my eyes under water but end up swallowing a lot of dirty water. The irrigation water was very dirty because that’s where they threw everything: dead pigs, people would pee in the water, houses were built on them and, of course, all kinds of waste and manure was in the water. But I didn’t care, there was this particular spot we would go swimming and all around was this floating debris.² 

In building a distinct cinematic oeuvre that spanned the 1970s through to his untimely death in 1991, Brocka did not turn to the fantasy that captured his youthful imagination as the material for his films. Rather, he used the bleak, tarnished and sordid viscera of everyday life to flesh out his exploration of marginalised members of Filipino society. Brocka opens Insiang (1976), his most globally well-known feature, in an abattoir that is soaked in blood and reverberating with the tortured squeals of pigs being slaughtered. The brutal butchering and flagrant disregard for suffering is not confined to the slaughterhouse; it echoes throughout the subsequent scenes of Brocka’s film.   

Shot on location in Tondo, a predominantly slum-filled district of Manila lining the Pasig River, Insiang tracks the spiralling of the film’s titular character (played by Hilda Koronel), who lives with her abusive and overprotective mother, Tonya (Mona Lisa). The already tense relationship between mother and daughter intensifies when Tonya’s younger boyfriend, Dado (Ruel Vernal), moves in with them after Tonya evicts the freeloading family of Insiang’s absent father. Unable to contain his mounting passion for Insiang, Dado sexually assaults her one evening, shifting the trajectory of the film from family melodrama to insidious rape-revenge. 

The first Filipino film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, Insiang’s inclusion in the 1978 Director’s Fortnight section was almost thwarted by the Philippines’ Board of Censors for Motion Pictures (BCMP). The banning was supported by the First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, who disapproved of the film’s graphic depiction of poverty and violence.³ Indeed, both Insiang’s subject matter and its cinéma-vérité aesthetics, which situate the viewer within the suffocating filth and squalor of Tondo’s gangland topography, did little to support the national mythology of “truth, beauty, and goodness” promoted by the First Lady.⁴ Although not expressly stated, political subtext is woven into Insiang’s story. Insiang went through all stages of production during a period in which Filipino cinema was subject to a set of BCMP guidelines that had the “job of expunging the sex and violence” that previously “disgraced the nation’s cinematic and political landscapes”.⁵ Given this background, Insiang’s portrayal of an environment in which acts of violent sexual transgression are dismissed as a masculine liability and police justice is regarded as ineffective is deeply subversive. To this end, Brocka’s film hardly conforms to the paradoxical creation of a national filmic identity that, in the words of Talitha Espiritu, had to traverse the thin line of “Imelda’s demand that local films authentically mirror the culture of the people while also serving the developmental initiatives of the martial law cultural state”.⁶

The prohibition under the guidelines of “perverted or abnormal personalities”, “drug addiction”, “incest and adultery”, as well as “violence and brutality” left little room for urban reality.⁷ However, as part of the Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema, Brocka was concerned with freeing the country’s national cinema “from the slick commercial and soft porn product it had previously been known for and move it in a more personal, socially progressive, and artistically challenging direction”.⁸  In the face of censorship, it is the social progressiveness of Brocka’s film that is most significant. The opening sequence of Insiang is a clear rejection of the sanitised restrictions enforced by the Marcos regime – from the savagery of the abattoir to shots of children playing in landfill debris to sweeping views of the ramshackle architecture of Tondo’s shanty towns. The extent to which Insiang incorporates a politically acceptable view of Filipino culture is limited to the covers of the serial magazine, Liwayway, that are stuck on the walls in Insiang’s home. The images of happy couples on the covers serve as a depressing counterpoint to the sexual abuse Insiang endures at the hands of Dado and the empty declarations of love offered by her boyfriend, Bebot (Rez Cortez). In presenting this visual contrast, Brocka silently emphasises the harsh irreconcilability of the social reality with Imelda Marcos’s call for “truth, beauty, and goodness.”

Brocka’s non-compliance with Marcosian politics was central to his approach to filmmaking. As he commented in a 1980 interview, “What is very important is that we develop an audience for Filipino films, to help them to discriminate and accept better things in life. You can’t develop an audience by just giving them fantasies and escapist films. I want to make films that will somehow put up a mirror to them and help them make up their minds about their values […] I want to confront people with reality”.⁹ The magnification of reality in Insiang is not confined to the film’s setting in Tondo; it is also cleverly embedded in the viewing experience. Insiang is frequently filmed through the gauzy veil of the mosquito net suspended above her bed and through partitions, such as the wooden bars that frame the shopfront where her best friend, Ludy (Nina Lorenzo), works. Although these spatial metaphors of entrapment could be regarded as a visualisation of Tonya’s controlling presence, it also gestures towards the authoritarian regime that confronts all the characters inhabiting the slums. When Insiang’s cousin reveals his despair at not being able to find a job, she tells him to “endure it”, but his reply reveals the pervasiveness of hardship in Tondo: “Up till when? Will it always be like this…always desperate?”

This feeling of inescapable claustrophobia extends to the zoomed close-ups that cinematographer Conrado Baltazar employs at the conclusion of scenes, with the camera lingering almost uncomfortably on the faces of the film’s characters. Although these stylised close-ups could be dismissed for their overt theatricality and their clash with the vérité realism established in the film, they also serve as a provocation that holds the viewer’s gaze and forces them to confront what they are watching unfold on-screen. Perhaps as a sly nod to Marcos’s call for beauty, there are some fleeting moments of visual splendour in Insiang – such as the emerald greens, buttercup yellows, vibrant fuchsias and deep violets of the clothing that Insiang launders to earn money. However, Brocka refuses to rescue his protagonist and transport her to one of the Hollywood musicals that he watched as a young boy. Rather, his unassailable commitment to capturing authenticity underlines that if you are searching for truth, you may have to face some ugliness. 

Insiang (1976 Philippines 95 minutes)

Prod. Co: Cinemanila Prod: Ruby Tiong Tan Dir: Lino Brocka Scr: Mario O’Hara, Lamberto E. Antonio Mus: Minda D. Azarcon Phot: Conrado Baltazar Ed: Augusto Salvador Prod Des: Fiel Zabat 

Cast: Hilda Koronel, Mona Lisa, Rez Cortez, Marlon Ramirez, Ruel Vernal, Nina Lorenzo, Mely Mallari, Carpi Asturias

Endnotes