Turumba

Kidlat Tahimik's second film Turumba (Kidlat Kulog Productions, 1983) offers a virtual textbook demonstration of the penetration of capital into a traditional village, and the transformation of collective relations by the market and money relationships. It is a process symbolized by the impact of the cash nexus on the religious ritual designated by the film's title and turns on the change visited by production for the market on Romy (Inigo Vito), the musician-performer traditionally responsible for this annual event. It is a festival in which what are separated in modern societies as culture and religion have not yet been dissociated and those whose beauty the tourist-spectators who are Turumba's Western public can still distantly glimpse and reconstruct from behind the interposed medium of the camera and its travelogue language. Here already, therefore, formal elements that will be found more ambitiously deployed and developed in Mababangong Bangungot (1977) can be enumerated. A secondary symbolism marked as such and the co-optation of co-optation involved in admitting and ostentatiously foregrounding the inauthenticity of the Western spectator and of the average travelogue spectacle. Here, handicrafts are the vehicle for what never changes and is yet changed irrevocably beyond all recognition. A German tourist-businesswoman likes some of the the decorations used in the festival and orders more. Family and then village itself must be enlisted in the gradual mass production of these items, which eventually destroy the cyclical or ritual time of the village and prevent the organizer for wasting any more of it on the festival which was the source of the objects in question in the first place. Even the crudeness of the final irony as their reward, Romy and his son Kadu (Homer Abiad) are given a trip to Europe, to the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Third World visiting the first at the very moment in which the latter is about to be violently impacted by the former is consistent with Kidlat's aesthetic, in which a gesture toward language and representations is preferable ti the thing seemingly achieved and thereby mistaken for the real.