Bliss Cua Lim (University of California, Irvine)
The lost history of the first, tragically short-lived National Film Archive of the Philippines (NFAP, 1981-1986) is entangled in the fate of several other cultural and political initiatives undertaken by the Marcos dictatorship, some of which survive and many others which did not. What was the place of the film archive in the cultural policies of the Marcos regime? How was the archive articulated with the aspirations, excesses, and abuses of the dictatorship? The paper retraces the impact of the regime’s densely reticulated web of film on the NFAP, setting the Film Archive alongside two other cultural institutions and edifices with which its fate was entangled: the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Manila Film Center. Exploring the ironic legacy of the Marcos dictatorship’s film policies and institutions, this paper focuses on two enduring problems bequeathed by the Marcos era film archive to the present day: first, the issue of presidential appointments; and second, the issue of anarchival temporality, which forms the flip side of the dictatorship’s frenetic pursuit of perpetuity.
Bliss Cua Lim is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (Duke University Press, 2009; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011). She is a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press and serves on the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media and Society published by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. Her second book manuscript, currently in progress, is on the challenges of archival film preservation facing Philippine cinema.