amBisyon 2010: Blurry vision, message lost…

By ISKHO F. LOPEZ

The growing popularity of independent movies (indies) is seen to be a trend towards the resurrection of the local movie industry. The successive gains local filmmakers have achieved at international film festivals most recently compliment the idea. Maybe so or hopefully, it does follow this positive trend. But certainly, an event like amBisyon 2010 is no occasion for Indie enthusiasts to gloat.

Ambitionmeans aspiration, desire, or the goal an individual wants to realize. Thus, ambisyon in the vernacular would be an appropriate name for a project aimed at encouraging the liberal expression of ideas. With the project focused particularly on the potential of the film medium as communication tool, amBisyon lends itself to a clever, more refined redefinition and becomes “ang vision.”

As reported, ANC, the ABS-CBN News Channel intended amBisyon 2010 for young aspiring filmmakers, for them to have a venue for their craft, as it would likewise be an opportunity for the network to “contribute to the national election awareness effort.” Where programming was concerned, the idea sounded rather innovative, which was fine, as it would be an act of benevolence or gesture of compassion for the filmmakers as well. (Applause!)

Its implementation would be an entirely different story, however. Participants were invited. Some 14 from a list of active filmmakers, with the six others culled from aspiring filmmakers who were encouraged to apply, which involved submitting scripts of their short films. Finally, a total of 20 short films led to a semblance of a festival of sorts. One could imagine that all these looked good and feasible on paper. Ambitious, too, but it was manageable.

Grand premiere

ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs head Maria Ressa didn’t mince her words during the grand premiere of the network’s 20-film project at the Cultural Center of the Philippines on April 6. “We need to see the world in a different way and we need to have thefreedom to express it,” she said during the opening ceremonies. (Shivers.)

The poster for the event graphically presented the concept and paid tribute to the participating film directors. Each of the 19 filmmakers who gracedthe occasion (one was out of the country and could not attend), was called onstage and presented with a poster for keepsake. The formal proceedings was such that one participant quipped, “Parang awards night. Sana isinama ko ang nanay ko.”

To say that amBisyon “is about the dreams of a nation, the vision of a future in the context of a country locked in poverty” is a loaded statement. That it is about “hope, possibility, and truth – through the lenses of those who tell its stories” is, to say the least ambitious, indeed.

Even contextually pretentious, considering the corporate profile of ABS-CBN, a television network that enjoys the popularity of its commercial program packages.

This is not to downgrade the well-meaning effort behind the concept but to underscore the irony.

The project, amBisyon 2010 may have laudable objectives but to say that it succeeded with this initial venture is highly debatable. What appears rather clear is that its implementation is confused, its organizers rather vaguely familiar with the efficacy of its structure. There may have been comprehensible moments but sophomoric should best describe the effort. To generalize it as successful can be downright misleading, in effect offering filmmakers and the public false hopes.

No amount of window dressing will sufficiently camouflage the shortcomings of the project. It was generous for the likes of Brillante Mendoza, Jeffrey Jeturian, Erik Matti, and Raymund Red, among others to have shared their prominence with amBisyon thus lending it a veneer of legitimacy. Unless the idea is to revel in our shortcomings, then that’s another story.

Rated X

The Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) may have unwittingly boosted viewer interest for amBisyon 2010 when it gave “Ganito Tayo Ngayon, Paano Tayo Bukas” (Jeturian) and “Ayos Ka” (Mendoza) an X, which prohibits the public screening of both. The board eventually reconsidered the rating of Mendoza’s music video and changed it to an R. Network management is reportedly inclined to seek a legal way out of the predicament.

Jeturian’s short film shows a newspaper with itsheadline heralding the administration’s economic prospects eventually being trashed literally, as a man wipes feces off his foot with it. Evidently, the board resolved the shot as repulsive with the newspaper page carrying a photograph of the incumbent President. The graphic rendering may have been considerably irreverent but the metaphor undeniably relevant as it echoes the public disenchantment for the current leadership. Expectedly, the MTRCB was not amused and its members will argue to no end its right to censure such a filmic dare.

The music video is easier to justify. Mendoza opts to document a prevailing scene – utter depravation, grime and squalor interestingly contrasted it with rap tempo and innocent smiles in the faces of children. Besides such an offering, what else?

Disarray, disorder, and confusion

A variety of 20 short films, from four to eight minutes in length, translate to a diversity of views and treatments of pressing national issues like justice and human rights, education, health, economy, environment, population, poverty, security, corruption and democracy. Twenty film directors, 10 issues and a marathon screening of the short films at the CCP Dream Theater, and the result was expectedly disarray, disorder, and confusion.

Erik Matti chooses to be lyrical in his treatment of the population issue in “The More, The Meniyer,” tracing its beginnings with the inhabitants of a cartoon paradise and the first couple’s simplistic interpretation of the multiplication dictum from an almighty.

A documentation of events following the Maguindanao tragedy with scenes shown in reverse suggesting the wistful thoughts and anxieties among the relatives of victims. Balloons fall from the sky, petals briskly fly into waiting hands; people walk backwards indicating the futile desire for events to return to wherever it started in “Requiem for M,” a short film by Kiri Dalena.

Memories of martial law moving onwards to a regime change are recalled in a short film titled Wasteland by Paolo Villaluna with a family losing just about everything in the process, with their sense of values in shatters as well. Concentrating on style, “Wasteland” offers charming vignettes, a lot of melodramatic moments with Snooky Serna and Gerard Madrid, while its message as empty as the household of its characters.

Villaluna, who conceptualized the project with fellow director Emman Dela Cruz, said he hopes to answer his own questions about the country through this project. “Not only is amBisyon 2010 supposed to inspire but more importantly, it’s supposed to provoke people into thinking again about their future,” he explained.

The amBisyon 2010 films are being shown via a five-part TV special on ANC (SkyCable channel 27) at 11 p.m. every Friday until the week before the elections. For more details on the project, just visit www.abs-cbnnews.com/ambisyon2010.

A multi-media practitioner, Ishko F. Lopez has worked as feature writer, columnist and editor in several major publications. He scripted TV material in the ’70s and is credited as screenwriter of about 20 movies.

homestretch blues

dismaying but interesting.   our minds and communications are on mercury-retrograde mode for the next three, four weeks, right smack in the last three weeks of the presidential campaign, which means that instead of moving on to other important issues we’ll be going back over old ground, which means more of hacienda luisita, alleged psychological incapacity, lack of experience, etc. with regard to noynoy, and more of c-5-at-taga, landgrabbing charges, and the poverty spin with regard to villar.   we will see how low either camp would stoop to discredit the other all the way to election day.  mas madaling magsiraan (hindi mauubusan) kaysa magmagaling (mauubusan).

are we going to see survey kulelats gordon, bro.eddie, jc, perlas, jamby giving up the fight to endorse either noynoy or villar, erap or gibo?   i seriously doubt it just because, if memory serves, it hasn’t happened in recent multiparty history.   to the very end they all think they have a chance, surveys are questionable, anything can happen, never say die, not even when llamadong llamado ang mga kalaban.   a pinoy macho thing, i suspect ;)) but hey i’d love to be disproven on this, just because it could tip the balance one way or another, make for a most definite win for the lucky one.   and then, again, maybe not.

what we ARE likely to see, i’m afraid, even now, are all kinds of glitches with machines, esp. those that have to do with communications and transportation, anything that moves people and ideas around, including the machines for automated counting of votes and conveying of results.   sana hindi.   sana suwertehin tayo, for a change.   but the odds are against us, so dapat ay paghandaan by having plans B and C, just in case.

meanwhile i still don’t have a president.   and i haven’t stopped wishing, how retrograde of me, that it were mar running for president and noynoy for vp.   i disagree with the notion that if noynoy had run for prez later rather than sooner, he could not have counted on the same phenomenal love and energy a la edsa generated by (ninoy’s) cory’s death that birthed the clamor for the unico hijo’s candidacy last august.

i don’t see why not.   i think that noynoy as vp (mar would have won easily, with noynoy behind him) could have used the next six years to clean up his act, do the morally, and politically, correct thing with regard to hacienda luisita, AFTER reading of course ninoy’s testament from a prison cell and other writings that might enlighten him a little about the Left.   if there were no poverty and oppression, there would be no Left;  snubbing and demonizing the Left (instead of finding a way for Left and Right to work together for the good of the whole) would not have been ninoy’s way, is no way to honor ninoy’s legacy, in fact it dishonors ninoy’s legacy.   anyway, if he used the six years wisely andcreatively, maybe also studied the education problem thoroughly — an additional two years of schooling is not the answer —  i have no doubt that the cory-ninoy effect would have kicked in as powerfully, and there would not be so many undecideds in 2016.

for now hindi ko pa mapatawad si noynoy for the hacienda luisita killings and for being so anti-Left, or is it anti-poor.   i guess i’m still hoping to hear him say something reassuring, to the effect that he will prevail upon the cojuangco-aquino clan to follow the law and give up luisita to the farmers, and that he would snub the likes of palparan and get the military to produce jonas burgos atbpang missing activists.

lacking either or both, well, there’s villar, pero kahit kayanin ko siyang patawarin for c-5 at taga and, even, the obscene spending, ay di ko yata kayang patawarin his obdurate stand against reproductive health.   si erap, he got his turn already, and he botched it.   gibo looks good but he reeks of status quo politics.   amboy gordon i considered, but only briefly.   bro.eddie is too fundamentally religious, perlas too green, jc too sophomoric.   jamby at least has not only the best-looking FG (french gentleman), she has the best platform of the lot.   so hmm, if not noynoy, it could be jamby for me, a protest vote, on principle.

plagiarism, manny pangilinan, karen davila

no wonder manny pangilinan a.k.a. MVP needs a ghostwriter for his speeches.  if his apology to fr. ben nebres is any indication — i’m supposing he wrote it himself — his english isn’t all that great pala:

I have been told last night that portions of my graduation remarks – in particular my address to the Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences – had been borrowed from certain other graduation speeches.

“i have been told last night”…??? eeeww.  this from an ateneo cum laude alumnus?

anyway, like i’ve said in twitter and facebook, at least pangilinan had the grace to be embarrassed and to apologize and take responsibility for the plagiarism instead of excusing himself and blaming only his writers a la ANC’s karen davila.  better yet he has the delicadeza (so rare!) to “wish to retire” from his official duties at the ateneo.

I am truly regretful for it. I already have too many battles to fight, and some of them I wish not to have to fight. In this instance, I do not want to, and would seek only the honourable and principled way out. The matter at hand may rest after this public apology, but it gives me a lot of personal discomfort to continue to be closely involved with Ateneo affairs after this incident. I am afraid the damage has been done – wala talaga akong mukhang ihaharap pagkatapos.

With much regret, Fr Ben, I would wish to retire from my official duties at the Ateneo.

in his place though i not only “would wish to retire,” i would simply resign and not give the ateneo any option but to accept it.  unless of course he is willing to be persuaded to stay, which would be not only masochistic of him, now that his rockstar status in campus has been degraded by a clear lack of “smarts” at least when it comes to PR ghostwriters, it would also send the message to / set the pattern for students and teachers alike that one only has to immediately apologize when found out, and ayos na ang buto-buto.

as for karen davila, she (along with maria ressa) must be thanking her lucky stars na hindi siya kasing bigtime ni manny pangilinan at hindi ako celebrity like oprah & jk rowling.  but if they think na nakalimutan na ang aking plagiarism charge re the laban ni cory tv docu that had davila mouthing spiels re EDSA that were clearly lifted from my book without attribution, they have another think coming.

even before MVP messed up, i would get intermittent queries from family and friends, online and off, asking kung ano nang nangyari, lalo na when davila was given her own show on ANC.   my answer always was, i’ll blog about it one of these days.   and mula nang pumutok itong kay MVP, ang daming nagtatanong uli kung kailan ba ako magkukuwento, what am i waiting for.  so, okay, now na.

timeline

august 2.  laban ni cory started airing on ABS-CBN 2, replayed again and again over the next ten days or so.

august 8.  emailed butch h., executive director of the people power foundation that published my book, about the plagiarism, and that i intended to blog it.  he said, go ahead:  “you are the author, after all is said and done.”

august 11.  plagiarism and, uh, karen davila, is that you?

august 12.  heard davila on dzmm teleradyo say that she knew nothing about it, she didn’t write her spiels for that docu.

august 13.  received this email from maria ressa:

From: <Maria_Ressa@abs-cbn.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:51 AM
Subject: Plagiarism Charge

Dear Ms. Stuart-Santiago,

Common friends told me about your blog post. I read both your post and the spirited debate in the responses.

I want to assure you that, as head of ABS-CBN News & Current Affairs, I take your charges seriously.

We do not condone plagiarism in any way.

I’ve started an investigation and will personally let you know the results.

Best,

Maria

august 14.  sat down with a lawyer whom i’d consulted on a property matter some years ago, whoagreed that i had a case, even if the copyright belonged to the publisher that paid me a lump sum for that print edition.  but he advised that we give ressa time (a couple of weeks) to investigate and get back to me, hopefully with at least an apology.  (yes, a quick apology would have sufficed.)

august 25.  having received no more word from ressa, lawyer sent ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. a registered complaint and demand letter.  failure to comply would force us to bring the matter to court and take appropriate action, etc.  (received my copy in the mail august 28)

september 7.  katrina attended poet larry ypil’s book launch where she was informed by a high-profile writer that he and another high-profile writer had received calls from ABS-CBNpersonalities saying that davila was looking to hook up with me in private, but neither presumed to know me well enough to help out; however the high-profile writer’s advice via my daughter was, better to “negotiate” with davila directly rather than go the lawyer-complaint route, or something to that effect.  but i was not interested in under-the-table deals.  i was more interested in seeing where “due process” would take me (or not).  besides if davila really wanted to find me, she could have tried harder.

september 11.   got an email from butch h., informing me that maria ressa was asking for a copy of my book.

also around this time i heard from a familyfriend who knows people high up in ABS-CBN that a serious investigation was going on and that the writer who wrote davila’s spiels was going to get fired if s/he hadn’t been yet, or something to that effect.  texted all this hearsay info to lawyer.

october 7.  texted lawyer: “anong balita?”   he texted back: “no communic8n, feelers from abs cbn?”  i said no, not on my end.  he texted back: “ok, will draft complaint na.”  that was the last i heard from him.

fast forward to feb 15, 2010.  a group of u.p. journalism students requested an interview re my plagiarism charge for a paper they were writing for their journalism ethics class.  of course i said yes, sabay text and email sa lawyer hoping for an update.  no response.

i went ahead with the interview anyway, which forced me to deal with and make sense of the fact that my lawyer seems to have bailed out on me — i had / have seen him on ANC (or maybe it was on Channel 2, or both) being interviewed as a 2010 bet, which should tell me what, that maybe he didn’t go to court with my complaint, as he had promised?  or maybe he did but “due process” is just supersloww?  or maybe he has been prevailed upon to drop the case?  either or, maybe he’s just too busy campaigning to text or email, let me know what’s going on?  maybe he doesn’t need my vote, lol.

bottom line?

i hoped / continue to hope, of course, that my publishers would support my plagiarism charge but maybe they don’t care to pala, in aid perhaps of information dissemination?  in that event, would it mean that anyone can now lift passages from my work?  a pattern, a precedent, has been set?  (please tell me it isn’t so.)

for ABS-CBN the bottom line may be:  she doesn’t own the copyright, she has no case.  hmm.  what did ressa say again?  “We do not condone plagiarism in any way.”   yeah, right.  after all, it is as much a sacred rule of journalism as respecting the confidentiality of one’s sources.

katrina’s take:

This is my issue with the way there has just been silence about this plagiarism case (and now Davila has a new show pa on ANC, que horror!).  The manner in which Mama’s original words were used, while possibly for information dissemination, etc., BECAUSE it was done by ABS-CBN, was really also about PROFIT.  Linawin natin: in the academe, sige, a teacher might read 3 books and do a lecture for a class, even using the authors’ words without attribution, okay lang, walang kumita doon.   But on nationwide commercial and cable television?  Paulit-ulit pa nila ni-replay!  Where is the justice in not even mentioning the author?  Where is the justice in just meeting a plagiarism accusation with silence?

ABS-CBN should be ashamed and embarassed.  Nakakahiya sila.

sabi rin ni alex magno sa philippine star on MVP’s speech::

In the academe and among the literati, plagiarism is a cardinal offense. For professional writers, an instance of plagiarism is a career-ender.

Never mind libel cases. Among opinion writers, that is an occupational hazard — and sometimes a measure of valor. But plagiarism, that kills. It washes away the respect of peers and readers. One opinion writer, many years ago, drifted into purgatory after a hawk-eyed reader spotted plagiarized text in his column.

ah, but davila & ressa, ABS-CBN & ANC, are something else, playing by the rules only when it suits them, in effect lowering the bar for broadcast journalism hereabouts,  what a shame.

they should take the cue from MVP who cares about honor and principle, and doing the right thing, kahit gaano kasakit — mabuhay siya!  and good luck na rin sa kanyang ABC channel 5!

Tagalog, language, deconstructed

Who would have thought that Tagalog could be de-constructed and that a mathematical order found in our use of verb phrases?

Who would have thought that there would be a discrete number of key verbs expressing, covering, every human experience, thought, action, possibility?

Who would have thought that different languages could be working from the same set of verbs, all perfectly lined up in a mathematical grid?

Who would have thought we could get to the bottom of language?

But this is exactly what Luis Umali Stuart, my mathematician-turned-lexicographer-turned-discoverer brother, sets out to demonstrate in his ebook The Secret Grid of Language.  There is a foreword by Nicole Revel, an expert in Anthropological Linguistics and Semantics, and Director of Research since 1988 in the Section 34 (Languages, Representations and Communication) of the French CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research, the largest basic science agency in Europe if not the world).   In Nicole’s words:

Luis approaches the morphosemantic problems of Tagalog in a totally different way: his is a rigorous mathematical intuition and mastery at the service of an extremely difficult empirical database and an observation of the perceptions of motion from the perspective of the speakers themselves.

My contribution to his work was to follow his thought without destroying his vision, while helping him to present his formal analysis in a way acceptable to linguists.  It required (from) me a constant readjustment in order to free myself from classic linguistic references and to enter into another way of perceiving and ordering facts, a formal concrete-abstract way of apprehending an enormous number of roots and their semantic modulations–the subtle onmipresent interplay of affixes in spoken Tagalog–and accessing to the structure underlying them in an explicit manner.

This is a work in Cognitive Semantics but it avoids a complex metalanguage. Its very economy and minimal formulation should be a source of enlightenmentto linguists and neurophysiologists.  I am sure it cannot but please the mathematicians.  I can only hope it will also be of interest to philosophers, for it points to our embodied condition.

Louie had many eureka! moments over the 20 years of his study of Tagalog and fleshing out of the grid, some shared with me on occasional one-on-ones over shots of lambanog, even if I could always only intuitively grasp the significances (not being as cerebral as he).  Here’s our latest exchange via email, on the occasion of The Secret Grid:

A:  Before the grid, my impression was that language was an inchoate, forever-evolving thing, with new words and expressions always coming in and old ones being thrown out, and even, rules changing, the unacceptable becoming acceptable.  Not really pala.

L:  A language, Tagalog, learns new words and expressions all the time but the grammar stays relatively constant.  It is what turns Tagalog into Taglish.  Nag-apply ako, iprinocess kami, na-hire siya sa call-center.  The grammar is still Tagalog but the vocabulary is bi-lingual, or international even.  Na-coup-d’etat siya noong mag-perestroika.  Vernacular Tagalog is riddled with Spanish and English loanwords from our past history, not to speak of Sanskrit and Malay and, of course, Chinese.  We are adding to this vocabulary constantly.  But the grammar is no different from Balagtas or the Pasion.

A:  What are dominant / current theories of language that the grid disproves / confirms / puts into question?

L:  Hmm.  The two biggest puzzles in Linguistics are the “origin of language” and the “deep structure of language”.  In other words, what are the key elements and molecules of language?  And is there a common structure to all the languages of Man, a universal grammar?  The former is still up for grabs but in the latter, the dominant thinking is from Chomsky of MIT although many linguists in Europe still prefer the structuralist approach of Levi-Strauss.  Neither has been able to get to the bottom of the two puzzles, and the general mood is that they are unsolveable; thus we are unable to teach computers to converse.  The grid offers a new approach and likely solution to the problem.

A:  This whole project started out with Pinoy Translator, when you started listing Tagalog words, yes?  When and what made you focus on verbs in particular?

L:  At the end of Pinoy Translator I attempted a closing section “Elements of Tagalog Grammar” for the beginning non-Tagalog student.  In the effort, it was soon obvious that the complexity of Tagalog, the difficulty in teaching and learning it, was all in the verbs.  The rules for nouns and pronouns and adjectives, even sentences, were simple enough to set up, but the verbs and adverbs were very unwieldy.  When to use what affix was the biggest problem; there was simply nothing for it, until the first signs of a grid appeared in my verb lists.  Brain scientists have long suspected that verbs are at the core of the neural structuring of language.

A:  How did Nicole enter the picture?  The foreword gives no indication that she speaks Tagalog rather well.  What got her interested in the grid?

L:  As far as I can tell she came in the late 60s to join the team of Robert Fox at Tabon Cave.  She stayed around and did her doctoral on Palawan languages, in particular the epic songs of the Palawan tribal shamans.  She joined the CNRS in 1972 as a researcher in Linguistics, and visits the Philippines almost yearly for teaching and continuing research.  She has an outpost on an island fronting Tabon cave but has been discouraged from travelling there by her embassy since the Dos Palmas crisis.  Since 1990 she has been building an Epic Poetry Archive at Ateneo.  My translation of the Pasion Henesis was part of this.  The archive has recently been digitalized and will be available on the net sometime this year if it isn’t yet.

She is structuralist in her linguistics and locked into my work because it was obviously structuralist as opposed to all the Chomskian work going on in current Philippine linguistics.

A:  Could all languages really be griddable?

L:  As I’ve often said, it is not reasonable that Tagalog alone should have this mathematical arrangement; I am convinced it represents a neural structure in Homo sapiens sapiens.  In the book, I actually demonstrate how the grid would work for the English language, and the result serves as my evidence.

The accomplished work still only accounts for 1/16th of the grid.  Mapping out the entire Tagalog grid is the next challenge.  In the short term, workers in language who are fluent speakers of both Tagalog and English have their work cut out for them.  Once done, all other languages will only need to mimic the results.

A:  Nakaka-excite nga the implications for language translation.  What are your great hopes for the grid in this age of the computer and the internet?

L:  Because it is a mathematical solution it interfaces perfectly with the problem in artificial intelligence of how to teach computers to comprehend and speak languages, and finally pass the Turing test.  Geeks in natural language processing (NLP) will see that the grid is actually a binary system that provides the perfect algorithm for the definition of knowledge sets and, from there, the perfect translation of any language to another.

A:  Do you have any thoughts on how the grid system could help improve the teaching of Tagalog/Filipino and English here, given how terrible the quality of Tagalog and English of students and teachers in public and private schools alike these days?

L:  The long-term theory, when the grid of language by way of Tagalog and English is all-mapped out and the downstream technologies are perfected is that we won’t need to learn languages anymore, in the same way that calculators have taken over arithmetic.  You say something in one language and a translator phone dishes it out in the other.

In my lectures, the most excited reactions always come from the language educators and child psychologists, perhaps because the grid amounts to a natural program of learning, from four elementary ideas, to sixteen, to sixty-four and so on, from the most general to the most specific, simultaneously building up the language and worldview of the learning brain.

Fascinating stuff.  Check it out.  If you’re not into language or education yourself, share the link with those you know who are. http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-secret-grid-of-language/8537171