Was it the water she sold? Or could it have been the sound of the train running on its tracks? Or just the lilt of her voice, singing songs of her hometown and also of ski trails, the warbling of the meadowlark, and moonlight in Vermont? Difficult to imagine that Nora Aunor is already 61; she was all of 11 when she won first prize in a music tilt sponsored by a milk company in Camarines Sur. Still harder to grasp that she has over time chalked up around 181 films, 238 songs, 53 records, and 260 awards. What kind of time and world might have formed Nora? What atmosphere of history did she breathe?
On the centennial of Philippine independence in 1998, the Cultural Center of the Philippines named a hundred artists of the nation, including the likes of the exemplary patriot-painter of the nineteenth century Juan Luna. Quite a formidable league, and Nora was the only actress of film to be part of it, a tribute to how her fine labor has transformed the work of art in the Philippines and how a humbled and inspired nation has returned the gesture.
Surely, the talent is the horizon, creating an extensive landscape of efforts in music, film, television, and theater and excelling in these fields as attested by the countless honors here and elsewhere. An argument can be made that she is sui generis — without precedent, peer, or progeny. She has been compared with the fabled Italian actress Giulietta Masina; and the equally illustrious French icon Jeanne Moreau, the chair of the Berlinale jury when Himala (1982) competed in 1983, remembered Nora having put up a brave fight against a Soviet actress that year.
The mythology would inflect this artistic potency. In other words, it is not only the rigor of the technique and the lightness of the effect that has made many cherish Nora’s presence in art and social life. It is also the moral tale of journeying from peninsula to city to pursue the promise of her voice and, in the fullness of time, to transcend the adversity that had made her dare to dream in the first place. It is the ballad of the migrant, the amateur, the expectant. It is the source of stigma, sadness, and inevitably, of the sublime. This myth has been lasting, and for her kind in different places, it is so moving.
It is this mythology that has enabled Nora to gather her own mass of faithful, to stir up the occasional hysteria, and to become quite a cognate of cinema as medium: how a wisp of a girl morphs into a startling kind of substance on screen is the very technology of enchantment itself. And the power can only be palpable. At the height of the Martial Law of Marcos, perhaps only Nora’s army, fired up by intense devotion, could have held a candle.
With form and mythology comes change. And Nora changed a lot of prejudices and discriminations, from the concept of a star to the role of a superstar, from the mestiza leading lady to the morena movie queen, from the studio fixture to a risk taker in terms of producing her own films and taking on eccentric characters. Change, too, came by way of the breakdown of the divide between the supposedly bakya (low-class) and the burgis (elite), high art and low art, commercial film and art film. Nora embodied aspects of these tendencies, with no apology nor conceit. She was only 23 when she produced and starred in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (1976), and on the first year of the awards of the organization of film critics called the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, Nora was declared Best Actress. We wonder who owed more to whom, the intelligentsia or the girl from Iriga?
Finally, the persistence, the sheer stamina of Nora to trudge on, with or without a National Artist medallion around her neck, a piece of jewelry that has been unfairly snatched away from her by mere government. The year has yet to end but she has already made six films and some of them have been doing the rounds of international film festivals, making her the busiest star in an industry where its so-called celebrities waste away in the cesspool of entertainment. With the recent grisly death of a transgender Filipino allegedly in the hands of an American soldier, she again comes to mind. As we watch the news unreel, who would not not remember Nora intoning the line before her brother’s coffin in Minsa’y Isang Gamu-Gamo (1976): “My brother is not a pig!”
In the lamentable film Hustisya (2014), Nora plays the role of Biring, a hireling in a syndicate who later takes the helm. In the last scene, a party to celebrate her birthday, the country’s corrupt political class gathers in her parlor. An assistant whispers something in her ear and she laughs nearly wickedly. Nora Aunor has always known the farce of this society and has mastered the madness of her method.
BusinessWorld, 2015
Awesome literary about my SUPERSTAR.
Superstar talaga, walang kapantay.