I WILLED my way through two hours and 40 minutes of Lav Diaz’s Magellan when it opened Wednesday. It was an ordeal.
Perhaps someone better schooled in the arts and critical analysis of films would appreciate the attempt at historical deconstruction and how it challenged the known historical narrative.
Related story: Rama: Si Lapulapu
Alas, I went to the cinema as a mere history buff intending to catch a historical drama. Maybe that’s why I, for the lack of a better term, felt short-changed.
The opening scene is of supposedly pre-colonial Bisaya people – naked – exclaiming, in lackluster portrayal, their astonishment over seeing a European and, in continued clumsy depiction, their lamentation.
The film then cuts to a wounded Magellan slumped in the aftermath of an unestablished and explained battle in Malacca. It is here that audiences meet Enrique, who history say is from Borneo, speaking confused Bisaya and Waray (but no Bahasa), calling on Apo Laki, a largely Tagalog deity.
The scene then jumps to Magellan’s return to Portugal, where viewers are half-hazardly introduced to his would-be wife. It then cuts to Spain, where he successfully pitches a new voyage to the Spice Islands.
We are then treated to a wide shot of three carracks [there were five say history books] making their voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Yet nothing in the scene’s technical layer communicates they were physically moving.
The voyage itself serves merely as a backdrop for the men’s hardships: two crew members caught and punished for “unnatural acts,” the marooning of a priest and another sailor after a mutiny, the deaths of some from scurvy and Magellan’s dream of losing his wife and unborn child.
Then comes their arrival to Cebu, which in the film’s creative telling was the only land they ever reached.
From the ships, the movie then cuts to the remainder of the opening scene, with the pre-colonial Bisaya settlement. Here we see Rajah Humabon, depicted less of a king and more of a village elder, meeting the Europeans at the beach.
Anyone from Cebu who knows the Sinulog narrative would expect the story to unfold in a certain way from here. Except it doesn’t.
As I wrote earlier, Lapulapu is depicted as a mere creation of Rajah Humabon, who has grown tired of the conquistadors and their condescending ways.
In the film, Humabon spreads rumors of a wakwak — purportedly Lapulapu — to bait Magellan into attacking another settlement. I don’t recall the movie mentioning Mactan at all. This plot leads directly to Magellan’s death and the defeat of his forces.
It’s an uncomfortable departure from history. It belittles pre-colonial Cebu and Mactan. It erases Homonhon, an island in Samar striving for attention and a platform to highlight the ongoing scourge of mining.
It silences the first mass, which, perhaps understandably, the production omitted since scholars still debate whether it was held in Limasawa, Leyte, or Masao in Butuan.
It ignores much of what Antonio Pigafetta — a first-hand witness — writes about Magellan’s arrival in “Zzubu,” where people adorned themselves with finely wrought gold earrings, bracelets and nose rings; wore hand-woven cotton cloth dyed red and yellow; and lived in hardwood houses and traveled in boats decorated with intricate relief patterns.
In the film, Zzubu is not a bustling settlement ruled by a powerful Humabon, clad in gold and holding court in a palisaded longhouse. Instead, it’s a poor hamlet, and Humabon a mere elder.
I found an online article quoting Magellan director Lav Diaz as saying “cinema is a tool for truth.” No argument there.
All things being equal, Magellan may be Diaz’s symbolic way of cutting through the layers of legend to invite deeper discourse on the lived experience of Cebu’s people — a microcosm of all precolonial settlements in the archipelago.
Perhaps, after this discourse, we can arrive at a better understanding of ourselves — a resilient identity that resists cultural homogenization and the colonial definition of growth and development.
Maybe this is what we need to push ourselves into revisiting communal sustainability practices that are born of stewardship of land and sea, rather than pouring concrete over everything and later complain of floods.
Maybe this very discourse is what we need to analyze pre-colonial socio-political agency, embrace consensus-driven leadership and engage the world with authenticity, ethical vision and de-colonial insight. (knrama@gmail.com)