“Dapol tan Payawar na Tayug 1931”: A film about collective memory and forgetfulness

by R.S.O.
(A reflection on Christopher Gozum’s film, “Dapol tan Payawar na Tayug 1931”)

We often hear it said that, “History is written by the victors,” which means establishment historians normally do not write for the vanquished. So what does this say about the field of history – or the kind of history that we know?

Christopher Gozum poses this provocative question in his latest film “Dapol tan Payawar na Tayug 1931,” an opus he calls “creative documentary.” As most reviews have already noted, Gozum doesn’t so much as tell the story of the pocket uprising in the town of Tayug in Pangasinan in 1931 through the life of its peasant leader Pedro Calosa (Paul Cedrick Juan, Perry Diaz) as investigate it using three approaches while making do with sparse reference materials.

The first approach to solving the problem of the dearth of information is through the lens of a documentary filmmaker (Fe Ging-Ging Hyde) who’s out to uncover the truth bit by bit through research -- by reading the work of prescient authors of the past and tracing other facts through interviews with primary and secondary sources. This strategy results in the presentation of morsels of findings through photomontage and quotes.

The second strategy is through a black-and-white silent film that comes complete with classical music as background and the so-called ‘intertitles’ used at the time – a valiant attempt to recover that period of American occupation.

The third one is through the reenactment of the interview of Calosa made by the Pangasinan-Ilocano novelist F. Sionil Jose and American journalist David Sturtevant in 1966 by way of a grainy video and in the style of European arthouse films of the period, as knowledgeable critics note.

In this three-pronged approach characterized by deliberate repetitiveness and punctuated by high academic tone, Gozum cleverly shows how claims are validated, just like in scientific research and newswriting, which routinely require at least two or more credible corroborating sources – the more, the merrier, so to speak.

From all these sources painstakingly unfolds the history of Pedro Calosa and the cause he fought for as a hungry, because disenfranchised, peasant, no thanks to foreign intruders suddenly laying claim to what was not theirs. The viewer then becomes a part of Gozum’s research process and thus shares his little triumphs of discovery along the way.

Without deifying the messianic Protestant Christian yet anting-anting (amulet)-armed Calosa, Gozum silently takes us viewers to the long-winding road of discovery of one uncelebrated person’s life in a tumultuous period of Philippine history. He makes an otherwise forgotten character intriguing enough to follow for two hours with the unconventional filmic devise. “Dapol” soon becomes a ‘game’ of slow, painful recall of what was long-forgotten, then at the back of the mind comes the succession of whys and wherefores. (Why did we forget? Etc.)

In the end, it comes off as a condemnation of historical amnesia, for indeed forgetfulness – the reverse of the film’s deliberate repetitions – comes with the self-inflicted curse of repeating history, particularly its tragedies, as though they never took place. Isn’t that supposed to be the relevance of history as a field and school subject – to be a guide to the present and the future through the lessons learned by our forebears, so as not to repeat the mistakes committed?

But as we all know, man is often foolish, and there is that constant threat of man’s tendency to relive the past as though valuable lessons have not been learned, so maybe that should be where the greater precaution lies: humanity’s inherent neurosis and puzzlingly illogical choices in the face of difficulties and confusion.

The other important takeaway from Dapol is the implied importance of artists allied to the study of history as corroborators in the telling of stories of the ‘other’ – the photographers, novelists, documentarists, essayists/commentators, reporters from alternative media, and other oft-unnoticed artists and craftsmen from the margins who, knowingly or unknowingly, document history from the side of the ‘vanquished,’ i.e., from the point of view of ordinary people and their quotidian lives. …Artists and artisans otherwise considered by the mainstream as ‘nobodies’ but without whose work a particular age’s day-to-day realities would remain untold, if not erased – consigned to, as is often said, the “dustbin of history.”

(The author’s opinion is solely his own and does not necessarily reflect that of LGU-Bayambang.)