John Torres, a Filipino filmmaker and punk-rock musician, makes films that look and sound like symbolist poems. Thoughts, images, history, vignettes, fiction, fact, faces in the crowds and disembodied voices floating in and out — they come together, clash and converse, coalescing into a stream as lucid as it is mysterious. In Todo Todo Teros (2006), Torres imagines moviemaking as a form of terrorism, which is perhaps what cinema should be, not only in Manila, where the director lives and works, but everywhere on this typhoon-infested side of the world. In Years When I Was A Child Outside (2008), the haunting secret about the filmmaker's father becomes a dream from which he cannot wake up. In Refrains Happen Like Revolutions In A Song (2010), a girl who's not exactly herself goes around a village as the past and the present become indistinguishable (as in poetry, why should they?).
A special screening at Reading Room on Silom 19 this weekend will show all of Torres' films, short and feature-length. The filmmaker himself will be in town to talk to the audience after the screening on Sunday. The event, called "A Child Outside", is organised by Film Virus and Reading Room with the support of Japan Foundation. Screening starts at 1pm tomorrow.
We chatted with Torres via email. In the same manner as he makes his films, the man speaks and writes words imbued with symbolist poetry.
Is there such a thing as prose versus poetry filmmaking? Would you consider yourself to be a maker of the latter?
If you hear me speak, it's the way I do so in film. I struggle to start a conversation, may get too shy or personal, but when we hit it off, the usual starting points are: old-school cars, ping-pong, glam metal, Kobe Bryant. I begin to tease you, then I begin to get to know you, to find out where you are from. Then you're stuck with me. I tend to ramble a lot. I see my way of filmmaking as a way of befriending you. You are stuck with me for 90 to 120 minutes. We talk about certain things, and I hope we meet again.
With the voice-over narration in my film, I do not try to write lines of poetry. Most of it is spoken before being written. I think it is rhythm, more than anything, that is at work here. Once we get into the flow of things, and we keep things steady or steadily progressing, we feel like we are being swayed and being carefully moved together at certain intervals. Some say it's poetry. I am not too comfortable with this label.
It's always hard to categorise your films, they could be either documentary, essay, hybrid, biographical fiction, etc. If pressed, how would you describe your films?
I also don't know how to describe my films, and if pressed, I settle on those words, those categories, too. To make things clearer: beginnings of a documentation then flying onto approximation of stories, settling on a description of emotion or an idea. I really do not know how to describe them. Maybe it feels too close to how I am so much so that it feels like I am asked to describe myself.
John Torres' movie A Child Outside.
The screening this weekend is called "A Child Outside", which comes from your film Years When I Was A Child Outside. It's a very biographical, even confessional, film about your family and your father. How do you draw the line between the personal and fictional? Is there even a line?
The literal translation in Filipino of the film means [something like] an illegitimate child, which then prompts people to immediately imagine stories. Who is your parent? Under what circumstances where you conceived? Who is that asshole who broke up the family?
I was never a child outside back then. I was always the good one, the smart one, the one who always had enough. But fiction has always been with me because I was surrounded by non-fiction books, because my father was a self-help writer. I had a lot of time trying to find stories within books by Dale Carnegie, or other instruction manuals on the laws of attraction, comedy and direct mail marketing. I developed my peculiar way of looking at people and correspondences. And then we lost everything. When news broke that my father had brought up other children I didn't yet meet, I was already thinking how their voices sounded, how they would call my father "Father", or "Papa", or "Dad", "Itay", "Tay". I never heard from them until just three years ago, when they had already grown up.
It is only practical for me to begin with things as they happen before the camera. And with much imagination and play, we begin to be led by details and events that make us ask how they are related to us, how all this leads somewhere or amounts to anything, why we even want to be filming on. I am not too much interested in being correct and accurate anymore. I guess I never was interested in that in the first place.
Your voice narrates your own films, making everything personal. But it also sounds like a ghost narrating the living. Why this mode of narration?
That's so nice of you to describe it as a ghost. It captures that other part that is always floating. It gives me a lot to think about in terms of my next project. But judging from the short films I made in 2003, the primary reason was for me to be more understood. So that those seemingly unrelated shots of different events are connected by this one yearning.
From Todo Todo Teros to Lukas The Strange, how has your understanding of cinema and your own approach to moviemaking changed?
I was just befriending cinema when I started with Todo Todo Teros. Back then, I was just offering what I could afford and was free to meet her as I was. Because I always approached filmmaking in a very gung-ho style at the start, having a fun-loving group surrounding me all the time, I felt like we could commute to places and show cinema around. We hit it off.
Now that I have gotten past this and seen a lot of her own baggage, things have become tedious, and I feel like sometimes I don't have things to say anymore. We have our moments of awkward silence, our lovers' quarrels. Lately, I revisited my affair with music and had been turning to music to get back this sense of rhythm that drives me. In fairness, cinema has not been jealous. She needed the space. But I am getting back to her now, and I still find myself tentative and too careful at times.
John Torres.
