Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)
Brocka's examination of urban marginalization and love in Manila
Country: The Philippines
Director: Lino Brocka
Time: 2 hours and 6 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Kanopy (free w/library card) and Criterion (free w/subscription)
What It Evokes: Urbanization, social critique, innocence lost
According to the UN, 2007 marked the first time in human history when a majority of the globe’s population lived in urban areas.1 Alongside its close cousin industrialization, large-scale urbanization (and its attendant social, economic, and cultural effects) has emerged a central process within global life over the past two hundred years. Early forms of industrialization spurred the world’s first predominantly urban society in Britain—by 1871, less half the country’s population lived in rural areas. The United States became majority urban in 1920.2 In the Global South, this process took longer to unfurl, with rural-to-urban migration patterns becoming increasingly prominent following World War Two. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “The world of the second half of the twentieth century became urbanized as never before... In Asia the multi-million city mushroomed, generally a capital. Seoul, Tehran, Karachi, Jakarta, Manila, New Delhi, Bangkok, all had between roughly 5 and 8.5 million inhabitants in 1980. In 1950 not one of them (except Jakarta) had more than about one-and-a-half million each.”3 Whatever “modernity” constituted, it constituted itself in the metropolis. Whatever development augured, the city remained its crucial context. In addition to lots of very cool things, these spatial and economic transformations also surfaced new forms of marginalization and exploitation, which Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light set out to explore.
Shot under Ferdinand Marcos’ Martial Law (1972-1981), Manila in the Claws of Light depicts the dislocations and ruptures inherent in rural-to-urban migration by exploring a young man’s journey to Manila from the province of Marinduque in search of his girlfriend, Ligaya. For her part, she has been enticed away from their home by a mysterious woman known only as “Mrs. Cruz” after being promised factory work and additional education. After a letter arrives in Maniduque claiming Ligaya has “disappeared” in the capital, Júlio (the young man) commences his search, allowing the film to document the novel temptations and depredations spawned by demographic and developmental shifts. After being robbed upon his arrival, Júlio takes a series of construction jobs, where safety regulations and prompt pay remain the exception instead of the rule, before finally being fired. Struggling to feed himself, he sleeps on the streets before meeting a “call boy,” who soon initiates him into that profession. Throughout this period of steady immiseration and hardening, Júlio manages to locate “Mrs. Cruz” and, eventually, Ligaya, whose own experiences turn out to mirror his own.
Brocka’s politically engaged films, alongside his leadership of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines—an organization that fought state censorship under Marcos’ “constitutional authoritarism”—made him an important figure in international cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. While this work’s central theme of provincial innocence lost in the metropolis hardly breaks new ground, the film’s great strength lies in its examination of the city as itself constitutive of social relationships. To lift from Henri Lefevbre, 1970s Manila comes to be defined as a form of simultaneity, encompassing a field of encounters through exchanges driven by spatialized relations. Within the city’s confines, interactions reduce to transactions and conversations continually circle around money. Material conditions mediate and shape human connections. This is not the world of rich versus poor, but poor versus poor. The truly desperate never come near wealth.
This does not mean Manila lacks kindness and charity. Throughout the film, Júlio benefits from the assistance of many strangers. Yet on Brocka’s terms, exploitation steadily inculcates isolation, militating against the possibility of collective political responses built upon class consciousness or solidarity. (Intriguingly, a near-final scene takes place during a “people’s march against fascism” that features protestors chanting, “Down with capitalism!” Yet Júlio stands at a literal distance from this politicized response.) If anomie never becomes a viable response, in part because this would demand a renunciation of the survival strategies adopted by the film’s characters, then alienation and anonymization predominate. In this way, the film shares affinities with other (slightly later) works, such as Héctor Babenco’s Pixote: The Law of the Weakest (Brazil, 1980) and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (India, 1988), which aimed to raise awareness of the uniquely urban problems confronting young marginalized populations, without assuming the need to provide programmatic solutions.
Naturally, the city’s counterpoise remains the countryside, which the film showcases through a steady stream of idyllic flashbacks set in Marinduque. These interludes manifest a sort of nostalgic mental space, their emotional resonance underscored by notably warmer color palettes. All the same, Marinduque does not present a possible alternative for the film’s characters. The province’s lack of opportunity and its pre-industrial forms of poverty push residents towards Manila. In this way, the countryside emerges a sort of prelapsarian ideal (similar to youth itself, another irretrievable and innocent space) whose conditions both forge and fissure “purer” relationships in the absence of material conditions necessary for their maintenance.
Whether Ligaya and Júlio can build a new relationship after the transformations wrought by their respective experiences in Manila remains the film’s central question. (As one might surmise, the answer isn’t all that hopeful.) Towards the end of the film, the couple meets for the first time since their separation in a church. One might read this spiritual structure as constituting its own unique space (within the city, but not of the city) and offering a different path predicated on a set of trans-contextual values that transcend modernity’s material dictates. Whether the film forwards this as a potential alternative to the twin poles of rural desperation and urban degradation seems interesting food for thought—Brocka himself converted to Mormonism and had complex but real ties to Christian institutions. Then again, film remains in the business of telling stories, not crafting political or spiritual programs, and wonderful films like Manila in the Claws of Light succeed by telling stories that matter.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Lino Brocka — Insiang (1976)
Lino Brocka — Weighed But Found Wanting (1974)
The UN does not employ a standardized definition of “urban,” but instead incorporates different countries’ definitions. For more on urbanization trends over time: https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization. For UN definitions: https://population.un.org/wup/General/FAQs.aspx.
Really sometime between 1910 and 1920. The 1920 census registered a majority of Americans living in urban areas. According to the 2020 US census, “To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,000 housing units or have a population of at least 5,000.”
From his masterful twentieth-century history, The Age of Extremes (p. 293).