Predicaments of Prestige: Negotiations and Symbolic Violence in Philippine Critical Film Practice

초록

As with its neocolonial center the US, the Philippine practice of film criticism was closely allied with academic and journalistic professions. The definitive triumph of Ishmael Bernal as film director occasioned several of his contemporaries to emulate his example of writing film reviews in newspapers while developing a film-industry network where they could possibly wangle directorial or scriptwriting breaks. Needless to say, the majority of these aspirants did not amount to any significance, as either critics or practitioners. What also remained unremarked was that this strategy was actually European in origin, modeled by the French nouvelle vague but with a vastly differing historical and cultural context that called for critical reconfiguring. This article will attempt an evaluation of the tradition of Philippine film criticism via its self-declared proponents, the organization of media reviewers who banded into an award-giving organization. It will make use of James F. English's reworking of Pierre Bourdieu's formulation and development of the concept of culture capital, in English's The Economy of Prestige specialIntscript which appropriately problematized the practice of award-giving. Where we can immediately see in how, for better or worse, the critics fostered an academicization of award-giving, positioning them among premodern institutions such as the Acad & eacute;mie Fran & ccedil;aise, they were also oblivious to the larger issues raised by the intervention of US interests in Asia during the Cold War era. This accounts for a problematic legacy of short-sightedness amid Euro-style obsession with validation on the part of the Philippine critical and artistic community.

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