Afflictive Apparitions: The Folk Catholic Imaginary in Philippine Cinema
The amusing aphorism that the Philippines is "a product of 300 years in a Spanish convent and 40 years of Hollywood" evokes audiovisual validation in the enduring presence of a Filipino religious film genre that represents what I would term as the "folk Catholic imaginary," a fur...
| Published in: | Material religion |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Taylor & Francis
[2015]
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| In: |
Material religion
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| Further subjects: | B
Filipino cinema
B postcolonial cinema B Folk Religion B Philippines B Religious Iconography B Filipino Catholicism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | The amusing aphorism that the Philippines is "a product of 300 years in a Spanish convent and 40 years of Hollywood" evokes audiovisual validation in the enduring presence of a Filipino religious film genre that represents what I would term as the "folk Catholic imaginary," a furious postcolonial syncretism of Roman Catholic piety and primal, pre-Hispanic religious practice. Filipino religious films keep open the portal between the this-worldly and the other-wordly, notwithstanding the ingression of what Charles Taylor terms as the "buffered self" (largely coming from "enlightened" Western thought) that summarily dismisses religiosity as belonging to the archaic, pre-enlightened world of enchantment where angels/demons and humans made strange bedfellows. Catholic religious iconography has been vividly portrayed as at once being definitively material and audaciously metaphysical, holding both in creative tension so that it is never a question of an either/or, but a both/and. Within the interpretive frame of the folk Catholic imaginary, I draw attention to Santa Santita, an acclaimed 2004 feature film lensed by noted filmmaker Laurice Guillen. I examine how the cinematic representation of postcolonial folk Catholicism, as expressed in the perceived power of religious icons and images over the lives of devotees, is indexical of a Filipino primal religion that the Spanish colonial missionary enterprise was not able to completely vanquish. |
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| ISSN: | 1751-8342 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Material religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2015.1103474 |