Keywords for Philippine Cinema's Archival Afterlives

Abstract

The phrase “archival afterlives” names the recognition that older Philippine films survive despite a history of defunct state and private archives. Synthesized from archival theory, feminist epistemologies, and postcolonial historiography, the book's key concepts—archival silence, archival power, and making do—move beyond mourning archival loss to foreground resourceful low-budget tactics for ensuring access. The Philippines' history of short-lived film archives gives rise to an anarchival condition that contradicts the fantasy of archival permanence; nonetheless, a decentralized advocacy for audiovisual archives perseveres through a kind of Sisyphean hope. The introduction offers a materialist media analysis that traces the afterlife of the last extant Filipino nitrate film, Ibong Adarna (Adarna bird; 1941), destroyed shortly after its 2005 migration and restoration. It also recounts the makeshift digitization of a decaying 16mm propaganda film, From a Season of Strife (1972), a rare glimpse into the early 1970s anti-Marcos protest movement known as the First Quarter Storm.