Small Town, Big Money: Capitalism Runs Amok in Turumba

The film stands out in Tahimik’s oeuvre as the only production for which he has used a script (one was required for the commission). And though the full-length version is one of his rarest works, the original short is one of his most widely viewed, having aired on German public television—to a prime-time audience, no less. The eighty-eight-minute feature incorporates everything from the earlier film, except a playful introduction that Tahimik added for its broadcast. In that excised section, he explains how he came to use “our daily bread” as his theme, as a reference to both the Catholic community depicted in the film and the hustle required for it to survive. Cheekily, he unveils a microphone made of bamboo and offers it for sale.

Tahimik’s wide grin in this unorthodox segment conceals his slyness behind the camera. On its surface, Turumba is a parable about the temptations of Western wealth. Certainly, the German woman’s manufacture order results in exploitation, familial strife, and the decline of village traditions. But the film and the context surrounding it are more complex than these problems would suggest. If Turumba was meant to be a warning, the message came too late, because the forces of global commerce had already reached neighboring Balian, where Perfumed Nightmare is set. There, villagers were already producing handicrafts to be shipped for Western export from Manila, only a hundred kilometers away. Then there is the question of the film’s audience. Olympic Gold was first seen by the German public in 1981, and Turumba was released in New York in 1984. Meanwhile, screenings in the Philippines were infrequent and sporadic, despite the film’s cautionary tale being ostensibly aimed at a Pinoy audience.

Tahimik fills the frame with lush detail: music from the Turumba revelers, children strumming guitars, brisk winds rustling the palms. The image of the village is bucolic and isolated, save a few key references to the outside world that Tahimik slips in. In one scene, as a few men play checkers with recycled bottle caps, a radio broadcast situates the film in 1971, during the global energy crisis. In another, Kadu brings Pati to a graveyard of Japanese war trucks—“top-quality steel,” Pati says approvingly—to source material for his machetes. Like the army vehicles repurposed into jeepneys in Perfumed Nightmare, these are remnants of imperial conquest fought on and over Philippine soil, from centuries of Spanish colonial rule to the fifty years of American empire, including the United States’ Pacific theater during the Second World War. Even after the Philippines gained independence in 1946, its people faced repression from within. On September 21, 1972, a couple of weeks after the massacre in Munich, Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law, beginning a notoriously brutal dictatorship that lasted for the next fourteen years. Turumba leads up to the precipice of these events, but instead of showing them unfolding, it depicts a literal typhoon descending on the village. This is not merely symbolism—in Tahimik’s films, nature has world-historical implications. “Do you know Americans tried to steer typhoons against the Vietnamese?” Kadu asks in voice-over, with a wisdom far beyond a child of his age.

Tahimik’s own story is inseparable from that of his country. He grew up in a well-to-do family in Baguio, where success was measured financially and often by the ability to go abroad (he received his MBA from the Wharton School of Business). Heavily influenced by American culture, he was still a child when the U.S. policy of “benevolent assimilation” in the Philippines officially ended, and while working in Europe he saw firsthand the neocolonial system built around the balikbayan, or Filipino guest worker—a trained individual, often in a service field like nursing and housekeeping, who works in more affluent countries and sends their earnings back home. While making Turumba, Tahimik was already conceptualizing what would become one of his largest projects: the incomplete Memories of Overdevelopment and its 2015 follow-up, Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III (there is apparently no second installment in the series). In a nod to the Third Cinema landmark Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), by the Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, these films explore the story of Enrique de Malacca, a Tagalog-speaking slave whom Ferdinand Magellan purchased as an interpreter, and who accomplished the circumnavigation of the globe that Magellan himself failed to complete. In Tahimik’s speculative telling, Malacca is the original balikbayan, as well as the first person to experience the world in its entirety.

While some have justifiably criticized the tendency to reduce Tahimik to an avatar of Third World cinema, the mental maps drawn by his films are undeniably expansive; Jameson noted that Tahimik’s work “independently [seems] to have conceived of the vocation of art itself as that of inventing new geotopical cartographies.” Even their margins brim with adjacent places and histories, like concentric circles that radiate out from a drop of water that falls into a puddle. Meanwhile, Tahimik’s characters, wide-eyed travelers all, easily traverse bridges and oceans, and even—in Who Invented the Yoyo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy? (1978/1982)—the expanse of outer space that leads to the moon. To some extent, this kind of global awareness is the burden of the colonial or postcolonial subject. But Tahimik fashions this in his own delightfully off-kilter way. It would be wrong to cast him as antimodern: Tahimik has an ongoing fascination with aeronautic technology, and in Turumba, there’s plenty of laughter on the Waldi production line. When Romy has earned enough to bring electricity into the home, he also buys speakers to blast the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Kadu and his siblings dance to the music in the yard, and their grandmother even taps along on her knee. Just don’t forget the old songs, she says, smiling.

In Turumba, Kadu and his friends tear up a poster advertising a cigarette company. They take the paper scraps home, where they dip them in glue and add them to their papier-mâché creations. The action recalls a decisive moment in Tahimik’s own life, when he ripped up his Wharton diploma to sever his ties to that part of his life. (The gesture was primarily symbolic; acknowledging his parents’ well-intentioned wishes for him, he had the school send a duplicate copy of the diploma to them.) Paper doesn’t last long in a Tahimik film, at least not before it’s turned to another, better use. Maybe this is why he never bothered with another script, which to him would have amounted to another useless stack of papers. Back when he was preparing to make Memories of Overdevelopment, Tahimik had appealed to Francis Ford Coppola for assistance. (Though Coppola had shot the jungle scenes for Apocalypse Now ten kilometers from the site of Perfumed Nightmare, the two directors did not meet until 1979, at the Cannes Film Festival. Coppola later distributed Perfumed Nightmare.) Funding was ultimately approved, but by some accident the letter of confirmation never reached Tahimik. He now considers the mishap a saving grace: “I don’t know what it would look like. They could have controlled me a little bit or forced me to put things on paper. [Such funding] limits these cosmic options because you get stuck once it has been written on paper. It would have become a more conventional film.”