BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol II, No. 08
Feb 23, 2005
social criticism by
Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra III
Table of
Contents
ARCHIVE:
2004
2005
Literary website:
Warphoto
Standing
Up To Thieves
A
CERTAIN great concern thinks video and audio piracy is killing the local film
and recording industry. I beg to disagree.
First, let me attempt a defense of the pirates by way of
the consumer’s position. People buy pirated dvds and vcds and cds for
two reasons and two reasons only. One, the bootlegs are way below the
price of the legitimate editions. Two, certain consumers are amazed at
their newly-discovered access to Cannes and Berlin film festival movies
hitherto reserved for jetsetters, a rare added value absent in such
Hollywood-worshipping networks as Video City or Astrovision.
Industry representative voices, however, say piracy is
ultimately anti-consumer -- because in the long term artists will stop
making art or entertainment, and bootlegs will likewise cease to exist.
That’s almost like saying all art is for sale and all artists earn from
their art. These industry voices should visit Philippine poets and
fictionists who lay out around P60,000 to P100,000 of their own money just
to get their books printed and distributed by a publisher/distributor like
Anvil (almost always with the unwritten because understood guarantee that
they won’t get their money back from meager sales). Some of these
authors would even get a high from the discovery that their unprofitable
books are being resold as bound “xeroxed” pages in the Manila
university belt by photocopiers! (A stall there seemingly run by a Moslem
[you could judge by the headwear of the woman behind the box] was even
selling hardbound “xeroxed” copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses [obviously unaware of the book’s “significance”] at the
height of the Islamic outcry over the book!)
But you’re right, artists who don’t have day jobs -- or
supposedly know nothing else other than what they do -- need to earn from
their art. So piracy must cease. And here’s where my beef against the
conventional anti-piracy wisdom begins.
The conventional wisdom totally forgets the consumer. For,
to reiterate, the art or entertainment consumer will want to have his
hands on any art out there in the market. As long as it’s available,
he’ll want to get it. Again, the consumer is merely in awe of the artist
and art product in his hands, products previously accessible only to
high-paid yuppies. Again, to the art industry representative the consumer
is killing the artist. But, to emphasize, the consumer is not thinking
about the economic level, he’s thinking about the art and art product
solely. When all art for sale dies and there’s only free art, the
consumer will not have ceased to exist. Only art for sale will have died.
So what am I saying? Like the war against drugs, the war
against piracy should also look at the consumer for ideas. After all, it
is the consumer that the art industry seeks to please. Instead, it comes
up with lame campaigns like “don’t buy bootlegs because they’re
inferior.” An easy-to-find inferior Krzysztof Kieslowski DVD copy
(inferior only because its English subtitles are grammatically Indonesian,
hehehe) is better than a hard-to-find legitimate one that one can hardly
afford once he finds it (and I guarantee you he won't find it). And this
inferior talk is even untrue, considering that the legitimate VCDs from
Magnavision would sometimes have color fit only for Cinema One.
What the industry should do, apart from place generals in
their mission (apparently, the pirates have beaten everyone to them), is
lure back the market first (or simultaneous to the raids). Sure, it would
be hard to “compete” price-wise considering that legitimate parties
pay taxes and (like with the VAT) add this cost to the consumer price. But
it could likewise begin talking to its suppliers to offer downgraded
editions, that is to say, editions sans the additional features -- leaving
only the subtitles and audio options. That’s one. It could also ask the
government for import tax breaks, or tax breaks on culture taxes,
considering that government officials are already getting much from the
pirates who will never cease to exist in the light of day in this country
of ours. But that’s a tall order since everyone is talking of creating
taxes left and right except from the big guys with huge net values.
When anti-piracy movements begin to consider the consumer, only then will it find support from the general public. As of now, it keeps on talking about and pleading for its own economic cause only, and talking as if its cause is a public cause.
I
guess that's all I can say about the lame anti-piracy movement in our
country.
SO, WHERE were we? Oh. What is killing the movie industry?
My theory is almost common wisdom.
First, the movie ticket price has soared at such movie
houses as SM Cinemas, and movie house owners like Henry Sy refuse to
kowtow to the philosophy that in order for consumption to increase,
salaries must likewise increase. Everyone must do his share in this
direction, including Henry Sy vis a vis his employees. When the Henry
Sy’s of the plutocracy refuse, everyone refuses, and workers continue to
receive meager wages and ultimately forego such luxuries as the
once-affordable habit of visiting the moviehouses, including Henry
Sy’s moviehouses. Even in economics the axiom that the evil you throw
out will go back to you likewise holds. But, unfortunately, not everything
in economics is economics, with 90% of it inhabited by politics and pure
merchant-statesmanship that doesn’t give a shit about revolutions and
environmental catastrophes to come since anyway its purveyors have green
cards and so on.
This is the reason why cheaper pirated dvds/vcds and
ill-branded dvd/vcd players have become much more popular. Moviehouse
tickets, like Henry Sy’s department store goods, become dearer each day
while pirated goods get cheaper. Simple inflation, ladies and gentlemen,
finding an answer in extra-legal zones. And the cause of the inflation?
Well, I think we've already discussed that.
Secondly, so much great screenwriting for the movies remain
on the shelves of such places as literary contest-sponsoring foundations.
Producers with their weird sense of what the public wants become virtual
screenwriters, asking writers and directors to do this and that kind of
emendation or production to be able to come up with what to them will be
charming concepts for the masses they think are more stupid than them.
Alas, the masses are proving to be smarter than them. The industry’s
stupidity (what Lav Diaz would call “idiocy in the industry”) extends
to the theory that bootlegs are killing the industry, as if video addicts
would not want to see the big-screen versions of the movies in their
collection. Producers had this uptown idea that the taste of the people
downtown and from the slums were within their mental grasp and
anthropological acumen, not even for a minute considering that perhaps
Filipinos only went to watch stupid Filipino movies because these
were the only ones in Tagalog. How many Filipino moviegoers who enjoyed
fragments from a certain popular movie but did not necessarily enjoy the
whole movie would want to come to the preview microphones during exit time
and declare “ang pangit-pangit!” Of course producers were thinking
their products were products of genius. As more and more Filipinos begin
to understand a little more English, they slowly choose to spend their
saved pesos on less stupid Hollywood blockbusters.
Nah. Filipino moviegoers have to be considered for a
democratic angle on why the movie industry is dying, in the same way that
American democracy had to cease asking why Sundance-inspired indies in the
US were thriving (and beginning to make money). For example, the popular
wisdom is that the good Filipino directors are working in the telenovelas,
this wisdom quite unaware that the directors they’re talking of also
work in the movies! The reason? The backward dubbing culture in the
Philippine movie industry. Great method acting with great pacing the audio
of which doesn’t synchronize would necessarily have tragic results for
the great art of acting. Why is Mario O’Hara a great actor? Because, as
a radio actor, he’s also a great dubber or voice actor. So many mediocre
movie actors turn out great on TV, for the reason that the ill-dubbing
harbinger is absent.
THE PHILIPPINE movie industry must now rethink its
position. Like an advertising agency that has become lazily (and
arrogantly) bookish in its formulas and its old focus-group research
methods, the studios must also get out of their non-dynamic formula
culture and unlazily re-know cinema as a masses-based storytelling
or essaying art. Once contented formulas for this truism take a life of
their own and begin to forget that the masses change their tastes and
ideas and knowledge through time, the truism becomes a lie. The formulas
are now targeted at a market that may not be there anymore. People now
know, for example, that not all gunshots sound the same, so they laugh
when a gunshot aimed at the sky sounds like the bullet hit a rock.
Many Filipino movies have been telling stories or essays
the culture either slowly found ludicrous or couldn’t understand
anymore. Fragments of a culture don’t necessarily make a product for a
culture. When the masses begin to flock to a movie because a producer
thinks he’s made the right positioning for the movie with a popular
comedian as the vehicle, the masses are usually found going to that movie
for a different (“wrong”) reason. Sure the masses may have loved the
comedian, despite the formulaic slapstick, but that doesn’t mean they
loved the movie. Such an impression, when it piles up in the audience's
subconscious, can turn into resignation -- settling for watching the same
comedian on TV. In short, such production attitudes for short-term profits
in the long run pirate money elsewhere at the expense of the industry
supporting an art.
And speaking of positioning, the reason why lousy Hollywood movies become international hits is usually correct marketing. Which is -- again -- a product of good people research as against uptown-deriving formula thoughts about the downtown market. Filipino marketing of even good Filipino movies often ruin the attraction to these movies.
As
for the view that scientific marketing ruins art, I say correct marketing supports art.
Film production gearing for national success can benefit from a marketing
man’s dissent that a certain project’s comedy may be strong only in
Manila. Furthermore, marketing as a product of a certain cultural thrust
can also create a culture. Diaz believes that it is wrong to say that the
masses cannot be changed. True enough, advertising changes people’s
views everyday.
Lav Diaz is right. The whole movie industry is wallowing in a rotting self-immersed culture. It must now
therefore go back to the people for inspiration. It is, after all, the
people who will listen to their stories. As of now, the attitude of the
industry is reflected in the behavior of actors devoid of thinking brains
who also happen to think they’re royalty and not mere benefactors of a
people’s now-waning (because smartly disillusioned) patronage.
THE MOVIE industry can take a lesson from the local
recording industry. Eraserheads was not a fluke. It was a presence waiting
to happen and surprise the conventional industry wisdom at the time the
E-Heads came out. That wisdom said Filipinos don’t like electric
guitars. Thankfully, the industry marketing gurus thought it had no choice
but to support and exploit the band’s shockingly increasing popularity
then.
Also, it’s not cd piracy that’s killing the music
artist. After all, artists get a little rich only from their concert
bookings. It’s only recording execs who get really rich from gold and
platinum record sales in our country. And they have the gall to talk about
bootleggers as thieves and exploiters.
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Posted 02/23/05. Send comments to:
bananacue_republic@yahoo.com
Comment, 1:
At Makati Park Square, there are stalls openly selling pirated dvds, cds, and mp3s. DVDs sell for P90 when they're good copies from China. Those from Malaysia go for P80 because of their poorer quality. These pirated cds bear the latest titles, not even shown on theaters yet. When I asked a vendor if he wasn't scared of the raids going on, he laughed and said not really. He said: "Edu (who strolls around here often) said as long as we don't sell pirated Filipino film copies and pornographic materials, we're safe. The police can ignore us." Edu Manzano, OMB's boss man, has a condominium unit in the upper floors of Makati Park Square, and is sometimes seen going around the mini-mall. I also saw 3 uniformed policemen looking over (and choosing) the sex videos, which were openly displayed on top of the counter. And these were sex videos with nude young Asian women on the covers, in various positions.
As I said before, Filipinos are never ones to follow the law and the rules... lawmakers, implementors and implemented on alike. As buyers who never really believe in intellectual property rights, we have nothing to worry about. Piracy is here to stay... -posted by agnesdv, 03/02/05.
"A certain great concern thinks video and audio piracy is killing the
local film and recording industry. I beg to disagree."