Transgressive placelings trespassing enclosures: Or why bodies die—or refuse to die—in Ishmael Bernal’s cinema of places

This paper presentation proposes the idea of The Cinema of Place, which looks at storied places in which are embedded the histories of humans interacting with co-humans and nonhumans. The main object of these interactions is mainly the human body in relation to its place in the body politic of societies. The body—as commons—are projects of the enclosures of the state, the church, capital, and patriarchy, which are all entangled with regimes of property rights that occur in place.

The talk looks into how these interactions of place, people, and rights regimes take place in the mediated places of Ishmael Bernal’s cinema. The phenomenon is obvious in his classics, such as Nunal sa Tubig (1976), Manila by Night (1980), and Himala (1982). The presentation re-explores Nunal sa Tubig to highlight some new observations Eli has not recognized in his earlier examination of this work. He then turns to the less-studied…