It is difficult to assess a scholar's early effort that is guided by uncommon diligence. The End of National Cinema: Filipino Film at the Turn of the Century is Patrick Campos's first full-length venture, and in contrast to the heft of this particular work, his academic credentials are meager, as dramatized by the last page of the book itself. Here lies the risk in such an attempt: to write so copiously without the distance of time and reflection to shape the writing more sharply. Decisive claims, needless to say, deserve the seasons.

On the one hand, Campos proposes a conceptual space for an end of a national cinema. On the other, he strings disparate research on aspects and practitioners of this cinema, probably, and very vaguely so, to thematize both the “end” and the “turn” of a “national cinema,” which is, frustratingly, barely articulated. A gap exists between these two gestures at the outset, as the author does not seem to be as intensely engaged in the explication of the problematic of the former as he is remarkably earnest in the exemplification of the latter. This is where time and reflection might have intervened more meaningfully. Data and discourse might have been made to interact with more rigor and care had Campos been more attentive to the implications of both material and theory, more aware of a larger corpus of scholarship, more judicious in his citation of theoretical sources, and more open to speculation.

The introduction of the book implicitly sets a direction, although the coordinates of this direction are not so well mapped out. It suggests a historiography of the end of a national cinema through two seminal moments: the movement of national cinema towards whatever exceeds being national (i.e. regional, international, global, translocal, and so on) and a history of digital technology in film mingled with a rather cursory description of the “independent” cinema scene in Asia. The reader would be led to infer that the end of a national cinema is a co-incident of the “turn” towards an elsewhere, the digital, and the independent. Conversely, the “turning towards” signifies a “turning away” from a perceived norm or doxa. This is an inference that is never followed through with necessary insight, and if it were, it would likely reach an impasse of futile dichotomies.

The main problem of the book emerges from the disinclination of Campos to think through concepts and put in sufficient theoretical labor to complicate such categories as “end” and “national cinema.” Fundamentally, he fails to inflect this notion of the “end” both historiographically and philosophically. In his formulation, such an end is merely a terminus of a period, which is principally characterized in terms of mode of production and circulation. What might have been a discourse-specific transformation is thus reduced to a medium-specific transition, even as Campos posits that Philippine cinema had been much more than national even in an earlier time. If this were so, what is the end all about? The end of the discourse of the “end?” This is one part of the contention. The other part is the “national,” which is set up here heuristically, rather than deconstructively, negated rather than reconstructed, re-politicized, and unhinged from its dominant modernity. The author might have overinvested in the term and in the process underexplained its usefulness to intuit the complexity of the geopoetic disposition of Philippine cinema.

Put differently, the national might have overdetermined the locality of the cinema to the point that Campos is moved to assert: “the medium of motion picture has never had a significant moment of defined locality before nation, and its definition is thus coterminous with the formation of nation” (p. 12). If this national were, let us say, merely Tagalog or Manila-centric, how would we appreciate the cinema in the other languages that were contemporaneous with Tagalog cinema or those made beyond the pale of Manila? If this cinema were Philippine or Filipino, how would we demonstrate its national construction? How did it become national and why did it become national? The book hardly responds to these crucial questions. Instead, it lets the national overdetermine the multiple geographies and the plural localities, as well as the interlocutions in the realm of reception, that it paradoxically wishes to recover so that it can finally proclaim the self-fulfilling prophesy of the “end.” It may well be that this end is a non-event after all in light of a film in Tausug like “Zamboanga” (1937); the robust cinema of the “Visayas”; Manuel Conde's 1950 “Genghis Khan” (with Tagalog and English superimposed for an international audience); or even films in Tagalog that on closer reading should not be, by default, conflated with the national in a strictly linear, sequential, and continental analysis. Alternatively, we can inquire into the political valence of the declaration of the end of the national. What does it mean to revoke or forsake the national in the context of the other moments of the local that need not be, or even resist, the national? What is the afterlife of this critique of the national under the aegis of, let us say, the global, the archipelagic, or the hemispheric? In fact, to what degree can the national be transcended? A more thoroughgoing back and forth with the provocations of the film historian and filmmaker Nick Deocampo would have served this project well as it grapples with the means to historicize and materialize “national cinema” in the post-colony.

The fraught modernity of the national, therefore, demands a theoretical elaboration in relation to the cinema it calibrates, and vice versa. The end, for its part, requires an equivalent annotation, if it must reference the tension between the integrity and intelligence of the film act, on the one hand, and the ecology of its relations, on the other: the radical particularity of its proposition so that a film is an end on its own; and simultaneously its exceptional translatability so that it cannot be only on its own. If the end means an end to dependency, what would institute the “beginning” when the critique is largely institutional and oblivious to a potential instituency?

Campos suggests the many ways by which this book can be read. All told, it might be less cumbersome if the essays were read straightforwardly as fragments that unevenly touch on certain mystifications of the auteurist persona; conditions such as the thirdspace; commentaries on style like realism; and some notes on memory and haunting. The author is most instructive when he teases out strands of practices and initiations, surveying themes and tendencies, for instance, in the oeuvre of Mike de Leon and Kidlat Tahimik, or when he evaluates the political economy of an institution like Cinemalaya. He is less persuasive when he tries to dwell on material that entails more patient explication of ideas like “urban realism” or “filmic folklore.” He is quick to name things but quite unwilling to “stay with the trouble” of the consequences of naming. Doubtless, in this exercise the reader is initiated into the terrain of film in an incipient century; the experience, however, may ultimately not be so enlightening. At best, the author's approach is symptomatic; at worst, it is just synoptic. For instance, the chapter on the feebly framed concept of a “rural cinema” rests on tired binarisms like the picturesque and the abject as if film were a reification of literary criteria and a thematization of literary devices. The materiality of film is never convincingly rendered, as Campos misses out on the lessons long conveyed by Petronilo Daroy's materialist critique of film and Alice Guillermo's insistence on the semiotic moment of the cinematic as opposed to the generally theatrical idealizations of the critics of the Filipino film in the seventies. One might surmise that since the author spends time trying to revise perspectives on film, the language and the modality of critique would inevitably modify. But still, he reverts to formulae as in this comment on the Enteng Kabisote films as “pathological substitutions” for folklore. He continues that the “line that connects folklore and popular culture … has been severed by the commodification of community life” (p. 456). This kind of conclusion does not seem to move the needle.

How this mélange of essays speaks to the argument of the “end of national cinema” remains hazy till the end of the book. A discussion of the contexts in which these texts were written might have helped inform the reader about the academic situations of which they had been part. Or the author could have retroactively and reflexively framed these texts with the view of pursuing a shifting thesis of a shifting rubric like the “end of national cinema.” As it is, the spadework, as it were, does not come up to the level of groundwork.

Many of the problems of this book may be traced to the state of film history, theory, and criticism in the Philippines. Campos is strongly linked to the legacies and current propensities of film studies in the country. That film is confined to “film studies” is in and by itself a fundamental issue, largely transfixed on the thematization of its object as “art” or “culture” and its determination as “ideology.” And such a limit to the knowledge on film is sustained by the institutions to which Campos belongs in the present: the film institute at the national university and the organization of critics that hands out awards in a manner negligibly different from how the industry peddles its pabulum. It would be a tragedy if the likes of Campos were to be trapped in this institutional thinking and hence further fail to imagine an end – and a turn – in the study of film, along with the range of identifications and sympathies that performs it. The best way perhaps to read this book is to treat it as a symptom of a disciplinary affliction – and we become interpreters of the malady, productively.