(3)Ī few decades later, Bill Landis, editor of American schlock-movie fanzine Sleazoid Express, would exhibit similar enthusiasm by praising De Leon’s way with girl-on-girl torture scenes (4).
In short, he creates dynamic tension at the very source of each action, each adventure. … Visually, this axis creates lines of flight – horizontal planes extending outside the frame to dissipate tension as well as lines of force – diagonal planes within the frame. A change of axis, a shift of frame, suffices to upset the rhythm. The extreme depth of field of his shots allows the viewer to take in everything, all the possible lines of action, and creates an internal rhythm sustained through all the mishaps and vicissitudes of the narrative. Tesson neatly encapsulated the director’s style and the giddy awe that it can evoke: De Leon won every possible major Filipino film industry award in his lifetime, and became the first filmmaker to be recognised as a Philippines National Artist shortly after his death in 1981.ĭe Leon’s reputation with cineastes peaked at around the same time, thanks to screenings of several of his films in France and a gushing, perceptive appreciation by Charles Tesson in Cahiers du cinéma.
MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND DE LEON SERIES
Coching’s popular comic book series featuring a sort of Filipino L’il Abner Blood Brothers (release date unknown), a staff orientation film for the United States Navy and, most intriguing, a handful of anti-American propaganda films produced in collaboration with the occupying Japanese forces during World War Two (2). He directed dozens of movies in almost every genre over the next 30-odd years, among them Bahay Kubo (1938), a musical acclaimed adaptations of Filipino anticolonialist martyr Jose Rizal’s novels Noli Me Tangere (1961) and El Filibusterismo (1962) antic action-fantasy programmer Sanda Wong (1955), which was co-produced with Hong Kong’s Vistan-Chapman studio Pedro Penduko (1954), a treatment of Francisco V. Passion, Opera, and So Forthīorn in 1913 to a show-business family in the Manila suburb of Bulacan, Gerardo de Leon Ilagan began making films in the late 1930s after finishing medical school, becoming licensed as a physician, and serving a stint as an actor. Given the rich and unusually convoluted artistic path De Leon had followed, his disillusionment and bitterness were perhaps understandable. Little wonder that he ended his days complaining of “the foreigners taking over” and arguing for state-subsidised production (1). De Leon was still the country’s most revered “golden age” director, but he was no longer first in line for the choicest projects and grew ever more dependent on American backing for more exploitative material. This schism doesn’t represent a vehement divergence of opinion on his ability as a filmmaker, but stems from a confounding material conundrum: there’s a distinct, maddening paucity of available works from De Leon’s most fertile period, while a series of low-budget, independently produced, mostly American-funded and distributed films he began directing in the late 1950s are abundantly available.Īt the time that De Leon took these latter projects on, the Hollywood-style Philippines studio system that had nurtured his early career – action specialists Premiere Productions in particular – was experiencing a meltdown analogous to that in the United States thanks to a well-coordinated, industry-wide labour dispute. Revered in his home country as a national treasure and esteemed by the international critical establishment, De Leon is just as readily dismissed by unwitting cinephiles – and undoubtedly many of the same critics who champion him – as an anonymous hack. September 12, 1913, Bulacan, Philippinesįew figures in cinema inspire such uniquely contradictory reactions as Filipino director Gerry de Leon.
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