I haven't been blogstalking much in the last few days, so I didn't know that Butas na Chucks was out of town. She mentioned the trip before, but absent minded me was, well, absent minded. Late afternoon, I was in a state of mini-panic because it would mean crossing the city all by myself, during rush hour on Quiapo day, and then sitting in a strange theater with no one to make running commentaries with about the movie. Then I remembered a bunch of us was supposed to go to Malate, so is all good. For added security, I panhandled my brother into coming with us, since his school is but a stone's throw away. But no, my brother bailed out at the last minute. He was at the Light and Sound Museum and then disappeared without a cellphone signal trace. He resurfaced later in the evening to inform me he went home because he was hungry. Duh, as if the offer didn't include dinner.

The matinee said 7pm, and we all gussied and worried that we wouldn't make it by then. We crawled in and there was only a smattering of people. They were showing a documentary on Philippine Cinema which was made by Mike de Leon. It traced the history of Pinoy Cinema from the time some friends cajoled Do?a Sisang to make a movie, Giliw Ko, the very first from LVN's several decades of movie making. I couldn't recognize all the movie stars in the clips because I'm not familiar with all of them. Rosa Rosal was a cigar-toting vamp in stilletos and Charito Solis was very pretty and imperially slim, a far cry from the plump Ina Magenta that we knew as kids. Sad really. It reminded me of the Pinoy Hollywood exhibit at the CCP lobby and I could barely make out the more familiar faces.

The LVN Studios made movies from 1939 to 1961. Do?a Sisang had stopped making movies by the time the Second Golden Age of Pinoy Cinema came, when the gloss and glam had been replaced by the gritty social realism of Brocka and Bernal. Mike de Leon would be part of this wave, although I've always thought that his movies existed in some kind of vacuum, an indeterminate time and space warp where people were haunted by ghosts and memories, and there were secret societies and singing

Kung Mangarap Ka't Magising