Lost in Adaptation: Antifidelity and/in Mike De Leon’s Bilanggo sa Dilim and Bayaning 3rd World

• Main Author: Sangil, Anne Frances N.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2021
• Subjects: Mike De Leon; film adaptations; metacinematic adaptation; adaptation by transgression; Bilanggo sa Dilim; Bayaning 3rd World; Film and Media Studies; Pacific Islands Languages and Societies; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/akda/vol1/iss2/7; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/akda/article/1016/viewcontent/6_Sangil_Lost_20in_20Adaptation_Akda_201_282_29.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Following the tenets of auteur criticism that proposes a film auteur to have an autonomous, original, and individual voice despite the nature of filmmaking as an art form that follows the Fordist model, this essay looks at how Mike De Leon’s artistic style has become the ordering agent for his two films: Bilanggo sa Dilim and Bayaning 3rd World. This study puts under the lens De Leon’s signature and confronts the difficulty of assigning authorship and originality within a collaborative, institutionalized medium that aims to adapt for the screen one literary and one historical material. De Leon has his own way of reclaiming an adapted work and a historical figure, and by wrestling Bilanggo sa Dilim away from the pages of the novel and by being unfaithful and transgressive in adapting Jose Rizal in Bayaning 3rd World, the filmmaker creates a space for himself and his signature in his cinematic transmediations.