The dynamics of narratives and meta-narratives in Jerrold Tarog's Camera trilogy

• Main Author: Uy, Ma. Jemimah R.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2806
• Institution: De La Salle University

Jerrold Tarog's Camera trilogy involves three feature films : Confessional (2007), Mangatyanan (2009), and Sana Dati (2013). The first part of the trilogy, Confessional, is about a film maker who is tired of the way media manipulate the truth. He creates a documentary on the Sinulog festival, through which he incidentally stumbles upon a truth with one of his subjects-- a former mayor who confesses all his crimes on video. The second movie, Mangatyanan, is about Laya Marquez, a photographer who finds a connection between her troubled life (having been sexually abused by her father) and the dying ritual of the Labwanan tribe called Mangatyanan. The final part of the trilogy, Sana Dati, is about a woman who delays her wedding upon meeting the wedding videographer who reminds her of her past love. Evidently, these films do not revole around a single plotline. They are similar, however, in the way they center on characters whose professions all involve cameras. The meta-narratives are created through the use of the characters' cameras. In this study, I identify how the dynamics of narrative and meta-narrative operate in revealing the cinematic lies produced by the camera. I show the ways in which the camera manipulates the personal truths in each film. Mainly, this study on the camera trilogy as metafiction will serve as a commentary on the art form of photography/videography. It seeks to show how each of the three films follows the formula: lies (provided by the people in front of the camera) + lies (the manipulation done by the person behind the camera) = truth. I am using Patricia Waugh's metafiction theory, in which we reexamine the conventions of realism in order to discover-- through its own self-reflection-- a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to contemporary readers (18). Frame analysis and play theory are also utilized in support of this metafictional reading on the trilogy. The camera lens is considered as a frame-- a construction of alternative reality a meta-narrative which functions in relation to the running narrative-- the base story of each film-- through a set of signs.