Rural dialogism: The intersections of ruralscapes and bodies in Philippine regional cinema

• Main Author: Mallari, Mary Anne D.C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Motion pictures > Philippines; Landscapes in motion pictures; Dialogism (Literary analysis); Film and Media Studies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdd_lit/2; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=etdd_lit
• Institution: De La Salle University

This dissertation proposes that rural landscapes as seen in Philippine regional cinema are contested sites of power that can also produce subversive imaginaries of the body. The idea of the rural as a contested space is explained through the conceptualization of the ‘ruralscapes,’ which was appropriated from Appadurai’s framework of global cultural flows, suggesting that the rural is constantly shaped by globalization and capitalism, especially in modern society. Moreover, the ruralscapes and the bodies that inhabit them mutually influence each other, and the presence of dialogue between these two imaginaries in Philippine regional cinema produces complex representations of the regions. To align these theories in terms of film scholarship, I used Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism to formulate the idea of rural dialogism that analyzes the imaginaries of the ruralscapes and its bodies, along with the film aesthetics, the directors’ creative process, and lived social realities of the people in the ruralscapes. This interdisciplinary method of understanding Philippine regional cinema further asserts the importance of the regions in constructing a more inclusive notion of Philippine cinema that understands rather than excludes the marginalized peripheries. This research aims to arrive to theorize the notion of rural dialogism by (1) analyzing how the imaginaries of the ruralscapes and bodies are represented in Philippine regional films; (2) exploring how the ruralscapes and bodies influence each other in the modern, globalized society, and (3) investigating how the dialogue of the ruralscapes and bodies produce subversive imaginaries that lead to the complex representations of the regions.