Flipside
By Eric S. Caruncho

Cinema Paradiso

I had never seen "The Bicycle Thief", Vittorio de Sica's masterpiece of postwar Italian neo-realist cinema - long hailed by critics as one of the best films ever made - until I found a pirate DVD copy in Quiapo.

I like the bells and whistles, the million-dollar computer graphics and THX sound and sheer technical gloss of the latest Hollywood blockbuster as much as the next guy. But even in plain black and white and dubbed mono, "The Bicycle Thief" -- the story of an unemployed worker's desperate search for his stolen bicycle -- was gut-wrenching and immediate in a way that "Harry Potter" or "Shrek" could never be.

Luckily, I had the choice of how to spend my P70. In fact, for local cinema buffs, the crowded, sweaty pirate DVD stalls in Quiapo's Islamic quarter have become the alternative to the arthouse, thanks to the influx of new product from Hong Kong (or Taiwan, or perhaps, Mainland China - who knows where this stuff comes from?). I know DVD piracy is supposed to be the death knell for the film industry (I'm not convinced that's necessarily a bad thing, given the kind of product we've seen lately) but I also can't help hoping that we're raising a new generation of cinema-savvy kids, who knows, the film auteurs of tomorrow, with omnivorous tastes developed through watching pirate DVDs.

In the last few weeks, for instance, I have renewed my acquaintance with Akira Kurosawa's works ("The Seven Samurai", "Rashomon", "Ikiru", "Red Beard", "Kagemusha", "Throne of Blood"). I've also begun reviewing Alfred Hitchcock's Hollywood suspense masterpieces (beginning with "Psycho", and working backwards through "Vertigo", "Rear Window", "North by Northwest", "Spellbound" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much"). I hope to get to his earlier British films eventually, but first I need to see Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion" and "Regle de Jeu", Antonioni's "Blow-up", and Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story".

I've also managed to feed my secret jones for genre films: film noir, Japanese yakuza movies, Grade B horror flicks, spaghetti westerns, '70s action flicks like "The French Connection", "The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three" and "Magnum Force" - all those movies I used to watch as double bills in my smelly old hometown grindhouse back in the day, my own Cinema Paradiso.

I remember being pissed off that I missed Nagisa Oshima's controversial "In the Realm of the Senses" when it was shown in Imelda Marcos's Manila International Film Festival in 1978. But I found it in Quiapo under its Japanese title "Ai No Corrida", and although it was in the original Japanese and subtitled in French, I got the gist. So that's what all the fuss was about.

Not that I have any illusions about the current level of taste of local moviegoers. Majority of people in Quiapo are merely interested in whether there's a clear copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But there's also an emerging market of cineastes haunting the stalls, looking for films they've only heard or read about in film journals. There's a guy that keeps pestering puzzled vendors, looking for "Citizen Kane". There are anime buffs buying up multi-volume editions of "Yu Yu Hakusho" and "Samurai X" and God knows what else. There are yuppies looking for the latest season of "Sex and the City" and "CSI", and suburban moms and pops looking for "Gone With The Wind" and "The Sound of Music". Me, I'm still kicking myself for not picking up Eisenstein's 1925 silent feature "Battleship Potemkin" when I first saw it. Now I have to leaf through stacks and stacks to find a copy.

But that's the way it goes. According to my friendly Maranao suki , they don't really have much of a say in what titles they get. They apparently buy DVDs by the lot, and keep their fingers crossed that it will contain enough fast-moving titles to justify their investment.

So it could only be a happy accident that the latest shipment happened to include Roberto Rosellini's "Open City", or Gillo de Pontecorvo's classic "Battle of Algiers", or John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon". Maybe that's why there's a preponderance of Korean soft-core videos and Japanese DVDs with no English translations on the covers. Just sheer random chance. Maybe the next shipment will consist mostly of Bollywood filmi , or Penthouse videos.

Stranger things have happened in Quiapo.

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