Celso and Cora is such an important film that it should be immediately made available for as many people as possible to see it. L. Brown
109 minutes Colour 1983
Film maker: Gary Kildea
Behind the facades of the main streets of Manila are narrow alleys. Here walkers tread carefully on slippery boards over mud holes, sewage facilities are minimal, stealing and extortion are a means of survival. These are the slums. This film is about one family who live in these slums, Celso and Cora and their two children. The film has no apparent beginning or end, rather it has been constructed from fragments taken from a three month segment of their lives.
Gary Kildea and a Filipino collaborator enter this family's life, filming them as they eat, as they care for their children, as they work on their daily chores, as they sell cigarettes at night in front of the Tower Hotel. The film employs very little voice-over: the major voice is the (sub-titled) Tagalog conversation of Celso and Cora. Kildea makes the sequence of events portrayed in the film clear through the use of blanks placed between certain sequences explaining an event or time change. The camera, as Kildea's eye, is very much a part of the film; people are continually asking Celso and Cora about the man with the camera and the couple refer to him themselves, telling the children to eat properly because `uncle' has the camera on. This film grants itself neither the pretence of being objective nor that the film-makers are invisible. By the end of the film, the viewer feels she or he has in a small way come to know Celso and Cora, the intensity of their lives, the circumstances in which they live.
Cora and Celso are street vendors. They tell how they met each other and came to be together. They are evicted from their home, find another, and Cora decorates their new one-roomed shack with bright plastic curtains. Each day the struggle continues, how to feed the children, how to find enough money to buy the cigarettes they sell. Their little boy gets pneumonia (a common illness in such areas) and the little girl has a continual cough. The couple struggle to find money for proper medication and food for the children. Celso and Cora have arguments, particularly over care of the children and matters relating to Cora's mother, and finally Cora leaves. Then a change of hotel policy forces them out of their established `position' where they sell cigarettes, and Celso faces the prospect of working as a `walking' street vendor, one who has no established `position'. Now he will make even less money and receive more police harassment. In the final scene of the film, Celso visits a park near Manila Bay with their girl, trying to keep the child healthy by exposing her to the sun. As Celso says, `That's how it is ... with the life of the poor ... it's not equal'.
As a political and emotional statement, the film is powerful. Because of the film-maker's unique use of his camera, making it (as an extension of the film-maker) an internal character in the film, rather than an external observer, and because of his narrative style, this film is likely to become a classic; it won the RAI 1984 Film Prize. Paul Henley has criticised the film on the grounds that it lacks context, making its contribution as an anthropological film debatable (RAIN June 1984, no. 62). The ethnography Slum as a Way of Life, the result of several years' fieldwork in a Manila slum by Mr and Mrs F.L. Jocano, gives the film a context, but to be fair to the film-maker, Kildea has never claimed that the film is `anthropological' or even an `ethnographic' film. Rather, others have given this film its label as `ethnographic' partly because it suceeds, where many others have failed, in creating an immediacy and intensity between the viewer and the vision presented on the screen. Celso and Cora is not a comfortable film, but it offers insights other films barely touch. It is recommended for courses in anthropology, film making, urban studies, development studies and sociology. Catalogue number (16mm): 10RA127.
L. Brown, 1985. `Celso and Cora: An Appreciation'. Anthropology Today, Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 26.
D. Decaesstecker, 1978. Impoverished Urban Filipino Families. UST Press, Manila.
P. Henley, 1984. `The 1984 RAI Film Prize'. RAIN, No. 62, pp. 9-12.
F.L. Jocano, 1975. Slum as a Way of Life. A Study of Coping Behaviour in an Urban Environment. University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City. [An anthropological study of the slums of Manila.]
M. Willson and G. Kildea, 1986. `Interpreting Ethnographic Film: An Exchange about Celso and Cora'. Anthropology Today Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 15-17.
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