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Abstract

Pro Bernal Anti Bio (PBAB) is the collaborative auto/biography of Filipino filmmaker Ishmael Bernal, begun by Bernal before his death, continued by his lifelong collaborator Jorge Arago, and finished by scholar Angela Stuart-Santiago after Arago’s passing. From the pair’s amassed auto-archive of materials, Stuart-Santiago transformed Bernal and Arago’s words into lines of dialogue, framing the final text as a speculative conversation held between their ghosts. PBAB’s experimental format emphasizes a deliberate divergence from the rigid forms of the neocolonial archive: a structure of narrative-production that enforces and authenticates state control by erasing deviant subjects and alternative histories. While Bernal’s place in the neocolonial archive is marked by his reductive recuperation into state-affirming, normative narratives, PBAB utilizes ephemeral, speculative, and communal methods of memorialization to unearth the aspects of his queer, leftist life that were criminalized under American imperial rule and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. This thesis analyzes PBAB’s content, format, and methodology to theorize PBAB as an “anti-archive”: a queer, anti-colonial medium that critiques the violences and silences of the neocolonial archive while creating an alternative site of memorialization for queer Filipinx subjects. Chapter One puts PBAB in conversation with Bernal’s 1980 “docufiction” film, Manila by Night (MBN), whose autoethnographic portrayal of a queer, impoverished Manila violently opposed dominant dictatorial visions of nation. This chapter argues that MBN’s appropriation of imperial documentary techniques and dictatorial aesthetics of “beauty” to re-narrativize martial law Manila casts the film as an anti-archive that queers and refigures the visual languages of neocolonial historical narrativization. Chapter Two analyzes PBAB’s methodology of “after-living,” which foregrounds queer Filipinx death to imagine spectral possibilities beyond the limits of queer erasure. Intervening into conversations within queer theory regarding death as the end of queer potential, I examine how PBAB and MBN’s use of (quasi-)auditory modes of record ruptures the silence of the archive to revitalize sites of queer death, presenting Bernal’s voice as loudly still-living even from beyond the grave. My conclusion expands upon these methods of after-living by placing PBAB in dialogue with Reuel Molina Aguila’s poem “Ishma” to identify new mediums for queer Filipinx anti-archival creation.