LGM Film Club, Part 443: Turumba
By 
I moved to Albuquerque 25 years ago this summer. Crazy. One of the first places I discovered there was Alpahville Video, your classic arty based movie rental store. It was good. They had all kinds of things. Of course, the rise of Netflix killed it a few years later and what has been better for cinema in the last quarter-century than that company…..Anyway, at the time they had VHS and DVD and I had both players. So I would do what the goddamn algorithms–a technology to create the worst and most boring version of yourself possible–can never do, which is allow you to browse and explore and pick things up and consider and then make a choice.
Well, one day, I was looking at their Asian section and I wanted something that wasn’t Japanese or from one of the relatively few arty Chinese directors whose films were available in the US. I picked up a VHS tape of a film called Turumba, directed by a Filipino guy named Kidhat Tahimik and released in 1981.
What I ended up watching was the best film about globalization I had ever seen or still have ever seen.
The story goes like this–there’s a family in a small town in the Philippines, probably not all that far from Manila, but far enough without a highway, which happens to be under construction. The time is 1970 or so. The family is really artistic. The father teaches music and is the lead cantor at the town’s religious festivals, called Turumba. The grandmother created a really advanced way to make the papier-mache toys popular in the town. Grandma is still around teaching the craft with an emphasis on craft. One day a German woman comes to town and sees the toys. As it turns out, she’s a scout for German manufacturers. She buys everything they have. Those things sell, she orders more, and pretty soon, she’s making big orders. Out goes the craftsmanship and in goes mass produced toys to commemorate the Munich Olympics in 72. Out goes spending time playing music and in goes long days in the nascent factory, not only for the kids (it’s told through the 10 year old or so son of the cantor/head of the household who becomes the factory owner) but for the kids of town. Out goes hanging out at night and in comes electric fans and TVs and cars. Out goes the joy of life and in comes the sadness of capitalism, a sadness that few actually want to reject because of the material upsides.
What makes the film so brilliant is the ambivalence. It isn’t romanticizing the people or place. They already exist in a globalized world. The kid loves his Batman t-shirt. It’s just starting at a given time–a time when globalization already is impacting a community in one way–and demonstrating what happens when that globalization goes into overdrive. It’s also not propaganda. It’s certainly a critique of neocolonialism, yes, but done the right way. The film really is about ambivalence. It’s funny. There are little asides that amuse. It’s filmed like a documentary but is not ham-fisted at all. It’s super cheaply made–the subtitles take up half the screen and Criterion Channel pretty clearly just did the best they could with a VHS copy since I am pretty sure this was never put on DVD. I would absolutely recommend watching this. I was amazed to see it show up and I was so happy. I watched it a couple of times, then the video store closed, and I hadn’t seen in 20 years. It was just as good as I remembered.
This leads to me two additional points. One is that for as wonderful as Criterion Channel is, it’s quite striking how even film buffs just want to watch 80s and 90s big budget films they remembered liking back in college. The monthly programming now is deeply skewed in that direction, with very little on foreign films. This month includes a Nicole Kidman retrospective, a collection of films called “Surveillance Cinema,” which is a way to organize The Truman Show and Minority Report and Gattaca into a respectable Criterion thing; and three Cameron Crowe directed films. There’s also a couple of collections around older Hollywood films, but it’s pretty clear that there really is no market for foreign films, even among cinephiles, in this country. I get that Criterion is responding to the market. The problem is that it is very hard to search for films otherwise unless you are looking for something specific. If you try, you can search by country and if you put in Philippines, a bunch of things come up, but you have to think of that yourself. If I hadn’t seen this film in the Recently Added category, I would probably have never found it.
The other thing rewatching Turumba made me consider is how villages become centers of a specific type of craft. I’ve been in Oaxaca for nearly two months. You might be familiar with the alebrijes that come from here, the fantastically artistic wooden animals. They are cool, I grant you. I have a few. The story of these here seems to be similar–something a few people did, then a British filmmaker brought some of these people abroad, they got popular, and now the economy of two entire towns is making these things. I very slightly know an anthropologist who has written a book on this and I guess I should read it. How do specific towns rearrange their economies to produce what were once crafts for a mass global market?
Anyway, watch this film.