‘Edjop’ and the hurrying of history

In his introduction to Pete Lacaba’s fervid account of the First Quarter Storm, Nick Joaquin described the events as the ‘hurrying of history’, a breaking of a tempestuous storm over a state broken by a dictator’s megalomania. Activist Edgar Jopson was caught in this frenzy of struggle, and like so many of those who were swallowed by the shadows of Martial Law, he wrestles with the likely chance of being forgotten by posterity. Katski Flores’ attempt on a biopic might just have rescued him from that limbo of forgetfulness.

For all its artistic liberties, ’Edjop’ intends to be a cinematic biography, and like many of these biopics about heroes or heroics, they aspire to be paeans to the fallen. In the film’s storytelling, the historical gaps are bridged with memories: while it is admittedly the story of Edgar Jopson, the film is so much more of an autobiography of daughter Joyette Jopson, her repressed remembrances of her father inundating the plot. Then again, how a persona is remembered relies as much on how others perceived him. As such, the film insipidly leans towards a retelling of history; it ends up as historiography and good storytelling onscreen.

The juxtapositions between recorded history and personal memory somehow casts a modicum of incoherence to the narrative. Still, it humanizes the plot: in ‘Edjop’, the personal becomes the proletarian. Perhaps it is in between the remembering and the recording that the facts of his story are best seen: the drama of the meeting between Edjop and the dictator, the latter snidely reminding him that he is but the son of a grocer; the intensity of a time of flying rocks and molotov cocktails at Mendiola, of banners borne by militant students against rattan staves and wicker shields carried by khaki-clad constabulary; the lurid details of torture and state-sponsored terrorism to keep the populace docile and quiet.

Unapologetically, Flores surrounds the biography with these minutiae — and if memory serves as metaphor to the storytelling, then the conflict is the race against forgetting and how the persona is to be remembered. The portrayals are complex and complicated. For one, Elijah Canlas in the titular role lends a seriousness to the character, one who dares to dream and run after the impossible dream of his ideals. Jodi Sta. Maria as estranged daughter Joyette is pitiable at the very least, her apathy made more palpable with her distancing from her father’s decisions and the consequences brought upon him by these. Yet at the same time, her narrative seems to seize the spotlight from Edjop himself. Flores’ symbolic parallels of race and relay as symbols of preserving and passing on history is nuanced but trite: it turns the biopic into a political parable of sorts.

At film’s end, we are left to confront the decisions and directions of Edjop. We find ideology served to us with a side of a private school education. One’s middle-class sensibilities might be  vexed to see the Atenista join the underground movement, when once he so strongly espoused dialogue. One might marvel in disbelief on how his parents could have supported his determined radicalism. We might be conflicted with the manner he was gunned down in the confusion of escape. But such is the coil of contradictions that history is chained to.

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A scene from the film: a young Edjop sits in a classroom at the Ateneo de Manila while a soutaned Jesuit perorates to the class about charity. To a classmate’s derogation of the paltry amount of his contribution, the student gives an extempore defending his widow’s mite of a donation. At the demure background is a phrase scribbled boldly on the blackboard: a person for others.

To students in a Jesuit school, that phrase might just be the core expectation from them —and by far the most difficult. It is so easy to attach the burgis allegation to the Atenista. When one is ushered daily to school in gilt-trimmed vehicles, or when affluence and influence ensure that one’s initial encounter with poverty and hard toil is by textbook and TV screen, that dictum scratched on the board assumes an admonishing stance to the bright and the privileged. Perhaps we can say that Edjop provided a contradiction to this image — that it was possible after all for the Atenista to go down the Hill and trod in the muck, to get off their knightly high horses, to descend the eagle or dragon’s eyrie, to wage one big fight for what truly matters to the last, least, and lost. Edjop, in going down that Hill, might have also veered towards his downfall, as bourgeois sensibilities would have it. While his contemporaries and our middle-class sense of propriety would think he might have lost his way, he did find himself and his calling in the process.

His name is one of many etched on the panels of the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, right below Evelio Javier’s. The past decades, which its tides and turns of power, have somehow left them as that: names on a list, slowly fading in meaning and sense. Katski Flores’ film just might have thrown him a saving line in the hurrying of history.

(The writer is a humanities teacher in one of the private schools in the city. The poster is from the movie’s Facebook page.)