Going nowhere? Revisiting Michael Lacanilao’s ‘The Escherian Stairwell’

1 of 12

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

LOOK UP Escher’s name in Google and search results will provide you a relatively obscure Dutch graphic artist whose body of work seems to comprise mostly of patterns, tessellations, and optical illusions. Among his illustrations are flights of stairs and staircases in chaotic distortions, bewildering to the eyes while leading nowhere.

Although these appear whimsical, they provide an apt reference for Michael Lacanilao’s experimental short film – and the premise of a subsequent documentary to iron things out.

Last week’s screening of his ‘The Escherian Stairwell’ at the UPV Cinematheque – a fitting commemorative for National Press Freedom Day – revived the controversy and questions surrounding the short film when it was released on YouTube twelve years ago. Now, framed in the context of a post-truth world where people seem to take in everything they see in social media, the reception of the short film has become a sounding board of the disturbing effects of disinformation saturated by a widespread deterioration of the public’s capacity for critical thought.

The six-minute video clip featured interviews with students and campus personalities who go up and down (and seem amazed) on what appears to be a Mobius strip-structured stairwell. The cinematographic editing did the rest. Essentially, it followed the same basic gambit: the same old trick of smoke and mirrors served to a gullible public easily amazed by the novel and the sensational. But the grand reveal was not the illusion itself; it was people falling for it.

‘The Escherian Stairwell’ went viral upon its publication on the platform and what began as an artistic project ultimately developed into a social commentary on how people perceive the real and the absurd – or how they blur the lines in between, for that matter. For all the ludicrous unreality of the ‘structure’, the short film incited the credulous and the skeptical to either defend or vilify the ‘phenomenon’. People have flocked to the campus hall where the purported flight of stairs resided and with flights of imagination and credulity running amok, have come to terms with the depressing reality that they fell for a grand artifice.

One would think the shenanigans ended there. During recent Philippine elections, social media accounts run by politically motivated personalities have touted and spread the ‘hoax’ as a proud product of Filipino architectural ingenuity – and the masses generally (and proudly!) swallowed this, hook, line, and sinker. Tragically, these are the same ones who cast – and will cast – their ballots come election day.

To clarify the misperception and to drive home the point of the short film, Lacanilao released an explanatory documentary in 2023, one which revealed the engineered machinery behind the structural sleight of hand. ‘A Brief History of the Escherian Stairwell’ unabashedly presents the scaffolding of the short clip’s narrative: the rawness of the acting, the naïveté of the participants’ banter, the bulk of online literature backing the architecture, the biographical details of the stairwell’s ‘architect’. Every bit of it was a deliberately concocted fragment built to give the illusion of a lie which inadvertently exposed a much deeper concern, one that tragically resonates with recent PISA results and the incapacity of 18 million high school graduates to comprehend what they read.

We might question the aesthetics of Lacanilao’s film but we cannot escape the direct effect of his film to its viewers. While some can readily claim to be insulated from the trickery of the cinematic illusion, all of us are still enmeshed in the tidal wave of credulity sweeping the considerable many, and with them, the social repercussions brought about at the wake of this gullibility. If ordinary, undiscerning viewers cannot separate fact from fiction and see through the deception of the film, what more if they are incessantly exposed to and bombarded with a plethora of political fake news, propaganda material, and senselessly violent jingoism?

* * * * *

A post-screening conversation by truly yours with Michael Lacanilao brought up what Imelda Marcos audaciously remarked in Lauren Greenfield’s ‘The Kingmaker’, that ‘perception is real, but the truth is not.’ Brief and blunt as it is, ‘The Escherian Stairwell’ just proved the collective gullibility which maintains the statement.

We can exasperatedly ask how preposterous it can be that people get duped on a national scale. As history would have it, it was not the first time it happened: tyrannies and oppressions are built on these illusions and forgetfulness. Heck, it just might happen again in the elections next week; then we’ll be once again stuck in a looped stairwell leading nowhere.

(The writer is a senior high teacher of one of the private schools in the city. The photos are from Ted Aldwin Ong.)