The Time of Poverty and the Image of Refusal

This article looks at the 1990 documentary Masakit sa mata (Eyesores) as an instance of Filipino filmmaking that, in the aftermath of Lino Brocka’s socialist realist cinema, explores the modalities of a postmodernist documentary style. It argues that the film founds the idea and practice of a radical collectivist cinema whose means of expression can be understood through Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the cinematic “time-image” in its elaboration of a temporal order in which the interaction of filmmaker, subject, and apparatus produce, through a series of fragmentary images and tableaux that composes the film’s narrative, a spatio-temporal “world” of stories, ideas, and subjects capable of giving rise to the idea of a collectivity whose existence is built upon nothing less than fighting against what the homeless child subjects of the film face daily: the punishing dialectics of late-twentieth-century capital accumulation.