City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila’s Alternative Film Culture ed. by Jasmine Nadua Trice (review)

City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila’s Alternative Film Culture by Jasmine Nadua Trice, an assistant professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a snapshot of a particular time in Philippine cinema when alternative or independent movies became a beacon of hope for the local film industry and when articulations of developing an audience for these movies became a focal point of discourse.

The early 2000s is a popular time period among Filipino film scholars because of the excitement generated by independent movies that brought a much-needed boost to the flagging film industry. These early studies of independent cinema focused on their means of production, aesthetic and narrative elements, and ideologies and meanings. Trice’s book deviates from these approaches as it is more concerned with the circulation and reception of these movies. The focus on independent cinema, according to Trice, is a way to demystify these movies by positioning them “as components of larger sociocultural and institutional structures” (13). The approach is welcome because the myth of independent movies as possessing superior narrative and aesthetic qualities continues to endure until the present time and glosses over the fact that a number of external factors contribute to their shape and form.

The central idea that ties all the chapters together is identifying speculative publics and how these publics are constituted by the sites of film circulation. Trice defines speculative publics as “visions of audience that promised to overcome these contradictions between radical texts and rarefied audiences” (9). It is speculative because, as Trice believes, it hinges on the possibilities associated with the ideal public sphere as a space for the creation and exchange of information.

In order to construct the notion of speculative publics, the book treats “cinemagoing” as a material experience where places such as malls, cinematheques, micro-sites, and mobile cinema provide the necessary space and context for the creation of the ideal Filipino film publics: rational and literate, exposed to various national and global cinemas, and financially capable of supporting alternative movies.

Specifically, the book focuses on the practices of alternative film circulation in the country from 2005 to 2012, with each chapter looking at film circulation projects and initiatives—tracing how these endeavors were founded, operationalized, and discontinued. Aside from physical spaces, Trice also includes promotional materials, online audience forums, question and answer sessions with directors, and conversations with various audiences among the sites of her analysis (22). There are insights gleaned from the book’s five chapters that are new and interesting, although there are some that are already familiar and obvious to those who have intimate knowledge of the problem of developing the local audience.

The first three chapters are highly influenced by the fields of urban studies and geography. The first chapter utilizes the concept of a revanchist city where the mass privatization of public space has resulted in a mall culture that has violently expelled the poor from these spaces. The poor’s exclusion and the imagined mobility of the middle class in these malls are already common topics of inquiry in the works of Rolando Tolentino and Reuben Cañete, among others. But what I appreciate is Trice’s application of the revanchist city to the analysis of film circulation and reception to describe the efforts of the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative to bring independent movies to the mall because this is where audiences are to be found. This strategy, according to the book, results in a discourse that inadvertently creates a dichotomy between “good” and “bad” audiences, which is one of the book’s most interesting insights. The “good” is personified by the “moneyed, middle-class moviegoer who consumes Filipino films in theaters” (64) and the “bad” are, by implication and extension, the poor people who not only lack the means to partake in neoliberal consumption but, worst of all, are also...