This book gathers together the pre-COVID-19 theater and movie reviews that I wrote, by fits and starts, across a decade.... Organizing the pieces thematically, I realized that the eighty-something Filipino films and theatrical productions I had reviewed were grappling, more or less, with the same issues and concerns: from the ironic realization that, despite its formal complexities, all that art can offer are illusions of the real, to celebrations of our archipelago’s peripheral cultures and identities, to examinations of the problems of our national and social histories ... The title of this collection means not only to single out the review that I believe best demonstrates its orientation but also to flag the generative truth of our country’s cognitive and epistemological situation: that as a people, we are, despite and after a century of public education and modernization, still enduringly oral, by and large. Clearly, as has been the primary insight that I’ve gleaned from a number of these recent films and plays, one of the greatest challenges that we’re facing as a nation pertains precisely to one of the nation’s most important prerequisites: a deep-seated literacy that endows its members with the facility of abstraction, categorical thinking, and imaginative capaciousness, upon which empathy is, of necessity, founded. Needless to say, empathy is an entirely crucial skill if national cross-identification and solidarity were to ever take place ... Identifying the effects of an unfinished and enduring oral mode of consciousness may help us understand better, on the one hand, the features of our national culture’s otherwise scripture-dependent forms (literary, dramatic, and filmic texts) and, on the other, the many enduring “national” problems that these selfsame works bring up, again and again. –From the Author’s Introduction

1. Motion pictures ? Philippines ? Reviews. 2. Motion pictures ? Philippines ? Historyband criticism. 3. Theater ? Phillippines ? History. 4. Philippines drama ? History and criticism. 5. Performing arts ? Phillippines ? History.