Perfumed Nightmare
This week the From Below is excited to bring you Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977) (Mababangong Bangungot) on Thursday, March 27th, at 7pm. This will be our last screening at 7pm for the foreseeable future. Come April we’ll be switching to our spring/summer hours and will be starting the films at 8pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will open at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
“The sleeping typhoon must learn to blow again.”
Perfumed Nightmare is a satirical, lightly surreal anti-colonial picaresque about a jeepney taxi driver in Baguio, Philippines–played by Tahimik himself–who dreams grandly about the American space program, Miss America pageants, and life in the West. This is a brightly playful film shot on 8mm in which Tahimik toys with the myth-making projects of modernity, placing in conversation the mythic story structures of capitalist development and space travel with family folklore, the colonial occupations of the Philippines, and Ifugao goddesses. Tahimik’s work fits beautifully into one prong of the fork of the From Below formula we’re slowly uncovering: handmade, low-budget yet highly ambitious works that take big swings with both their formal choices and ideas.
Commonly claimed as an entry into a loose cluster of films from the mid-20th century characterized as Third Cinema, Perfumed Nightmare is a funny, micro-budget colorful criticism of neocolonialism that enjoys the comedy of cultural hybridity while eschewing a heavy-handed didacticism. Bridges figure symbolically large, as do jeepney taxis, beautifully painted refurbished American military trucks left over from World War II. As Kidlat succinctly puts it, “vehicles of war made into vehicles of life,” and so go many of the dialectical turns within the film. In one running gag Tahimik is the proud founder and president of the local fan club for Werner von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist brought to the US through Operation Paperclip to build the first American space shuttles. Perfumed Nightmare shifts the geography of reason in such a way to tip over the European story of Modernity to make room for another account, a new starting place that can perhaps take us elsewhere, commencing from the jeepney-high perspective of a bustling Filipino city abutting a US military base. Perfumed Nightmare offers a sincere and critical story of homecoming, an example of what Walter Mignolo might call an act of “epistemic disobedience” that serves to “de-link from the magic of the Western idea of modernity.” How else to turn that new leaf, as Frantz Fanon calls for in the Wretched of the Earth, to set afoot a new humanity, but with the resurgent winds of a typhoon relearned?
This is the first film of several in Kidlat Tahimik’s long and ongoing career, an autodidact who works across several different mediums. Near to the From Below’s particular fascination, and perfectly indicative of the kind of mythic bricoleur sensibilities of Tahimik, is the massive wooden ark he has built at the artist commune he lives at in Baguio. Balanghay ni Ikeng cinematheque is a massive “replica” of Ferdinand Magellan’s ship and it houses a 100 seater cinema. The theater is named after a man enslaved by Magellan, Enrique de Malacca, the actual first person to circumnavigate the globe after Magellan fell short due to his death in the Philippines. The first film screened in the handcarved ship cinema was Tahimik’s *BalikBayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment (2015), *his experimental homevideo epic 35 years in the making that retells Enrique’s circumnavigation of the globe and the birth of modernity.