08/30/2026
GRIPPED BY HYSTERIA: ISHMAEL BERNAL x3
Featuring A SPECK IN THE WATER (1976), TISOY! (1977), and HIMALA (1982).
While the brutal dictatorship and resulting censorship of the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos regime ought to have smothered the country’s film industry throughout the 1970s and 80s, it wound up producing what is now referred to as The Second Golden Age of Philippines Cinema. The country was lucky enough to have a libertarian-inclined censorship office head, and most of the boundary-pushing films of that era did well enough financially and critically to allow for the Marcos regime to accept a certain amount of cinematic criticism. Nevertheless, it still wouldn’t have been called a Golden Age without directors such as Lino Brocka, Kidlat Tahimik, and Mike De Leon all managing to push boundaries via their own forms of melodrama, docufiction, social realism, and more.
Despite being considered the second-most important Filipino director after Brocka in his home country, the work of Second Golden Age director Ishmael Bernal has not been screened as often abroad in recent years, in part due to print scarcity. Notorious for his sharp wit, the openly gay Bernal was a subversive ironist and a committed feminist. His films frequently used the roles of women to skewer what he saw as a sick society under the Marcos regime, best summed up by a line from his provocatively-titled essay Why The Martial Law Will Affect Your S*x Life: “Here we are, being practically ruled by a stranger who shall parade the chills and fevers of his ego and what are we going to do about it? We are going to be gripped by hysteria, that’s what.” This attitude culminated in the consensus pick for his masterpiece, Himala (1982), a study of the blind faith of the Philippines and the grip of hysteria that comes with it – it has only been vindicated with the country’s election of another Ferdinand Marcos to the Presidency. Bernal has subsequently remained a touchstone for the two key figures from the subsequent Third Golden Age: Spectacle favorites Lav Diaz and Raya Martin.
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