Harana: The Movie is the kind of film that brings up a host of memories. It is also a film of missed opportunities. As viewers of film, we tend to check the visual (and aural) scenes with our personal experiences, albeit at times, distanced from time and place. As a Filipino in diaspora, who I believe is the main audience the film is directed at, we also subject ourselves in the time-honored tradition of nostalgic remembrances, of faded feelings, faint music, and fleeting loves. Harana tries to extract these emotions from you as a viewer, specially if you have lived this experiences.  The film stops at that. If one were to imagine the movie as a harana – a serenade,  directed to the viewer, it is unrequited and the door to the heart remains shut. This might be imputing an intention of the film maker that was not there in the first place, but there were signals that the idea was present. In fact, there were too many ideas that threaded its way into the film but got lost along the way.

-The quest: Here Florante introduces the idea that he was in search of original harana music and performers. Pied Piper-like Florante, in search of the authentic haranista, takes to us different places, lovely in its simplicity (Quezon, Cavite and Ilokos provinces).  There is beauty to its reality, without romanticising and falling to the video postcard mode. As an anthropologist (and guitarist), I felt the longing of the fieldwork, the smell of dark earth moist from the morning dew and the sudden whiff of tricycle exhaust. The extreme closeups evoked a sense of intimacy and attempts to draw the viewer to the music. Yet familiar as I was with the context, there was no immediate sense of longing or returning. There are moments of humor like the classic indirection of the Filipino who when asked for directions will point here, there, or, maybe this way which is shorter! Or a classic visual pun of walking on a solitary road, guitar case in hand, when a tricycle cab overflowing with passengers pass by, a cut and the scene returns with Florante, guitar case astride,  riding in the already overfilled tricycle cab. The audience got a good laugh from that. But I also felt the anxiety of the local singers who were being asked to perform, for a stranger no less, about songs and skills that have long faded away. In this quest, we are treated to a discovery of this long lost skills from Mang Romy, a former harana contest winner who now is a fisherman; Mang Tino, a distinguished haranista but is now a small farmer; Mang Felipe,  and a former zarzuelista, who is now a tricycle operator in Ilokos. Florante’s quest for the true harana practitioner takes him to all this places where they perform and display their now re-discovered skills in rural homes and streets, town meeting halls, the Philippine Cultural Center and ultimately San Francisco and Los Angeles. You know this  quest is consumated when the audience releases a sigh of acknowledgement and relief when the haranistas take their bows in Los Angeles, halfway around the world from Cavite and Ilokos.

-The personal quest and return to roots: the film begins with Florante’s narration about coming to home to bury his father after having left the Philippines many years ago to study and play the classic guitar. As classic guitarist myself, I symphatize when Florante bemoans that least music he plays are those of Filipinos. The core of classic guitar music is overwhelmingly European, naturally, since the modern classic guitar repertoire by the masters before and after Andres Segovia wrote and performed music from Western Europe. This includes South American music and despite its introduction of Afro-Caribbean rhythms still relies on western harmonization modes. As an extension of the Spanish colonial empire, the Philippines absorbed the same harmonies from Spain and from Mexico, its direct cultural lifeline for almost 400 years. Harana is, in fact, a Mexican term, from jarana, a music performance popular in the Guerrero province of Mexico. The intriguing question is how the Mexican jarana which is more a dance and instrumental music performed on a platform-the jarana, became translated into the Philippine harana, in the course of Filipino hispanization. Sometimes labeled harana habanera, the Philippine harana has come to represent a part of the courtship ritual that receded further into the rural areas as the Philippines modernized. It is foremost, a social event by a small group of men led, by a skillful vocalists and guitarists to woo a lady with songs to initiate the courtship process.  While rhythmically distinct from the kundiman, harana  became synonymous with the kundiman (perhaps with the introduction of radio and movies and the spread of popular love songs). The kundiman, ia a song form scholars have noted as a love song mutated from a war song, known as kumintang that early observers have described as a song of intense pain and lost.

Quote from Viaje por Filipinas De Manila a Tayabas (Alvarez Guerra, 1887)

¿Qué es el cumintán? dirán aquellos de nuestros lectores que no conozcan las costumbres tagalas. El cumintán es una mezcla de todos los acordes tristes y melancólicos que se conocen en el pentágrama. El cumintán es una balada compuesta de suspiros. Sus notas son otros tantos ayes arrancados en el silencio de la noche, de la mujer que ama, del corazón que espera, del proscripto que tras la azulada bóveda busca cual otro rey del Oriente la estrella que marca el derrotero de su patria. El cumintán tiene algo de salvaje, algo que hace volver la vista á los agrestes bosques en que se escuchan sus acordes. Tiene sus reminiscencias de las antiguas cántigas moriscas, recordando no pocas veces el gemir del polo gitano. El cumintán nació con la primera guitarra que se oyó en estas playas. En esta canción india, todas las razas que han pasado por este suelo han llevado una adición ó una nota. Como dejamos dicho, se asemeja á las canciones gitanas, las cuales ni se aprenden, ni se inspiran en la pauta sino en la vívida luz de unos ojos de fuego, en el dolor intenso de una perfidia ó en el triste recuerdo que sintetiza un acerbo dolor.

Classic filipino guitar music in fact, is associated with this song form and was the sole respresentative of solo guitar music until the introduction of contemporary Philippine guitar music by De Leon, Kasilag and a few pioneering composers. The distance of this music from harana music is far yet connected as its distance and connection with European music. Although it is implied in the film – what else is evoked when you mention Ruben Tagalog, Mr. Kundiman himself, the kundiman is not mentioned. A good friend interviewed in the film, Mr. Manikan, tried to express this genre of song as the uttermost sense of desperation and longing. Which is why the harana is foremost a risky attempt to win a woman’s heart. It could open doors of courtship or be shunned and be a town embarassment driven off by ferocious dogs and shamed by a pail of dirty water dumped from the up stairs window.

This personal quest would have been the most powerful idea of the film secured by honoring his father’s tomb with a guitar recital; sharing his guitar music with the folks of Tondo -once the bane of decent Manila  upperclass families; and playing with the with three haranistas in the old colonial town of Vigan. One can understand Florante’s desire to focus on the haranistas over his own music, yet his guitar music punctuates into the scene cuts, as if in recital. Is it about his guitar, his music? Florante is a much accomplished guitarist, his technique impeccable, why not explore this to its glory and re-discovery of Filipino music as befitting the idea of returning and fulfill the very meaning of his namesake Florante, the hero of the great poet Balagtas in the love story Florante and Laura.

-A sociology of popular music: indeed the songs and performances the past generation has made and endeared in cultural history is almost gone. The haranista generation of Mang Romy, Tino and Felipe has no chance of continuing amid the onslaught of videokes and karaokes- musical devices that mimic sociality but in the end are isolating, objectifying, and commodifying consumption of music. There were opportunities to explore the future it seemed. Like the scene where a young boy strums his guitar in the plaza before adoring girl classmates or, the young man with his back to the sea wall, a guitar in hand. I would have wanted to hear what they think about their music.  It is a poignant scene where the old haranista can recall his songs by plunking a few coins into the videoke to serenade a machine. The film also depicts a peculiar sociological phenomenon in the Philippines (I have seen it in Mexico too), where the presence of the video camera triggers a celebrity spectacle. There is no question, the haranistas deserve it and if it publicizes their cause,  it is a well-deserved. But what is the cause?  Is the cause to publicize a dying art form and the attempts to record and recover it? Is it the cause to irrevocably alter the lives of the haranista’s into a potentially unsustainable expectations. Research of this nature tend to develop those dependencies. There is a moment of stardom mimicry when, in slow motion,  they enter the IIIR community center  in black tees and pants, a scene the audience quickly noticed and reminiscent of grand entrances in TV shows. In the end, the film would have made a wonderful testimony of change, on how culture changes when impinged by the necessities of life – feeding a family, paying for medications, or aging alone.

In the end the contesting intentions of the film evoked by the many ideas – all worthy of another film, diminishes its potential for the archive of memories. As an ethnography, or more properly an ethnomusicology, it skims over the musical artifacts for the sake of filmic brevity. One feels that the film maker worked hard to make a quieter film – the Philippines is a world of noise- and to make the music stand out, most of the music is faded out and almost none is s-ng to completion. This is most likely a editing decision, necessary to limit the viewing time but an unfortunate necessity. Perhaps in a future project, ala Alan Lomax, a body of recorded music from non professionals can be archived- komposos, zarsuela fragments, drinking songs or guitar virtuousity, like the left-handed guitarists who played a right-handed guitar. Recordings that would complement what ethnomusicologists like Maceda, Santos and others have done for the ethnic minorities. This music may not have the indigenous label like the others, but in spite of its coloniality, is still a valid representation of original cultural expression appropriated, in this case, to lowland rural folks.

As a concert, as with the introduction given before showing, the music came in fleeting fragments. The songs faded out into silence as the scene segued to the next. Perhaps this was an editorial issue. The focus was on the haranista, in close up, as they struggled with their own self-questions of skill and family responsibilities. They were after all, except for Florante, non-professional musicians and the excerpts played displayed a level of virtuosity for someone who has not performed in many years. Yes, it also displayed Florante’s virtousity and the haranista’s vocal resilience to good effect. Applause, however, is withheld until perhaps the accompanying audio CD is listened to. And if you do, the music is a testimony to Filipino musicality. Finally,  if as a love story, the movie’s storytelling was wanting. If it  simply followed the outline of Florante’s biography and his love for the guitar and of Philippine music in general, the narrative would have been more consistent.  The actual harana scene where they play in behalf of a young man who needed to increase his chances at courting the girl provided a light moment in the film, although clearly the harana did not seem to change the girl’s mind or even her parents. I hope I am wrong, for the poor boy’s heart-broken attempts will have been recorded for posterity.

It is a film worth its effort no less, a tremendous undertaking that involved so many individuals and organizations.  Watch out for later showings. Florante and his group has made a noble effort to put on record the lost art of the harana, a most archaic mode of romantic communication for showing one’s affection for another, in a world overwhelmed with tweets, txts, and phone videos. To enjoy the music in the quiet of your iPod, get the CD Harana Kings (New Arts Media Production). You will be more than rewarded.

http://haranathemovie.com/screenings.html