Neoliberalism and Global Cinema

Abstract

Committed to exposing the ways in which the personal is always crosshatched with the social and the political, Filipino filmmaker Jeffrey Jeturian’s traces the relentless conversion of all forms of social experience into economic transactions. Whether in Pila Balde [Fetch a Pail of Water]) or Kubrador [Bet Collector], 2006) Jeturian’s films thematize the neoliberal transformation of social individuals into calculative entrepreneur-consumers. This chapter traces two levels at which both films operate to expose the workings of neoliberal rationality in the Philippines: first, a diegetic elaboration of commodification in story worlds where sex, longing, death, and grief become subject to economic calculation; and second, the extra-cinematic dimensions of Filipino film production in the context of economic crisis and political corruption. My consideration of Pila Balde, a low-budget pito-pito film, indexes the desperate measures Philippine film studios adopted to weather the 1990s “crisis of Philippine cinema” brought on by the Asian economic crisis. In turn, Kubrador was released in the context of political scandals in 2005 that implicated the First Gentleman of the Philippines, Mike Arroyo, in payoffs from the illegal gambling trade, jueteng.

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