Love Diaz devoted himself to the history of the Philippines and came up with what can be called a historical idea. As a chronicler, he reformulated the genre of historical cinema, as required by the specifics of his country. History had to be reclaimed from a non-existence that had swallowed up witnesses, testimonies, civilization, and memory itself, which had been eradicated successively by Spanish colonization, American occupation, and internal dictatorship. Diaz draws his memories from the humid air of the rice paddies surrounding the extinct barrio villages, from the mourning and songs of old women, from the skirmishes in the mountains of Mindanao, from the worn soles of the peasants who constantly rotate his black-and-white world.

Diaz's films "The Evolution of the Philippine Family" and "From the Previous One" reincarnated a historical film based on subjective feelings and ghostly forms: on the weakening of the image, the rejection of entertainment, on the emphasized lack of a category of skill, except that partially provoked by a digital camera. Its installation never drowns out the natural expressiveness of the landscape, separated only by the horizon line. Diaz's Philippine chronicles take in as much as a memory card and the lens of an immobile camera can absorb, which is wrapped around the reality unfolding on the screen - "a life that does not allow itself to dictate anything, because it does not read and precedes any text." ¹

This inclusiveness and minimization of selection seem to compensate for the catastrophic losses and gaps that Philippine society has been forcibly subjected to. In the absence of reliable information, Diaz practices a close look at the terrain and people's actions, at the village world and everyday life, investing in experience rather than knowledge.

"The woman who left"

Ang Babaeng Humayo

Based on Leo Tolstoy's short story "God sees the Truth, but He won't tell it soon"

Written, directed, and directed by Love Diaz

Artist Popo Diaz

Cast: Charo Santos-Consio, John Lloyd Cruz, Michael De Mesa, Noni Buencamino, Shamen Buencamino and others

Cinema One Originals, Sine Olivia Pilipinas

Philippines

2016

1. Derrida Jacques. The letter and the difference. Inspired speech. St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 228.

The artist and natural observer became akin to the ancient historical collector-more in the spirit of Homer than of Herodotus and Plutarch. Diaz is true to the archaic in his own way. The monochrome image in his films dates back to the fabulous days of the advent of cinema, which was born in black and white. The director has created an epic where the country's history, like a human biography, is fused together from heterogeneous and unequal materials, including ancient Malay religious rituals that were replaced by Christianization and Islamization, television recordings or staged reconstructions-interviews with the classic Philippine film Lino Broca. Imagination and legend play no less important roles in it than authenticity and fact. And time itself is almost irrelevant. The famous length of Diaz's plan sequences, shot from a carefully chosen and almost always fixed point, would seem to suggest the opposite. The more certain it is that the camera in a state of stasis eliminates time - just as acute sensation, strong experience, and trance states lead to its disappearance. For Diaz, history is not born out of time, but out of space. His slow-motion films are structured like the body of a seven-thousand-island Philippine archipelago. Episodes-islands are connected by smooth scenes-straits-forest and country roads that someone is walking, has already passed or is about to appear. You can't tell if it's because of a long turn or because of the edge of the frame.

A film about a "woman who left" - who left her home for thirty years, where she will never go again - may well be inferior in duration to films that cover even a shorter period. The timing is only three hours and forty minutes. As if inspired this time by Leo Tolstoy's ABC story "God sees the truth, but he won't tell it soon", Love Diaz decided to create not only on the scale of "War and Peace".

The 2013 film Norte, The End of History, also fits in at four hours - Diaz's first approach to a relatively concise narrative, where he also turns to both color and a moving camera. The most polyphonic of Diaz's paintings, The Evolution of the Philippine Family (2004), which covers a decade and a half of martial law declared by President Marcos, is five hundred and forty minutes long. "Evolution..."together with the films "From the previous" (2014), " Lullaby to a sorrowful Mystery "(2016) and" Melancholy " (2008), which stands out and is much closer to the novel form, they are united by the need (for the country, fellow citizens of the director and his audience) to find a sense of history.

So far, it has been much more important for Diaz to release a larger story from the natural and generic than a specific character in his existence. In previous films, Diaz's characters are not isolated from the landscape, nature, or myth. And finally, not under the influence of the new novel, which is subject to "Melancholy" with its masked characters, and not in the folk tradition of "Florentina Hubaldo" (2012) in the filmography of Diaz-from under the blocks of monumental abstractions - the story is purely private, individual. Instead of a new attempt to embrace the vast, the author focused on a single character and the truth of his character. Instead of embodying the entire history of the Philippines, there is a single fate, a humble refusal to connect the whole Philippine reality with its grief, poetry and truth to the heroine's story. Instead of a comprehensive image, where the details are important, Diaz even allows himself such sedition as a frame where only the figure of the main character remains in focus.

In "The Woman Who Left", the director follows the character so consistently for the first time, allowing him to determine the saturation of the frame and subordinating the composition of the film to him. Now Diaz is getting very close to the feelings of a man who was thrown out of the big game by coincidence.

stories. His heroine stands out from the communal and natural whole, finds a full-fledged "I". Her name is Horatia Somorostro, and the time of her life is as divided as the past and present of the Philippines.

Schoolteacher and everyone's favorite Horatia (Charo Santos-Consio) served thirty years in prison on false charges. The year her mother, Teresa of Calcutta, died and Hong Kong was handed over to China, Horatia was acquitted. The world she left is no more. The husband died, the son disappeared, the daughter lives her own life. Keeping her release a secret, Horatia hopes to find her son and plans revenge on Rodrigo Trinidad, the villain who faked her arrest out of jealousy. Under a new name, she gathers information about Rodrigo's habits and prepares to kill him. On this mortal journey, she meets a city idiot who vigorously pursues demons, a cheerful street vendor (Noni Buencamino) of typical Filipino snacks balut (boiled duck eggs with a formed embryo), aka the doomed transgender prostitute Hollande (John Lloyd Cruz), a young man who changed his gender and left home.

The film has a strict structure, literally divided into day and night, light and shadow. The high contrast of the image thickens the darkness and whitens the daytime scenes as much as possible. In the evening, Horatia turns into a stalker, the fool supplies her with agent data, the alliance with the peddler makes it possible to scout the surroundings of Rodrigo's house without suspicion. But a day is a day with the mercy of everyday chores and the dazzling whiteness that covers the blackest souls. The dusk of the deserted streets resounds with the monotonous bird calls of the peddler who has taken on the burden of Horatia.

Of the" Woman Who Left, " it could be said that with her, Love Diaz made a leap comparable to the transition from the Old Testament to the New. From the history of kingdoms to the mysterious ways of the soul, from crime and imminent punishment to mercy and forgiveness. This time, his Story is born not out of space and nature, not out of time, but in a soul that exists fully only on the border of light and shadow. Oracia Somorostro literally walks on this terminator, on the very edge of a bright and sharp contrast. Diaz had done some impressive experiments with sharpness before, shooting almost in silhouette under the sun at its zenith. In the night, Horatia will see Hollande for the first time, dancing in the dark alleys. Horatia will take care of all the seedy and squalid people she meets. But only together with Hollande going to kill Rodrigo - in this single episode, the camera will start moving.

Diaz's art has found its freedom. He is now ready to give up any of his formal or structural attachments, because " if there is still something satanic and truly cursed in our time, it is the predilection to linger-according to the artist's right-on the form.. ."²

2. Artaud Antonin. The theater and its counterpart. St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 104.

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