Fellow: Elio Garcia
Moderator: Luna Sicat Cleto
“The narration of human relations are caught in slo-mo gloom, capturing granular change…and delicious discoveries of pain and loss.”
Dr. Luna Sicat Cleto opened the session with high praise for Elio Garcia’s “Camera Obscura,” drawing attention to not just the readabilty and relatability of his prose, but its special appeal, which lies in the orality and awareness that it is Filipino. She described him as writing “..from his soul, from the effusion of spirit.” In discussing the piece’s overarching themes of nature and technology, Dr. Cleto saw spiritual traces of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with its ever-present awareness of “…the patterns in our own bodies…whorls in fingerprints.”
During the discussion, Dr. J. Neil Garcia described the piece as “clearly written by a cinephile conversant in critical theory,” praising the ease with which it juggles different knowledges and registers, from theorists such as Deleuze and Bergson to the writer’s own personal memories. However, he also pointed out the piece’s “embarassment of riches”—excessive and rhapsodic in its generalizations, particularly regarding memory and visual media. While he appreciated this demonstration of wide learning, the aspects of the piece do not yet cohere or possess a strong direction.
Both workshop fellow Josh Paradeza and Dr. Bomen Guillermo conceded with Dr. Garcia’s criticism of the piece’s lack of surefootedness. In particular, Dr. Guillermo expressed how he found lacking the piece’s metaphorization of memory and the body through technical, materially grounded discussions of film; at times, these two aspects failed to converge. He also brought attention to the contradictions in the piece’s established point of view—”You cannot observe yourself if you are inside the camera obscura, inside the machine.”
Next, Dr. Rolando Tolentino praised the piece as “…a wonderful read…in its attempt to materialize a state of mind,” in the process melding together the philosophical and theoretical with the everyday. However, he also observed that its narration of personal trauma is obscured and, to some extent, insufficiently substantiated in comparison to the other creative nonfiction pieces (by women writers) in the workshop. Finally, he raised how the piece perhaps leans too Western, advising the writer to anchor his filmic sensibilities to the Filipino perspective.
Several of the panelists and workshop fellows also took issue with the scholarly or academic aspect of the piece. Dr. Jun Cruz Reyes expressed that, while he enjoyed its “magic” and playfulness, its resolution felt deflating in its impersonality. Rayji de Guia described the two aspects of the piece—the personal and the academic—as too demarcated, perhaps in need of more integration and “controlled chaos”; on the other end, Krysta Frost enjoyed the piece’s dark, grappling “gaps in memory.” To close the session, Elio Garcia expressed his delight at having succeeded in one of his main goals in writing—to aid his readers in generating multiplicities of meaning, refusing to capitulate to a singular, definitive reading.
