Lino Brocka’s best-known film, Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, is arguably the most complicated work in Philippine cinema. Translated as “Manila in the Claws of Neon” and “Manila: in the Claws of Darkness” to foreign audiences, the film made it in some international critics’ lists as one of the most important films ever made. The indecision in providing a more accurate translation sheds light to the uncertainty of the film’s characters, their fates bounded by Manila’s luminescence and darkness–mystified by its pleasures and dangers as they venture on what was supposedly a hopeful journey.
Bembol Roco stars as Julio Madiaga, a young fisherman from the country who travels to Manila in search for his lover, Ligaya Paraiso, who is portrayed by …show more content…
Writers find Aristotle’s work of literature as the foundation of storytelling. But Maynila, perhaps Lino Brocka’s most powerful film, is the every archetypal tragic plot that transformed from imagination to a world with human shape and meaning. Northrop Frye, one of the most prominent modern literary critics, poses that the art of literature is formulaic because every story has a signatory archetype, like a hero’s quest. In his first book, a close reading on William Blake entitled “Fearful Symmetry”, he describes that culture and civilization are derived from imagination, which he defines as a “creative force of the mind”. In the film, audiences are drawn to the reality of Manila’s culture and society where the central character, Julio, a young man from the province in hopes of making a living in the city, an archetype that begins with a “recurrent image, plot and pattern”–a retelling to take on a “universal quality”. In Frye’s most important work, “Anatomy of Criticism”, the word “archetype” means “beginning pattern” that audiences can relate to because they are who are being represented by the characters. Characters are made human, Frye argues with a Jungian concept that “part of what makes us human is an ‘unconscious’ inhabited by shared memories, desires, impulses, images, and ideas” that are distinct in every
Bembol Roco stars as Julio Madiaga, a young fisherman from the country who travels to Manila in search for his lover, Ligaya Paraiso, who is portrayed by …show more content…
Writers find Aristotle’s work of literature as the foundation of storytelling. But Maynila, perhaps Lino Brocka’s most powerful film, is the every archetypal tragic plot that transformed from imagination to a world with human shape and meaning. Northrop Frye, one of the most prominent modern literary critics, poses that the art of literature is formulaic because every story has a signatory archetype, like a hero’s quest. In his first book, a close reading on William Blake entitled “Fearful Symmetry”, he describes that culture and civilization are derived from imagination, which he defines as a “creative force of the mind”. In the film, audiences are drawn to the reality of Manila’s culture and society where the central character, Julio, a young man from the province in hopes of making a living in the city, an archetype that begins with a “recurrent image, plot and pattern”–a retelling to take on a “universal quality”. In Frye’s most important work, “Anatomy of Criticism”, the word “archetype” means “beginning pattern” that audiences can relate to because they are who are being represented by the characters. Characters are made human, Frye argues with a Jungian concept that “part of what makes us human is an ‘unconscious’ inhabited by shared memories, desires, impulses, images, and ideas” that are distinct in every