Perfumed Nightmare

Abstract

“Se esta ultimando la instalacion del cinematografico para der sessiones dentro de pocos dias.” With this announcement of the inauguration of the first Lumiere cinematographe in a salon in Escolta, Manila (the installation of the cinema is almost finished, and sessions will start in a few days), the Philippines had its first acquaintance with the silver screen, in January 1897, just two years following the invention of the motion picture in Europe.¹ Curiously, it was also the final year of three centuries of Spanish colonization before the fraudulent cession of the islands to the United States for U.S. $20 million in the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The colonial conspiracy would have disastrous consequences in the shaping of Filipino culture:

Filipino identity and consciousness now faced a concerted threat from the new colonizer. The colonial traits inculcated by the Spaniards—the legacy of ignorance, superstition, hierarchical values—all these still existing beneath the surface of the dynamic new revolutionary consciousness provided the new conquerors with a convenient basis for imposing their own norms. The counter-consciousness that animated the struggle for independence had hardly developed into a new consciousness before the consciousness was again being modified to suit the needs of a new colonial system.²