Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System

Directs incisive but at the same time admiring attention to H. R. Ocampo, Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, and Emmanuel Garibay—four masters, the profound originality and complex visuality of which genre-specific efforts to parlay Philippine social dynamics into visual practices of engagement, struggle, and transcendence have produced for each of them a much-deserved and committed local following, even as they remain mostly overlooked, or misunderstood, by the rest of the world’s critical communities.

Published in 2006.