Rumored to have been salvaged from a commercial movie studio dumpster, “Riddle: Shout of Man” (original title: Original title: Bugtong: Ang sigaw ng lalake) is a commentary on Filipino on-screen macho culture, in the form of an optically printed film collage of deteriorating found footage. It was a product of the last Christoph Janetzko film workshop, with a focus on experiments with optical printers, held in 1990, and one of the rare surviving works in the brief filmmaking career of the now deceased Ramon ‘RJ’ Leyran.
“Riddle: Shout of Man” is streaming on Metrograph, as part of the Kalampag Tracking Agency Shorts Program
Essentially a collage of action/exploitation film of the 70s and 80s, some of them by Lino Brocka if I am not mistaken, the movie comments exactly on how men are presented in this kind of films, in contrast to women. Almost all of them foster a mustache and hold different types of guns while killing each other, and the women on the other hand, look scared, and are tortured and before eventually ending up dead. Just before the ending, however, a number of movies that include women who also hold guns are presented on screen, in a vague comment that seems to state both that machismo is not restricted to men and that at least partial equality eventually appeared on cinema, with women no longer being just the victims.
The footage is juxtaposed with abstract images of splashes of color, for lack of a better term, which, in combination with the frantic pace, the noise music, the repetition of scenes and the zoom ins to some particular sequences create a truly tense atmosphere, that actually works quite well for the short in terms of entertainment.
The rather experimental approach deems “Riddle: Shout of Man” a film that is addressed to the very few, also because the whole audiovisual approach could easily be described as annoying. At the same time, though, as it was unfolding in front of my eyes, I could not stop thinking how fitting it would be for a music video of some garage/punk song.
