I am saddened whenever Filipino movie historians ignore the contributions of movie directors they probably consider "ridiculous": the works of Luis Nepomuceno, Pierre Salas, and Joey Gosiengfiao. These were directors who preferred to write their own screenplays and developed cinematic worldviews so unique and so disagreeable to atchay promoters that they are still scoffed at and referred to as Filipino directors who never "made it" to this very day.

Nepomuceno's movies were heavily influenced by advertising, which aims to depict the world as nothing short of perfect. As such, his plots were pat and conveniently constructed. In certain scenes the performers' clothing and props matched the walls of the houses they were in. His actors and actresses were carefully made up and coiffed. Every strand of hair was in place, and all clothes and costumes looked like they'd come straight from the laundry, newly pressed. Even his beggars were smudged with evident artifice. All of this was deliberate, but critics could not comprehend the message: that, watching these movies, the audience should be jolted to the reality that life is NOT like that, and that that was the point of it all.

Salas, on the other hand, was an extreme minimalist in scenery, in casting, in plot, and in dialogue--again, something that critics could not understand, to the point that they perceived his movies as sparse and too low-budgeted for the tickets the audiences were paying for. He was not interested in shooting stories, he was interested in describing situations. His camera lingered not on action and conflict but on his performers' faces and bodies. The critics could not see that his stories stripped life of useless trappings, his message being that everything boils down to relationships--between people who love each other and between people who do not love each other.

Gosiengfiao's serious movies were seen as pretentious, if not foreign in temperament. He is the only Filipino director I know, however, who was obsessed with definitions and re-definitions of women, evident not only in his movies but also in his TV melodramas. Being a man, he trod that sensitive line between depicting women as women and dangerously depicting women as possible men disguised as women.

I wish that we could see the good in every Filipino movie director. I note that society tends to adulate directors who are influenced by the movies they watch rather than the movies they believe they should be making. As a result, their oeuvre becomes inconsistent, if not merely episodic.

Our halls of movie directors are as full of artists as those of France and India are. There will never be directors like Nepomuceno, Salas, and Gosiengfiao again. Each of them was truly one of a kind. But nobody seems to care, especially now that they are gone.