The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship
Through his filming of bodies in poverty and squalor, Brillante Mendoza prevents the traditional consumption of the third world as enjoyable, entertaining, and educational, and instead enables a multisensorial immersion in a bewildering pandemonium that remains tense and uncomfortable. In this, the filmmaker questions the basis of identification: they suffer like me is replaced by they suffer unlike me. Yet the films demand a feeling, what I call shared spectatorship, for it is a mode of identification predicated not on pleasure but on difference as the necessary condition for us to mark our own positions outside that suffering. We are not inside the shoes or the soul of the other, rather the movie shows us our distance through representations of proximity that emphasize difference. His films butcher the spectator because people are rampantly butchered in the Philippines—as a fact and not a fantasy that his films concoct.