José B. Capino

I am a scholar of minoritized cinemas—decolonial, documentary, melodramatic, independent, adult, avant-garde—in the US and the Philippines/the Filipinx dispora. I use rigorous multi-archival research as well as critical perspectives in cinema studies and cultural theory to author pioneering accounts of neglected movies or offer trenchant revisions to the historiography of dominant cinemas. Recently, thanks to fellowships underwritten by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the University of Illinois, I have obtained further training in the digital humanities and ethnography. This training has enabled me to create works of multi-modal scholarship (such as video essays) and integrate ethnographic approaches into my research on the history of moving images.

My most recent book, Martial Law Melodrama: Lino Brocka’s Cinema Politics (U of California Press, 2020), studies political discourse in the films of the internationally renowned Filipino director, a frequently bankable maker of commercial films who also pioneered politically committed filmmaking and queer cinema in the Global South. Drawing extensively from primary sources and archival material, the book offers a textured account of anti-authoritarian politics in commercial and independent cinema. It engages in a timely discussion of how popular cinema--especially melodrama--registers and responds to authoritarian spells and fascist regimes, such as the ones currently seizing liberal democracies the world over. More broadly, the book offers a versatile model for interpreting politics in popular film.

My first book, Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema (U of Minnesota Press, 2010) illuminates the decolonial imaginary of Filipino movies, beginning in the immediate post-WWII/post-independence era but focusing on work from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Apart from positing Philippine cinema as an assemblage of decolonizing afterimages of Hollywood, the book also demonstrates how that cinema levels some of the most incisive critiques of American geopolitical and neoimperial power found in world cinema. An imaginative reconsideration of Philippine film history through the lens of postcolonial critique, Dream Factories won the 2012 cultural studies book prize from the Association for Asian American Studies.

I am currently working on two book manuscripts. The first is called Documentary and US Empire: A Decolonial History.  This study rewrites the history of US documentary cinema and the transformations of US empire, examining how public and private entities in the US devised or appropriated various forms of “nonfiction” filmmaking to serve the many ends of US colonial and neoimperial entanglements with its only former colony, the Philippines. Its objects of study include a wide range of films, from late 19^th-century movies about the Philippine-American War to 21st-century cinema verité documentaries about the travails of Filipina émigrés recruited to teach in an American inner city. The product of two decades of research at archives all over the US and in the Philippines, this book discusses long-neglected and recently rediscovered films. It contributes to current scholarship on documentary cinema, the cultures of US imperialism, decolonial theory and praxis, the history of global anticommunism, Asian American and Asian diaspora studies, among others. This study is a thoroughly updated tear-down revision of “Cinema and the Spectacle of Colonialism,” grand prize winner of the 2003 Dissertation Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. It proposes a fresh and broadly applicable approach to the study of colonial and decolonial visuality.

My other manuscript-in-progess is provisionally titled Necessary Sexploitation: Queer Independent Cinema in the Philippines. Queer independent Philippine films have blossomed on Philippine screens just as commercial movies have deserted multiplexes, as local and foreign film festivals showcasing such films have multiplied exponentially, and as new channels—from micro cinemas to online streaming platforms—have created transnational cyber venues where they play alongside queer movies from other nations. Though the moribund domestic commercial cinema of the Philippines has a long (if checkered) history of representing queerness, the scrappy independents have fashioned a vibrant, heterogeneous cinema for today and an envisioned gentler future, advancing rights-based identity politics, improvising vernacular sexologies of queerness in a patriarchal and Christian-dominated country, registering the dizzying changes wrought by hypercapitalism, neoliberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and—in the spirit of exploitation cinema—trying though not always succeeding to cash in on the enduring appeal of topical subject matter and sexual thrills. This study utilizes ethnographic and interpretive methods to understand the many kinds of projects that have been alternately know as queer cinema, gay-themed movies, LGBTQIA+ films, pink films, and others.

I have published widely cited and prize-winning essays on documentary film, adult cinema, and Philippine cinema in venues such  as Film Comment, Cinema Journal, and Animation Journal. I penned the teleplay of an award-winning documentary on the Philippine National Hero José P. Rizal that was broadcast on Philippine television. I have also translated both classic and contemporary world drama (Euripides's The Trojan Women, Pedro Calderon dela Barca's Las Tres Justicias en Una, and Hanoch Levin's The Whore from Ohio) into Filipino for the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). I won three Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (Drama), a screenplay award from the Film Development Foundation of the Philippines, and a best experimental film prize from the CCP.

My essay "A Proletarian Inferno" appears in the Criterion Collection's DVD and Blu-ray editions of Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light (1976) and, in Italian translation, in a box set of Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project-funded restorations issued by the Cineteca di Bologna. My video essay and liner notes are featured in Blu-ray discs of Lino Brocka's Cain and Abel and Lupita Aquino’s Once a Moth for the North American and Asian markets.

My research has helped locate the film elements that will be used in forthcoming restorations of Lino Brocka's Bona (1980) and Jaguar (1979). I have also done pro bono consultancy work on Philippine cinema for international firms seeking to release Filipino films on optical discs.

My most recent essays have been on Khavn's Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (in a book that received the 2023 best anthology award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies), Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat, Celine Shimizu's The Celine Project, Peque Gallaga's Scorpio Nights, Philippine indie cinema, and Clint Eastwood's American Sniper.

Apart from the honors mentioned above, I am a two-time Fulbright scholar and the recipient of fellowships underwritten by the Asian Cultural Council, the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Internal awards and fellowships from the University of Illinois include the Helen Corley Petit scholarship, the Conrad Humanities scholarship, the Study in a Second Discipline fellowship, the Humanities Research Institute faculty fellowship and writing prize, the Flora Hewlett fellowship, and most recently an Arnold O. Beckman award (2023) from the Campus Research Board. 

RESEARCH INTERESTS