Alternative Cinema: The Unchronicled History of Alternative Cinema in the Philippines recalls a cinema whose history has been substantially left unwritten. The book is the first comprehensive account of the network of film forms—from documentaries to experimental, animation to short features, student films to home videos—that forms an alternate cinematic reality to the conventional Filipino movies. The “invisibility” of these alternative film forms belies the sheer volume of films produced, outnumbering the entire total production by the mainstream movie industry. Yet, despite their prodigious number and ubiquitous presence, their history is forgotten and they live in a subterranean world. This alternate film form claims the oldest of motion pictures produced and also the most recent, evidenced by the first newsreel shot by Jose Nepomuceno in 1918 and the most recent digital productions. Alternative cinema spans the entire breadth of motion picture history in the country. This is captured in this book with lucidity and fondness. Providing an understanding of its complex history of development, the book introduces Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome paradigm to account for the multiplicity of film forms taken by motion pictures as their development becomes interlaced with colonialism, capitalism, technology, culture, and the politics wrapping around the notion of “national identity.” Describing one of Asia’s vibrant alternative film cultures, the book is a rich resource of historical, cinematic, and social memories accompanying the emergence of a counter-cinema as motion pictures took root in the archipelagic nation. It is through this mesh of engagements that an idiosyncratic, if not wild, intelligence is honed in Deocampo, prompting him, as if instinctively, to track every species, and therefore every rhizome, in the rainforest of film. It is a daunting and exhausting task to account for this welter, and Deocampo does not only go through the motions of stirring; rather, he performs it because he is in the thick of it. —Patrick D. Flores,

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