Journeying with Howie Severino in His ‘Biyaheng Edsa’

By Seymour Barros Sanchez

The author with Howie Severino (pinoypress photo courtesy of Seymour Barros Sanchez)

“Bago pa naging rebolusyon, highway lamang ang EDSA…” Thus starts Howie Severino’s voice-over in his documentary about the former Highway 54. Although several i-Witness episodes strike a chord in me, I prefer Howie’s “Biyaheng Edsa” over the rest, not only because of its storytelling and technical aspect, but also because of its significance to the present times. I realized this more when I handled Introduction to Communication for the first time at a Catholic university in Manila, even including the four other colleges where I taught before.

Since I was assigned Crispin Maslog’s new edition of Philippine Communication Today as a required textbook, I have to make use of it so I required my students to read Chapters 4 (People Power 1) and 5 (People Power 2) to analyze the role of communication in a crisis. I was taken aback by the reactions of my students in their papers. Many of them find the reading material irrelevant since they were not born in 1986 or were still young in 2001. Others just don’t care at all.

Having watched Howie’s documentary about Edsa, which is a clear manifestation of his dictum “Make the important interesting and relevant,” I believe that this would make my students stop and take notice of the same topics so I showed it in my class. True enough, they were able to appreciate the historical events better. Given the prevalence of texting and the Internet, it would take the right combination of non-fiction storytelling and visual arts to hook this “generation of surfaces.” Here, Howie is effective in visually walking his audience through a complex story.

The documentary starts with Howie at Monumento Circle in Caloocan asking different people how to go to Edsa by walking or without taking any mode of transportation. He may appear like one of those pranksters in gag shows but since he has long been a credible broadcast journalist, the audience would slowly believe that he is not joking. At Balintawak, where the Katipunan’s cry of revolt in 1896 is historically remembered, he satirizes our concept of freedom by attaching it to our “freedom” to do unscrupulous deeds like taking drugs and hurting others. While discussing a serious inquiry on whether the 1986 People Power is a revolution or just a revolt, he injects humor to his documentary and juxtaposes it with how we erroneously view our freedom.

When Howie arrives at Muñoz, he zooms in on SM City North Edsa, the first mall of its kind in the Philippines, and touches on the prevailing “mall culture” in our country. Any feature on Edsa at present would not be complete without a take on the MRT so he rides the train to go to GMA 7, which airs i-Witness. He does this not to blatantly promote his network but, moreso, to stress that television is the most powerful medium nowadays, with heroes of fantasy series slowly easing out whatever memories we have of our national heroes.

Once again, I remember why Howie prefers television work more, even after 14 years as print journalist. Aside from the fact that “you can’t fake a TV interview, what you see is what you get” as compared to the print media, as what the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize organizers found out too late in reporter Jayson Blair’s story, our literacy rate has tremendously declined so more and more Filipinos now choose to watch television than read the newspapers.

Even though “i-Witness, Philippine television’s finest hour,” airs late at night, sometimes even way past midnight, he can be assured that at least one million of our ballooning population will still view his work. There is even a running joke among us, writers, nowadays that only our fellow writers read our works.

Enthused by this development, I’m beginning to make use of my 12 years in school publications (three years in elementary, four in high school, and five in college) and two years in the mainstream press in my conscious effort to shoot some documentaries and short films. However, so far, I haven’t made something as effective as his documentaries since I still maintain the serious tone.

In Cubao, Metro Manila’s former shopping and entertainment center, Howie mentions the repainted Love Bus and the now-abandoned Act Theater to touch on how we tend to disregard things or fail to preserve what should have been a part of our nation’s culture. Then, he aptly interviews a metro aide previously assigned in Camp Crame to emphasize our penchant to forget our past (”Iisang layunin dati, kanya-kanya na ngayon.”). A historical clip of People Power 1 reminds me of a recent discovery I had at the Quisumbing-Escandor Film Festival for Health, that is, martyr-doctor Johnny Escandor was the one beside Ninoy Aquino in the PP1 banner.