José B. Capino

I am an award-winning scholar of minoritized cinemas—documentary, melodrama, independent, adult, avant-garde—in the US, the Philippines, and the Filipino diaspora. I have also researched the cultural, literary, and historical aspects of US imperialism, particularly in relation to the Philippines, the only former US colony.

I employ rigorous multi-archival research and draw on critical perspectives in cinema studies and cultural theory to offer trenchant revisions to the historiography of dominant cinemas as well as author pioneering accounts of neglected films. Recently, through fellowships underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Illinois, I have received further training in the digital humanities and ethnography. This has enabled me to produce videographic criticism and integrate ethnographic approaches into my research on film cultures.

My most recent book, Martial Law Melodrama: Lino Brocka’s Cinema Politics (U of California Press, 2020), examines the inscription of politics 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 archival material and research on melodrama, the book offers an eye-opening account of anti-authoritarian politics in commercial and independent cinema. It engages in a timely discussion of how films register and respond to authoritarian spells and fascist regimes, such as those currently seizing liberal democracies the world over. More broadly, the book offers an innovative and 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 and anticolonial thought of Filipino movies, beginning in the immediate post-WWII/post-independence era but focusing on work from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Beyond positing Philippine cinema as an assemblage of decolonizing afterimages of Hollywood and US empire, the book also shows how that cinema offers some of the most incisive and imaginative critiques of American geopolitical power in world cinema. An unprecedented reconsideration of Philippine film history through the lens of anticolonial critique and postcolonial theory, Dream Factories won the 2012 grand prize in the cultural studies category from the Association for Asian American Studies.

I am currently working on three book manuscripts. The first is Macho Dancer, study of Lino Brocka’s landmark work of “Third World” erotica, in the Queer Film Classics series from McGill University Press. The second is called Documentary and US Empire: A Decolonial History. This study charts the intersecting histories of US documentary cinema and US empire, examining how public and private entities in the US devised or appropriated various forms of “nonfiction” filmmaking to serve the ends of American colonial and neoimperial relations with the Philippines. The product of over two decades of research at archives all over the US and in the Philippines, this book discusses many 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, and Asian American and Asian diaspora studies, among others. This is a thoroughly updated and reconceived study based upon “Cinema and the Spectacle of Colonialism,” grand prize winner of the 2003 Dissertation Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. 

My third manuscript-in-progress is provisionally titled Necessary Sexploitation: Queer Independent Cinema in the Philippines. Queer independent films from the Philippines have proliferated on domestic and international screens as domestic commercial movies have faltered. These mostly low-budget pictures sell out one-off screenings at gigantic venues and micro cinemas despite often middling reviews. Because of their long-lived international popularity and bankability, Filipino queer movies have helped stabilize specialized transnational streaming platforms, where they play alongside queer movies from around the world. 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, advancing rights-based identity politics, 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 subjects and perverse sexual thrills. Perhaps most importantly, these films have been engaged in improvising what Stephanie Foote has described elsewhere as “vernacular sexologies” of nonnormative ways of erotic being—parsing foreign influences and constantly reformulating local understandings of sexualities; doing so in a Christian-dominated heterosexist country. This study blends ethnographic and interpretive methods to examine the multifarious projects alternately known 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 wrote the teleplay for an award-winning documentary on the Philippine National Hero José P. Rizal that aired on Philippine television. I have also translated both classic and contemporary world drama (Euripides's The Trojan Women, Pedro Calderon de la 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 research has helped locate the film elements used in the restoration of Lino Brocka's Bona (1980), which premiered in the Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival. 

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, and Peque Gallaga's Scorpio Nights.

In addition to the honors mentioned above, I am a two-time Fulbright scholar and a 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.