Surrealism in the Philippines is not just limited to artworks; filmmakers have also started creating films involving surrealistic visual themes.
One of these films include Puti (2012) a surrealistic horror film directed by Mike Alcazaren, a story about a counterfeit painter that lives in a life of recluse with his son, who creates forgeries of famous artworks and would exchange them to an art dealer. One day, he gets himself into a car accident with his son that leads him to becoming colorblind and the world around him starts turning stranger and even stranger, even haunting.
The film’s visuals elevate the premise of the film where it expresses how an artist that loses their capability to discern color, can become a nightmare, especially to someone who heavily relies on visual arts to survive. Alcazaren’s use of visuals is able to sustain a good amount of surrealistic and abstract visuals whilst also being able to ground the narrative despite the film’s visuals defying logic and reality.
Another example of surrealistic visual usage is an advertisement made by RC Cola wherein surrealistic visuals were used to create an advertisement that both confused and humored the audience due to the absurdity of the narrative and the visuals itself.
A study by Barba et al. explains that despite the most common humor categories include exaggeration, silliness, surprise, and comparison. Surrealism’s absurdity was mostly utilized as Filipinos used this as a coping mechanism to alleviate any negative feelings they have and being used as a tool for successful advertising. Especially when the campaign was released during COVID-19 pandemic, a time where people were struggling mentally and emotionally.
Lowbrow art, frequently recognized as "pop surrealism," represents a subversive visual movement that surfaced during the late 1970s within the Los Angeles underground scene.
This aesthetic emerged from a fusion of California countercultures, including surf and hot rod influences, punk rock, underground comix, and tattoo graphics. Pioneer Robert Williams is widely credited with defining the movement through his 1979 publication, alongside other influential figures such as Gary Panter, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and later artists like Mark Ryden and Todd Schorr.
The terminology serves as a sarcastic defiance of "highbrow" academic institutions. Many of these creators were skilled illustrators who found themselves marginalized by the traditional gallery system because their inspirations were rooted in "low" cultural symbols rather than formal artistic history.
While classical Surrealism (led by Dalí and Magritte) focused on Freudian psychoanalysis and the uninhibited expression of the subconscious through automatism, Lowbrow finds its identity in commercial kitsch, animation, advertising, and pin-up aesthetics.
Traditional Surrealist works often maintain a detached, cerebral, and philosophically heavy mood. In contrast, Lowbrow is characterized by its vibrant, satirical, and story-driven approach, mirroring the bold imagery found in comics and street culture.
Surrealism was a structured movement that gained academic and critical approval relatively quickly. Lowbrow intentionally positioned itself as an outsider art form, thriving in tattoo studios and zines before eventually penetrating the mainstream art market in recent decades.
Surrealists aimed to uncover hidden psychological realities and defy rationalism. Lowbrow artists, however, prioritized visual insurrection and humor, elevating "low" cultural subjects to the status of legitimate art without relying on complex psychoanalytic frameworks.
Nonetheless, both movements share significant visual territory through the use of bizarre and uncanny symbolism, hence the "pop surrealism" moniker. Many critics view it as a more playful, cartoon-inspired relative to the original Surrealist lineage rather than a completely disconnected phenomenon.
Now that we’ve listed down the common techniques and learnt an example of how we could apply them to surrealist paintings, let’s try to apply these techniques from a film’s perspective.
When we interviewed the director of Puti, Mike Alcazaren, regarding his film, he said that he practiced automatism in regards to the film process itself. He did not have a solid storyboard and did the shots as they went as if ideas came flooding to his mind. He has also said that he wanted every shot to feel like a painting, and had an emphasis on negative space.
The re-ocurring theme throughout the film is Inversion, meaning a complete turn, flip, or change of position, order, or relationship to the opposite.
The film opens up to Amir painting “The Erl King’s Cage” by Geraldine Javier in an upright position. But in a later shot we see Amir’s art dealer in the same position seeing the painting upright.
Several scenes after, Amir begins to work on creating the painting that his art dealer wants him to make. Here it is first explained by Amir why he chooses to see his references upside down, explaining that he better sees how the painting is structured and how the techniques came together because he doesn’t understand the whole picture and it makes his brain forced to examine things individually first.
He then also explains why he rarely gets to show off his originals to Nika after being asked, saying that his originals barely sell, and that it’s been more profitable making forgeries
In a later scene we also find Amir, finding his reflection in the mirror to be inverted.
Inverting something usually means the opposite of what it generally means when upright, in this case, for the story it was redefined as Amir seeing and thinking things partially rather than whole.
The first and second picture depicts this in full view and can be juxtaposed to symbolize further how different Amir and other people see his art. Throughout the story it can be interpreted that anything you would inverted has a deeper meaning based on how Amir perceives it, if it would be upright or upside-down.
Sometime after Nika leaves after helping Amir paint, Amir and Jaime decide to go out to eat dinner together. Jaime asks Amir that he should start teaching in a school otherwise mother would get mad. Amir thinks momentarily and becomes deep in thought, ending up in a car crash shortly after. We then see Amir all along, separate from Jaime, and a glimpse into his “colorblind” state.
Several scenes after when he comes back home to keep working on the painting project his art dealer gave to help support the hospital funds Jaime needs, he starts to board up the light from the windows leaving just enough light from the windows to seep in and create this shot focusing on the eyes of the blind woman.
However, after experiencing what it felt like to paint colorblind, Amir turns the painting upright which completely goes against his usual way of painting
Amir, in his colorblind state, later gets his eyes stitched open to face the light in a dream sequence.
Blindness can represent ignorance, inner insight, and vulnerability. In Amir’s case and story, they are represented to be colorblind, however, in the story it appears more that what’s causing Amir the most grief is his extra sensitivity to light, which leads him to wear sunglasses all the time.
How people commonly assume blindness to be is complete darkness, but for Amir, it’s the opposite, it was juxtaposed that he is not just blind to color, but also completely blind when trying to face the light, the light which symbolizes righteousness and justice. This theme of blindness is also connected to the blind woman that follows Amir, who acts as a silent observer.
When Amir began to paint a counterfeit upright for the first time, it represented them going against their ideal to not see the whole picture, as if they were trying to go against their ideal of seeing things individually and their usual way of life, and through analyzing the color seen in this shot we can also identify how yellow was used as if a bit more sickly to represent illness, more closely that it seems to feel like it’s drooling from the eye of the blind woman itself.
Later on, in the last dream sequence, Amir gets his eyes sewn open to face the light, representing him finally facing change itself and the justice he’s been avoiding by hiding in the darkness.