Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s Long Films: Currencies of Circulation and Dialectics of Spectatorship

Abstract

This article forms part of a larger project to explore the contemporaneity of the long films and mode of artistic practice of Filipino independent filmmaker Lav Diaz. Its research method encompasses the practice of curation combined with an exploration of the trajectories of circulation and exhibition of Diaz’s films. Drawing on my recent experience of co-curating the exhibition Lav Diaz: Journeys (January-March 2017), the article discusses the practical, institutional, conceptual, and discursive challenges of exhibiting Diaz’s long films. The process of exhibition making, and some responses to the strengths and limitations of the exhibition’s form, opened up productive hesitancies over the question of how one is to exhibit Diaz’s long films in the way that they are ‘meant to be shown.’ The frictions encountered in the curatorial process and during the exhibition’s life would seem to signal the way that Diaz’s films invoke disparate, and at times contending, conceptions of cinematic experience, participation, and spectatorial ethics.