In Shireen Seno’s Nervous Translation (2017), the world is cut to eight-year-old Yael’s measure. The film unfolds almost exclusively within the family home in Manila, where Yael spends much of her time alone – her mother, Val, works long hours at a nearby shoe factory; her father works overseas in Riyadh, and communicates through cassette tapes he sends by post. The opening (playing the hit Japanese superhero series Super Sentai) immediately transport the viewer to the late ‘80s: a period of transition in the Philippines following the People Power Revolution, which ended President Ferdinand Marcos’s 21-year dictatorship. The viewer receives glimpses of this political context through televised snippets of archival news footage, which also signal the impending arrival of Typhoon Unsang. Yet these contexts are filtered through the child perspective of protagonist Yael – a perspective that similarly animates Seno’s feature-length debut, Big Boy (2012).
The second feature from the Philippines-based filmmaker, artist, and curator, Nervous Translation introduces Yael as she arrives home from school.¹ Through the film’s wonderfully arrhythmic editing, which combines lingering compositional shots, brief detail close-ups, and playful jump-cuts, the viewer watches as Yael meticulously wipes down her shoes; completes ‘Mad Minute’ multiplication tables with her friend over the phone; and cooks dinner with the aid of a doll-size miniature oven. The editing approximates the felt time of each activity. Jump-cuts abound in ‘Mad Minute’, alternating from shots of a maths exercise book to a digital timer, building to a crescendo of close-ups of relevant door numbers; while the camera lingers on the slow of Yael’s cooking – the magnified sound of a ticking clock accentuating the feeling of passing time. Visual shifts in scale, the miniaturisation and enlargement of quotidian objects and details, further cue the viewer into Yael’s child perspective. The camera frames Yael’s cooking in low-angle close-ups: as Yael slices ingredients with a spreader knife and boils rice over a simple tea-light, her hands dwarf the miniature objects in shot. The return of her mother, Val, interrupts Yael’s fanciful dominion over the material world. Just as the front door creaks open, the camera moves back, revealing a diminutive Yael sitting at her bedroom desk. Off-screen, her mother’s voice intones: “Thirty minutes, starting now.”
Seno’s own diasporic experience informs Nervous Translation, which reflects on the familial effects of displacement and migration encouraged by supportive governmental policies for Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW).² On the well-intentioned advice of her husband overseas, Val has instituted a thirty-minute ‘no talking’ rule after each work day; choosing to recuperate in shared quiet, watching soap operas. Yael plucks the grey hairs from her mother’s head in exchange for a small allowance, tallying up the numbers in her journal. Yael’s fixation on counting recurs throughout the film, from the number of minutes left of ‘no talking’, to the coins in her rabbit-shaped piggy bank, or her visualisation of numbers during ‘Mad Minute’ sequences. There is an emphasis here, and throughout Nervous Translation, on how a child measures the world – at what scale and through which metric? The film’s sound design accentuates the sonic richness of Yael’s perceptual experience. Like the detailed close-ups of Yael’s surroundings, which align the viewer with Yael’s child perspective, the sound design often isolates and amplifies domestic sounds and intrusions from outside. In one memorable scene, Yael vocalises and lists each sound she hears within the home, translating them onomatopoeically as the film follows her aural attention, visually presenting each sound source in close-up: a telephone; a ceiling fan; an air con unit. Later, Val reads Yael’s list to her husband over the tape recorder, as if their daughter’s taxonomy of the material world might communicate something of a life from which he is physically absent.
Some of the most affecting moments in Nervous Translation turn on Yael’s experiences of shyness and shame. When extended family visits from abroad, Yael observes from a distance, hiding behind doorways. The camera aligns the viewer with her POV as her younger cousins dance and perform for the adults. With the cousins’ backs towards her, Yael looks towards the smiling, receptive crowd, retreating only when they begin cajoling her to participate. The extended duration of this scene, which far exceeds its narrative import, accentuates our affective alignment with Yael. Later, after Yael misinterprets her uncle’s writing advice, the sound design magnifies the adults’ responding laughter over and above the conversational din. This sensitive observation of family dynamics, communicated through Yael’s perspective, has a specific register within the Philippines and its diaspora. The film subtly depicts the strain of the OFW father’s absence on mother and daughter. The viewer listens as Yael plays alone with a blood pressure monitor, chanting the nursery rhyme, ‘Mother, mother I am sick’. In one of several fantastical sequences which punctuate the film, Yael drags her mother’s body along an empty bridge, before throwing her into the river below. Yet this is not the story of a neglectful mother. Nervous Translation continually reminds us of the limits and partiality of its child perspective, even as it presents glimpses of Val’s own interiority. In one such scene, Yael eavesdrops on Val’s whispered longings, as she records an audio-cassette sex tape to be posted to her husband. In an interview with Screen Daily, Seno describes the film as “a portrait of the quintessential Filipino family nowadays, since the 80s, where we only see and hear fragments of each other, and always in spurts.” Nervous Translation channels these fragments through the auditory media technologies of cassette tapes and boombox playback devices. Yael repeatedly intercepts her father’s cassette tape communiqués: she listens to them over and over, ear pressed towards the boom box speaker. She mimics the cadence of his voice; stops and rewinds the tape; and records over his voice with her own. These tactile, mediatised interactions with her father’s voice suggest a form of possession or control – a way of negotiating his absence, of bringing it down to size.
These interactions also point to the film’s broader interest in domestic media technologies, and the power play their new interactive interfaces invite.³ Twice, in an image reminiscent of the opening of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Yael places her hand against the blank screen of the analog TV, the tactile contact producing an audible hiss. Later, while watching TV with her mother, Yael flicks her hands towards the camera, as if wielding a remote control, provoking the return of the glitchy, laser zaps of Itos Ledesma’s score. Through Yael, Nervous Translation presents the wonder of these everyday technologies, their ability to transform the animate into the inanimate (and vice versa). These transformations infuse Yael’s fantasies, from picturing her cousins as zombies, to throwing her mother’s unmoving body into the river. Yet nowhere is this wonder more evident than in the film’s central sequence, from which Nervous Translation gets its title.
The camera tracks slowly across Yael and her young cousins, curled up on the pillowed floor, fast asleep in front of the TV. The English-language news, narrating events of the People Power Revolution, mixes with the background hum of their parents’ conversation. Yael wakes to the jingle of a Japanese commercial, advertising a pen that can translate nervous thoughts. The commercial fills the screen, its animated pen swirling against the bright blue backdrop. Wonder is here shot through with American-style consumerism – emphasised by the American English of the tagline, “for beautiful human life.” The dazzling image of this pen-as-commodity exerts its own power over Yael, who presses closer to the TV, mimicking the wild gestures of the actor writing. Yael’s subsequent search for the pen leads her beyond the confines of the family home. The film follows Yael, rabbit-shaped piggy bank in hand, as she travels from the store to her mother’s desk at the shoe factory, the typhoon building around her. In mapping this journey, Nervous Translation re-embeds its eight-year-old protagonist within the contexts (political, capitalist, and environmental) that shape and intrude upon her everyday, giving lie to Yael’s previous dominion – however fanciful – over her world.
1 Nervous Translation is produced and co-edited by John Torres, with whom Shireen Seno forms Los Otros, an experimental filmmaking studio and platform established in Manila. In addition to her work with Los Otros, Seno co-curates The Kalampag Tracking Agency, which traces a history of experimental filmmaking in the Philippines and its diaspora. 2 The number of Overseas Filipino Workers in the last recorded period, from April to September 2017, totaled 2.3 million. 3 See Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Power Play,” in Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 204.
Hannah Paveck is a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral project draws on the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy to examine sound and listening in contemporary global art cinema.
