Of Audiences and Archival Publics: Pepot Artista Available to Purchase

There is an unrecognized connection between filmmakers' yearning to overcome Philippine cinema's “audience problem” and archiving advocates' hopes of hailing a public that roots for audiovisual preservation. Structural problems with distribution and exhibition mean that locally produced alternatives to formulaic commercial movies have historically failed to attract a substantial domestic audience, despite international recognition. The epilogue analyzes Pepot Artista (Pepot superstar; dir. Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., 2005) as an independent film that addresses and imagines an archival public for Philippine cinema. The epilogue foregrounds a chicken-and-egg problem arising from Philippine cinema's anarchival condition: wide public support for audiovisual archiving cannot be achieved without first ensuring public access to archival holdings. Access, then, is the necessary precondition for archival autonomy and longevity. If recognized as an immediate priority for audiovisual memory collections, access might eventually pave the way for long-term public awareness and support for Philippine audiovisual archives.