WHEN DOES INFORMATION become an entertainment and vice-versa?
Entertainment, being an action that provides amusement and enjoyment, has also been the stimulus that purges emotions such as joy, sadness, wonder, love, hatred, fear etc. in response to an act or reaction done, being face-to-face in any medium, plastic or real-life situations while information is a fact about someone or something conveyed using a particular medium or multimedia like a human body or any instrument in communications.
‘Like Andres Bonifacio, Rizal was a theater person as well. He might not be directly involved in stage acting but he wrote a play in Filipino at the age of eight. No wonder entertainment was also in his DNA.’
This brings to mind the idea of infotainment because the line that divides entertainment and information already blurs the singular meanings evoked by the two actualities.
We have seen the dual, even multiple, roles being played by our winning and losing candidates in the last midterm elections where all are actors in polity, all of them informing truths, lies, half-truths and half-lies at the same time entertaining not only themselves but the vulnerable public as well who are to discern—against confusion and frenzy—what is true or false.
Then and now, we are all agents of actions and reactions in entertainment and information in all degrees of our participation in the daily quotidian.
So, let us drag in figures, popular or not, to illustrate the assumption.
RIZAL AND CINEMATOGRAPHE
In the case of National Hero Dr. Jose Rizal, he is an addition to messengers of infotainment earlier than the film pioneers in Father of Philippine Cinema Jose Nepomuceno and his confrere Vicente Salumbides combined.
Being educated —formally or not in his given environment —in Spain, France and Germany, Rizal had lived in the early civilization of cinema in Europe at the time the medium’s infancy was an interesting stage of a new gadget.
Although there is no record of proof that he was involved in filmmaking or simply watched movies—at the time billed as Cinematographe–in his free time, there was his pursuit of intellectualism in arts and sciences very intrinsic in the invention of modern tech and filling up of contents/ideas in the medium.
Before Rizal went back to the Philippines from Europe, the Kinetoscope, a motion picture device invented by Thomas Alva Edison which inspired the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, from France to enhance the Edison invention to the so-called Cinematographe.
Early practitioners of motion picture from the West were influential in the technology transfer to the world, in Asia, specifically in the Philippines like French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere who invented the Cinematographe, Spanish Antonio Ramos who brought in film equipment, established theater in Manila and later on, sold them to Nepomuceno.
PURVEYOR OF INFOTAINMENT
Prior to the invention of the moving pictures, though, Rizal was a purveyor of infotainment when he was a small boy.
In Calamba, he shared his shadow play, traditionally known as carrillo, to his, for instance, playmates.
Like Andres Bonifacio, Rizal was a theater person as well. He might not be directly involved in stage acting but he wrote a play in Filipino at the age of eight.
No wonder entertainment was also in his DNA.
Rizal bequeathed his artistic talents to his descendants, one of them 1964 Miss International Gemma Cruz-Araneta, a great-granddaughter of his sister, Maria Mercado who was married to Daniel Faustino Cruz.
Gemma has been involved in arts and culture.
Meanwhile, young actress Therese Malvar is a great-great grandniece of Rizal being a scion of Soledad and the revolutionary hero Miguel Malvar who had a son who got married to Soledad Rizal, one of the sisters of the National Hero.
The brilliance of Therese in theater and film, particularly acting, is a legacy of Dr. Jose Rizal.