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‘Let the picture come to you’ (2 decades of working with Egay Navarro)
By HOWIE SEVERINO, GMA News
In the wet and bitter-cold New York winter of 2008, my cameraman Egay Navarro and I were wrapping up a day of shooting a homeless Filipino man in the streets of Chinatown and looking forward to our warm and clean hotel room.
Then Egay did something so typically exasperating and brilliant at the same time: he invited the homeless man, who had left Leyte decades before and ended up in the US Army before being ruined by alcohol, to our hotel room.
It was not something I would have done, having just spent the day wallowing in the aroma of a vagrant who probably had not bathed in weeks, perhaps longer.
But Egay was different from me and just about anyone else I knew.
Egay’s invitation was a gesture of friendship to a hard-luck guy, but it was also more than that – he wanted to create an unexpected scene that he was eager to record.
So as an exotic scent filled our stuffy room, I played my role in the situation my cameraman engineered, talking to the man about his childhood memories of his hometown. He wondered wistfully what it now looked like, whether anything had changed.
Then I thought of showing it to him, via Google Earth. As the globe turned on my computer and the image slowly zoomed in on Leyte, Egay’s camera zoomed in on his face, capturing the awe of someone who had never seen satellite pictures of anything so familiar.
As his town came into view, he got excited and pointed to the street where he once lived, the places where he played, and the pier from where he and his childhood chums dove into the glassy sea.
Then he fell silent and stared at the screen, a finger smudging a tear, a homeless man who had just traveled home through cyberspace.
Egay had made another friend; he also got his video.
The author with Egay Navarro, right, shooting in Marinduque in the 1990s. Photo by David Pollard
There were countless such moments in the 21 years that I worked with Egay Navarro, someone who combined work and play and friendship so seamlessly. I had never met anyone in any field who loved his work more than he. He brought so much childlike joy and energy to shooting that I never imagined him growing old, let alone dying.
So when he did die from an illness one year ago this month, I felt a large measure of my own enthusiasm dissipate. I realized that a big part of the fun I had shooting and producing documentaries came from the fact that I was working with an incomparable cameraman.
He moved like a cat
I was a newspaper reporter when I first saw him shooting in 1991 in Zambales, in the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption. Watching him made me consider a career shift.
He moved like a cat, nimble and quick and ready to pounce on any dramatic situation. In the evening, when he showed us his raw video of relief choppers flying above the trees and seen through the branches, it was like watching a movie.
He opened my eyes to the physicality that eventually drew me to video production. Unlike in print, where you can produce stories by just making calls and not even leaving your bedroom, shooting video compels you to move constantly and get as up close and personal as you can to your subjects.
I learned later on that Egay had been getting up close and personal for decades, since the 1960s when he was one of the few men who wielded moving image cameras for news organizations. He was there in 1970 when Pope Paul VI was attacked in Manila and nearly killed by a crazed Bolivian artist at the airport.
Among his peers, he had a reputation, like a great rebounder in basketball, for being a master of positioning. In the typical media scrum that accompanies major events or VIPs (Egay called it a “gang bang”), he often had the clearest shot. He was willing to crawl on his stomach; he was also among the first news cameramen with an assistant carrying around a small ladder.
When he got me hooked on shooting in the 1990s, he had a favorite piece of advice: “Let the picture come to you.” In other words, get good access, get in position, and let the scene unfold before your camera.
It was a dictum he followed as an early advocate of cinema verité – being a camera-equipped fly on the wall as people went about their daily dramas, oblivious to the guy wearing his trademark Cambodian scarf.
Friends everywhere
Beyond the technical aspects of his job, Egay was a very sociable person. It’s what made him truly great.
He had friends nearly anywhere we went in the world. The friends gave us stories and leads, access, footage, equipment, bed space, and joy when we needed to unwind.
In Sorsogon, we tracked down his painter-friend, Bakang, who lived in a big antique house surrounded by lush vegetation where we would stay. As we arrived at night, Egay’s eerie tracking shot through the driveway’s reeds illuminated by our headlights was an image that conveyed mood as much as any other that I have seen.
That time in New York, in 2008, he told me to come along on a visit to an old friend, who turned out to be D.A. Pennebaker, the legendary American documentary maker who did "Don’t Look Back," the iconic 1960s film on Bob Dylan.
Egay had met Pennebaker in the 1970s when he used his editing facilities in Manhattan to finish a propaganda film about the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Da Real Makoy
That film, "Da Real Makoy," was directed by Nonoy Marcelo, the late comic-strip artist with an absurd sense of humor. Marcelo and his young sidekick Egay had convinced the Marcoses not only to give them the job, but to allow them to edit it in New York so they could concentrate (daw).
Produced during a time when propaganda apparently had more than shoestring budgets, the film about Marcos during a trip to Ilocos was part animation and could be seen now as a quirky, sly satire of the kind of blatant hagiography being created at the time by the regime.
The sequence showing Marcos’s ancient elementary school teacher singing and acting out the nursery rhyme, London Bridge is Falling Down, was classic Egay (we would later use that same recording to score a scene of a First Quarter Storm riot in the early 1970s).
Egay was only in his 20s then, but his verité shots of the virile Marcos moving around – the camera in his face without making the subject appear uncomfortable or self-conscious – already bore the signature of the cameraman who would collaborate with me in his 50s.
Looking back on Egay’s career, it’s ironic that Marcos would give him that kind of intimate access, since his news coverage into the 1980s was anything but helpful to the regime. As the bureau chief for United Press International TV News at a time when the Philippine domestic press was controlled, Egay was among the few newsmen who could tell it like it was.
Egay would be one of the first cameramen to spend quality time with NPA guerrillas in the remote hills where they fought and organized. He made friends with NPA leaders who would occasionally sleep over his house during secret visits to Manila.
One of his proudest pieces was a report he did on Marcos’ proposed Chico River dam project that would flood Cordillera mountain communities. Egay shot tribal dances and customs, and clearly showed what was at stake. The video was smuggled out of the country and televised around the world, opening its eyes to what was going on beneath the iron sheen of martial law. The dam project never got done.
The camera was not just the tool of his profession, but his way of interacting with the world. He was not the most articulate man; he started working straight out of high school. But his camera was a familiar device that overcame language barriers from Lanao to Mindoro to Aceh to Kenya to France.
It was his way of doing his friends favors, by shooting the baptisms of their kids or the performances of his artist buddies, who were plenty. He shot anything that interested him, whether or not it was for work. But he had a special fondness for indigenous music. He traveled to dangerous areas in Jolo and Maguindanao just to find and record local musicians.
A wide angle lens
After he encouraged me to shoot with my trusty Sony TRV-900 in the 1990s, he literally widened my view of the world. Noticing that I would look away from the viewfinder when talking to subjects, who would invariably move out of the frame, Egay came home from a Hong Kong trip one day and gave me a wide-angle lens for my camera. I could then just point it at my subject without looking through the viewfinder, my vision enlarged by the lens and by Egay's notion of how I should shoot.
He also lengthened my view of the world by telling me numerous stories of what life was like in Manila in the 1960s and early 70s, the era of flower children and long-haired activists that had always fascinated me. The arts had bloomed in those years, and the many older friends I have from the arts today are people I met through Egay.
In 2007, he took a short break from documentary to shoot a lyrical, well-received but under-appreciated indie film, "Hunghong sa Yuta," a tragic musical about the war in Mindanao.
We had stopped working together when he became ill in 2009 and was advised by doctors to take it easy. I didn’t think that I would work with him again.
Then in 2011, we began shooting together again for I-Witness and he worked like a madman, as if he was making up for lost time. After his documentaries with me were shot, he sought shooting gigs with other public affairs shows.
One of our last collaborations involved a grueling 24-hour land and boat journey in mid-2012 to Isabela’s coastal wilderness where the former NPA commander Victor Corpus accompanied us to find the long-lost wreck of the NPA arms cargo boat, the MV Karagatan.
We found it in the clearest water I have ever dived in, on a sunny day that was perfect for shooting. It was another hallelujah moment that documentarists live for.
And when, to our surprise, a Dumagat elder and Corpus renewed their friendship on a deserted white beach after 30 years, Egay was there too rolling his camera, a big smile on his face.
I suspect that Egay might have lived longer if he extended his convalescence, just taking it easy at home. But he would have missed moments like that. That’s what he pushed his body till the end for.
By the end of 2012, he couldn’t leave his house anymore, except for trips to the hospital. I kept dropping by to urge him to get well so we could continue our adventures.
Shortly before Christmas of that year, about five weeks before he died at age 62 on January 30, 2013, he limped out of his bedroom to give me an old glasses case. Inside was a pair of wooden, home-made goggles, given to him by a tribal diver in Palawan, one more friend he had made.
It was yet another lens for interacting with the world. – BM, GMA News
So when he did die from an illness one year ago this month, I felt a large measure of my own enthusiasm dissipate. I realized that a big part of the fun I had shooting and producing documentaries came from the fact that I was working with an incomparable cameraman.
He moved like a cat
I was a newspaper reporter when I first saw him shooting in 1991 in Zambales, in the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption. Watching him made me consider a career shift.
He moved like a cat, nimble and quick and ready to pounce on any dramatic situation. In the evening, when he showed us his raw video of relief choppers flying above the trees and seen through the branches, it was like watching a movie.
He opened my eyes to the physicality that eventually drew me to video production. Unlike in print, where you can produce stories by just making calls and not even leaving your bedroom, shooting video compels you to move constantly and get as up close and personal as you can to your subjects.
I learned later on that Egay had been getting up close and personal for decades, since the 1960s when he was one of the few men who wielded moving image cameras for news organizations. He was there in 1970 when Pope Paul VI was attacked in Manila and nearly killed by a crazed Bolivian artist at the airport.
Among his peers, he had a reputation, like a great rebounder in basketball, for being a master of positioning. In the typical media scrum that accompanies major events or VIPs (Egay called it a “gang bang”), he often had the clearest shot. He was willing to crawl on his stomach; he was also among the first news cameramen with an assistant carrying around a small ladder.
When he got me hooked on shooting in the 1990s, he had a favorite piece of advice: “Let the picture come to you.” In other words, get good access, get in position, and let the scene unfold before your camera.
It was a dictum he followed as an early advocate of cinema verité – being a camera-equipped fly on the wall as people went about their daily dramas, oblivious to the guy wearing his trademark Cambodian scarf.
Friends everywhere
Beyond the technical aspects of his job, Egay was a very sociable person. It’s what made him truly great.
He had friends nearly anywhere we went in the world. The friends gave us stories and leads, access, footage, equipment, bed space, and joy when we needed to unwind.
In Sorsogon, we tracked down his painter-friend, Bakang, who lived in a big antique house surrounded by lush vegetation where we would stay. As we arrived at night, Egay’s eerie tracking shot through the driveway’s reeds illuminated by our headlights was an image that conveyed mood as much as any other that I have seen.
That time in New York, in 2008, he told me to come along on a visit to an old friend, who turned out to be D.A. Pennebaker, the legendary American documentary maker who did "Don’t Look Back," the iconic 1960s film on Bob Dylan.
Egay had met Pennebaker in the 1970s when he used his editing facilities in Manhattan to finish a propaganda film about the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Da Real Makoy
That film, "Da Real Makoy," was directed by Nonoy Marcelo, the late comic-strip artist with an absurd sense of humor. Marcelo and his young sidekick Egay had convinced the Marcoses not only to give them the job, but to allow them to edit it in New York so they could concentrate (daw).
Produced during a time when propaganda apparently had more than shoestring budgets, the film about Marcos during a trip to Ilocos was part animation and could be seen now as a quirky, sly satire of the kind of blatant hagiography being created at the time by the regime.
The sequence showing Marcos’s ancient elementary school teacher singing and acting out the nursery rhyme, London Bridge is Falling Down, was classic Egay (we would later use that same recording to score a scene of a First Quarter Storm riot in the early 1970s).
Egay was only in his 20s then, but his verité shots of the virile Marcos moving around – the camera in his face without making the subject appear uncomfortable or self-conscious – already bore the signature of the cameraman who would collaborate with me in his 50s.
Looking back on Egay’s career, it’s ironic that Marcos would give him that kind of intimate access, since his news coverage into the 1980s was anything but helpful to the regime. As the bureau chief for United Press International TV News at a time when the Philippine domestic press was controlled, Egay was among the few newsmen who could tell it like it was.
Egay would be one of the first cameramen to spend quality time with NPA guerrillas in the remote hills where they fought and organized. He made friends with NPA leaders who would occasionally sleep over his house during secret visits to Manila.
One of his proudest pieces was a report he did on Marcos’ proposed Chico River dam project that would flood Cordillera mountain communities. Egay shot tribal dances and customs, and clearly showed what was at stake. The video was smuggled out of the country and televised around the world, opening its eyes to what was going on beneath the iron sheen of martial law. The dam project never got done.
The camera was not just the tool of his profession, but his way of interacting with the world. He was not the most articulate man; he started working straight out of high school. But his camera was a familiar device that overcame language barriers from Lanao to Mindoro to Aceh to Kenya to France.
It was his way of doing his friends favors, by shooting the baptisms of their kids or the performances of his artist buddies, who were plenty. He shot anything that interested him, whether or not it was for work. But he had a special fondness for indigenous music. He traveled to dangerous areas in Jolo and Maguindanao just to find and record local musicians.
A wide angle lens
After he encouraged me to shoot with my trusty Sony TRV-900 in the 1990s, he literally widened my view of the world. Noticing that I would look away from the viewfinder when talking to subjects, who would invariably move out of the frame, Egay came home from a Hong Kong trip one day and gave me a wide-angle lens for my camera. I could then just point it at my subject without looking through the viewfinder, my vision enlarged by the lens and by Egay's notion of how I should shoot.
He also lengthened my view of the world by telling me numerous stories of what life was like in Manila in the 1960s and early 70s, the era of flower children and long-haired activists that had always fascinated me. The arts had bloomed in those years, and the many older friends I have from the arts today are people I met through Egay.
In 2007, he took a short break from documentary to shoot a lyrical, well-received but under-appreciated indie film, "Hunghong sa Yuta," a tragic musical about the war in Mindanao.
We had stopped working together when he became ill in 2009 and was advised by doctors to take it easy. I didn’t think that I would work with him again.
Then in 2011, we began shooting together again for I-Witness and he worked like a madman, as if he was making up for lost time. After his documentaries with me were shot, he sought shooting gigs with other public affairs shows.
One of our last collaborations involved a grueling 24-hour land and boat journey in mid-2012 to Isabela’s coastal wilderness where the former NPA commander Victor Corpus accompanied us to find the long-lost wreck of the NPA arms cargo boat, the MV Karagatan.
We found it in the clearest water I have ever dived in, on a sunny day that was perfect for shooting. It was another hallelujah moment that documentarists live for.
And when, to our surprise, a Dumagat elder and Corpus renewed their friendship on a deserted white beach after 30 years, Egay was there too rolling his camera, a big smile on his face.
I suspect that Egay might have lived longer if he extended his convalescence, just taking it easy at home. But he would have missed moments like that. That’s what he pushed his body till the end for.
By the end of 2012, he couldn’t leave his house anymore, except for trips to the hospital. I kept dropping by to urge him to get well so we could continue our adventures.
Shortly before Christmas of that year, about five weeks before he died at age 62 on January 30, 2013, he limped out of his bedroom to give me an old glasses case. Inside was a pair of wooden, home-made goggles, given to him by a tribal diver in Palawan, one more friend he had made.
It was yet another lens for interacting with the world. – BM, GMA News
