[REVIEW] “Unfortunately, I Return to Panahon: Glenn Barit’s Cleaners and the Materiality of Memory” by Richell Isaiah Flores¹

Glenn Barit (director). Cleaners, 2019. 79 min.

1. Critical for me is the word film, as it contains the weight of form. Distinct is the wonder of film, as the simultaneity of the senses bewitches consciousness within the created artistic experience. This understanding of film was outlined in my reading of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon. It was then that I realised that film enables a certain kind of storytelling that could not be contained by other literary or artistic forms. Perhaps the project explodes on the page, each word that attempts to contain the movement of the director’s imagination within its frame inflated to its limits. What I mean to say is that the film experience is a simultaneous sensory experience.

2. Memory is material for Glenn Barit in two ways. First, as topic. I have already watched two of his short films: Luzonensis osteoporosis (2022) and yung huling swimming reunion before life happens [the last swimming reunion before life happens] (2024). Borrowing from Virgilio Almario, Philippine National Artist for Literature, it can be said that there is an anticolonial gesture in these shorts through their reclamation and reconstruction of national memory (gunita).

In Luzonensis, a future is imagined looking back upon a supraprogenital past. It is a futurism of flying homes interfaced with the wailing of the body, which seemingly returns to history. To heighten what it attempts to say, an elevated polish is evident in the film’s production. The film surprises and, in the moment of astonishment, reveals all our presumptions about the prehistoric.

In huling swimming, this polish is translated into the 3GP format of nostalgia. Chaotic, blurred, but ultimately funny. Truly, it is the kind of video captured during a barkada’s [friend group’s] final swim together. It is a reconstruction that foregrounds the commonplace as a possibility of identity, even at its final iteration.

It was in view of these earlier films that I came to understand Cleaners, both in how it wholly differs from what I have watched of Barit and, more significantly, in how it aligns with his solidarity, or at least what I surmise to be his solidarity, with the project of memory. Barit’s personal memories are, therefore, Philippine memory. The monthly presentations, the incomprehensible school requirements as an overture to defecation, even the grip of political dynasties on the lives of the students of Barit’s IV-Rizal.

Thus, the material memory of high school, interfaced with the Filipino audience, produces further memory. The film makes its audience confront their own experience of panahon. Through this, memory is realised as collective remembrance (gunita). The past is spoken of because it is experienced again, together with all its attendant embarrassments and questions.

3. Second, as thing (bagay). The processes of xeroxing (in a conscious choice of the word), selecting frames, and highlighting them are themselves processes of remembrance. Controlled, on a physical level, is the runtime (takbo ng panahon, lit. “run of time”). Yet beyond digital editing, the physicality of each strand, each movement of the xerox machine, and the hands that highlight the frames contributes to an understanding of memory as material in a concrete sense. A bagay that could be marked and ordered according to imagination (haraya).

This form is a huge part of what makes Cleaners a film in the critical understanding outlined earlier. Words alone would not suffice. Neither would videos and images. On the smoothness of the page, palpable to the eyes is the roughness of each reproduction of memory. This is not reality, but it has a real source. Hence, the work postures as a riddle whose answer comes through the utterance of one’s own experience. Or, to borrow from the film’s final scene, through screams.

The film is fragmented. Each second jumps. Strands of clothes walk. Whatever is overexposed eventually darkens. I am assured that somewhere there is a mountain of images and a bin full of highlighters. This image of the production allows memory to be held and touched, and time itself to be coloured.

4. In short, film itself is panahon. It is an archive of the point of remembrance, the point of reproduction, and the point of interfacing. Barit knows how to get along with panahon (makibagay sa panahon). His form goes along (nakikisama) with what memory requires. His work brings bountifulness to fruition, as huling swimming can be said to be a fruit of Cleaners, since the former was commissioned for a Kani release of the latter.

And it is not because of memory that the film becomes panahon. Rather, through what is bountiful, what could be panahon becomes known. That which could be a simultaneous sensory experience that could not be derived from other works of art. Cleaners could be regarded as a good use of our panahon, encompassing both the linear and Filipino theorisations of the term.

As a good person makes time worthwhile, so does Cleaners. Thus, the lasting impression: isang mabuting pelikula, a good film.

Footnote

1. This essay is a product of my attempts at a continuous engagement with Christian Jil Benitez’s theorisation of panahon (loosely translated as “time”), as outlined in Isang Dalumat ng Panahon [A Theory of Time] (ADMU Press, 2022). For the initial ideas, see Christian Jil R. Benitez, “Panahon and Bagay: Metonymy and the Close Reading of Dictionaries to Understand Filipino Temporality”, Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, vol. 67, no. 3, 2019, pp. 457–488. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/phs.2019.0023. ↩︎

^{How to cite: Flores, Richell Isaiah. “Unfortunately, I Return to Panahon: Glenn Barit’s Cleaners and the Materiality of Memory.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Aug. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/08/29/cleaners.}

Richell Isaiah Flores is an instructor at the Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. He finished his degree BS Applied Mathematics – M Data Science with a minor in Philippine Literature from the same university. He is also a member of Linangan sa Imahen, Retorika, at Anyo (LIRA) [Center for Imagery, Rhetoric, and Form]. His poetry was published in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine and HEIGHTS, Ateneo’s literary folio. Visit his website for more information. [Read all contributions by Richell Isaiah Flores.]