Any reading of a film should be an act of cultural resistance. Himala has generally been interpreted as the tragedy of a woman caught in a system generated by excessive religious emotion and as representing a merging, interesting and powerful, of Catholicism and folk beliefs. There is much substance to this interpretation. But beyond these, we need to see the tragedy of Elsa as outcome of patriarchal ideology. In patriarchal societies, which deny female subjectivity and thwart female desire, one of the few ways in which females attain glory is through supernatural experiences; even here, she is not the ultimate maker of her destiny: the society is. The camera frames her as an object of desire. Her desires and confessions and protestations count for nought. In reading Himala, then, we need to uncover the oppressive forces involved within repressive categories of seeing and understanding. Our reading of the film must be engaged and adversarial, recognizing that it does not flow naturally from the filmic text. It is the silences, fissures, marginalizations as well as the surplus of meaning that they produce that we need to attend to; seen in this light, we realize that Himala exemplifies the repressive power of androcentric discourse and how representation of gender is subject to ideological coding.

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