Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability 9463721932, 9789463721936, 9789048551163

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability explores a geopolitically situate

206 52 3MB

English Pages 254 [255] Year 2020

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Expanding the Postcolonial Map
An Unfamiliar Postcoloniality
Touchstones in Postcolonial Film Studies: On Style and Practice
Strategies Old and New
Cold Wars and Methodological Debates
1. Postcolonial Spatiality
Singapore Maps its Cinema
Aerial Maps
Affective Colonial Maps
The Persistence of Colonial Spatiality
2. Reorienting Film History Spatially
Finding Singapore in The Impossibilities of Tan Pin Pin
The Vexed Images of Singapore’s New Wave
3. Postcolonial Cacophonies
Malaysia Senses the World
Nancian Soundscapes
Resonant Subjects
Postcolonial Globalism
4. Postcolonial Myths
Indonesia Americanizes Stability
A Brief History of Sublation
American Influence
The Road to Reformasi
Conclusion
A Look Forward for Southeast Asian Film Studies
Theorizing Edwin
What Theory and Southeast Asian Cinema Mean to Each Other
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Recommend Papers

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability
 9463721932, 9789463721936, 9789048551163

  • 0 0 0
  • Like this paper and download? You can publish your own PDF file online for free in a few minutes! Sign Up
File loading please wait...
Citation preview

CRITICAL ASIAN CINEMAS

Gerald Sim

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Critical Asian Cinemas The Critical Asian Cinemas series features book-length manuscripts that engage with films produced in Asia and by Asian auteurs. “Asia” refers here to the geographic and discursive sites located in East and Central Asia, as well as South and Southeast Asia. The books in this series emphasize the capacity of film to interrogate the cultures, politics, aesthetics, and histories of Asia by thinking cinema as an art capable of critique. Open to a wide variety of approaches and methods, the series features studies that utilize novel theoretical models toward the analysis of all genres and styles of Asian moving image practices, encompassing experimental film and video, the moving image in contemporary art, documentary, as well as popular genre cinemas. We welcome rigorous, original analyses from scholars working in any discipline. This timely series includes studies that critique the aesthetics and ontology of the cinema, but also the concept of Asia itself. They attempt to negotiate the place of Asian cinema in the world by tracing the distribution of films as cultural products but also as aesthetic objects that critically address the ostensible particularly of Asianness as a discursive formation. Series Editor Steve Choe, San Francisco State University, USA Editorial Board Jinsoo An, University of California, Berkeley, USA Jason Coe, Hong Kong University Corey Creekmur, University of Iowa, USA Chris Berry, King’s College, London Mayumo Inoue, Hitotsubashi University, Japan Jihoon Kim, Chung Ang University, South Korea Adam Knee, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore Jean Ma, Stanford University, USA

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability

Gerald Sim

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Flight map of Southeast Asia Source: From Singapore GaGa, 2005; courtesy of Tan Pin Pin Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 193 6 e-isbn 978 90 4855 116 3 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463721936 nur 670 © Gerald Sim / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

For my mother, who took me to the movies and taught me to love language, lighting the path to this book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

13

Introduction

17

Expanding the Postcolonial Map

An Unfamiliar Postcoloniality Touchstones in Postcolonial Film Studies: On Style and Practice Strategies Old and New Cold Wars and Methodological Debates 1 Postcolonial Spatiality

Singapore Maps its Cinema

Aerial Maps Affective Colonial Maps The Persistence of Colonial Spatiality

25 31 36 44 53 63 81 84

2 Reorienting Film History Spatially Finding Singapore in The Impossibilities of Tan Pin Pin The Vexed Images of Singapore’s New Wave

97 106 118

3 Postcolonial Cacophonies

141

Nancian Soundscapes Resonant Subjects Postcolonial Globalism

146 150 156

Malaysia Senses the World

4 Postcolonial Myths

Indonesia Americanizes Stability

A Brief History of Sublation American Influence The Road to Reformasi Conclusion

A Look Forward for Southeast Asian Film Studies

Theorizing Edwin What Theory and Southeast Asian Cinema Mean to Each Other

169 177 185 194 211 213 223

Bibliography

235

Index

251

List of Illustrations Figure 0.1 Singapore’s Capitol Theater. Seniman Bujang Lapok, 1961 Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd. Figure 0.2 A movie advertising truck passing Singapore’s Lido Cinema. Seniman Bujang Lapok, 1961 Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd. Figure 1.1 Affective historical space, the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, which closed in 2011. Old Places, 2010 Courtesy of Chuan Pictures Figure 1.2 An iteration of cartographic cinema Courtesy of Rodolphe De Koninck and NUS Press Figure 1.3 The first exhibit, an animated map of Southeast Asia based on Abraham Ortelius’s first edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, with the roving “lens” resting over Singapore Photo taken by the author at Singapore History Gallery, National Museum of Singapore. Reproduced with permission of National Museum of Singapore Figure 1.4 The final exhibit, an interactive world map illustrates Singapore “Becoming a World City” Photo taken by the author at Singapore History Gallery, National Museum of Singapore. Reproduced with permission of National Museum of Singapore Figure 1.5 “Cartographical value” in driving the length of Singapore from east to west at a constant speed. 80km/h, 2003 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin Figure 1.6 Logo of the Integrated Public Transport System, an approximation of Singapore’s landmass Reproduced with permission of the Land Transport Authority Figure 1.7 The MRT System Map with the Public Transport logo as backdrop Reproduced with permission of the Land Transport Authority

18 18 61 65

66

67

68 71

71

Figure 1.8

Figure 1.9 Figure 1.10 Figure 1.11 Figure 1.12 Figure 1.13 Figure 1.14 Figure 1.15 Figure 1.16 Figure 1.17 Figure 1.18 Figure 1.19

A cutaway from Melvyn Cedello (offscreen, right) singing “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.” The logo and sign place him at the Novena station. Singapore GaGa, 2005 72 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin A 4-shot series of aerial views and maps (clockwise from top left). Singapore GaGa, 2005 73 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin Collage of shots of storm drains and water canals. All the Lines Flow Out, 2011 74 Courtesy of the artist Tan Pin Pin takes another aerial view from the external elevator of the National Library. Invisible City, 2007 76 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin “SEA STATE 1: Inside\Outside” (2005), detail, prepared GSP1 chart, published by Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore 77 Image courtesy of the artist “SEA STATE 8: The Grid” (2014), detail, prepared GSP1 chart, published by Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore77 Image courtesy of the artist Aerial view of downtown Singapore. Moon Over Malaya, 1957 79 Courtesy of Asian Film Archive and family of Ho Kian-Ngiap Aerial view of the Singapore River. China Wife, 1957 79 Courtesy of Asian Film Archive and family of Ho Kian-Ngiap Singapore’s financial district under the title. Perth, 2004 83 Courtesy of Djinn Singapore’s City Hall in the colonial city. Ibu, 1953 88 Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd. Shots establishing location move outward from the colonial city. Penarek Becha, 1955 89 Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd. Shots establishing location still move outward from the Civic District. Singapore Dreaming, 2005 91 Courtesy of Colin Goh

Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6 Figure 2.7 Figure 2.8 Figure 2.9 Figure 2.10 Figure 2.11 Figure 2.12 Figure 2.13 Figure 2.14

An alienated protagonist visually diminished under public housing development. Mee Pok Man, 1995 Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films Nostalgia for rural village life, Kampong Buangkok. Old Places, 2010 Courtesy of Chuan Pictures Graffiti of unknown origin. Yangtze Scribbler, 2012 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin Site of a child’s drowning. The Impossibility of Knowing, 2010 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin Vacant, disconnected, anonymous public housing exteriors. 12 Storeys, 1997 Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films A pathetic introvert silhouetted against the urban expanse. Be With Me, 2005 Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films Deleuze’s purely optical situation; fluorescent bulbs highlight the geometric repetition of a public housing block at night. 12 Storeys, 1997 Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films A somnambulant figure against a simulated mise-enabyme. 12 Storeys, 1997 Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films The same vertiginous shot in a documentary film Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014 A macabre joke on the frequency of suicide jumps. Eating Air, 1999 Courtesy of Boku Films Transportation infrastructure. In Time to Come, 2017 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin A man waits for the lift in an interstitial space. In Time to Come, 2017 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin A carpark being fumigated. In Time to Come, 2017 Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin Uncovered fluorescent bulb Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014

101 108 110 110 122 122

124 126 126

127 132 132 132 134

Figure 2.15 Interior of public housing apartment Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014 Figure 2.16 A window view peers over an adjacent graveyard Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014 Figure 4.1 A potent set of metaphors at the beginning of The Act of Killing, 2013 Courtesy of Joshua Oppenheimer Figure 4.2 A visual metaphor of Indonesia’s cinematic perspective and subjectivity. The Act of Killing, 2013 Courtesy of Joshua Oppenheimer Figure 5.1 Badminton, Indonesia’s national sport. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008 Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM Figure 5.2 The Chinese-Indonesian identity crisis allegorized in badminton. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008 Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM Figure 5.3 Without the familiar squeak of badminton shoes, Edwin conjures silent haptics. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008 Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM Figure 5.4 A shuttlecock unable to clear the net, a metaphor for the futility of Chinese-Indonesian patriotism. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008 Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM Figure 5.5 An insert of a pig tethered in a field. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008 Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM Figure 5.6 Director Edwin plays with light. Trip to the Wound, 2008 Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM Figure 5.7 An out of focus final shot and inconclusive ending of Trip to the Wound, 2008 Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

134 134

172 175 215 215

215

216 217 218 219

Acknowledgments I did not expect to write this book. It began as a side-hustle of sorts as my thoughts on these films germinated. I wrote one essay, then another, and was pleasantly surprised to discover an audience whose curiosity as well as my own would ensure that the project remained active. Its nascent ideas had sprung from foundations laid earlier by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Akira Lippit, whose aesthetic dimension of critique enhances my apprehension of cinema. When the venture expanded, I relied on old friends and new for advice and support. James Tweedie, Rosalind Galt, and Eric Freedman were unstintingly helpful, encouraging, and honest. And, but for this research I would not have invited myself to coffee with Laurie Sears. Since that afternoon cuppa in late 2014 overlooking Union Bay, her friendship has been a gift. To Maryse Elliot and Steve Choe at Amsterdam University Press, thank you for your part in bringing this book into the world. You chose a set of reviewers whose rigorous and sincere commentaries are examples for how I want to serve the profession. I am also grateful for Jaap Wagenaar’s endeavor during the final stages of production, and for the chance to work with my indexer, Morgan Blue. Prior to their collective involvement, it was personally meaningful to be welcomed by venues that embraced key early notions. Excerpts from Chapters 1 and 2 appeared in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies as “Historicizing Singapore Cinema: Questions of Colonial Influence and Spatiality.” A version of Chapter 3 was published in positions: asia critique as “Postcolonial Cacophonies: Yasmin Ahmad’s Sense of the World”; it appears by permission of Duke University Press. A few observations within it were first made in Film Quarterly, “Yasmin Ahmad’s Orked Trilogy.” In 2013, a modest but game-changing grant from the University of Michigan’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies gave me a week in Ann Arbor that put many thoughts in motion. The Asia Research Institute then funded incremental progress with Visiting Senior Research Fellowships in 2013 and 2016. The gigs afforded me the time, amenities, and experiences to develop some of my favorite ideas in this book. Most of all, the Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia provided the decisive thrust that brought the manuscript home. I came to know Chua Beng Huat at ARI and Donald Emmerson at Stanford as incisive and catholic intellects, committed leaders who buoy everyone in their orbit. They were a pleasure to work with. While on fellowship, I profited

14 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

from new acquaintances and rich conversations that inform many of these pages. Donald Nonini dropped a key reference for Chapter 1 over a bowl of kway teow noodles. Sandeep Ray gifted a pivotal lead for Chapter 3 in ARI’s canteen. Michelle Miller, Jonathan Rigg, Prasenjit Duara, and Huang Jianli were such warm colleagues at ARI. Thanks perhaps most of all to the ARI staff who helped me with matters large and small: Tay Minghua, Valerie Yeo, Sharon Ong, Henry Kwan, Jonathan Lee, Sharlene Xavier, Noorhayati bte Hamsan, Vernice Tay, and Chelvi Krishnan. Every last member of this tireless team is a treasure. Their colleagues across campus, Amy Tan and Tanvi Rajvanshi, were just as unfailing. I am equally indebted to the stalwarts at Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center: Lisa Lee, Huma Shaikh, Debbie Warren, and Kristen Lee. Every day in Palo Alto during the fall of 2016 was a good day. The lunchtime talks, breakroom chats, and coffee meetings outside Green Library enriched my time on campus and nourish every fiber of this manuscript. On the other side of her office door in Encina Hall, Jennifer Choo always had time for a laugh. On morning walks to class, I rediscovered forgotten pleasures in attending Mark Granovetter’s lectures on Economic Sociology, from which I will draw inspiration for future work. I certainly would not remember my time on that campus quite so fondly were it not for the company of Shane Denson, Usha Iyer, Karla Oeler, Carol Vernallis, Susan Whitehead, and Smokey the cat. Finally, the Prolific Oven always offered the perfect spot to read and think, while La Morenita served comfort at the end of many days; those erstwhile institutions will be missed. It was a privilege to interview some of the artists discussed in these pages, specifically Tan Pin Pin, Charles Lim, and Joshua Oppenheimer. They spoke without precondition, pretention, or reservation. And I have tried to repay that trust by doing their work justice. Because much of what I have to say is indeed driven by engaging with films, the kindnesses shown by all who facilitated the images herein are invaluable. In particular, Chew Tee Pao and the responsive team at the Asian Film Archive were a crucial resource. Many people I admire have helped to vet and refine key ideas in this book. These contributions were facilitated by film studies and Southeast Asian studies programs that hosted me for seminars and talks. I am grateful for the opportunities to meet these audiences at ARI, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin, King’s College London, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Michigan State University, Oregon State University, and Yale-NUS College. Thanks especially to all the staff who took care of the bookings, designed the flyers, and made sure the checks went out on time. For their feedback and conversations after, I

Acknowledgments

15

would like to single out Barbara Andaya, Zarena Aslami, Mark Betz, Lilian Chee, Swarnavel Eswaran, Laurel Fantauzzo, Caryl Flinn, Goh Beng Lan, Ken Harrow, Sebastian Heiduschke, Ashley Hinck, Lee Sang Joon, Jon Lewis, Liew Kai Khiun, Linda Lim, Celia Lowe, Ellen McCallum, Mary McCoy, Yuki Nakayama, Marylou Naumoff, Justus Nieland, Markus Nornes, Ellen Rafferty, Jessica Riggs, Laura Rozek, Stephen Teo, Toh Hun Ping, Ben Tyrer, Sarah Weiss, and Prakash Younger. While on research leave from Florida Atlantic University to complete my first book, I was able to nurture speculative ideas for a second. Well-timed internal grants including Morrow Fund awards made it possible to reach subsequent benchmarks. Susan Day’s advice on grant narratives yields ongoing dividends. All day every day, Marissa Brown runs the show in my department. Within it, I am proud to be on a fearsome crew in film and media studies with Stephen Charbonneau, Christopher Robé, and Nicole Morse – “SCMS2.” You won’t find a more accomplished, giving, even-keeled, and funny cohort anywhere. This book was written over four continents. I have logged untold miles these few years, during which continual motivation to stay in the field often came from a desire to spend more time with my family. Their immense part in this venture, it must be said, came about by way of downright utter apathy. They are a bedrock of emotional stability only because of their bemusement with academic life, with the curious work that I do, and their strident obliviousness to what the hell any of this means. But they care about me, and they’re happy when I’m back at the dinner table, at least until the banter resumes. They matter so much more than this, and are an infinite joy to be around. All my love to Lily, Marjorie, Raymond, Anna, June, Ken, Seraphina and Gabby (both of whom grew up over the course of this writing), Mark, Alicia, Elijah, and Charlotte. And as always for Peter, whose eyes that looked so pointedly at the world live on in mine.

Introduction Expanding the Postcolonial Map Abstract The Introduction situates postcolonial Southeast Asian cinemas within historical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts. With a combination of historical surveys, intellectual mapping, and cultural anecdotes, it recommends a renewal of critical frameworks for the region’s emerging cinemas. It connects Southeast Asia’s unique geopolitical history to cultural and social particularities in three culturally affiliated nations: Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The postcolonial legacy of each surfaces cinematically through locally specific preoccupations. Their films offer readable manifestations of how postcolonial character manifests in Singapore’s spatial imaginary, Malaysia’s aural sensibility, and Indonesian discourses of stability. Finally, the Introduction foregrounds the book’s continual concern with method, and outlines its self-reflective mode of theoretically informed film analysis that accounts for power differentials between knowledge traditions. Keywords: postcolonialism, Southeast Asian studies, Southeast Asian cinema, national cinema, postcolonial theory, critical theory

Oh don’t worry, you weren’t as bad as the Japanese. – Taxi driver in George Town, Malaysia

The opening shots of Seniman Bujang Lapok, a Malay Film Productions release from 1961, embark on a short expedition to discover Singapore’s movie theater landmarks. Following a montage of impeccable colonial buildings on the waterfront that establish the film’s locale, the camera pans to follow a truck decorated with promotional hoardings. For everyone within earshot of “Beer Barrel Polka” emanating from mounted loudspeakers, the mobile

Sim, Gerald, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463721936_intro

18 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 0.1 Singapore’s Capitol Theater. Seniman Bujang Lapok, 1961

Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd.

Figure 0.2 A movie advertising truck passing Singapore’s Lido Cinema. Seniman Bujang Lapok, 1961

Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd.

Introduc tion

19

signs advertise a new local film. The vehicle finds a route connecting the stately “Capitol” cinema and more modern “Lido.” (Figures 0.1 and 0.2) The sequence makes an impression, documenting local film history, exploring the former British colony’s spatial imagination, and as a consequence, reveals a national heuristic. Inspired by how these shots establish location with a cartographic and self-reflexive topos, this book in a way retraces the path of that truck. Through cinema, it explores a geopolitically situated set of cultures negotiating unique relationships to colonial history. The Singaporean, Malaysian, and Indonesian films accounted for in these pages express postcolonial identities that have been shaped in particular ways by Southeast Asian memories of colonial encounter. The pristine colonial monuments on display in Seniman Bujang Lapok signify a deep and historical embrace of colonial institutions. Let us begin with a primer on the region’s particular form of postcoloniality, by way of literal passages through striking examples of this attitude and the cultural work that it performs. Casting our eyes on a diverse mix of commercial f ilms, art cinema, experimental work, features and shorts, we will hence discover instances of postcoloniality that manifest stylistically through Singapore’s preoccupations with space, the importance of sound to Malay culture, and the Indonesian investment in genre. Studies of postcolonial film aesthetics tend to emphasize tropes such as hybridity, syncretism, and creolization, which embody the notion that multiple identities undermine colonial ideology’s essentialist assumptions behind racial purity and cultural superiority. That literature has been crucial to examining colonialism’s material and psychic consequences, and demonstrated the utility of postcolonial thought. The postcolonial poetics in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia’s cinemas however, diverge from convention. They form a nationally distinct regional subset nonetheless bound by proximity, culture, and language. More important, the films reveal three new ways to think about postcolonial film form. For readers informed by Anglo-American or European film studies and their theoretical canon, this book is an exploration of film cultures rapidly emerging on the world scene, and a study of unfamiliar postcolonial narratives. To those already acquainted with these cinemas and cultures, the coming pages invite reengagement through critical theory. While that mode of criticism is de rigueur in film studies as a whole, its application to these films can be fraught. If it is less favored in these parts, the disinclination is a legacy of empiricist area studies traceable to colonialism and the Cold War. Ultimately, necessarily, this is also a discussion about theory’s place in Southeast Asian

20 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

film studies, as well as how the field should be configured. These are some pretty high stakes, the journey to which begins on the ground, along the streets rather, of Singapore. In the summer of 2009, the storied soccer team Liverpool F.C. jetted to the Far East for a set of lucrative exhibition matches. English clubs in particular favor these trips. For sporting reasons, the fixtures offer non-competitive pre-season games for managers and coaches to evaluate talent, implement tactics, and develop fitness. The considerably greater incentive to bear jetlag and stifling humidity, however, is financial. English teams have been popular in Asia for decades, and even before megadollar satellite broadcast deals made it infinitely easier for fans to watch their favorite teams “live” from anywhere in the world, the English league occupied a regular presence in television sports coverage worldwide. Soccer’s global marketing explosion now renders these long trips inexorable for teams that aspire to build a global brand, stoke jersey sales, promote cable television subscriptions, and even tour packages. Among fans in Singapore, Liverpool retains the largest contingent of loyalists. This visit followed sojourns in 1991 and 2001, before another in 2011. The contest was scheduled in the mugginess of late July, and pit Liverpool against Singapore’s national team. Local media buzzed with speculation about whether Fernando Torres, the Reds’ Spanish star forward, would play. In the midst of sporting publicity, the hubbub turned political. A newspaper’s interview with Singapore’s defensive stalwart Daniel Bennett ignited a controversy over the lopsided fervor of fans supporting visiting foreigners at the expense of the local boys. He wondered aloud about how great it would be if the fans backed the local team. “These fans have no real connection with Liverpool. Their passion should be with the Singapore national team. Instead, the National Stadium will look more like [Liverpool’s stadium] Anfield on match day.”1 As added irony, Bennett, a naturalized citizen, actually possesses Liverpool roots. His statements incited days of public debate. From a certain point of view, the match itself was a curious spectacle. Both teams wear all red uniforms, and so the sea of red shirts that flooded the bleachers surprised no one. But the crowd’s roars revealed whom most of the ticket holders had come to see. Whereas local players received perfunctory applause, the visitors were greeted with raucous cheers and at times, delirious levels of support. Event organizers went the whole nine yards to transform Singapore’s National Stadium into a facsimile of 1

Wang, “Roar for your country: Bennett.”

Introduc tion

21

Liverpool’s home ground literally half a world away in northwest England. The master of ceremonies declared over the public address system, “This is Anfield!” before Liverpool’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” rang out among the excited throngs. When Liverpool played Melbourne’s professional team in Australia four years later, the 95,000 who sang that song produced a stirring spectacle, particularly since Anfield’s capacity is roughly half that. These rituals by themselves are not extraordinary. But the public ruminations over national identity in Singapore speak to much more than the vitality of Liverpool’s brand or its popularity. This is because anyone who wanders through the former colony is likely to sense a strikingly similar attitude pervading the city-state’s culture, on matters beyond the confines of the soccer stadium. This is not to recapitulate C. L. R. James, whose momentous book Beyond a Boundary interprets cricket as both imperial instrument and colonial text. Whereas he argues that colonial life influenced the game and vice versa, Southeast Asian colonies’ relationship to association football is not nearly comparable. But the Daniel Bennett incident is nonetheless a clear and distinguishing statement of Singapore’s postcolonial identity. Let’s travel. Singapore’s hub of athletic facilities is connected to the city center by Nicoll Highway and the Merdeka Bridge. This stretch of roadway is an infrastructural expression of the national chronotope. The former was named after Sir John Fearns Nicoll, Singapore’s colonial Governor from 1952 to 1955, one of her last before colonial rule ended. “Merdeka” is the Malay word for independence. A journey that traverses Nicoll Highway toward downtown – southwest over a monument to Singapore’s self-governance in 1955, then resuming terrestrially on Nicoll – symbolizes Singapore’s postcolonial era rather perfectly. The Merdeka Bridge becomes an ironic metaphor for how independence from the British was only an interregnum between colonial rule and a subsequent era of colonial hegemony. This context draws out and magnifies an uneasy moment in documentarian Tan Pin Pin’s arguably most famous work. The U.S. trained filmmaker is one of the country’s most prominent artists whose filmography is singularly devoted to exploring national identity. She described the film, Singapore GaGa (2005) on the official website as “paean to the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape.” It is an episodic collection of interviews and performances from the country’s artistic spectrum, from world-renowned musicians to subway buskers. During one poignant discussion, harmonica virtuoso Yew Hong Chow and classical guitarist Alex Abisheganaden opine on the history of music education in Singapore. They argue that when the recorder was adopted for the primary school curriculum, fatefully, the

22 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

difficult instrument turned generations of students away from music. In not so many words, Abisheganaden criticizes subservient colonial mimicry. Our leaders were probably people who had their music education either in Europe or in England. You see? There were some who went to France, there were some who went to U.K. and if you had gone to either France or U.K. [the recorder] was probably used in schools and so they copied the idea from the British. I would think so, you see? Whereas we should have taken the [harmonica] from China.

And yet for their impromptu duet on camera, Yew and Abisheganaden choose an anthem of the American West, “Home on the Range.” That it is such a stirring rendition further suggests that trying to distance themselves from Eurocentrism only deepened their colonial imagination, a circuitous artistic route that parallels the topographical ride onto, then promptly off the Merdeka Bridge. Nicoll Highway eventually touches the War Memorial Park, near where Seniman Bujang Lapok begins. The Park is a one-block area with a 230-foot centerpiece, the Civilian War Memorial, dedicated to those killed during the Japanese Occupation of World War II. The iconic Raffles Hotel, named for the British statesman who founded modern Singapore, sits due north across the street. Located southwest of the monument is City Hall, a resplendent piece of European architecture that for a long time housed the island’s municipal offices. The arrangement of these three structures summarizes again the coloniality of Singapore’s political, economic, and cultural identity. Although City Hall and the Raffles Hotel, in a country of perpetual public construction and residential renovation, have both undergone the local fetish of refurbishment and renewal, their exteriors remain preserved as conspicuous signifiers of a warmly remembered British colonial history. Nestled between them, the somber, towering Memorial commemorates victims of an Asian empire. It reinforces a historical subjectivity, a literally concretized one that recalls Japanese perpetrators and benevolent British overseers. Less than a mile up the road, the difference in attitude towards those two periods of occupation is unequivocally clear in the National Museum’s various historical exhibits. On its second floor walkway, the doors of two exhibition halls face each other. The sign above one entrance says “Surviving Syonan,” in reference to the three-year occupation during which the Japanese renamed Singapore Syonan-to (Light of the South). Inside the exhibition hall, this dark chapter is remembered as a period during which resilience, resourcefulness, perseverance, and other precursors of the citizens’ fabled

Introduc tion

23

modern work ethic thrived. Its mythological complement is housed 25 feet away behind a door labeled “Modern Colony.” The British are recalled to have introduced advanced technology, new cultures, and cosmopolitan values. The streams of uniformed children on educational excursions to the National Museum receive an indelible lesson: Japan brought suffering, while the British delivered modernity. Indeed, peruse those students’ history books, and you will find depictions of British colonialism possessing an almost splendid flavor. A Secondary Two textbook, for example, quotes British officials spouting naked racism, evidence that the state-approved account does not completely whitewash history. Nevertheless, the mention of white supremacy feels tokenistic because the text is also replete with subheadings such as: How did the British Government Improve Social Services for the People? How did the British Improve Law and Order? What Problems did the British Face in Maintaining Law and Order? The Orientalist answer to that final question, incidentally, singles out the pernicious threat of Chinese coolie agents and secret societies.2 This postcolonial attitude is not exclusive to Singapore. Two British colleagues offer the following story from their Malaysian trip to George Town, the northern capital state of Penang named after Britain’s King George III. An inquisitive cab driver asked where they were from. “The U.K.,” one of them replied. “Ah … you know Britain used to colonize us,” which is not really the type of thing a foreign tourist wants to hear whilst trapped in a backseat. Trying to think quickly and react tactfully, she cautiously offered an apology on behalf of Her Majesty, which presented no small anguish for a proud Glaswegian. “I’m … yeah … sorry about that.” “Oh don’t worry,” reassured the driver, “you weren’t as bad as the Japanese.”3

Indeed, where Singaporean schoolbooks’ unqualified respect for colonial rule punctuates a thorough accounting of crimes committed by ruthless Japanese occupiers during World War II, reverence for Malaysia’s colonial era is also inscribed. In the tourist’s guide to “George Town’s Historic Commercial and Civic Precincts,” European architecture is esteemed as a cultural signifier of growth, development, and progress. The Japanese encounter on the other hand is conversely associated with suffering and destruction. A passage reads: “Sadly, many of these [buildings] were destroyed by Japanese and 2 3

Singapore: From Settlement to Nation Pre-1819 to 1971. Rosalind Galt, in conversation with the author, July 2013.

24 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

allied aerial bombing during WWII, leaving George Town today deprived of some of its grandeur of 100 years ago.” The George Town World Heritage Inc., a public-private partnership dedicated to managing, promoting, and preserving the district, states its off icial mission to “nurture” a “living legend.”4 A lengthy sequence of quotidian anecdotes relayed in inordinate detail may seem like a curious way to inaugurate a study of film, until one realizes how pervasive these paradigms are. You cannot help but sense it on the ground and in the air. These are unmistakable Southeast Asian stories. For the benefit of the uninitiated, and indeed those who would expect the postcolonial condition to leave subjugated peoples clinging to enmity, these observations summarize postcolonial identities that are defined with relatively little hostility. Those who have examined the region more carefully are less surprised. Literary scholar Tamara S. Wagner’s analysis of Singaporean and Malaysian literature discovers “revisionist” and “emulative” types of Occidentalist tropes. She formulates an opposition between despisement, rejection, and retaliation on one hand, and on another, the sort of admiration, desire to imitate, and appreciation for colonial rule illustrated in preceding paragraphs.5 The “emulative” postcolonial mindset tends to be inconceivable in most progressive and academic circles, where it is shocking and abhorrent to associate colonialism with anything other than exploitation, racism, oppression, and injustice. But adopting that conventional point of view is too easy in this context. It proves inflexible and clearly fails to capture vital nuance, as demonstrated by the situations described in these pages. This book does not advocate discarding the truths about colonialism’s fundamental criminality, only that we must consider the politically incorrect notion of postcolonial nostalgia within former subjects. But does this mean that they are thorough masochists or otherwise irretrievably interpellated? To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s famous question, are these in fact subalterns with neither subjectivity nor ability to speak? Or do they wish not to? What some may interpret more cynically and less generously as affection for the colonizer is not completely unusual. Circumstances vary. Not every colonial encounter transpires around the barrel of a gun. Nor is it too difficult in any postcolonial society to come upon pockets of people in higher castes yearning for the privilege they enjoyed prior to independence. 4 Langdon, Guide to George Town’s Historic Commercial and Civic Precincts, 4, 61. 5 Wagner, Occidentalism in Novels in Malaysia And Singapore,1819-2004.

Introduc tion

25

Frantz Fanon explains this aspect of colonial subjectivity when he describes the schizophrenic split between desire and antipathy towards colonizers. Postcolonial governments do not always alter street names and demolish colonial buildings as soon as they are able. Nonetheless, the unconflicted warmth with which some independent Southeast Asian countries remember colonialism is distinctive. It can moreover seem curious if not downright bewildering to some. This book aims to reach those readers; not at historians who shrug knowingly, but at postcolonial cinema scholars whom one reckons are less acquainted with this part of the world.

An Unfamiliar Postcoloniality Anglo-American postcolonial film studies has thus far trained the bulk of its attention on cinemas from economically disadvantaged lands – developing countries in the so-called Third World, namely the Middle-East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In comparison, Southeast Asian histories, cultures, and psyches represent more complex circumstances of another postcoloniality. Studying this unique area of postcolonial history requires a grasp of realities on the ground. The growing need for such studies comes from a film production surge in the region just before the turn of the millennium. German media scholar Tilman Baumgärtel heralds them in the collection, Independent Southeast Asian Cinema: “The rise of an independent cinema in Southeast Asia is one of the most significant developments in World Cinema right now, and the film community has taken notice.”6 Baumgärtel’s enthusiastic cheerleading exhibits attendant bias, but the statements are not off base. During the nineties, Southeast Asian films began reaching beyond specialized niches. With steady frequency they announced themselves to international film culture via the Cannes Film Festival. If pressed to name Southeast Asian titles, knowledgeable fans of global cinema are likely to cite a cohort of Thai films first, among them Tears of the Black Tiger (2000), Un Certain Regarde selection at the 2001 Festival. Wisit Sasanatieng’s baroque western was topped by two Apichatpong Weerasethakul films: Blissfully Yours (2002), which won the award the following year, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which captured the Palme d’Or in 2010. After Eric Khoo’s neorealist urban drama 12 Storeys became Singapore’s first Cannes invitee in 1997, the trailblazing director began to contend in competitive categories. In 2013, Anthony Chen’s 6 Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 6.

26 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Ilo Ilo won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature. More recently, Kirsten Tan (Pop Aye, 2017) and Sandi Tan (Shirkers, 2018) left the Sundance Film Festival with major awards. Next door, the late Malaysian director Yasmin Ahmad has been recognized by the Berlin International Film Festival, as has fellow countryman Amir Muhammad, an experimental documentarian. Both have been programmed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And although much of the recent attention on Indonesia has been occupied by Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), over the past two decades directors like Garin Nugroho, Faozan Rizal, Edwin, Riri Riza, Nia Dinata and Nan Achnas have emerged onto the regional scene and beyond. Many of these films are political, which satiates the global art cinema market where sophisticated bourgeois tastes and liberal sensibilities crave serious themes and weighty storylines. Political content in Southeast Asian films is in turn clearly preoccupied – or plainly readable as such – with the social consequences and psychic costs of colonialism, globalization, western influence, and modernity. Audiences should therefore know the context from which the films originate. To bystanders, the depths of postcolonial nostalgia can otherwise seem peculiar or bizarre. Malaysia and Singapore’s affection and affinity for their colonial masters for example, would look strange if one expects to encounter hostile revolutionary fervor and bitterness amongst subjected peoples. But these sovereignties did not arise from gunshots or out of revolutions, velvet or otherwise. To understand these films, to more specifically interpret them as postcolonial expressions, makes it imperative to comprehend the textured nature and legacies of their colonial memories. Certainly, the field of postcolonial studies has never been completely ignorant of these historical instances; its major thinkers are acutely if not manifestly aware of them. Because postcolonial studies’ anti-universalism is directly informed by poststructuralist theory, namely as it served to counter Eurocentric ideals of racial and cultural purity, the field is constitutionally predisposed to know that blind spots exist over underrepresented and marginalized areas of research.7 Important voices from postcolonial cinema studies in particular have warned about using “postcolonial” as a catch-all vessel for all national or social histories. Ella Shohat may have said it best when she warned of “ambiguous spatiotemporality” or ahistoricism in other words. If postcolonial refers simply to that which is affected by colonialism, then former colonizers in the First World share space under the umbrella of 7 Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 41. For a discussion of whiteness’s connection with the idea of purity, see Richard Dyer, White.

Introduc tion

27

“postcolonial” with formerly colonized subjects of the Third World. Shohat points out that significatory vagueness impedes our knowledge of politics and contemporary power relations. For spatiotemporal specificity then, she suggests alternative designations such as “neocolonial” and “postindependence.”8 To an extent, Shohat and Robert Stam go further in their indispensible volume, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Their specific examples of neocolonialism instantiate empires that continue to impose their will on ex-colonies, not to mention American geo-economic hegemony in the Third World. On that point, historian and theorist of postcolonial cinema Priya Jaikumar admits that the field has a problem – one that recurs in her own pedagogy. In an interview published in the collection, Postcolonial Cinema Studies, she concedes: I defined empire mainly through European and Anglo-American political regimes. This is still vast, but I was teaching from what I knew. It has the problem of replicating a certain Eurocentricity in its frame. We did talk about Hong Kong, but I didn’t address the imperialisms of Japan, of China. I think what I offered needs to be more decentralizing.9

The editors of that volume concur; Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller encourage future research into the “many more films and film cultures that need to be engaged in postcolonial film studies.”10 Indeed, good honest work has already begun to examine those complexities. In Hong Kong’s encounter with colonialism on its British and now Chinese fronts, that context takes cinematic form in the emotional knots of crisis and nostalgia coursing through films produced during the run-up to the 1997 handover.11 Michael Baskett’s The Attractive Empire has also made the important point of examining the film industry’s role in Japan’s imperial project, and Guo-Juin Hong’s Taiwan Cinema follows with a look at Japan’s cultural imprint on Taiwanese postcolonial films. José B. Capino’s Dream Factories of a Former Colony has made inroads into Southeast Asia, tracing the Philippines’s postcolonial imagination through the islands’ experiences with American colonization and Japanese occupation. But the outsized value of these books reminds us of the present shortage of such work. Additional projects would 8 Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 38-41. Shohat alone is attributed because the section first appeared in her earlier essay in Social Text, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’.” 9 “Postface: An Interview with Priya Jaikumar,” Postcolonial Cinema Studies, 239. 10 Ponzanesi and Waller, “Introduction,” 14. 11 See Poshek Fu and David Desser, eds., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, entries by Tony Williams and Natalia Chan Sui Hung in particular.

28 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

aid efforts such as Baskett’s to redefine history’s view of Japanese cinema as occupier and colonizer, rather than as occupied or colonized. World film history no doubt more readily remembers General Douglas MacArthur’s influence on Japanese postwar film production during his time as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. In its own way, this book furthers the investment needed to refocus the field. What Jaikumar recommends must surely include Southeast Asian experiences of Japanese occupation. It would certainly cast light on why the Malaysian cabbie in George Town considers the British not as bad as the Japanese. Jaikumar understands innately that an area’s inclusion on a map, merely acknowledging its existence, hardly means that it has been fully explored. Paths remain unpaved. Chua Beng Huat has pointed out the egregious disciplinary oversight regarding “one of the most colonized regions of the world; Southeast Asia does not figure significantly, if at all, in the expanding archive of what is constituted as the academic field of Postcolonial Studies.”12 Furthermore, despite the obvious and understandable sensitivity to incongruities within the so-called “postcolonial” – between its epistemological narrowness and the social and political diversity of the world that it refers to – the term persists with a limited connotative range within film studies. Examinations à la Shohat and Stam of neocolonial or post-independence cinemas have not exactly sprouted all across the field. At the same time, postcolonial studies has purported to remain steadfast in doing what Ponzanesi and Waller describe as “breaking with universalisms and learning to navigate a fluid, situational, relational mode of knowledge production.”13 For her part Jaikumar prefers to resist any singular analytical method.14 These valiant commitments retain analytical malleability and breadth in application, but in spite of avowed desires to be “situational” there remain abundant reasons to investigate new situations. This book takes up Jaikumar’s challenge to “decentralize” and explore different postcolonial cultures. The need is made only more urgent by the inexorable presence of noteworthy new films, along with the rising production cultures from an understudied part of world cinema. The state of postcolonial inquiry can be illustrated by the reception of Ilo Ilo. For his semi-biographical story of a young boy’s relationship to his family’s new Filipino housekeeper and nanny, director Anthony Chen adopts conventional visual and narrative styles. His secondary storyline 12 Chua “Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies: an Introduction,” 231. 13 Ponzanesi and Waller, “Introduction,” 1. 14 “Postface: An Interview with Priya Jaikumar,” 237.

Introduc tion

29

depicts the woes of middle-class precarity during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, an economic calamity precipitated by the collapse of the Thai baht. Ilo Ilo triumphed at Cannes after eliciting universally warm receptions from audiences taken by the intimate narrative’s surprising weight and tendency to emotionally linger. Six months after earning the Camera d’Or, the film added a second major win for Best Film at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. Reviewers praised the script’s deft tone and pacing. In spite of that, the f ilm’s narrational transparency is deceptive. Although the critical agreement on Ilo Ilo’s melodramatic execution is justified, the critical appreciation for Chen’s narrational aplomb can also be understood as the natural recourse of an international audience not sufficiently equipped to process other aspects of the film’s signification. Ilo Ilo forces us into a deep encounter with modernity and its transnational flows. First, the title itself codifies mistranslation. The English title centers the narrative on Teresa the foreign domestic worker because “Ilo Ilo” is the Philippine province where many migrant workers originate. But the title’s Chinese characters (ba ma bu zai jia) mean “father and mother are not home,” which shifts identification to the boy. The disjuncture invites readings through a disciplinary plethora of poststructuralist paradigms such as transnationalism, postcolonialism, hybridity, and split address. Second, descriptions of the local setting tend to trip over local nuances. While unfathomable to many Western audiences, the region’s labor market makes it eminently affordable to hire a domestic worker, even for households below the middle-class in comparatively more developed countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Since their rates of economic progression are hitched to colonial rule, infrastructure, and legacies, answers to economic questions often require knowledge of colonial history. Without it, class becomes interpreted in Western-centric terms. For example, The Guardian’s review of Ilo Ilo explains that “in the globalised labour market, Singapore’s professional classes are well able to employ those from the Philippines,” and the British Film Institute’s synopsis refers paradoxically to a “working couple” in “an affluent family.”15 In actuality, the couple in the film is neither affluent nor professional. Ilo Ilo follows a number of other productions from Singapore with a visual portrait dominated by iconographic shots of its public housing structures. They are known locally as “flats” – the British term for apartment building derived from Old English. Although structures of well-maintained concrete have widely understood connotations and can thus eff iciently signify 15 Bradshaw, “Ilo Ilo review”; Fennell, “Child of the 90s.”

30 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

feelings of isolation, alienation, uniformity, and subjection, they also contain historical and local significance related to socioeconomic class. Erected to house the population during a rapid phase of economic development and urbanization, these buildings were designed for a modernizing project based on an urban plan with roots in colonial ideologies and policies. The brief travelogue that opens this chapter only begins to demonstrate how that history imposes itself on the country’s lived realities. An inevitable spatial epistemology affects that existence and is related to many issues of interest to postcolonial studies. For those seeking a socio-political context for these films, this book details a national tradition of cinematic mise en scène inextricable from that spatiality. Singapore’s postcolonial space on our side of the proscenium is indispensible to understanding the geography being imaged on the other.16 Highlighting these socioeconomic and architectural particularities is not meant to take writers to task for not being worldly enough or sufficiently acquainted with a Southeast Asian city-state smaller than New York City. For its part, the island has adopted the “red dot” as a popular nickname for itself, and the logo for “SG50” celebrations marking 50 years of independence was designed around the graphic as well. The term is a reference to the fact that its landmass is so diminutive that maps routinely magnify its presence with an alien erubescent mark. It is at once self-deprecating and a proud reference to economic success despite physical limitations.17 Nevertheless, the country now houses a key financial service sector for the world economy, while its size and dependence on transnational capital make it a useful petri dish in which to observe life under neoliberalism, not to mention late stage capitalist consumerism. If on the evidence, national film production and that of its regional neighbors are in the process of crossing the key divide between festival visibility and greater prominence, we should take a closer look. That tautology does emit a whiff of Eurocentrism by implicitly tethering a film’s worthiness for study to the imprimatur of major European festival prizes, but it is far from the only compelling reason. In one basic respect, this book presents a cinematic journey of ethnographic discovery. By now we intuitively understand the cultural meanings behind visualizations of 16 That spatial reality renders the topic at hand in excess of what Edward Said describes in Orientalism as “imaginative geography,” which is essentially an imperial gaze that objectifies the Orient. 17 “The red dot” is used for titles of children’s books, names of commercial businesses, a current affairs program on television, and an important design collective and museum. See also Koh and Chang, eds. The Little Red Dot.

Introduc tion

31

America’s frontier, Australia’s outback, Tokyo’s sensorium, and Beijing’s density, for example, due in good measure to cinema’s role in establishing and disseminating those impressions. We can expand world cinema’s map, and reveal a unique set of aesthetics and epistemologies percolating in this corner of the world – stylistic signatures attributable to postcolonial culture and history, which postcolonial film theory and criticism in its current formation does not fully process. The relatively slim set of aesthetic forms through which postcolonial identity is predominantly taken to express adds to the impetus here. If the efforts of individual filmmakers and festivals are towing these films into the waters of international cinema, this book proposes to be at the end of another hawser on a mission to identify and theorize their postcolonial poetics. It might begin as a set of academic meditations, but as film scholar David Bordwell writes, the study of poetics fruitfully informs practical film criticism.18

Touchstones in Postcolonial Film Studies: On Style and Practice The matter of postcolonial cinema style has been addressed within eminent works that continue to offer immeasurable value to understanding the films’ politics, content, tone, form, and relationship to colonial history and imperial power. Nonetheless, before Southeast Asian postcoloniality’s socioeconomic idiosyncrasies, some restrictive limitations become evident. Take for instance, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s 1969 anti-colonial manifesto, “Towards a Third Cinema.” In bold Marxist strokes, the Argentine authors outline the mission of revolutionary cinema on behalf of the Third World against the First. These “films of decolonization” reject products of “the System” – works dominated by spectacle and production value that affirm capitalist and bourgeois culture – in favor of “films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs, or making films that directly and explicitly set out to fight the System.”19 Solanas and Getino’s uncluttered prose and boisterous clarity simplify the conceptualization of films standing outside the commercial mainstream, beyond the author-centric conventions of traditional art cinema. The influential screed carves a stark distinction between colonial hegemony, First World power, commercial modes of production, and capital on one side, and those who 18 Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 17. 19 Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” 33, 42.

32 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

rebel against them on the other. The authors write with moral clarity and political imperative about ideological aesthetics and radical filmmaking, but the force of their rhetoric is so strident and unequivocal, that it makes for an all or nothing proposition. That is to say, it becomes simplistic if not problematic to apply Third Cinema paradigmatically onto film practices that originate outside the West, resist commercial circuits, or lack production values. The developed and developing former colonies of Southeast Asia rarely produce Third Cinema. Regional films may check off some categories and elicit a temptation to interpret them as such, but these films arise from national histories that bear vastly different relationships with global capital, Marxist politics, and colonial authority.20 They stand a world apart literally and figuratively from Third Cinema’s original Latin American context and movement politics. Solanas and Getino’s call for politicized production reverberates in the hermeneutic blueprint for An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy’s magisterial and deft study of exilic, diasporic, and ethnic filmmaking from Third World and postcolonial countries. Naficy focuses on the aftermath of post-1950s decolonization, revolution, liberation, and other social upheavals brought about by the Cold War. The concern for postcolonial liberation that he shares with Solanas and Getino explains the affinity that accented cinema has for Third Cinema. “The accented cinema is one of the offshoots of the Third Cinema,” the author professes, but it is “much more situated,” “less polemical,” “not necessarily Marxist or even socialist,” “not necessarily radical” or even oppositional, but thoroughly engaged in the experience of deterritorialization.21 Therefore in contrast to Solanas and Getino, who are so unmistakably clear in defining Third Cinema as to be exclusionary, Naficy is fluid and inclusive. He expects accented cinemas to originate from essentially anywhere geographically, politically, historically, ethnically, culturally, or aesthetically. This inclusiveness extends to An Accented Cinema’s methodology and theory; Naficy’s outline of the accented style hews tightly to postmodern traits. The array of styles Naficy calls accented reveals his consistent effort within textual analyses to widen treatments of film form beyond the limits of narrative and plot, and in turn, to stretch that discussion outside the 20 Anti-colonial movements in Southeast Asia often included communist involvement at some stage, but they were stymied in civil wars with anti-communist domestic factions. The Cold War and the lure of global capital together deterred colonial regimes from transferring power to communist independent governments. Chua, “Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies,” 232-234. 21 Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 10-11, 26, 30-31.

Introduc tion

33

trope of hybridity. In this vein he bemoans, “even those who deal with the accented films usually speak of exile and diaspora as themes inscribed in the films, not as components of style.”22 In this respect, Naficy builds upon the conventional set of tropes associated with postcolonial culture, norms that Shohat and Stam encapsulate well in Unthinking Eurocentrism. Postcolonial theory, in so far as it addresses complex, multilayered identities, has proliferated in terms having to do with cultural mixing: religious (syncretism); biological (hybridity); human-genetic (mestizaje); and linguistic (creolization). The word “syncretism” in postcolonial writing calls attention to the multiple identities generated by the geographic displacements characteristic of the post-independence era, and presupposes a theoretical framework, influenced by anti-essentialist poststructuralism, that refuses to police identity along purist lines.23

An Accented Cinema expands the outer limits of postcolonial aesthetics that Shohat and Stam summarize here. Naficy leads his exploration with the subcategory, “structures of feeling” à la Raymond Williams, in reference to stylistic manifestations that are not yet programmatic, recognized, or formalized.24 This book tends that fertile area with him. Its chapters cultivate an appreciation for film poetics related to formal aspects of film space, sound, and genre, and find scant recourse in poststructuralist hybridity. Take this project as a supplementary and corrective effort to vary and renew postcolonial film studies. Among others who also wish to broaden the aesthetic taxonomy of postcolonial cinema, Laura U. Marks’s The Skin of the Film stands out. It forges an original path for “haptic visuality” on the backs of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson. Marks argues that interstitial social groupings create “intercultural films” whose images trigger non-visual senses and evoke embodied memories that disrupt hegemony and challenge visual regimes. The aforementioned Postcolonial Cinema Studies collection can also be cited for its attempt to deepen analyses of postcolonial film style in its push to transcend hybridity as the primary aesthetic trope. Naficy’s expansive idea of what constitutes postcolonial style, however, continues to somewhat recapitulate the poststructuralist and postmodern themes that have calcified around the common definition of what is 22 Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 20. 23 Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 41. 24 Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 26.

34 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

“postcolonial.” The aesthetic compendium condensed into An Accented Cinema’s Appendix draws from the postmodern lexicon; it is peppered with variations on hybridity, openness, fluidity, liminality, and self-awareness. The problem with this is partly that postmodernism’s political potency has been smothered in recent times by the new international economic order that homogenizes, flattens the world and deactivates boundaries. Naficy himself acknowledges globalization’s ability to nullify borders, but he maintains that physical borders retain an empirical existence and still pose verifiable threats to real people. The key words that summarize the postindustrial system – globalization, privatization, diversification, deregulation, digitization, convergence, and consolidation – are all associated with centralization of the global economic and media powers in fewer and more powerful hands. However, this market-driven centralization masks a fundamental opposing trend at social and political levels, that is, the fragmentation of nation-states and other social formations, and the scattering, often violent and involuntary, of an increasing number of people from their homelands – all of which are driven by divergence, not convergence.25

Nevertheless, few dispute Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s claims that globalization is a phenomenon that postcolonial paradigms are too outdated and ill equipped to process. They argue on ample evidence in Empire that the strategy of weaponizing postmodern and postcolonial concepts such as anti-foundationalism, anti-essentialism, hybridity, and all the rest can be effectively neutralized through commodification. The market prizes mobility and flexibility all too well.26 This argument may only be waged in finite pockets of postcolonial studies – over the merits of poststructuralist theory, hybridity politics, and subaltern studies, for instance – but the debates are very much alive and active. This was evinced by the fiery reception that met Vivek Chibber’s flagellation of subaltern studies in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013), in which the author decries the field’s rejection of the Enlightenment and de-emphasis of political economy. Chibber restated the importance of integrating economics into historical frameworks. To do so turns our gaze even more acutely towards Southeast Asia’s direction. The region’s individual economies develop at different rates, but all have benefitted from effectively patching into the circuitry 25 Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 31, 42. 26 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 133, 142-146, 150-152.

Introduc tion

35

of global capital and financial markets. Those externalities sway markets, drive institutional reform, and impose transformation on corporations and banks.27 This political economic history turns these cinemas into very handy cultural windows with which to observe the colonial-to-global transition. This part of the world is not only an unexplored section of the film studies map, it also serves as a fitting and opportune case study of postcolonial societies and globalized economies. It is a critical nexus, even though opinions may differ slightly on how the postcolonial-global relationship should be viewed. Hardt and Negri’s perception of global capital as a subsumptive force parallels Arif Dirlik’s contention that global capitalism is a condition for postcolonialism. But when Chen Kuan-Hsing stresses the importance of putting “the history of colonialism and imperialism back into globalization studies” because of how globalization discourses obscure “the relationships between globalization and the imperial and colonial past from which it emerged,” he suggests that you cannot study globalization without considering colonial legacies, not vice versa.28 Regardless, they all agree that this is an important historical intersection. The manner in which that is felt and experienced on the ground is demonstrated by a poignant moment in a timely and topical short film from Singapore, Polling Day (2012). Its protagonist Gregory is a fresh university graduate doubly alienated by his domineering father and being left behind in a late capitalist economy – a narrative that follows an archetypal premise among local films. A prospective employer, a Chinese national, asks the English-speaking Gregory why he cannot communicate in Mandarin, illustrating the power of China’s language and capital. A short decade ago, English proficiency offered a clear postcolonial advantage, but globalization has superseded that. When Gregory’s disastrous interview concludes, his dejection is compounded when the next candidate, an American, casually displays Mandarin fluency. Humbled and downcast, Gregory passes his competitor on his way out. This briefest of exchanges, recorded quietly in claustrophobic close-ups, senses something much larger; Gregory’s despair condenses the political economic climate with emotional weight. The insight came from an unobvious venue. Director Jesmen Tan was a production coordinator for Ilo Ilo; Polling Day was his film school thesis project – a skillful but modest work that signals what can be potentially unearthed once we dig deeper. 27 Robison, “The Reordering of Pax Americana,” 66. 28 Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 73; Chen, Asia as Method, 2. See also Amin-Khan, The Postcolonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization, 4-5.

36 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Recently, Singapore’s booming finance and real estate sectors have made its wealthy’s conspicuous luxury consumption irresistible to international media. Meanwhile, its economic moves are tracked with interest, heightened by the 2008 financial crisis, and what has been termed the eastward shift of the global economy’s “center of gravity.”29 Singapore’s economic connections and those of its neighbors are often facilitated by geopolitical alliances and relationships fashioned out of Cold War or post-9/11 conveniences. It is not coincidental that the West’s anti-terror discourse so frequently cites Malaysia and Indonesia as examples of moderate Islam. Indeed, “Southeast Asia” is itself a manifestation of bygone American policies of communist containment and Domino Theory. Subsequent to that, nearby Indonesia became what Mary Zurbuchen categorizes as “transitional” – a society that is “transforming systems determined by older geopolitical patterns into a post-Cold War conf iguration of markets, information, and new democracies.30 These geopolitical developments magnify and sharpen the rising visibility of the textual bouquet studied here, specifically among postcolonial cinemas but also in the larger constellation of world films. The region’s particularly deliberate participation in the global economy makes a narrative such as the one Hardt and Negri provide in Empire, more applicable to understanding these cultures. For that reason, even though the ideological thrust of Third Cinema seems less relevant, its Marxism comes in handier in analysis than as manifesto.

Strategies Old and New This book conceives postcolonial film style along national lines, and presumes that each cinema is economically, socially, and culturally inflected. These portraits of national cinema are not comprehensive, but rather curations of films and culture that speak to nationally specific conditions. Still, at a juncture when the “transnational” possesses rising currency in the field, national cinema paradigms may seem outdated or even regressive. James Tweedie’s The Age of New Waves is the latest and most impressive of those choosing to retain the approach. It argues convincingly that “repetition and simultaneity in various locations” reveals world cinema’s “most innovative and revelatory dimensions.” Although Tweedie reiterates the well-understood 29 Mahtani, “Wealth Over the Edge: Singapore.” See also Quah, “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity.” 30 Zurbuchen, “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia,” 9.

Introduc tion

37

desire to transcend arbitrary borders that the culture industry exploits for product differentiation in the name of novelty and specificity, he acknowledges that the “national” continues to offer both methodological value and situational utility for unique cultures.31 Persisting with a national model must however withstand strong intellectual countercurrents. Take for instance, Chris Berry’s transnational studies of Chinese diasporic cinema that devote important attention to films from Singapore. He claims albeit cautiously and with abundant qualification that on balance, the Singaporean texts’ Chineseness outweighs local considerations.32 A cursory look at domestic circumstances would undermine those presumptions, however. Visceral xenophobia among locals, including the ethnic Chinese, came to a boil in recent years over economic policies that exacerbated the wealth gap. Liberal immigration policies had opened doors to an influx of mainland Chinese immigrants, consisting of a wealthy set attracted by neoliberal financial deregulation, and an underclass methodically recruited from China and Bangladesh to suppress the cost of labor. In neighboring countries, ethnic Chinese communities are not any closer to the motherland. ChineseIndonesian director Edwin’s films lament his society’s marginalization of ethnic Chinese but offer little hint of any connection to China. Similarly, Malaysian filmmaker James Lee’s exploration of ethnic Chinese identity in Ah Beng Returns (2001) produces little more than cultural pastiche. Gaik Cheng Khoo, an influential commentator on Malaysian cinema, wrote dismissively: “This search for identity and acceptance seems to yield cryptic signs of Chineseness, whether traditional China is represented in [a] gown, or by the communist statements made by the four gangsters in their conversations.”33 So although Naficy’s definitions of diaspora and exile parallel Berry’s transnational assumptions, one still senses that they are ill-fitting categories for what remain nationally specific experiences in Southeast Asia. Likewise, fractiousness between Malaysia and Indonesia should disincline conflation of Malay and Indonesian cultures. The strongest case for national paradigms comes in fact from the field of Southeast Asian studies. The etymology of “Southeast Asia” itself provides significant reason to retain national borders. The region originated as a geopolitical fabrication of convenience – a mainly American construction during the Cold War. And yet political scientist Donald Emmerson’s seminal essay “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” shows that the region came into 31 Tweedie, The Age of New Waves, 5-6. 32 Berry, China on Screen, 214; and Berry ed., Chinese Films in Focus II, 1-2. 33 Khoo, “Contesting Diasporic Subjectivity,” 179.

38 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

being on the strengths of both nationalism and the borders of nation-states. Geographer Terry McGee more recently echoes the idea. My recent work on the creation of Putrajaya, the new capital of Malaysia, finds that there appears to be a dynamic hybridity of traditional, colonial, and post-colonial ideas that have influenced its creation. I would describe it an architectural expression of the traditional Malay sultanate, cloaked in a post-modern rhetoric of the modern nation state. It leads to a certain scepticism about post-modern arguments to do away with boundaries.34

A certain national-transnational contradiction may be inescapable in this part of the postcolonial world. The fact that filmmakers with authentic national voices are often reliant on transnational funding creates a conflict that Indonesian film scholar May Adadol Ingawanij refers to as “dialectics of independence.”35 All in all, circumstances support the rationale for nationally delineated study. This book adopts a bifocal method of national uniqueness and stylistic interconnectedness similar to Tweedie’s, but with the transnational project a long-term secondary endeavor built on the former. National analysis of cinema makes for a foundation that may be familiar, predictable, and even intellectually unsound. But it remains useful as an initial line of questioning. Tweedie is not unlike Naficy, who nods toward globalization’s “convergence” while simultaneously stressing national “divergence” within accented cinemas. In sum it is prudent to straddle that national versus transnational divide. Chapter 1, “Postcolonial Spatiality: Singapore Maps Its Cinema,” kicks off this journey through the region in its most affluent society, advanced economy, and vital transportation hub. The only Asian economic “Tiger” of the group, its economic story is most famous for the breathtaking ascension from developing nation to First World status in one generation. It was achieved in the absence of natural resources, limited human resources – namely an uneducated and fractious multi-ethnic population – and the added challenge of being one of the smallest countries in the world by area. The geographical limitations continue to spur a meticulous approach to urban planning, and thus a profoundly spatial impact on people’s lives. It should surprise no one that Singapore’s real estate market is among the world’s most fevered. The state also wields political power through its management of space: urban development, land ownership rights, and 34 McGee, “Many Knowledge(s) of Southeast Asia,” 279. 35 Ingawanij, “Introduction: Dialectics of Independence,” 2-5.

Introduc tion

39

public works. This chapter examines how that micro-management has occurred under the structural influence of Singapore’s real and imagined relationship to British colonial rule. Land scarcity invites postcoloniality to impress itself onto the built environment, and produces a geographically inflected condition that continually finds its way onto its national cinema’s expressive palette. The study’s foray into history, space, and cinema borrows a theoretical compass from Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema. For him, maps in the film image are windows into history that lives beyond cinema, “written in codes and signs that are not those of film; yet they are of a spatial scale not unlike that in which they are portrayed. And they can never be assimilated entirely into the visual narrative or other modes of rhetoric of the films in which they are deployed.”36 Singapore’s “red dot” moniker originates from a cartographically attuned national hermeneutic, which leads to the discovery of pregnant codes and signs and activated signals of direction and scale. For the chapter’s evocative sample of features and shorts, Singapore’s postcolonial identity infuses them with spatial discourse in three forms: aerial cartography, affective maps, and colonial atlases. Chapter 2, “Reorienting Film History Spatially,” applies those conclusions to rethink local film historiography and national identity. Spatial thinking triggers an aesthetic reevaluation of recent films, making it easier to bridge Singapore’s bifurcated film history. Socio-political readings have cleaved the story of local cinema into two periods: the “golden age” of the 50s and 60s, and the post-90s production revival. Film production lay largely dormant between the earlier boom during the twilight of colonial rule consisting of mostly Malay films made by Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions and Cathay-Keris Studio (which later released Chinese-language features), and the recent creative surge (a mix of melancholic socially critical works, popular comedies, and horror). Independence in the intervening period, along with the deep, pervasive impact of one-party state policies on every aspect of national life, make it too easy to believe that contemporary films are only informed by the authoritarian governance of modern Singapore. This chapter reflects on that critical tendency through the hermeneutic links between the production eras that can appear unobvious. Postcolonial spatiality helps draw them into view. The consideration of Singapore goes on to mull the relationship that bodies have with the inhabited environment. Positing the non-f iction work of prominent local director Royston Tan for illustrative contrast, it observes the oeuvre of documentarian Tan Pin Pin at length, and finds 36 Conley, Cartographic Cinema, 4-5.

40 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

a valuable interlocutor who grasps the importance of space to national identity. Her critically incisive and observationally deft films fashion affective poetics of ambivalence, uncertainty, and hiraeth, in expressing nostalgia for a perpetually elusive and perhaps non-existent place. These insights inform a subsequent examination of the unintended ironies created by recent “new wave” narrative fiction films that appropriate the language of alienation popularized by Western art cinemas. Published criticism has been precipitous in reaching for the usual canon, but reframing analysis in spatial terms accomplishes two things. It routes thinking away from mimicry and related tropes like cultural authenticity, subaltern agency, and the like. It also amplifies the voices of films capable of stretching theoretical predicates. They make it possible to see what happens when Deleuzean time-images associated with alienation, helplessness, and the inability to act either within or on one’s physical setting, are conscripted into the service of a culture where subjective existence is bound up ever so tightly with landscape and the structures within. The conclusions help to resolve the postcolonial paradox, in which new wave-inspired films from the revival period try in vain to wrench from their environment, individuals who are closely attached to their surroundings. With space in far greater abundance, Malaysia’s experience is naturally different but retains a similar substructural tension. Take Gerhana (“Eclipse,” 2009), Chinese-Malaysian director James Lee’s contribution to “15Malaysia,” an omnibus short film project involving the country’s notable film and video artists. Selections were curated to represent a socio-politically sensitive view of Malaysia. Set entirely in a hotel room, Gerhana’s geographic location is established by the Malay newscast airing on the television. A woman gazes impassively at the screen from the edge of a bed, while her companion picks over his dinner at a desk. The couple commiserates over a series of wretched stories on the broadcast regarding local politics, the state of Malaysia’s democracy, and the “swine flu” epidemic. Stoically, they rue the unlikelihood of change. The specter of global capital is reified in their modern clothes, the hotel room, and its sleek decor. Lee wryly situates his protagonists as disconnected tourists in their own country. The woman is neither ethnically Malay nor Muslim; it is implied that she eats pork. In view of deepening racial schisms in recent times, is miscegenation the reason behind the couple’s marginalization? Their inability to engage and peripheral state of belonging is thus suggestively attributed to globalization. Postcolonial criticism would be accustomed to employ familiar frameworks to a text such as this, including what Homi K. Bhabha would interpret as “in-between-ness.” Writers such as Dirlik, on the other hand, may insert

Introduc tion

41

capital and the influence of First World power into the conversation.37 Both are applicable. Lee cheekily leaves viewers with audio of the television newsreader’s final report: “Barack Obama mentioned Malaysia in his Middle Eastern speech. He praises our country as progressive. This is an astounding achievement as the name of our country was mentioned by a famous president.” The line evokes Wagner’s formulation of the “emulative Occidentalism” in Malaysia’s supplicant postcoloniality, within a nationalist brew of pride, modernity, and independence. The eclipse metaphor injects both spatial and temporal connotations. Much like history itself, it refers to a limited temporal window (when planetary masses align). In that way “Gerhana” hints at Malaysia’s unique position def ined simultaneously by postcolonial hybridity and global capital. Gaik Cheng Khoo acknowledges the duality in her analysis of Lee. Pondering whether the director’s theme of alienation refers to the sectarian Chinese view of local multiethnic realities or to the universal experience of globalization, she realizes that his films’ influences and audiences are both global and local. This openness to diverse theories would substantially enrich discussions of Southeast Asian films, particularly since many parts of Southeast Asia are undergoing processes that follow from intense neo-liberal capitalism, giving rise to possible disillusionment, and repeating the universal condition of alienation under historical capitalism. Still, the universal does not have to preclude the particular, and vice versa.38

Her tone remains non-committal, almost as if obligated however slightly to make a choice. Those instincts may be right. The examples collected in this book may insist that the global and local are always operative, in the sense that Malaysia’s thorough involvement in globalization essentially defines its particular postcolonial situation. Chapter 3, “Postcolonial Cacophonies: Malaysia Senses the World,” examines that identity through one of Lee’s contemporaries, the late Yasmin Ahmad, a beloved director of melodramatic and interethnic romances who maintained another career as a high-level advertising executive. Her portfolio at the renowned Leo Burnett outfit included spots for the multinational oil and gas company Petronas. Ahmad’s best-known work might be the television spots that the conglomerate commissioned. They celebrate 37 Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 73. 38 Khoo, “Smoking, Eating, and Desire,” 133.

42 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Malaysia’s multiculturalism as a way to commemorate occasions such as Hari Merdeka (Independence Day). Her film and advertising work are thematically consistent, and interpretable as a projection of national identity. Situated astride Malaysian and global film culture, Ahmad’s fresh model of postcolonial poetics represents both a departure from traditional hybridity tropes, and an indication of the nation’s postcolonial-global duality. As a filmmaker, she embodies Malaysia’s postcolonial-global nexus. As art, her films perform it through film sound. The manner in which Ahmad exploits multilingual dialogue is not so much an example of the linguistic creolization catalogued by Shohat and Stam in Unthinking Eurocentrism – aural hybridity of different cultures, languages, and meanings. On the contrary, her films lift spectators through sound above the local diversity, to confront them with globalization’s emptiness. Set in globalized social and cultural milieus, Ahmad stages interethnic squabbles between speakers of different languages. First, using imperfect or absent subtitles, she steers attention away from dialogue’s linguistic meaning, toward the purely acoustic pleasures of dueling cultural phonemes or prosody, what language simply sounds like. The resultant national soundscape harbors an aesthetic that transcends the hybridity paradigm associated with postcolonial culture. Ahmad’s second predilection, of highlighting characters that speak ethnically incongruent languages, does not require audience comprehension either. It offers a cinematic experience that is thoroughly aural, spatially marginalized, and yet seductively immersive. Through French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening, and his eponymous writing vis-à-vis globalization in The Sense of the World and The Creation of the World or Globalization, we discover a phenomenology that speaks to Malaysia’s geopolitical “sense of the world.” Chapter 4, “Postcolonial Myths: Indonesia Americanizes Stability,” takes up Indonesian postcolonialism, except that the colonial power in question is not the Netherlands, its longtime occupiers. It instead considers Indonesia’s colonial relationship with the United States, which in the absence of physical occupation, Edward Said would describe as “indirect.” Indonesia’s less antagonistic experience with the U.S. falls more in line with its neighbors’ view of the British. The Dutch were ousted by revolution. Moreover, the American relationship forged during the Cold War offers a more unimpeded view of Indonesia’s place within the history of contemporary capitalism. The participation of Indonesian fighters with U.S. troops in the Vietnam War is not well known. Internally, Cold War exigencies enabled Suharto’s militaristic authoritarianism. The violent excesses of his New Order government birthed the regime in trauma, crisis, and horror. Since Suharto, the country’s struggling “transition” into a democratic civil society has been

Introduc tion

43

hampered by its inability to acknowledge and move past the killings of 1965-1966.39 The overall impetus to break through that impasse can be felt in two volumes: Zurbuchen’s edited collection of essays titled Beginning to Remember, and historian Laurie J. Sears’s monograph, Situated Testimonies. These two books map a passage through psychic infrastructure on a search for historical troves and repressed memory in forgotten lacunae. Psychoanalysis is commonplace methodology in the humanities writ large. But in the Indonesian instance, it is evidence of a dire need to rescue what decades of authoritarianism and trauma have incapacitated: the subjective power to access, recognize and represent the past. Debates within the left’s mixed reception of Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing tend to glide past the film’s most germane offering to that recuperative project, the footage shot by perpetrators of Suharto’s anti-communist pogrom reenacting their crimes. While this is much more a film about Indonesia than of it, the documentary manages to find itself staring at emblematic processes occurring in a unique part of national postcolonial history. Many understand the scenes to be part of Arsan and Aminah, a garish Hollywood-style production from a script for a wartime romance based on a real-life killer’s nightmares. Oppenheimer contests that version of events; he maintains that his subjects always only understood that they were shooting those scenes for the documentary and not Arsan and Aminah. 40 But the “found footage” from the latter provides the most eye-catching and surreal moments. Critics may dismiss the director’s reenactment premise as facile conceit, but what of the subjects’ prerogatives? Should those be discounted out of hand? Their series of choices in staging psychic narratives is significant in how typical it all is. Documentary theory postulates that reenactments possess the unique ability to access and negotiate trauma specifically through the body, because the corporeal becomes vital when people cannot verbalize memories. Afforded free creative reign, the murderers fashioned a set of yarns inspired by Hollywood’s most famous genres: the western, noir, war film, and musical. Using these individual fantasies as points of departure, this chapter charts how the cinematic uncanny that surfaced on the set can assist thinking about the ways that genres serve psycho-political functions elsewhere. Film genre theory girds a hypothesis that Indonesia’s genre-dominated cinema reinforced New Order ideology. Hollywood genres Americanized colonial subjects and their memories. Narrative formulae restated the value of 39 Zurbuchen, “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia,” 9, 14. 40 Joshua Oppenheimer, communication with the author, 1 August 2018.

44 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

predictability, which dovetailed with the premium placed by the New Order on social and political stability. Suharto sold authoritarianism as a necessary condition of order, and exploited fears of communist instability and disorder to legitimize his administration. The mindset left a legacy in postcolonial Indonesian cinema of taking continued comfort in classical narrative closure and resolution. I focus especially on films precipitated in one way or another by the reformasi movement, a drive for democratization, openness, and engagement during the post-Suharto period to remake Indonesian society by working through the traumas and violence of life under the New Order. Based on those close readings, this book identifies Americanism functioning as psychic conduits and historical indices in coming-of-age stories, through the discursive beats and rhythms of the road film.

Cold Wars and Methodological Debates This book promises only a partial inspection of the Southeast Asian catalog, but the historical and aesthetic paradigms it uncovers are potentially portable and useful for further explorations of films from the region. To a degree, this treatment of film texts is informed by Bordwell’s measured approach to film poetics, which identifies key “conventions at the intersection of conceptual distinction and social customs,” and considers all modes of study: analytical, theoretical and historical.” But where Bordwell insists that historical poetics entail empirical research into specific circumstances of production, the following chapters adopt a more liberal definition of historical context that includes sociopolitical, political economic, or geopolitical conditions of postcoloniality – even if he would dismiss them as “an explanatory prop” or crude cultural reflections. 41 Over those objections, this book is also inspired by Ann Laura Stoler’s model of how colonial history exerts pressure on the present. Imperial demands and priorities, she argues, can persist in logics and affective sensibilities that are not articulated or sensed in evident ways. Deviating from “prevailing themes of colonial history as we know it,” she suggests that the past can be refashioned, reinscribed, displaced, and amplified on lived conditions today. 42 More important, Stoler brings attention to where postcoloniality manifests intangibly, in moments and spaces that we have not come to anticipate. 41 Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 12-13, 15, 30. 42 Stoler, Duress, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 27.

Introduc tion

45

In thinking about how those impositions surface in national cinema poetics, the next chapters withdraw any claim to be performing comprehensive examinations of either nation or cinema. This is not that kind of treatise. It does not canvass every precinct, but the textual readings that follow will shepherd you through a survey of films that make national statements. The Indonesian films for example, are of the transition to liberalism and openness after Suharto. In Malaysia to the north, films like Gerhana were curated to represent the nation, while Yasmin Ahmad’s personal style was conscripted into a national multiculturalist discourse. And back across the causeway in Singapore, the works of Tan Pin Pin are self-evident studies of its national condition. For the less obvious choices that remain, perhaps film historian Ben Singer put it best in an essay on Japanese cinema. It would be ludicrous to hold up just one brief sequence in a f ilm as somehow capable of encapsulating the aesthetic essence of an entire national cinema. There obviously are too many different types of scene, in too many different films, made in too many different directorial styles, period styles, and genre styles, for any one instance to somehow illustrate or stand in for the unimaginably vast array of cinematic materializations constituting any national tradition – let alone an unusually prolific and sustained major tradition like Japan’s. And yet, there are certain moments in Japanese films that strike one as stylistically so distinctive, so seemingly emblematic, and so hard to imagine having been created elsewhere, that one finds oneself drawn toward an expository position that comes dangerously close to the one just discounted. At least, to rephrase with slight hedging, one is prompted to insist that any viable encapsulation of the aesthetics of Japanese film would need to encompass or account for the cinematic specimen in question. 43

One can never do enough to assuage anti-essentialist critics of “national” cinema; Identifying distinctive qualities is sufficiently straightforward, but ascertaining if a text is truly “emblematic” requires definitive knowledge of the “national.” In the way that Shohat and Stam parse the term “postcolonial,” we must always remember to qualify slippery terms, be wary of essentialism, and account for historical contingency. Let us then proceed with caution on a project about postcolonial poetics upon clarifying its presumptions and parameters. Social conditions within these national cultures can be adequately understood by weighing salient 43 Singer, “Triangulating Japanese Film Style,” 33.

46 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

political and economic factors. But the poststructuralist aversion to essentialism with which critics contest the validity of national hermeneutics is layered with suspicions that national cinema studies are Orientalist. The early critical engagements with Japanese cinema remain excellent reminders of how Anglo-American film studies exoticized and homogenized cultures that appear distant from what was familiar. For its part, this project occasionally finds itself in an uneasy position of trying to transcend hybridity as a critical method, but thoroughly aligned with both the poststructuralist trope’s utility in enacting “dynamic departures from colonial paradigms of knowledge and power,” as well as studies like Ponzanesi and Waller’s of cinema’s engagements “with history, subjectivity, epistemology, and the political ramifications of all of these.”44 There can only be opposition to colonialism’s exploitation, militarism, Orientalism, racism, and intellectual hegemony. Nevertheless, metaphors involving infants and soapy water come to mind. This study plainly relies on critical theory and continental philosophy written in the West to address undertheorized films. In these instances, it admittedly shelves Chen’s call to look to Asia for points of reference. What are the implications of doing so with non-Western films, even if they nurse colonial affection, or spring from countries that are modernizing with linear economic models? The concluding chapter swerves directly into that debate in hopes of proposing methods for future study of Southeast Asian cinema, while providing a historical appreciation of how we renew our approaches. These films may just be uniquely qualified to facilitate the task that Chen terms, deimperializing theory. 45 He believes that Asian localities should avert any imperialized overreliance on the West for frames of reference, especially when the aim is to generate self-understanding. Instead, the production of knowledge must expand interrogatory perspectives to include more adjacent spaces and neighboring regions. To an extent, the first installments on that order have arrived in the form of scholarship in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean film theory, or with Arnika Fuhrmann’s Ghostly Desires, a book in which the author fashions vernacular Buddhism into a theoretical method for Thai film and video. Theory should not be applied as universal knowledge on passive subaltern objects. To that end this book treats films from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia as interlocutors of active subjectivities fully capable of responding in kind – to talk back, as it were – first and foremost to the postcolonial theory canon that can come 44 Ponzanesi and Waller, “Introduction,” 1. 45 Chen, Asia as Method, 2-3.

Introduc tion

47

up frustratingly short. In fulfilling these conditions among others, Chen believes that theory’s problems can be ameliorated. He puts forth an agenda replete with a familiar vocabulary – deconstruction, decentering, relativizing, and so on – and reminds us that Eurocentrism cannot be completely undone so long as material power, resources, and wealth remain unevenly distributed. 46 To wit, we must marry theoretical critique with real world intervention. This echo of Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach reinforces Sears’s recommendations in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, a case to rejuvenate Southeast Asian studies by “deparochializing” the field and encouraging greater interaction “between scholars of and from the region.”47 At the same time, Chen pushes colonial subjects to “generate selfunderstanding in relation to neighboring spaces as well as the region as a whole, while removing the imperative to understand ourselves through the imperial eye.” He is not alone in sounding that call to “actively acknowledge [the West] as a part of the formation of our subjectivity.”48 The final chapter sounds out the writings of Rey Chow, Stuart Hall, and Naoki Sakai, who express that very need. This film study is written in that self-critical spirit of openness and willingness to submit to scrutiny. Thereafter, we become better able to assess the intentions of any who deign to apply theory under pretensions of neutrality, objectivity, or universal knowledge. Basically, being ready to accept critiques of Eurocentrism is a form of defense against it. Fair enough. My recourse to French theory owes itself to the University of Iowa’s particular legacy in film studies, and reflects the years I spent there in postgraduate training. I wrote this post-tenure book ensconced in the American academy and supported by endowed fellowships at Stanford and the National University of Singapore. On those well-manicured campuses, I was pampered in flush research institutes housed in splendid edifices devoted to area studies. To borrow Chen’s term, the views from the offices they gave me would feel like an “imperial eye.” My path to that station extends from genealogical roots in Indonesia and Singapore, where I attended a secondary school named for the country’s British founder Sir Stamford Raffles. For four years, I shuttled to classes past his noble bust that kept imperious watch over the main quadrangle. Is the biology degree from Duke that followed the reason why I am instinctively loath to foreclose on Kantian universalism and brash metanarratives? To what extent has that life imperialized the way I think about the world? 46 Chen, Asia as Method, 2-3, 217-222, 253. 47 Bonura and Sears, “Introduction,” 3, 9. 48 Chen, Asia as Method, 2, 223.

48 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

In this moment, I find much to identify with in Chow’s description of being “caught, in a cross-cultural context, between the gaze that represents her and the image that is supposed to be her.”49 I cannot claim to write from the perspective of a subaltern just as it would be absurd to think that I do not. From a position of relative privilege, I know that this manuscript is both an exercise of cultural capital and expression of political interests. By all means, consider this book’s relationship to those traditional and knowledge economies. But when Deleuze scholar David Martin-Jones performs a similar self-reflexive nod in the introduction to Deleuze and World Cinemas, he describes himself as “just one British scholar’s point of view on one French scholar’s point of view.”50 I would rather not concede that much. These are dialectical divulgements, an admission that this could be imperializing knowledge, as well as a petition for the benefit of doubt. Of course, it would be awfully expedient to barter a paragraph’s worth of biodata for the license to wield Western theory with reckless impunity. The conclusion, itself a self-conscious contemplation of methodology, shows that it cannot be and is not that disingenuously simple. For now, the gesture acknowledges the “contradictory, complicitous” spot I occupy, in accordance with Chow’s dictum that “if ‘the West’ as such has become an ineradicable environment, it is not whether we ‘pay homage’ to it but how we do it that matters.”51 This book examines the intellectual origins of that proposition in the final chapter. If analysis and cultural studies are structured by colonial or imperial priorities that reside in critical theory, area studies, and postcolonial theory, the solution is not to avoid theory but to change how it is done. Part of that involves revisiting our ideas of what the response to Western imperialism should be. Is opposition still the only acceptable position when postcolonial subjects declare that they have no hangups, or that the Japanese were worse? It behooves us to pause, listen, empathize, and grapple with the oddity of that situation. Ultimately, these dilemmas may be what is most Southeast Asian, let alone postcolonial, of all. Put another way, the region might just be the most suitable location to tend these political and epistemological matters, to resume the pursuit for a remedy to Spivak’s proverbial question. This could be that part of the proceedings to postulate that postcolonial subjects – liminal, between borders, moving, unstable, contingent – are auspiciously placed to reach the self-awareness that Chen describes, of one’s position with respect to other 49 Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 32 50 Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas, 16. 51 Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, xv, 32.

Introduc tion

49

cultures, most of all the West. In their own ways, both Naficy and Marks share that conviction. For Naficy, global capitalism facilitates population and cultural flows that engender accented subjects enriched with knowing and perception. In comparison, Marks sees globalization as an adversary that threatens to commodify and diminish cultural difference, but she remains optimistic that “intercultural life will continue to produce new and unmanageable hybrids, given the volatility of sensuous experience.”52 Perhaps postcolonial poetics can deliver some limited salvation through cinema. If that happens in a way that authorizes these films to stake a claim for their uniqueness, which locus would it occupy within film studies as an enterprise? That very question, which Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Stephen Teo have ambitiously posed about “Japanese cinema” and “Asian cinema” respectively, could be constructed differently as a result.53 Southeast Asian cinema studies would enjoy an advantage of contemporaneity, for Yoshimoto and Teo were both writing after Japanese and Asian cinemas’ currencies had been circulating for some time. Their insights bequeath a specific benefit, the heightened awareness of being broadly Othered or taken as a particularized variation on “world cinema.” Only time will tell if this means that Southeast Asian cinema will come to enjoy the ability to define itself, but at a juncture when the sister discipline of Southeast Asian studies is so keenly aware of its etymology and heredity in Cold War area studies, does this equip Southeast Asian cinema with the potential for geopolitically informed criticism? As this book re-sounds the calls to expand postcolonial film studies and renew its aesthetic possibilities, those ineluctable responsibilities await.

Bibliography Amin-Khan, Tariq. The Postcolonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2012. Baumgärtel, Tilman, ed. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. —. “Introduction: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 1-10. Berry, Chris. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. —, ed. Chinese Films in Focus II. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 52 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 243-244. 53 Yoshimoto, Kurosawa; Teo, The Asian Cinema Experience.

50 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Bonura, Carlo and Laurie J. Sears. “Introduction: Knowledges that Travel in Southeast Asian Studies.” In Sears, Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, 3-32. Bordwell, David. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. Bradshaw, Peter. “Ilo Ilo review--Novelistic Singaporean Debut by Anthony Chen.” The Guardian (1 May 2014) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/01/ ilo-ilo-review (accessed 24 May 2017. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperializtion. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Chua, Beng Huat. “Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies 11, 3 (2008): 231-40. Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in The Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Fennell, Chris. “Child of the 90s: Anthony Chen on Ilo Ilo.” BFI News, Features and Opinion (28 April 2014) http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/ interviews/child-90s-anthony-chen-ilo-ilo (accessed 24 May 2017). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Fu, Poshek and David Desser, eds. The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Ingawanij, May Adadol. “Introduction: Dialectics of Independence.” In Ingawanij and McKay, Glimpses of Freedom, 1-14. Ingawanij, May Adadol and Benjamin McKay, eds. Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Jaikumar, Priya. “Postface: An Interview with Priya Jaikumar.” In Ponzanesi and Waller, eds. Postcolonial Cinema Studies, 233-41. James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “Contesting Diasporic Subjectivity: James Lee, Malaysian Independent Filmmaker.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (2004): 169-85. —. “Smoking, Eating, and Desire: A Study of Alienation in the Films of James Lee.” In Ingawanij and McKay, Glimpses of Freedom, 121-35. Koh, Tommy and Li Lin Chang, eds. The Little Red Dot: Reflections by Singapore’s Diplomats. Singapore: World Scientific, 2005. Langdon, Marcus. Guide to George Town’s Historic Commercial & Civic Precincts. Penang, Malaysia: George Town World Heritage Inc., 2015.

Introduc tion

51

Mahtani, Shibani. “Wealth Over the Edge: Singapore.” The Wall Street Journal (7 March 2013) http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324662404578 334330162556670 (accessed 24 May 2017). Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze and World Cinemas. New York: Continuum, 2011. McGee, T.G. “Many Knowledge(s) of Southeast Asia: Rethinking Southeast Asia in Real Time.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 48, 2 (2007): 270-80. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Ponzanesi, Sandra and Marguerite Waller, eds. Postcolonial Cinema Studies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Quah, Danny. “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity.” Global Policy 2, 1 (2011): 3-9. Robison, Richard. “The Reordering of Pax Americana: How Does Southeast Asia Fit In?” In Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia, edited by Vedi R. Hadiz. New York: Routledge, 2006, 52-68. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Sears, Laurie J. ed. Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’.” Social Text 31, 2 (1992): 99-113. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 2014. Singapore: From Settlement to Nation Pre-1819 to 1971. Singapore: Curriculum Planning and Development Division, Marshall Cavendish Education, 2012. Singer, Ben. “Triangulating Japanese Film Style.” In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Daisuke Miyao. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33-60. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World.” In New Latin American Cinema, Volume One, Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, edited by Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997, 33-58. Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Tweedie, James. The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wagner, Tamara S. Occidentalism in Novels in Malaysia And Singapore, 1819-2004: Colonial and Postcolonial Financial Straits and Literary Style. Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.

52 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Wang, Meng Meng. “Roar for your country: Bennett.” The Straits Times (26 July 2009): 40. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Zurbuchen, Mary S. ed. Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005.

1

Postcolonial Spatiality Singapore Maps its Cinema Abstract This chapter examines the ways in which Singapore’s geographically inflected condition finds its way onto the national cinema’s expressive palette. It examines the country’s spatial epistemology from its historical origins as an island and colonial port city, to the modern state’s management of urban development and land scarcity. Singapore’s real and imagined relationship to British colonial rule exerts a structural influence, and impresses itself onto the architecture of its built environment, infrastructural design, and artistic production. Inspired by Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema, this study defines the national hermeneutic that results, through the discovery of pregnant codes and signs, along with activated signals of direction and scale. Singapore’s postcolonial identity thus infuses feature and short filmmaking with spatial discourse in three forms: aerial cartography, affective maps, and colonial atlases. Keywords: Singaporean cinema, colonial history, spatial epistemology, maps, colonial architecture, cartographic cinema

This was a colony that went into independence without any hangups. – Gordon Duggan, British High Commissioner to Singapore, 1990-1997 1

Let us return to the topographical introduction to Singapore, previously paused at the War Memorial Park on the edge of the Civic District. Around the block, entrances abound to the underground Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system. The nearby City Hall station is a major node in the network. The 1 Epigraph appears in Darren McDermott, “Singapore in No Hurry to Shed Legacy of British Colonialism.”

Sim, Gerald, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463721936_ch01

54 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

traffic above ground is relentless. At the Raffles Hotel across the War Memorial Park’s northern intersection, sightseers make requisite stops at the Long Bar for Singapore Slings. Those who fulfill this obligation ignore celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s admonition: “Skip that. No one in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It’s a disgusting drink, don’t waste your time.”2 Many of course do, in the belief that sitting in the Long Bar’s rattan chairs sipping the gin-based cocktail, they are imbibing local history. Looking up from that beverage and moving one’s gaze beyond the Raffles Hotel’s colonial veranda, can indeed offer a broad sense of how Singapore’s history has been curated in ways both big and small. The Raffles Hotel is dwarfed by Raffles City, a dense development across the street comprising retail shops, hotels, and convention center space built in 1986 on the former grounds of the nation’s oldest secondary school, Raffles Institution. Southwest down St. Andrews Road, towards the mouth of the Singapore River, the space remains organized exactly as the British settlers left it. To Terry McGee, Singapore was a prototypical “planned colonial city,” like European towns “laid out with all the integral institutions of the English Colonial city – the cricket ground, the church, the government buildings, the club, and the military cantonment […] all incorporated in this area close to the large and spacious dwellings of the Europeans.”3 Raffles City’s towering suites has since been met by striking architectural landmarks in the vicinity, among them The Esplanade Theatre’s pair of spiked domes, the Singapore Flyer Ferris wheel, and the Marina Bay Sands’s trio of skyscraper hotels connected at the top by a “Skypark” that has quickly become an iconic part of the skyline. Nonetheless, pedestrians strolling towards the Singapore River today will still see a tableau that has stood for the better part of a century. McGee’s “planned colonial city” remains impeccably preserved. Along St. Andrews, you will pass its eponymous Anglican Cathedral, the National Gallery (comprising two former structures, City Hall and the Old Supreme Court Building), and the Old Parliament House. This parade of colonial architecture rolls across the Anderson Bridge until it meets the financial district’s lustrous but predictable labyrinth of steel and glass. Many of these architectural artifacts from the colonial era have been designated as national monuments. A few retain their original function, but most have been repurposed to serve Singapore’s ambitions to be a world city. The National Gallery’s collection of Southeast Asian modern art for example, acclaimed as the region’s largest, represents an immense effort 2 “Singapore,” The Layover. 3 McGee, The Southeast Asian City, 71.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

55

to accrue cultural capital. Nearby at the mouth of the Singapore River, what used to be the General Post Office is now the Fullerton, a luxury hotel. Its business-suited clientele striding across the cavernous lobby alert you to the neighboring hub of offices servicing global circuits of finance capital. The National Heritage Board selected these buildings for protection based on what it deemed to be “historic, traditional, archaeological, architectural or artistic interest.”4 That purpose bears out in the structures’ visual prominence in domestic cinema. Shot often from reverentially low angles, these panoramas have long served as establishing shots for films across genres and production eras. The photogenic images connote historical significance on the surface, but they are also innervated by a subtext. As this chapter attempts to demonstrate, their manner of cinematic articulation reinforces Singapore’s innate spatiality, while being generated in turn by its postcolonial eccentricity. These visuals are spatial because they are colonial, and vice versa. Applying the judgment of Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo in Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity, the Marina Bay area around this district “materially realizes” the island’s “extended, strategic engagement with the twin enterprises of postcolonialism and globalization, as well as with colonialism.” The British colonial city that McGee mapped in 1967 remains modern Singapore’s commercial and government center. The careful and expensive refurbishments in particular represent “a continuation, perpetuation, and multiplication of colonial richness into the present global order.”5 Through their functional evolutions, the buildings’ grandeur continue to embody and exert undiminished authority, but in different forms. When the former City Hall, Supreme Court Building, and Parliament House would originally house government offices along with its judicial and legislative branches, they projected real and imagined state power, first on behalf of Britain’s empire and then of a postcolonial Republic. Post-renovation, as museum and exhibition spaces for art, the Corinthian columns and Victorian design now dress the buildings in prestige of a different mode, related to art’s aura of a Benjaminian sort.6 Both institutions draw from a cultural inheritance symbolized by the same colonial concrete. Both induce public veneration that feels indelibly familiar. Neighboring churches and Christian structures complement this cultural mission. Even those that have been decommissioned, such as the 4 Preservation of Monuments Act (Cap 239, 1985 Rev Ed) s 5 (a). 5 Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, eds. Beyond Description, 2. 6 See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”

56 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

former St. Joseph’s Institution (a Catholic boys school) that now houses the Singapore Art Museum, still mobilize colonial-ecclesiastical-missionary signifiers that comport with the modern state’s cosmopolitan mien, to evoke historical weight and grandeur.7 Abidin Kusno’s study of how Indonesian architecture expresses historical and political subjectivity sheds light on the geographical phenomenology along St. Andrews Road. His analysis highlights postcolonial Indonesia’s ambivalent relationship to her former Dutch masters via Homi Bhabha’s idea of “inauthenticity,” whereby the postcolonial subject recognizes the contingent constructed nature of his cultural, political, and social identities.8 In Bhabha’s estimation, the colonial subject may reject the colonizer’s culture but cannot resist identifying with it. The “inauthenticity” thus conditions an internal terrain on which subjects negotiate their political and social lives. Such is the cultural crisis within Indonesian architects and space planners that Kusno gleans from Jakarta’s urban environment – an inner dialogue reified in cement. Roughly 1000 miles away in Kuala Lumpur, an analogous negotiation unfolds on the Islamic design elements of the Petronas Towers, whose architects conceived the glass and steel façade as a “modern expression” of something “uniquely Malaysian.”9 By contrast, one is much harder pressed to spot a comparable level of unease or mixed emotions in the way that Singapore “flaunts its colonial past and postcolonial/global present.”10 The British High Commissioner’s words in the epigraph would seem irredeemably condescending to most. But in local ears they strike a less patronizing tone. The official could in fact be merely parroting the native. Michael Fam, the former chairman of the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit Corporation once declared, about the selection of colonial-era names for subway stations, “we have no hang-ups about our colonial past.” Lim Pin, longtime Vice-Chancellor of the National University of Singapore also averred, “we have no hang-ups about where we come from.”11 In a way, the peculiar phrase encapsulates a driving motivation behind this book, which sets a course to understand the history behind 7 See Goh, “Evangelical Economies and Abjected Spaces.” 8 Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial, 91. See Bhabha, “The Postcolonial Critic,” 57. 9 “Petronas Towers,” Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. For a critical “reading” of the building, see Bunnell, “Views from Above and Below.” In Hollywood media, the image of the Towers make brief but highly symbolic appearances to convey the uneasy convergence of Islam and modernity, in the espionage-themed Fair Game (2010) and the premiere episode of 24 (TV, 2001-2014). 10 Bishop et al, Beyond Description, 2. 11 Dhaliwal, “Three MRT Stations to be Renamed,” 15; “Uneven Results of a Colonial Legacy,” Times Higher Education.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

57

that sentiment, the imagination that it nourishes, and the cinema that comes forth.12 Although Singapore is decades removed from colonial rule, it never discarded the governmental, legal and educational institutions that the British established. Its prosperity in fact sprang from economic infrastructure built in service of that empire. For Singapore’s industrializing economy, colonial culture’s imprint conveniently branded the nation with modernity. There are several reasons why those residues remain woven into its traditions, mythology, and space. Geographer Brenda Yeoh points out that like all colonial cities, it was ordered and structured to assist colonial rule and signify colonial economic, political and ideological aspirations. “Underlying colonial discourse was the scheme that the city of Singapore expressed and facilitated the aims of the Empire in functional, symbolic and spatial terms.”13 She argues that the built environment embodied and expressed tensions and negotiations between inhabitants and colonial powers. But over time the latter has broadly held sway. To Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, Singapore retains colonial identity as a calculated means to demarcate itself “as both different from other global capitals and a repetition of them.”14 Meanwhile, architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas maintains that colonial history is the country’s most recognizable historical paradigm, preferable to ahistoricism and postmodern artifice.15 Singapore has certainly come to terms with its colonial past; it even recapitulates that history with a good amount of pride. Phillips notices that “the statue of its founder Sir Stamford Raffles remains in the heart of the city.” The colonial administrator arrived in 1819, and there are in fact two statues, one in front of the Victoria Memorial Hall, and a replica at the site where he landed. Today, even in his absence, “subjects continue to serve, but now they serve themselves.” Phillips further states that “Singapore has always been an urban phenomenon” with “no history outside or beyond urbanism,” and argues that this environmental development from preindustrial to industrial urbanism “seems to have been an almost entirely British phenomenon…inextricably related to British imperial expansion.”16 If Singapore’s cultural identity surfaces in urbanism, what form does colonial history take on the landscape? The demolition and wholesale replacement 12 For examples in which the phrase is used in a Malaysian context, see Kuppusamy, “No Colonial Hangups as Malays Rush to Learn English”; Musa, Moving Malaysia Forward, 293; Ridge, “English Language and Malaysian Identity,” 67. 13 Yeoh, Contesting Space, 16-18 14 Bishop et al, Beyond Description, 2. 15 Koolhaas, “Singapore Songlines.” 16 Phillips, “Singapore Soil,” 180, 190.

58 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

of the Raffles Institution campus with a retail megalopolis highlights a contrasting decision to preserve sans hangups, the structures on the adjacent thoroughfare. These conscientious efforts are purposeful and ideologically explicit in shaping national identity. Official websites for the National Gallery and Fullerton Hotel, for example, proudly regale visitors with extensive and highly polished multimedia accounts of how the colonial structures are painstakingly maintained in the name of “heritage.” The term, layering grand tradition and high culture onto historicity, recurs in publicity materials. The National Gallery’s architectural rejuvenation adopted an objective to maintain “a masterful balance between heritage and modernity.”17 Likewise, The Fullerton Hotel promises to surround “its guests with a refreshing ambience of heritage, peace and tranquility.”18 They inscribe a reassuring message that colonial history is peaceful, tranquil, and spatially experienced. Spaces that Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo deem to be “beyond description” require intimate engagement beyond merely empirical observation of structures or topographical referents. The authors find Singapore’s colonial character within “spectral phenomena” that manifest within discursive practices, rituals, beliefs, and ideals.19 It is therefore insufficient to read structures and locations as signs and texts, for physical objects and spaces are part of a more expansive, even dimensionless spatiality that is experienced, sensed, and interfaced with psychic landscapes, imaginations, and yes, cognitive maps. Thus, it remains important to talk about how space exceeds the sum of its physical and geometric measurements. To do so, we require an appropriate historical hermeneutic. To understand space, we must understand history. Geographer Alan Baker subsumes them all under the umbrella of “ideology.” Historical studies of landscapes must be grounded in an analysis of material structures: they are properly concerned with tangible, visible expressions of different modes of production, with hedgerows and field systems, with canals and factory systems. But such material structures are created and creatively destroyed within an ideological context: such studies must therefore also acknowledge that landscapes are shaped by mental attitudes and that a proper understanding of landscapes must rest upon the historical recovery of ideologies.20 17 18 19 20

“Building Architecture,” National Gallery Singapore. “The Fullerton Heritage,” The Fullerton Hotel. Bishop et al, Beyond Description, 2-10. Baker, “Introduction: On Ideology and Landscape,” 3.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

59

Bishop reiterates this imperative in an introduction written for Lilian Chee and Edna Lim’s recent and timely collection, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space. He begins by meditating on the historical constructedness of space, emphasizing that space is crafted “out of the ether of experience. Our senses, our experiences, all of these are learned from the positioning of our unique chronotopes.”21 To wit, space in any form or dimension is historically contingent and incomprehensible without first being situated within specific conditions, or as Chee and Lim put it, “the latent political, social and cultural ideologies underpinning a geopolitical region.”22 Without question, this book joins a long line of scholarship that connects built environments to less tangible forces, structures, and discourses. Let us search for explanations in multiple directions: backward in time for history, outward in space to include global interrelationships, and inward to explore psychic subjectivities and imaginaries. These are by now straightforward hermeneutic propositions about cinema and space, held by cultural anthropologists, geographers, film scholars, and critical theorists, all attributable to the so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. In recent decades, space has grown in popularity as both an object and paradigm of analysis. Opinions differ on what precipitated the turn, but social and cultural theory undeniably fell into its slipstream.23 For film studies, its spatial turn occurred over the aughts, which witnessed an intense proliferation of film-related titles divisible by sub-discipline: geography, architecture, urbanism, and cartography.24 Leftists found alliances with Henri Lefebvre, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey.25 Analysis partial to architecture identified a double significance; in addition to producing a visual landscape, architecture determines how people move through space and thus conditions their modes of perception.26 21 Bishop, “Forward: Seeing Space/ Crafting Space/ Moving Space,” xi. 22 Chee and Lim, “Asian Films and the Potential of Cinematic Space,” 2. 23 For example, Mark Shiel sees the 1970s as a key period for social and cultural theory on the Left, represented by Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991), Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), and Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1993), while Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne trace the engagement with spatial frameworks to the French Annales school and Italian microhistory, published as early as 1949. See Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” 5, and Kümin and Usborne, “At Home and in the Workplace,” 308. 24 See the reviews of literature assembled in the following: Chee and Lim, “Asian Films and the Potential of Cinematic Space,” 15n1; Roberts and Hallam, “Film and Spatiality: Outline of a New Empiricism,” 1, 26n1; Koeck and Roberts, “Introduction: Projecting the Urban,” 2. 25 Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Geopolitical Aesthetic; Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. 26 See Lamster, ed. Architecture and Film, Shonfield, Walls have Feelings, and Koeck, Cine-Scapes.

60 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Similarly, maps are treated as both object and discourse. Tom Conley for example assesses the visual presence of maps in films as well as cartographic phenomenology, or what Teresa Castro calls a “visual regime.”27 At the intersection with sociology, writers thought about how cinema as a social institution influences urban development. Moviegoing has of course always been an urban phenomenon, and as a result, it is a cultural form aligned with industrialization, modernity, and postmodernity.28 A preponderance of this writing is devoted to the usual suspects: renowned world cities, cultural capitals, and centers of film production, exhibition, or criticism: Los Angeles, New York, and Paris for example. That is a list Singapore aspires to join. One might expect the rapidly industrialized and urbanized island, a buzzing petri dish of Late Capitalist ideology, to produce films that are impeccably ripe for the spatial turn in film studies. Jameson does not cite Singapore in writing about the “eternal present,” nor in his claims that temporality has been spatialized.29 Nonetheless, it is in many ways a perfect specimen. Its perpetual state of development, renovation, and relocation nurses a constant need to remember – an incurable affliction of nostalgic pangs invariably expressed spatially. Two recent and well-received local films illustrate this. Royston Tan’s ethnographic Old Places was a very successful TV movie in 2010. Producers first solicited reminiscences of personally meaningful locales. People were only too willing to call in with memories of an old cinema, train station, amusement park, swimming pool, playground, a colorful mural on a block of public housing flats, and others. (Figure 1.1) Based on those voicemail recordings, Tan shot live footage and mixed the hissy and granular audio of regular folk with an episodic montage of unique landmarks and relatively desolate places. Immense broadcast ratings led to two sequels, Old Romances in 2012 and Old Friends in 2015.30 The sentimental films are genuinely touching, yet one cannot help but notice its rather present state of the past. The facility memorialized in one segment, the Serangoon bus interchange, was built and made defunct all within 24 years.31 The languid short film, Keluar Baris (2008), winner at the Singapore International Film Festival for Best Short Film, Best Director, and Best 27 Conley, Cartographic Cinema; Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse.” 28 See Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City, Koeck and Roberts, eds. The City and the Moving Image, and Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds., Screening the City (London: Verso, 2003). 29 Jameson, Postmodernism, 154-156. 30 Tay, “Royston Tan: ‘Old Romances’ Isn’t Just About Nostalgia.” 31 Gaik Cheng Khoo describes this ahistoricism in this way: “premature archives mourning a future loss.” See Khoo, “Of Diminishing Memories and Old Places,” 32, 45.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

61

Figure 1.1 Affective historical space, the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, which closed in 2011. Old Places, 2010

Courtesy of Chuan Pictures

Cinematography, suffers the same postmodern symptom. Director Boo Junfeng, who would soon be invited to Cannes with feature films in 2010 and 2016, mobilizes a well-worn trope of Singaporean cinema: alienated and disaffected youth. Days before his conscription into national military service, eighteen year-old Daryl returns from studies in Spain. The teen’s authoritarian father is another convention of local narratives and an obvious allegory of the state: task-oriented, distant, and impersonal. Daryl shares his Spanish memories with a childhood friend instead. The boys reflect on their lives on the bleachers of the National Stadium. A downpour commences, and the ham-fisted attempt at sobriety drags the film into cloying parody, but Boo’s cinematic language remains unmistakably Singaporean. The fondly remembered arena, where thousands ritually cheered the national soccer team from the mid-seventies on, had been scheduled for demolition.32 Boo uses rows of bare concrete in the “ancient” brutalist structure built in 1973 to signify the boys’ disappearing pasts and unknown futures. It is a visage meant to evoke disposable memories and thoroughly predictable futures in Singapore’s eternal present. Once again, temporality is inevitably spatialized. Geographers Lily Kong and Yeoh echo the wisdom that Singapore’s relationship to its landscape is uniquely acute, adding that the country defined 32 This is the arena referred to in the first few pages of this book. It was demolished in 2011 and replaced with a new stadium sporting a retractable roof and cooling system.

62 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

its national identity with landscape for geographically and economically material reasons. Singapore’s case is also unique in its small area and the consequent significance of geographical constraints on its material and physical development. This situation has led to the justification for widespread and substantial landscape change. The reconstruction and management of landscape has become a critical factor in the material and ideological shaping of Singapore […] The state in Singapore has emphasized various ideological positions that […] often draw on the materiality of landscapes for their legitimation.33

Phillips also theorizes that urban space essentializes the city-state, positing that it is the “chief mode of representation […] the text that Singapore is. Singapore is already a response, an interpretation and reconstruction of a set of conditions that are readable and can thus be reconstituted.”34 In Saussurean terms, space is not the referent but the signifier. All in all, this spatial identity makes it no surprise that Singapore is home to one of the most esteemed geography departments in the world, or that the scholarship in general on its cinema, not to mention the films themselves, are habitually attentive to social and politicized spaces.35 The reasons to include Singapore when discussing the spatial turn are therefore not restricted to Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodernity, in which temporality ceases to exist and spatial epistemes take over. That is to say, Singapore is not spatial because it is postmodern to be spatial, and Singapore is most certainly postmodern. Rather, this country’s imagination was always spatially def ined. Without a developed pre-colonial identity, and after a postcolonial phase that lurched headlong into Late Capitalism, its past hardly existed before the eternal present arrived.36 At the same time, spatialization was always its phenomenological strategy. Singapore is not immune from postmodern symptoms. One expects it to face the same challenges involved in cognitively mapping capitalist relations as Jameson says of postmodernity. But could Singapore have a 33 Kong and Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore, 3-4. 34 Phillips, “Singapore Soil,” 188-189. 35 See for example, Poon, “Common Ground, Multiple Claims”; Wee, “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape”; Bin Sa’at, “Hinterland, Heartland, Home,” in Baumgärtel, ed. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema; Law, Wee, and McMullan, “Screening Singapore.” 36 The historical narrative of Singapore generally underserves the “early history,” otherwise known as its pre-colonial period.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

63

head start in that process? Maybe. Is the so-called geopolitical aesthetic a Singaporean one? Perhaps. Still, Phillips senses Utopian hope in its cultural specificity. The essence of Singapore lies behind, is hidden by, or at least marginalized by, its brash postmodern exterior […] Some indigenous, local, particular cultural identity retains an autonomy beneath or beyond, or at least in potential against the onslaught of global capitalism.37

Phillips may doubt the possibility of “reading” that identity off a secondary text such as a film, preferring a closer encounter with the primary text, landscape – the text that Singapore is. The objective of this book however, beyond to learn about Singapore, is specifically about considering its cinema’s stylistic proclivities. They go towards a national aesthetic that relies heavily on space to define identity and orient itself within the world system.

Aerial Maps The Singapore-trained Dutch geographer Rodolphe De Koninck adopts a slightly different view of the relationship between Singapore’s perpetual territorial transformation and ideology. Where most conceive of spatial changes as the result of political action and ideology, De Koninck reverses causality in what he terms “the territorial hypothesis.” He emphasizes instead how the unending process of overhauling the environment services nation-building and developmentalist ideology. “Repeated displacement” from “mobile territory,” he asserts, weakens the usual cultural, social, or ethnic investments in traditional reference points. This generates “permanent spatial insecurity” within the populace, who are pushed into the arms of “the State as a whole in its territorial form.”38 De Koninck avoids stating that the people have absolutely no spatial investments, but he astutely observes that they have an untraditional relationship to space and place. Singapore’s spatial preoccupation takes several forms. They can include fondness and emotional attachments to particular sites, or gross obsession over real estate values. But the phenomenon is also about the preponderance of spatial discourse, spatial modes of cognition, or psychogeography. Such is 37 Phillips, “Singapore Soil,” 188. 38 De Koninck, “Singapore or the Revolution of Territory,” 214.

64 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

the case in Kelvin Tong’s contribution to 7 Letters, an anthology of short films about national identity and the idea of home commemorating Singapore’s Golden Jubilee. Tong’s Grandma Positioning System (2015) privileges space’s ability to inhabit cultural and psychic imagination. The story presents a family making an annual drive to Malaysia to visit a grandfather’s grave. When the GPS system provides suspect directions, the late man’s widow tells her son to defy the computer and turn right. Grandma’s instincts prove correct. At the tombstone, the old woman performs an annual ritual of giving her husband detailed directions from his resting place to the family’s home. Her instructions are subjective and unscientific, yet they sketch a route illustrated with vivid references to familiar local landmarks. Where urban development has claimed a structure, she conveys the change on her next visit. Although Tong plays grandma’s fastidious dictation for comedic laughs, he manages to depict Singaporean spatiality as something poignant. Objective geographical representations of the real world are no more significant than intangible, emotional, experiential, or imagined cartographies. Cinema makes abundantly clear that a spatial phenomenology functions within Singapore. If the emotional excess coursing through Old Places, Keluar Baris, and Grandma Positioning System mean anything, it would be that despite the country’s terra infirma, locals cling mightily onto something more than the statist venture. Although that undermines De Koninck’s hypothesis, his argument remains compelling. Its most intriguing aspect lies in its methodology. De Koninck illustrates Singapore’s territorial makeovers with a chronological series of strikingly produced maps that spatially track the proliferation of public housing estates, population density, the distribution of ethnic groups, the diminishment of agricultural land, and so on. (Figure 1.2) The charts represent changes executed as “a deliberate and politically motivated form of social transformation and social management, a transformation monitored from above.”39 The final two words are a double entendre, referring to the vantage point of an omniscient state, as well as the impulse to observe events from an elevated perspective. De Koninck’s maps also deploy an essentially cartographic metaphor of cinema’s material base – a succession of variant images conjuring the illusion of movement, animating change. They look like filmstrips! The territorial hypothesis therefore rests on a presumption that this story is best told with maps. Embedded within the lines of that supposition, we can discern the recurrent vision of a cartographic cinema. 39 De Koninck, Drolet, and Girard, Singapore, 2.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

65

Figure 1.2 An iteration of cartographic cinema

Two representative diagrams from Rodolphe De Koninck, Julie Drolet and Marc Girard, Singapore: An Atlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008). Plates 15 and 16 reproduced side by side, sequentially mapping the changes over time in Singapore’s agricultural (left, p. 41) and industrial (right, p. 43) landscape, conjure images of film strips. Courtesy of Rodolphe De Koninck and NUS Press

Although De Koninck remains undeniably conjectural, we can verify Singapore’s uncanny faith in maps through the frequency with which the nation curates its history with cartographical recourse. The Singapore History Gallery, a 30,000 square foot multimedia installation half a mile from the colonial city, literally begins and concludes with aerial maps. The permanent exhibit housed on the first floor of the National Museum attracts a steady mix of tourists and local school children. Directly behind the entrance doors stands a floor-to-ceiling projection of Southeast Asia taken from Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius’s first edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (“Theater of the World”). The atlas is animated; the display includes a magnifying glass that roams across the screen as eyes would over a map. Informational script appears when the lens finds an area of interest. Over the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, it enlarges a red dot marked “Cincapura.” (Figure 1.3) At the other end of the winding exhibit, immediately before visitors exit the Gallery, touchscreens beckon them to

66 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 1.3 The first exhibit, an animated map of Southeast Asia based on Abraham Ortelius’s first edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, with the roving “lens” resting over Singapore

Photo taken by the author at Singapore History Gallery, National Museum of Singapore Reproduced with permission of National Museum of Singapore

interact with another map, “Becoming a Global City.” Input your country of origin, and a bubble will pop up offering Singapore-related trivia about that nation. (Figure 1.4) “Despite being a little red dot on the physical map,” a placard to the side reads, “Singapore’s status as a well-connected hub has led the city-state to become a recognisable and respected name worldwide.” In the darkened exhibition space, these projections approximate a cinematic experience. Where De Koninck and the National Museum’s cartographic exhibits are in essence cinematic, the converse, a cinema that is cartographic, belongs to director Tan Pin Pin. Raised by architects, it is perhaps inevitable that her films thematize geographic space and nostalgia, none more so than the non-narrative video, 80km/h (2003). It consists of a single long take, shot from a car travelling at that speed on Singapore’s Pan Island Expressway – a major artery that connects its two coasts – from the eastern landmark Changi Airport to the western Tuas Checkpoint adjacent to one of the island’s two northbound bridges to Malaysia. As the highway

Postcolonial Spatialit y

67

Figure 1.4 The final exhibit, an interactive world map illustrates Singapore “Becoming a World City”

Photo taken by the author at Singapore History Gallery, National Museum of Singapore Reproduced with permission of National Museum of Singapore

barriers and buildings behind zip by, the film is hardly in focus but in an unchanging composition for 40 minutes. (Figure 1.5) According to Tan, the constant velocity confers “cartographical value,” and coupled with her plan to repeat the exercise regularly, “Singapore’s topographical changes can be mapped with previous recordings.”40 Political scientist Kenneth Paul Tan is not wrong in writing, “it is also a record of change, innovatively layering multiple pasts and present in a composite image that illustrates the extent of change.”41 In that way 80km/h rearticulates De Koninck’s series of time-lapse images. The confluence between cinema and cartography would come as no surprise to Conley and Castro. Conley describes the media’s shared affinity with space, suggesting that maps and f ilms are “coextensive” because they require similar modes of spatial cognition and engender comparable spectatorial encounters from the viewers of maps and those of films. We 40 Tan P. P., “80km/h.” 41 Tan, K. P. “Alternative Visions in Neoliberal Singapore,” 159.

68 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 1.5 “Cartographical value” in driving the length of Singapore from east to west at a constant speed. 80km/h, 2003

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

read and locate ourselves within maps in much the same way that we make sense of films. This in turn informs how we relate to the world they represent. Of vastly different historical formation, cinema and cartography draw on many of the same resources and virtues of the languages that inform their creation. A film can be understood in a broad sense to be a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “invent” and as a result, to seek to control. A film, like a topographic projection, can be understood as an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators. When it takes hold, a film encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space. The same could be said for the fascination that maps have elicited for their readers since the advent of print-culture or even long before. Both maps and f ilms are powerful ideological tools that work in consort with each other. 42 42 Conley, Cartographic Cinema, 1-2.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

69

Conley points out that geographical metaphors are deployed by important swaths of the film theory canon, namely by André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze. These works display a spatial “sensibility that ties the perception […] of cinematic space to the order of a philosophical event.”43 Essentially, film images have innate powers; we do not need to see a map on screen to be prompted to reflect on our relationship to diegetic, imaginary, or material space. One would expect that the films of Singapore, set within such a finite and highly managed urban space as that of a city-state, amplify cinema’s ability to act as simultaneously topographical and ideological maps. Castro agrees with Conley’s basic presupposition that films harbor a “mapping impulse” on account of the fact that both media graphically deploy spatial understandings of the world that are ideologically informed. She acknowledges that spatial thinking originates in human consciousness, Western thought, or comes about during the spatial turn, but emphasizes the influence of social determinism. Singapore’s culturally unique “mode of thought” thus bears on its cinema’s mapping impulse, reifying formally in Castro’s taxonomy of “cartographic shapes” – basic units of film language that she categorizes as panoramas, atlases, and aerial views. Collectively, these shots survey spaces in totalities, catalog particular places, and offer a sense of scale, all while enabling spectators to traverse space and time. 44 These functions recall Kevin Lynch’s influential terminology and comparable premise. Lynch argues in The Image of the City that people orient themselves in urban spaces using a “notational system of ‘edges,’ ‘nodes,’ ‘landmarks,’ ‘districts,’ and ‘paths.’”45 Both he and Castro underscore the social constructedness of space. They situate the process and product of mapping within the broader landscape, that is to say in visual culture and national identity, forged specif ically through social and economic relations. 46 In mid 2015, a spate of rush-hour service disruptions on two of Singapore’s most heavily used subway lines sparked an intense public outcry. A pair of research analysts from a local think tank used opinion surveys of the MRT to argue in a newspaper op-ed that the outsized reaction came about because the train system is an “emblem of national pride” representing the country’s “journey from Third World to First.”47 The MRT has an actual visual emblem 43 Conley, Cartographic Cinema, 7. Emphasis author’s. 44 Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse,” 11-14. 45 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960). See Roberts and Hallam “Film and Spatiality,” 16-17. 46 See Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse,” 13. 47 Lim and Ho, “What the MRT Really Means to S’poreans.”

70 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

distributed throughout the landscape, the logo of the Integrated Public Transport System. The ubiquitous insignia designates the location of train stations and bus stops. Larger illuminated versions act as beacons, drawing passengers in, providing cognitive orientation and psychological reassurance. The yellow symbol’s shape approximates the outline of Singapore’s landmass, and provides a subtle backdrop for the MRT’s ever-present system maps. (Figures 1.6 and 1.7) This is a cartographical map superimposed on a symbolic one – Lynch’s notational system of edges, nodes, districts, and paths, positioned strategically at locations where subjects cognitively need to get their bearings, over a map that is itself visual artifact and national iconography. The two layers serve separate purposes. One is an aerial view encompassing the entire border of the island – a red dot if viewed from a distance too far away, a node in a global network. The other is an internal rail network connecting where people are to where they go. Together they make up a pair of national discourses reflecting two strata of identity, two means with which Singapore situates itself in history and in relation to the rest of the world. Within its current cohort of filmmakers, cognitive and affective maps imprint themselves most deeply in the creative intuition of Tan Pin Pin. 48 She has been warmly received by domestic audiences, notched respectable box office numbers for independent non-fiction films, earned artistic credibility internationally, and provoked the ire of the government’s political sensitivities. By all accounts, her films essentialize the nation. Singapore GaGa is probably the best known and most beloved. In the opening shots we see Melvyn Cedello, a busker singing to his own guitar at the mouth of an MRT station. The film cuts to the top of the stairs feet away, where an overhead sign places Cedello at the Novena station. We spot the Transport System logo in the top left corner of the frame. (Figure 1.8) Tan then uses his rendition of Freddy Fender’s country ballad, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” as a sound bridge, cutting away to shots from the seat of a landing airliner. The camera looks through the window of the descending plane, then at an animated flight map. Singapore is labeled on the map of Southeast Asia but too small to be represented. The film gazes back out the window for a view from the air, but returns to the aerial map on the video image. (Figure 1.9) Singapore GaGa rolls through an eclectic cast of characters: a puppeteer, schoolchildren from a madrasah singing the national anthem, another 48 It is easy to attribute Tan’s preoccupation with space to an upbringing by architect parents. See Brenez, “Tan Pin Pin. No Vacation from Politics.”

Postcolonial Spatialit y

Figure 1.6 Logo of the Integrated Public Transport System, an approximation of Singapore’s landmass

Reproduced with permission of the Land Transport Authority

Figure 1.7 The MRT System Map with the Public Transport logo as backdrop

Reproduced with permission of the Land Transport Authority

71

72 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 1.8 A cutaway from Melvyn Cedello (offscreen, right) singing “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.” The logo and sign place him at the Novena station. Singapore GaGa, 2005

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

street performer named Gn Kok Lin, Liang Yu Tao, a woman selling tissue packets in a wheelchair who sings a charming self-composition, elderly men who get together to sing in Latin, amongst professional musicians such as Margaret Leng Tan performing John Cage’s “4’33,” harmonicist Yew Hong Chow, and guitarist Alexander Abisheganaden. The film’s path, traversing various ethnic enclaves and socioeconomic classes, winds metaphorically through the subway’s network. Observational shots of passengers using the train occasionally help to transition between scenes. Tan even replicates the train’s soundscape by interviewing Juanita Melson, the woman who voices announcements on the public address system. Cedello, Gn, and Liang’s segments all take place at MRT stations. These locations are not simply backdrops. The trains’ trajectories as well as the tides of commuters moving up and down on escalators and through turnstiles, push our attention beyond the frame. Concomitantly, these sites constitute a geographic atlas. Each activates cognizance of the train network, which in turn registers a

Postcolonial Spatialit y

73

Figure 1.9 A 4-shot series of aerial views and maps (clockwise from top left). Singapore GaGa, 2005

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

mental view of the whole – a totality visually appreciated from above, the island map. 49 Consider too visual artist Charles Lim’s structural video essay All the Lines Flow Out (2011), which was part of his exhibit SEA STATE that represented Singapore at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The camera is subterranean, flowing through Singapore’s holistic system of storm drains and water canals. (Figure 1.10) As the shots pass through this drainage system, they are animated in the background by different architectural prof iles: residential, industrial, and horticultural. Lim’s oceanographic eye, that of a former Olympic sailor, rarely leaves the water and is never aerial. Even so, as a topographic negative of aerial vision, the notable film journeys through the city’s network of unseen tributaries in inexorably cartographic fashion. 49 See Conley’s recitation of “what Deleuze calls a cartography of becoming.” Cartographic Cinema, 13.

74 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 1.10 Collage of shots of storm drains and water canals. All the Lines Flow Out, 2011

Courtesy of the artist

Back on terra firma, Tan’s camera frequently strains for height. Invisible City (2007), a non-fiction film about documenting history, remembering spaces, and precarious memories, is enraptured by the city from the perspective of a rising external glass elevator. (Figure 1.11) From an airliner in Singapore GaGa, her lens had seemed evenly captivated by the flight map and the delight of peering out the tiny passenger window. She does it again in To Singapore with Love (2013), in which touching long shots stare

Postcolonial Spatialit y

75

pensively at the island through the eyes of political exiles stranded across the strait separating the country from Malaysia. The final cut is driven by dissident interviews, but she reveals that the project began as “a video about Singapore’s coastline from afar.”50 These “aerial views” instantiate one of Castro’s three cartographic shapes, high angled moving shots combining the twin pleasures of sight and flight. She believes that these are inimitable sensorial opportunities to take in “geographic and quantitative scale,” that also happen to be exclusively cinematic, emotional moments when the eye discovers “the earth’s surface from a new and exciting angle of vision.”51 Screens beyond cinema trigger this pleasure too, but with added ambivalence for the Singaporean consciousness. When we spin a globe on its axis or dart our eyes across a world map, it is an instinct as universal as the mapping impulse to locate ourselves, one satiated in some measure by the roving lens on Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum as well as by the interactive world map in the Singapore History Gallery. We want to see where we are and where we come from. But for Singapore that ocular journey always ends in futility. Its destination can never be found. The place is unrepresentable, a vicinity at best, cruelly designated with a red dot, obscured by even the most economical signifier. Singapore understands its size geographically and historically. Being diminutive creates a certain sense of dependency. Being a port city also means that it can never fully be self-sufficient. Inevitably, its longstanding identity as a trading center is geographically inflected. The shipping industry was first established by the British who saw a colony well positioned on an important sea route, as a key cog in their challenge to Dutch trade dominance in the region.52 De Koninck and collaborators Julie Drolet, and Marc Girard suggest that the idea continues to have substantial currency both mythologically and empirically. “It has almost become a truism to refer to Singapore as being strategically located. Yet, truism or not, among major cities on the planet, Singapore is indeed among the most strategically located.”53 The red dot does not merely mark a spot, it is a reminder of smallness, and a beacon that hails, a node that activates a network. By definition, to be a “strategically located” port city presumes an innate awareness of geography and of less strategically placed neighbors. For Singapore, it posits the added reminder of oneself as an island. The thriving port is 50 51 52 53

Brenez, “Tan Pin Pin.” Castro, “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse,” 14. Ho, “From Port City to City-State,” 213. De Koninck, Drolet, and Girard, Singapore, 6.

76 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 1.11 Tan Pin Pin takes another aerial view from the external elevator of the National Library. Invisible City, 2007

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

a foundation of its economic exceptionalism, but its very islandness ironically negates the ability to distinguish or distance itself from others. Jacques Derrida elaborates on this conundrum in The Beast and the Sovereign, in which he likens the island experience to an autoimmune condition. Within this logic, the self is attacked from within, through a self-persecutory destruction of one’s own defenses. Although Derrida appropriates the island allegory to ruminate over the binary of refuge and escape, the deconstructive logical interplay is instructive and useful to understanding Tan’s aerial perspectives. Whereas Castro suggests that these shots express the allures of sight and flight, Derrida notes that to flee islands or to take refuge on them presupposes flight as well. “One cannot dissociate the figure of the island from the experience of flight.”54 Overhead surveys of Singapore’s landmass are therefore self-reflexive, and evoke “in the same desire, a murky concurrence and a strange simultaneity, when it comes to the insularity of the island, between attraction and repulsion, between insularophilia and insularophobia.”55 54 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 64, 68. 55 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 69. See Kelly Oliver’s analogous reading of Apollo images of Earth in Earth and World.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

77

Figure 1.12 “SEA STATE 1: Inside\Outside” (2005), detail, prepared GSP1 chart, published by Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore

Image courtesy of the artist

Figure 1.13 “SEA STATE 8: The Grid” (2014), detail, prepared GSP1 chart, published by Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore

Image courtesy of the artist

This oppositional conflict of identity was on full display in Singapore’s national pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Lim’s exhibit contemplates what it means to be an island state through an assemblage of multimedia works in multiple formats. We inevitably find aerial maps in the exhibit.56 Two in particular, “Inside\Outside” and “The Grid,” appropriate hydrographic nautical charts. (Figures 1.12 and 1.13) In the first, Lim traces the island’s maritime border and frames it separately. For the second, he extracts the blocks within the island’s borders, and places it likewise aside. The pixelated landmass remains familiar even in the roughest of representations. The 56 Lim’s SEA STATE was part of another exhibition presented by the National Library in 2015, “Geo | Graphic.” The ersatz historical project in the year of Singapore’s 50th anniversary as a republic is yet another version of the nation’s story that is narrated cartographically. “For Singapore in particular,” the festival brochure reads, “maps are a window to our early history.”

78 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

extricated units distinguish Singapore from its surroundings, but floating in blankness they also harken back to an original trauma. History bears decisive moments in this regard, which suggest that Singapore has internalized the contradiction. The country’s modern independence, brought about by a Malaysian Parliamentary vote to expel Singapore from its federation, is remembered through the anguish of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew weeping on national television.57 This extraordinary yet unproblematic aspect of its collective memory signifies the country’s more or less tacit acknowledgment that its existence hinges equally on external dynamics and internal fortitude. The image of itself as an island – in the form of aerial maps, bird’s-eye views, or cartographical symbols – subtends a network of historical knowledge and psychic emotion. No wonder then, that aerial views find their way into films from the so-called “golden age” of cinema from the 1950s to early 1970s, especially those with modern narratives like Moon Over Malaya (1957), China Wife (1957), Azimat (1959), and Rasa Sayang Eh (Feelings of Love, 1959). (Figures 1.14 and 1.15) The era coincides with the time between Britain’s postwar relinquishment of dominion over the island, and the latter’s full independence in 1965. These images speak to a historical chapter where Singapore negotiated its singular uniqueness along with disquieting reminders of isolation. Insularity is never an option for Singapore. Its destiny, as embodied by the f inal display in the Singapore History Gallery, was to “become a global city.” As Chua Beng Huat points out, the republic realized early on that it could not be viable as an independent economy. He highlights governmental discourse referring to the world as Singapore’s “market.” He explains: This imagination was felicitously made realizable through an exportoriented industrialization made available at that time by the new international division of labor. It is now a common refrain among ordinary Singaporeans that “the world is our hinterland.” As an independent city-state or an island-nation among a world of nations, “the world” was brought into the visual horizon of political leadership, causing the then Minister of Foreign Affairs to declare Singapore a “global city” two decades before the concept circulated freely in urban discourse.58 57 The transition from British rule in Singapore to its status as an independent republic occurred over roughly 20 years that included a period of increasing self governance and a merger with Malaysia in the early 1960s. 58 Chua, “Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts,” 30-31.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

Figure 1.14 Aerial view of downtown Singapore. Moon Over Malaya, 1957

Courtesy of Asian Film Archive and family of Ho Kian-Ngiap

Figure 1.15 Aerial view of the Singapore River. China Wife, 1957

Courtesy of Asian Film Archive and family of Ho Kian-Ngiap

79

80 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Devoid of natural resources, Singapore has also been forced to import potable water and food, and turned to a variety of service industries to support its economy. It only began with shipping. Singapore then built a world-class airport to burnish a reputation for transportation infrastructure. Valuable tourist dollars were successfully sought. And it has invested heavily in digital infrastructure to become a regional hub for sectors such as financial services, data colocation, and digital media production. Its current stake in remaining politically and economically interlocked with the global economy is triply significant. One, it was geographically necessitated. Two, it perpetuates the strategic role Singapore served for the crown. Three, it has indubitably ossified within identity, culture, and art. As Minister for Information and the Arts George Yeo declared in 1994, “if the arts in Singapore are only by Singaporeans for Singaporeans, we will get nowhere for we are too small […] Singapore is Singapore only because our national spirit is a cosmopolitan one.”59 That cosmopolitan character and internationally connected place in the world fostered an identity within its colonial imagination, all of which is cinematically and visually iterated by the aerial map. In the penultimate chapter of Imagined Communities, “Census, Map, Museum,” where the late Benedict Anderson describes how the colonial state imposed an imperial imagination onto its subjects. Mercator projections drawn in the service of military and commercial navigation effectively placed the world under totalizing surveillance. Administration of the Southeast Asian colonies was “put on a wholly territorial-cartographic basis.” Most important, Anderson specif ically describes the use of two types of avatars: the “historical map” that lent cartography a gravitas of antiquity, and the “map-as-logo,” reproducible, recognizable, and ubiquitous emblems that “penetrated deep in the popular imagination.”60 He argues that these images helped to forge enduring national identities. One senses however, that Anderson’s account of maps seems limited to their function of delineating borders and boundaries. Singapore’s cartographic cinema exponentially exceeds that role, while expanding ideas of what maps are or look like. Cartography inordinately informs the ways that Singapore narrates history and fashions art. It spatially orients, ideologically of course, but with phenomenological, historiographical, and affective consequences as well.

59 Yeo, “Singapore Arts Centre: Taking Shape,” 36. 60 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 171, 173-175.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

81

Affective Colonial Maps Singapore’s mapping predisposition, and that of its cinema, converge within overhead shots. These are more than photographic or geographic projections, because they also allow us to peer into emotional repositories. Giuliana Bruno’s exposition of affective mapping is useful here. She writes in Atlas of Emotion that mapping tends “a terrain that can be fleshed out by rethinking practices of cartography for travelling cultures, with an awareness of the inscription of emotion within this motion.”61 The reverse would also hold. A sense of affect can reveal insights into a subject’s material and cartographical relationship to landscape. Tracing these pathways through the psychological drama, Perth (2004), we can chart the protagonist’s inner and outer worlds. The film pays obvious homage to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which is itself one of New Hollywood’s most searing commentaries on America’s post-60s, post-Vietnam, post-traumatic stress disorder. In Perth, the protagonist Harry Lee is a middle-aged security guard and part-time cabbie estranged from his family and left behind by the Singaporean economic miracle. His private yearnings parallel national aspirations. Harry longs to retire in the eponymous Western Australian capital for a more relaxed life. But those dreams are tragically sidetracked when he decides to rescue a Vietnamese prostitute from an abusive pimp. Perth is a popular migratory destination because of its relative proximity. It offers all the trappings of European society but with more manageable levels of economic and social transition. Some critical readings have tied Harry’s social maladjustment and alienation directly to neoliberal capitalism and the government’s ruthless political and economic policies.62 But placing the narrative in that context overlooks a colonial subtext. Globalization provides an apt explanation, but explains only so much. Perth opens with a nighttime shot of Singapore’s modern commercial skyline, moving quickly to the shipyard where Harry works. The locational switch resituates the f ilm narratively and politically. Both his current occupation and his past in the merchant navy evoke Singapore’s long history in the shipping trade.63 When Harry nostalgically laments at the docks that “this is where I started,” he refers to both a personal and national 61 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 71. 62 See Naruse, “(Un)shared Values,” and Ng, “Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism in Singaporean Cinema.” 63 Ng’s description (“Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism in Singaporean Cinema,” 271) of the establishing shot notices the Fullerton Hotel’s inclusion, but sees the colonial building only as part of “an exposition of Singapore’s own economic journey.”

82 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

self. In the early scene, Harry looks on introspectively in long shot as a ship slides backwards down the ways into the water. The movement is captured in a series of dissolves that frame his pensive meditation metaphysically, and leave us to ponder his own as well as his country’s place in the world.64 As the vessel recedes into the background of the shot, Perth unrolls a mental map into the horizon, implicitly and latently. Conley argues that film art, with multiple implements such as visual style, perspective, sound, and narrative, “brings forward and summons issues of mental geography.” Beyond that, “when the historical latencies of a map are discovered in a film, myriad tensions – many not under the control of the rhetoric of the film – can lead us toward productive, critical, and even creative speculation.”65 In Perth, these explorations bring us closer to Singapore’s colonial history. The vestigial scars of that past add to the emotional burden Harry shoulders. Colonialism is not easily consigned to history. As a port city, Singapore was one of the “bridgeheads for the establishment of European territorial empires” and a nodal point of British power.66 Out of that past, the imperial project’s affective or cognitive maps still inform Singapore’s subjectivity and social relations today. Perth’s director acknowledges on the film’s DVD commentary that Harry is indeed a colonial subject: a middle-aged Chinese man whose primary language is English. One of his passengers, an obnoxious European expatriate, remarks condescendingly on his perfect English. On the other hand, Harry’s native identity cannot be taken for granted either. He shares scant affinity with the Chinese artifacts adorning his apartment. Internally, his alienation from others and from himself conveys the extent of colonialism’s impact on his psyche. Echoing Anderson, Conley provides a crucial reminder that “cartography is marked by the appropriation, control, and administration of power.”67 The colonial cartography in Perth is therefore always ideological, just as maps were employed by explorers with imperial designs to conquer and subjugate. Do the aesthetic choices to recycle Scorsese’s portrait of Travis Bickle and the political gravitas of New American cinema, mean that the aesthetic sensibilities behind Perth are under occupation? The question is taken up in the following chapter. Like so much of Singapore’s current artistic expression, 64 Ng also took note of the scene (267, 272) but read it only as a metaphor, in that where his economic opportunity is concerned, his ship has sailed. 65 Conley, Cartographic Cinema, 3-4. 66 McPherson, “Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change,” 76 67 Conley, Cartographic Cinema, 5.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

83

Figure 1.16 Singapore’s financial district under the title. Perth, 2004

Courtesy of Djinn

the film evinces an acute, multi-layered tension between the inside and outside, between the local and foreign. But Perth holds up a temporal bridge in addition to the spatial one. Against a tendency to attribute alienation to the pressures of participating in a 21st century global economy, the film reaches backward to affix causality to Singapore’s colonization. Harry’s twenty years in the merchant navy allude to an interstitial identity, and the complex decentered nature of the national subjectivity, caused first by colonialism then modified by globalization. That history informs how Harry sees himself in the world as he looks out to sea on the docks. Whereas aerial maps engage vision in the vertical dimension by looking downward, the affective cartographic projections in Perth go out horizontally along the terrestrial plane, across panoramas. This film organizes space in a distinctive manner identifiable in others. A characteristic compilation of images frequently centers the island around the colonial city, essentially outlining a colonial subjectivity. As is often the case, Perth performs this maneuver early in the f ilm. The f inal shot of the opening credits is a wide-angle portrait of the financial district at the mouth of the Singapore River next to the Civic District.68 From this location, colonial cartography projects out. Director Djinn’s digital camera renders clouds in the night sky visible while street lamps illuminate skyscrapers from below. The haunting 68 In the case of Perth, the shot of the gleaming financial district punctuates the point about Harry’s economic marginalization.

84 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

composition sets up the irony of red block letters spelling “PERTH” fading in across Singapore’s urban tableau. (Figure 1.16) Electronically distorted atonal sounds modulate the film’s emotional register. Although famous skylines commonly serve the purpose of establishing narrative setting, things are never so simple.

The Persistence of Colonial Spatiality Castro’s outline of cinema’s mapping impulse includes the “atlas,” a “methodical assemblage of images” that catalogue the world in an analytical order, describing and disciplining space ideologically.69 Therefore atlases determine how spaces are navigated. A colonial atlas is part of Singapore’s spatio-cinematic vocabulary through every phase of its national cinema history. In the contemporaneous narratives of the “golden age,” shooting locations include built landscapes that were familiar and evocative. These productions set in a modernizing nation are the most numerous, in comparison to other Malay language cycles of period epics and fables, along with geographically ambiguous stories with only abstract links to the modern world.70 Take Seniman Bujang Lapok (1961), made two years after Singapore became fully self-governing in 1959.71 Its director P. Ramlee has come to embody the “golden age” with a name that is synonymous with that period of film production. His works resonated with the public, were the most popular and often depicted contemporary life. Seniman Bujang Lapok displays complex cultural and national identity, and suggests that they are inextricable from the country’s status as a former British colony. It is especially significant as a self-reflexive address of both the local encounter with modernity, and of how cinema mediates the process. In revealing its own mode of production, the film also speaks directly to history. Seniman Bujang Lapok is the third in the “Bujang Lapok” series of buddy film-romantic comedies. The Malay phrase translates as “moldy bachelors,” a humorous metaphor for their unsuitability for couplehood. In this installment, the film’s three leads find work in the local film industry – “seniman” means actor – and the audience is clearly notified that the plot takes place in the 69 Castro, “Les Archives de la Planète.” 70 Teo, “Malay Cinema’s Legacy of Cultural Materialism,” 10. 71 This stands in greatest contrast to the work of Ramlee’s contemporary Hussain Haniff, who received more acclaim for his period dramas, but whose career is generally regarded as less significant. Millet, Singapore Cinema, 51.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

85

very studio that produced the film, on the very same sets. The narrative is set mostly in rural villages, except for a particularly evocative opening sequence where metatextual shots negotiate cultural and national identity. Spectators enter the space via a series of shots from the governmental district, heart of the “planned colonial city” per McGee. The first shot looks up reverently at a statue of Raffles. The material remnant from British colonialism reifies the country’s “pointedly singular postcolonial story.”72 Behind the monument, stand tall austere pillars of the Victoria Memorial Hall (named after Queen Victoria). The camera pans to capture the surrounding colonial architecture, and conducts an abbreviated tour of the district, which includes long shots of the Empress Place Building and General Post Office, now the Asian Civilizations Museum and Fullerton Hotel. A long shot of the Victoria Memorial Hall follows the first cut. At this moment, we see a traveling movie ad enter the frame: signs mounted on a small truck announcing the upcoming release of the Malay film Panji Semerang (1961) at the Rex theater. Another pan follows the vehicle, and as it exits the frame, the camera settles into a long shot of City Hall. Similar atlases, gestures of colonial-cultural curation, can be found in a cross-cultural list of Singaporean films from that era, including Hujan Panas (Warm Drizzle, 1953), Moon Over Malaya, and the romantic drama Shi Zi Cheng (Lion City, 1960), the first Chinese film shot and produced entirely on the island.73 Set in one of the earliest public housing estates, Shi Zi Cheng features extended panoramas of the colonial city center, including landmarks seen in the opening of Seniman Bujang Lapok. The film supplements these shots with geographical information indelicately inserted into the script, ostensibly with a view towards regional distribution and promotion in markets unfamiliar with the newly independent ex-colony. If Shi Zi Cheng is constructing a national identity, lingering intently on the British monuments coats that identity with colonial signification. Carefully staged shots in Seniman Bujang Lapok designed to highlight specific locations and settings continue to follow the advertising truck as it moves away from the waterfront. The drive provides a transition into the second part of the montage, a contemporaneous tour of Singapore’s oldest and biggest downtown film theaters. (Recall Figures 0.1 and 0.2) It first passes the Capitol Theatre, a true relic where the twelve signs of the zodiac are carved under a signature dome roof. The surveying camera 72 Phillips, “Singapore Soil,” 180. 73 It can also be found in the Hong Kong productions filmed in Singapore, Malaya Love Affair and Belle of Penang (both 1954).

86 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

stays on the exterior of the Capitol long enough for us to see an actual billboard for the Tony Curtis comedy The Great Impostor (1961). Next it passes the Lido Theatre. A pan across the building pauses at the advertising for Anthony Mann’s 1960 western, Cimarron. The truck f inally makes a turn off the city center, and arrives at a rural village where residents run out to welcome it. The irresistible political metaphor within this sequence overwhelms the f ilm’s light-hearted tone. Since the camera hardly returns to those urban locales in the rest of the f ilm, the early shots serve only to foreground Singapore’s fundamentally urban and colonial character. Both Conley and Castro would be particularly struck by this topographical survey of a colonial city. For Conley especially, the montage can trigger the critical subjectivity of local audiences during a process he calls “bilocation,” that leads to a consciousness of belonging and distance, of locational guarantee and prevarication. Bilocated f ilm audiences are simultaneously included and excluded from narrative space, prompting a call-up of mental geographies that in turn encourage them to consider both where and who they are.74 Seniman Bujang Lapok’s opening sequence emphatically aff irms the story’s setting, but its violations of continuity bilocate local viewers. Although diegetic continuity is provided by the truck’s presence in every shot, unidirectional camera movements, and a sound bridge provided by music emanating from the vehicle, the vehicle’s path across the island is not cartographically accurate. Its route def ies spatial and directional logic for those familiar with local topography. These continuity errors break the illusion by refusing to orient those spectators spatially. They crack the proscenium, reveal f ilmmaking artifice, and introduce another rupture, that which lies between narrative ideology and lived existence. The gap is excavated further by the truck’s music along this tour of colonial landmarks. We hear a trumpet playing the British military’s “Colonel Bogey March,” the Malay folk song “Rasa Sayang,” and the “Beer Barrel Polka,” an originally Czech composition made popular throughout the world by World War II soldiers. The musical medley brandishes a sharp political edge by signaling a recollection of colonial engagement. “Rasa Sayang,” a famous song about love and longing, is bookended by two foreign compositions with strong military associations and connotations. This progression parallels the route from Nicoll Highway onto the Merdeka Bridge and back. “Colonel Bogey March” in particular, had been made famous by the 1957 war film, 74 Conley, Cartographic Cinema, 3-4, 15.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

87

The Bridge on the River Kwai. The soundtrack’s musical juxtaposition depicts European culture’s grip on local traditions as forceful and systematic. It also suggests that Singaporean culture and identity begins and ends with imperial occupation. Ramlee was the lead actor and composer on an earlier film, Ibu (Mother, 1953), which performs a similar exercise. A trumpet player Zulkifli takes on a poor Kuala Lumpur shoeshine boy Rahimi as his protégé. Years later, Zulkifli encourages the grown Rahimi (Ramlee), now an accomplished trumpeter himself, to meet him in Singapore where the younger musician can develop his career. But when Rahimi discovers on arrival that his mentor has moved away. He stews and roams the streets, which take him to City Hall, the Supreme Court Building, and the Anderson Bridge across the mouth of the Singapore River. Rahimi gradually manages to land some lucrative gigs, but is soon swindled out of his earnings. It is one of several tragedies to befall him. Those losses frame the film’s visual cartography. Its tour through downtown again violates spatial continuity, and the bilocation wedges the text apart. This time the city’s imposing colonial structures diminish Rahimi and taint modernity as corrupt. Conversely, Ibu’s melodramatic tragedies become tinged with ideology. Nevertheless, through it all the architecture manages to retain its imperial grandeur. (Figure 1.17) Bilocation aside, these sequences also organize space ideologically. They correspond with how Singapore is socially stratified. They commence with an image from the colonial center on prime urban real estate, before moving to outer vicinities inhabited by local communities, where ethnic enclaves still thrive today. Placed at or near the start of the film, these cinematographic maps inaugurate national subjectivity. For example, the movie advertising truck in Seniman Bujang Lapok drives from the southern colonial city area and towards rural villages and ethnic enclaves further inland. Ramlee’s first directorial effort, Penarek Becha (Trishaw Puller, 1955) also begins with a pan of the city from the Anderson Bridge, and cuts to scenes in the Katong area, an eastern district historically known for Straits Chinese residents. The camera then tracks a newspaper delivery boy on foot as he moves farther eastward on East Coast Road. (Figure 1.18) Over years of post-independence urban planning, those socio-geographic borders were not disrupted. Government-subsidized housing developed exclusively in the outer regions. And although public housing allocations may prioritize diversity and integration, the peripheral locations of cultural epicenters have stayed put. Fifty-odd years of self-governance and urban renewal conducted at an almost frenetic pace has not decentered the colonial

88 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 1.17 Singapore’s City Hall in the colonial city. Ibu, 1953

Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd.

organization of space. Singapore implements a modular system of public housing development where “new towns” comprise a mixture of public amenities for education, healthcare, and recreation, along with commercial properties that provide employment. These estates are built around town centers and served by one or more subway stations. Residents who can walk to a neighborhood H&M store in slippers may feel less inclined to shop downtown for the latest trends in fast-fashion, but the colonial city retains pride of place. The MRT system map reflects this graphically. All its lines radiate outward and upward from a southern cluster of stations in the Civic District. Singapore’s golden era of filmmaking began to recede in the mid-sixties. Malay Film Productions shuttered in 1967 and Cathay-Keris Studio, which produced Shi Zi Cheng, followed in 1973. Without those institutions, when national cinema was dormant for more than two decades, film was essentially an independent medium. A filmmaker with a legacy from that period is Rajendra Gour, an immigrant from India who started in local broadcasting before producing educational and training films. On his own time and money, he shot passion projects on 16mm. The most treasured among them is Sunshine Singapore (1972), a seven minute long city symphony restored by the locally based Asian Film Archive in 2018. Gour structured it chronologically as well as geographically. He documents a workday from morning to night, setting the scene with famous landmarks and training his eye on pedestrians in the downtown area. He inserts marching soldiers

Postcolonial Spatialit y

Figure 1.18 Shots establishing location move outward from the colonial city. Penarek Becha, 1955

Courtesy of The Shaw Organization Pte Ltd.

89

90 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

between these shots of office workers, tourists, and shoppers, then a series of bank logos and luxury goods viewed through shop windows. Sunshine Singapore is an obvious critique of consumerism and modernity; it is also Gour’s love letter to his adopted country. His camera is enchanted with the way that both sunlight and rainwater touch its natural and built environments. Gour opens by looking directly into the morning glare through lens flares at recognizable buildings and monuments, and later in close-ups at raindrops from an afternoon shower hanging off tropical foliage. Inevitably, the colonial port’s cartographic epistemology exerts itself. The second shot gazes eastward at ships on the horizon, the third upward at the august silhouette of Raffles’s statue on the waterfront. The images wander about for the most part in the colonial city center, but gradually move north, inland towards the retail zone on Orchard Road and to Chinatown. Only twice does it glance at flats further away from the Civic District and downtown. Sunshine Singapore opens in one part of the city, heads in an anticipated direction, and concludes in a residential precinct. The day winds down with the sunset on a beach. The final image, behind Gour’s authorial credits, is a nighttime long shot of a public housing block. After an industrial heyday and a few dormant decades, we spot the same “atlas” in contemporary cinema. Take these two important and profoundly local films that adopt socio-politically critical views of the progress narrative obsessively driven by the state. The opening montage of Singapore Dreaming (2006) begins with postcard images of Queen Elizabeth Walk, a pedestrian boulevard in the colonial city. The first image is of the Merlion (a mythical mascot and tourism mien) with the Fullerton and adjacent skyscrapers in the background, followed by a pan across the distinctive domes of the Esplanade Theater. (Figure 1.19) The images move away in recognizable fashion. An aerial shot of an MRT train pulling into a station beckons us to follow, to a food center, a wet market, and to the public housing unit where the family at the center of the melodrama lives. The circuit taken by Jasmine Ng and Kelvin Tong’s “motorcycle kungfu love story” Eating Air (1999) is more implicit. The kinetically edited film opens with shots of its protagonist “Ah Boy” joyriding on his motorcycle along Shenton Way in the financial district. The colonial buildings are unseen, but local audiences would no doubt know that the Civic District is just off-screen. Ah Boy rides into an underground tunnel, and ends up in his government flat. Singapore Dreaming, a screenwriting prizewinner at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, is a morality tale about a working-class family’s doomed economic aspirations. It depicts the plight of a family finding itself suddenly left behind in the rat race, and couches it in domestic melodrama,

Postcolonial Spatialit y

91

Figure 1.19 Shots establishing location still move outward from the Civic District. Singapore Dreaming, 2005

Courtesy of Colin Goh

framing personal choice as the solution to structural problems. The film still touched a chord, received excellent reviews in the local dailies, and was described by the President as “life in its reality.”75 For its part Eating Air, an iconic and formally adventurous Gen X rebellion story from the post-90s production revival, aggressively counterposes local vernacular and ethnic dialects against the importance the government confers on standard 75 Ramani, “Singapore Dreaming (Review).”

92 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

languages. Its heroes are ne’er-do-wells and two-bit gangsters on the social margins. Ah Boy is introduced riding towards the camera, cigarette hanging from his mouth and unbuttoned shirt flapping behind. These two f ilms admonish audiences about conformity. The more belligerent Eating Air is visually and literally louder in comparison to the more measured critique of Singapore Dreaming. Yet despite taking different approaches to counter-narrative, both of these anti-establishment f ilms retain one important commonality: an unshakable bond with colonial cartography. Tucked away in otherwise routine expository shots conveying location, architectural and geographical identif iers assemble in historically meaningful sequences that evoke an indelible part of the country’s past. That spatial awareness, along with aerial and affective instincts, become readable as a national style – a colonial cartographic cinema. Beyond the borders of the frame, these postcolonial poetics remain prominent and visible everywhere, perceptible to everyone who cares to look, anyone in and of Singapore. They can also inform how the history of its cinema should be rewritten, a discussion taken up in the next chapter.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006. Baker, Alan R.H. “Introduction: On Ideology and Landscape.” In Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the Past, edited by Alan R.H. Baker and Gideon Biger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 1-14. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version].” Grey Room 39 (2010): 11-37. Bhabha, Homi. “The Postcolonial Critic: Homi Bhabha Interviewed by David Bennett and Terry Collins.” Arena 96 (1991): 47-63. Bin Sa’at, Alfian. “Hinterland, Heartland, Home.” In Baumgärtel, ed. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 33-50. Bishop, Ryan, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, eds. Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity. London: Routledge, 2004. Bishop, Ryan. “Forward: Seeing Space/ Crafting Space/ Moving Space.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, xi-xiii. “Building Architecture.” National Gallery Singapore. N.d. https://www.nationalgallery.sg/about/building/architecture (accessed 27 February 2016).

Postcolonial Spatialit y

93

Brenez, Nicole. “Tan Pin Pin. No Vacation from Politics.” Jeu de Paume: Each Dawn a Censor Dies (7 April 2016) http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/blogs/each-dawn-acensor-dies-by-nicole-brenez/2016/04/07/tan-pin-pin-no-vacation-from-politics/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Bunnell, Tim. “Views from Above and Below: The Petronas Twin Towers and/in Contesting Visions of Development in Contemporary Malaysia.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 20, 1 (1999): 1-23. Castro, Teresa. “Les Archives de la Planète: A Cinematographic Atlas.” Jump Cut 48 (2006) http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/KahnAtlas/text.html (accessed 23 May 2017). —. “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture.” The Cartographic Journal 46, 1 (2009): 9-15. Chee, Lilian and Edna Lim, eds. Asian Cinema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015. —. “Asian Films and the Potential of Cinematic Space.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, 1-18. Chua, Beng Huat. “Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, 27-54. Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. De Koninck, Rodolphe. “Singapore or the Revolution of Territory. Part One: The Hypothesis.” Cahiers de géographie du Québec 34, 92 (1990): 209-16. De Koninck, Rodolphe, Julie Drolet, and Marc Girard. Singapore: An Atlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Dhaliwal, Ray. “Three MRT Stations to be Renamed.” The Straits Times (28 November 1986): 15. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. “Fullerton Heritage.” The Fullerton Hotel. N.d. http://www.fullertonhotel.com/ heritage-en.html (accessed 11 April 2016). Goh, Robbie B.H. “Evangelical Economies and Abjected Spaces: Cultural Territorialization in Singapore.” In Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, Beyond Description, 95-111. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

94 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Ho, Kong Chong. “From Port City to City-State: Forces Shaping Singapore’s Built Environment.” In Culture and the City in East Asia, edited by Won Bae Kim, Mike Dougalss, Sang-Chuel Choe, and Kong Chong Ho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 212-33. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. —. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “Of Diminishing Memories and Old Places: Singaporean Films and the World of Archiving Landscape.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39, 1 (2013): 31-52. Koeck, Richard and Les Roberts. “Introduction: Projecting the Urban.” In The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections, edited by Richard Koeck and Les Roberts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 1-17. Koeck, Richard. Cine-Scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities. New York: Routledge, 2013. Kong, Lily and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of ‘Nation’.” Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Koolhaas, Rem. “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis … or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa.” In S, M, L, XL, edited by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995, 1009-1089. Kümin, Beat and Cornelie Usborne. “At Home and in the Workplace: A Historical Introduction to the Spatial Turn.” History & Theory 52 (2013): 305-18. Kuppusamy, Baradan. “No Colonial Hangups as Malays Rush to Learn English.” Inter Press Service (23 August 2005) http://www.ipsnews.net/2005/08/educationno-colonial-hangups-as-malays-rush-to-learn-english/ (accessed 5 March 2019) Kusno, Abidin. Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia. New York: Routledge, 2000. Lamster, Mark, ed. Architecture and Film. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. Law, L., C.J.W.-L. Wee, and F. McMullan. “Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo’s Be With Me.” Geographical Research 49, 4 (2011): 363-74. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lim, David C.L. and Hiroyuki Yamamoto, eds. Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention. New York: Routledge, 2012. Lim, Varian and Elaine Ho. “What the MRT Really Means to S’poreans.” Today (20 July 2015) http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/what-mrt-really-meanssporeans?page=1 (accessed 24 May 2017). Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960.

Postcolonial Spatialit y

95

Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1993. McDermott, Darren. “Singapore in No Hurry to Shed Legacy of British Colonialism.” The Wall Street Journal (25 June 1997) http://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB867283245554886500 (accessed 24 May 2017). McGee, T.G. The Southeast Asian City: A Social Geography of the Primate Cities of Southeast Asia. New York: Praeger, 1967. McPherson, Kenneth. “Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 1890s-1920s.” In Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, edited by Leila Tarazi Fawaz and Christopher Alan Bayly. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 75-95. Millet, Raphaël. Singapore Cinema. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2006. Musa, M. Bakri. Moving Malaysia Forward. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2008. Naruse, Cheryl Narumi. “(Un)shared Values: Alienation, Modernity and Singaporean Identity in Perth.” Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 6, 1 (2008): 66-81. Ng, Jenna. “Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism in Singaporean Cinema: A Case Study of Perth.” In Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique, edited by Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner. New York: Routledge, 2011, 261-78. Oliver, Kelly. Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. “Petronas Towers.” Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. N.d. http://pcparch.com/project/ petronas-towers/detail (accessed 23 May 2017). Phillips, John. “Singapore Soil: A Completely Different Organization of Space.” In Urban Space and Representation, edited by Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy. London: Pluto Press, 1999, 175-95. Poon, Angelia. “Common Ground, Multiple Claims: Representing and Constructing Singapore’s ‘Heartland’.” Asian Studies Review 37, 4 (2013): 559-76. Preservation of Monuments Act (Cap 239, 1985 Rev Ed) s 5 (a). Ramani, Vinita. “Singapore Dreaming (Review).” Criticine (23 October 2006) http:// www.criticine.com/review_article.php?id=21 (accessed 24 May 2017). Ridge, Bryan. “English Language and Malaysian Identity: A Shifting Odyssey.” Asian Studies Review 19, 3 (1996): 67-78. Roberts, Les and Julia Hallam. “Film and Spatiality: Outline of a New Empiricism.” In Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place, edited by Julia Hallam and Les Roberts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, 1-30. Shiel, Mark. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” In Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City, 1-18. Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. —. Screening the City. London: Verso, 2003.

96 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Shonfield, Katherine. Walls have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City. London: Routledge, 2000. “Singapore.” The Layover. The Travel Channel, 21 November 2011. Tan, Kenneth Paul. “Alternative Visions in Neoliberal Singapore: Memories, Places, and Voices in the Films of Tan Pin Pin.” In Lim and Yamamoto, Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia, 147-67. Tan, Pin Pin. “80km/h.” Blog. http://www.tanpinpin.com/wordpress/80kmh/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Tay, Yek Keak. “Royston Tan: ‘Old Romances’ Isn’t Just About Nostalgia.” inSing (14 December 2012) http://www.insing.com/feature/interview-royston-tanold-romances-isnt-just-about-nostalgia/id-b8673f00/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Teo, Stephen. “Malay Cinema’s Legacy of Cultural Materialism: P. Ramlee as Historical Mentor.” In Teo, Stephen and Liew Kai Khiun, eds. Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2017, 3-19. Wee, C.J.W.-L. “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape: Cultural Difference and Film in Singapore.” positions: asia critique 20, 4 (2012): 983-1007. Yeo, George Yong Boon. “Singapore Arts Centre: Taking Shape.” Speeches: A Bimonthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 18.4 (1994): 32-7. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

2

Reorienting Film History Spatially Abstract This chapter applies Singapore’s postcolonial spatial epistemology to rethink local film historiography, national identity, and film style. First, the framework bridges Singapore’s bifurcated film history, namely its “golden age” of the 50s and 60s, and the post-90s production revival. Second, in mulling the relationship that bodies have with the inhabited environment, it highlights the oeuvre of documentarian Tan Pin Pin, and finds a spatially attuned artist who fashions affective poetics of ambivalence, uncertainty, and hiraeth. A subsequent examination of unintended ironies created by “new wave” films that appropriate the language of alienation popularized by Western art cinemas, discovers a postcolonial style less reliant on tropes such as mimicry, cultural authenticity, and subaltern agency. These films conscript Deleuzean time-images and “any-space-whatevers” into a postcolonial paradox, in which new wave-inspired films try unsuccessfully to wrench individuals from the inextricable landscape. Keywords: Singaporean cinema, urban development, new wave films, Tan Pin Pin, Gilles Deleuze, “any-space-whatever”

Geography is never just geography, and buildings are never just buildings. They are repositories of shared memories for a lot of people. – Kelvin Tong, filmmaker I don’t want to try to recapture memories though I am curious about the past. – Tan Pin Pin, filmmaker 1

1 Epigraphs appear in Han, “Kelvin Tong Gets Personal with 7 Letters Short, Grandma Positioning System (GPS),” and Yeong Chong, “Tan Pin Pin: The Hidden Depths of Memory.”

Sim, Gerald, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463721936_ch02

98 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Singapore cinema’s key significations endure even though its signifiers change over time. Modern architecture can make film cartography’s colonial heritage less evident, but clear signals of a spatial phenomenology remain. Although film production lay essentially dormant for approximately 25 years between the “golden age” and mid-90s revival, a common cartography bridges them. Spatial poetics unify the older and contemporary eras by illuminating the less obvious colonial intonations within recent films. But Singapore film history is often cleaved into two. In the recent collection, Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives, Stephen Teo and Edna Lim make important attempts to rehistoricize and connect the two film historical periods.2 They argue that the cycles share common cultural and creative traits. Teo points out that both Malay auteur P. Ramlee and director Jack Neo, known for Chinese comedies geared to the domestic audience in the so-called “heartland,” rely heavily on the theme of cultural materialism, a combination of capitalist, materialistic, and traditional cultural values. Lim focuses on how films from both eras perform national identities in ways that also resist the state’s development narratives. Specifically, Malay films from the “golden age” treasure rural community values, while the recent productions seem intent on uncovering the social underbelly of rapid modernization. Teo and Lim do not refer to spatiality directly, except to link the Malay kampung (village) community with the residents in today’s public housing flats. Expanding on its own prior conclusions, this book joins in their project of cultural mapping. When the preceding chapter traced colonial cartographical phenomena such as aerial mapping and colonial spatiality to the “golden age” of film production, it proved that these spatial affinities are capable of smoothing over historical periodizations separating the two eras. They encourage us in turn to redraw the common social frame of reference for recent films. That entails thinking about the country’s present state of postcoloniality in more thorough, varied, and spatial ways. It includes discerning postcolonial signs within the inviting tropes of globalization, and in the modern urbanscape as well. Spatial poetics can furthermore reconfigure essentialist understandings of national identity. This chapter negotiates that notion through the spatially obsessed films of Tan Pin Pin, before using those conclusions to examine the revival’s fondness for foreign “new wave” stylistics. The bulk of film criticism and scholarship concentrates on the newer texts. It ascribes themes, aesthetics and authorship to contemporaneous 2 Teo, “Malay Cinema’s Legacy of Cultural Materialism” and “Jack Neo, Conformity and Cultural Materialism in Singapore Film,” and Lim, “Singapore Cinema: Connecting the Golden Age and the Revival.”

Reorienting Film History Spatially

99

circumstances, and interprets textual representations of national identity with a synchronic reflectionist view.3 Specifically, writers look primarily to globalization and post-independence state-sponsored ideology for context, and adopt the critical discourse associated with global capitalism. It is without question a productive strategy, but limiting and occasionally misleading because colonialism’s significance to modern Singapore should not be underestimated. In contrast, the social sensibilities of the fifties and sixties are understood to arise from an encounter with colonialism and modernity, the result of psychological and cultural negotiations of a colonial subject. Although films made in the last three decades appear to have been read in a different context, postcolonialism manages to linger. Colonial history has not been replaced in the hermeneutic; it is perhaps just slightly displaced. In scrutinizing the interpretive disparity, it is apparent that much of it originates from the inclination of writers to single out ubiquitous shots of high-rise public housing in recent films. These are striking images on screen in the same way that the neighborhoods’ vertical sprawls are captivating to visitors. The films purvey a message that people marginalized by society experience alienation and anguish arising from urbanity. The built expanses photographed from stark angles render inhabitants insignificant, portraying a modernity that isolates disempowered subjects. (Figure 2.1) To Olivia Khoo, these geometric shots emphasize the uniform buildings’ stifling impositions of anonymity and urban alienation.4 The architecture secondarily connotes economic inequality between 85% of people who inhabit these estates and an elite minority who can afford to live in private houses. Critics generally read the images as visual manifestos of class-consciousness that disrupt celebratory bleats touting a national tide of prosperity that supposedly lifts all boats. Chua Beng Huat and Yeo Wei-Wei also discern in filmmaker Eric Khoo’s bleak cinematography a representation of state power that critiques the state’s omniscience and “deflates the triumphalism” of Singapore’s success story “by pointing to the underbelly of the nation.” The public housing flat […] inevitably points to the presence of the government, which takes much pride in its efficiency and efficacy in housing 3 I disagree with Kenneth Paul Tan’s recent claim that the “golden age” has been repressed in the official history. It is always mentioned reverentially, and was memorialized in prominent exhibits at the National Museum, “The Golden Age of Malay Cinema,” and “The Foundation of Run Run Shaw’s Cinema Empire.” See Tan K. P., “Pontianaks, Ghosts and the Possessed.” Alfian bin Sa’at may be more accurate in stating that Malay films are peripheral to the consciousness of local audiences and filmmakers, in “Hinterland, Heartland, Home,” 36. 4 Khoo, “Slang Images,” 88.

100 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

the entire nation in public housing – 85% of the resident population lives in comprehensively planned high-rise, public housing estates. Public housing is the literally concrete reminder of the pervasive presence of the government.5

More recently, C.J.W.-L. Wee describes how contemporary films use public housing structures to signify the social failures of the government’s economic and late-modernist venture. Their dystopian visions overturn the architecture’s hegemonic symbolism as “the state’s ideological embodiment of a uniform urban space of ‘physical perfectibility.’”6 In sum, the film images of public housing are seen as artistic ripostes to the post-independence government’s power and ideology. The analysis gains traction because the ruling party does use those buildings as ideological instruments. Geographers Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh point out that public housing exemplifies the state’s vision of rapid modernization from undeveloped slums and squatters.7 What is more, although public subsidies permit a high rate of home ownership, residents pay a continual political price in the form of leveraged reminders of that providence. The electorate is explicitly and regularly admonished to vote wisely or have infrastructural upgrades and services withheld from their electoral district.8 Chua and Yeo are therefore correct; shots of urban architecture do indeed foreground the authority of the state. But these flats and their images are overdetermined. The government indeed constructs those buildings in concert with social policies that perpetuate the class distinctions reified within them. Nonetheless the ethnic and social divisions predate independence. These high-rises trigger a cultural imagination rooted in a rich sociological history from before 1965. The modern milieu of commercial skyscrapers and high-rise public housing, now vital elements of Singapore’s mise en scène, was not built by the British. However, the structures belong to a lasting and well-documented legacy.9 For Jini Kim Watson, “earlier colonial spatial technologies already pioneered the ways the state becomes an active agent for the commodification of its territory.” Via Henri Lefebvre’s writing about how states facilitate spatial 5 Chua and Yeo, “Singapore Cinema,” 118. 6 Wee, “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape,” 983-984. 7 Kong and Yeoh, The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore, 205. 8 “PM Lee, I Don’t Get Upgrading, So Can I Pay Less Tax?” 9 For details on how Singapore implemented urban planning objectives and instruments that were inherited from British colonial rule, see Yuen, “Urban Planning in Southeast Asia,” and Ho, “From Port City to City-State.”

Reorienting Film History Spatially

101

Figure 2.1 An alienated protagonist visually diminished under public housing development. Mee Pok Man, 1995

Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films

organization according to the logic and needs of international capital, Watson highlights Singapore’s land reclamation, public housing, and infrastructural developments – precisely the “spatial technologies” that are both seen and felt through its contemporary cinema.10 But since the emotional distance represented by the films comes from spatially inflected economic and social conditions that colonialism established, globalization is not the only cause for disenchantment. The characters’ chronically discomfited sense of place deserves a thorough deliberation of local history and spatial articulations. For her part, Watson spins a skillful narrative that weaves Singapore’s emergence in 21st century global capitalism into its colonial history, writing with an avowed interest “in delineating its spatial logic as emphatically postcolonial” (original emphasis).11 Watson is not alone in addressing colonial history, but notably avoids drifting into a globalizational hermeneutic. Film studies that do touch on Singapore’s colonial history tend to highlight language and not space, namely the privileged presence of English in the local vernacular. For example, Sophia Siddique sees English as a hegemonic norm that is modified and subverted by locals to broker different cultures in the service of a national identity, while Ho Tzu Nyen writes of a “postcolonial anxiety” afflicting Singaporean filmmakers, who use “Singlish” to “repel 10 Watson, “Aspirational City,” 546. See also Lefebvre, State, Space World. 11 Watson, “Aspirational City,” 545.

102 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

the anxiety of their linguistic colonization.” He argues that local artists’ unstable identities result from the influence of foreign film canons on their aesthetic sensibilities. Ho believes that the angst leads them to carve out a self-reflexive position within inescapably foreign film traditions, “like a tourist stammering in a foreign tongue.”12 But save for his brief discussion of Singlish as a contested site between the Queen’s English and an Other’s vernacular, Ho is vague about how the tension specifically arises from colonial doctrine. It is suggestive though that he instinctively looks to colonial identity for explanation. When Siddique and Ho refer to cultural exchange occurring after independence in 1959, they steer emphasis away from colonialism. As a result, they use postcolonialism to either explain minor historical backstories, or equate it with globalization or the postmodern since all the paradigms are generically similar. These broadly refer to circumstances where external (Western) power intrudes upon local autonomy and cultural boundaries. Drawing that epistemic equivalence is understandable because Singapore’s relationship with colonial rule foregrounds its current involvement in globalization. From colonialism to globalization, it has a history of being greatly dependent on foreign hegemonies. Recalling the poignancy of aerial maps examined in the previous chapter, that relationship to the outside is a longstanding part of its identity. But colonialism should not be conflated too easily with globalization for conceptual and historical reasons. Colonialism and globalization proffer dissimilar cultural ideologies. Colonialism’s objective was the territorial division of the world driven by Orientalism, while globalization does not consider the spatial dimension consequential, nor is it reliant on supremacist discourse. If anything, globalization’s free-flowing capital often seeks to transcend both spatial distance and racial or cultural difference, where the world, as jingoistic voices like Thomas Friedman’s claim, is flat.13 Material differences between the two historical phases affect how the narrative of Singapore cinema is written. Using globalization as an interpretive prism inductively excludes films produced in the “golden age” for which globalization is not a concern. Conversely, treating colonialism seriously as an important part of history, culture, and consciousness would address its prevailing influence over the national imagination. It also bridges the interregnum from one production era to the next. Most important, it would ease the temptation to think the film eras are distinct when they have 12 Siddique, “Images of the City Nation”; Ho, “The Afterimage,” 312-313. 13 Friedman, The World is Flat.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

103

plenty in common. Why then has the historiographical split for Singapore cinema hardened? Why is its colonial identity, with or without hangups, discussed infrequently by the scholarship? Those reasons have to do with the attractiveness of globalization’s epistemology. Singapore’s rising presence in world cinema since the 1990s is notable, especially in light of the near complete inactivity that followed its “golden age.” Almost three decades on, its production output is now consistent with a growing and credible range of features and short films. Some have earned acclaim at A-list festivals. The local exhibition market is dominated by Hollywood, but a genre led by Neo of Chinese language comedies sustained in large part by local audiences is now a recognized part of the commercial and cultural landscape. Public funds for production have become more available since the Singapore Film Commission formed in 1998. Meanwhile, film offerings sprouted in university curricula. These developments complement a cinema-going rate per capita that always ranks among the highest in the world.14 The Singapore International Film Festival continues to thrive despite the government’s puritanical censorship practices, control of political speech and capricious levels of support. These developments do their part to make the revival period seem discrete. The periodizing tendency is also exacerbated by formal differences in the films from each era. Features produced since the nineties fall into two main categories: The first consists of comedies geared towards domestic business using vernacular slapstick along with cultural and linguistic references so narrow that cross-cultural appeal is all but impossible. The second consists of social realist dramas with avant-garde pretensions and festival ambitions, influenced by new wave cinemas of various stripes. Although most films reflect the nation’s multiracial character, recent productions tend to construct narratives centered on Chinese characters and experiences. By comparison, the “golden age” is famous for Malay language films set against the backdrop of a developing society. Non-Malay films were also made but in the popular imagination, the approximately 200 Malay language productions are synonymous with local cinema’s past. Dominated by Ramlee, who directed, performed and composed music, most of the earlier films are multi-generic romantic screwball comedies that contain musical numbers and martial arts sequences to boot. They remain popular with Malay-speaking audiences throughout the region even today. These linguistic, cultural, stylistic, and generic disparities further separate the two eras. 14 “Feature Films: Exhibition – Indicators,” UNESCO.

104 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

In addition, contemporary films have been isolated from the “golden age” because of Singapore’s economic advance over the intervening period. It strengthens the inclination to relate them synchronically to political economic circumstances of global capitalism. Therefore, the newer films are subsequently taken to describe a nationally specific contagion of Generation X-type social alienation, along with symptoms of postmodernity codified by author Douglas Coupland: depthlessness, disengagement and disillusionment. The revival brought a steady stream of narratives with socially estranged characters who fit the generic mold. Hollywood influence is in the mix, with millennial films like The Matrix, Fight Club and Office Space (all 1999) for example, portraying the malaise and disaffections of rationalized, culturally barren postmodern consumer societies and oppressive corporatism. All represent apocalyptic anxiety in response to epochal change. Although scholars can be reluctant to slap a master narrative onto Singapore, which they believe exhibits a psychically variant alienation, multinational capitalism remains the inescapable referent. Political scientist Kenneth Paul Tan’s book, Cinema and Television in Singapore is an illustrative example. It examines local media in an industrialized, globalized and capitalist city-state. Via the Frankfurt School, Tan considers how film and television carry out political and cultural criticism from within a culture industry housed within a Herbert Marcusean “one dimensional” society.15 Although it describes Singapore’s identity as “postcolonial,” the book never elaborates, concentrating instead on global capitalism. Similarly, Olivia Khoo argues that contemporary Singapore cinema’s fortunes abroad rely on a “global vernacular.”16 She posits that textual ambivalences are necessitated by the multiple demands of global markets, while also replicating a general identity crisis brought about by the unique challenges of global capitalism. Maintaining a coherent national identity gets tough, particularly for a country so heavily reliant on international trade. The government’s ongoing efforts to cultivate a unifying narrative demonstrate that difficulty, which as Rem Koolhaas and Paul Rae argue, results ironically from its own doing. Singapore’s unformed social beginnings made it vital for the government to impose its radical vision from without, causing the country to be haunted “by its own potential impermanence” – discourse reinforced by globalization’s themes of mobility and flow.17 It stands to reason that film critics almost uniformly highlight the city-state’s economic expansion, 15 Tan K. P. , Cinema and Television in Singapore. 16 Khoo, “Slang Images,” 93. 17 Rae, “‘10/12’,” 236; Koolhaas, “Singapore Songlines,” 1011.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

105

industrialization, and rapid modernization, enabled above all by the policies of the People’s Action Party. For instance, Chua and Yeo argue that local filmmakers find the PAP’s omnipresence a “relatively easy target for critique” that is “almost too good to pass up,” while Khoo looks to “coincident private and public initiatives” in the 1990s for explanatory context.18 Beyond film studies, witness the debates swirling around cyberpunk author William Gibson’s 1993 essay for Wired, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty,” which details the island’s ahistoricism and cultural sterility before laying waste to its reputation for eff iciency and rapid development.19 In Singapore’s defense Koolhaas charged Gibson’s critique with Eurocentrism and paternalism for assuming that modernity can only truly be grasped by the west. There is no disagreement between them however, that the cause of those social and cultural symptoms was the city-state’s autocratic, technocratic, and authoritarian style of government.20 One can hardly dispute that PAP policies place outsized pressures on people’s lives. The rapid transition from Third to First World status was made possible by the party’s mix of capitalism steered by authoritarian democracy. It remains clinically determined to compensate for the land’s lack of natural resources through the exertion of social control over its human resource. The state’s footprint on the cultural landscape is wide and deep. Its censorship policies are especially overbearing, which can make films that resist official ideology particularly intriguing. This often leads writers to link textual ambivalences to the contemporaneous interaction of globalization with the PAP’s governmental quirks. Cumulatively, these circumstances justify the periodization of economic and f ilm history. Unfortunately, they make it easy to ignore Singapore’s unique and longstanding history of strategic engagement with colonialism, postcolonialism, in addition to globalization. Not every new Singaporean film refers somehow to its colonial history, but there are good reasons why film historiography should be reconfigured. Singapore’s history and cultural identity did not begin forming in 1959, just as its film production did not commence in the 1990s. Colonialism’s imprint remains on institutions, iconography and space. Film historians should begin to address the totality of the country’s past in order to 18 Khoo, “Slang Images,” 83; Chua and Yeo, “Singapore Cinema,” 117. 19 Gibson, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” 20 Koolhaas, “Singapore Songlines,” 1013, 1031-1033; Phillips, “Singapore Soil,” 176-177, 194 n25. Indeed, Koolhaas is commonly referenced, namely by Khoo and Ho, for his analysis of Singapore’s relationship to global capitalism. See Khoo, “Slang Images,” 87, and Ho, “The Afterimage,” 316.

106 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

comprehend the present. This means being more mindful of colonialism’s hold on the Singaporean imagination even as the country advances in the global economy behind an idiosyncratic government. If its cinema speaks to a specific experience, then we must seek to account for the totality of that experience which entails entanglements past and present. The urban landscape signifies individual alienation that can no doubt speak to the government’s policies, but these images are also fundamentally related to a much earlier encounter, a prior ideological regime. Colonial history and colonial spatiality remain productive contexts for this cinema, even if they are not a fashionable historical paradigm. Journey along Queen Elizabeth Walk, venture into the colonial buildings on the Esplanade, and you discover thoroughly modern interiors behind the glorious facades. The task for film scholars is precisely the reverse, to look beyond obvious significations of modernity, global economics or postmodernity, so as to unearth colonial elements of the nation’s cultural and psychological infrastructure. The imagery in Singaporean cinema should be understood beyond its face value. Because the hermeneutic of local spaces are so multivalent and connotatively rich, visual representations of those spaces ought to be contemplated with greater nuance. The historiography is incomplete otherwise. As it were, that thought project is well under way and led by Tan Pin Pin, arguably the country’s most perceptive and incisive wit making films today.

Finding Singapore in The Impossibilities of Tan Pin Pin As a cinematic triptych, Royston Tan’s Old Places (2010) and its follow-up editions, Old Romances (2012) and Old Friends (2015), express far more than what they seem, emotional byproducts of Singapore’s economic and social transformation. Understood together, the coupling of “place” and “romance” intimates the extent to which space is fetishized, as well as the manner in which historical recollection is necessarily spatial. Although the films are not overly explicit about the political and economic policies behind these cultural symptoms, their director does make his cognizance of those material circumstances clear in interviews. He feels urgency to document these places before their imminent and inevitable disappearance; between the first and second installments, 40% of the structures that appear in Old Places were flattened.21 21 Tay, “Royston Tan.”

Reorienting Film History Spatially

107

Tan Pin Pin projects a more critical voice in both her short form and feature length work. Since the documentary Moving House (2001), her calling card Student Academy Award-winning MFA thesis film at Northwestern University, she has averaged two films every three years. Moving House records a family’s experience of exhuming an ancestral grave for the purpose of transferring the remains to a columbarium. These forced relocations are not uncommon in Singapore, where gravesites can be designated for urban development. Tan gives her audience a crash course in geography and history early on, with an authoritative voiceover summarizing the island’s physical limitations and the government’s successful plans to house its exploding population. In between grainy archival film and footage of present day public housing estates, Tan inserts a black and white newsreel replete with British elocution extolling Singapore’s public housing miracle. The segments politicize Moving House, raising it above mere anecdote or ethnographic record. By editing the newsreader’s sunny optimism into starkly somber events, she generates both visual and tonal counterpoint. And the title – British vernacular for changing one’s residence – links state policy to spatial identity and everyday lives. These creative choices underline her ideological distinction from Royston Tan. The latter’s trilogy enjoys greater mainstream awareness and dovetails neatly into state-sponsored projects to cultivate if not augment national heritage, memory, and myth. In Gaik Cheng Khoo’s estimation, his “popular aesthetics of affect and nostalgia” suit the government’s agenda to develop civic nationalism by combining economics and affect. Khoo argues that urban planning policies systematically exploit knowledge of local emotional geography.22 After beginning his feature career with a hyperkinetic film about teenaged Chinese gangsters, 15 (2003), Tan made 4:30 (2005), a deliberately paced and taciturn attempt to set social alienation in public housing. He then turned sharply toward more accessible fare. It is a far cry from the intense wrangling with government censors over his fledgling efforts. The recent run of sentimental heritage films marks a drastic change not merely because they are state sanctioned projects, they also view historicizing as an unproblematic process. The trilogy treats the camera as an objective witness, and maintains unwavering faith in the positivist historical value of each monument before it. The disembodied voiceovers narrating personal anecdotes do not call attention to subjectivity or contingency. Instead, by retaining the hissy aural signature of an “old” technology, the telephone, the sounds connote authenticity in a straightforward instance of pastiche. (Figure 2.2) 22 See Khoo, “Where the Heart is,” 98, 107.

108 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 2.2 Nostalgia for rural village life, Kampong Buangkok. Old Places, 2010

Courtesy of Chuan Pictures

Compared to Royston Tan’s more naïve approach to his archival project, Tan Pin Pin has a messier view of representation and reality. But in a way, drawing out the differences between them shows that in spite of some significant ideological and philosophical disparities, the two share a mighty interest in space and place. To wit, despite the dissimilarity between one director’s blissful romanticism and the other’s ennui, their films are essentially spatial in one form or another, and indelibly Singaporean as such. Cartography is an endemic symptom, but not the only manifestation. Singapore’s fetish for urban redevelopment and territorial transformation would explain why these are important concerns within the national psyche, and hence why the recuperative impulse generates remembrances of bygone places and former spaces. But Tan Pin Pin poses sharper and far more searching inquiries of the accepted public narrative. Deliberately, thoughtfully, she chips away at the varnish on Singapore’s history as well as its stereotype as a marvel of immaculate cleanliness and efficiency. The writing to date about her films tends to fixate on her apparent fondness for marginalized subjects – the banished, the poor, the underprivileged, vagabonds who refuse to pursue rational accumulation, even the suspiciously deranged – and cite this predilection as evidence of her subversive political sensibility.23 The most 23 See Watson, “Aspirational City,” 543-558; Lilian Chee, “Chasing Inuka,” 60; Tan K. P. “Alternative Visions in Neoliberal Singapore,” 147-167; Tan K. P. , Cinema and Television in Singapore, 262.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

109

obvious foci are the audio-ethnographic Singapore GaGa and the interviews with political exiles in To Singapore with Love. These are works eminently readable as countercultural and politically critical. But even the whimsical short, Yangtze Scribbler (2012) manages to inscribe critique. Local visual artist Debbie Ding narrates a personal account of discovering a curious collection of graphical and numerical graffiti throughout a dingy stairwell in a Chinatown shopping center whose most notorious tenant, the now defunct Yangtze cinema, was known as a popular haunt for the geriatric male set drawn to the theater’s profitable slate of soft core pornography. (Figure 2.3) Scored with experimental artist Bani Haykal’s atonal electric guitar, the quirkiness of Ding’s intrepid expedition derives initially from Yangtze’s unseemly reputation, then from the mysterious hand behind the unruly marker. Tan metaphorically tracks along the frayed sutures of an over-managed social fabric, stopping at interrupted seams where humanity wriggles free from media control and interpellated discipline. The anonymous star of Yangtze Scribbler joins the principle characters in another short, The Impossibility of Knowing (2010), a geographic catalog of death and trauma. An address near the bottom of the screen introduces each of the film’s seven chapters. The titles pinpoint locations: an abandoned house where an unidentified corpse was found on a toilet floor, a stretch of highway where a deer was killed in traffic, the condominium complex where a teenager committed suicide by jumping from his bedroom window, a burned out mosque that a young runaway accidentally set ablaze, a storm canal where a schoolgirl drowned, a public housing block where a lesbian couple leapt to their deaths, and the Nicoll Highway MRT station where a tunnel collapse claimed the life of a heroic foreman. (Figure 2.4) Tan’s collage of desolate death sites were motivated by her thoughts on whether “the video camera can capture the aura of a space that has experienced trauma.”24 She leaves the question open. In a way, the lead character of her films is anonymity itself, the unknowns that transcend narrative. In that vein, her choice of the word “aura” indicates that what she considers most pressing is not the camera’s capacity to record. Rather, following Walter Benjamin’s discussion of historicity, contingency, and aura, her overarching concern pertains to whether history is knowable.25 In comparison, Royston Tan’s Old Places is utterly confident in itself as a historical document, not self-conscious in the least about how its formal devices assemble notions of the past. 24 Tan P. P., The Impossibility of Knowing. 25 See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”

110 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 2.3 Graffiti of unknown origin. Yangtze Scribbler, 2012

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

Figure 2.4 Site of a child’s drowning. The Impossibility of Knowing, 2010

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

Tan Pin Pin does not accept such a premise. In 9th August (2006), she flashes backwards and forwards across 40 years of National Day Parades. These annual spectacles commemorate statehood with mass performances and processions before government leaders and dignitaries. Tan’s short film clumps each edition’s requisite portions together: cultural processions,

Reorienting Film History Spatially

111

mass calisthenics, military displays, ceremonial introductions, and so on. The montage spotlights generic tedium and programmatic repetition in the forced ritual, down to specific salutes and gestures. Watson considers the video a parodic counterpoint to the state’s crafted narrative, “an ironic look at the militarized, productivist and multiculturalist logic that was successfully deployed by the Singaporean state.”26 The director also nurtures suspicion of historical narratives in a general sense. “The impossibility of knowing” is for Tan, not merely the title of a single work but a structural theme. Whereas Royston Tan tacitly reassures us that history will be safe so long as his camera can reach the scene in time, Tan Pin Pin doubts the ability of any witness to secure those guarantees. In The Impossibility of Knowing, she employs a voiceover that dictates news stories about the tragedies in an indifferent tone. Ironically, adding this reportage to the video footage brings viewers barely closer to a complete understanding of what happened. In some instances, the woefully deficient news coverage executed solely by-the-numbers compounds journalistic failure. Where the everyman recordings in Royston Tan’s “Old Places trilogy” intend to animate the scenes with intimacy and authenticity, witnessing exacerbates uncertainty for Tan Pin Pin. The strategic differences between these two filmmakers call back to recent theories of documentary by Hito Steyerl and Erika Balsom, who have written complementarily about bifurcated modes of documentary in recent non-fiction film practice. Steyerl argues that the positions taken by “proponents of realism and constructivists” come from long-standing disputes over “belief and incredulity, between trust and distrust, hope and disillusionment.” But the current historical moment of globalization, in which economic precarity and social anxiety are magnified by hypermediated culture, dislodges our faith in what used to be “authoritative truth procedures.” Steyerl sees this as progress because subjectivity if not propaganda have in the past been frequently passed off as objective truth. The more immediate and realist an image is these days, the further it seems to get from the truth. As a result, modern documentaries take on greater abstraction at the expense of objective realism.27 Balsom too identifies a decline in naturalism and positivist reliance on observational vision, but warns that postmodern cynicism about truth may lead us to prematurely dismiss our shared investments in reality that can still be acknowledged as “chaotic and unmasterable.” In doing so, she writes favorably about films that 26 Watson, “Aspirational City,” 547. 27 Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty.”

112 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

“assert a bond to reality while also marking limits that are at once visual and epistemological.” Steyerl and Balsom come together in agreement though, that Western colonialism and traditional hierarchies of knowledge have exploited the epistemic authority of conventional documentary realism. Immediacy and transparency can therefore be a political illusion, yet Balsom is emphatic in reaffirming her faith in reality, trust in viewers, and reliance on “the power of cinema as window.”28 The currency of these ideas helps to position Tan Pin Pin’s films within local cinema, and suffuses these readings. With The Impossibility of Knowing and the feature length Invisible City (2007), she traces the limits of epistemology and empiricism. The latter text engages history through the mediations of human subjects, because spaces do not speak for themselves. Tan interviews an amateur filmmaker, a photographer, journalists, and archaeologists – subjects who share the work of documenting and archiving Singapore’s vanishing landscapes and receding histories. Three of her interviewees are infirmed, facing mortality before Tan’s unyielding camera. She shows us the eyes of an old woman darting around the room as her husband off screen recounts their days resisting the Japanese occupation. The aged hands of British expatriate Marjorie Doggett hold up a book featuring her famous local photographs of old buildings; on the soundtrack she whispers her memories through labored breathing. Finally, amateur photographer Ivan Polunin enthusiastically discusses his rare trove of 16mm footage of mid-20th century Singapore. At one point the effects of recent brain surgery catch up to him, and so we wait through painful pauses as he struggles to remember: “Now funnily enough,” he begins, “that turns out to be the most valuable stuff of all from the … from the … from the … anyway …” Later on, Tan replicates Polunin’s incapacity by giving us a black screen while he speaks alongside a projector’s whir. By withholding the image, she foregrounds epistemological contingency. We too are vulnerable victims to time, physical deterioration, and mnemonic imperfection. Tan’s darkened segments confuse, jar, and frustrate. And when Polunin shows where he stores his films, he exacerbates that anxiety. His tarnished cans, untended clutter, and haphazard filing system underscore the reliance of those reels and their content on Polunin’s presence. Can the footage outlive him in any sort of meaningful way? The history housed within is precarious. Urban studies scholar Joanne Leow comes away from these scenes in agreement that Tan doubts the integrity of memory and history. However, she locates the site of skepticism in vessels of history, be they memories, film 28 Balsom, “The Reality-Based Community.”

Reorienting Film History Spatially

113

reels, or other media forms; they are all imperfect records.29 It is a reasonable conclusion to make about Tan’s body of work, in which two further examples come to mind. In 9th August, the collage reveals how National Day Parade broadcasts adopt a highly regimented collection of shot angles. The video thus remarks on how historical narratives are constructed, staged, and presented – subjective and inaccurate. In another experimental short, she uses the graphical simplicity of Thesaurus (2012) to belie conceptual heft. The six-minute-long video consists of a computer animated word tree springing from “remember”: black sans serif font against a white background. As sets and subsets of synonyms and connotations grow denser, the clusters grow and collapse, swerving to one direction then another in unpredictable patterns and progressions. The graphic grows into a virtual etymological organism, an unwieldy assembly of linked constellations swiveling about with variable, migratory centers of gravity. It promptly becomes evident that the individual words subtended by each link are less crucial than the movements of the network as a whole. Specifically, the absence of logic in their maneuvers is a metaphor for how arbitrary and capricious language can be. Tan’s reservations set the table for an epistemological debate that reaches beyond the question of how we observe and remember. One cannot even be certain that she has confidence in the referent to begin with. Although architectural historian Lilian Chee believes that “Tan’s persistent object of inquiry is ‘Singapore,’ a site as simultaneously opaque and unknowable as it is banal and predictable,” one suspects that Chee the geographer cannot foreclose on a Singapore that remains real, normally unseen but ultimately discoverable.30 Critics recognize Tan’s unrelenting national project of discovery, and tend to assume that she will find “Singapore,” but should they? Her output continually pronounces its elusiveness, which we can interpret differently. Where Gibson diagnoses Singapore as postmodern and hyperreal, one could also say Singapore is absent because the place is a perpetually transforming urban “Etch-a-Sketch.” Tan’s films recapitulate that ocular scan of the world map where the Singaporean outcome is perpetual futility. The Welsh have a word, “hiraeth,” which refers to the longing or nostalgia for a home to which one cannot return, perhaps one that never even existed. Do not equate Singapore with Wales, even though the English ear may reckon Singlish and Welsh equally impenetrable. The point is, Tan may not be the only artist with an uncanny knack of finding a path back to realms of space 29 Leow, “The Future of Nostalgia,” 120, 123. 30 Chee,“Chasing Inuka,” 59.

114 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

and place, but her films very adeptly intuit what the Welsh intone by that term. In a way, her cinematic practice validates both Steyerl and Balsom, by having uncertainty and contingency lead to the unique truths within Singapore’s reality. The films stake a more intriguing claim however, that in this case, the specific truth of Singaporean identity is defined by that very irony. “Singapore” is not a stable truth, nor is it an unstable truth. Rather, the truth is instability, uncertainty, or precarity itself. By foregrounding epistemological contingency and uncertainty, Tan makes films that perform local identity. It is something not simply represented or shown, but experienced. Her body of work is heuristically complex, essayistic rather than experimental. Its epistemological prevarications make her voice singularly unique among local filmmakers. The texts are open, theoretically engaged, and as a whole they transcend the geographical, anthropological, archival, or observational. In Chee’s view, “there is an intensity of space from within which Tan’s subject matter unfolds,” and although “space is not the point of her films […] her use of space, in its subtle and tangential way, is inseparable from the meanings of her films.”31 Chee alludes to the depth and texture that many recognize in Tan’s corpus, and indeed a dialectic weaved into the fabric of the films, one akin to the contradictory longing for a place that never existed, exceedingly well illustrated in what Tan calls her “cartographical” film, 80km/h (2003). Viewers may disagree with the director for whom the single-shot video’s “duration is its message.”32 Its tedious monotony, in a mostly unchanging gaze out the passenger side window for 38 minutes as a car travels from coast to coast, certainly heightens both awareness of time passing, as well as the relief of reaching the destination. For Watson, Tan exploits the repetition of one building after another whizzing behind the concrete barricade, to encourage recognition of subtle variations produced within the pattern. The constant motion causes the structures to merge, reproducing “the passage of the ideal object Singapore’s built environment has been designed for: the content-less, subject-less flow between the international airport at one end of the island and the bridge to peninsular Malaysia on the other.” Watson concludes with a point about state control, that the alienating flow through Singapore’s built banality replicates an experience that is “not one of freedom but of prescribed speed and guided movement.” Indeed, the camera’s blanket refusal to settle our gaze reflects the country’s own experience of urban renewal and breakneck development. Watson extrapolates from 31 Chee, “Chasing Inuka,” 68, 71. 32 Tan P. P. , “80km/h.”

Reorienting Film History Spatially

115

temporality and arrives naturally at a discussion of space; “80km/h is an attempt to visualize the essence of a place that has been defined, above all, by the rationalization of space.”33 Watson may be on to something here. The title denotes a unit of speed, mathematically speaking a derivative of distance, a measure in space. It furnishes a numerical value in kilometers per hour. Through monotony the filmmaker nurses our obsession with elapsed time, and entices the audience to perform a simple mathematical operation to decipher distance. Title X Runtime = Distance. Tan’s visual composition locks them securely in a passive perspective, looking out a left passenger window. At the video’s halfway point, the car’s westward trajectory means we are looking south – yes, towards the colonial city center and the port. From that passenger’s seat, Tan’s lateral view begs consideration of the alternative: Peering out the front or rear windshield would offer the more recognizable single-point image where the lines and barriers of the road along with the vehicles of fellow travellers would converge in the distant horizon. If we recall Jean-Louis Baudry’s theoretical proposition that the Renaissance perspective replicates the sensation and faculties of a transcendental subject, the decision to point the camera out the left becomes an implicit rendering of passivity and loss of control.34 Tan makes it impossible to apprehend 80km/h as a complete accounting of space without also minding some attendant degree of alienation. Therefore, the video applies a pair of oppositional forces that define the director’s relationship to her homeland: attraction and distance, fascination and estrangement, longing and rejection. To borrow one of her titles, she sets out to “know” but finds the task “impossible.” Do we not hear this in the lonely busker’s chorus of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” at the start of Singapore GaGa? Why should I keep loving you When I know that you’re not true? And why should I call your name When you’re the blame For making me blue.

Perhaps 80km/h allegorizes a similar state of equilibrium between push and pull; the landscape whooshes by, approximating a hover just above ground, 33 Watson, “Aspirational City,” 553-554. 34 Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” 39-47.

116 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

asymptotically close but never in contact. The result of the video’s cartographic project encapsulates Tan’s futile endeavors to discover “Singapore” over the years, searches all destined to end in vain. Is it any surprise then, that even To Singapore with Love – her most unambiguously patriotic film to date, in which political exiles agonize and plead for right of return – was banned from public exhibition?35 We can hardly imagine another eventuality. We could take this conflict to be a national condition, a conundrum of citizenship. But what if we reverse the logic? That is to say, are attempts to impose distance conversely also thwarted by the undeniable spatial preoccupation in the Singaporean imagination? Are the social, political, and psychic investments in space so thorough that it can never be effectively pushed away? Momentarily, the question will be posed of narrative fiction films important to the revival era. Many of them adopt social alienation as a common refrain. The films’ remonstrations of capitalism, state power, unrelenting pressures to conform, or countless ventures in social or geographic engineering, ring loudly in a chorus of social criticism. They also derive a stylistic vocabulary from the European New Waves. The visual language of Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Wim Wenders, to mention a few, are evident inspirations. Specifically, their recognizable iterations of what Gilles Deleuze describes as the time-image are appropriated for the Singaporean milieu, where images of subjects disconnected from their environment signify dehumanization, alienation, social disintegration, and hopelessness, otherwise symptoms of modernity’s failure. But this is neither France nor Germany nor Italy, socially, psychically, or in particular, geographically. Some differences are enough to disrupt its films’ political messaging. For film criticism, the standard procedure for dealing with situations such as this – a developing cinema adopting Western film conventions, a former colony no less – entails delving into questions of cultural authenticity and subaltern agency. Scholarship on contemporary Singapore cinema adopts precisely this tact.36 It reconnects with theoretical and political debates in postcolonial and subaltern studies represented again by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”37 Spivak famously leads us to question whether say, films can avoid underwriting the ideological and economic interests of Anglo-American institutions of commercial 35 I raise To Singapore with Love in this instance for effect as much as for proof. A more detailed study in the context of local politics and censorship policy, see Khoo, “On the Banning of a Film.” 36 See for example, Khoo, “Slang Images,” and Ho, “The Afterimage.” 37 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Reorienting Film History Spatially

117

and art cinema. Should we think that Perth for instance, simply furthers Hollywood hegemony with its stylistic nods to Taxi Driver? Or can this subaltern speak in an authentic voice for its own independent interests? The condition of subaltern autonomy is the driving question in Ho’s analysis of contemporary Singapore cinema, which he believes contains deep insecurity – a “postcolonial anxiety” – over using a foreign medium. The world cinema canon, he argues, imposes a psychological burden on the local artist in that “cinematic influence must be grasped as just such a form of pressure, equally fraught with anxiety, for what is at stake is the possibility of artistic ‘originality’.”38 For good measure, Ho ropes in Homi Bhabha’s concept of subversive mimicry as well.39 But these films do not use art cinema conventions ironically, not in the least. We would be hard pressed to detect any semblance of what Bhabha considers an intention to alienate “the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as an ‘inappropriate’ colonial subjects.”40 We therefore need another explanation for Singapore cinema. That prompts a turn towards Deleuze’s Cinema books insofar as they facilitate thinking through Singapore’s identity and its cinema’s spatial fixations. The process enables a locally reconfigured postcolonial criticism. A Deleuzean reading turns up significant meanings in the emblematic time-images of recent Singapore cinema. The filmmakers are undoubtedly trying to highlight severe debilitations brought on by Late Capitalism, exacerbated no doubt by how the economic ideology is implemented by an authoritarian state: disorientation, feeling unmoored in space, untethered from time. But Deleuze cannot explain everything. Those limits have to do with Singapore’s innately spatial character, inherited from a socioeconomic history passed down from the island’s geopolitical position as a colony. The films find themselves caught between local postcolonial and global Late Capitalist epistemes, and straining against Deleuze’s categorical distinction between movement-image and time-image. To reconcile that tension the spatial cinema of Tan Pin Pin formulates a useful but untraditional and anti-essentialist notion of cultural identity and national character. It helps untangle the contradiction within Singapore’s cinematic imagination, a task that winds its way in the final section of this chapter through Deleuze’s ruminations on cinema, history, and crystal-images. 38 Ho, “The Afterimage,” 311. 39 Ho mentions Bhabha’s essay in a footnote, but in so doing he shunts the political component of mimicry as an instrument against colonial authority, away from the main debate stage. 40 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 129.

118 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

The Vexed Images of Singapore’s New Wave After the final credits roll at the conclusion of Invisible City, Tan returns to a party of archaeologists whom she has followed during the f ilm. A close-up observes one of them using a metal tool to remove hardened earth from an artifact. We also see others cataloguing their finds. They record measurements, snap photographs, and wipe off residue. In the last shot, an archaeologist holds up a familiar item, a soft drink bottle. The scientist dictates aloud to his partner the words marked on the glass. “Y-E-O-H-I-AP-S-E-N-G” spells out the name of a well-known local beverage company. The red paint on the neck of its iconic glass bottles has worn down to a translucent band, but the container’s identity is unmistakable. It is the second time a soft drink bottle appears in Invisible City. During an earlier segment, team leader Lim Chen Sian explains to us the historical value of his work. “Some guy drank that Coke, dumped it here along with that cigarette, so what were they doing back in 1956?” The question from the cherubic and earnest Lim evokes the flattened nature of Singapore’s history – its eternal present – a cruel joke on a society so ahistorical as to consider 1956 a time in the distant past. When Tan repeats the gag with the “Yeo’s” bottle, the redundancy makes a distinct point that the audience cannot ignore. By adopting the scene as epilogue, she also designates it as commentary, as if whispering sideways for native ears. And by reciting a similar moment twice she highlights its variation. When the local archaeologists process an artifact that must be utterly familiar to them using such measured protocols, so methodically, the moment takes on an air of incredulity. The scene parodies the application of anthropological praxis to local conditions. To be clear, the joke is not on archaeology or the local artifacts. Something else is amiss, the uneasy attempt to install distance, one that recapitulates a disjuncture within contemporary Singapore cinema. The rejuvenated production scene in the late 1990s spawned a cohort of landmark films whose festival achievements eased the path for others that followed. As trailblazers, their cinematographic norms persisted through the films’ influence on the following generation of filmmakers. These artists benefit increasingly from state support and the desire of an aspiring world city to breed a creative class better qualified to exploit “world class” infrastructure, and whose activities promise economic returns. 41 Decades earlier, that kind of instrumentalist thinking had devalued the arts and 41 See Kong, “Ambitions of a Global City.”

Reorienting Film History Spatially

119

cemented the fate of the “golden age,” before a millennial rethink led officials to change course. New tax incentives encouraged private investment, and the government rolled out plans in the mid-2000s to transform Singapore into a “global media city,” or where cinema is concerned, “a regional hub for international film production and distribution with state of the art media production and postproduction facilities.” Young filmmakers coming of age during this period were nurtured by fresh opportunities for education, training, and financing. These included industry-oriented grant schemes for overseas training, and a niche for film studies on university curricula. The moves complemented previous initiatives such as the Singapore International Film Festival launched in 1987, and the opening of Substation, an alternative (read: cosmopolitan) art space, in 1991. 42 The strategy behind these cultural and economic bets harkens back to a familiar theme. It is embedded within the island identity whereby distinction and uniqueness are ironically inextricable from foreign participation. Recall the preceding chapter’s explanation of how the contradiction circulates symbolically in aerial maps; compare it to the explicit wording in this frequently cited passage from a ministerial speech by George Yeo, then of the Ministry of Information and the Arts. Nothing is more inimical to the development of the arts than a false nationalism which tries to protect a market under the guise of safeguarding some misconceived national essence. We offer Singapore as a venue and as a stage for artists and those who enjoy the Arts from all over the world. 43

The world is not only a welcome source of influence and invention; it is also a market for local production. The push for filmmaking infrastructure, talent, and expertise comes with recognition that the domestic market is not big enough to generate a return on a capital-intensive investment such as film production. 44 In that sociopolitical climate, these hard and soft resources yielded a specific fruit: foreign production practices and stylistic norms in local 42 Tan, Lee, and Aw, “Contemporary Singapore Filmmaking.” 43 Yeo, “Promoting the Arts,” 114. 44 See Tan et al, “Contemporary Singapore Filmmaking,” and Khoo, “Slang Images,” 81-82. For a specific case study of The Maid (2005), a successful international co-production that mixed local, Hollywood, and New Wave Asian horror conventions, see Aquilia, “Westernizing Southeast Asian Cinema.”

120 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

cinema. In Olivia Khoo’s view, artists were prone to navigate both domestic and foreign demands. Filmmakers work to produce a vision or version of the local that is also able to engage the internal audiences the country is so keen to capture […] One way of regarding the aesthetic choices made by local filmmakers forced to negotiate competing pressures upon them – to be “local” and yet enticingly “foreign” (and therefore exportable).

They made “aesthetic choices that at the same time manufacture a brand of foreignness assimilable and ‘recognizable’ by outside audiences.”45 The hegemony of commercial filmmaking is by itself not extraordinary or unique, neither is the outsized weight of Western film festival committees and juries. But something particular unfolds in the revival films that broke through in the late nineties: a distinctive array of shots designed to express a defined message within the category of international art cinema. They juxtapose isolated subjects with their urban environment, depicting an oppressive modernity as inhuman as it is inhumane. Collectively, these films critique all that Singapore is renowned for, because rapid development came at a social and profoundly personal cost. The precise causes of their psychological afflictions – be they modernity, postmodernity, the structural inequalities of capitalism, the emptiness of Late Capitalism, being left behind by an unforgiving meritocracy, or feeling suffocated by an authoritarian state – are relevant to this discussion but so is the general state of alienation projected on screen. In one of the most literate and persuasive studies of Singapore cinema’s revival era, Wee trains his attention on the public housing milieu. In his estimation, the buildings connote class, traditional cultures, and social immobility. The socioeconomically and geographically mobile, that is to say, the wealthier cosmopolitan classes, live in single-family houses and possess the resources for movement and travel. Wee argues that these films problematize the “state’s quasi-authoritarian late modernity” with a visual critique that evinces a lower class longing for a “thematized break” from that development project. 46 Tellingly, Wee describes the urban landscape emblematized by coercive images of public housing spaces as “dystopic,” dominated by “repetitive sameness,” and “limited.” He suggests in other words that its denizens are geographically, economically, and socially 45 Khoo, “Slang Images,” 82-83. 46 Wee, “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape,” 984-985, 1002.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

121

immobile. The experiences of these alienated inhabitants are subjectively fragmented, “empty,” “static,” isolated, and eternal – “a fait accompli” with “no way out.”47 Although Wee’s analytical acuity favors narrative over image, the verbiage is uncanny in recapitulating Deleuze’s visual formulation of the time-image. Articulated continually throughout Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 as “purely optical or sound situations,” or in regard to “any-space-whatevers,” the time-image expresses disconnection, stasis, vacuity, immobility, and the loss of physical autonomy. Because Deleuzean analysis identifies the time-image as an episteme that appears after World War II, it shifts the frame of analysis and alters the historical narrative for contemporary Singapore cinema. In Deleuze’s time-images, we encounter vacant spaces, disconnected and anonymous locations. (Figure 2.5) Should they appear, human subjects cut isolated and melancholy figures with severed sensory-motor links. They are alienated from their surroundings and powerless to act on their desires or react to the world they occupy. (Figure 2.6) The pure space in a time-image does not form continuities with spaces in other shots; it is instead an optical artifact existing for its own sake. Deleuze holds up the movement-image as a baseline for contrast, equating it essentially with what he discerns in classical Hollywood, in which narratives roll forward, thrust by the actions of characters that enjoy strong “sensory-motor” links and the benefit of causality. Against that, the time-image reflects impeded subjectivities of people unable to perceive directly and react accordingly – “the being who is absent from the world as much as from himself.”48 Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng’s Eating Air (1999) recapitulates this binary with its unnamed protagonist, “Ah Boy.” Cast aside by the school system and with no home life to speak of, the unsophisticated teen whiles away his days riding his motorcycle, at video game arcades, and gathering with equally errant friends on public housing rooftops. Ah Boy’s bravado belies his deficit in street smarts, which result in a comedic series of humiliations. Our hapless anti-hero compensates with fantasies plucked straight from kungfu f ilms and television shows, during which he can envisage what it is like to have sensory-motor abilities. These impressionist sequences where he imagines triumphs over adversaries with his physical prowess and indomitable martial arts, accentuate his impotence in real 47 Wee, “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape,” 985-986, 988-989, 990, 992, 998. Remarkably similar language can be found in Lim, “Counterperformance,” Sa’at, “Hinterland, Heartland, Home,” and Chua and Yeo, “Singapore Cinema,” 119. 48 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 9.

122 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 2.5 Vacant, disconnected, anonymous public housing exteriors. 12 Storeys, 1997

Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films

Figure 2.6 A pathetic introvert silhouetted against the urban expanse. Be With Me, 2005

Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films

Reorienting Film History Spatially

123

life. There is a similar scenario in Perth in which the tormented Harry Lee vicariously visualizes himself pummeling a rude bus driver in retaliation for a personal slight. Where Perth recites Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Eating Air opens and closes with irresistible references to Godard’s Breathless (1960). The cigarette dangling off the side of Ah Boy’s mouth in the opening shots recalls Jean-Paul Belmondo’s homage to Humphrey Bogart. Eating Air closes with a violent climax in an underground expressway. The tunnel is a quintessential any-space-whatever, an anonymous, non-descript space of transit and impermanence. Ah Boy’s equally nameless love interest “Ah Girl” walks away from his body as Jean Seberg’s Patricia does in Breathless, in a thoroughly ambiguous close-up. The European New Waves use time-images as these films do, to indict modernity by spotlighting the individual costs extracted from humans gripped by emotional and mental crisis. Deleuze conceives pure space and pure time as instruments equipped with a critical edge, capable of breaking down modernity and hegemonic discourse. In everyday banality, the action-image and even the movement-image tend to disappear in favour of pure optical situations, but these reveal connections of a new type, which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with time and thought.49

The art film’s propensity for humanist, counter-ideological messaging sits comfortably in this scheme of things. However, emancipation requires confrontation and internal grappling with the throes of anguish. Deleuze attempts to capture this process with stuttering sentences: A purely optical and sound situation does not extend into action, any more than it is induced by an action. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable.50

This critical application of the time-image translates easily from the stylized visuals of recent Singaporean cinema. Again and again, we see desolate shots of concrete, either heavily stained or pristinely painted. Vacant. Disconnected. Graphical shapes. And repeated patterns. They dominate, seared onto our retinas with sharp lines and the aid of bright fluorescent tubes. (Figure 2.7) A second variety of shots, of solitary human subjects, hold the organic 49 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 17. 50 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 18.

124 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 2.7 Deleuze’s purely optical situation; fluorescent bulbs highlight the geometric repetition of a public housing block at night. 12 Storeys, 1997

Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films

body against inorganic structures. In extreme long shots, these persons are engulfed by public housing blocks that diminish mere bodies. Under the overbearing, towering structures in angular configurations, the lone subjects stand stranded and diminished, powerless in anonymous backdrops. They traipse with downcast eyes or behind infinite gazes out towards nowhere, through anti-social, impersonal, and melancholic spaces, prisons of silent suffering, vast architectural symbols of state power and conformism. The Singaporean camera is particularly fond of one image: deep focus compositions of dead men walking – almost floating – down empty corridors, where regularly spaced columns and beams fashion a mise en abyme of sorts. The abysmal depth of infinite sadness evoked here doubles as the cinematic symbol for vertigo. (Figures 2.8 and 2.9) But these somnambulant figures suffer far graver maladies. Among the directors from the revival era, Eric Khoo was most willing to fully explore the macabre consequences of severe psychotic breaks. The dull-witted title character in his breakout festival hit Mee Pok Man (1995) is a noodle seller in a seedy neighborhood, who attempts to nurse a prostitute named Bunny back to health after she falls victim to a hit-and-run. Without his deceased father, the nameless character clings only barely to reality. By the end of the film, he tumbles into necrophilia in continuing to care for Bunny even after she dies in his flat. Khoo followed up Mee Pok Man with what became Singapore’s first

Reorienting Film History Spatially

125

representative at the Cannes Film Festival, 12 Storeys (1997). The parallel narrative cuts between the dysfunctional occupants of 4 units in a public housing block. One of them is an overprotective older brother, Meng, whose obsessive attempts to control his pleasure-seeking teenaged sister, Trixie, is revealed to come from incestuous desire. Their neighbor San-San is a prototypically affectless wanderer, an overweight social outcast subjected to the incessantly cruel Cantonese harangues of a late mother who, even in death, manages to torture her daughter through continual traumatic flashbacks. At an early juncture, San-San despondently lifts a leg over a top floor parapet but hesitates when she catches a young man staring impassively at her. She steps back and returns home, leaving us to see the man leap off the ledge himself soon after. Writing on the New Wave, Deleuze highlighted mental breakdowns and unconscious eruptions: “amnesia, hypnosis, hallucination, madness, the vision of the dying, and especially nightmare and dream.”51 Although Khoo seems to have been the only director to carry alienation to its logical conclusion, many other films undeniably attune us to their characters’ death wish, having also painted the contours of private prisons with no way out. Even Be With Me, Khoo’s drastically more hopeful, heartwarming third feature remains mired somewhat. In 2005, his stature was by then large enough to make Be With Me the opening film at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. One of its parallel narratives features an introverted security guard paralyzed by social anxiety disorder, unable to do anything other than silently stalk the woman of his dreams at a distance. He finally gathers the courage to pen a love letter but is struck dead on his way to delivering it by a character from an adjacent plotline. A teenaged girl discovers her girlfriend’s relationship with a boy, and jumps off a building in despair just as the security guard walks past. The two shattered bodies on the ground transcend coincidence. The chance collision is less poetic as much as it is inevitable. Recall the forlorn lesbian lovers memorialized in The Impossibility of Knowing. Eating Air jokes about the phenomenon of suicide jumping at the expense of a fresh body discovered on the pavement at the foot of a public housing block. Ah Boy and his friends peer down at the scene from their perch atop a nearby roof. (Figure 2.10) One of them has heard that the victim died after becoming ensnared in a drug dealer’s beef, but not before his friend asks, “another one who thought he was Superman?” Another one. In both Khoo’s 12 Storeys and Royston Tan’s 15, such gravitational deaths are treated as farce too. Do people 51 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 55.

126 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 2.8 A somnambulant figure against a simulated mise-en-abyme. 12 Storeys, 1997

Courtesy of Zhao Wei Films

Figure 2.9 The same vertiginous shot in a documentary film

Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014

Reorienting Film History Spatially

127

Figure 2.10 A macabre joke on the frequency of suicide jumps. Eating Air, 1999

Courtesy of Boku Films

in Singapore kill themselves in any other way? On screen, hardly. Perhaps a better question would be whether another method could be more fitting. What else would they use besides the land? They acquire an aerial view and hurtle towards the red dot, becoming a red dot themselves on the terrain in the quickest and most direct way possible. This is the central irony. To leave Singapore, they must get closer. Alienation from the place ultimately leads to one eventuality, being one with it. This spatial investment freights new wave films of the revival with a paradox generated by the inexorable geographical, cartographical, and topographical valences of Singapore’s identity. It is a conspicuous refrain. Khoo reveals his own emotional stakes in reflecting on the locations for Mee Pok Man. I am glad that I shot it in Geylang (the red light district of Singapore), because a lot of the areas and places where we shot have been demolished since. If you look at the landscape of Geylang, where the prostitutes are, it has completely changed. It looks like Disneyland now, compared to what it used to be like. I wanted to capture that moment.52

Khoo goes on to recount his personal history in that interview. He alludes to the fact that structures in Tiong Bahru, the neighborhood where he grew 52 Baumgärtel, “‘I Do Not Have Anything Against Commercial Films’,” 219.

128 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

up, were designated for conservation. “It is beautiful there, all the houses there are in this Art Deco style. That whole era is preserved. They can’t tear it down anymore. It is a place old and untouched.”53 These sensitivities disrupt the idea of “any-space-whatever.” Khoo’s attunement feels like a countercurrent against the attempt to distantiate. One cannot help but notice Wee’s instinctive spatial acuity too. Citing Goh Poh Seng’s If We Dream Too Long (1972) as a literary precedent to contemporary films in which public housing slabs take on simplistic, rigid repetition that estranges the novel’s protagonist from modernization, the critic writes that a character in the novel, “Kwang Meng lives in a relatively early HDB-built estate, one actually near the noodle seller’s home in Khoo’s Mee Pok Man.”54 Wee, like everyone, draws maps it seems. Understanding Singapore cinema spatially through time-images bypasses the natural temptation to assume that borrowed aesthetics denote “foreignness” or “otherness.” That is the tendency of the critical reception of the revival era films, in which “foreignness” and “otherness” are operative terms premised on ideas of cultural authenticity and contamination.55 There, the issue is whether the colonizer’s film language has imposed hegemonic constraints on subaltern voices. With Deleuzean categories and their prewar/ postwar timeline however, it is possible to rethink local cinema’s relationship to foreign films because Deleuze makes foreignness a moot point, due to the fact that he comprehends history and film history differently. There are of course historical and geographical factors in all this, running through cinema, bringing it into relation with other arts, subjecting it to influences and allowing it to exert them. There’s a whole history. But this history of images doesn’t seem to me to be developmental. I think all images combine the same elements, the same signs, differently. But not just any combination’s possible at just any moment: a particular element can only be developed given certain conditions, without which it will remain atrophied, or secondary. So there are different levels of development, each of them perfectly coherent, rather than lines of descent or filiation. That’s why one should talk of natural history rather than historical history.56 53 Baumgärtel, “I Do Not Have Anything Against Commercial Films,” 221. 54 Wee, “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape,” 986. “HDB” refers to the Housing Development Board, the statutory body in charge of Singapore’s public housing. 55 See Khoo, “Slang Images” and Ho, “The Afterimage.” 56 Deleuze, Negotiations, 49.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

129

Film images thus do not evolve on an independent and linear path, experiencing course changes precipitated externally by “historical history” as it were. Deleuze submits the term “natural history” instead, in which case both experience “universal” conditions.57 He outlines a schema where “historical and geographical factors” encourage or otherwise permit some of the image’s intrinsic properties to become visible, akin to how environmental stresses lead to natural selection and genetic variation.58 Deleuze defines “image” rather openly as well, as a historical snapshot as well as a cinematographic artifact. Jacques Rancière helps to clarify the point: “Images, properly speaking, are the things of the world. It follows logically from this that cinema is not the name of an art: it is the name of the world.”59 The Cinema books are therefore not a history of cinema, but instead a history of the image, or otherwise a philosophy through cinema. To the practice of film criticism, they provide impetus to historicize cinema and general history together as mutual interlocutors on one trajectory. Nevertheless, does the resilient bond between Singaporean subjects and space gum up those analytical conclusions? What of this context where space – public housing spaces in particular – is a foundational, structuring part of local epistemology and national imagination? What of subjects for whom space is an ineluctable part of identity? Understood another way, these spaces are never completely anonymous, unspecific, or disconnected. The Singaporean subject is never completely alienated from them, not merely because they recognize locations acutely, but because they remain inescapably invested. In asking whether this makes the time-image hermeneutically obsolete, we circle back to the type of questions that those writing about Singapore’s revival cinema have posed in the first place, about whether Western knowledge (Deleuze and the time-image) is truly applicable in this context. To paraphrase Ho, is this approach akin to stammering in a foreign tongue? Some critics of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 call its conclusions Eurocentric. As an advocate, David Martin-Jones is inclined to afford their author benefit of the doubt, but he acknowledges that the Frenchman makes broad suppositions based on a restrictive selection of films. And by taking World War II as a historical lynchpin, Deleuze essentially centers his argument in Europe. 57 See the word inscribed repeatedly in Deleuze, Cinema 1, 58, 81. 58 Along those lines, Rancière posits that the movement-image and time-image are not “two types of images ranged in opposition, but two different points of view on the image.” See Rancière, Film Fables, 112-113, 119. 59 Rancière, Film Fables, 109.

130 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Martin-Jones concedes that it is a “universalizing extrapolation from what can be considered a provincial European perspective.” As a result, Deleuze defeats the principled purpose of world cinema studies to broaden knowledge of film traditions that have been suppressed by Eurocentric intellectual regimes.60 In the field of Deleuze studies Martin-Jones has done much to address these problems, specifically by testing the paradigmatic validity of associating classical Hollywood with the movement-image and Western European art cinema with the time-image. In Deleuze and World Cinemas, part of that ongoing endeavor, he examines a selection of films of the type that Deleuze did not consider. He shows how the films mobilize different aspects of both image types, illustrating “the relative, or perhaps, arbitrary nature of the division between the two image categories.”61 These texts soften Deleuze’s distinctions and demonstrate ability to talk back. Where his notion of natural history had earlier led us to reconceive film history, the tables are turned against the philosopher. Martin-Jones recalibrates the any-space-whatever with two examples that resonate with Singapore cinema. In Hong Kong action films, he discovers instances in which any-space-whatevers are not the completely anonymous non-places described by Deleuze, but instead geopolitically significant locations where a postcolonial non-Western culture negotiates its environment’s transition into a globalized space.62 He also explores Michael Mann’s Los Angeles crime-noir film, Heat (1995) for the presence of “action-crystals.” Crystal-images – commensurable with the time-image – evince manifest movement along with vestiges of sensory-motor schema in Heat. Elements of both movement- and time-images combine to become action-crystals.63 Action-crystals aptly describe the alienation and attachment in images of Singaporean flats, in which helpless loners float at a distance over the very same urban environment that constitutes national subjectivity. Where concrete dispositifs express authority by embodying the state’s narrative of unrelenting development and progress, socially critical films respond with depictions of isolation, atmospheric oppressiveness and spiritual emptiness. But framed within the geometric compositions of purely optical situations in those flats, the same films reveal them to be instruments of last resort for sensory-motor control, even though that autonomy involves 60 Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas, 11, 13, 14. 61 Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas, 1. 62 Martin-Jones arrives at these conclusions by way of writing by Ackbar Abbas and Laura U. Marks, Deleuze and World Cinemas, 133-134, 141-145. 63 Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas, 167-171.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

131

determining the manner and timing of one’s death. What Wee comprehends as a symbol of social immobility is for others an avenue to taking flight for a few seconds of freedom. Singapore cinema’s any-space-whatevers accord with Deleuze’s description, but not quite perfectly. The underground expressway in Eating Air, visualized in an emerald hue, bears all the markings. It is a non-descript non-place, a space of transition, undifferentiated urbanity, and disconnected but connectible almost anywhere.64 It seems like a crystal of time, but the character Ah Boy is most alive in this space; he shares a cigarette with a friend and participates in gang conflict. Whizzing through on his motorcycle, he crosses real duration but remains nonetheless suspended in a virtual present. It is subsequently also where he perishes and is consigned to the past. More important, the tunnel is complicit in the film’s act of colonial mapping as well. Eating Air opens with Ah Boy on his bike in the financial district adjacent to the colonial Civic District. He enters a tunnel after which the plot places him in the public housing heartland. That journey, literally through the island’s landmass, repeats the act of ideological mapping. Across those cuts Eating Air configures Singapore as a postcolonial space, narrativizing the city’s history onto the underground expressway, not quite an any-space-whatever. That slice of infrastructure appears prominently once again in Tan Pin Pin’s 2017 city symphony, In Time to Come. The essay film announces itself as “a meditation on temporality,” documenting the ritualistic exhumation of a time capsule as a new one is constructed and compiled.65 In between sections showing anthropologists at work, Tan brings her camera from one anonymous public space to another: pavements where office workers mill about on smoking breaks, interstitial patches of grass where migrant laborers nap, convention halls, elevator foyers, people movers in the train station, public housing void decks, pedestrian crossings, mall walkways, dark caverns under overpasses, and empty underground highways. (Figures 2.11, 2.12, and 2.13) She territorializes the search for what past, present, future time mean in Singapore onto infrastructural spaces. These too are action-crystals. A final example to round out the chapter considers a work that hybridizes new wave aesthetics and non-fiction. Cinema and history converge in 03-FLATS (Lei Yuan Bin, 2014), a documentary both impressionist and observational of three single women living in public housing units located in distant neighborhoods. The film opens with a black-and-white newsreel 64 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 212. 65 In Time To Come Press Kit, 3, 6.

132 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 2.11 Transportation infrastructure. In Time to Come, 2017

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

Figure 2.12 A man waits for the lift in an interstitial space. In Time to Come, 2017

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

Figure 2.13 A carpark being fumigated. In Time to Come, 2017

Courtesy of Tan Pin Pin

Reorienting Film History Spatially

133

exalting the government’s feat in relocating a majority of residents into modern public housing estates. The newsreader’s chirpy commentary recycles Tan Pin Pin’s rhetorical maneuver in Moving House, juxtaposing the official story against counter-narrative. 03-FLATS is a critical ethnography of people rarely featured in official discourse. Whereas the ambitious public housing project mandates and incentivizes family living, the film’s unmarried trio raises pointed questions about heteronormativity and patriarchy. 03-FLATS peers into the women’s quotidian lives. The elderly Sim Boon Ngoh, on her own since the passing of her mother, spends her autumn years cooking and cleaning for herself, strolling around the block for exercise, and falling asleep in front of the television. Lei’s camera is there when the old lady receives her nephew and his daughter one afternoon. She prepares a meal and gifts the child a pair of home-sewn pajamas. Amy Tashiana is a transgender former model with an exuberant sense of style. Her densely decorated apartment contrasts with Sim’s spartan décor. The camera records her preparations for a Hari Raya Aidilfitri celebration at home.66 The third subject is Tang Ling Nah, an artist who has purposed her space as a studio. Many shots linger on the clutter of a busy professional and creative workspace. The film’s hybrid nature is ever so evident. The filmmaker collaborated with an academic, Lilian Chee. Its trail on the festival circuit reflects the pair’s identities: split evenly between artistic venues such as the Busan International Film Festival and La Cinémathèque Française, and architecturally oriented exhibitions. Stylistically, the film’s mostly dispassionate gaze, loosely connected narrative and observational realism recall Frederick Wiseman at his perceptive best. 03-FLATS is aligned with other local films taking on social policies. Perhaps most important, when it mobilizes the time-image’s visual signature in service of ethnography, it produces actioncrystals. Immense rectangular configurations dwarf isolated beings in wide-angled long takes. Invariably, those figures find themselves caught in vertiginous tunnels of structural repetition. Our eyes are diverted toward purely optical situations too, such as the close-up of a bare fluorescent tube, an exterior image featuring matrices of perfectly aligned windows, or countless examples of architectural geometry. The graveyard next to one block of flats offers multiple significations. Tombstones in perfect rows parallel the residential apartments above in a graphical and metaphorical parallel. (Figure 2.14, 2.15, and 2.16) These gestures may be overly obvious. Has the government’s instrumentalist philosophy and social engineering zombified the citizenry and inflicted a spiritual death? Probably. Is the 66 Hari Raya Aidilfitri holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

134 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 2.14 Uncovered fluorescent bulb

Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014

Figure 2.15 Interior of public housing apartment

Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014

Figure 2.16 A window view peers over an adjacent graveyard

Film still from 03-FLATS, directed by Lei Yuan Bin; original concept and research by Lilian Chee, 2014

Reorienting Film History Spatially

135

image commenting on the site’s precarious future given how others have been razed for urban development? Perhaps. Those critiques signal a rejuvenated sensory-motor regime on the part of all three characters that are subverting the ideology relentlessly driven by the newsreel footage. The film announces where they are located – a silent prompt to map these neighborhoods in our imagination. Across that space, 03-FLATS presents us with a trio of diverse women living their own truth. The film is an utterly spatial, geographic, and Singaporean work that realigns Deleuze’s ideas about cinema, and thinks through his formulation of natural history. It is an empirical study of sociology and public policy, while at the same time, an analytical view of modernity through the eyes of modernist cinema. Too stylized to be completely objective, while empirical enough to serve as socioeconomic document. Recapitulating Rancière, its images are “not in the name of art” but “of the world.” The film dissuades us from splitting medium from content, screen image from historical image, and cinema from the world. Singapore’s un-antagonistic attitude towards British colonialism occasionally requires putting aside the critical praxis inspired by the postcolonial studies canon. Its spatial culture deserves a flexible alternative. Approaching it from well-rehearsed angles can be productive, but there is potential in new channels. By processing the visual tics of post revival cinematographic vocabularies through an analytical function attuned to space, the results certify a need to reconsider how instinctively we reach for customary tropes. Otherness, Westernness, and foreignness retain much currency and relevance, but not in every instance. The spatial contradiction between attachment and alienation in these time-images, when recast along the contours of style against reality, falls away within Deleuze’s framework of natural history, but also manages to challenge his theories in return. Nonetheless, colonial hierarchies and hegemonies remain broadly operative and are thus important to grasp and critique. Therefore, even though this book wishes to transcend them in some ways, the traditional politics of postcolonial studies retain great utility against those enduring legacies. That said, ahistorical methods may well befit ahistorical cultures. Reading these archetypal shots as post-Deleuzean action-crystals leads to an uncanny paradox that captures a meaningful grasp of Singaporean hiraeth, of what it is like to be drawn towards a place that is never there, or never was, to want to touch a land that does not exist, but yet be rooted when you wish to leave. It is indeed very tempting to run this duality through protocols of postcolonial studies, after which we can tag this as an instance

136 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

of liminality or instability, available if we follow the moral imperative to disrupt colonial power. But what if, contra intellectual instincts honed by postcolonial studies in particular, this is in fact not a state of instability or volatility? Tan Pin Pin reveals this with a counterintuitive voice that might just be the most quintessentially Singaporean. A distinct identity does exist here. The angst that one encounters on local streets and coffee shops belongs to the usual variety, arising from economic insecurity and fraying social fabrics. What the worry does not signify is uncertainty over identity. In that vein, it would be precipitous to deduce that cosmopolitanism and global connectedness necessarily diminishes the practical essence or knowability of the national self. Suddenly then, we are piqued to apprehend this culture that cannot avoid spatializing its history, as belonging to a nation whose past often seems non-existent and whose Late Capitalist identity renders it ahistorical.

Bibliography Aquilia, Pieter. “Westernizing Southeast Asian Cinema: Co-Productions for ‘Transnational’ Markets.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20, 4 (2006): 433-45. Balsom, Erika. “The Reality-Based Community.” e-flux 83 (2017) https://www.e-flux. com/journal/83/142332/the-reality-based-community/ (accessed 20 July 2018) Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28, 2 (1974): 39-47. Baumgärtel, Tilman, ed. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. —. “‘I Do Not Have Anything Against Commercial Films’: Interview with Eric Khoo.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 213-26. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version].” Grey Room 39 (2010): 11-37. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 125-33. Chee, Lilian. “Chasing Inuka: Rambling Around Singapore Through Tan Pin Pin’s Films.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, 59-76. Chee, Lilian and Edna Lim, eds. Asian Cinema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015. Chua Beng Huat and Yeo Wei-Wei. “Singapore Cinema: Eric Khoo and Jack Neo-Critique from the Margins and the Mainstream.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, 1 (2003): 117-25.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

137

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. —. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. —. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. “Feature Films: Exhibition--Indicators.” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) N.d. http://data.uis.unesco.org/index. aspx?queryid=60&lang=en (accessed 24 May 2017). Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Gibson, William. “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” Wired 1.04 (1993) http:// www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/gibson.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Han, Wei Chou. “Kelvin Tong Gets Personal with 7 Letters Short, Grandma Positioning System (GPS).” Channel NewsAsia (22 August 2015) http://www.channelnewsasia. com/news/entertainment/kelvin-tong-gets-personal/1996230.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Ho, Kong Chong. “From Port City to City-State: Forces Shaping Singapore’s Built Environment.” In Culture and the City in East Asia, edited by Won Bae Kim, Mike Dougalss, Sang-Chuel Choe, and Kong Chong Ho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 212-33. Ho, Tzu Nyen. “The Afterimage – Traces of Otherness in Recent Singaporean Cinema.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, 2 (2007): 310-26. In Time to Come Press Kit. BFG Media (2017). Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “Where the Heart is: Cinema and Civic Life in Singapore.” In New Suburban Stories, edited by Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 97-108. Khoo, Olivia. “Slang Images in the ‘Foreignness’ of Contemporary Singaporean Films.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, 1 (2006): 81-98. —. “On the Banning of a Film: Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, with Love.” Senses of Cinema 76 (2015) http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/documentary-in-asia/tosingapore-with-love-documentary/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Kong, Lily. “Ambitions of a Global City: Arts, Culture and Creative Economy in ‘Post-Crisis’ Singapore.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 18, 3 (2012): 279-294. Kong, Lily and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of ‘Nation’. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Koolhaas, Rem. “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis … or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa.” In S, M, L, XL, edited by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995, 1009-1089.

138 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Lefebvre, Henri. State, Space World: Selected Essays. Translated by Gerald Moore, edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Leow, Joanne. “The Future of Nostalgia: Reclaiming Memory in Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City and Alfian Sa’at’s A History of Amnesia.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45, 1 (2010): 115-30. Lim, Edna. “Counterperformance: The Heartland and Other Spaces in Eating Air and 15.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, 187-203. —. “Singapore Cinema: Connecting the Golden Age and the Revival.” In Teo and Liew, Singapore Cinema, 20-36. Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze and World Cinemas. New York: Continuum, 2011. Phillips, John. “Singapore Soil: A Completely Different Organization of Space.” In Urban Space and Representation, edited by Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy. London: Pluto Press, 1999, 175-95. “PM Lee, I Don’t Get Upgrading, So Can I Pay Less Tax?” Yahoo! News Singapore (6 April 2011) https://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/pm-lee-don-tupgrading-pay-less-tax-20110405-231901-526.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Rae, Paul. “‘10/12’: When Singapore Became the Bali of the Twenty-First Century?” focas: Forum on Contemporary Art & Society 5 (2004): 218-55. Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Sa’at, Alfian Bin. “Hinterland, Heartland, Home: Affective Topography in Singapore Films.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 33-50. Siddique, Sophia. “Images of the City Nation--Singapore Cinema in the 1990s.” PhD Thesis, University of Southern California. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 2002. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313. Steyerl, Hito. “Documentary Uncertainty.” Re-visiones 1 (2011) http://re-visiones. net/anteriores/spip.php%3Farticle37.html (accessed 20 July 2018). Tan, Kenneth Paul. Cinema and Television in Singapore: Resistance in One Dimension. Leiden: Brill, 2008. —. “Pontianaks, Ghosts and the Possessed: Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema.” Asian Studies Review 34, 2 (2010): 151-70. —. “Alternative Visions in Neoliberal Singapore: Memories, Places, and Voices in the Films of Tan Pin Pin.” In Lim and Yamamoto, Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia, 147-67. Tan, Pin Pin. “80km/h.” Blog. http://www.tanpinpin.com/wordpress/80kmh/ (accessed 24 May 2017).

Reorienting Film History Spatially

139

—. Singapore GaGa: A Film by Tan Pin Pin. Official website. http://www.tanpinpin. com/sgg/story.html (accessed 24 May 2017). —. The Impossibility of Knowing. Official website. https://theimpossibilityofknowing.wordpress.com/about/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Tan, See Kam, Michael Hong Hwee Lee, and Annette Aw. “Contemporary Singapore Filmmaking: History, Policies and Eric Khoo.” Jump Cut 46 (2003) http://www. ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/12storeys/index.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Tay, Yek Keak. “Royston Tan: ‘Old Romances’ Isn’t Just About Nostalgia.” inSing (14 December 2012) http://www.insing.com/feature/interview-royston-tanold-romances-isnt-just-about-nostalgia/id-b8673f00/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Teo, Stephen. The Asian Cinema Experience. London: Routledge, 2014. —. “Malay Cinema’s Legacy of Cultural Materialism: P. Ramlee as Historical Mentor.” In Teo and Liew, Singapore Cinema, 3-19. —. “Jack Neo, Conformity and Cultural Materialism in Singapore Film.” In Teo and Liew, Singapore Cinema, 67-83. Teo, Stephen and Liew Kai Khiun, eds. Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2017. Watson, Jini Kim. “Aspirational City.” Interventions 18, 4 (2016): 543-58. Wee, C.J.W.-L. “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape: Cultural Difference and Film in Singapore.” positions: asia critique 20, 4 (2012): 983-1007. Yeo, George Yong Boon. “Promoting the Arts.” Speeches: A Bi-monthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 16, 4 (1992): 112-5. Yeong, Chong. “Tan Pin Pin: The Hidden Depths of Memory.” Memento (Blog) (30 March 2012) http://www.iremember.sg/index.php/2012/03/tan-pin-pintapping-the-hidden-depths-of-memory/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Yuen, Belinda. “Urban Planning in Southeast Asia: Perspective from Singapore.” Town Planning Review 82, 2 (2011): 145-67.

3

Postcolonial Cacophonies Malaysia Senses the World Abstract This chapter argues that Malaysian f ilmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, a prominent cultural voice on racial politics, presents a fresh model of postcolonial poetics. Through interracial romance melodramas set in globalized milieus, she stages interethnic squabbles between speakers of different languages. Ahmad deemphasizes linguistic meaning in favor of purely acoustic pleasures. The soundscape harbors a local aesthetic that transcends the hybridity paradigm associated with postcolonial culture. Ahmad’s predilection for highlighting characters who speak ethnically incongruent languages, furthers a cinematic experience that is aural, spatially marginalized, yet seductively immersive. Jean-Luc Nancy’s concepts of “ecouter” and “resonance” inform these readings, while his eponymous writing vis-à-vis globalization circumscribe a phenomenology that speaks to Malaysia’s postcolonial-global duality and geopolitical

“sense of the world.”

Keywords: Yasmin Ahmad, film sound, Jean-Luc Nancy, multiculturalism, racial politics, globalization

Making commercials has really helped me in making films because you learn the economy. At the same time, making films has helped me make commercials. – Yasmin Ahmad 1

In the introductory act of the Malaysian film Sepet (2004) sits an easily overlooked but strikingly crafted shot. The dinner scene provides a backstory 1 Epigraph appears in Tilman Baumgärtel, “I Want You to Forget about the Race of the Protagonists Half an Hour into the Film.”

Sim, Gerald, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463721936_ch03

142 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

for the romantic melodrama’s teenaged lead, Jason. Director Yasmin Ahmad’s stationary camera records a long shot of a modest dwelling where Jason is eating with four family members. The tableau is deceptively plain, for as we peer diagonally across the square table, Ahmad utilizes depth of field to frame the foreground with discolored concrete walls, unconcealed electrical wiring, and the utilitarian kitchen clutter of a working class home. Visually, her cinematographic canvas is firmly neorealist, skillfully capturing the type of “special density,” “material context,” and “subtlety and suppleness of movement within these cluttered spaces” that film critic André Bazin famously prized in Italy’s postwar cinema.2 Ahmad herself once professed admiration for Yasujiro Ozu’s ability to instill deep emotion via cinematic representations of the everyday.3 The scene invites us to cast our gazes on the lived essences, both auratic and material, emanating from the details. The scene’s soundscape likewise comports with neorealism’s imperative of ambience and materiality by thrusting viewers into the middle of several locally spoken languages. However, the sounds’ overall effect also places the audience in a complex relationship with the action. As the shot fades in and reveals the scene, Jason’s father speaks first from his wheelchair. The patriarch begins carping in Cantonese. Across the table, his older son’s wife starts a separate conversation with her husband in Mandarin. In response to the old man, an elder woman offers a rejoinder in a third language, Malay (specifically a creolized version spoken by Straits-born Chinese). The exchanges rapidly develop momentum until they turn into rapid-fire verbal hostilities. Every voice is raised over the gathering din. A crying baby joins the commotion. Meanwhile, centered in the shot, the young Jason remains speechless and almost oblivious to the multilingual crossfire. Many audiences are often mystified by the cacophony of Cantonese, Malay, and Southeast Asia-accented Mandarin, especially since more than thirty seconds elapse before the first subtitles appear: “Pick up that baby,” the old man ostensibly commands in Cantonese. Even then, the subtitles are imprecise because the character actually says, “Hey, hey, hey! That baby is so noisy! It may need a diaper change, it may be hungry!” The multilingual construction of this shot is the source of meaningful polysemic complexity, which is however, based only marginally on the linguistic meanings of the tongues being spoken. The scene’s significance is manifold. The absent subtitles may be expected to divide the audience into regional natives more likely to understand local languages, and the global 2 Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 2, 38. 3 Ahmad, “The Making of Mukhsin, Part 3.”

Postcolonial Cacophonies

143

spectators that attend international film festivals. The captivated audiences for Sepet at Créteil, San Francisco, and Tokyo, for example, could have been left baffled in the din. Yet this group, expelled from narrative goings-on because they lack linguistic access, is presented with the fascination of a Bakhtinian heteroglossia. It is a carnivalesque moment mixing a linguistic polyphony with a corporeal ritual of eating. These foreign spectators might not comprehend the dialogue, but the discernible distinctions between the rhythms and tones of the languages being spoken remain very available, as is the worldly appeal of postcolonial hybrid aesthetics and bilingualism. As Bengali author Amitav Ghosh opines, I feel writers like me, writers like say, bilingual Arabs and so on […] in today’s world, we are the “universal” people because we have access to the wider modes of experience, modes of thought and modes of culture. Westerners are contained within a sense of being which is very particular. It is only people like us who have had access to that universality. I think that’s the peculiar importance of what we are doing. I think that’s why people read us, because they recognize this. They recognize that what we offer to the reader is a much greater dimension of experience; a much greater dimension of history; a much greater vision of the plurality of the world.4

Meanwhile, for locals who better understand the characters’ speech, their pleasure can be additionally connotative. Contrary to the surface-level anger and meanness with which the lines are delivered, it is possible that Ahmad intended for the scene to be funny, relying as it were on cultural quirks and racial stereotypes, as well as the juxtaposition of chaos with Jason’s impassive expression in the middle of the frame. Above all, the racial and ethnic interplay is politically tinged by Malaysia’s colonial legacy of racial classification and ethnic hierarchies.5 Malaysia ceased being a British protectorate and became independent in 1957. In the following explication of the scene’s many components, it is apparent that they exceed the scope of expedient readings that presume the primacy of linguistic comprehension.6 For example, Ahmad’s artistic contemporary, 4 From Chitra Sankaran’s discussion with Amitav Ghosh on bilingualism and hybridity, in Sankaran, “Diasporic Predicaments,” 8. 5 Hirschman, “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya.” Hirschman is cited by Benedict Anderson in his brief on how the colonial state used the census, in Imagined Communities, 164-170. 6 Brian Bernards makes similar observations in his acute analysis of some of the scenes highlighted here. He also uses Malaysian postcolonial multiculturalism for context. He believes

144 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

the experimental documentary filmmaker Amir Muhammad, believes that “there’s no real communication, and the room is unusually gloomy.”7 His judgment probably arises from a combination of low-key lighting and the impression created by the characters’ crosstalk that can be difficult to decipher; perhaps the simultaneous absences of illumination and verbal clarity reinforced each other. Muhammad may be searching for meaning in the wrong places however, because the sequence is among the best examples throughout Ahmad’s oeuvre in which the dialogue’s linguistic meanings are of secondary importance to the sounds they create, the ironic emotions they generate, the interplay between diegesis and subtitles, and the differential relationships subsequently engendered between disparate audiences and film. The resultant, concomitant availability of immersion and alienation installs postcolonial subjectivity in the spectatorial experience – a point of view, or rather, a point of audition from which emerges a postcolonial film aesthetic. It appears to be a locally particular phenomenology, attributable to the region’s unique history of colonialism. Crucial details from Ahmad’s biography such as her transition from international advertising where her portfolio included commemorative spots for Malaysia’s independence day, to a niche of some distinction in world cinema, lend credence to the supposition that her postcolonial subjectivity shares a phenomenological base with national identity and imagination, which owing to Malaysia’s openness to free trade and foreign direct investment, are in turn situated at the intersection of postcolonialism and globalization. Like that of most newly independent former colonies and developing nations, Malaysia’s postcolonial legacy is now undeniably entwined with global capital. Southeast Asian attitudes are distinctive, we remember, not imbued quite as thoroughly with the antipathy of the postcolonial politics in locales that provide the historical background for the bulk of postcolonial theory. And for film study, the temptation to cite “Third Cinema,” so often relied on to analyze works from the developing world, may be palpable for Ahmad’s unadorned visuals or “inadequate” subtitling. But as Stephen Teo succinctly observes, economic prosperity across the continent makes Third Cinema “almost irrelevant in conceptualizing Asian Cinema.”8 In short, that the soundtrack and subtitles’ “concise paraphrasing” produce “partial intelligibility,” and argues that Ahmad’s “audio-visual dynamics” facilitate an affective presentation of creolization that challenges the society’s failure to address cultural imbalance. These are key differences how he observes and interprets the type of meanings created by the director’s stagings. See Bernards, “Reanimating Creolization through Pop Culture,” 64-65. 7 Muhammad, Yasmin Ahmad’s Films, 57. 8 Teo, The Asian Cinema Experience, 227.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

145

this is another study of Southeast Asian films that stretches conventional understanding of postcolonial cinema studies and widens the view of how being postcolonial manifests in film form and style. I look to deconstructionist Jean-Luc Nancy to build theoretical scaffolding around this inquiry and reconstruction. He suits the purpose because deconstruction’s themes of duality, mobility, and liminality for instance, resonate and are frequently interchangeable with postcolonial tropes like hybridity and in-betweenness. By that criterion, it would seem at first that Homi Bhabha and Jacques Derrida are more experientially qualified on account of their personal encounter with the interstices between Britain and India, and France and Algeria respectively. Nevertheless the affirmative reasons to use Nancy for this study of film sound spring from the noteworthy way that his corpus stretches across Derrida’s attention to sound and logocentrism, as well as Bhabha’s contribution to postcolonial film theory.9 By the same token, Nancy’s sociopolitical ruminations distinguish his work from the eminent but more formalist work on film sound by Michel Chion, for example. Between the original publications in French of The Sense of the World (1993), Listening (2002), and The Creation of the World or Globalization (2002), Nancy renders a sensibility if not a unique constellation of themes that form, over that fecund period, a credible starting point for discussions about sound, cinema, postcolonialism, and globalization. Above all, his specific elaborations in Listening on the issues of sound, resonance, and subject formation proffer a forceful and compelling interpretation of film-sound motifs present in the contemporaneous work of Ahmad, a filmmaker who herself sits opportunely at the junction of postcolonialism and globalization. Film studies habitually rely on linguistic metaphors to describe postcolonial aesthetics. Two examples come to mind. Hamid Naficy’s pre-eminent study of An Accented Cinema uses the eponymous trope to describe the film style of postcolonial or Third World diaspora. Naficy finds that these Western-based filmmakers experience a dislocation that confers on their altered mode of production and resultant product qualities that correlate to the condition of being displaced or deterritorialized. More locally speaking, Olivia Khoo examines Singaporean filmmakers’ fraught relationship with the classical Hollywood tradition – and presumably European art cinema’s too – that results in what she terms “slang images.”10 But beyond minor 9 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, and Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 10 Naficy, An Accented Cinema; Oivia Khoo, “Slang Images.” The affinity of Khoo’s analysis to Naficy’s is unacknowledged, but striking because “slang” is also commonly taken by locals to mean “foreign accent.”

146 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

discussions of multilingualism, both writers focus on narrative structure and visual style. Therefore, although Naficy and Khoo apply models of aurality to descriptions of cinema, there remains a need to study the aurality of cinema itself or more specifically that of postcolonial films. Linguistic or aural metaphors are understandably popular. Sounds and specifically accents are a common and important way through which people encounter difference (of geographical origin or social grouping).11 The auditory is also unique among our senses; we are acutely attentive to its stimuli but have difficulty describing and quantifying them. Therefore, a sound can seem familiar and yet concomitantly inaccessible. In that way, sounds are not just a vital conduit of hybridity and difference; they also consist of a contradiction that restages the phenomenological effect of postcolonial subjectivity. It moves me to present this analysis as a corrective in some measure – even if it is only the latest requisite call for film studies to pay more attention to sound. Nonetheless, the endeavor is especially pressing with Malaysian films in light of historian Barbara Watson Andaya’s claim that Malay culture and society is deeply oral and particularly aural. Andaya believes that significant insight into Malay history comes from the ability to “hear” it, a directive appropriate for the task of coming to grips with Ahmad’s work.12

Nancian Soundscapes Nancy’s Listening springs forward with a first paragraph that asks, “Hasn’t philosophy superimposed upon listening, beforehand and of necessity, or else substituted for listening, something else that might be more on the order of understanding?” His question briskly underlines the thematic binary within our audition between listening and sensing on one hand, and understanding and comprehending on the other. He critiques an overemphasis on the latter pair – the types of listening that satiate a predilection to concentrate on linguistic meaning. Entendre, “to hear,” also means comprendre, “to understand,” as if “hearing” were above all “hearing say” (rather than “hearing sound”), or rather, as if in all “hearing” there had to be a “hearing say,” regardless of whether the sound perceived was a word or not.13 11 See Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 22-23. 12 Andaya, “Distant Drums and Thunderous Cannon,” 17, 30. 13 Nancy, Listening, 1, 6.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

147

He raises this point constantly, resorting in one instance to a comparison with music, which is enjoyed by “listening to something other than sense in its signifying sense.” He later extols the ability of “operas without words, they say what the words don’t say.” If we already harbor this appreciation for music, Nancy argues that we should transfer it to all sounds, including “accent, tone, timbre, resonance, and sound.”14 He pushes us to reorient our senses, and retrieve the capacities and desires to approach listening in another way. Doing so obliges us to hear the dinner disputes in Sepet differently. We have indeed been alerted to a need for this sensorial adjustment early on by the film’s first scene. The film opens with a tranquil and sensitive sequence with Jason and his mother. He reads tenderly to her – a Chinese translation of a novel by Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Arrestingly, he vocalizes the text in Mandarin but speaks to his mother in Cantonese, while she replies to him in Malay. We hear more languages than there are actors, but the subtitles keep pace with the slow, intimate, and enunciative delivery. Since audiences are allowed sufficient time to match lines of dialogue with onscreen actions, the conversation is completely intelligible. This early scene establishes multilingualism as a motif and prefaces the form and tonal shift of the dinner table sequence to come. In that later scene, Jason’s father breaks the silence by sarcastically expressing gratitude that his son has chosen to grace the family with his presence. In her son’s defense, Jason’s mother points out that he now has a job, even retorting that her disabled husband does not know much anyway, since he himself is usually just sitting, lazing about, and complaining all day. As she speaks, her husband raises his voice to be heard and complains that his lousy children only know how to take money. The older couple’s loud argument in Cantonese and Malay drowns out Jason’s sister-in-law, who carps at her husband in Mandarin. The subtitles arrive too little, too late, and are inaccurate to boot. The onscreen text translates the elder man’s grouse about the loud crying as a command: “Pick up that baby!” This is not a literal translation. Only two other subtitles appear, which turn out to be reasonably accurate if incomplete. Jason’s sister-in-law wants to let her child cry. This immediately prompts her mother-in-law to refocus her attention away from her spouse, to counter the younger woman with a disproportionately sectarian rebuke. The subtitles state: Pick up that baby! My mum said you spoil a baby if you pick it up too often. What do you and your mum know … bloody Singaporeans. 14 Nancy, Listening, 3, 32-33.

148 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

That third and final sentence on-screen does not totally explain the elder woman’s rejoinder. It is in truth an even harsher expression of xenophobia in which she remarks that her daughter-in-law’s nationality has everything to do with why she acts like an orang utan. Even her dyed hair, the older woman bluntly disparages, looks like an orang utan’s. These remarks douse the arguments’ intensity into awkward silence. This elucidation shows the extent to which the three meager subtitles are partial, inexact, and unattributed. They are therefore utterly inadequate for dialogue consisting purely of crosstalk. The lines of dialogue overlap intensely enough to leave even multilingual spectators at least partially bewildered. The speed with which the dinner table squabbles escalate and the swiftness of their descent back into uncomfortable silence further reduce (both foreign and local) audiences’ chances to discern or decipher, regardless of fluency. Moreover, it appears based on the following reasons that Ahmad fully intended to leave the subtitles incomplete. First, she was directly involved in their production.15 Second, she repeats this pattern of restraint when staging and subtitling local dialects for her other f ilms as well. There is yet another spat between the same elder couple in Sepet’s sequel, Gubra (2006), in which they fling sharp insults at each other simultaneously. Although the subtitles are adequate in that case, they also detract from the scene’s comedic value, which is created by the sound of dueling languages. Ahmad seems to take Nancy’s suggestion not to over-value linguistic comprehension. Both apparently see unexplored depth and complexity in what we hear and how we listen. Chion coined a term for unintelligible dialogue: “emanation speech.” Ahmad’s various directorial strategies to de-emphasize linguistic meaning in favor of inscribing speech within what Chion might characterize as a “visual, rhythmic, gestural, and sensory totality,” constitute attempts to “relativize speech.” Furthermore, Chion assesses emanation speech as “the most cinematic.”16 Nancy may well agree. By overloading the soundtrack and undersubtitling, Ahmad uses “relativizing techniques” that thwart our aural instincts to seek out language.17 It arguably serves to move our attention elsewhere, away from what the words signify and toward what they sound like. The imperative to listen is underlined by the general stillness of Ahmad’s shots. At Sepet’s dinner table, the seated actors move only their heads and hands. Framed in long shot, their gesticulations become less prominent. All in all, the scene 15 Amir Muhammad, communication with the author, 28 August 2013. 16 Chion, Audio-Vision, 177-178. 17 Chion, Audio-Vision, 178-181.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

149

was formally constructed to highlight the aural mélange of three different languages. Linguistics research shows that foreign audiences, including those not fluent in these tongues, would still be able to distinguish between each language based on their prosody – the intonations, rhythms, and stresses of speech.18 Space occupied predominantly by non-linguistic acoustic phenomena, is thus shared by all spectators. Here, where we cannot tell what is being said, only that we hear it, harkens back to what Nancy terms the “fringes of meaning.” To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing than this edge, this fringe, this margin – at least the sound that is musically listened to, that is gathered and scrutinized for itself, not however, as an acoustic phenomenon (or not merely as one) but as a resonant meaning, a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance.19

Film criticism has sometimes found it difficult to shy away from logocentrism. Contemplating Orson Welles’s penchant for overlapping dialogue, François Thomas for example, still privileges linguistic comprehension in designating it an “aesthetic of confusion” in which the director installs “a destabilizing quality that hangs his spectators more and more upon his characters’ very word.”20 By contrast, Nancian listening deprioritizes the search for that meaning. Neither he nor Ahmad places on it the sort of premium that leads them to understand it as a state of confusion to begin with. Instead of waiting to receive something that is conveyed or transmitted, Nancy’s listeners are well positioned to open themselves up to the most crucial of states, the one he calls “resonance,” which refers to a contemporaneous and bidirectional referral of sound to meaning and vice versa. For Nancy, the path to that dynamic state goes through the edges of meaning, as it were. And there, in that space consequently created by continuous referrals, the subject comes into existence. It is necessary that sense not be content to make sense (or to be logos), but that it want[s] also to resound. My whole proposal will revolve around 18 See Nazzi, Bertoncini and Mehler, “Language Discrimination by Newborns,” and Ohala and Gilbert, “Listeners’ Ability to Identify Languages by Their Prosody.” 19 Nancy, Listening, 7. 20 Thomas, “Orson Welles’ Trademark,” 138.

150 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

such a fundamental resonance, even around a resonance as a foundation, as a first or last profundity of “sense” itself (or of truth).21

Listening therefore does not entail receiving a linear or unidirectional transmission. In this case, it relates to being in the midst of resonance. It consists of the totality of infinite referrals, “from a sign to a thing, from a state of things to a quality, from a subject to another subject or to itself, all simultaneously.”22 For resonance, Nancy favors the metaphor of an echo chamber, within whose walls sounds reverberate, and between which sounds can rebound. Subjects form here in the act of listening, as they enter resonant space and are in turn penetrated by its reverberations. A subject is a function of these referrals or in other words, a result of them. As for listening bodies, they are much like resonance chambers: open structures – between inside and outside, while also both inside and outside.23 In that state, a subject forms as it feels itself feel. Within Nancy’s phenomenological schema, subject formation occurs manifestly in sound, through listening, and during resonance. Logically, if a subject comes into being through resonance, then the nature of that resonance determines its character. Resonance produced by Ahmad through the acoustic interplay of ethnic differences and cultural signifiers of postcolonial Malaysia, governs the constitution of subjects – themselves produced within the film as characters, and audiences before the screen through a process akin to acoustic interpellation.

Resonant Subjects Nancy’s anti-ocular convictions about the so-called ideologies of the visible are rooted in a belief that sound can “enlarge” its material form, lending it “an amplitude, a density.”24 The view corresponds with the unexplored depth and complexity in Ahmad’s soundscapes. She installs her audience in an ideal position for just such a mode of listening and creates the conditions for resonance. Inductively, she calibrates an aurality that clues us into the subjective consciousness of her films. Acoustic resonance can be demonstrated in Ahmad’s stagings and compositions throughout her work in both filmmaking and advertising. 21 Nancy, Listening, 6. 22 Nancy, Listening, 7. 23 Nancy, Listening, 14, 38, 45. 24 Nancy, Listening, 2.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

151

Take for example, her prior film and first feature, Rabun (2003). The title translates into Malay as “bad eyesight” and refers most directly to one of its characters, Pak Atan, a middle-aged man suffering from shortsightedness. As was the case in Sepet’s dinner squabbles, a person’s disability is casually played for laughs, this time with a series of Mr. Magoo-type gags of misrecognition. But to be “rabun” and unable to see could also be taken in this case as a call to seek meaning beyond the visual, or to forgo one’s sense of sight. Again, Ahmad readjusts our senses with her film’s opening sequence, a ninety-second close-up of two concentric circles in the dirt. The scarcity of immediate meaning draws our attention to conversations taking place offscreen. The edges of the frame demarcate the limits of visual meaning from within, and along that very border we sense sounds originating from without. The soundtrack informs us that children are playing a game known as “koba,” in which the objective is to knock a tin can over with stones. With this knowledge, local audiences would recognize the inner circle as the can, and the outer ring as a line drawn on the ground with a stick. Skillfully, Ahmad places and displaces her audience with film sound, repeatedly highlighting that which separates cultural insider from outsider, spatial inside from outside. Pak Atan and his wife Mak Inom split their time between a house in the city and an older dwelling in a rural village. During one of these commutes, they stop to buy cooking gas from a rotund Indian proprietor, Ah Lek. The sequence begins with the man in medium-long shot, looking off to his right, one arm raised while he directs commands to a silent character present offscreen. He holds this pose as we hear his orders, delivered in a predominantly Cantonese mix of phrases, to an employee ostensibly trying to position an object to his boss’s fastidious liking. His instructions take the form of a series of rapid-fire phrases spoken in one of the most commonly spoken Chinese dialects in Malaysia. Ahmad’s audience for Rabun was local, inferable because the film was a television movie produced for the Malaysian broadcast network TV3. Although merely a fraction of those domestic viewers are fluent in Cantonese, they would undoubtedly recognize the language’s distinct verbiage and prosody. The film asks only for the ability to identify the language rather than comprehend it; Ah Lek speaks not in complete sentences but with a mix of quotidian phrases and semi-lexical expressions, clearly identifiable as Cantonese but more sound than language. With his bulbous belly and unkempt hair, he cuts a comical figure that clashes with his language – Cantonese phrases precise enough to be spoken by a fluent speaker but also trite enough to be used by non-Cantonese speakers mimicking the language. The humor and irony are based on ironic dissonances of both ethnicity and gender, which

152 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

are magnified because Ah Lek’s ethnically marked oral emanations are stereotypically fussy, nagging and connotatively female. Ahmad once again withholds subtitles, and their absence along with the unseen interlocutor in the stationary image, conspire to clog the usual visual and narrative channels. These “Cantonese” sounds are further isolated by the incongruity of being spoken by a body of the “wrong” ethnicity and gender. Ah Lek embodies a trope of resonance that Ahmad had presaged prior to Rabun’s release, namely in one of her commercials commissioned by the Malaysian oil and gas company, Petronas. The spot titled, “Bush,” was produced in 2000 to celebrate Malaysia’s independence. It consists of a single take that begins in front of a tall bush. We hear the voice of a young man heartily singing a Tamil song, punctuated by the rhythmic snips of garden shears.25 The camera gradually moves up and forward, building suspense for an anticipated reveal of the vivacious singer’s identity. The shears become visible first, just before the gardener’s head appears over the top edge of vegetation. However, contrary to what we probably reckoned from the language of the song, he is not Indian but Chinese, singing energetically in tongue-curling Tamil. His mastery of the language, arguably the most impenetrable of the local tongues, heightens our surprise. Then, titles articulating a national and corporate investment in multiculturalism fade in: “In Malaysia, cultural differences are not only accepted but embraced.”26 Ahmad reiterates these values in her cinematic oeuvre. More important, the gardener is an ethnic inverse of Ah Lek’s resonant body. As a precedent, “Bush” shows that the clash of Ah Lek’s aurality with his corporeality is not merely uncanny or coincidental. Furthermore, there are other reasons to believe that Ahmad intentionally staged Ah Lek’s scene for effect. Ah Lek’s comic harangue is interrupted by the arriving Mak Inom. As he turns toward her, the camera pans to center the pair in a two-shot; but when the two characters begin conversing in Malay, their lines are fully subtitled. We can thus surmise that comprehension evidently becomes more paramount when the character speaks in a more “fitting” language.27 Incongruence seems to be purposefully highlighted. Then, in Ah Lek’s only other scene, he is once again comedically berating his employee 25 The song “Poo Pookum Osai,” from the film, Minsara Kanavu (1997). 26 Translated from Malay titles. A different version of the commercial also aired with English titles, “Don’t you just love this country?” 27 Malays and Indians have relatively more in common culturally and socially than they do with the Chinese community, for various reasons ranging from religion to skin color. It is beyond the scope of this work to prove this conclusively, other than to say that it is more unusual to encounter an Indian man speaking Cantonese rather than the national language, Malay.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

153

in Cantonese. This time the worker is in the shot but remains mute. This maintains the centrality of Ah Lek and his speech. Significantly, subtitles are again absent. Therefore, the interracial juxtaposition between his sounds and body is hardly a fluke. From how the sequences are framed, staged, written, and subtitled, they seem to be designed for maximum contrast. Ah Lek’s physicality and its contrapuntal aurality is a cinematic staging of Nancy’s concept of resonance, as it is in “Bush” because comprehension of the Tamil lyrics is not nearly as important as the ethnic and cultural irony on display. Resonance is the sense that a Nancian listener – a resonant subject – obtains, the space that they enter. Ahmad’s films to wit also seek to position us there with meticulously staged soundscapes. On resonant objects, Nancy writes: In the external or internal space, it resounds, that is, it re-emits itself while actually “sounding,” which is already “re-sounding” since that’s nothing else but referring back to itself. To sound is to vibrate in itself or by itself: it is not only for the sonorous body, to emit a sound, but it is also to stretch out, to carry itself and be resolved into vibrations that both return it to itself and place it outside itself.28

This formulation makes resonance possible through the boundaries that separate external from internal space. Within the walls of an echo chamber such as those in musical instruments, vibrations are returned; outside, they are emitted.29 And outside the sonorous body, the vibrations spread out, then inevitably return to the body – a process of referral in which a subject forms. Nancy describes resonance further as simultaneous semiotic referrals “from a sign to a thing, from a state of things to a quality, from a subject to another subject.” This subject comes into existence within a spatial dimension – “the space of a self, a subject.” That is to say, out of these collective phenomena the subject forms; it conceives of itself in resonance. Nancy writes, “Sound is also made of referrals; it spreads in space, where it resounds while still resounding ‘in me,’ as we say (we will return to this ‘inside’ of the subject; we will return to nothing but that).”30 A self is nothing other than a form or function of referral: a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self, which is nothing other 28 Nancy, Listening, 8. 29 Nancy, Listening, 31. 30 Nancy, Listening, 7, 8.

154 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

than the mutual referral between a perceptible individuation and an intelligible identity.”31

Nancy thus draws a correlation between listening and subject formation that theoretically innervates the manner in which Ahmad presents Ah Lek, who is resonant as both object and subject. Ah Lek effectively creates tension between each instance and repetition of referral, and between inside and outside. His disparate aurality and physicality allow Ahmad to cinematically render resonance and its effects. Crafted as a joke of incongruity, the scenes foster awareness of the sounds coming forth from their source or, alternatively, of the interplay between language and body. Resonance would otherwise be dampened were those elements to correspond more, because a more unif ied text diminishes referrals and does substantially less to impede the habitual presumption that sounds function mainly to communicate or transmit meaning. Instead the Cantonese phrases and sounds refer back to Ah Lek himself, an Indian man with a Chinese name, on whose body the presence of Chineseness meets its absence, where the sounds on the outside deepen the mystery of what lies inside. Cantonese sounds both inside and outside, but in different forms. As with Nancy’s metaphor of the echo chamber or resonance chamber, the character physically illustrates “the rhythmic reployment/deployment of an enveloping between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ or else folding the ‘outside’ into the ‘inside,’ invaginating, forming a hollow.”32 Sepet’s shot of the family dinner also resonates. The chamber is not necessarily a body per se. It forms in the space around the table, with invisible walls at a distance – where the overhead lamp’s illumination ends, at earshot, or at the proscenium. As Andaya has shown, there is precedence in pre-modern Malay society of how sound defined “cultural parameters” and “established acoustic boundaries incorporating all those within earshot into a community.”33 Within those confined radii, each sentence reaches a diegetic interlocutor. But outside, where the lines submerge in their own overlap, the speech becomes relativized and collectively resonant when indecipherable.34 There is thus an inside and outside to the resonance chamber, which is first outlined according to differential 31 Nancy, Listening, 31. 32 Nancy, Listening, 38. 33 Andaya, “Distant Drums and Thunderous Cannon,” 22, 30. 34 “Submerge,” like “relativized speech,” is a term coined by Chion, Audio-Vision, 181.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

155

fluencies among different audiences but develops into something more complex, in which the spectator perceives sounds that refer to speech originating inside, where voices in turn resonate comprehensibly to the family on-screen, then outward as cacophony. At the center of the frame, Jason sits with an impassive countenance, as if oblivious to the verbal jabs hurled around him. Jason’s father criticizes him to the mother, and through her. He refers to Jason while not speaking to him. The boy is physically inside the spatial resonance chamber, spoken to as if he were not there. He is literally in the middle of it, but mentally and emotionally, that is to say, internally, he is outside. In Nancian terms, Jason becomes a resonant body in a resonant space, where, as Nancy has informed us, subjects form. The films moreover extend the realm of resonance created in the corporeal figure of Ah Lek or in a shot of a family dinner, to the listeners in front of it. We the listening subjects in the audience become points of infinite referral. We resonate too. We sense the bodies resonating, and our own bodies respond in kind.35 Nancy writes: To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me : it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a doable, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a “self” can take place.36

Nancy points out that sound and hearing, more than the other stimuli and senses, enable this immersive experience or, in his words, “penetration.”37 Although Ah Lek and the dinner table were framed plainly as portraits on-screen, these scenes are more than mere milieus of a world offered by Ahmad to gaze at or contemplate. They invite spectators to inhabit their resonant subjectivity. They are texts expressly fashioned to involve audiences on some level in a shared space and participatory event. Ahmad also employs melodrama to achieve this outcome. Her cunning use of melodramatic affect infuses an oeuvre that has turned out to be formidably enthralling to diverse audiences across Asia and Europe. What else do we know about the subject or subjectivity projected by Ahmad that those audiences f ind compelling? Although the concept of 35 Nancy, Listening, 70n11. 36 Nancy, Listening, 14. 37 Nancy, Listening, 73n27.

156 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

national cinema comes with well-known caveats, let us presume for the moment that the subject in question houses a Malaysian character, specifically that of a multicultural society with a globalized economy. After all, the f ilms showcase the country’s unique cultural spectrum while their transnational circulation parallels its participation in the global economy. Nancian thought, initially instructive for listening, is germane here as well. If Nancy first enables appreciation of Ahmad’s postcolonial soundscapes, his contemporaneous reflections on the postcolonial or globalized world then allow us to further infer an understanding of the resonant subjects encountered in those f ilms. Nancy’s intuitions about the “sense of the world” illuminate what it is like to live, as Malaysia, Ahmad, and her f ilms do, at the nexus of those political and economic regimes.

Postcolonial Globalism As a postcolonial subject traditionally def ined as hybrid and marginalized, Jason has much profoundly in common with Ah Lek. As a Chinese boy in love with a Malay outsider, Jason is himself on the economic periphery of society. Ah Lek the sundries merchant lives outside the city, just as Jason sits “apart” from the others at the dinner table. Their multicultural subjectivity, contoured by the racial hierarchies inherited from the colonial past – Malaysia’s postcoloniality in essence – is in turn subtended by the present global capitalist era. Jason is a local working-class kid subsisting on black market VCDs of transnational f ilms, a thoroughly Asian platform for global cinema. Ahmad is herself def ined by the intersecting pulls of postcolonialism and globalization, evidenced by a biography that traces the country’s geopolitical prof ile. Furthermore, her soundscapes and her melodramatic style reify both branches of that social genealogy, a mix that constitutes the subjectivity ultimately formed in the resonance she fashions. My concluding meditation on the distinctiveness of Malaysia’s postcolonial globalism begins by examining Ahmad’s departures from common postcolonial paradigms for aesthetics, politics, and theory. It is apparent that neither the radicalism of hybridity nor that of Marxian discourse possesses much currency in her thinking. Ahmad moved into filmmaking after a successful rise through the ranks at two international advertising firms, Ogilvy & Mather, and later Leo Burnett, for which she became executive creative director in Kuala Lumpur until

Postcolonial Cacophonies

157

her passing in 2009.38 Compare that sociopolitical position with how Naficy characterizes postcolonial subjectivity in An Accented Cinema. The authority of the exiles as filmmaking authors is derived from their position as subjects inhabiting interstitial spaces and sites of struggle. Indeed, all great authorship is predicated on distance – banishment and exile of sorts – from the larger society. The resulting tensions and ambivalences produce the complexity and intensity that are so characteristic of great works of art and literature.39

Tensions at in-between spaces are prominent motifs in Ahmad’s narratives, but one should not overstate her “struggle,” much less “banishment and exile.” Ahmad did receive much public criticism from religious leaders and more obdurate sections of Malaysia’s film community for daring to incorporate progressive representations of race relations and Islam. Nevertheless, she was clearly a member of the professional elite, not short on resources as a filmmaker, and hardly a victim. Ahmad was a creative force at Leo Burnett who attracted both professional and popular acclaim for campaigns commissioned by Petronas, a state-owned multinational conglomerate and member of the Fortune Global 500. These slickly produced short films, released to coincide with major local festivals and holidays, are by and large sentimental vignettes photographed in her preferred neorealist style, sometimes lushly scored but always edited for maximum emotional purchase. Those commemorating Hari Merdeka (Independence Day) in particular, promote multicultural values like tolerance and community. If its presence and total views on YouTube are any measure, perhaps the most beloved and well-known item in this section of her portfolio is “Percintaan Tan Hong Ming” (“The Love of Tan Hong Ming”), an enchanting ninety-second spot that won gold at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2008. It features a Chinese boy aged seven or eight, gap- and buck-toothed, confiding to an interviewer (Ahmad offscreen) about his secret affection for a pigtailed Malay girl, Umi Qazrina. The children’s faces, ethnic accents, and dress highlight their social differences. Hong Ming wears a standard-issue school uniform but Umi is outfitted in more traditional Malay clothes. When the girl admits that she shares similar feelings toward him, the boy’s face lights up before he leads his friend by the arm, beaming as they walk away. Some perceive 38 Bergan, “Yasmin Ahmad.” 39 Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 12.

158 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

“Percintaan Tan Hong Ming,” and “Bush” before it, as political commentaries on how Malaysia’s increasingly sectarian politics sit uncomfortably with its secular constitution and aspirations for modernity. For her part, Ahmad readily affirms at least some liberalism in her blog writings, but the Petronas commercial serves the company’s neoliberal messaging even more thoroughly. This brand identity, imbued by the ideology of capital, espouses apoliticism with an anti-ethnocentric missive but is deceptively dogmatic. What appears seductively as a humanist celebration of multiculturalism and racial harmony can be simultaneously couched in the marketable ethos of middle-class egalitarianism. “Percintaan Tan Hong Ming” is also a product of economic ideology. Nancy’s general chorus of tropes – fringes and edges of meaning, open structures, and mobile if not fluid dualities – strike a natural chord with the well-worn, customary themes of postcolonial theory and its deconstructionist strains in particular. Thanks in no small part to Bhabha, postcolonial subjectivity conjures ideas of hybridity, ambivalence, liminality, and interstices. These terms entice us to read the dinner sequence in Sepet as a provocative, destabilizing iteration of postcolonial Malaysia’s multiethnic differences. Its lead character Jason feels alienated by being literally and inescapably in the middle of every culture linguistically represented at the table, all of which knows a past life under British rule and racial hierarchy. His multicultural identity is postcolonially inflected, like that of many of the characters in Ahmad’s films. Sepet itself harbors an unmistakable ambition to be a postcolonial artifact, even finding occasion to insert a sequence where its female lead and Jason’s love interest, Orked, strolls through her family’s colonial bungalow summarizing Frantz Fanon to her best friend while the other girl holds a copy of The Wretched of the Earth. Orked pedantically describes how colonial Eurocentric ideology inhabits the psyche of its subjects, causing them to fetishize white colonizers. She then relates it to their relationships. Sepet irresistibly pulls together thoughts on Nancy, Ahmad, and Fanon’s postcolonial subject. Postcolonial cinema has by and large been aesthetically conceived in variations on the theme of hybridity, particularly as a means of renegotiating colonial or Western power and the ethnic binaries that it traffics. Postcolonial cultures are aestheticized on film as mixes of narrative or visual stylistic traditions or as a set of thematic oppositions, and represented by linguistic syncretism and postcolonial characters.40 Ahmad satisfies that conventional 40 Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures, 112-121. For example, Featherstone cites Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) for its mix of Indian and British-American cinematographic styles, its

Postcolonial Cacophonies

159

approach in myriad ways, such as with the linguistic and cultural diversity of songs on her soundtracks, interracial and intercultural narrative motifs, multilingual characters, or the semiautobiographical female lead character of three films (Orked) who effortlessly traverses the social worlds of the colonizer and colonized. Like Ahmad, Orked is proudly Muslim and wears traditional Malay dresses. But both were educated in Britain and maintain professional lives in a Western workplace. This hybridity occupies the thinking of film criticism and scholarship on Ahmad thus far. Some contextualize that biography against a cultural landscape of contemporary politics and domestic multicultural debates. For example, Gaik Cheng Khoo defines Ahmad’s point of view as a “cosmopolitan Malay subjectivity” that arises from a liberal Sufi Muslim ideology. She defines Ahmad’s duality as one constituted by Western modernity on one end and Malaysia’s reactionary move toward Arabicized Islam on another. For the late Malaysia-based film critic Benjamin McKay, the films proffer an idealized or “dreamed” vision of how Malaysia can overcome the implacable divisions in its social mosaic – partitions and hierarchies with colonial roots.41 Khoo and McKay navigate the familiar idea of hybridity for similar ends and situate the films in cultural interstices between Malaysia and the West. However, hybridity does not sit all that comfortably with Nancy’s idea of what it means to be on the fringe or edge of meaning. Nor does it fully grasp what is happening on Ahmad’s soundtrack. The linguistic differences splayed on Ahmad’s soundscape posit a different sort of dichotomy. What Nancy describes, the space where Ahmad impels audiences to occupy, is not a border between different cultures or opposite meanings but one where we encounter the opposite of meaning itself, to stare off its cliff into the absence of (linguistic) meaning – liminal in the strict sense of being at this threshold. At stages of resonance, Ahmad’s listeners are not asked to discern linguistic content or to differentiate between languages but to perceive sounds that have no meaning in a conventional sense. Existing critical models require some rethinking if they are to be applied here. Ahmad’s politics and style are additionally asymmetrical with the critical and creative works – with which the field is replete – that advocate straightforward overturning of colonial power. Take Abé Mark Nornes’s use of physical gestures common in Bollywood films, and narrative structure and style. He also discusses films from New Zealand, namely the influence of music video and African-American ghetto films in Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994) and the Maori cultural inflections in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). 41 Khoo, “Reading the Films of Independent Filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad,” 107; McKay, “Auteur-ing Malaysia,” 107-108.

160 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

eminent analysis of film subtitling, which valorizes “abusive” on-screen text over “corrupt” subtitles that pretend to be precise translations under an ideology of fidelity. Abusive subtitles do not try to suppress the inherent epistemological violence contained within the act of translation, nor do they hide foreignness or otherness. They bring audiences toward the original text, circulate subversively between the familiar self and the unfamiliar other, and challenge spectators by placing them within the perspective of the foreign. 42 Likewise, Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s seminal study of colonial racist discourse examines Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and discovers the film’s critical strategy of subjectively positioning spectators in unfamiliar points of view.43 Australian Tracey Moffatt’s avantgardism supports this political strategy. Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) explore the experience of Aboriginal women, highlight colonial violence, and problematize representation by forcing viewers into the perspectives of colonized people. Finally, when Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) so effectively constructs an in-between space with regard to cultures, languages, and signification, she reminds us of Ahmad, who also utilizes image, sound, and subtitles, except that Trinh’s film is more stylistically radical and stridently intellectual by some distance. Ahmad’s comforting narratives are neither. Compared thus to Nornes, Stam, Spence, Moffatt, and Trinh, neither Ahmad nor her unsubtitled multilingual cacophonies are as stylistically radical or politically confrontational in the same manner. In a way, her work exceeds the colonizer-colonized binary because she does not simply reverse colonial ideology or identification. This explains why despite her grand self-reflexive gesture in Sepet to foreground Fanon, Ahmad’s political orientation does not accord with the anti-colonial writer’s Marxist call to revolution. Indeed, as Adeline Koh and Frieda Ekotto have pointed out, Orked espouses Fanon’s wisdom so incompletely and ahistorically that the film is essentially apolitical. 44 Indeed, while Ahmad appropriates Fanon for intellectual heft, she shies away from any semblance of radicalism beyond boilerplate, milquetoast calls for diversity and tolerance. On that score, Ahmad’s British education and professional stature in multinational corporatism, where she fashioned a strategic public voice on behalf of global capitalism, provide vital context and explanation. She positioned her films along the margins 42 Nornes, “For an Abusive Subtitling,” 29, 32. 43 Stam and Spence, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation.” 44 Koh and Ekotto, “Frantz Fanon in Malaysia,” 132-133.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

161

with unquestioned proficiency and aplomb. They were too progressive for vocal Malaysian traditionalists aghast at violations of adat (a code of Malay conduct and etiquette) and affronts to Islam, but they possessed sufficient local character to fascinate the multicultural sensibilities of the Western film-festival set. Film festivals are themselves perfect vehicles for that duality. Marijke de Valck reminds us in her study of the European venues that these are contradictory institutions with “one foot planted in the model of avant-garde artisanship, while the other steps forward to the beat of market forces within the economy.”45 Ahmad’s commitment fits neatly here. She is not an anti-colonial radical, but given to virtue-signaling through the showy reference to Fanon. Although that is no doubt a cynical judgment, the objective is not to sneer at either Ahmad’s brand of pluralism or how it may counter rising levels of religious and ethnic sectarianism in Malaysia. But appraisals can be layered with an understanding of her films as statements on behalf of capitalism, an ideology that has no use for cultural difference that is not commodified for the market. The use of Malaysia’s multicultural fabric as corporate packaging for Petronas exemplifies this. Neoliberalism defines human well-being as “entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” As David Harvey explains, it advances individual freedoms for their populist appeal, not to disrupt class power. 46 Witness what Orked ultimately learns from Fanon. She points out that he married a white woman and concludes, “You love who you love.” Her motto dismisses Fanon’s politics in one jingoistic, libertarian swoop, and reductively privileges individual preference above social justice. Furthermore, Ahmad’s uncritical view of consumption sanctions “a neoliberal market-based popular culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism,” along with the values of multiculturalism and narcissistic consumerism.47 Orked’s modern worldliness, as Sepet reveals, grows out of her steady diet of popular movies and their iconic stars. Ahmad’s sentimental message of unity expressing an essential wish to buy the world (or at least Malaysia) a Coke illustrates what Harvey despairs – the “creative destruction” of everything that cannot be reduced to a market transaction.48 Slavoj Žižek might greet Ahmad’s racial politics even 45 de Valck, Film Festivals, 25. 46 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2, 40. 47 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 41, 42. 48 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 3.

162 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

more cynically since multiculturalism, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism, politicizes race so that capital appears apolitical and insulated from critique. 49 One expects Ahmad to be better positioned than most to grasp this relationship between cultural and economic capital. Indeed, her final work, a short film titled Chocolate, evinces key insights. It opens with a close-up of a Chinese boy sitting in a dark room. Offscreen, his mother nags him to accept a scholarship against his desire to stay home where his friends are. A distant female voice calls out, “Hello!” In the next shot, the boy emerges behind the counter of a neighborhood sundries shop, where a Malay girl has come for AA batteries. A cute exchange follows, and the couple appears taken with each other. He is enchanted by her prettiness, even though her face is just visible under a tudung (a local form of the hijab, a Muslim woman’s veil or head scarf). She picks a chocolate out of a jar but does not have enough change to buy it. The mother’s shrewish voice asks why he is taking so long with that Malay girl. The boy snaps back, and his annoyance unfortunately spills over and he condescendingly tells his customer that she cannot buy the candy without enough money. She hurries away meekly with the batteries. He regrets his rudeness immediately but, having lost the moment, slams the chocolate down and walks away. The final shot lingers on the candy for a moment before cutting to black. Ahmad borrows familiar themes and encourages audiences to look beyond difference, anticipating a budding romance and then ruing its interruption. The film criticizes the unseen mother, and by not embodying her, Chocolate implies that racist ideology is a system of normative ideas. At the same time, Ahmad allegorizes how human relationships are informed and even structured by market forces; a mere five extra cents made all the difference. Nevertheless, the film’s politics are muddled. Is it a critique of intolerance, of capital’s ruthlessness, or both? In the end, rather than situate Ahmad’s films politically, readers should see them as ambiguous and comportable with the capitalist order of things. But although they do not stake out a position, they present a certain “sense” of the situation, what Nancy prefers to call a sense of the world. The films obviously display vivid snapshots of local culture and discourse, but their keenest insight is an understanding of the Malaysian postcolonial-global amalgam, which explains Ahmad’s divergence from regular hybridity tropes of postcolonial cinema, as well as her aversion to radical criticism. She does not fulfill the materialist pronouncements by for example, Arif Dirlik, who is among the loudest and most articulate believers that postcolonial histories are incomplete 49 Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” 30, 49.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

163

without a thorough accounting of postcolonialism and global capitalism’s nexus.50 But she retains deftness in conjuring sentiment and affect, and it is here, through her films and vis-à-vis Nancy, that we can sympathize with Malaysia’s postcolonial experience and apprehension of the world. Within this “sense” nestles the social and political import of her films. If Listening instructs us on how to listen to her films, what then does The Sense of the World and The Creation of the World reveal about her sense of the world, our sense of postcolonial-global Malaysia, or the nation’s sense of itself?51 Nancy proffers The Sense of the World during a period when he contemporaneously ideated about listening. He ponders the notion of a world, as well as how we perceive and situate ourselves within it. The eroding faith in positivism and objectivity pushed both the world and perception into contingency. Since the world exists only in our senses, and autonomy in our senses is lost, Nancy arrives at a paradox. Our sense of the world today is marked by the absence of neither a sense nor, therefore, a world. To wit, we know the following with certainty: There is no longer any world: no longer a mundus, a cosmos, a composed and complete order (from) within which one might find a place, a dwelling, and the elements of an orientation. Or, again, there is no longer the “down here” of a world one could pass through toward a beyond or outside of this world. There is no longer any Spirit of the world, nor is there any history before whose tribunal one could stand. In other words, there is no longer any sense of the world.52

Nancy applies this assertion in several contexts.53 In citing “Spirit” and “history,” he refers to the loss of a divine ascription and the fading of metanarratives. The guarantee of history once provided by forces such as the West’s colonial projects, that which “was supposed to orient the course of the world,” has disappeared.54 For better or worse, they lent the world definition and situated its citizens. Whereas colonial networks branched out from empires’ centers of power and culture, global capital flows respect no border and find cartography redundant. Globalization results in a dramatically different 50 See Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura. 51 Akira Lippit’s appropriation of Nancy’s The Sense of the World in a different context, to think about situatedness and specificity in contemporary Japanese cinema, was an important influence on my treatment of these films. Lippit, “At the Center of the Outside.” 52 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 4. 53 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 171n6. 54 Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 34.

164 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

phenomenology. Some spirit can remain – within the Marxian pejorative that capitalism or globalization is its own religion for example. Nancy would agree, having observed significant worsening of inequalities and suffering worldwide.55 But these material developments occur when our senses and capacities to grasp them are in retreat, hence we are left as Jason finds himself: unmoored, defenseless, impossibly alienated from remnant postcolonial conflicts, and without an alternative, without even a sense or semblance of one, just when our need for it is most acute. There is no longer any sense in a “sense of the world” […] And yet, one is not wrong either – quite the contrary – to protest that it is necessary indeed that there be something like a sense of the world (or some sense in the world), in the greatest possible generality of the expression, in its most vague, general, and insignificant generality.56

It is plain to Nancy that both the world and our sense of it are no longer. This recalls how he links listening, resonance, and subjects. The subject that senses does not precede listening or resonance. The subject comes into being during resonance, and resonance must be sensed. The relation between “sense” and the “world” is therefore a similar tautology. Thus, world is not merely the correlative of sense, it is structured as sense, and reciprocally, sense is structured as world. Clearly, “the sense of the world” is a tautological expression.57

Without a sense there is no world, and vice versa. And without a world, we come to an existential precipice: that steep ledge beyond which neither meaning nor the possibility of meaning exists. Ahmad brings audiences to that point aurally through multilingual cacophonies, and underlines that habit with stylistic gestures of self-reflexivity. Audiences are often bewildered by a handful of narratively and temporally illogical scenes in the Orked “trilogy.” Sepet was followed by the sequel Gubra and prequel Mukhsin (2007). One half of the romantic couple tragically perishes at the end of Sepet, but before the credits roll, the film somehow resurrects the character and suggests that the death was either a dream or on an alternate timeline. Orked and Jason reappear as an adult couple 55 Nancy, The Creation of the World, 34. 56 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 7. 57 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 8.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

165

and even interact with their younger selves in both Gubra and Mukhsin. Critics too have struggled to come to terms with these chasms in realist logic and chronology. Khoo and McKay interpret these narrative curiosities optimistically as utopian dream sequences, a parallel universe, or an afterlife – visions of an idealized Malaysia fulfilling hopes of transcending cultural divisions.58 Through Nancy’s philosophy however, one might consider these sequences to be representative of a crisis of “sense” and “world.” Cinema at the turn of the millennium was replete with representations of people arriving at this point, confronted with the end of the world, the obliteration of meaning, and complete breakdowns in their sense and subjectivity: Neo in The Matrix (1999) taken aback by the first sight of the “desert of the real” after a lifetime in virtual consciousness, John Murdoch literally breaking the wall that enclosed his world and staring into deep space during the climax of Dark City (1998), and Truman Burbank’s boat crashing into the dome around his artificial existence on a television soundstage at the conclusion of The Truman Show (1998). Sepet, Gubra, and Mukhsin arguably bring their spectators to this edge of meaning too. At the close of Mukhsin, the pastoral third installment in Ahmad’s Orked trilogy, the proscenium and in fact the entire diegesis collapses during a self-reflexive finale; cast and crew gather around Ahmad’s real-life parents on a piano for a wrap party doubling as a celebration of communal village life. This is Ahmad’s sense of the world; the warmth it exudes is illusory. The scene is from one point of view also evoking millennial science fiction. By this reasoning, her instances of narrative breakage are Malaysian signs of a global affliction, brazen and provocative ruptures adding up to more than narrative oddities that oblige explanatory resolution. They are symptoms of the very world we live in. The Malaysian experience could be one that resonates far beyond. Confusion about these occurrences in the films’ world speaks to our sense of our world and, more precisely, its end. This posits an explanation for Ahmad’s aff inity with the transnational audiences who appreciate her films. Conversely, the critical volleys that the director elicited from local Muslim quarters can be reframed in this context. The conservative Muslims castigating Ahmad were not merely offended by alleged sacrilege, profanity, and the creep of Western modernity; they were threatened as well by a waning of master narratives. The reason this malaise does not manifest universally, why this sense of the world is not felt more deeply throughout world cinema, is that not 58 Khoo, “Reading the Films of Independent Filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad,” 121; McKay, “Auteur-ing Malaysia,” 108. See also “Muhammad, Yasmin Ahmad’s Films, 121.

166 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

all cultures are sufficiently given to the aurality required for privileged or unobstructed access. The nationalist trope with which this inquiry began retains utility in that regard. Local cultures more attuned to listening might find their way more easily to what Nancy labels edges and fringes of meaning. By that measure, postcolonial ears more used to existing on cultural and social margins would also navigate borders more ably. For that matter, in the case of Ahmad’s cacophonies, multilingual subjects may perceive the contrast between linguistic meaning and nonmeaning more sharply, possessing an acuity perhaps conditioned by the modes of thought and greater awareness of historical dimension that Ghosh alludes to. Does this therefore position the cinema of Malaysia and Southeast Asia at large, whose relatively nonadversarial views of colonialism and global capital remain distinctive, as favored holders of insight to what defines the situation currently experienced by all? Here is one of its preeminent auteurs from recent years, supremely adroit at weaving together melodramatic sentiment and music, yet notably insisting on distantiative detours beyond the jurisdiction of linguistic comprehension and narrative logic. Sensing the world through these films resembles how it feels to hear Ahmad’s cacophonies, where invitations into a culture serve only to alienate, where participation conveys more deeply what it feels like to be outside, and where observing a local culture offers a phenomenology of globality.

Bibliography Ahmad, Yasmin. “The Making of Mukhsin, Part 3: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice.” The Storyteller (27 March 2007) yasminthestoryteller.blogspot.com/2007/03/ making-of-mukhsin-part-3-flavour-of.html (accessed 24 March 2017). Andaya, Barbara Watson. “Distant Drums and Thunderous Cannon: Sounding Authority in Traditional Malay Society.” International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 7, 2 (2011): 17-33. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006. Baumgärtel, Tilman. “‘I Want You to Forget about the Race of the Protagonists Half an Hour into the Film’: Interview with Yasmin Ahmad.” In Southeast Asian Independent Cinema. Edited by Tilman Baumgärtel. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 245-52. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 2. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Bergan, Ronald. “Yasmin Ahmad.” The Guardian (12 August 2009) www.theguardian. com/global/2009/aug/12/obituary-yasmin-ahmad (accessed 24 May 2017).

Postcolonial Cacophonies

167

Bernards, Brian. “Reanimating Creolization through Pop Culture: Yasmin Ahmad’s Inter-Asian Audio-Visual Integration.” Asian Cinema 28, 1 (2017): 55-71. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. De Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in The Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Featherstone, Simon. Postcolonial Cultures. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hirschman, Charles. “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology.” Sociological Forum 1, 2 (1986): 330-61. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “Reading the Films of Independent Filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad: Cosmopolitanism, Sufi Islam and Malay Subjectivity.” In Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, edited by Daniel P.S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden and Gaik Cheng Khoo. London: Routledge, 2009, 107-23. Khoo, Olivia. “Slang Images in the ‘Foreignness’ of Contemporary Singaporean Films.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, 1 (2006): 81-98. Koh, Adeline and Frieda Ekotto. “Frantz Fanon in Malaysia: Reconfiguring the Ideological Landscape of Negritude in Sepet.” In Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature: Remapping Uncertain Territories, edited by Magali Compan and Katarzyna Pieprzak. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, 123-41. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. “At the Center of the Outside: Japanese Cinema Nowhere.” Situations 2 (2008): 1-19. McKay, Benjamin. “Auteur-ing Malaysia: Yasmin Ahmad.” In Glimpses of Freedom, edited by May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012, 107-19. Muhammad, Amir. Yasmin Ahmad’s Films. Kuala Lumpur: Matahari Books, 2009. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. —. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. —. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

168 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Nazzi, Thierry, Josiane Bertoncini and Jacques Mehler. “Language Discrimination by Newborns: Toward an Understanding of the Role of Rhythm.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 24, 3 (1998): 756-66. Nornes, Abé Mark. “For an Abusive Subtitling.” Film Quarterly 52, 3 (1999): 17-34. Oliver, Kelly. Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Ohala, John J. and Judy B. Gilbert. “Listeners’ Ability to Identify Languages by Their Prosody.” In Problèmes de prosodie, Vol. 2, edited by P. Leon and M. Rossi. Ottawa: Didier, 1981, 123-31. Sankaran, Chitra. “Diasporic Predicaments: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” In History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, edited by Chitra Sankaran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012, 1-15. Stam, Robert and Louise Spence. “Colonialism, Racism and Representation.” Screen 24 2 (1983): 2-20. Teo, Stephen. The Asian Cinema Experience. London: Routledge, 2014. Thomas, François. “Orson Welles’ Trademark: Overlapping Film Dialogue.” In Film Dialogue, edited by Jeff Jaeckle. London: Wallflower, 2013, 126-39. Žižek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review 225 (1997): 28-51.

4

Postcolonial Myths Indonesia Americanizes Stability Abstract This chapter examines the aftereffects of the U.S.-backed New Order government’s violent excesses and their legacy of trauma, crisis, and horror. Since Suharto, the country’s struggling “transition” into a democratic civil society has been hampered by its inability to acknowledge and move past the killings of 1965-1966. Indonesia’s genre-dominated cinema reinforced New Order ideology because its formulae begot predictability, which dovetailed with the New Order’s premium on social and political stability. At the same time, Hollywood genres Americanized colonial subjects and their memories. As a result, even films precipitated by the reformasi movement working through the traumas of Suharto’s violence, take continued comfort in generic closure and resolution. For example, Americanism functioning as psychic conduits and historical indices in reformasi coming-of-age stories, emerges through the discursive beats and rhythms of the road film. Keywords: Indonesian cinema, New Order, political violence, genre, classical narrative, reformasi

Our religion tells us that good men prosper and evil men don’t. From your fine movie, we see that you Americans believe this too! – Native Indonesian Priest  1

When General Suharto resigned the Indonesian presidency in 1998, director Garin Nugroho was part of a filmmaking vanguard that sought to stabilize local film production in the midst of upheaval. An unfettered influx of 1

Epigraph appears in Johnston, “Hollywood,” 574.

Sim, Gerald, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463721936_ch04

170 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

commercial films from abroad saturated the market at a time when religious groups with growing influence were imposing censorial demands. Perhaps the most significant form of relief concerned political expression. Without Suharto’s invigilation, filmmakers were free to address political taboos. Nugroho, an independent trailblazer with a formidable reputation and local clout burnished by awards from the Tokyo and Berlin International Film Festivals, promptly released A Poet the next year. The stagy reenactment documentary, set within the claustrophobic confines of a prison, was the first critical treatment of the anti-communist killings that inaugurated Suharto’s rise to authoritarian power in 1965. Nugroho constructs the film around Ibrahim Kadir, an exponent of didong, a form of live poetic performance that incorporates vocals and dance from Aceh province in northern Sumatra. Kadir, himself an eyewitness to the atrocities, plays an accused communist with a cast of non-professional actors as his fellow inmates. Together, they recount murders, mourn the dead, relive terrors, and vocalize their fear. A Poet shifts occasionally to a dark room, where an isolated Kadir in chiaroscuro allows his memories to surface corporeally. The pervasive theme throughout the film is duality, specifically bifurcated depth. The Indonesian title, Puisi Tak Terkuburkan, translates as “unburied poetry” or “poetry that cannot be buried.” It also goes by an alternate English title, Unconcealed Poetry. Double meanings are in fact formally endemic to didong, which involves poetic dueling and relies heavily on allusions that are fashioned by creative wordplay such as comedic metaphors and puns. In this context, the Sumatran art reifies a politicized set of binaries in A Poet. The tyrannical measures with which Suharto wielded terror were brutally effective in plunging words, thoughts, and emotions underground. In response, Nugroho appropriates a cinematic form of didong’s polysemy to represent that repression. The buried memories, silent anguish, and unsalved pain require just the slightest encouragement to irrupt. Memories and emotions driven underground are not far from the surface, likely to emerge through involuntary parapraxis, accessed by means of therapeutic recitation. Kadir’s reenactments are simultaneously performance and embodiment, fiction and reality. His body language articulates the past in the corporeal present, allowing audiences to see an unseen history, stylized and ascetic at the same time. And Nugroho’s choice to shoot on digital video, while akin to guerilla filmmaking, visualizes a suppression of dynamic range. The washed out image makes it easy to mistake the palette for black-and-white, so that on occasions when the director allows faded colors to appear, the effect is uncanny. A Poet won the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2000 and the Jury Prize for Best Film at the Singapore International Film Festival the

Postcolonial My ths

171

following year. It is an elegantly Indonesian formulation of the genocide, and a deeply filmic exposé about the inner lives of its victims. Nugroho deploys the medium’s unique strengths in combination with didong to illustrate the psychic, epistemic, and local repercussions of physical force. His film would become a precedent for a rash of documentary and narrative films revisiting the murders. But the technique of reenactment in particular would be borrowed thirteen years later by an international co-production about the events, one that makes Indonesia’s postcolonial ideological roots additionally manifest. The Indonesian cross-genre romance, Arsan and Aminah contains a striking composition. A giant man-made fish sits perched on stilts over a rural water bank. At the mouth’s opening, a red-carpeted platform extends straight out. Gradually, a choreographed line of yellow robed dancers sashays out of the cavity. From unseen depths within the ferrous beast, they are disgorged into the open. During rosier economic times, this structure on northern Sumatra’s Lake Toba was a seafood restaurant, but fell victim to the economic collapse precipitated by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The abandoned and dilapidated eatery’s tarnished amber walls are sandwiched by lustrous green foliage below and magenta clouds above. In a case of poetic historical coincidence, the catastrophe also destabilized and claimed Suharto’s New Order government after three decades. The restaurant is now the location for a film about the killings that brought him to office. The dream-like scene from the film is a depiction of heaven, to which a perpetrator of that violence has ascended. The fish, a monstrous relic still casting a large shadow on the landscape, is an enticing historical metaphor. (Figure 4.1) Arsan and Aminah does not exist, in that the project was neither completed, nor released, nor understood as such when its scenes were shot. The title was only conceived by one of the subjects in The Act of Killing (2012) and provided a creative vehicle of sorts on set, but the idea that they were making a separate film was invented ex post facto.2 The “film” survives only as found footage and posited by Joshua Oppenheimer as a phenomenological artifact in his documentary. The filmmaker was originally conducting interviews for The Globalization Tapes (2003), a report on labor abuses at a Sumatran palm oil plantation. Violent union-busting tactics were snuffing out organizing efforts already hampered by the anti-socialist stigma stoked for decades by Suharto’s 2 The popularly held narrative took on a life of its own after posters of a film titled Arsan and Aminah were printed and seen on television, and after Anwar Congo publicly claimed that he was shooting a film of that title. Joshua Oppenheimer, communication with the author, 1 August 2018.

172 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 4.1 A potent set of metaphors at the beginning of The Act of Killing, 2013

Courtesy of Joshua Oppenheimer

pro-American government. Still terrified by the government’s anti-communist massacres from 1965 to 1966, workers were reluctant to speak on the record. Furthermore, the killers retain political power in Indonesia and would speak openly about their past actions. Interviews with those perpetrators constitute The Act of Killing, for which Oppenheimer persuaded a cadre of hired gangsters in Medan to reenact their memories. They produced scenes in which garish colors exemplify the overproduced excesses of the murderers’ filmic imagination, which were in turn dominated by crude daguerreotypes of the Hollywood musical, and later on, of Westerns, noir, gangster, and war films. Oppenheimer presents his “making of” documentary as creative ethnography. But cynics deem him complicit with treachery, faulting him for misplacing empathy with the killers while victims’ voices remain underrepresented.3 Such reservations dampened the wave of tributes for The Act of Killing, and focused scrutiny on the film’s major conceit – that its reenactment and selfreflexivity crafts what Oppenheimer extravagantly terms “a documentary of the imagination.”4 Documentarian Nick Fraser wrote pugnacious writs 3 See Cribb, “The Act of Killing,” 147-149, and Hearman, “‘Missing Victims’ of the 1965-66 Violence in Indonesia,” 171-175. Note that Oppenheimer was diverted away from the victims because they were too petrified to speak, and that the follow up, The Look of Silence (2015), is narrated from victims’ perspectives. 4 One should not overstate the impact of this negativity, which is far more prevalent in academic literature. The film is held in extremely high esteem outside of that sphere.

Postcolonial My ths

173

that questioned the kitschy excess of including the colorful reenactments. He believes that The Act of Killing “could have been made in a less ‘out there fashion’ and still have attracted its share of audiences and prizes. I don’t believe that so much artifice is required, or indeed appropriate.”5 Yet although Fraser and others think that Oppenheimer unduly encouraged his subjects, the found footage may also be basically authentic. Both propositions can be correct. Arsan and Aminah and The Act of Killing ring true not simply on Oppenheimer’s say-so, but in echoing a very Indonesian condition of the post-Suharto era: the need to work through a fraught but suppressed history of violent trauma. These two texts are therefore eminently useful points of departure, helping to reveal the dispositifs in the national cinema’s postcolonial predispositions towards film genre. Following Indonesia’s independence from Dutch colonial rule after World War II, neither the Sukarno (President from 1945 to 1967) nor Suharto regimes were models of liberty. But Suharto’s autocracy routinely used violence, namely the anti-communist killings of 1965-1966, the 1975 invasion and occupation of East Timor, and the clampdowns on the Free Aceh Movement. He bolstered military force with propaganda throughout education curricula and mass media. His resignation in 1998 was preceded by local riots that claimed even more lives. In sum, Indonesian history brims with ghastly stories forcibly forgotten, and memories of bloodshed systematically smothered. The shot of the fish’s “regurgitation” recalls the most contentious scene in The Act of Killing. Oppenheimer’s primary interview subject, Anwar Congo, confronts his demons on a terrace where he had tortured and executed countless victims decades before. Anwar first demonstrates on camera how he strangled suspected communists by wrapping a homemade garrote around an assistant’s neck. If his theatrically wide stance conveys callousness, the deputy’s toothy grin drapes the scene in macabre comedy. Anwar appears wracked by decades of guilt and unresolved trauma. When they later return to the roof, he begins to retch heavily. He asks aloud if he needed to kill those people, before hunching over and emitting an indescribable guttural sound – vile, visceral, and monstrous all at once. The Act of Killing is supposed to pay off in moments such as this, in which we bear witness to a villain facing his guilt, right before his morality mutinies. In another scene relating a victim’s experience, a crewmember named Suryono who is also Anwar’s neighbor, meekly approaches the killers on the set one day with a story suggestion for the script. They decline to include Suryono’s anecdote 5 Fraser, “We Love Impunity,” 21-22. He agrees with other critics who accuse the film of turning perpetrators into victims.

174 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

of how his murdered stepfather was abducted and killed overnight. But moments later we see him in the role of an arrested communist pleading for his life. Tears roll down his contorted face as his body convulses with sobs. His close-ups juxtapose uncomfortably with stone-faced reaction shots of Anwar’s crew who were caught unprepared for the genuine anguish. These are examples of how The Act of Killing visualizes the return of repressed memories and trauma, through involuntary corporeal eruptions and abstract metaphor. Among the films that have been made about those events, this text’s self-consciousness sets it apart. Directly and indirectly, it catches Indonesians in the middle of a culturally particular and socially inevitable process of working through the psychic costs of its recent past.6 In advance of this chapter’s survey of Indonesia’s post-Suharto cinema, this specific film is an interesting prologue because its oft-criticized selfreflexivity happens to also uncover a key symptom of its postcoloniality, the appearance of an American uncanny through film genre discourse. In that context, a quiet and understated but unduly long 18-second insert immediately after Suryono’s breakdown becomes readable as a deus ex machina. Anwar, clad in a military combat helmet, swivels in a seat on a rising camera crane as he looks through the viewfinder. (Figure 4.2) The take is silent except for an audio hum left in the sound mix that accentuates the quietness. What would otherwise seem like an ordinary transition between scenes, points directly to the film’s self-referential nature. Anwar’s lens swings across our sights, permitting us a look into his camera, a reminder that this is a film-within-a-film, foregrounding the apparatus of cinema and the contingencies of realism. At the same time, Anwar’s look directly into a second camera, Oppenheimer’s ethnographic eye, compels us to process his view of the world. Is anything behind that countenance comparable to the latent emotions within Suryono? Anwar’s perspective is reified in a camera positioned to resemble an extension of his body. The surreal multicolored panoramas, we realize, are cinematic visions. Doing so takes the director’s ethnographic project at face value over the objection of critics, but in a strategic attempt to diagnose the psychic symptoms evident in Anwar and his ilk as reflections on Indonesian society. 6 Oppenheimer does not claim to have made an Indonesian film, beyond any role the film has played in precipitating political change in Indonesia and the extent to which it has resonated with domestic audiences. But nor is he an Orientalist interloper. It is worth noting that Oppenheimer’s time in the limelight has obscured the contributions of his anonymous Indonesian collaborator who earned a co-directorial credit, and that local directors played important roles in the film’s production, namely Nia Dinata and Garin Nugroho, whose work specif ically addresses the massacres as well.

Postcolonial My ths

175

Figure 4.2 A visual metaphor of Indonesia’s cinematic perspective and subjectivity. The Act of Killing, 2013

Courtesy of Joshua Oppenheimer

This film cracks an opportune window into layers of psychosocial infrastructure, and gifts an indelible peek into local film culture. This is far from the only Indonesian film about the genocide. Post-Suharto, Lexy Rambadeta’s 2001 documentary Mass Grave, Rumekso Setiadi’s Kado Untuk Ibu (2006) centering on interviews with four female survivors, and Farishad Latjuba’s fictional short Klayaban: A Tale of an Outcast (2004) are a few examples. In light of Nugroho’s Brechtian appropriation of an Indonesian performance tradition in A Poet, Oppenheimer was not the first to consider the murders through reenactment either. Very valid questions about Oppenheimer’s pretentions should be asked of the filmmaker. But The Act of Killing poses important questions of its own about Indonesian subjectivity. It may not be Indonesian cinema per se but there is something very Indonesian about how it foregrounds the act of remembering and cinema’s complicity in both inflicting and repressing trauma. As Anwar peers pensively into the camera atop the crane, his blinking eyes under the helmet’s brim punctuate the moment. The somatic reflex moves us to ponder his thoughts, and how he sees the world. If the shot suggests that cinema mediates Indonesia’s vision and experience of history, what is the significance of something so evident, that these memories are patterned ideologically after American film genres?7 7 Ideas of American or Hollywood influence are at variance with David Hanan’s excellent recent monograph on Indonesian cinema, which maintains that an indigenous character

176 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

This would not be surprising since genres are precisely the type of symbolic and representational systems into which governments and institutions invest ideology.8 Film genre theorist Rick Altman provocatively states that genre theory can help us to think about nations. This is because genres can serve to connect the imaginations of fragmented spectators and diasporic groups onto a unified social fabric.9 Altman almost preternaturally finds basic recourse in Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” which only further renders Indonesia as an exemplar of how genres and nations “are tied together in such a special way that against all likelihood, genre theory might actually be a useful tool for analyzing relationships between populations and the texts they use.”10 In the most politically charged sequence of Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road (1976), the two leads, Robert and Bruno, come upon an abandoned outpost in the German countryside. The hut bears marks left by U.S. soldiers once stationed there, one stop on the men’s road trip of despair. Robert is unable to stop himself from repeating an American pop song. Exasperated by the earworm, he utters one of New German Cinema’s most famous lines: “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.” Have the Americans, whose Central Intelligence Agency participated in Indonesia’s anti-communist killings, occupied the Indonesian mind in the way that they have the German psyche? Indonesian cultural historian Ariel Heryanto thinks so, and highlights the massacres as the formative event.11 Wenders embeds the critique in a road movie after all, one of the more potent American genre myths. As it were, genre is the film language in which Anwar and Indonesian cinema appear to be most fluent. We thus edge closer to grasping why studies of Indonesian cinema rely on genre for classif ication and analysis. Genre f ilms are often treated as indices of history and politics ( film perjuangan, film pembangunan, Reformasi films, I-Sinema, feminist films, film Islami).12 But historians of Indonesian film who borrow generic taxonomy and terminology from Western criticism tend to presume that genres provide a neutral platform perseveres in local films through colonialism and globalization’s infiltrations, not in form or style but by way of “cultural codes” rooted in native performance traditions and body language. Hanan, Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film, 10-12. 8 Altman, Film/Genre, 26. 9 Altman, Film/Genre, 161, 205. 10 Altman, Film/Genre, 206. 11 Heryanto, “Where Communism Never Dies,” 148-149. 12 Translates to: “battle for independence,” “development,” and “reformation era.” I-Sinema is a local offshoot inspired by the Dogme 95 Movement. Film Islami refers to Islamic films.

Postcolonial My ths

177

that is repurposed for local rituals and myths.13 In other words, genre offers empty textual signs circulating in cultures that lend those signs meaning.14 This chapter reassesses that premise to look more carefully at how generic structure orders the world in contemporary Indonesian cinema, post-New Order reformasi-inspired films in particular. Its analytical “dig” parallels psychic excavations by modern Indonesia to negotiate hidden memories and traumas. Deep within genre films lie the vestiges of a national imperative on stability and order that once served both the New Order and America’s Cold War machinations.15 Even after Suharto, the national imagination still processes memories through a type of narrative that Hollywood has often chosen for American mythology. By my account, these stories of self-discovery and historical reckoning often trundle along a path paved by variations on a theme of road narratives. These films about transition and transformation eventually revert to the American way. Remnants of that ordered subjectivity, ideologically repressed and subtextually buried, poignantly analogize the forgotten but haunting trauma of unspeakable violence carried out in Indonesia’s name.

A Brief History of Sublation The theme of involuntary corporeal eruption should be framed by Indonesia’s recent history of systematic repression and enforced silence. It abounds with stories of brutal suppression at the hands of Suharto’s authoritarian New Order government, toppled in 1998. The collapse produced a cathartic release. In film production, 1998 uncorked a geyser of pent up artistic expression.16 13 See Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 39-57; van Heeren, Contemporary Indonesian Film, 135-156; Hanan, “Innovation and Tradition in Indonesian Cinema,” 107-121; Barker, “A Cultural Economy of the Contemporary Indonesian Film Industry,” 180-181. 14 Stam, Burgoyne, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, 77. 15 See Yngvesson, “Kuldesak and the Inoexorable Pulp Fiction of Indonesian Film History.” The author expresses a similar take on the seminal omnibus f ilm, Kuldesak (1998), made by four film school graduates right as the New Order fell, and considered an important political turning point for Indonesian cinema. Kuldesak’s uncritical appropriation of 90s American cinema anchors it in the liberal values and ideology of capitalist commodification. The film’s imitation of Pulp Fiction (1994) and Taxi Driver (1976) for example, did not do enough to alienate or distance itself from their original American context, which therefore often ends up coloring the lens through which it projects reformasi. This chapter overlaps with his essay, but attends to the influence of American cinema differently. 16 Clark, “Indonesian Cinema,” 42-43. See Yngvesson (2018) for an account of how filmmakers were able to sidestep the New Order’s control by embedding political criticism in lowbrow genres like slapstick comedies and melodramas that could elude the attention of censors.

178 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

A pattern of questioning would follow: What secrets bubble up when the lid is lifted? How do New Order policies condition the post-98 future? How do culture and society negotiate that dramatic release? How do people remember violence? For that matter, can they even remember in the first place? The queries drive research, typified for instance by a conference convened at the University of California Los Angeles in 2001, “History and Memory in Contemporary Indonesia.” In the anthology it produced, Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present, editor Mary Zurbuchen lays out the historical imperative. The critical event stimulating our thinking was, of course, the abrupt end of the 32-year rule of Suharto in May 1998, which had opened new spaces for addressing national crises and, in the hopes of many Indonesians, for improving troubled social and economic conditions. When former President Suharto stepped down, a flood of relief and euphoria inundated the landscape of public awareness. For a time it felt as though the New Order would simply dissolve, and a consensus called reformasi would effortless flow over the land, righting past wrongs and dispelling conflict […] It wasn’t long before sober realities reappeared, however, and the weight of its history once again burdened Indonesia’s future.17

The scholarly literature depicts an unremitting wave of trauma, psychic burdens, and latent memories, phrased in psychoanalytic terminology. Inevitable and in situ, the forcibly forgotten past unsettles subjects in the present, evoking real and imagined sites of conflict, and imposing a persistent drag on progressive thinking towards the future. For example, Heryanto speaks of “the three-decade-old trauma, silence and memories,” Laurie J. Sears examines “ongoing legacies of violence” as yet unresolved, while Gerry van Klinken describes how ethnic consciousness surfaced from “long repressed historical memories.”18 The scholarly consensus is instructive; it steers into depth, delving into inner layers of the unconscious, social imagination, and cultural mythology. The devastating anti-communist genocide is only the most gruesome facet of Suharto’s autocracy. Restrictive social policies systematically disempowered people and constrained free expression. A combination of hard and soft power 17 Zurbuchen, “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia,” 3. 18 See the psychoanalytic tropes deployed in Heryanto, “Where Communism Never Dies,” 148, 167; Sears, “The Persistence of Evil and the Impossibility of Truth in Goenawan Mohamad’s Kali”; van Klinken, “The Battle for History After Suharto,” in Beginning to Remember, 79, 247.

Postcolonial My ths

179

submerged memories, thoughts, and instincts deemed incongruent with state ideology. Tracking the flow of these cultural forces leads to an American origin. The New Order’s governing principles should be understood against the backdrop of the Cold War, to wit, Indonesia’s geopolitical alliance with the United States, and its place in the conflict’s Southeast Asian arena. Both the Americans and the Soviets conducted proxy wars by supporting or opposing independence movements in Asia.19 Suharto received American backing as he gained and maintained power. American universities welcomed local economists in the fifties. Nicknamed the “Berkeley mafia,” they became influential advisors in the New Order government.20 Suharto subsequently implemented social values and cultural norms consonant with what is expected of a client state invested in cultivating a growth economy. To that end he fostered the image of a politically and socially stable country, culturally tolerant, and modeled on bourgeois class values. It projected the image of a state resistant to socialist insurgency and friendly to foreign capital investment. But internal divisions presented constant challenges. Indonesia was ethnically and religiously diverse, with residual anti-Western resentments held over from Dutch colonialism. The political left had partnered with Islamic religious leaders in resisting the colonial Dutch East Indies government, but after independence, absent a common adversary, uneasy alliances frayed. Sukarno struggled to quiet differences and over time his authoritarian proclivities surfaced. He acted to centralize power in 1957 by discarding parliamentary democracy and introduced “Guided Democracy” in its place. He veered left out of expediency, building a nationalist case for anti-American isolationism in an attempt to unify communists and Muslims. He urged them to understand capitalism as the enemy of both Marxism and Islam. He warmed diplomatic relations with China and the Soviet Union, and relied increasingly on support from the Indonesian communist party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI). By 1965, the PKI’s 3.5 million members and 23.5 million more in affiliated organizations made it the largest communist base outside China and the USSR. But on 30 September 1965, a bloody operation by a group of air force officers and Sukarno’s praetorian guard ended with the summary execution of six generals.21 In the ensuing confusion, General Suharto mobilized elite units to seize control, decimated the PKI and assumed the presidency in 1968. 19 Boothe, The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 50. 20 Boothe, The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 7, 74; Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, 163. 21 Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, 79-80, 140, 144-145, 153-154, 156.

180 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

That breathless sprint through Indonesian political history is enough to reveal its sociopolitical fault lines, and recognize the historical juncture of 1965 as a turning point for Indonesia’s relationship with the United States. This is the country Suharto inherited, and the geopolitical milieu in which he ruled. He policed dissent tightly, and purveyed unceasing propaganda about the events of 1965-1966. Allies in the military framed the initial murder of the generals as a failed coup perpetrated by the PKI and backed by the People’s Republic of China. That story gained local traction by reactivating a history of anti-Chinese bias not unlike the experience of Chinese Malaysians. During Dutch and British rule, the Chinese in Southeast Asia occupied a high rung on the colonial racial hierarchy. In Malay societies, they are racial minorities overrepresented among the middle and upper classes, an uncomfortable combination of economic privilege and social marginalization. Suharto did little to soothe tensions by taking advantage of Chinese access to capital while also stoking racist sentiment against them.22 They were convenient bogeymen, trotted out during hard economic times as an easy target for blame and public ire. The government also enacted controversial assimilation policies. A string of legislation in 1967 banned the use of Chinese languages, the practice of Chinese culture, and mandated adoption of Indonesian-sounding names. Between these laws and the 19651966 purge, Chinese Indonesians suffered a double effacement. Recent work by Chinese Indonesian filmmakers show the decades of torment erupting in creative catharsis. For example, the films of avant-garde filmmaker Edwin, discussed in the conclusion, continually examine the sublated trauma suffered by Chinese Indonesians. Video artist Ariani Darmawan’s notable body of work also thematizes the psychic symptoms of silenced ids and unresolved history. Her most acclaimed title is the well-travelled essay short, Sugiharti Halim (2008), in which a young ethnic Chinese woman wonders aloud in direct address about the history and rationale of her Indonesianized name. Sugiharti Halim and Edwin’s Trip to the Wound were both part of 9808, a collection of ten independent shorts commemorating a decade since the New Order’s demise. Suharto constructed an anti-communist master narrative based on political stability and economic growth. In the interests of stability, the government took it upon itself to def ine cultural identities and social hierarchies.23 Gender and religion were legislated for the same purpose. The New Order codified patriarchy within what Julia Suryakusuma terms 22 See Heryanto, “Silence in Indonesian Literary Discourse,” 26-29. 23 Heryanto, “Where Communism Never Dies,” 153.

Postcolonial My ths

181

“Bapak Ibuism,” an ideology that subordinates a woman’s agency and rights to her husband’s.24 It appropriated the institution of marriage to regulate female sexuality and morality. The state determined women to be wives first, then procreators, mothers and educators, housekeepers, and finally social citizens.25 Suharto’s regime conflated sexually unruly women with social and political instability. It readily exploited patriarchal anxiety over female sexuality and conservative abhorrence of sexual deviance writ large. National interest justified these policies.26 Wary that zealots could sow social tension, religious expression was restricted as well. In a practical sense, “stability” was broadly employed to dampen overt expressions or performances of religious rituals. To protect the peace, agitation and public commentary on a set of key issues were outlawed. Officials coined the acronym SARA for the list of forbidden topics: suku (ethnicity), agama (religion), ras (race), and antar golongan (social groups). These heavy-handed efforts did not dowse sexual energies or religious commitment, and merely led people to silence their speech and moderate behavior.27 Suharto incorporated “stability” and “order” into his political rhetoric to further propagate a narrative that legitimized his regime. He painted life endured under Sukarno as chaotic and unstable. The New Order prized cinema as a medium to disseminate doctrine and propaganda. Films, under the purview of the Department of Information since 1964, were redesignated to the Coordinating Minister of Politics and Security in 1978.28 The 1992 “no. 8” Law on Film declares the political significance of the film industry. The legislation begins by proclaiming that cinema, a mass communication medium important for national culture, is essential to national security and development. On that basis, the law resolves to officially promote and develop Indonesian cinema.29 Suharto favored a free market for films. By 1966, he had swiftly reopened domestic screens to Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese productions by lifting Sukarno’s two year-old ban on foreign films. At the height of Sukarno’s 24 “Bapak” and “ibu” translates to “father” and “mother.” See Suryakusuma, “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia,” 92-119; Paramaditha, “Cinema, Sexuality and Censorship in Post-Soeharto Indonesia,” 69-87. 25 Suryakusuma, “The State and Sexuality,” 101. 26 Wieringa shows this in her social history of the PKI’s women’s organization, Gerwani. See her Sexual Politics in Indonesia. See also Brenner, “On the Public Intimacy of the New Order,” 13-37. 27 Imanda, “Independent Versus Mainstream Islamic Cinema in Indonesia,” 92. For a survey of films negotiating the Post-Suharto religious climate, see pages 89-104. 28 Sen and Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, 139. 29 The Laws of the Republic of Indonesia, no. 8, 1992, on Film.

182 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

anti-Imperial stance against the West, he saw Western movies as a cultural pollutant threatening Indonesian values.30 For its part the PKI’s cultural wing considered cinema to be an abhorrent capital-intensive bourgeois form and a potent vessel for capitalist ideas and values.31 Suharto’s permissive attitude on foreign imports, however, did not extend to censorship. He continued to exert those regulatory powers for ideological control. Sukarno had inherited Indonesia’s Board of Film Censorship from the colonial era, and deployed it to curb Hollywood’s political and sexual excesses. Suharto dismissed left-leaning members but still regulated local and foreign films. His government redirected censors away from lascivious content and towards ideological subject matter. Listed taboos included colonialism, imperialism, fascism, communism, as well as anything that would cause social conflict and dissent.32 The archetypal New Order film reiterated the regime’s legitimizing rhetoric prioritizing stability and order.33 That ideological stamp disciplined Indonesian cinema in accordance with Cold War-era Americanism, which sheds light on the inescapably strange found footage in The Act of Killing. Campy extravagance aside, they hint at the uncanny extent to which the men’s memories, subjectivities, if not their very agencies, were annexed by Hollywood. That film-within-a-film weaves itself through American cinema’s most enduring generic mainstays: the musical, noir, the gangster film, western, and war picture. And so, deep in the mental recesses of Anwar and his crew, kaki tangannya or low-level agents of the Cold War, we come upon turf that has been colonized by American genre cinema.34 To a degree, this political reading fends off critics who accuse Oppenheimer of not being more explicit and forceful about America’s role in these affairs.35 The film holds more clues than it gets credit for. On a tour of his old haunts, including the former cinema where he used to scalp tickets, Anwar recalls with annoyance how Sukarno’s restriction of imported films cut off his source of income. Film history and political 30 Paramadithia, “Contesting Indonesian Nationalism and Masculinity in Cinema,” 43; Sen and Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, 138-139. 31 Sen, Indonesian Cinema, 30. Of further note, Hollywood was considered a “pernicious” threat by Dutch colonials as well, for their effects on the uneducated natives (13-14). 32 Sen and Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, 138-142. 33 Sen and Hill, Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, 143. See also Sen, Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, 82. 34 Kaki tangannya, a colloquial term for manual labor, translates literally as “feet and hands.” 35 Fraser, “We Love Impunity,” 22. Oppenheimer did point the f inger directly on the air in “The Act of Killing,” Democracy Now!; Historians have been much more explicit about the CIA’s complicity in handing over lists of names, see Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, 140-141, 157.

Postcolonial My ths

183

history intersect, adding context to his role in the Cold War. Hollywood escapism in fact facilitated those killings. When we’d watch happy movies, like Elvis movies, we’d leave the cinema with cheerful smiles on our faces, always moving to the music, our hands and feet still dancing. If girls passed we’d whistle. We loved it. We didn’t care what people thought … Here was the Pancasila paramilitary office where I always killed people. I’d see the guy being interrogated. Sometimes I’d give him a cigarette, and I’d still be dancing and laughing. It was like we were killing happily.

Then the opiate effects wore off. Oppenheimer cuts to another interview where Anwar relates his nightmares from murdering so many. In these moments, he captures Indonesia’s wont for psychic repression. More than that, it unearths how subjectivity was ideologically cast and embedded in American genre films. That can thus reconfigure prevailing ideas about film genre and ideology in Indonesia. First, it contradicts a common assumption that generic formulae are basically value neutral. Genre studies of New Order films treat characters and cultural iconography as signifiers.36 A road movie for example, would be considered Indonesian if American symbols are replaced with signs more recognizable to local audiences.37 Thomas Barker’s treatment of reformasi horror films comparably assumes that genres are allegories customized by social conditions.38 But this reduces the question to one of cultural signification, and does not address the ability of genre to be more than structural placeholders for cultural signs, to exert its own meaning on the text.39 Second, it justifies redefining colonialism to include the American relationship. Indonesia’s colonial history ordinarily refers to its past as the Dutch East Indies from 1800 to 1949. (The end of Dutch rule 36 Heider for instance, differentiates Indonesian Kompeni films from American westerns based on the presence of Dutch military forces in place of the Seventh Cavalry (Indonesian Cinema, 41). “Kompani” refers to the Dutch East India Company. He also suggests that inserting local details and cultural references can nativize other Hollywood genres such as melodrama and horror. 37 Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 6. Note too his presumptions in the following statement. “The first claim – Indonesian films are embedded in Indonesian culture – leads to the second claim: Indonesian films are to Indonesian culture as Hollywood films are to American culture.” (1) 38 Barker, “A Cultural Economy of the Contemporary Indonesian Film Industry,” 181. 39 See Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 1-13, and David Hanan, “Changing Social Formations in Indonesian and Thai Teen Movies,” 54-69. Paramaditha is an exception who believes that the perceived triviality and apoliticism of genre films often obscure their doctrinal potency. Paramaditha, “Contesting Indonesian Nationalism and Masculinity in Cinema,” 44.

184 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

began with defeat to Japanese occupying forces during World War II, which weakened the colonial administration right before the national revolution. The Netherlands formally recognized Indonesia’s independence in 1949.) The term “American imperialism” is common parlance, distinct from colonialism that entails occupation or physical settlement. But American power over Indonesia was essentially colonial, in which case Indonesia’s postcolonial imagination should include the United States’ political economic and cultural influence. Author and activist Hilmar Farid describes U.S. support for the Suharto regime this way: “In Indonesia after 1965, the state in fact restored colonial exploitative relations in different sectors, which can be read as the destruction of the nation as a radical political project.”40 Farid seconds Edward Said, who in Orientalism, parallels the 20th century American project with British and French colonialism. Said points out that when the spread of independence movements and withdrawal of the European empires coincided with American geopolitical ascendency after World War II, the United States found itself perfectly positioned to fill the space vacated by Britain and France. He sees symmetry in how America penetrated the East through cultural, educational, and social institutions, and concludes that these maneuvers are “no different from their French and British counterparts.”41 More to the point, Heryanto argues that the colonization of Indonesian minds was forged in blood. [The] mass killings in 1965-6 lay the foundation of the New Order’s authoritarianism, which until 1998 enjoyed generous assistance, and continued protection from the USA and other leading advocates of liberal democracy. That violence has been the most crucial force in the formation of subject identities, fantasies and everyday activities of this fourth most populated nation in the world for the past three decades. Arguably, in different degrees the same past may continue to be a defining factor in subsequent decades. 42

Farid too frames the massacres as a formative event in the development of Indonesian capitalism. 43 But the Cold War wound down, and shifting 40 Farid, “Rethinking the Legacies of Bandung,” 17. 41 Said, Orientalism, 294-295. See also Robison, “The Reordering of Pax Americana,” 60. Robison describes how for Southeast Asia, American economic ascendancy rests as the British Empire did, on political and military primacy, and that even after the Cold War, “a new form of global political primacy, a new Pax Americana, was needed.” 42 Heryanto, “Where Communism Never Dies,” 148-149. 43 Farid, “Indonesia’s Original Sin,” 9-14.

Postcolonial My ths

185

American priorities exposed New Order vulnerabilities that had been fomenting for years from a combination of economic inequality and government corruption scandals. Frustration boiled over into full-blown crisis during the Asian financial meltdown of 1997. Government forces cracked down on mass protests waged by students, Islamic groups, opposition supporters, and even elements of the military. Violent episodes broke out frequently over subsequent months. Early attacks singled out the Chinese community, widely thought of as New Order collaborators. The worst atrocities involved mass sexual assaults on Chinese women. Suharto resigned in May 1998, but unrest continued into the next year. The United States, now less forgiving of abuses of power and human rights violations, began pushing for reform. Today, that process splutters along, and while the crisis and tumult that gripped Indonesia from 1997 to 2004 has subsided, social and political schisms remain volatile. 44 The emotions in and around The Act of Killing corroborate that.

American Influence These events make 1998 a handy historical marker, when “the unif ied coherence of Suharto’s New Order was thoroughly discredited, as economic stagnation and growing discord undermined core themes of stability and state-managed development.”45 In response to a moment pregnant with sociopolitical meaning, Indonesian cultural studies became replete with analyses of what films reveal about life before and after the start of reformasi – the transition from authoritarianism to an era of political reform, social liberalization, and expanded civil liberties. The post-Suharto films reflect the period’s oppositional culture of democratization and engagement, and have been characterized as an independent movement propelled by creative freedom, stylistically and ideologically diverse artists, and notable for transformative representations of gender from Suharto-style militarism and paternalism.46 In describing this phase of cultural production, Paramaditha hatches “ the scenario of experiment,” derived from a term (eksperimen) popular among an activist generation that aspired to “create new initiatives, ideas, collectives, affiliations – in order to make cultural intervention.”47 44 Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, 199-203, 205, 214, 220-224. 45 Zurbuchen, “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia,” 3. 46 Paramaditha, “Contesting Indonesian Nationalism and Masculinity in Cinema,” 50, and “City and Desire in Indonesian Cinema,” 500-512; Yngvesson, “Kuldesak and the Inoexorable Pulp Fiction of Indonesian Film History,” and Clark, “Indonesian Cinema.” 47 Paramaditha, “Film Studies in Indonesia,” 364-365.

186 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

However, supporting American interests during the Cold War with a menu of cultural and social policies left its mark, just as Hollywood hegemony bore economic and stylistic influence on domestic film culture. Genre in particular has been under-emphasized as a conduit for Americanism. Writings on Indonesian genres highlight the presence of local myths, but a deep ideological commitment to Hollywood storytelling practice can be found within those textual layers. Specifically, its classical principles of coherence and closure underwrite the values of stability and order that legitimized Suharto. Held over from New Order, they stultify reformasi filmmaking. Ever watchful over the pernicious effects of capitalist cinema and permissive values, the PKI had pressured Sukarno for years to restrict Hollywood’s access to local theaters. To hear Anwar tell it, communists in the city of Medan were despicable for banning Hollywood imports. The more popular American movies made for good business because they spiked black market demand for tickets. But the gangster also derived great personal pleasure as a fan, a passion cultivated by a steady diet of Hollywood. Sukarno’s embargo, enacted in 1964 and rescinded two years later, amassed a backlog that inundated Indonesia with 400 Hollywood films in 1967. 48 Over the next two decades, Suharto retained a relatively liberal policy on foreign imports, aside from stringent restrictions on sexual, violent, culturally sensitive, and political content. Films that violated standards endured cuts or were banned outright, until the growth of film piracy and satellite television in the 1990s. 49 Censorship over both administrations may have hindered American distribution slightly but not the spread of free market capitalism and its individualist mythology. In a 1957 speech recounting diplomatic missions to Indonesia and Southeast Asia, the President of the Motion Picture Association of America, Eric Johnston extolled his industry’s ability to spread these purportedly universal values: Hollywood became and is today America’s master salesman because it sells these concepts in which we deeply believe and in which men everywhere devoutly wish to believe. They are: Hollywood sells the concept that man is an individual, not a mass. Hollywood sells the concept that man can be and is meant to be free. 48 Roberts, “Indonesia: The Movie,” 176; Sen, Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, 48-49. 49 Imanda, “Independent Versus Mainstream Islamic Cinema in Indonesia,” 94; Sen, Indonesian Cinema, 161.

Postcolonial My ths

187

Hollywood sells the concept that man can remake his society as he wishes it to be.50

These self-serving and jingoistic ideas took a tight hold when coupled with New Order propaganda. Suharto mined political capital by juxtaposing authoritarian order against the discordant climate that many associated with Sukarno’s tenure. That ideology of stability insinuated itself into the local cinematic imagination through individualist narratives committed to preserving social order, an expression of American Imperialism’s economic doctrine rooted in classical Hollywood genres. Even for films produced under the cultural auspices of reformasi, less constrained by autocratic yokes and basking in the spirit of cultural renewal and social freedoms, Indonesian storytelling continues to evince that subjectivity. Hollywood took full control of local distribution by the mid-1950s. The industry’s movies were ubiquitous. Through AMPAI, the American Motion Pictures Association in Indonesia, American studios negotiated from strength. The industry further collaborated with State Department efforts to affect the Indonesian industry at its roots. Sukarno was receptive because he recognized cinema’s immeasurable political power, and reacted by upping investment in domestic production. American assistance and funding materialized for production hardware, consultants, and U.S.-based training for Indonesian personnel. Local filmmakers admired the art of Hollywood cinema. The directing luminary Usmar Ismail wrote about being profoundly influenced by the “working methods of Hollywood directors and actors.” The UCLA graduate was one of many American-trained film personnel who came to occupy upper administrative levels of Indonesia’s film education and production.51 To this day, U.S. dollars fund film festivals and other cultural initiatives in Indonesia. In 2000, The New York Times reported on the United States Agency for International Development’s US$5.9 million investment in voter education advertisements and media training, of which an important beneficiary was none other than political auteur and doyen Garin Nugroho.52 Katinka van Heeren’s history of Contemporary Indonesian Film details the role of the United States Information Agency in transferring American diplomatic objectives onto the content, narrative, and genres of Indonesian cinema. From the early 1950s, the USIA produced and distributed 50 Johnston, “Hollywood: America’s Travelling Salesman,” 574. 51 Sen, Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, 20, 24, 38-39. 52 Rohde, “From Auteur to Advertising Man,” E3.

188 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

anti-communist educational films to developing countries. These productions typically depict a village thrown into disarray by a calamity, then subsequently rescued by a central character or authoritative figure who restores order. Examining two local genres that Suharto used to fashion New Order history, “struggle for independence” and “development” films, van Heeren finds that they “were cast in the same mold as USIA films.” The first genre pits New Order heroes against Dutch colonial villains, while the latter valorizes professional figures and external agents. Both genres in essence advocated for pro-Western, anti-leftist developmentalism.53 Writers have formed slightly different opinions about Indonesian films’ formal relationship to American filmmaking. In van Heeren’s view, movies inserted local signs on a syntactical template all too kindly provided by the USIA. Others make a traditional argument for national cinema. Visual anthropologist Karl Heider for one sees Indonesian productions as authentic expressions of cultural values. His Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen is driven by genre analysis. He adopts the “ritual approach,” where a film’s popularity is attributed to its resonance with the social realities of the audience. The larger crowds attracted to genre films signal to Heider that something in their content can be traced to a social group’s “cultural roots.” Popular movies therefore reflect the priorities of “the basic conflict of life” in Indonesia. From a sample of well-attended films, Heider identifies a recurrent emphasis on protecting the social group from disruptive forces bringing disorder. This tendency, found also in the USIA-clones, indicates an essential “Indonesian-ness.”54 When Heider’s attention comes around to film genre, he highlights the importance that generic narratives put on preserving social order, dovetailing neatly with New Order ideology. However, this argument for Indonesian cultural authenticity may underestimate the textual schema’s underlying American-ness – latent presuppositions of American values woven into the New Order’s political discourse. Heider uses American culture for counterpoint instead; he declares that “it is in the nature of cultural analysis to be comparative, and so Indonesian films will be compared with American and European films.”55 To that end he pits local values around social cohesion against Hollywood-style individualism, where narrative conflicts are personalized into battles between inherently good heroes and evil villains. This reflexive 53 Van Heeren, Contemporary Indonesian Film, 84-89. 54 Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 5-6, 29-38. 55 Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 1.

Postcolonial My ths

189

use of Hollywood for comparison is understandable given its hegemony in film culture.56 But in Indonesia, it is buttressed more broadly by U.S. geopolitical presence behind the New Order. For that reason, although Weber’s notion of ideal types is unquestionably useful, making a distinction between Indonesian and American culture may be untenable. Heider draws inspiration from Will Wright’s “brilliant structural analyses” of the American Western in Sixguns and Society, and by extension Claude Lévi-Strauss’s research in structural anthropology on which many early studies of film genre relied.57 But Lévi-Strauss and Wright conceive folktales dynamically and dialectically – as myths that help to resolve contradictions, not as more or less stable reflections of “basic insights” and “dominant patterns” in each culture.58 Structuralism thus applied runs the risk of oversimplifying the American mythology that innervates the Hollywood Western, for it is not a genre that touts individualism uncritically. Take for the sake of argument, the iconic endings of two canonical Westerns. In My Darling Clementine (1946), Wyatt Earp rides away alone after saying to Clementine Carter, “I might come east again, get some cattle. Maybe stop by here again.” And in the famous final image of The Searchers (1956), Ethan Edwards unites the family and swivels away as the front door closes on him. These scenes are complex meditations on the opposition between individual and community; the heroes extricate themselves from society despite their longing for social belonging. Moreover, Westerns narrativize the “Frontier Thesis” as a history of conquering and civilizing the wilderness, in which the anti-social cowboy functions to deliver rather than destroy civilization. The individual and the social are inextricable in the mythic structure. The civilizing project needs to restore social order to disorder. It is why Earp confronts the Clantons, and why Edwards rescues his kidnapped niece from the Comanche. In sum, these Indonesian and American narratives are not diametrically opposed and may actually have much in common. Heider issues caveats on cultural specificity but accentuates it, gently but precipitously filtering the “social” out of the American individualist myth. 56 For another example of this tendency to compare against Hollywood, see Hanan, “Changing Social Formations in Indonesian and Thai Teen Movies.” 57 Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 3; See Will Wright, Sixguns and Society, 16. Wright states that “the idea and inspiration for my study of the Western comes almost entirely from [Lévi-Strauss’s] work.” Lévi-Strauss used Saussurean linguistics to argue that cultural myths revolve around structural oppositions deep in the text. Mythic narratives help cultures to resolve those contradictions. Wright equated popular American genres with the indigenous South American folktales in Lévi-Strauss’s research, and applied structuralism to Westerns and musicals. 58 Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 29-30.

190 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

David Hanan’s critique of Heider’s structuralist schema reiterates one of the latter’s concessions, that collapsing the order-disorder binary onto a narrative conflict between agents of order and agents of disorder results in a text that resembles “common narrative structure.”59 The similarity becomes clearer when cast in Aristotelian terms, in which a disruptive incitement is followed by a restoration of social order brought about by a heroic protagonist. Knowing what we do about the U.S. and Hollywood’s outsized influence over the development of Indonesian film production, however, allows us to infer a little more about this narrative structure. It is not “common” as much as it is the classical system developed by Hollywood during the studio era.60 Borrowed foreign conventions of generic formulae, visual style, and acting can be broadly understood to be driven by purely commercial motivations, or simply the most effective means to tell coherent, psychologically realist stories to mass audiences.61 But in Suharto’s Indonesia, narrative clarity and closure fulfill a further purpose. It delivers an overdetermined film experience that comports with New Order promises of stability and order. The most famous film in Indonesia may be Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (“Treachery of the 30th September Movement/PKI”), a docu-drama directed by Arifin Noer in 1984. Before being commissioned by the New Order, Noer had recently helmed Serangan Fajar (“Attack at Dawn”), a family melodramawar epic based on the Indonesian National Revolution. Suharto, who pops up in Serangan Fajar as a key figure in the insurgency that retook the capital Yogyakarta, resumes his hagiographic journey in Pengkhianatan G30S/ PKI as a shrewd commander who smothers a coup and steers his country to prosperity. The propaganda film is a polyglot of several genres: political thriller, melodrama, horror, and documentary. It displays the style and tone of Alan J. Pakula’s defining Watergate-era films replete with conspiratorial overhead shots illustrating a disembodied omniscient view from above. The film hits emotional crescendos like Hollywood melodramas at their best, and borrows from horror to stage the murders. In one memorable sequence, a murdered general’s daughter sinks to her knees in a fresh pool of her father’s blood. Cupping it with both hands, she smears her face red and screams hysterically in close-up, recalling the grisly blood-soaked heroines 59 Hanan, Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film, 47. 60 This hegemony outweighs the transnational influence of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian films on Indonesian cinema. For more on that context, see Paramaditha’s discussion in “Film Studies in Indonesia,” 360. 61 Said, Shadows on the Silver Screen, 3-10.

Postcolonial My ths

191

of American slasher films from the 1970s. The horror conventions render communist evil as unimaginable and unfathomable. And for realist effect, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI grounds itself by incorporating documentary-style archival audio and print media. From 1984 until the fall of the New Order, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI was compulsory viewing for school children and televised annually on the anniversary of the alleged coup. Oppenheimer shows Anwar watching a scene from the film in which a PKI leader initiates the communist plot in front of a giant red flag adorned with gold hammer and sickle, then a sequence where bloodthirsty subversives hack innocents to death with sickles, the Marxist weapon of choice. “The government made this film so the people would hate the communists,” the old man says, but he still goes along with the ruse. “I felt proud because I killed the communists who look so evil in the film.” The film has captivated and instilled a vicarious American fantasy in at least one spectator; he cites Al Pacino and John Wayne by name – icons of the gangster film and the Western, and symbols of American authoritarianism to boot. As a preman (“gangster”) and agent of American interests, he could not have named a more fitting pair. Wayne the well-known reactionary would be proud. It is probably not coincidental that the gangsters in The Act of Killing explain the local word for gangster, “preman,” by translating it into English, “free man.” That choice to evoke the American trope of civil liberty is telling because “preman” more likely originates etymologically from the Dutch word “vrijman.” In colonial times, it designated laborers with economic liberty – privateers. But, “Free Men” was The Act of Killing’s original title. Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI presents the New Order’s version of events so well that on the face of it, the film even steeled killers with a moral imperative. Such a psychological effect can extend from the genres appropriated by the film. For Thomas Sobchack, the most definitive and significant trait of genre films is in evidence here. He argues that genres serve up ordered, immersive worlds inhabited by heroic figures with whom spectators identify. In an enduring but under-considered essay, “Genre Film: A Classical Experience,” Sobchack identifies the hermeneutic value of genre films in their consistency. Differences between genres and subgenres are cosmetic, compared to an underlying, transcendent truth. Predictable generic formulae provide a reassuring presence. The genre film is a classical mode in which imitation not of life but of conventions is of paramount importance. Just as in the classical dramas of Greece, the stories are well known. Though there may be some charm

192 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

in the particular arrangement of formula variables in the most current example of a genre, the audience seeks the solid and familiar referrents of that genre […] Elevated and removed from everyday life, freed from the straitjacket of mere representationalism, genre films are pure emotional articulation, fictional constructs of the imagination, growing essentially out of group interests and values.62

Genre texts are thus defined by their familiarity and ability to efficiently install basic conflicts between good versus evil. This allows spectators to identify easily with characters who are restrained by the momentum of preordained plots. “No matter how complicated the plot of a genre film may be, we always know who the good guys and the bad guys are; we always know whom to identify with and for just how long.” These characters fold viewers back into the values of the group, returning to “the basic principles of the genre film, the restoration of the social order.” Consistent and unwavering purpose affords viewers a means of emotional catharsis that Sobchack argues, yields the social benefit of maintaining calm and stasis. Echoing Levi-Strauss, he writes that genre films resolve the paradoxes of social contradiction, and dissipate the stress generated by moral quandaries.63 The prevalence of genre in Indonesian film culture makes sense in this regard, particularly when we bear in mind the New Order’s “stability” doctrine. Generic structure would have furnished valuable recitations of firmness and “order.” Indeed, next to state television, Krishna Sen considers cinema “the most ‘ordered’ space of the New Order’s mediascape.” Plot conventions mandated the “return” to order, while disruptive characters outside society had to be “repositioned” within it. The government in fact wished that it were true for all media. In Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, Sen writes: The archetypal text of this “ordered” medium is about order. Every film (with one exception) discussed in the book – and I would argue almost every film produced in new Order Indonesia – has a narrative structure that moves from order through disorder to a restoration of the order. This formal characteristic is not altered by differences in themes, genres, or 62 Sobchack, “Genre Film,” 196, 204. 63 Sobchack, “Genre Film,” 197, 200-202. Sobchack continues that genre allows viewers to vicariously act out individualist fantasies without the threat of censure from the social group (202). Note the poignancy of this statement to Anwar, who is flung into an emotional tailspin when Oppenheimer reminds him that unlike the emotions he felt on set, actual persons experienced genuine fear as they died at his hands.

Postcolonial My ths

193

other aesthetic attributes. The ordered beginning and end of the film narrative are signified in various ways.64

The identifying feature that Sen thus defines as Indonesian is essentially a rebranded feature of the classical text. Generic stability, the very thing that for her localizes these films, was inherited from Hollywood cinema and by extension American imperial design. In construing genre as a classical experience and describing the degree to which genre films contribute to group identity and subjectivity, Sobchack helps to render genre as something uniquely relevant to Indonesian cinema. More important, it shows how genre films articulate the New Order’s very raison d’être. The Aristotelian and Freudian tenets Sobchack applies outline a process where psychic energies circulate within a phenomenological system of local cultural production and national, or even geopolitical political interests. As that national subjectivity ossified over decades of authoritarian control, an individualist myth embeds itself in genre’s classical architecture while taking various shapes.65 This chapter concludes with a profile of one such generic ritual still doing cultural work. These are imperial coercions of the very type Ann Laura Stoler describes as postcolonial duress – “conditions of constraint” that the close readings below attempt to assay. They are signs less seen than felt, more internalized than externally detectable, preserved despite the “comforting affirmations” within a national project of reformation.66 The affective duress impinges on current thinking by persisting in post-Suharto films despite a forwardlooking climate of freedom, renewal and progressive aspiration. Indonesian cinema appears encumbered in ideological inertia, unable despite optimism and openness to live up to the reformasi spirit. 64 Sen, Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, 159. Sen highlights the walled space of a family home provides a visual signifier of order in family melodramas and historical films. Other narrative conventions reminiscent of the Hays Code include the eventual return of a prodigal son, and either the domestication or expulsion of problematic women from the domestic realm. 65 The myth takes shape in several forms: protagonists in teen movies, legendary heroes in exploitation genres, reincarnations of wayang heroes, or even politically oppositional reformasi-era anti-heroes. See Hanan, “Changing Social Formations in Indonesian and Thai Teen Movies,” 67; Imanjaya, “The Other Side of Indonesia,” 148; Clark, “Men, Masculinities and Symbolic Violence in Recent Indonesian Cinema,” 131; Yngvesson, “Kuldesak and the Inoexorable Pulp Fiction of Indonesian Film History,” 366-367; Paramaditha, “Contesting Indonesian Nationalism and Masculinity in Cinema,” 52-53; Abidin Kusno, “The Hero in Passage,” 130-146. 66 Stoler, Duress, 3-7.

194 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

The Road to Reformasi Subsequent to the New Order’s demise, Indonesia experienced the reformation era as a dramatic rebirth into political transparency and free elections. Creative communities wasted little time in exercising new expressive freedoms to openly revisit history, explore forbidden subjects, and recast social norms around gender, sexual, racial, and religious identity. A generation of young filmmakers began giving previously silenced voice to topics such as feminism, gay themes, anti-Chinese bias, and the taboo on the 1965-1966 killings. These artists have also been referred to as the “Indonesian New Wave,” fresh film school graduates seeking to open up political discourse in the post-New Order democracy and to bring the untold, sometimes unspeakable evils of the Suharto regime to light.67 The movement has made headway despite many hurdles. Globalization exacerbated inequality and promoted consumerism at the same time. Islamic fervor that Suharto did much to contain began to mushroom. And perpetrators of the anti-communist purge remained politically ensconced. The historical period that followed 1998 should not be idealized. Nevertheless, Indonesian cinema diversified significantly and welcomed marginalized perspectives during this time. Many films adopted the reformasi-era push to engage with national identity by working through psychological scarring inflicted by the New Order. They are often populated by young protagonists journeying through liminal phases and coming of age in modernity. These are thus allegories of a nation struggling to deconstruct and reconstruct what it means to be Indonesian. The texts selected for examination here have some things in common. First, they are in varying degrees politically conscious bildungsromane trying to facilitate national dialogue. They present characters who must reconcile complex personal histories before they negotiate uncertain futures. Unified in this resolve and sensibility, the films run the gamut from ambitious art films, somber festival-oriented work, to star vehicles. The filmmakers openly contest patriarchal and historical narratives force-fed to the masses for decades. Yet just beneath the surface of these coming-of-age stories are the percolating remains of American empire permeating a generic discourse with highly symbolic tropes and syntagma. Reformasi promised openness and did let loose a surge of creative freedom, beginning with electoral reforms that rippled into culture. But it did not simply flip a switch that made stability discourse disappear altogether. Films continued to display symptoms of American neocolonialism. Therefore, second, they still often 67 Yngvesson, “Let’s Get Lost.”

Postcolonial My ths

195

leaned on structure: generically identifiable and generally obedient to narrative conventions and capitalist realism of the New Order. Third, an important thread runs through some prominent reformasi films. They cohere around an affinity with the road movie, occasionally expressed through allusion rather than iconographic citation, sometimes more implicit than explicit. That is to say, these films are discursively and symbolically identif iable as having road narratives, but do not always semantically or outwardly seem to belong to the genre. Maladjusted young characters traverse local landscapes, encounter native cultures, undergo self-reflection, and actualize identities. These figures may not necessarily roll over paved asphalt highways, before distant horizons, or in cars for that matter. But they refract and echo road movie syntax as stories of travel through transitory spaces. With Kings of the Road, Wenders realizes too that the “road” is both real and likely to be a metaphor of indeterminate zones, more means than ends, headspace rather than territory, but inevitably between past and future, for purposes of escape and refuge. The interstate may not always be visible or remarkable, but Indonesian locales inevitably are. These are sweeping, soul-stirring, and longing master shots of roadside merchants, local processions, tropical bungalows, the Javanese desert, Jakartan nightlife, or the recognizable hue of the sea around certain islands – visages that anchor these journeys in environments of almost atmospheric national specificity. With or without an automotive rumble, there is internal momentum driving these stories; a palpable but latent beat bringing Indonesia to some place different. Drawing from the transformative power of the road genre’s terrestrial passage, contained within the familiar structural confines of classical stability, these films lead us on tours of national subjective ideation within an Americanized imaginary. These deceptively anodyne films belie cinematic evocations locating them in a political, historical, and cultural web that tethers them to the period between 1965 and the present. It is notable that they share more in common with road films than with the local genres registered in Heider and Hanan’s account of Indonesian cinema.68 It may be even more important that this genre is the apparent vehicle for remembering, discovery, 68 Heider lists the following: The legend, kompeni (Dutch colonial period), Japanese period, perjuangan (struggle for independence), sentimental, horror, komedi (comedy), expedition, musical, and anak-anak (kid or youth) films. The expedition genre refers to ethnographic films. See Heider, Indonesian Cinema, 40-45. Hanan lists the Betawi musical, dangdut musical, “Queen of the Southern Ocean” film, martial arts (silat) film, teenage romances, colonial period films, and “Warung Coffee” comedies. Hanan, Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film, 78-80.

196 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

and identification. To appropriate a phrase from Stoler, these Indonesian and American films “share a politically inflected and afflicted historical etymology.69 Road movies are uniquely American films whose growing popularity paralleled postwar industrialization. Hollywood exploited the New World’s expansive landscapes, myth-making hand-in-hand with the Midwestern heartland’s automotive industry. These tales are also modern iterations of the Western, perhaps the most American of all genres. Both draw power from the American Dream’s optimistic ethos, and the chance it provides to social outcasts for transformation, renewal and reintegration.70 The postcolonial “road” is not the sole province of Indonesian cinema, and is obviously far from the country’s only symbolic system for postcolonial history. Barker’s ritual approach to reformasi politics in the horror genre for instance, focuses instead on a different aspect of experience. He finds that horror films are allegorical tools to revisit the ghosts and monsters in a society’s memory. The horror genre is for Barker, valuable as an affective venue to revisit trauma, physical violence in particular.71 Alongside the ritual function served by horror, road films are thus certainly not the lone inevitable outcome of Indonesian history. They have however burrowed their way into the reformasi project, putting pressure on how films negotiate the past, reenacting New Order priorities by affecting aesthetic possibility. Finally, with a political history so dominated by authoritarian figures, the unrepentant patriarch becomes an inevitable trope. The youths in these films deal one way or another with derelict fathers, whose absence or irresponsible actions subsequently force their dysfunctional families to pick up the pieces. Familial alienation leaves the young characters adrift and unsure, seeking to come to terms with an emotional or spiritual crevasse. In films that explore female subjectivity through stories about women’s stories and experiences, the critique of male privilege includes a rebuke of sexual violence. Often, older women are implicated for how they may have abetted oppression. All these journeys retrace those taken by the road movie’s archetypal outcasts – fugitives, marginalized misfits, and everything in between, who are comparably motivated in their quest for freedom and transformation. Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya (“3 Days to Forever,” 2007) slots easily into the road genre. The well-travelled festival film was named Best Indonesian Film at the Jakarta International Film Festival, and stars pop idols Nicholas 69 In Duress, Stoler uses the phrase to refer to the terms “duress, durability, and duration” (7). 70 Outline of the road movie draws very loosely from Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls, 137-160. 71 Barker, “A Cultural Economy of the Contemporary Indonesian Film Industry,” 191-192.

Postcolonial My ths

197

Saputra and Adinia Wirasti. Their sex appeal is relentlessly on display. Yusuf (Saputra) is asked to deliver a set of plates to a family wedding. His aunt is fearful that the heirlooms may be damaged in flight. Ambar (Wirasti) joins him in the car after missing her flight to the event. They confide in each other on the drive. Yusuf must decide if his heart really belongs in architecture school, while Ambar is starting to recognize that she has been spoilt by her economic privilege. Their search for authenticity sets them apart from both sets of parents who are in loveless marriages. The teens belong to the same affluent class but crave more than soulless and emotionally dishonest lives. The older people they meet on the road trip underscore the generational divide. In one humorous scene the travellers come upon a bickering couple running a food stand. In another sequence, they encounter a leering innkeeper who propositions Yusuf for group sex. The couple consummates their romance, but lose touch. Reuniting in the film’s epilogue, they run into each other at a family gathering nine months later. They are both content, having put the revelations from their trip to good use. Yusuf is in a relationship and still an architecture student, while Ambar is on break from studies in London. The film ends with the couple looking at each other in the middle of a crowded room. We do not know what happens next, but their inner struggles are resolved. The political is not far away at all from the personal. Their scenic trip from Jakarta to the Javanese cultural capital, Yogyakarta, is highlighted by point of view shots of individuals, communities, and cultures on the way: street merchants, landscapes, random folks going about their business. These sights configure the adventure as an historical exploration of national identity. The teens then roll past a gruesome multi-victim accident and witness a crowd of bystanders lugging bodies out of a ditch. Our gazes are transfixed through theirs. The sight is director Riri Riza’s metaphor for the massacres, a common metatextual backstory in reformasi narratives. He also raises the killings directly in Gie (2005), the biopic of Chinese-Indonesian activist Soe Hok Gie (1942-1969). Nan Achnas’s The Photograph (2007) takes on the issue obtusely, but in so doing the languid drama manages to represent the slaughters with inordinately explicit and grisly images of bloody dismemberment.72 Sita is a struggling low-end escort who makes a human connection with Johan, the elderly and taciturn title character. After she moves into his attic, they take mutual solace and help one another through crippling emotional 72 Prominent film artists in the reformasi era, Achnas and Riza are two of the directors involved with post-New Order milestone Kuldesak.

198 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

afflictions. Sita longs to see the young daughter she left in the care of her ailing mother. Her guilt over abandoning them is compounded by her shame of sex work. We find out that Johan is tormented by the knowledge that he is responsible for the deaths of his wife and son. Decades before, he had left them. In despair, she wandered with the child along a set of railway tracks. As fate would have happen only in cinema, they are killed by the train Johan was riding on his way out of town. He alights and instinctively begins to document the carnage with an old twin-lens reflex camera, realizing who the victims are when he recognizes a bracelet on a severed arm. The scene unfolds in flashback, cutting between past and present, as Johan relates the story to Sita while gingerly laying out a delicate stack of aging prints. Achnas superimposes Johan’s tragedy onto Chinese-Indonesian history by using the gory moment to visually recall the film’s beginning. When The Photograph opens, we see Johan straightening a row of frames on the wall, photographs of his ancestors. Their names are imprinted in red on the glass: Chinese characters above their Romanized spelling in Hokkien, the language spoken by the Southern Chinese who predominate among Southeast Asian migrants from China. Johan puts up an empty frame that his own photograph will eventually occupy. Achnas positions her lens to place his reflection within the mounting, on which his multiple names are also visible next to his face. The meticulously blocked shot splits his identity into three egos. The Chinese character for his surname, pronounced “Chen,” indicates his national origin. The Hokkien name spelled out below in English letters, “Tan,” signifies his ethnic subgroup. The Indonesian name “Johan” was probably selected for its phonetic similarity to “Chen”; it was a common practice among the Chinese when the 1967 law forced them to localize their names. Thus, Achnas fills out Johan’s story with the subtextual pain and trauma of modern Indonesian history. Without drawing too much equivalence between The Photograph and Arsan and Aminah, we still observe cinematic vision once again providing the avenue by which Indonesia enters into psychological negotiations with the massacres. It is almost as if photographic media have an ontological relationship to suppressed violence. Johan memorializes his family with two rituals. At night, he quietly lays out a set of photographs. During the day, he visits the abandoned tracks and assembles a meditation altar where they perished. In arguing that Achnas deconstructs common local gender stereotypes such as the immoral prostitute and selfish young husband, Yvonne Michalik’s feminist reading singles out this location. “[The] altar in the railway station is a purifying and transitional space for both characters

Postcolonial My ths

199

where Nan Achnas breaks their stereotypical portrayals.”73 Michalik writes that it “creates a cleansing effect and a transition,” a place for healing that allows Johan and Sita to transcend their pasts. But in a different context, these images can be refocused. The railway is arguably more meaningful than the altar. Lighting joss sticks at the Buddhist shrine signifies Johan’s exercise of his Chineseness. More important, the railway tracks are at least just as symbolic. Sita and Johan are both mired in an internal struggle. The film reifies that by returning over and over to the same spot on the tracks. As a semiotic part of the road film, in which trains connote movement, transition, and transformation, the overgrown weeds on this track imply the opposite. So, at the commencement of the final act when the two characters bond and grow closer, their revelations to both themselves and each other are inevitably facilitated by a journey on a train to the harbor. The road genre’s iconography therefore provides the setting for both fictional and national narratives. And as if to bring the latter full circle, the story’s villain is also killed at the same site. Sita is initially tormented by her pimp Suroso (a homonym of Suharto). The despicable character lures her into a gang rape, a plot point that again triggers a recall of violent episodes from both 1965 and 1998. The anguish persuades Sita to leave Suroso, but he finds her hiding at Johan’s. The resulting foot chase ends at the tracks, where an oncoming train runs over Suroso. The railway line bookends the film’s allegorical allusion to the New Order’s reign. The tracks are a site of physical trauma, unresolved emotions, and paralyzing torment, but a transformative path as well. Achnas has a habit of evoking history like this through affect. Take Pasir Berbisik (“Whispering Sands,” 2001), an early reformasi work that earned her a directorial award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival. It is an impressionist film, layering striking landscape panoramas with theatrical staginess, using a combination of temporal ellipses, mannerist compositions, ambiguous inserts, and restrained acting. But audiences will find themselves conversant with the narrative’s major plot points. A feminist text set in the ash desert around a Javanese volcano, Pasir Berbisik centers on two female leads. Teenager Daya longs to reunite with her father who abandoned the family when she was little. Daya and her strict mother, Berlian, are forced to flee their spartan life in a seaside community when corpses wash up on the beach one day. No explanation is given beyond Berlian’s statement that the hot season brings out aggression in people, but the reference to the 73 Michalik, “Indonesian Women Filmmakers,” 388.

200 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

anti-communist killings is unmistakable.74 The trauma of those events is smoothed over by generic formulae. Sobchack’s contention that genre incorporates reality into morally unambiguous environs which then mediate how audiences experience narrative, bears out in these sequences. The violence surfaces in the text as personal crises and anguish from unresolved conflict, but the characters at the center of the melodramas retain their agency, exercising choices that steer their lives in realistic and anticipated directions. By opting for stability over disruption, they conform to social order, as Indonesia used to always do. Although critics rightfully point out that the films extend old definitions of masculinity and female sexuality, Pasir Berbisik’s narrative for example, brings a high degree of classical closure at the same time. Achnas further encourages audiences to identify with Daya when she cast teenage starlet and beauty queen Dian Sastrowardoyo.75 Like Saputra and Wirasti, she offers convenient access to a diegetic perspective and focal point for empathy. Migrating inland, mother and daughter meet a host of eccentric characters. There is no road in the desert location, but those generic tropes are nonetheless distinct. In Dag Yngvesson’s in-depth consideration of Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya, he notes the connection between that obvious road film and Pasir Berbisik, describing it as “a more pedestrian version of a mapless Road Movie.” He makes little hay of the similarity, but senses a generic echo distinct enough to mention that Achnas weaves her narrative through movement, landscape, memory, and history.76 Suharto appears again, allegorically in the figure of Daya’s father, Agus. He comes to Berlian’s doorstep one night. Daya hopes that his apparent commitment to developing a meaningful relationship with her is genuine. But the burgeoning bond is severed for good when Agus pimps her out to a moneylender. The man sends the father outside with a gift of American cigarettes. He waits in his vehicle knowingly while the grotesque villain takes advantage of Daya. The cigarettes implicate America symbolically in Daya’s suffering at the doing of a heinous patriarch. For the crime, Agus is decisively punished when Berlian poisons him. We crave that retribution for an unambiguously evil act that leaves few other acceptable outcomes. The film’s storytelling is unhurried and can be opaque, but these emotional payoffs are reliably afforded. The 74 Beyond Indonesia the context is lost, on the reviewer for Variety, for instance. Elley, “Review: ‘Whispering Sands’.” 75 For a detailed feminist reading of this film as an anti-Suharto text, see Paramaditha, “Pasir Berbisik and New Women’s Aesthetics in Indonesian Cinema.” 76 Yngvesson, “Let’s Get Lost.”

Postcolonial My ths

201

film concludes neatly as Daya leaves the village at her mother’s insistence so that the girl may set her own course. Avant-garde filmmaker Faozan Rizal also uses the desert in his native Java for Yasujiro’s Journey (2004). The experimental film is non-classical but shares generic traits with Pasir Berbisik. Its scene is set decades before when a Japanese soldier survives a plane crash in Indonesia on the way to Pearl Harbor 1942, never to return home. His grandson, also named Yasujiro, goes to Indonesia searching for the elder, but is perhaps on a vision quest of his own. He gets lost too, parched and sunbeaten, reliving the fate of his grandfather. The younger man is wrought by not knowing what happened in 1942. He feels estranged, literally an alien in a strange and unforgiving land. Rizal expresses the feeling visually with topographical shots of soft dry sand shifting under Yasujiro’s feet, making him struggle for a stable foothold. His road is yet to be found, until then it is imaginary. Rizal does not tab the f ilm as Indonesian, except for distant allusions to global conflict, massive death, and Americans involved somehow. Otherwise Yasujiro’s Journey is by all accounts a universal treatise on memory. Tellingly for Rizal, remembering the past is not an expedition through time. Rather, self-realization is a discovery performed through travel. In its own way, the film’s narrative experimentalism recapitulates the familiar generic trope. The path that Soe Hok Gie takes is just as figurative. Gie is a not road movie but for the mountainous trails that the late writer loved. Where Yasujiro finds no resolution, Gie does. With Saputra in the lead role, Riza ensured that fans would identify with the character and be drawn into serious subject matter. This is the most openly political film of the group, a historically based work that conscripts the events of 1965. By valorizing a Chinese-Indonesian and early symbol of democratic freedom, the film sets itself against the militarist masculinity of Suharto’s reactionary regime. For film critic Intan Paramaditha, “Soe Hok Gie’s rebellious persona is a perfect icon of Reformasi.”77 The story remembers a man of unimpeachable virtue, a spiritual conscience for modern Indonesia. Sukarno and Suharto make for easy villains. Riza depicts Sukarno lecherously eyeing a servant; Suharto’s evil is represented first by the killings, and then after Gie criticizes the government, in the plain-clothes agents on his tail. Sadly, his compassion, intelligence, righteousness, and stoicism are layered with tragedy. The real Gie famously died on a nature walk after inhaling toxic fumes emanating from the mountains. His premature passing layers the plot with destiny, a 77 Paramaditha, “Contesting Indonesian Nationalism and Masculinity in Cinema,” 50.

202 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

prewritten history that lends emotional weight to the film. His death on the final hike hangs spectrally over the entire film. Only a year before, the eponymous character in Yasujiro’s Journey had come upon neither conclusion nor resolution. He had retreaded his ancestor’s ill-fated steps and expired in the desert. That preordained Javanese death march is the bond that Yasujiro shares with Gie. The latter, however, now dies a fully formed political subject. The end of the road for him is ironically one that sets the country on its path – not at the time but three decades down the line. With that fateful trek in East Java, he becomes the country’s North Star and spiritual embodiment of reformasi. Themes of mobility and expedition, on real and imagined roadways, thread themselves through these ventures: teenagers in a Peugeot from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, lost children on foot through Javanese desert sands, or within an urban travelogue exploring Jakarta’s nightlife in chiaroscuro. Riza’s Eliana, Eliana (2002) is set in contemporary Jakarta. It begins just as the young title character is being fired from her service job for kicking a male customer in the groin. Returning home, she discovers that roommate Heni, on whom she relies for rent, has moved out without warning. Worse, Eliana finds her estranged mother in the apartment. The two women charter a taxi and proceed into the city after dark as Eliana searches for the missing friend. The f ilm’s sociopolitical metaphors are numerous and evident, between the backstory of a father who walked out years ago, and Eliana’s comedic knack for subduing troublesome men with well-placed knees to the groin. The film brandishes a feminist critique of the autocratic patriarchs in Indonesian postwar history. Simultaneously, the tension between an obstinately traditional mother and her forward-looking daughter’s modern aspirations, symbolizes concurrent reformasi-era political wrangling. Indonesia cannot navigate its future without resolving its proper relationship to the past. Politically, it must strike the appropriate balance between realist caution and more radical idealism. Eliana, Eliana projects Indonesia’s conflicted view of itself narratively and stylistically. Digital cameras and low production values inscribe a social realism inspired by mumblecore. The camerawork and sound mixing seem haphazard and slipshod, befitting a script that seems unconcerned with providing every plot detail. The narration reflects Eliana’s alienation and vulnerability in the middle of Jakarta’s nighttime sensorium of assorted denizens, as well as the national uncertainty post-1998. In that way, the excursion presents a set of challenges and serves as a rite of passage for the heroine’s self-discovery. All is resolved when the journey ends. A plethora of subplots are tied up, and replicating the mother-daughter relationship

Postcolonial My ths

203

in Pasir Berbisik, Eliana reconciles with her mother who accepts that her child must find her own way thereafter. The film ends optimistically with assuring close-ups of Eliana smiling and walking with fresh confidence into an urban market. Ravi L. Bharwani’s critically successful Jermal (2008) is set on a fishing platform, one of many such temporary structures sitting off Indonesian shores. There is not a literal road but the horizon is ever present. The story of a young boy, Jaya, looking for his father after the death of his mother, takes place in the liminal sea setting. The ocean, prominently featured in Pasir Berbisik and Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya, becomes the only backdrop throughout Jermal. Unaccustomed to life on the platform, Jaya suffers bullying by the other boys who work there. Worse, his father Johar flatly denies paternity. We side easily with the lonely underdog. Jaya gradually overcomes his physical frailty and lashes out cathartically after one provocation too many. The incident prompts Johar to come clean. He admits to being an absentee husband and killing his wife’s lover in a fit of rage. He fled before Jaya’s birth and exiled himself on the jermal (fishing platform) to avoid prosecution. After observing too much of himself in his son’s vengeful anger, he renews his relationship with Jaya and decides to leave the platform to face his crimes. The film resolves as Jaya earns the respect of the other boys and closes the Oedipal narrative by reuniting with his father. They accompany each other on the journey to turn Johan over to the authorities. In the final shot, graphically reminiscent of two buddies on the road, we see the pair from behind riding side by side in a vessel looking towards the distant horizon. The whimsical advertising poster for Teddy Soeriaatmadja’s Banyu Biru (2005) depicts the lead character in a boat at sea too. This local star vehicle is a more straightforward road movie. The title character is a disaffected young man with emotional baggage related to his young sister’s death years before. Their father Yuskar abandoned the family soon after. After an awful day at work, Banyu (played by comedic star Tora Sudiro) sets off to find the old man in a bid to sort out these unresolved issues. By rail, trishaw, truck, foot, and finally a boat, he roams through the country. He first returns to the bungalow that was his childhood home and connects with old acquaintances, including a former neighbor (Sastrowardoyo starring in another prominent role). He moves on and meets a string of characters in a series of surreal experiences. He finally finds Yuskar on an island, but not the indifferent father he had remembered and long imagined. Instead, Banyu meets a sad, sympathetic man full of regret. When he wakes up suddenly at a productivity seminar, Banyu realizes that the entire journey had been a dream. He walks

204 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

away from work as his internal monologue resolves to seek answers in real life. Reformasi narratives tend to address these paternal relationships either with reconciliation or vengeance. On that score, Banyu Biru’s ending takes a rather reactionary stance. It proffers a message that one should not cling to resentments, or trust that memories are accurate. The film’s pragmatic advice to move on effectively pardons crimes and displaces the historical onus onto victims to forgive. As parables about the Suharto and the New Order’s litany of crimes go, Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017) deals justice most swiftly by decapitating the bad guys. The film was nominated for prizes at both Cannes and the Golden Horse Awards. The heroine is a new widow living alone in the country. A gang of seven robbers arrives on her farm to pillage and rape. They steal the livestock and force her to cook dinner. Their offhanded comments reveal that they commit these atrocities repeatedly and with impunity. Marlina manages to poison four of them, but is raped by Markus the leader. In the middle of the ordeal, she manages to grab a machete and lops off his head. She wraps the liberated napper in a sling and leaves the homestead to report the crime. The film is most inspired by the desolate and taciturn spaghetti western, but Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts is also a road movie. Along her journey to the police station on barely paved desert roads, Marlina catches the bus, a converted lorry, and encounters a cast of quirky travellers. She finds common cause with Novi, a pregnant woman abandoned by her abusive partner. The women are eventually taken hostage by the youngest bandit Franz. He forces Novi into the kitchen, where she finds a stray poison berry on the floor. As she cooks his dinner, Marlina calls out for help when Franz rapes her. Novi ditches the plan, dashes into the bedroom, and chops off Franz’s head with one swing of a machete. No time for reconciliation here, only justice and satisfying payback. Marlina and Novi do not pause to think before they pick up the weapon, and do not ask us to empathize either. Surya stages the symbolic castrations as moments of exhilaration and comedic delight. The women’s dexterity followed by the sight and sound of a head bouncing off the wooden floor, as we observe in an uncut emotionally detached long shot, only satiates our thirst for retribution and does not dither with regret. That appears to mark a gender difference in reformasi politics among these films. It seems that only men try to reconcile with their fathers during reformasi, and feminists like Marlina, Novi, Eliana, and Berlian are more decisive. Revenge provides its own closure. In The Photograph, Sita bears absolutely no remorse when a train eviscerates her pimp. After Marlina kills her attackers, she is initially shadowed on her passage by the headless

Postcolonial My ths

205

corpse of Markus. Surya leaves this surrealist part of the film unexplained; the figure simply stops showing up after Marlina reports the crime to the police. We can interpret the mystery though, through feminist allegory. The officer informs Marlina that her declaration of self-defense is exculpatory. But she needs to prove rape, and there are no funds to purchase a rape kit for at least another month. The law’s impotence or indifference would appear to absolve her from legal and moral accountability. If the beheaded zombie represents Marlina’s conscience, then the timing of its vanishing from the narrative suggests that she need not bother with listening to it. Our rooting interests in these films are usually clear. As they negotiate painful memories of the New Order through allegory, we align with intrepid characters that often arrive at satisfying points of closure by journey’s end. The classical formation of these films offer assorted reassurances of moral certainty and rehearse predictable outcomes that would in the past bolster the New Order’s self-legitimating claims to order and stability. But their continuing presence in these political texts haunts reformasi, ostensibly a period of openness and renewal.78 The discernible generic patterns of one genre in particular, ebbing in some texts and flowing in others, are not a coincidence. Semblances of the road film of all genres, spotted in the undercarriage of the reformative project, further implicate it in Indonesia’s Americanist past. At the same time, there is more than one determinant. Apart from the uncanny explanation above, there is an economic one: the need for films to subsist financially by appealing to general audiences. Occam’s razor would look no further to conclude that classicism and genre are adopted because more spectators prefer them. Foreign markets showed an appetite for genre productions.79 Independent artists after 1998 were for their part, always cognizant that commercial success is important for the long-term sustainability of a capital-intensive medium such as filmmaking.80 On a more basic level, these filmmakers also made it a priority to establish and cultivate a domestic audience for Indonesian films. As Riza once put it, “it seems that alternative film movements in other countries just don’t care much about their audience. For us, the audience is still very important.”81 These are perfectly reasonable financial incentives to color between the 78 Yngvesson’s analysis of Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya takes a different path but comes to a similar conclusion regarding Hollywood’s stylistic inf luence. See Yngvesson, “Let’s Get Lost.” 79 Imanjaya, “The Other Side of Indonesia,” 146; Said, Shadows of the Silver Screen, 3-5. 80 Barker, “A Cultural Economy of the Contemporary Indonesian Film Industry,” 101. 81 Sharpe, “Eliana Eliana.”

206 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

lines. Still, if Indonesian cinema’s political instincts cannot relinquish the safety of genres or resist the closure afforded by classical narrative, the reliance may very well be the sign of an ideological hangover. What is the point at which adherence to convention signals an aversion to risk, or an internalized reluctance to disavow oneself from the order and stability that the New Order considered paramount? The figurations of Chinese-Indonesian director Edwin, discussed at the start of the next chapter, could be experiencing the aftereffects of that legacy. His style is often judged to be unnecessary, excessive, and cumbersome. For now, it is useful to look to New German Cinema for an instructive precedent, especially in light of reformasi’s generic predilections. In his seminal book about the influential film movement, Thomas Elsaesser sees Kings of the Road as a successful effort by Wenders to turn the American road movie against itself. Elsaesser argues that German cinema was not merely regurgitating American culture superficially, but repurposing genre with autonomous, substantive, socially critical nous. Are we seeing reformasi cinema in the process of doing the same? The re-orientation happened not so much in terms of iconography and even less through formula plots (that is, of the kinds of stories told or the settings used) but in terms of the narrational strategies, of how the spectator was to be involved in the characters.82

Elsaesser’s prescription is a call to tinker at the level of narrative, subverting the classical formula that Sobchack elucidated in film genre. Observe the pattern within the grammar of his sentence. Elsaesser finds it important to look deeper, beyond iconography on the surface, beyond plots after that. It feels like a process of digging, of excavation, like the manner of so many films plowing through memories, the standard procedure to which Indonesian history and culture seem to return.

Bibliography Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Barker, Thomas. “A Cultural Economy of the Contemporary Indonesian Film Industry.” PhD dissertation, National University of Singapore, 2011. Retrieved from scholarbank.nus.edu.sg. 82 Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 120-122, 231.

Postcolonial My ths

207

Baumgärtel, Tilman, ed. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. Boothe, Anne. The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Brenner, Suzanne. “On the Public Intimacy of the New Order: Images of Women in the Popular Indonesian Print Media.” Indonesia 67 (1999): 13-37. Clark, Marshall. “Men, Masculinities and Symbolic Violence in Recent Indonesian Cinema.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, 1 (2004): 113-131. —. “Indonesian Cinema: Exploring Cultures of Masculinity, Censorship and Violence.” In Heryanto, Popular Culture in Indonesia, 37-53. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Cribb, Robert. “The Act of Killing.” Critical Asian Studies 46, 1 (2014): 147-149. Elley, Derek. “Review: ‘Whispering Sands’.” Variety (21 December 2001) http://variety. com/2001/film/reviews/whispering-sands-1200552142/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Farid, Hilmar. “Indonesia’s Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965-66.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, 1 (2005): 3-16. —. “Rethinking the Legacies of Bandung.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, 1 (2016): 12-18. Fraser, Nick. “We Love Impunity: The Case of The Act of Killing.” Film Quarterly 67, 2 (2014): 21-22. Hanan, David. “Changing Social Formations in Indonesian and Thai Teen Movies.” In Heryanto, Popular Culture in Indonesia, 54-69. —. “Innovation and Tradition in Indonesian Cinema.” Third Text 24, 1 (2010): 107-121. —. Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film: Diversity in Unity. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hearman, Vanesssa. “‘Missing Victims’ of the 1965-66 Violence in Indonesia: Representing Impunity On-Screen in The Act of Killing.” Critical Asian Studies 46, 1 (2014): 171-175. Heider, Karl. Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. Heryanto, Ariel. “Silence in Indonesian Literary Discourse: The Case of the Indonesian Chinese.” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 12, 1 (1997): 26-45. —. “Where Communism Never Dies: Violence, Trauma and Narration in the Last Cold War Capitalist Authoritarian State.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 2 (1999): 147-177. Imanda, Tito. “Independent versus Mainstream Islamic Cinema in Indonesia: Religion Using the Market or Vice Versa?” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 89-104.

208 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Imanjaya, Ekky. “The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films.” Colloquy 18 (2009): 143-159. Johnston, Eric. “Hollywood: America’s Travelling Salesman.” Vital Speeches of the Day 23 (1 July 1957): 572-574. Kusno, Abidin. “The Hero in Passage: The Chinese and the Activist Youth in Riri Riza’s Gie.” In Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention, edited by David C.L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto. New York: Routledge, 2012, 130-146. Laws of the Republic of Indonesia, no. 8, 1992, on Film. Michalik, Yvonne. “Indonesian Women Filmmakers: Creating a New Female Identity?” Indonesia and the Malay World 43, 127 (2015): 378-396. Paramadithia, Intan. “Contesting Indonesian Nationalism and Masculinity in Cinema.” Asian Cinema 18, 2 (2007): 41-61. —. “Pasir Berbisik and New Women’s Aesthetics in Indonesian Cinema.” Jump Cut 49 (2007) https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/PasirBerbisik/text.html (accessed 24 May 2017). —. “City and Desire in Indonesian Cinema.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, 4 (2011): 500-512. —. “Cinema, Sexuality and Censorship in Post-Soeharto Indonesia.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 69-87. —. “Film Studies in Indonesia: An Experiment of a New Generation.” Bijdragen tot de Taal, Land- en Volkenkunde 173, 2/3 (2017): 357-375. Roberts, Martin. “Indonesia: The Movie.” In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjortt and Scott MacKenzie. New York: Routledge, 2000, 173-188. Robison, Richard. “The Reordering of Pax Americana: How Does Southeast Asia Fit In?” In Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia, edited by Vedi R. Hadiz. New York: Routledge, 2006, 52-68. Rohde, David. “From Auteur to Advertising Man, in a Campaign for Indonesian Democracy.” The New York Times (28 December 2000): E3. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Said, Salim. Shadows on the Silver Screen: A Social History of Indonesian Film. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 1991. Sears, Laurie J. “The Persistence of Evil and the Impossibility of Truth in Goenawan Mohamad’s Kali.” In Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember, 74-98. Sears, Laurie J. Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013. Sen, Krishna. Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order. London: Zed Books, 1994. Sen, Krishna and David T. Hill. Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Postcolonial My ths

209

Sharpe, Joanne. “Eliana Eliana: Independent Cinema, Indonesian Cinema.” Inside Indonesia 72 (2002) http://www.insideindonesia.org/eliana-eliana-independentcinema-indonesian-cinema (accessed 9 August 2018). Sobchack, Thomas. “Genre Film: A Classical Experience.” Literature/Film Quarterly 3, 3 (1975): 196-204. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge, 1992. Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Suryakusuma, Julia I. “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia.” In Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, edited by Laurie J. Sears. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, 92-119. Van Heeren, Katinka. Contemporary Indonesian Film: Spirits of Reform and Ghosts from the Past. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012. Van Klinken, Gerry. “The Battle for History After Suharto.” In Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember, 233-258. Vickers, Adrian. A History of Modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wieringa, Saskia. Sexual Politics in Indonesia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Yngvesson, Dag. “Let’s Get Lost: Unmapping History and Reformasi in the Indonesian film Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya.” Jump Cut 53 (2011) https://www.ejumpcut. org/archive/jc53.2011/DagIndonesia/text.html (accessed 24 May 2017). —. “Kuldesak and the Inoexorable Pulp Fiction of Indonesian Film History.” Indonesia and the Malay World 43, 127 (2015): 345-377. —. “The Unconscious is Structured like an Archive: ‘Epic’ Politics and Postmodernity in Indonesian Cinema.” Plaridel 15, 1 (2018): 67-104. Zurbuchen, Mary S. ed. Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005. —. “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia.” In Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember, 3-32.

Conclusion A Look Forward for Southeast Asian Film Studies Abstract Inaugurated by a theoretical reading of experimental films from Indonesia, the Conclusion proposes principles and methods for future studies of Southeast Asian cinema. It grapples self-reflexively with the implications of applying critical theory and continental philosophy on undertheorized films from Southeast Asia, and acknowledges historical apprehensions regarding theory’s ability to imperialize knowledge. These intellectual politics render it worthwhile to ponder the political roots of Southeast Asian studies and area studies, for they are disciplines rooted in imperial and neo-imperial projects as well. Out of that conundrum, Southeast Asia’s uniqueness creates challenges for research, but these cinemas may also provide the infrastructure for a method that can wriggle free and clear these ideological or political overhangs. Keywords: Edwin, haptic cinema, area studies, critical theory, imperialism, Southeast Asian cinema

Technically, yes – films from America, the UK, France – you can see they are more advanced than us in Asia, but in the way that they treat the film medium and the way they express the problems they face, it’s all the same. – Edwin, filmmaker 1

When the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society awarded Edwin the Edward Yang New Talent Award at the 2012 Asian Film Awards, the encomium in its press release gushed over the filmmaker’s distinctive style and hailed a next great artist. For HKIFFS Executive Director Roger Garcia, 1

Epigraph from Tioseco, “A Conversation with Edwin.”

Sim, Gerald, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789463721936_concl

212 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

the Indonesian’s “approach to cinema and eternal human issues is at once lyrical, dreamlike, magical, and I’m almost tempted to say mythical. I venture that we are witnessing an auteur in the making, hopefully the evolution of a world class filmmaker.”2 It would seem to be a pro forma, otherwise unremarkable statement, but some of these words resonate in a different context. Garcia’s universal and humanist presumptions come from cultural values shared by Edwin, who proclaims that films around the world are “all the same.” The HKIFFS notes his country of origin, denoting his oeuvre as “set within the contemporary social and racial tension of urban Indonesia.” At the same time, the organization also praises him for transcending national boundaries, addressing “eternal human issues,” and being “world class.” It endorses Edwin on behalf of a “world” of institutional norms collectively subtended by a circuit of international film festivals, art film traditions, and inevitably, influential arbiters of taste and aesthetic worth. Compared with other political films associated with the reformasi movement, Edwin’s work takes bigger and more numerous creative risks. Whereas many films making willful interventions in social controversies and hot button issues remain constrained by a generic affliction of postcolonial history, Edwin in contrast seems indifferent when he wanders from the aesthetic mean. His work eschews clarity and the ideological mandate for ordered and stable texts. He overloads images with stylistic gestures that deposit opacity on screen. While foreign critics are more receptive to those formal experiments, home audiences tend to construe his storytelling as stubbornly abstruse. Edwin has to a degree been critically marginalized in and around his own country even though his films dwell intently on Indonesian cultural politics and pick at some of the freshest scars in its national history of social conflict. His bipolar reception is of course overdetermined by many factors. This includes the competing interests and disciplinary politics behind intellectual production about and around Southeast Asian cinema. In that context, this book takes stock of one of the issues at stake – the place for theory in those undertakings – to glean a set of best practices for conducting film history and criticism. Productive connections between Edwin’s style and politics can be derived by applying the theoretical work of Laura U. Marks on haptic cinema and Timothy Corrigan’s ideas about essayistic filmmaking. This chapter applies them to two films released on the 10th anniversary of reformasi, Trip to the Wound (2008) and Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008). A theoretically informed and sympathetic treatment of Edwin’s stylistic maneuvers helps 2 Hong Kong International Film Festival Society, “Indonesia’s Edwin to Receive the Edward Yang New Talent Award at the 6th Asian Film Awards.”

Conclusion

213

to highlight the variance between local and international critics’ responses to these films. The difference parallels divergent levels of interest in critical theorizing. One could go so far as to say that it is attributable to theory’s greater currency in American and European film studies than in Southeast Asia. Hence key disciplinary tensions come into focus. They crisscross theory and politics with methodological consequences for Southeast Asian film studies. In moments when this book reaches for French theorists like Derrida, Deleuze, Rancière, and Nancy, it has opted not to find points of reference in Asia. Because of that, it traverses a politicized web of intellectual and ideological boundaries. How then should a self-conscious study apply and present those insights? The production of knowledge about Southeast Asia has a social scientific bent that originates in the region’s historical relationship to the Cold War. Area studies research was fueled and funded in service of that conflict. Since the postcolonial cinemas and cultures of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia are also nurtured by those very same postwar geopolitical and economic conditions, any parochialism that area studies exerts on film studies should be thought through, simply in the interests of academic integrity. In asking the following questions, set aside for the moment the fact that these nations have embraced the linear model of economic development and are forging ahead towards modernity without too many “hangups.” Under anti-imperial imperatives though, how should we circumscribe the parameters for more honest and valid methods of film criticism that draw participation from the less empowered? Because is it more imperialistic or Eurocentric to use these theories or to avoid them? Choices to theorize or to cite certain writers affect how films are interpreted and valued. Posing these questions while conscious of my own discursive position in the American academy, this book closes by offering a historical understanding of what the playbook for theorizing Southeast Asian cinema should look like.

Theorizing Edwin Edwin’s socially conscious films are trained on the troubled relationship of ethnic Chinese immigrants with their own country. They have long felt marginalized in Indonesia. The issue is known locally as Masalah Cina (the Chinese problem). Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly strings together variations on that theme with loosely connected vignettes of inscrutable flashbacks and flashforwards. Each of them expresses a range of emotional

214 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

struggles and split social identities experienced by Chinese Indonesians. A prominent character, Linda, eats Chinese firecrackers like a hot dog. Courting death by consuming an ethnic artifact, her odd habit symbolizes Chinese-Indonesians’ internal conflict and communicates the severity of the problem. The film does not begin so nihilistically, though, but rather with an anecdote of emotional pain and indignity wrought by microaggression. An intertitle introduces “Verawati, the fragile badminton player.” The words are followed by a slow-motion take of a badminton game in progress. The image is silent. Peering downcourt, we see Verawati in national colors agilely exchanging shots with an opponent from China for almost 90 seconds. She maneuvers herself all over the foreground, her country “Indonesia” emblazoned across the back of her jersey. (Figure 5.1) When she wins the rally with a drop shot, the scoreboard shows that she has tied the set for Indonesia at 10-10. (Figure 5.2) The scene continues with a cut-in of Verawati from the same side of the court. The tighter frame makes the “Indonesia” on her shirt more conspicuous. She serves, still in slow-motion. When her racket meets the shuttlecock this time, a dramatic “thwack” shatters the silence. Under this second rally, Edwin’s soundtrack bears the whips and cracks of rackets meeting the shuttlecock at speed. The fourth shot of Verawati is below the waist, only of her legs. Offscreen sounds of the rackets now foreground the absence of other sounds that should be audible with the image: the indelible squeaks that badminton shoes make with the floor, crowd cheers, or grunts of physical exertion. (Figure 5.3) Then, a child’s voice asks, “which one is the Indonesian?” Stung by the insult, Verawati’s legs freeze. In close-up, the shuttlecock clips the top of the net and falls back into her court. The sequence harnesses Indonesia’s national sporting obsession and its proud tradition as a world power in badminton to demonstrate the complex relationship that Chinese Indonesians maintain with their country. International badminton tournaments are unifying cultural spectacles, but ethnic Chinese players dominate the local ranks. Edwin condenses the uneasy experience of being committed to a country that does not love you back into an evocative series of audio-visual combinations. They depict an athlete forced to reconcile being celebrated as sporting hero but alienated as a citizen. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly specifically stirs the cultural memories of ethnic minorities and diaspora communities. Their hybrid subjectivities and interstitial status give rise to perspectives that traditional visual regimes cannot fully process. Rather, their embodied knowledge is encoded within a different system of signification that Marks famously terms “haptic.” The result is an “intercultural” counter cinema that questions colonial

Conclusion

Figure 5.1 Badminton, Indonesia’s national sport. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008

Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

Figure 5.2 The Chinese-Indonesian identity crisis allegorized in badminton. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008

Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

Figure 5.3 Without the familiar squeak of badminton shoes, Edwin conjures silent haptics. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008

Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

215

216 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 5.4 A shuttlecock unable to clear the net, a metaphor for the futility of Chinese-Indonesian patriotism. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008

Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

hegemonic ideas about the nature of knowledge, memory, and art.3 The silence and slow-motion in the badminton sequence alerts us to what we should hear but do not: rubber soles squeaking against the court, graphite rackets cutting the air, approbation from the crowd. The first loud smack of taut nylon hitting cork attunes our ears to the textures of surfaces, tension in the racket strings, even the heaviness of the tropical humidity. Via haptic visuality, Edwin’s sensorium triggers Chinese Indonesian pain. One child’s naïve question paralyzes the athlete’s muscled limbs. Verawati toils in Indonesian colors but it is not sufficient evidence of patriotism. The net in close-up further symbolizes the imaginary Sino-Indonesian border that she and many others struggle to cross. (Figure 5.4) Throughout Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, we repeatedly hear a version of Stevie Wonder’s pop hit, “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” The cover recording is an obsessive presence that evokes the bitter pain of unrequited affection. Perceptible harmonic dissimilarities to Wonder’s original recording, in the synthesized music and local singer’s accented voice, haptically express futility. The song accompanies the storylines of several characters. Linda’s father is most memorable, a blind dentist on an unending journey of ethnic disavowal. He lost his sight after a botched attempt to surgically alter the shape of his eyes, and is now mulling conversion to Islam. Linda’s friend Cahyono recalls childhood beatings at the hands of racist bullies, and has taken to telling acquaintances that he is Japanese. A television set in one scene airs a documentary about the 1998 Jakarta riots where Chinese citizens were singled out for physical and sexual violence. The traumatic episode is restaged for Linda when she witnesses her father being sexually extorted. 3 Marks, The Skin of the Film, xi-xiii, 6, 24.

Conclusion

217

Figure 5.5 An insert of a pig tethered in a field. Blind Pig who Wants to Fly, 2008

Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

In between, Edwin cuts whimsically to a distressed pig struggling to free itself from a tether in the middle of an empty field. (Figure 5.5) The porcine metaphor is irresistible but only suggestive. Do the inserts have to do with the importance of pork to the Chinese diet? Is it actually blind like the dentist? Should we infer anything from its eventual escape about the human characters’ personal journeys? Ambiguity is emblematic of Edwin’s style. He insists on obliqueness over direct narration, distance instead of immersion, and defamiliarization not identification. Likewise, the three narrative segments in his next feature, Postcards from the Zoo (2012) appear in sequence but without proper transition. We come upon a little girl, abandoned by her father at the zoo, wandering the facility at night in a series of lushly photographed shots. These hypervisible images convey precious little and dislodge themselves from both our gaze and the diegesis. Edwin shunts us swiftly to scenes with Lana, a young woman interacting with the animals and keepers in dreamy truncations. Bereft of exposition, the audience is left to surmise that the film has flashed forward to the same character years later. Lana meets a charming magician dressed as a cowboy. He leads her to the world outside the zoo. Suddenly, they find themselves inside a massage parlor. Lana receives training from wily masseuses. Edwin keeps temporal and causal linkage faint throughout. Intertitles appear – scientific definitions of zookeeping terms – but they only throw viewers off course; the film is not remotely about zoology. Edwin’s short, Trip to the Wound, is no less obtuse. A man and woman meet on a bus where the entire film is set – it is another road film. Shilla strikes up a conversation with Carlo about his scar. Edwin narrates elliptically again, cutting backwards and forwards, shuttling between daylight and darkness over the young woman’s voice. She takes Carlo’s hand and guides

218 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Figure 5.6 Director Edwin plays with light. Trip to the Wound, 2008

Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

it up her arm towards her own scar. (Figure 5.6) Carlo explores her body but cannot find the wound. She looks away. A tear rolls down her face. Her pain is obvious but the trauma at its root is unexplained and unspoken. Trip to the Wound was part of 9808, an anthology of independent shorts looking back at 10 years of reformasi. The watershed events of May 1998 form the cornerstone for every chapter in the project. We can thus read Shilla’s tear to be a precipitation of the harrowing aftermath of mob violence visited on Chinese women, which is where Marks’s theorization of haptic cinema comes in handy again. A corporeal secretion, leaving a moist trail on Shilla’s cheek, embodies her cultural memory, her invisible scar a virtual trace of the past accessible through physical senses. 4 Haptic cinema invites “a look that moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what she or he is beholding.”5 Edwin obliges. He shoots the night scene from several vantage points, deploying light in a series of refractions: Streetlights blurred by the bus’s windshield, blinding lens flares created by light scattering within the lens array, the visage of Shilla’s ennui internally reflected on the window, blurry shots left out of focus. (Figure 5.7) 4 Scars as a trope reach deep into Marks’s intellectual lineage. The weight The Skin of the Film places on Deleuze creates footprints that lead to his Difference and Repetition, 77. In the same discussions, Marks also raises Henri Bergson. His Matter and Memory in particular, thinks about how memory is “embodied in nascent sensations” (179), materializes, and leaves traces on the body. See the first half of Chapter III. 5 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 162-163.

Conclusion

219

Figure 5.7 An out of focus final shot and inconclusive ending of Trip to the Wound, 2008

Courtesy of BABIBUTAFILM

He beckons our eyes towards surfaces, including that of the Betacam tape he chose to shoot with that produces a cool bluish tint. Gradually, the images sensitize our vision to tactility, before landing on Shilla’s skin, a site of pain, penetration and trauma. By the time Carlo moves his hand up her arm, her face, and legs, the camera touches our nerves too. In terms of form and structure, these unsettled narratives raise a forceful counterpoint to the ideological classicism of transparent storytelling and formulaic genres. Edwin hoists discomfiting experiences on spectators that are at once critical and liberating. The unbound narratives free audiences to harbor doubt and insecurity, but also autonomy and possibility. Absent the structured outcomes or coherent dramaturgy observed in popular reformasi films, Edwin engages through distantiation. He encourages witnesses to grasp the artistic encounter politically and invites self-determination, so the Brechtian thinking goes. But locally, Edwin’s mannerist film style elicits a different understanding. The director has been a trailblazer for Indonesia at Cannes, Berlin, and Rotterdam. And Western critics burnish his “new wave” and “art house” films with artistic gravitas.6 But while they celebrate his visual excess and 6 Sharkey, “Director Edwin in Vanguard of Indonesia’s New Wave of Filmmakers”; Brzeski, “Indonesian Director Edwin Partners with Holland’s Lemming Film for Sex-Driven Period Feature.”

220 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

lackadaisical plots as bold, auteurist, “idiosyncratic,” “experimental,” and “poetic,” judgments closer to home are less sympathetic.7 Fellow avant-gardist Faozan Rizal can empathize, having despaired at his own experience. He is well known internationally as an experimental filmmaker but longs for that work to be recognized by locals, to whom he is better known as a cinematographer for the more commercial films in his portfolio. In an interview with Criticine, an online journal about Southeast Asian filmmaking, Rizal compared the reception that Yasujiro’s Journey received from Indonesian and European audiences, clearly despondent over the local indifference towards less accessible filmmaking. Twelve people in the audience came from Indonesia for the screening [at the Singapore International Film Festival], but eight left in the middle of the show. In SIFF it was not too bad with many film students and Singaporean filmmakers. In Paris, I couldn’t believe the audience. Yasujiro’s Journey was attended by so many people. About 250 people came and watched the movie until the end. It was followed by a one-hour discussion. The questions were not only basic questions. I thought they would ask about the f ilmmaking process but they didn’t. They asked about the essence of the movie and shared their impression after watching it. In my own country, I’ve never experienced anything like it.8

Rizal raises his disappointment repeatedly in the interview and believes that the experience is common for experimental filmmakers in Indonesia. Although he continues to teach in Jakarta, his work is compelled to travel outside Indonesia to be appreciated.9 When the Ministry of Education and Culture published A Brief Cultural History of Indonesian Cinema, a promotional coffee table book published in 2012, Rizal is not mentioned at all.10 A similar pattern appears in academic criticism. An early review tipped its hat to Edwin’s “visual conceptualization and high regard for film form and experimentation” and for giving “a fresh perspective of Indonesian society.” It nevertheless considered them “thin on substance and development,” overly repetitive, and heavy on symbolism. The critiques implicitly deride 7 Hale, “Feeling Like Aliens in their Own Land”; Mintzer, “Postcards From the Zoo: Berlin Film Review”; Chang, “Review: ‘Postcards From the Zoo”; Fujishima, “Postcards from the Zoo.” 8 Sasono, “A Conversation with Faozan Rizal.” 9 Sasono, “A Conversation with Faozan Rizal.” 10 Tirtokusumo, A Brief Cultural History of Indonesian Cinema.

Conclusion

221

his stylization as facile, self-indulgent veneers that distract from serious issues.11 In not so many words, it faults Edwin for abdicating responsibility to speak more directly on politics, and selfishly seeking festival approbations by fashioning a pastiche of foreign art cinema instead.12 Criticine probed Edwin about these creative choices. “I showed a friend of mine your films,” the interviewer asks, “and he was impressed with the technique, but he was asking: where is the ‘Indonesian’ voice?”13 The questioner’s grammar recapitulates a familiar refrain: Edwin is reckoned to have opted for style over substance. By inference, the query equates deep meaning with realism, cultural authenticity, and plain political messaging. It begrudges Edwin for believing that he is “all the same” with international cinema. These ungenerous opinions are myopic. Alternatively, Edwin’s vision is neither empty nor evidence of some postcolonial Europhilic fetish. Rather, it expresses serious essayistic discourse. Corrigan’s account of how essay films merge and glide between personal expression and public experience echoes throughout Edwin’s creative labor. Across the history of its shifting practices, the essayistic stretches and balances itself between abstracted and exaggerated representation of the self (in language and image) and an experiential world encountered and acquired through the discourse of thinking out loud.14

Edwin’s ambiguities, more warmly admired at festivals abroad than in Indonesia, emerge from what Corrigan terms “expressive subjectivity.” After “experiential encounters in a public arena,” a f ilmmaker’s vision becomes “the figuration of thinking.” The formulation allows us to see how Edwin’s essay films transcend personal expression in an ongoing process of dramatizing thought within Chinese Indonesian social experience. It catalyzes a phenomenological interaction that “destabilizes” his authorial subjectivity, the films, and our apprehension of them.15 Therefore, these works can usher us into an encounter with his underlying thinking, into sociopolitically conscious reflections on the conditions of his reality. Historical scars, wounds, and traumas all come to bear on Edwin’s representation of the world. They disrupt his capacity to perceive and articulate his experiences, 11 Khoo, “Spotlight on the Films of Indonesian Filmmaker Edwin,” 136-137, 147. 12 Khoo, “What is Diasporic Chinese Cinema in Southeast Asia?” 70; Setijadi, “Chineseness, Belonging and Cosmopolitan Subjectivity in Post-Suharto Independent Films,” 71, 76. 13 Tioseco, “A Conversation with Edwin.” 14 Corrigan, The Essay Film, 15. 15 Corrigan, The Essay Film, 20, 30.

222 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

perhaps to the point where he wishes to undermine ours. They render his world resistant to denotation, unrepresentable on film. For that matter, Edwin and Rizal’s historical engagements also share an aesthetic kinship with a global documentary movement in formal experimentation. Hito Steyerl and Erika Balsom’s combined view that these filmmaking strategies are effecting artistic oppositions to epistemic authority and colonial regimes of visual knowledge in particular, should also discourage snap judgments and dismissals of these films as politically shallow.16 The earlier treatment of Tan Pin Pin’s documentary style as a political maneuver against authority and ideology in Singapore, is transposable and transportable across narrow intervening straits between these islands. These Indonesian films are choosing to take a resonant approach to find local authenticity. Continuing in the spirit of self-reflection with which this study was inaugurated in the introductory chapter, the sort of self-understanding advocated or practiced by Chen Kuan-Hsing, Rey Chow, and others, I am moved to further ponder my experiences in authoring this book. On account of those recollections, Edwin’s reception and Rizal’s lament ring true. More than that, they both illustrate and help diagnose a point of disciplinary contention. During this manuscript’s gestational period, I spoke from it at academic seminars whose audiences typically drew from film studies, Asian Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies. Differences registered right away. Theorizing felt more at home in front of some crowds than with others. Listeners based in American and British film studies were by and large more at ease with theory and willing to accept it as universal knowledge. Interlocutors from social sciences and area studies could be unaccustomed to close textual analysis and hesitant to theorize by comparison. Historians, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and an array of policy folks were versed in quantitative logic and spoke from a deep well of empirical examples. But enthusiasm for theoretical rumination was at times lukewarm. Geographically, the disciplinary divide replicates the critical split experienced by Edwin and Rizal. Local assessments that deem their styles superficial, even sybaritic, are borne not merely from taste, but subtended by intensely political structural factors having to do with area studies and the geopolitical formation of Southeast Asia. The ideologies underpinning that history inflect on the discourse and production of knowledge at academic institutions, and occupy the national cultures that pollinate films and cinematic traditions. They nourish the analytical parameters of film studies, and trickle into the prose used by film critics and journalistic reviewers. 16 Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty” and Balsom, “The Reality-Based Community.”

Conclusion

223

The politics of theorizing can therefore be thoroughly implicated in the politics of film in these parts. Let there be no mistaking my goal to advocate for more theory. It can glean refreshing insights into already venerated films and generate enthusiasm for less accessible work. But theorizing cannot be indifferent to well-grounded apprehensions that it may for example, produce knowledge in a manner that is imperializing. Even though critical theory is both useful and arguably underused for Southeast Asian cinema, its application must nevertheless be cognizant of intellectual politics. To that end, it is worthwhile to ponder the political inheritance of Southeast Asian studies and area studies, disciplines rooted in imperial and neo-imperial projects, and responsible for constructing “Southeast Asia” itself. By way of a conclusion, this book takes a measure of prior debates on Southeast Asian area studies and its relationship to critical theory, for the valuable proposals they have yielded, some of which inform this project. The region’s uniqueness creates challenges for research, such as figuring out how to theorize its cinema, free from its ethical quagmires and clear of ideological or political overhang.

What Theory and Southeast Asian Cinema Mean to Each Other Expanding the map of postcolonial film studies has acquainted us with unfamiliar manifestations of postcoloniality that force a rethink of the postcolonial theory canon. Retheorizing aside, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia’s cinemas remain undertheorized. The same can be cautiously said of Southeast Asian cinema in general. This does not mean that theoretical treatments are hard to find. Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Filipino director Lav Diaz are just two examples of directors attracting their fair share of ink. One can point to the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas conference program as well. The biennial gathering is an important incubator for research about the region’s cinema, including a healthy proportion of theoretical papers that find homes in theory-friendly venues. Most however, can often be traced to the American and British academic diaspora. Beyond it, studies of Southeast Asian films tend to use critical theory less frequently. The difference can mean that texts are not read symptomatically as often as they are treated like cultural indices, reflections of sociopolitical realities. Aesthetic preferences lean towards classical realism, social realism, and neorealism. These anthropological sensibilities condition empiricist eyes, for which the best films are about life, and the best films about life are those that document directly. These dispositions in Southeast Asian film

224 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

studies grow out of an instrumentalist penchant tied to the region’s postwar military, political, and economic history. The mission of practical purpose pervaded academic conditions and knowledge production. During World War II, the Pacific theater was mapped and sectioned into regions. Japan played an early role in creating the Southeast Asia we know today by designating and occupying its “southern resource area” during the war.17 Regional boundaries would shift as countries were added or subtracted from time to time, but “Southeast Asia” was eventually codified in American governmental discourse. In the War’s immediate aftermath, the Department of State established a Division of Southeast Asian Affairs. Academic units were inaugurated at Yale and at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. These institutions helped define the political cartography with which America plotted its anti-communist maneuvers in the coming decades. Its geopolitical strategy backed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which forged alliances through market-oriented development. Politicizing the region produced market demand for knowledge, which further legitimated Southeast Asian studies as an academic discipline.18 Scholars from the social sciences and humanities met those needs, in political science, anthropology, history, economics, languages, and geography. Their work was oriented to serve socioeconomic development and to be easily translatable into policy applications. Within the region, Southeast Asian scholars and institutions internalized the Cold War agenda, and remained on the economic and political course set by the West. From Donald Emmerson’s history of the field, “on balance, the incorporation of Southeast Asians into Southeast Asian Studies has deepened the emphasis on ‘modern’ research – current, politicoeconomic, and national-policy-preoccupied – established by American writers in the quarter-century after World War II.”19 Cultural historian Ariel Heryanto adds that the Southeast Asian intelligentsia in modern social sciences and humanities, even in more developed countries with abundant wealth and resources, continue to be institutionally committed to instrumentalist thinking, nation building, and modernization. The pursuit of national economic interests remains paramount.20 Nonetheless, the early eighties witnessed a push among U.S.-based Southeast Asianists to pivot away from developmentalism. American scholars 17 18 19 20

Park and King, “Introduction,” 13. Emmerson, “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” 8-10. Emmerson, “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” 9, 12, 14-15. Heryanto, “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” 83.

Conclusion

225

began to focus on what anthropologist David Szanton calls “conceptual systems” behind societies and cultures, a change he understands as evidence of intellectual maturity.21 Political scientist Ruth McVey attributes the shift to competition in the U.S. academy, which incentivized area specialists to reexamine “the theoretical concerns of their discipline.”22 What Szanton and McVey perceive as theory, however, refer largely to ideological analysis; to be theoretical or conceptual was limited to questioning socially embedded values and norms that narrativize history, shape interpretation, or contour research methodology. Theory in this sense is not quite critical theory, such as the social theory of the Frankfurt School, literary theorists like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Rancière, and Nancy, as well as the film theorists cited here who derive from that tradition: Conley, Bhabha, Marks, and others. Although critical theory established footholds in some boroughs of U.S.based humanities, it exerted limited influence. The professionalization of English, comparative literature, anthropology, linguistics, and film studies, for example, attracted scholars to theory, but the trend was disparaged by conservative detractors who saw indulgent, cloistered, professorial elites publishing incomprehensible, useless gobbledygook. In U.S.-based area studies, divergent attitudes bifurcated theory into two distinct units on campus: Embattled and underfunded multidisciplinary departments in the humanities, and far better resourced policy-driven area studies institutes. I witnessed the stark differences in resource and funding levels for myself; I wrote most of this book housed in the latter category, at Stanford’s Asia Pacific Research Center and the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. These programs produce fewer students but wield much greater influence as intellectual and programmatic focal points in the world.23 The organizational structure seals off theoretical criticism from the ostensibly more important fields. Beyond the academy there are political impediments. Exogenously crafted Cold War policies impacted internal politics by installing a third rail that polices radical critique, the kind that aims to change the social order or disrupt systems of knowledge. For example, independence struggles in Southeast Asian countries often pit colonial regimes against alliances of insurgents and communists. In the midst of the Cold War, colonies negotiating for independence were forced to reject communism as a precondition. A 21 Szanton, “Southeast Asian Studies in the United States,” 86-87; Szanton, The Politics of Knowledge, 2-4. 22 McVey, “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies,” 5. 23 Szanton, The Politics of Knowledge, 6-7.

226 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

new villain, the threatening specter of communist totalitarianism, replaced colonial oppression. A market economy became part of the bargain for freedom. Singapore’s case is exemplary. As the new republic transitioned to independence, colonizers evaded scrutiny and are recalled as benign benefactors who bequeathed modernity.24 Such is the cost of having no hangups. With capitalism and colonialism off limits, there is less obvious need for critical theory, for what remains for it to be critical of? Moreover, the Cold War often placed a premium on national stability, and where it was policed by authoritarian governments, writers tend to stay on the reservation. Such political climates acted as a check on critique. For film studies in Southeast Asia, forays into theory under the disciplinary banner of cultural studies or media studies retain an obligation to be grounded in empirical observation, which can mean to fly within the aspirational altitude of “middle-level” research advocated by David Bordwell.25 One can empathize with Bordwell’s position on theory in the discipline, and there is no reason to relitigate it here, but if these chapters have articulated persuasive readings of f ilms and compelling cultural insights, then I posit a prima facie case for theory. Critical theory lends us a capacity to imagine utopian alternatives to the status quo. Especially in a region where fears of nonconformism, unknowns, or of possibility itself are exploited to legitimate political power, the importance of genuinely critical theory is immeasurable. Change would lean into additional headwinds beyond those previously mentioned. Heryanto, an influential voice on Southeast Asian cultural studies and Indonesian cinema, opposes theory on populist grounds.26 His recent polemics insist on a reprieve for Southeast Asian Studies from the discursive, ideological, and practical restrictions imposed at Anglo-American universities during the Cold War. In particular, he singles out the ways those institutions have inhibited and marginalized Southeast Asian students and scholars. He recommends corrective concentration on mass culture and commercial genres, arguing that popular texts deserve a level of attention directly proportional to their relevance to the lives of people. On that note, he also wants a bigger platform for public intellectuals: homegrown critics and non-academic writers, including “artists, civil servants, and journalists,” who would wrest control of critical discourse away from the foreign academy, 24 Chua, “Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies,” 233. 25 See Bordwell, Making Meaning. 26 See Heryanto, “Popular Culture for a New Southeast Asian Studies?” and “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”

Conclusion

227

and towards the domestic public sphere. Heryanto is not strictly opposed to theory, but he sees the discipline’s future to be distant from it.27 His measures would decentralize knowledge production and transfer agency to marginalized groups – from cultural producers to cultural users, away from the elites, the over-educated, the West. One can appreciate the logic. Nonetheless, my conviction in theory’s benefits is neither naïve nor blind to the vigorous charges of Eurocentrism and parochialism. Derrida, Deleuze, Rancière, and Nancy are all vulnerable to indictments for framing their ideations through European – or specifically, French – experiences. “That is,” as Chen Kuan-Hsing declares in Asia as Method, “Martin Heidegger was actually doing European studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas.”28 That’s certainly one way to put it. But although Chen is not among her targets, there is also Rey Chow’s rebuke of conservative area studies scholars who mask retrograde opposition to theory behind “the glorious multiculturalist aura of defending non-Western traditions.” Laying down cover fire for non-theoretical area studies, she argues, protects positivism, essentialism, nativism, and traditional hierarchies.29 Chen’s line of attack in that instance echoes something Stuart Hall intones in his touchstone essay, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” Hall states that European conceptual frameworks, norms, and traditions of representation were used to process what expeditions discovered in the New World: This is hardly surprising: we often draw on what we already know about the world in order to explain and describe something novel. It was never a simple matter of the West just looking, seeing, and describing the New World/the Rest without preconceptions.30

Yet, note the familiar Foucauldian vocabulary in the subtitle. Hall draws on Foucault, as Edward Said does in Orientalism, to implicate Western discourse in the exertion and reinforcement of colonial and imperial power. So, when Chen characterizes Foucault for example as merely “doing European studies,” he is probably being purposefully reductive to make a point. We can surmise that Foucault’s theory is undoubtedly useful, but not irredeemable, however. 27 Heryanto, “Popular Culture for a New Southeast Asian Studies?” 229, 252. 28 Chen, Asia as Method, 3. In light of Sakai’s presence in the coming passages, see his discussion about the anti-theory alliance in Harootunian and Sakai, “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies,” 609-610. 29 Chow, “Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Studies,” 111-112. Emphasis in original. 30 Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 294. See Chen, Asia as Method, 226.

228 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Still, Chen and Hall make a worthy point that theory subjects all parties to normative aims and practices. Via Foucault, Hall reminds us that it “is always a power-relation. Those who produce the discourse have the power to make it true,” as long as the West retains the upper hand politically, economically, and socially.31 Riding ashore atop a wave of theory is almost never simply a battle of ideas. Every ounce of that professorial gallantry and all semblance of intellectual neutrality rest on Western authority’s physical and material foundations. In his historical account of area studies and its subset Asian studies, Naoki Sakai writes that the heavy muscle summoned as “humanity in the sense of humanitas has come to designate Western or European humanity.”32 He identifies and questions the presumptive incongruity between theory and Asia. With a nod to European and American empires as important formations of power, he argues that their hegemony instates theory as a province of the West and not of Asia. The bias stems from the distinction between the West and the Rest, defined not as geographic markers but a discursive binary. It prejudicially associates universal humanity, or humanitas, with a transcendental relationship to knowledge, in which knowledge is produced in reflective ways, capable of renewing conditions of knowing, “thereby transforming both the constitution of the object for knowledge production, and the subjective conditions of knowing.”33 By providence of theory, humanitas accords the privilege of being able to destabilize knowing, and thus make “universal” claims. Absent theory, the general form of humanity known as anthropos is left to gather information about humanity in a general sense, so as to deliver “particular” claims, akin to how area studies has in the past been a data collection service for colonial administrations.34 Hence when the West endows itself with exclusive access to humanitas, it denies the Rest that very right. The latter’s anthropos is unable to alter or reconceive the means of knowledge. “Unable” to theorize, it is reduced to menial grunt work of collecting data about general human nature. As a consequence, academic information flows unevenly. Factual data related to anthropos runs centripetally towards Western European and North American centers, while methods of knowledge classification, evaluation, engagement, and translation stream centrifugally outwards to peripheral 31 Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 295. 32 Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity,” 455. See also Sakai, “From Area Studies Toward Transnational Studies,” 265-274. 33 Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity,” 454. 34 See Harootunian and Sakai, “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies,” 596; Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity,” 454.

Conclusion

229

satellites.35 In f ilm studies, it is undeniable that Marks and Corrigan’s ideas hold passports with unmatched access. The humanities and film studies are coordinated globally like a Weberian bureaucracy, in which directives emanate from the top of a hierarchy and information travels in the reverse direction. Assigned roles are further justified by appeals to cultural and ethnic particularities, and function through a “splitting” binary as stereotypes do. Hall explains that what defines the West versus that which characterizes the Rest depends on and reinforces its Other.36 The determinative difference between the West and the Rest goes from being a putative essence, to being constituted within a discursive relationship. It is an epistemological change that bolsters ethnically differentiated inequity between who needs theory and gets to use it, and who does not. The stereotype persists despite structural changes brought about by globalization, amid opened transnational channels for academic and cultural exchange.37 These circumstances occasion the opportunity to challenge ethno-cultural divisions of labor in the humanities, and disrupt asymmetries in knowledge production that reconstitute colonial administrative hierarchies. To that end, Sakai raises two propositions for critical methods. First, one should not appropriate theory with complete credulity, but reflectively, more aware of its own historical embeddedness. Hall might recommend foregrounding theories individually and collectively in the political, economic, and social formations of the West, whose discursive duality with the Rest can still be found “in the modern world […] in the language, theoretical models, and hidden assumptions of modern sociology itself.” In his words, “the important idea to grasp now is the deep and intimate relationship which Foucault establishes between discourse, knowledge and power.”38 This means taking seriously the best values of humanitas, the “selfreflective knowing about knowing and […] the legislation of new means of knowing to which ‘man’ willingly subjects himself.”39 Those words echo in Chen’s proposal for the colonized as well to undergo “self-critique, selfnegation, and self-discovery […] to form a less coerced and more reflexive and dignified subjectivity.” Collectively, they inform the process of self-analysis that I began in the introduction and continued here. Among the filmmakers presented, Tan Pin Pin and Edwin are exemplary in that regard, inordinately 35 Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity,” 455. 36 Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 308. 37 Harootunian and Sakai, “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies,” 607; Sakai, “From Area Studies Toward Transnational Studies,” 267-268; Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 154-155. 38 Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 295, 318. 39 Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity,” 454. See also Bonura and Sears, “Introduction,” 7-8.

230 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

ready to test the limits and contingencies of their respective subjectivities. For Chen, underwriting these risks is part of the painful but necessary process of deimperialization, during which both colonizer and colonized transform their understandings of each other. This ultimately rehistoricizes and decenters the world.40 The focus of this conclusion, by holding a mirror up to itself, represents the book’s resolve to fulfill that duty. Second, in that spirit of openness, Sakai’s concept of “heterolingual address” – addressing multiple linguistic communities, or a broader audience, with no guarantee of translation or communication – is additionally instructive. Theory’s parochialism often comes about when it presumes to communicate ideas through a putatively unitary regime of language and discourse. Subaltern Others who respond on those terms, homolingually within those parameters in other words, perpetuate their own subordination. But heterolinguality introduces a different attitude of unresolved indeterminacy. A heterolingual theorist who already translates within the act of writing, facilitates a transnational move to break down the walls and hierarchies that protect insiders and sustain vestiges of empire.41 Heryanto’s reason for wanting more public intellectuals writing about mass culture in Southeast Asia arises from very similar concerns. But we may already find ourselves oversupplied. Before we take that route, let us perhaps first give self-reflexive heterolingual theorizing an old college try. If all these voices for more inclusiveness and active participation tell us anything, it is that the Rest must avoid rekindling its old relationship to the West. It must learn to talk back. This book’s push to soften the ground in Southeast Asian film studies, to cultivate a field friendlier to critical theory, is motivated by the potential to harvest readings that are deeper, more nuanced, and different. With French writers dominating the framework, a bigger onus is on the films to talk back, and indeed they do. A good number are profoundly aware in an epistemological and phenomenological sense. Far from passive texts waiting to be read by subjects, they refuse to be subsumed under the hermeneutic dome of the postcolonial theory canon, and call attention to the intellectual history behind it. They hold their own and reciprocate in mutually enriching dialogue. When films from Singapore express colonial spatiality, they subject the spatial turn to a historiographical context beyond Late Capitalism to which we are more accustomed. For her part, Tan’s national portraits are at their most lucid when inscrutable; by discovering Singapore’s authenticity in its anonymity, she undermines 40 Chen, Asia as Method, 3, 252-253. 41 Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 1-8.

Conclusion

231

essentialist notions of national cinema. Yasmin Ahmad’s multilingual stagings call on Malay aurality to reexamine Bhabhan hybridity, while Lei Yuan Bin’s 03-FLATS disrupts Deleuzean categories of movement- and time-images. New wave and art films from Singapore and Indonesia nuance our understanding of aesthetic mimicry. These examples fulfill Chen’s hopes of multiplying frames of reference, especially by seeding a pattern of “inter-referencing,” within Asia’s rich diversity no less – between its South and Southeast. 42 Cinemas without colonial hangups have an evident knack of asking these questions, of interrogating the normative positions we hold. These were merely flickers from Southeast Asia as recently as two decades ago but have gathered into a surge difficult to ignore. This relatively obscure district of the postcolonial world, idiosyncratically of Asia yet inimitably Westernized, has a way with films that can defamiliarize and spark consideration of both our differences and shared values. Hangups signify a psychological affliction, an impediment to forward movement and progress. A cinema immune to them is well positioned to stage these critical reflections but not without controversy. If these cultures are in one sense free from prejudicial burdens of the past, perhaps they enjoy the critical distance we desire to flee the present to imagine the possible. But hangups also denote neuroses and trivial preoccupations. This raises a warning. Being rid of them must never come at history’s expense. Ahistoricism is a postmodern scourge, and we should dismay at political amnesia whenever we find it. 43 No matter what one may think about these postcolonialities, their recitations of nostalgia, anxiety, loss, trauma, and death prove that they have not abdicated the responsibility to remember.

Bibliography Balsom, Erika. “The Reality-Based Community.” e-flux 83 (2017) https://www.e-flux. com/journal/83/142332/the-reality-based-community/ (accessed 20 July 2018) Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone, 1988. 42 Chen, Asia as Method, 212, 223, 243. 43 In 2014, a poll found that 59% of Britain’s public thought the British Empire something to be proud of. Reconducted in 2016, the portion of positive respondents was a lower but still substantial 44%. Dahlgreen, “The British Empire is ‘Something to be Proud of”; Stone, “British People are Proud of Colonialism and the British Empire, Poll Finds.”

232 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Bonura, Carlo and Laurie J. Sears. “Introduction: Knowledges that Travel in Southeast Asian Studies.” In Sears, Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, 3-32. Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Brzeski, Patrick. “Indonesian Director Edwin Partners with Holland’s Lemming Film for Sex-Driven Period Feature.” The Hollywood Reporter (26 September 2013) http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/indonesian-director-edwin-partnersholland-637319 (accessed 24 May 2017). Chang, Justin. “Review: ‘Postcards From the Zoo’.” Variety (15 February 2012) http:// variety.com/2012/film/markets-festivals/postcards-from-the-zoo-1117947096/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperializtion. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Chow, Rey. “Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Studies: Issues of Pedagogy in Multiculturalism.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 103-118. Chua, Beng Huat. “Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies 11, 3 (2008): 231-240. Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Dahlgreen, Will. “The British Empire is ‘Something to be Proud of’.” YouGov UK (26 July 2014) https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Emmerson, Donald K. “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, 1 (1984): 1-21. Fujishima, Kenji. “Postcards from the Zoo.” Slant (23 April 2012) http://www. slantmagazine.com/film/review/postcards-from-the-zoo (accessed 24 May 2017). Hale, Mike. “Feeling Like Aliens in their Own Land.” The New York Times (10 September 2009) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/movies/11blind.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity: Understanding Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben. Cambridge: Polity, 1992, 276-331. Harootunian, Harry D. & Naoki Sakai. “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies.” positions: east asia cultures critique 7, 2 (1999): 593-647. Heryanto, Ariel. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” In Sears, Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, 75-108.

Conclusion

233

—. “Popular Culture for a New Southeast Asian Studies?” In Park and King, The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies, 226-262. “Indonesia’s Edwin to Receive the Edward Yang New Talent Award at the 6th Asian Film Awards.” Hong Kong International Film Festival Society [Press release] (8 February 2012). Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “What is Diasporic Chinese Cinema in Southeast Asia?” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 1 (2009): 69-71. —. “Spotlight on the Films of Indonesian Filmmaker Edwin.” Asian Cinema 21, 2 (2010): 135-149. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. McVey, Ruth. “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, 1 (1995): 1-9. Mintzer, Jordan. “Postcards from the Zoo: Berlin Film Review.” The Hollywood Reporter (15 February 2012) http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ postcards-zoo-berlin-review-291397 (accessed 24 May 2017). Park, Seung Woo and Victor T. King, eds. The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies: Korea and Beyond. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013. —. “Introduction.” In Park and King, The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies, 1-42. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. —. “From Area Studies Toward Transnational Studies.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, 2 (2010): 265-274. —. “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13, 4 (2010): 441-464. Sasono, Eric. “A Conversation with Faozan Rizal.” Criticine (9 August 2007) http:// www.criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=29 (accessed 7 August 2018) Sears, Laurie J. ed. Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Setijadi, Charlotte. “Chineseness, Belonging and Cosmopolitan Subjectivity in Post-Suharto Independent Films.” In Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, Religion and Belonging, edited by Siew-Min Sai and Chang-Yau Hoon. London: Routledge, 2013, 65-82. Sharkey, Betsy. “Director Edwin in Vanguard of Indonesia’s New Wave of Filmmakers.” Los Angeles Times (2 April 2012) http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/01/ entertainment/la-ca-edwin-20120401 (accessed 24 May 2017). Steyerl, Hito. “Documentary Uncertainty.” Re-visiones 1 (2011) http://re-visiones. net/anteriores/spip.php%3Farticle37.html (accessed 20 July 2018).

234 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Stone, Jon. “British People are Proud of Colonialism and the British Empire, Poll Finds.” Independent (19 January 2016) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ politics/british-people-are-proud-of-colonialism-and-the-british-empire-pollfinds-a6821206.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Szanton, David L. “Southeast Asian Studies in the United States: Towards an Intellectual History.” In A Colloquium on Southeast Asian Studies, edited by Tunku Shamsul Bahrin, Chandran Jeshurun, and A. Terry Rambo. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981, 72-87. —. “Introduction: The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States.” In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David L. Szanton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 1-33. Tioseco, Alexis A. “A Conversation with Edwin.” Criticine (14 June 2008) http:// criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=31 (accessed 24 May 2017). Tirtokusumo, Sulistyo. A Brief Cultural History of Indonesian Cinema. Jakarta: The Ministry of Education and Culture, Republic of Indonesia, 2012.

Bibliography Ahmad, Yasmin. “The Making of Mukhsin, Part 3: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice.” The Storyteller (27 March 2007) yasminthestoryteller.blogspot.com/2007/03/ making-of-mukhsin-part-3-flavour-of.html (accessed 24 March 2017). Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Amin-Khan, Tariq. The Postcolonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2012. Andaya, Barbara Watson. “Distant Drums and Thunderous Cannon: Sounding Authority in Traditional Malay Society.” International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 7, 2 (2011): 17-33. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006. Aquilia, Pieter. “Westernizing Southeast Asian Cinema: Co-Productions for ‘Transnational’ Markets.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20, 4 (2006): 433-445. Baker, Alan R.H. “Introduction: On Ideology and Landscape.” In Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the Past, edited by Alan R.H. Baker and Gideon Biger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 1-14. Balsom, Erika. “The Reality-Based Community.” e-flux 83 (2017) https://www.e-flux. com/journal/83/142332/the-reality-based-community/ (accessed 20 July 2018) Barker, Thomas. “A Cultural Economy of the Contemporary Indonesian Film Industry.” PhD dissertation, National University of Singapore, 2011. Retrieved from scholarbank.nus.edu.sg. Baskett, Michael. The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2008. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28, 2 (1974): 39-47. Baumgärtel, Tilman, ed. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. —. “Introduction: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 1-10. —. “‘I Do Not Have Anything Against Commercial Films’: Interview with Eric Khoo.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 213-226. —. “‘I Want You to Forget about the Race of the Protagonists Half an Hour into the Film’: Interview with Yasmin Ahmad.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 245-252.

236 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 2. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version].” Grey Room 39 (2010): 11-37. Bergan, Ronald. “Yasmin Ahmad.” The Guardian (12 August 2009) www.theguardian. com/global/2009/aug/12/obituary-yasmin-ahmad (accessed 24 May 2017). Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone, 1988. Bernards, Brian. “Reanimating Creolization through Pop Culture: Yasmin Ahmad’s Inter-Asian Audio-Visual Integration.” Asian Cinema 28, 1 (2017): 55-71. Berry, Chris. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. —, ed. Chinese Films in Focus II. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 125-133. —. “The Postcolonial Critic: Homi Bhabha Interviewed by David Bennett and Terry Collins.” Arena 96 (1991): 47-63. —. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Bishop, Ryan, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, eds. Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity. London: Routledge, 2004. —. “Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity.” In Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, Beyond Description, 1-16. Bishop, Ryan. “Forward: Seeing Space/ Crafting Space/ Moving Space.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, xi-xiii. Bonura, Carlo and Laurie J. Sears. “Introduction: Knowledges that Travel in Southeast Asian Studies.” In Sears, Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, 3-32. Boothe, Anne. The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A History of Missed Opportunities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. —. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. Bradshaw, Peter. “Ilo Ilo review--Novelistic Singaporean Debut by Anthony Chen.” The Guardian (1 May 2014) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/01/ ilo-ilo-review (accessed 24 May 2017). Brenner, Suzanne. “On the Public Intimacy of the New Order: Images of Women in the Popular Indonesian Print Media.” Indonesia 67 (1999): 13-37. Brenez, Nicole. “Tan Pin Pin. No Vacation from Politics.” Jeu de Paume: Each Dawn a Censor Dies (7 April 2016) http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/blogs/each-dawn-acensor-dies-by-nicole-brenez/2016/04/07/tan-pin-pin-no-vacation-from-politics/ (accessed 24 May 2017).

Bibliogr aphy

237

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Brzeski, Patrick. “Indonesian Director Edwin Partners with Holland’s Lemming Film for Sex-Driven Period Feature.” The Hollywood Reporter (26 September 2013) http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/indonesian-director-edwin-partnersholland-637319 (accessed 24 May 2017). “Building Architecture.” National Gallery Singapore. N.d. https://www.nationalgallery.sg/about/building/architecture (accessed 27 February 2016). Bunnell, Tim. “Views from Above and Below: The Petronas Twin Towers and/in Contesting Visions of Development in Contemporary Malaysia.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 20, 1 (1999): 1-23. Capino, José B. Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Castro, Teresa. “Les Archives de la Planète: A Cinematographic Atlas.” Jump Cut 48 (2006) http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/KahnAtlas/text.html (accessed 23 May 2017). —. “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture.” The Cartographic Journal 46, 1 (2009): 9-15. Chang, Justin. “Review: ‘Postcards from the Zoo’.” Variety (15 February 2012) http:// variety.com/2012/film/markets-festivals/postcards-from-the-zoo-1117947096/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Chee, Lilian. “Chasing Inuka: Rambling Around Singapore Through Tan Pin Pin’s Films.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, 59-76. Chee, Lilian and Edna Lim, eds. Asian Cinema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015. —. “Asian Films and the Potential of Cinematic Space.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, 1-18. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperializtion. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. New York: Verso, 2013. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. —. “Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Studies: Issues of Pedagogy in Multiculturalism.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 103-118. Chua, Beng Huat. “Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies 11, 3 (2008): 231-240.

238 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

—. “Singapore as Model: Planning Innovations, Knowledge Experts.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, 27-54. Chua Beng Huat and Yeo Wei-Wei. “Singapore Cinema: Eric Khoo and Jack Neo – Critique from the Margins and the Mainstream.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, 1 (2003): 117-125. Clark, Marshall. “Men, Masculinities and Symbolic Violence in Recent Indonesian Cinema.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, 1 (2004): 113-131. —. “Indonesian Cinema: Exploring Cultures of Masculinity, Censorship and Violence.” In Heryanto, Popular Culture in Indonesia, 37-53. Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. —. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Cribb, Robert. “The Act of Killing.” Critical Asian Studies 46, 1 (2014): 147-149. Dahlgreen, Will. “The British Empire is ‘Something to be Proud of’.” YouGov UK (26 July 2014) https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/07/26/britain-proud-its-empire/ (accessed 24 May 2017). De Koninck, Rodolphe. “Singapore or the Revolution of Territory. Part One: The Hypothesis.” Cahiers de géographie du Québec 34, 92 (1990): 209-216. De Koninck, Rodolphe, Julie Drolet, and Marc Girard. Singapore: An Atlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008. De Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. —. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. —. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. —. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. —. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Bibliogr aphy

239

Dhaliwal, Ray. “Three MRT Stations to be Renamed.” The Straits Times (28 November 1986): 15. Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in The Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Elley, Derek. “Review: ‘Whispering Sands’.” Variety (21 December 2001) http://variety. com/2001/film/reviews/whispering-sands-1200552142/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Emmerson, Donald K. “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, 1 (1984): 1-21. Farid, Hilmar. “Indonesia’s Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965-66.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, 1 (2005): 3-16. —. “Rethinking the Legacies of Bandung.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, 1 (2016): 12-18. Featherstone, Simon. Postcolonial Cultures. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. “Feature Films: Exhibition--Indicators.” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) N.d. http://data.uis.unesco.org/index. aspx?queryid=60&lang=en (accessed 24 May 2017). Fennell, Chris. “Child of the 90s: Anthony Chen on Ilo Ilo.” BFI News, Features and Opinion (28 April 2014) http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/ interviews/child-90s-anthony-chen-ilo-ilo (accessed 24 May 2017). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Fraser, Nick. “We Love Impunity: The Case of The Act of Killing.” Film Quarterly 67, 2 (2014): 21-22. Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Fu, Poshek and David Desser, eds. The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Fujishima, Kenji. “Postcards from the Zoo.” Slant (23 April 2012) http://www. slantmagazine.com/film/review/postcards-from-the-zoo (accessed 24 May 2017). “Fullerton Heritage.” The Fullerton Hotel. N.d. http://www.fullertonhotel.com/ heritage-en.html (accessed 11 April 2016). Fuhrmann, Arnika. Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

240 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Gibson, William. “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” Wired 1.04 (1993) http:// www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/gibson.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Goh, Robbie B.H. “Evangelical Economies and Abjected Spaces: Cultural Territorialization in Singapore.” In Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, Beyond Description, 95-111. Hale, Mike. “Feeling Like Aliens in their Own Land.” The New York Times (10 September 2009) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/movies/11blind.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity: Understanding Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben. Cambridge: Polity, 1992, 276-331. Han, Wei Chou. “Kelvin Tong Gets Personal with 7 Letters Short, Grandma Positioning System (GPS).” Channel NewsAsia (22 August 2015) http://www.channelnewsasia. com/news/entertainment/kelvin-tong-gets-personal/1996230.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Hanan, David. “Changing Social Formations in Indonesian and Thai Teen Movies.” In Heryanto, Popular Culture in Indonesia, 54-69. —. “Innovation and Tradition in Indonesian Cinema.” Third Text 24, 1 (2010): 107-121. —. Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film: Diversity in Unity. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harootunian, Harry D. & Naoki Sakai. “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies.” positions: east asia cultures critique 7, 2 (1999): 593-647. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. —. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hearman, Vanesssa. “‘Missing Victims’ of the 1965-66 Violence in Indonesia: Representing Impunity On-Screen in The Act of Killing.” Critical Asian Studies 46, 1 (2014): 171-175. Heider, Karl. Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. Heryanto, Ariel. “Silence in Indonesian Literary Discourse: The Case of the Indonesian Chinese.” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 12, 1 (1997): 26-45. —. “Where Communism Never Dies: Violence, Trauma and Narration in the Last Cold War Capitalist Authoritarian State.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 2 (1999): 147-177. —. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” In Sears, Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, 75-108.

Bibliogr aphy

241

—. ed. Popular Culture in Indonesia: Fluid Identities in Post-Authoritarian Politics. London: Routledge, 2008. —. “Popular Culture for a New Southeast Asian Studies?” In Park and King, The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies, 226-262. Hirschman, Charles. “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology.” Sociological Forum 1, 2 (1986): 330-361. Ho, Kong Chong. “From Port City to City-State: Forces Shaping Singapore’s Built Environment.” In Culture and the City in East Asia, edited by Won Bae Kim, Mike Dougalss, Sang-Chuel Choe, and Kong Chong Ho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 212-233. Ho, Tzu Nyen. “The Afterimage – Traces of Otherness in Recent Singaporean Cinema.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, 2 (2007): 310-326. Hong, Guo-Jin. Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Imanda, Tito. “Independent versus Mainstream Islamic Cinema in Indonesia: Religion Using the Market or Vice Versa?” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 89-104. Imanjaya, Ekky. “The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films.” Colloquy 18 (2009): 143-159. In Time to Come Press Kit. BFG Media (2017). “Indonesia’s Edwin to Receive the Edward Yang New Talent Award at the 6th Asian Film Awards.” Hong Kong International Film Festival Society [Press release] (8 February 2012). Ingawanij, May Adadol. “Introduction: Dialectics of Independence.” In Ingawanij and McKay, Glimpses of Freedom, 1-14. Ingawanij, May Adadol and Benjamin McKay, eds. Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Jaikumar, Priya. “Postface: An Interview with Priya Jaikumar.” In Ponzanesi and Waller, eds. Postcolonial Cinema Studies, 233-241. James, C. L. R. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. —. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Johnston, Eric. “Hollywood: America’s Travelling Salesman.” Vital Speeches of the Day 23 (1 July 1957): 572-574.

242 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “Contesting Diasporic Subjectivity: James Lee, Malaysian Independent Filmmaker.” Asian Cinema 15, 1 (2004): 169-185. —. “Reading the Films of Independent Filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad: Cosmopolitanism, Sufi Islam and Malay Subjectivity.” In Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, edited by Daniel P.S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden and Gaik Cheng Khoo. London: Routledge, 2009, 107-123. —. “What is Diasporic Chinese Cinema in Southeast Asia?” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, 1 (2009): 69-71. —. “Spotlight on the Films of Indonesian Filmmaker Edwin.” Asian Cinema 21, 2 (2010): 135-149. —. “Smoking, Eating, and Desire: A Study of Alienation in the Films of James Lee.” In Ingawanij and McKay, Glimpses of Freedom, 121-135. —. “Where the Heart is: Cinema and Civic Life in Singapore.” In New Suburban Stories, edited by Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 97-108. —. “Of Diminishing Memories and Old Places: Singaporean Films and the World of Archiving Landscape.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39, 1 (2013): 31-52. Khoo, Olivia. “Slang Images in the ‘Foreignness’ of Contemporary Singaporean Films.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, 1 (2006): 81-98. —. “On the Banning of a Film: Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, with Love.” Senses of Cinema 76 (2015) http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/documentary-in-asia/tosingapore-with-love-documentary/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Koeck, Richard and Les Roberts. “Introduction: Projecting the Urban.” In The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections, edited by Richard Koeck and Les Roberts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 1-17. Koeck, Richard. Cine-Scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities. New York: Routledge, 2013. Koh, Adeline and Frieda Ekotto. “Frantz Fanon in Malaysia: Reconfiguring the Ideological Landscape of Negritude in Sepet.” In Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature: Remapping Uncertain Territories, edited by Magali Compan and Katarzyna Pieprzak. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, 123-141. Koh, Tommy and Li Lin Chang, eds. The Little Red Dot: Reflections by Singapore’s Diplomats. Singapore: World Scientific, 2005. Kong, Lily. “Ambitions of a Global City: Arts, Culture and Creative Economy in ‘PostCrisis’ Singapore.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 18, 3 (2012): 279-294. Kong, Lily and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of ‘Nation’. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Koolhaas, Rem. “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis … or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa.” In S, M, L, XL, edited by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995, 1009-1089.

Bibliogr aphy

243

Kümin, Beat and Cornelie Usborne. “At Home and in the Workplace: A Historical Introduction to the Spatial Turn.” History & Theory 52 (2013): 305-318. Kuppusamy, Baradan. “No Colonial Hangups as Malays Rush to Learn English.” Inter Press Service (23 August 2005) http://www.ipsnews.net/2005/08/educationno-colonial-hangups-as-malays-rush-to-learn-english/ (accessed 5 March 2019) Kusno, Abidin. Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. “The Hero in Passage: The Chinese and the Activist Youth in Riri Riza’s Gie.” In Lim and Yamamoto, Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia, 130-146. Lamster, Mark, ed. Architecture and Film. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. Langdon, Marcus. Guide to George Town’s Historic Commercial & Civic Precincts. Penang, Malaysia: George Town World Heritage Inc., 2015. Laws of the Republic of Indonesia, no. 8, 1992, on Film. Law, L., C.J.W.-L. Wee, and F. McMullan. “Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo’s Be With Me.” Geographical Research 49, 4 (2011): 363-374. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. —. State, Space World: Selected Essays. Translated by Gerald Moore, edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Leow, Joanne. “The Future of Nostalgia: Reclaiming Memory in Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City and Alfian Sa’at’s A History of Amnesia.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45, 1 (2010): 115-130. Lim, David C.L. and Hiroyuki Yamamoto, eds. Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention. New York: Routledge, 2012. Lim, Edna. “Counterperformance: The Heartland and Other Spaces in Eating Air and 15.” In Chee and Lim, Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, 187-203. —. “Singapore Cinema: Connecting the Golden Age and the Revival.” In Teo and Liew, Singapore Cinema, 20-36. Lim, Varian and Elaine Ho. “What the MRT Really Means to S’poreans.” Today (20 July 2015) http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/what-mrt-really-meanssporeans?page=1 (accessed 24 May 2017). Lippit, Akira Mizuta. “At the Center of the Outside: Japanese Cinema Nowhere.” Situations 2 (2008): 1-19. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960. Mahtani, Shibani. “Wealth Over the Edge: Singapore.” The Wall Street Journal (7 March 2013) http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324662404578 334330162556670 (accessed 24 May 2017). Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1993.

244 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze and World Cinemas. New York: Continuum, 2011. McDermott, Darren. “Singapore in No Hurry to Shed Legacy of British Colonialism.” The Wall Street Journal (25 June 1997) http://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB867283245554886500 (accessed 24 May 2017). McGee, T.G. The Southeast Asian City: A Social Geography of the Primate Cities of Southeast Asia. New York: Praeger, 1967. —. “Many Knowledge(s) of Southeast Asia: Rethinking Southeast Asia in Real Time.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 48, 2 (2007): 270-280. McKay, Benjamin. “Auteur-ing Malaysia: Yasmin Ahmad.” In Ingawanij and McKay, Glimpses of Freedom, 107-119. McPherson, Kenneth. “Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 1890s-1920s.” In Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, edited by Leila Tarazi Fawaz and Christopher Alan Bayly. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 75-95. McVey, Ruth. “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, 1 (1995): 1-9. Michalik, Yvonne. “Indonesian Women Filmmakers: Creating a New Female Identity?” Indonesia and the Malay World 43, 127 (2015): 378-396. Millet, Raphaël. Singapore Cinema. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2006. Mintzer, Jordan. “Postcards from the Zoo: Berlin Film Review.” The Hollywood Reporter (15 February 2012) http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ postcards-zoo-berlin-review-291397 (accessed 24 May 2017). Muhammad, Amir. Yasmin Ahmad’s Films. Kuala Lumpur: Matahari Books, 2009. Musa, M. Bakri. Moving Malaysia Forward. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2008. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. —. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. —. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Naruse, Cheryl Narumi. “(Un)shared Values: Alienation, Modernity and Singaporean Identity in Perth.” Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 6, 1 (2008): 66-81. Nazzi, Thierry, Josiane Bertoncini and Jacques Mehler. “Language Discrimination by Newborns: Toward an Understanding of the Role of Rhythm.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 24, 3 (1998): 756-766.

Bibliogr aphy

245

Ng, Jenna. “Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism in Singaporean Cinema: A Case Study of Perth.” In Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique, edited by Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner. New York: Routledge, 2011, 261-278. Nornes, Abé Mark. “For an Abusive Subtitling.” Film Quarterly 52, 3 (1999): 17-34. Oliver, Kelly. Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Ohala, John J. and Judy B. Gilbert. “Listeners’ Ability to Identify Languages by Their Prosody.” In Problèmes de prosodie, Vol. 2, edited by P. Leon and M. Rossi. Ottawa: Didier, 1981, 123-131. Paramadithia, Intan. “Contesting Indonesian Nationalism and Masculinity in Cinema.” Asian Cinema 18, 2 (2007): 41-61. —. “Pasir Berbisik and New Women’s Aesthetics in Indonesian Cinema.” Jump Cut 49 (2007) https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/PasirBerbisik/text.html (accessed 24 May 2017). —. “City and Desire in Indonesian Cinema.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12, 4 (2011): 500-512. —. “Cinema, Sexuality and Censorship in Post-Soeharto Indonesia.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 69-87. —. “Film Studies in Indonesia: An Experiment of a New Generation.” Bijdragen tot de Taal, Land- en Volkenkunde 173, 2/3 (2017): 357-375. Park, Seung Woo and Victor T. King, eds. The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies: Korea and Beyond. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013. —. “Introduction.” In Park and King, The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies, 1-42. “Petronas Towers.” Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. N.d. http://pcparch.com/project/ petronas-towers/detail (accessed 23 May 2017). Phillips, John. “Singapore Soil: A Completely Different Organization of Space.” In Urban Space and Representation, edited by Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy. London: Pluto Press, 1999, 175-195. “PM Lee, I Don’t Get Upgrading, So Can I Pay Less Tax?” Yahoo! News Singapore (6 April 2011) https://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/pm-lee-don-tupgrading-pay-less-tax-20110405-231901-526.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Ponzanesi, Sandra and Marguerite Waller, eds. Postcolonial Cinema Studies. New York: Routledge, 2012. —. “Introduction.” In Ponzenesi and Waller, Postcolonial Cinema Studies, 1-16. Poon, Angelia. “Common Ground, Multiple Claims: Representing and Constructing Singapore’s ‘Heartland’.” Asian Studies Review 37, 4 (2013): 559-576. Preservation of Monuments Act (Cap 239, 1985 Rev Ed) s 5 (a).

246 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Quah, Danny. “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity.” Global Policy 2, 1 (2011): 3-9. Rae, Paul. “‘10/12’: When Singapore Became the Bali of the Twenty-First Century?” focas: Forum on Contemporary Art & Society 5 (2004): 218-255. Ramani, Vinita. “Singapore Dreaming (Review).” Criticine (23 October 2006) http:// www.criticine.com/review_article.php?id=21 (accessed 24 May 2017). Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Ridge, Bryan. “English Language and Malaysian Identity: A Shifting Odyssey.” Asian Studies Review 19, 3 (1996): 67-78. Roberts, Les and Julia Hallam. “Film and Spatiality: Outline of a New Empiricism.” In Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place, edited by Julia Hallam and Les Roberts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, 1-30. Roberts, Martin. “Indonesia: The Movie.” In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjortt and Scott MacKenzie. New York: Routledge, 2000, 173-188. Robison, Richard. “The Reordering of Pax Americana: How Does Southeast Asia Fit In?” In Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia, edited by Vedi R. Hadiz. New York: Routledge, 2006, 52-68. Rohde, David. “From Auteur to Advertising Man, in a Campaign for Indonesian Democracy.” The New York Times (28 December 2000): E3. Sa’at, Alfian Bin. “Hinterland, Heartland, Home: Affective Topography in Singapore Films.” In Baumgärtel, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, 33-50. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Said, Salim. Shadows on the Silver Screen: A Social History of Indonesian Film. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 1991. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. —. “From Area Studies Toward Transnational Studies.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, 2 (2010): 265-274. —. “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13, 4 (2010): 441-464. Sankaran, Chitra. “Diasporic Predicaments: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” In History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, edited by Chitra Sankaran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012, 1-15. Sasono, Eric. “A Conversation with Faozan Rizal.” Criticine (9 August 2007) http:// www.criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=29 (accessed 7 August 2018) Shonfield, Katherine. Walls have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City. London: Routledge, 2000.

Bibliogr aphy

247

Sears, Laurie J. ed. Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. —. “The Persistence of Evil and the Impossibility of Truth in Goenawan Mohamad’s Kali.” In Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember, 74-98. Sears, Laurie J. Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013. Sen, Krishna. Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order. London: Zed Books, 1994. Sen, Krishna and David T. Hill. Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Setijadi, Charlotte. “Chineseness, Belonging and Cosmopolitan Subjectivity in Post-Suharto Independent Films.” In Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, Religion and Belonging, edited by Siew-Min Sai and Chang-Yau Hoon. London: Routledge, 2013, 65-82. Sharkey, Betsy. “Director Edwin in Vanguard of Indonesia’s New Wave of Filmmakers.” Los Angeles Times (2 April 2012) http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/01/ entertainment/la-ca-edwin-20120401 (accessed 24 May 2017). Sharpe, Joanne. “Eliana Eliana: Independent Cinema, Indonesian Cinema.” Inside Indonesia 72 (2002) http://www.insideindonesia.org/eliana-eliana-independentcinema-indonesian-cinema (accessed 9 August 2018). Shiel, Mark. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” In Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City, 1-18. Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. —. Screening the City. London: Verso, 2003. Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’.” Social Text 31, 2 (1992): 99-113. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 2014. Siddique, Sophia. “Images of the City Nation--Singapore Cinema in the 1990s.” PhD Thesis, University of Southern California. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 2002. “Singapore.” The Layover. The Travel Channel, 21 November 2011. Singapore: From Settlement to Nation Pre-1819 to 1971. Singapore: Curriculum Planning and Development Division, Marshall Cavendish Education, 2012. Singer, Ben. “Triangulating Japanese Film Style.” In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Daisuke Miyao. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33-60. Sobchack, Thomas. “Genre Film: A Classical Experience.” Literature/Film Quarterly 3, 3 (1975): 196-204. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World.” In New

248 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Latin American Cinema, Volume One, Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, edited by Michael T. Martin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997, 33-58. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313. Stam, Robert and Louise Spence. “Colonialism, Racism and Representation.” Screen 24 2 (1983): 2-20. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge, 1992. Steyerl, Hito. “Documentary Uncertainty.” Re-visiones 1 (2011) http://re-visiones. net/anteriores/spip.php%3Farticle37.html (accessed 20 July 2018). Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Stone, Jon. “British People are Proud of Colonialism and the British Empire, Poll Finds.” Independent (19 January 2016) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ politics/british-people-are-proud-of-colonialism-and-the-british-empire-pollfinds-a6821206.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Suryakusuma, Julia I. “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia.” In Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, edited by Laurie J. Sears. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, 92-119. Szanton, David L. “Southeast Asian Studies in the United States: Towards an Intellectual History.” In A Colloquium on Southeast Asian Studies, edited by Tunku Shamsul Bahrin, Chandran Jeshurun, and A. Terry Rambo. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981, 72-87. —. “Introduction: The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States.” In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David L. Szanton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 1-33. Tan, Kenneth Paul. Cinema and Television in Singapore: Resistance in One Dimension. Leiden: Brill, 2008. —. “Pontianaks, Ghosts and the Possessed: Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema.” Asian Studies Review 34, 2 (2010): 151-170. —. “Alternative Visions in Neoliberal Singapore: Memories, Places, and Voices in the Films of Tan Pin Pin.” In Lim and Yamamoto, Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia, 147-167. Tan, Pin Pin. “80km/h.” Blog. http://www.tanpinpin.com/wordpress/80kmh/ (accessed 24 May 2017).

Bibliogr aphy

249

—. Singapore GaGa: A Film by Tan Pin Pin. Official website. http://www.tanpinpin. com/sgg/story.html (accessed 24 May 2017). —. The Impossibility of Knowing. Official website. https://theimpossibilityofknowing.wordpress.com/about/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Tan, See Kam, Michael Hong Hwee Lee, and Annette Aw. “Contemporary Singapore Filmmaking: History, Policies and Eric Khoo.” Jump Cut 46 (2003) http://www. ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/12storeys/index.html (accessed 24 May 2017). Tay, Yek Keak. “Royston Tan: ‘Old Romances’ Isn’t Just About Nostalgia.” inSing (14 December 2012) http://www.insing.com/feature/interview-royston-tanold-romances-isnt-just-about-nostalgia/id-b8673f00/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Teo, Stephen. The Asian Cinema Experience. London: Routledge, 2014. —. “Malay Cinema’s Legacy of Cultural Materialism: P. Ramlee as Historical Mentor.” In Teo and Liew, Singapore Cinema, 3-19. —. “Jack Neo, Conformity and Cultural Materialism in Singapore Film.” In Teo and Liew, Singapore Cinema, 67-83. Teo, Stephen and Liew Kai Khiun, eds. Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2017. “‘The Act of Killing’: New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres.” Democracy Now! 19 July 2013. https://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/19/the_act_of_killing_new_film (accessed 24 May 2017). Thomas, François. “Orson Welles’ Trademark: Overlapping Film Dialogue.” In Film Dialogue, edited by Jeff Jaeckle. London: Wallflower, 2013, 126-139. Tioseco, Alexis A. “A Conversation with Edwin.” Criticine (14 June 2008) http:// criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=31 (accessed 24 May 2017). Tirtokusumo, Sulistyo. A Brief Cultural History of Indonesian Cinema. Jakarta: The Ministry of Education and Culture, Republic of Indonesia, 2012. Tweedie, James. The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. “Uneven Results of a Colonial Legacy.” Times Higher Education (17 March 1995) https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uneven-results-of-a-coloniallegacy/96923.article (accessed 24 May 2017). Van Heeren, Katinka. Contemporary Indonesian Film: Spirits of Reform and Ghosts from the Past. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012. Van Klinken, Gerry. “The Battle for History After Suharto.” In Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember, 233-258. Vickers, Adrian. A History of Modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

250 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Wagner, Tamara S. Occidentalism in Novels in Malaysia And Singapore,1819-2004: Colonial and Postcolonial Financial Straits and Literary Style. Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Wang, Meng Meng. “Roar for your country: Bennett.” The Straits Times (26 July 2009): 40. Watson, Jini Kim. “Aspirational City.” Interventions 18, 4 (2016): 543-558. Wee, C.J.W.-L. “The Suppressed in the Modern Urbanscape: Cultural Difference and Film in Singapore.” positions: asia critique 20, 4 (2012): 983-1007. Wieringa, Saskia. Sexual Politics in Indonesia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Yeo, George Yong Boon. “Promoting the Arts.” Speeches: A Bi-monthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 16, 4 (1992): 112-115. —. “Singapore Arts Centre: Taking Shape.” Speeches: A Bi-monthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 18.4 (1994): 32-37. Yeoh, Brenda S.A. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Yeong, Chong. “Tan Pin Pin: The Hidden Depths of Memory.” Memento (Blog) (30 March 2012) http://www.iremember.sg/index.php/2012/03/tan-pin-pintapping-the-hidden-depths-of-memory/ (accessed 24 May 2017). Yngvesson, Dag. “Let’s Get Lost: Unmapping History and Reformasi in the Indonesian film Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya.” Jump Cut 53 (2011) https://www.ejumpcut. org/archive/jc53.2011/DagIndonesia/text.html (accessed 24 May 2017). —. “Kuldesak and the Inoexorable Pulp Fiction of Indonesian Film History.” Indonesia and the Malay World 43, 127 (2015): 345-377. —. “The Unconscious is Structured like an Archive: ‘Epic’ Politics and Postmodernity in Indonesian Cinema.” Plaridel 15, 1 (2018): 67-104. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Yuen, Belinda. “Urban Planning in Southeast Asia: Perspective from Singapore.” Town Planning Review 82, 2 (2011): 145-167. Žižek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review 225 (1997): 28-51. Zurbuchen, Mary S. ed. Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005. —. “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia.” In Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember, 3-32.

Index 03-FLATS 126, 131–35, 231 4:30 107 9th August 110–13 12 Storeys 25, 122, 124–26 15 107, 125 80km/h 66–68, 114–15 Achnas, Nan 26, 197–200 action-crystals 130–31, 133, 135; see also time-images aerial maps 63–67, 70, 73–74, 77–80, 83, 98, 119 affective maps 81–84 Ahmad, Yasmin 26, 45, 141–46, 152, 231 Hari Merdeka spots 157–58 national identity in films of 41–42, 144, 156 politics of 159–63 soundscapes in films of 148–56, 164–66 see also “Bush”; Gubra; Mukhsin; “Percintaan Tan Hong Ming”; Rabun; Sepet alienation 40–41, 61, 135 and citizenship 81–83, 116–21, 144, 158, 164–66, 214 familial 35, 196, 201–2 urban 99–101, 104–7, 114, 125–30 All the Lines Flow Out 73–74 Altman, Rick 176 Americanization 42–44, 176, 182–86, 188–91, 195, 205; see also Hollywood Andaya, Barbara Watson 146, 154 Anderson, Benedict 80, 143 n.5, 176 anthropos 228–29 anti-Chinese legislation 180, 198 “any-space-whatever” 97, 121–23, 128–31 A Poet 170, 175 area studies 19–20, 47–49, 213, 222–23, 225–28 Arsan and Aminah 43, 171–73, 198 art cinema and history 120, 128 political content of 26, 31, 130, 145, 221 Western conventions of 40, 117, 231 see also new wave films arts policy in Singapore 80, 118–19, 116 n.35 Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas 223 atlases 39, 65, 72, 84–85, 90; see also maps aural culture 21, 166 Malay 19, 42, 230–31 and resonance 150–56, 163–64 and soundscapes 146–50 authenticity 111, 173, 188, 221–22 and national voice 38, 230 and subaltern agency 116–17, 128 Azimat 78 Balsom, Erika 111–12, 114, 222 Banyu Biru 203–4 Bennett, Daniel 20–21

Be With Me 122, 125 Bhabha, Homi 40, 56, 117, 145, 158, 231 bilocation 86–87 Bishop, Ryan 55–59 Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly 212–17 Bordwell, David 31, 44, 226 Breathless 123 Bruno, Giuliana 81 “Bush” 152–53, 158 cacophonies 142, 154–55, 160, 164–66 cartographic cinema 39, 64–68, 80, 92, 98 Castro, Teresa 60, 67, 69, 75–76, 84–86 censorship 103, 169–70, 177 n.16, 182, 186 Chee, Lilian 59, 113–14, 126, 133–34 Chen, Anthony 25–26, 28–29 Chen, Kuan-Hsing 35, 46–48, 222, 227–31 China Wife 78–79 Chocolate 162 Chow, Rey 47–48, 222, 227 Chua, Beng Huat 28, 78, 99–100, 105 classical narrative cinema 121, 130, 200, 205–6 and genre 43–44, 177, 186–88, 189–95 cognitive maps 58, 62, 70, 82 Cold War Americanism 182–86 area studies 19, 44–49, 213, 224–26 and construction of Southeast Asia 36–37 and Suharto 42–43, 177, 179 colonial architecture 22–23, 54–56, 85–87 colonial city 54–55, 83, 85–86, 88–90, 115, 131 colonial names 21–25, 56 communists in anti-colonial movements 32 n.20, 224–26 banning Hollywood films 186 and Chinese identity 37 in educational films 187–88 Indonesian 176–80 violence against 43–44, 170, 172–74 Conley, Tom 39, 60, 67–69, 82, 86 Corrigan, Timothy 196 n.70, 212, 221, 229 critical theory 59, 222 calls to reengage with 19–20, 46–48, 212–13, 223–30 films talking back to 46, 130, 230–31 Dark City 165 De Koninck, Rodolphe 63–67, 75 Deleuze, Gilles 48, 125, 135, 218 n.4 and “any-space-whatever” 97, 121–23, 128–31 and cartography 69, 73 n.49 and time-images 40, 116–17, 121–24 Derrida, Jacques 76, 145 dialogue, multilingual 42, 142–48, 159–60, 164–66, 231

252 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

didong 170–71 Dirlik, Arif 35, 40–41, 162–63 documentary realism 111–12 Eating Air 90–92, 121–25, 127, 131 Edwin critical reception of 219–22 film style of 37, 180, 206, 211–19, 229–30 see also racial politics; Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly; Postcards from the Zoo; Trip to the Wound Eliana, Eliana 202–5 Emmerson, Donald 37–38, 224 emulative occidentalism 24, 41 essay film 114, 131, 180, 212, 221 Fanon, Frantz 25, 158, 160–61 Fight Club 104 film studies 36–44, 59, 101 methodological debates in 44–49, 223–24 postcolonial 25–27, 31–36, 49, 144–45 financial crisis 1997 29, 171, 185 2000 36 flats see public housing genre and Americanization 43, 174–75, 186 analysis 45, 103–4, 176–77, 183, 187–89, 191–96 and structuralism 189–90 in The Act of Killing 43, 172, 182 see also Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI; road films George Town 17, 23–24, 28 Gerhana 40–41, 45 Ghosh, Amitav 143, 166 Gibson, William 105, 113 Gie 197, 201–2 globalization 38, 55, 144–45, 156, 175 n.7 and heightened inequalities 111, 163–64, 194 as interpretive lens 34–35, 41–42, 49, 81–83, 98–105 Gour, Rajendra 88–90 Grandma Positioning System (GPS) 64, 97 Gubra 148, 164–65 Hall, Stuart 227–29 haptic cinema 33, 212–18 Hardt, Michael 34–36 Heryanto, Ariel 176–78, 184, 224, 226–27, 230 heterolingual address 230 hiraeth 40, 113, 135 Hollywood censorship of films from 182–83 classical narrative style 121, 130, 145–46 cultural influence of 103–4, 117, 172, 175–77, 186–96 see also Americanization Hujan Panas (Warm Drizzle) 85

humanitas 228–29 hybridity 29, 38, 46, 49, 153, 231 tropes of 19, 32–34, 41–42, 143–46, 156–59, 162 Ibu (Mother) 87–88 Ilo Ilo 26, 28–29, 35 imperialism 27, 34–36, 48, 55–57, 184–87, 228–30 independence celebrations of Singapore 30, 77 n.56, 110–11 celebrations of Malaysia 42, 144, 152, 157 Ingawanij, May Adadol 38 In Time to Come 131–32 Invisible City 74–76, 112, 118 Islam 36, 40, 56, 157–62, 165, 179, 194, 216 Jaikumar, Priya 27–28 Japanese occupation 27, 184 of Malaysia 23, 27–28 of Singapore 22–24, 112 Jermal 203 Keluar Baris 60, 64 Khoo, Eric 25, 99, 124–28 Khoo, Gaik Cheng 37, 41, 60 n.31, 107, 159, 165 Khoo, Olivia 99, 104–5, 120, 145–46 Kings of the Road 176, 195, 206 Koolhaas, Rem 57, 104–5 Lee, James 37, 40–41 Lim, Charles 73, 77 Liverpool F.C. 20–21 maps aerial 63–67, 70, 73–74, 77–80, 83, 98, 119 affective 81–84 as coextensive with films 39, 60, 67–69, 75, 77 n.56, 84–85, 90 cognitive 58, 62, 70, 82 and colonial spatiality 55, 87–88, 98, 131 “map-as-logo” 71, 80 Marks, Laura U. 33, 49, 212, 214, 218, 229 Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts 204–5 Martin-Jones, David 48, 129–30 Marxism 31–32, 36, 47, 156, 160, 164, 179 Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) 53, 56, 69–72, 88, 90, 109 McGee, Terry 38, 54–55, 85 Mee Pok Man 101, 124–25, 127–28 mimicry 22, 40, 117, 231 movement-images 117, 121–23, 129–30, 231; see also action-crystals; time-images Moffatt, Tracey 160 Moon Over Malaya 78–79, 85 Moving House 107, 133

253

Index

Mukhsin 164–65 multiculturalism in area studies 227 in films of Yasmin Ahmad 42, 45, 143 n.6, 152, 156–62 multilingual dialogue 42, 142–48, 159–60, 164–66, 231

prosody 42, 149–51 public housing and alienation in films 98–101, 107–9, 120–25, 128–34 and government in Singapore 29–30, 87–88 see also 03-FLATS

Naficy, Hamid 32–38, 49, 145–46, 157 Nancy, Jean-Luc 42, 158–59, 162–66 and music 147, 153 and resonance 149–56, 159, 164 and soundscapes 145–49 national cinema 36–39, 45–46, 84, 155–56, 173, 188 Negri, Antonio 34–36 Neo, Jack 98, 103 New German Cinema 116, 176, 206 New Order government and allegory 199, 204–6 and film culture 186–93 and political control 177–85 violent excesses of 42–44, 173–74, 194 new wave films 36–37, 40, 103, 118–26, 194, 219–20 style of 127–28, 131–32, 133–36 see also art cinema Noer, Arifin 190 nostalgia 24–27, 40, 60–61, 66, 107–8, 113 Nugroho, Garin 26, 169–71, 174–75, 187

Queen Elizabeth Walk 90, 106

Office Space 104 Old Places 60–61, 64, 106, 108–9, 111 Oppenheimer, Joshua 43, 171–75, 182–83, 191–92 Orientalism 23, 30 n.16, 46, 102, 174 n.6, 184, 227 Pasir Berbisik 199–203 patriarchal figures 35, 61, 180–81, 194–96 as stand-in for Suharto 199–200, 202–4 Penarek Becha 87–89 Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI 190–91 “Percintaan Tan Hong Ming” 157–58 Perth 81–84, 117, 123 Petronas 41, 56, 152, 157–58, 161 Phillips, John 55–59, 62–63 Postcards from the Zoo 217 postcolonial duress 44, 193, 196 postcolonial hangups 48, 53, 56–58, 103, 213, 226, 231 postcolonialism definition 26–28 in Indonesia 42 in Malaysia 144–45, 156, 162–63 in Singapore 55, 99–102 postcolonial theory 33–34, 46–48, 144–45, 158, 230 preman (vrijman) 191

Rabun 151–56 racial politics in Ahmad’s films 153, 157–62 in colonial ideology 19, 23–26, 46 in Indonesia 180–81, 194, 212–17 in Malaysia 40–41, 143, 156 in Singapore 102–3 Raffles, Sir Stamford 22, 47, 57–58, 85, 90 Ramlee, P. 84, 87, 98, 103 Rancière, Jacques 129, 135 Rasa Sayang Eh (Feelings of Love) 78 “red dot” 30, 39, 65–66, 70, 75, 127 reenactment 43, 170–75 reformasi movement 44, 178, 185 and films 176–77, 183, 186–87, 194–206, 212, 218–19 resonance 149–50, 159 and bodies 150–56, 164 Rizal, Faozan 26, 201, 220–22 Riza, Riri 26, 197, 201–2, 205 road films 176–77, 183, 205–6, 217 iconography of 199–200 themes of 195–96, 201–4 Said, Edward 30 n.16, 42, 184, 227 Sakai, Naoki 47, 227–30 Sears, Laurie 43, 47, 178 SEA STATE 73, 77 self-reflexivity 19, 34, 76, 84, 102, 221 in Ahmad’s films 160, 164–65 in film scholarship 46–49, 213, 222, 229–30 in The Act of Killing 172–75 Seniman Bujang Lapok 17–19, 22, 84–87 Sen, Krishna 192–93 Sepet 141–43, 147–54, 158, 161, 164–65 Shi Zi Cheng (Lion City) 85, 88 Shohat, Ella 26–28, 33, 42, 45 Siddique, Sophia 101–2 Singapore as island 76–78, 119 size of 30, 38–39, 62, 70, 75, 80, 107 Singapore cinema golden age 39, 78, 84, 98, 99 n.3, 102–4, 119 revival 39–40, 91, 98, 103–4, 116, 118–29, 135 Singapore Dreaming 90–92 Singapore GaGa 21, 70–74, 109, 115 Singapore History Gallery 65–67, 75, 78 “Singlish” 101–2, 113

254 

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema

Sobchack, Thomas 191–93, 200, 206 sound see aural culture; multilingual dialogue Southeast Asian studies 37, 47–49, 222–27 spatiality and aerial maps 63–80 and colonial architecture 55–57, 84–92 and epistemology 58–63, 97–102, 117, 121 in Singaporean films 30, 38–40, 106–9, 116–17, 127–28, 135–36, 230 spatial turn 59–62, 69, 230 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 24, 48, 116 stability and genre 177, 192–95 and political rhetoric 180–82, 185–87, 190, 200, 205–6, 226 Stam, Robert 26–28, 33, 42, 45, 160 Steyerl, Hito 111–12, 114, 222 Stoler, Ann Laura 44, 193, 196 subaltern studies 34, 116–17 sublation, history of 177–85 subtitles abusive 159–60 Ahmad’s use of 42, 142–48, 152–53 Sugiharti Halim 180 Suharto 42–45, 177–79 cinema after 174–77, 193 and Hollywood 182–87, 190 New Order patriarchy 180–82, 201 violence of 169–73, 194, 204 see also patriarchal figures suicide 109, 125–27 Sukarno 179–82, 186–87, 201 Sunshine Singapore 88–90 Surya, Mouly 204–5 Tan, Pin Pin 39–40, 222, 229–30 and history 97, 107–8, 112, 131–33 and mapping 66–68, 70, 72–73 national identity in films of 45, 110–11, 117, 136 see also hiraeth; 80km/h; 9th August; In Time to Come; Invisible City; Moving Home; Singapore GaGa; The Impossibility of Knowing; Thesaurus; To Singapore with Love; Yangtze Scribbler Tan, Royston 39–40, 60, 106–11, 125 Taxi Driver 81, 117, 123, 177 n.15 Teo, Stephen 49, 84, 98, 144

territorial hypothesis 63–64 The Act of Killing 26, 171, 174–75, 182, 185, 191 criticism of 43, 172–73 see also self-reflexivity The Impossibility of Knowing 109–12, 125 The Matrix 104, 165 The Photograph 197–98, 204 Thesaurus 113 The Truman Show 165 Third Cinema 31–32, 36, 144–45 Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya 196, 200, 203, 205 n.78 time-images 40, 116–17, 121–24, 128–30, 133–35, 231; see also action-crystals Tong, Kelvin 64, 90, 97, 121 To Singapore with Love 74–75, 109, 116 trauma 78, 109, 125, 196 in Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly 216–17 in Indonesia 42–44, 177–80, 198–200 and The Act of Killing 173–75 in Trip to the Wound 217–19, 221 Trinh, T. Minh-ha 160 Trip to the Wound 180, 212, 217–21 Tweedie, James 36–38 urban development 30, 38–39, 56–60, 62-64, 69, 87–88, 106–8, 112–14 and new wave films 98–100, 120–22, 130–35 see also Tan, Pin Pin violence of New Order government 42–44, 171–73, 177–78, 184–85 in Pasir Berbisik 199–200 in The Photograph 198 against women 196, 216–18 “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” 70, 72, 115 Watson, Jini Kim 100–1, 111, 114–15 West and the Rest 227–30 Yangtze Scribbler 109–10 Yasujiro’s Journey 201–2, 220 Yeo, Wei-Wei 55–59, 99–100, 105 Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro 49 Zurbuchen, Mary 36, 43, 178