Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention

David C. L. Lim, Hiroyuki Yamamoto

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136592461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

This book discusses contemporary film in all the main countries of Southeast Asia, and the social practices and ideologies which films either represent or oppose. It shows how film acquires signification through cultural interpretation, and how film also serves as a site of contestations between social and political agents seeking to promote, challenge, or erase certain meanings, messages or ideas from public circulation. A unique feature of the book is that it focuses as much on films as it does on the societies from which these films emerge: it considers the reasons for film-makers taking the positions they take; the positions and counter-positions taken; the response of different communities; and the extent to which these interventions are connected to global flows of culture and capital.

The wide range of subjects covered include documentaries as political interventions in Singapore; political film-makers' collectives in the Philippines, and films about prostitution in Cambodia and patriotism in Malaysia, and the Chinese in Indonesia. The book analyses films from Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, across a broad range of productions – such as mainstream and independent features across genres (for example comedy, patriotic, political, historical genres) alongside documentary, classic and diasporic films.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Southeast Asian film as a site of cultural interpretation and social intervention

David C. L. Lim

In the past decade, having long been under the shadow of the more established East Asian cinemas, film in Southeast Asia has emerged as an exciting new field of enquiry for scholars across disciplines. There has been a profusion of new scholarly works of diffused foci produced in the same period, mostly dispersed across wide-ranging journals, volumes, the internet and other media sources. Although the new input has helped to shed some light on the field, David Hanan’s observation in 2001 that little has been published in English about film in Southeast Asia remains as true in essence today as it was ten years ago. There remain large gaps in knowledge on film in the region. Since the publication of Hanan’s now-classic but out-of-print edited volume, Film in South East Asia: Views from the Region (2001), no other book on film in the region had been published, until this volume.¹

This book studies film but it does not narrow the enquiry to a film type or a particular genre such as fictional narrative, documentary or independent but engages instead with a broad range of productions. Aside from mainstream and independent features across genres (comedy, musical comedy, political, patriotic, national, historical, etc.), it examines also documentary, classic and diasporic films, as well as telemovies. Also, although book focuses on film, it does not take film as the sole or final target of enquiry, nor does it set out to provide a comprehensive country-by-country historical overview of film in the region in the way that Hanan’s (2001) anthology has accomplished, as have other volumes with substantial focus on Southeast Asia, such as Being and Becoming: The Cinemas of Asia (Vasudev et al. 2002) and Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame (Ciecko 2006). As final qualification, this book does not seek to problematize ‘Southeast Asia’ as a construct but employs the term on one level as denoting the geopolitical region whose internationally recognized coherence has largely been the outcome of Western imperatives during the cold war and ASEAN efforts initiated by political elites to guide the conduct of inter-state relations. On another level, ‘Southeast Asia’ is imagined herein also, following Ananda Rajah (1999: 51), as a system of ‘interpenetrated systems’ consisting of ‘variable, synchronically and diachronically disjunctured hierarchies of political, economic, social and cultural linkages over geographical space and time’. These systems are contingent, shaped by interactions of varying intensity and density, marked by subjective perceptions and produced and sustained by ‘brokers’, namely ‘individuals and institutions, able to transcend diversity or difference, whether it is linguistic, cultural, political or economic’ (1999: 51).

Having thus cleared the ground, it can now be stated that this volume of essays is interested primarily in film and society in contemporary Southeast Asia. Specifically it interrogates film from the region as a site of cultural interpretation and social intervention. Film, with its technological ability to represent social reality in vision, sound and narrative, is framed as a site of cultural interpretation insofar as its meaning is neither singular nor endogenously generated without human mediation but the result of meaning-making by its makers and viewers/interpreters. The surplus of meaning that any film text can symbolically engender is cultural in the sense all meanings are discursively mediated by individuals who construct them out of shared interpretative reservoirs on which they draw in order to create their own interpretive patterns and to communicate and share meanings with others (Cahoone 1988: 247). Film meaning is thus like culture in that both are ‘pluralistic, contingent creation[s] of historical human acts of interpretation and construction’ (Cahoone 1988: 248).

If film is a site for the inscription of cultural meanings, then it is also a site of contestations between social and political agents seeking to promote, challenge or erase certain meanings, messages or ideas from public circulation. Agents may seek to intervene in a number of ways, for instance, by being directly involved in the production of films that communicate certain desired meanings; by lobbying for particular kinds of films to be made and disseminated; through funding and censorship policies that privilege films carrying approved messages while discouraging or prohibiting others; or through acts of interpretation, which are in themselves interventionist in the critical communicative-performative sense of having a ‘reflective, transforming effect on what is being criticized’ (Dubiel 1992: 13).

The documentaries produced by the political film collectives in the Philippines examined in this volume serve as an instance of how the film form is strategically employed by the underclass as a medium of social intervention aimed at generating new levels of community consciousness and initiating sociopolitical change in a country where crisis has become second nature in everyday life. Another example of films made to affect change in society is a subgenre of Burmese classics known as ‘inter-ethnic harmony’ films. These are state-aligned productions, which were ostensibly made to promote harmony between the dominant Burmans and the ethnic minorities in Burma/Myanmar but which effectively helped to other the latter until today. Yet another example is found in the state-backed Malay(sian) ‘patriotic’ films examined in this book, which aim to rouse exclusive Malay racial patriotism in multi-ethnic Malaysia. Even popular but unassumingly ‘lowbrow’ comedy films, an evergreen favourite genre in Thailand that urbane cosmopolitan viewers might look down upon as ‘mindless’ mass culture that engenders passivity, can in fact intervene socially through the laughter they generate from viewers, for instance, by critiquing the pretensions of high society or by giving voice and reaffirming the identities of the marginalized. These are but a handful of examples of filmic interventions case-studied in each chapter in this volume.

That film meaning derives from cultural interpretation and is routinely deployed for the purposes of intervention in Southeast Asia and elsewhere is unsurprising, given that soon after the Lumière brothers’ first public demonstration of their invention of cinematography in 1895, the moving image was already recognized as a powerful new medium that could attract and reach vast, even illiterate, populations. On the potential of the cinema, Russian writer Leonid Andreyev observed in 1911 that, although it had ‘no language’ (as it had yet to acquire soundtrack), it was ‘equally intelligible to the savages of St Petersburg and the savages of Calcutta’ (cited in Taylor and Christie 1988: 30). Like many of his peers across Europe and beyond where cinematography quickly spread, Andreyev found it so ‘miraculous’ an invention that its potential was self-evident: ‘It copes with everything, conquers everything, conveys everything’ (cited in Taylor and Christie 1988: 31). Just as the power of film was recognized early on in its existence, so too was film recognized from the outset as a potential threat to traditional moral standards and to those in power, thus requiring censorship in the name of morality or the national good.

The contention that viewers do not passively internalize the ideological mandate carried by a particular film has, of course, done little in practice to dissuade filmmakers from continuing to encode certain ideologies into their films with the hope that viewers will consume them in a way that ensures the mandates are decoded and internalized as intended. It has not persuaded governments to abolish film vetting and censorship, policies for which remain (unevenly) strict in contemporary Southeast Asian countries, if not autocratic in some. Nor did it discourage governments from systematically mobilizing film as a medium of propaganda during the First and Second World Wars. Then, and now, ‘In a world of mass politics, politicians of every political colour [recognize] the need to manage and manipulate the attitudes and aspirations, the hopes and the fear, the beliefs and the ideologies of the masses they sought to govern’ (Reeves 2004: 4–5). In this context, film invariably serves as the main choice for its multisensory powers, alongside other communicative media such as visual art, music and literature.

Film was introduced to Southeast Asian countries at different paces in early twentieth century, mainly through colonial contact. From Manila and Rangoon to Singapore and Jakarta, wherever film was screened in the early days, it received overwhelming and enthusiastic reception. In the years that followed, domestic film production grew across the region but subsequent local social, economic and political realignments precipitated by such global events as the Second World War and the cold war soon impacted upon the number and type of films produced and consumed domestically, the degree to which the state exerted control over the industry, and the societies out of which these films emerged. Over the decades right up to the 2000s, each Southeast Asian country, although exposed to global influences in varying degrees, had developed its own trajectories and patterns of film consumption and production. There were certain overlaps but each ultimately had its unique cycles of highs and lows, as governments changed or became more entrenched in power, technologies advanced and the region opened up and became more integrated with the global capitalist system, facilitating flows and mobilities of people, objects, images, data and cultures across and beyond Southeast Asia.

Despite the divergence, there is a deepening sense of shared understanding between stakeholders across the region today that film has evolved far beyond entertainment that attracts viewers across such divides as gender, ethnicity, class and nationality. Bearing multiple functions, it has come to serve as a way of reconciling with the past or preserving tradition from the tide of modernity; a vehicle for the projection of national identity and the assertion of national pride; a medium through which socio-historical memory is constructed and contested; an instrument of propaganda and resistance; a mode through which neoliberal capitalism extends itself; and other functions, which the essays in this volume collectively examine.

In the rest of this introductory chapter, I briefly review some trends in film consumption and production in Southeast Asia in the first decade of the twenty-first century as a way of putting in a larger context the kinds of cultural interpretation and social intervention examined in each chapter.

Contextualizing film in contemporary Southeast Asia: the decade in review

More than a hundred years after it was first invented, film today, while remaining rooted in its local context of production, ‘no longer has its own place’ since ‘it is [now] everywhere, or at least everywhere that we are dealing with aesthetics and communication’ (Casetti 1999: 316). Film is still consumed in the cinema but it is no longer confined as celluloid to the site, liberated for some time now by the videotape that plays in domestic players, and subsequently by digital technologies, such as personal computers and free/illegal file sharing across global networks, that escape effective institutional control. If not already digitized, film can easily be rendered into the format, circulated and consumed anywhere through portable digital gadgets, making it ‘at once an object, an affectual experience, an idea/memory, a system of code, and transferrable data’ (Harbord 2007: 7). Indeed, as Janet Harbord (2007: 1) underscores, ‘technological convergence has disarmingly blurred the distinction between modes of dissemination and cultural forms’. The computer, for instance, although commonly associated with specific practices of production, has also become a transmitter of cultural forms such as film. The dislocation of film, which results in its everywhere-ness today, has essentially changed the nature of film. Liberated from the spatial site of the cinema and moviegoing as a social practice, film loses the appeal of immediacy but retains its powerful auratic qualities which distinguish its form (Harbord 2007: 37).

The ubiquity of film and its independence from cinema as site and practice are evident everywhere in contemporary Southeast Asia, where consumption of film is generally on the rise and film is assuming greater importance as a form through which identities, relationship and futures are imagined and contested. Film consumed is not always in the digital format, especially in areas lacking broadband infrastructures, satellite television or digitally-equipped cinemas; the videotape, for instance, is still popular in Laos, where few if any movie theatres remain operational. Digital or otherwise, film has become a staple in the lives of a majority of Southeast Asian peoples. Even in a closed authoritarian country like Burma/Myanmar, and in landlocked Laos, pirated movies are routinely sold in the open by street vendors. Varying in degree, the situation is essentially the same across most parts of the region, where illegal motion picture and television piracy thrives, with the exception of Singapore, which has a piracy rate of 15 percent, making it one of the lowest in Southeast Asia by the 2002 estimate of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) (Chai 2003). Vietnam tops the MPA list at 100 percent. Indonesia and Malaysia rank at 90 and 75 percent respectively, while Thailand’s rate is 70 percent. These figures cover only MPA member companies’ films (mostly Hollywood type) pirated as hard goods (optical discs, for example) and online media in a variety of formats downloaded using peer-to-peer (P2P) and other web technologies. Excluded from the count are overwhelming numbers of non-MPA copyrighted releases covering the entire spectrum, from art film to pornography. These include virtually everything else circulating under the counter, ranging from local productions and popular films from Hollywood, Bollywood, Korea, Hong Kong and China, to niche titles from European and other cinemas.

While film is available everywhere in contemporary Southeast Asia, local film production in the region has been uneven, with significant disparities in output evident between countries. Filmmaking in Burma/Myanmar, for instance, has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Southeast Asian film as a site of cultural interpretation and social intervention
• 2. From contested histories to ethnic tourism: cinematic representations of Shans and Shanland on the Burmese silver screen
• 3. Toward a Laotian independent cinema?
• 4. Screening the crisis of monetary masculinity in Rithy Panh’s One Night After the War and Burnt Theatre
• 5. When memories collide: revisiting war in Vietnam and the diaspora
• 6. Malay(sian) patriotic films as racial crisis and intervention
• 7. ‘Our People’: telemovies, bangsa and nationalism 3.0 in Sabah, Malaysia
• 8. The hero in passage: the Chinese and the activist youth in Riri Riza’s Gie
• 9. Alternative vision in neoliberal Singapore: memories, places, and voices in the films of Tan Pin Pin
• 10. Documentary filmmaking, civil activism, and the new media in Singapore: the case of Martyn See as citizen journalist
• 11. Cinema and state in crisis: political film collectives and people’s struggle in the Philippines
• 12. Nostalgic parodies and migrant ironies in two Thai comedy films
• Index