Chinese Films in Focus II

Chris Berry

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781844572366
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838714970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Chinese cinema continues to go from strength to strength. After art-house hits like Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984) and Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), the Oscar-winning success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) disproved the old myth that subtitled films could not succeed at the multiplex. Chinese Films in Focus II updates and expands the original Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes with fourteen brand new essays, to offer thirty-four fresh and insightful readings of key individual films. The new edition addresses films from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the Chinese diaspora and the historical coverage ranges from the 1930s to the present. 

The essays, by leading authorities on Chinese cinema as well as up-and-coming scholars, are concise, accessible, rich, and on the cutting edge of current research. Each contributor outlines existing writing and presents an original perspective on the film, making this volume a rich resource for classroom use, scholarly research and general reading for anyone wanting to understand more about the historical development and rich variety of Chinese cinema.

Contributors: Annette Aw, Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Felicia Chan, Esther Cheung, Robert Chi, Rey Chow, Mary Farquhar, Carolyn FitzGerald, Ping Fu, Kristine Harris, Margaret Hillenbrand, Brian Hu, Tan See Kam, Haiyan Lee, Vivian Lee, Helen Hok-Sze Leung, David Leiwei Li, Song Hwee Lim, Kam Louie, Fran Martin, Jason McGrath, Corrado Neri, Jonathan Noble, Beremoce Reynaud, Cui Shuqin, Julian Stringer, Janice Tong, Yiman Wang, Faye Hui Xiao, Gang Gary Xu, Audrey Yue, Yingjin Zhang, John Zou

The Editor:  Chris Berry is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London.

1 15: The Singapore Failure Story, ‘Slanged Up’

Song Hwee Lim

Released in 2003, Royston Tan’s debut feature film 15 can be situated in the context of a revival in Singaporean film-making that began in the early 1990s. Following the closure of the Shaw and Cathay studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s respectively, not a single film was made in Singapore until the abysmal Medium Rare (Arthur Smith) in 1991.¹ While there were attempts at making genre films aimed at the mass market in the subsequent years, resulting in films such as the comedy Army Daze (Ong Keng Sen, 1996), the thriller God or Dog (Hugo Ng, 1997), the disco-inspired Forever Fever (Glen Goei, 1998) and the teen movie The Teenage Textbook Movie (Philip Lim, 1998), all of which enjoyed varying degrees of box-office success, two noteworthy trends emerged outside of this genre-based milieu. The first is what Olivia Khoo calls ‘local content films’ that centre around the comedian Jack Neo,² such as Money No Enough (Tay Teck Lock, 1998), Liang Po Po: The Movie (Teng Bee Lian, 1999) and the Neo-directed hits, I Not Stupid (2002) and Home-run (2003). These films typically target a Mandarin-speaking audience who are already familiar with Neo’s television work,³ and are also well received in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.⁴ The second consists of more self-consciously stylised films, including Eric Khoo’s Mee Pok Man (1995), 12 Storeys (1997) and Be with Me (2005); Eating Air (1999) by Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng; and Tan’s 15 and 4:30 (2005). These have begun to break into international film festival and arthouse cinema circuits in the West. Both groups of films are similarly invested in representing the underbelly of Singapore society that is at odds with the country’s sparkling clean image, giving voice to different marginalised groups and to the officially censured Chinese dialects (in particular Hokkien) and Singlish (a local version of ungrammatical English mixed with other languages and dialects, including Malay). In their different ways, these films engender a cinematic social realism that implicitly and at times explicitly performs a social critique function in a country whose government is not known for its tolerance of dissenting views.

It has been argued that the artistic sphere, to which the films of Eric Khoo and Jack Neo belong, has emerged as ‘a “privileged” space for critical reflection on society’, and that the all-pervasive presence of the People’s Action Party government ‘makes itself a relatively easy target for critique’ that is ‘almost too good to pass up’.⁵ However, if it is accurate to say that, in Singapore, ‘as in all authoritarian regimes, artists have a tendency to embed their work within quite explicit critiques of politics’,⁶ it must be emphasised that such a critical stance plays well not just locally but also globally. In this regard, there is a shared tendency for discourses on Singapore and the People’s Republic of China (and their respective cinemas) to interrogate excessively (if not exclusively) issues surrounding official censure, alternative artistic practices and potential for resistance, sometimes leading to the specificities of films being conveniently overlooked, as Geremie Barmé has demonstrated in his dismissal of the early works of the PRC filmmaker Zhang Yuan as ‘bankable dissent’, while leaving the ‘oppressed’ film-maker with no viable position other than that of a ‘dissident’.⁷Within this dynamic, dissent or dissidence becomes what global audiences now expect of any film from countries with a presumed authoritarian regime, and simultaneously serves as the film-maker’s almost compulsory passport to global recognition.

Appearing almost a decade after those of Khoo and Neo, Tan’s film-making can be located in this tradition yet departs from it. On the one hand, Tan said in an interview about his debut film that ‘It’s time we washed some of our dirty linen in public’,⁸ thus locating 15 as a cinematic discourse of social critique. On the other hand, while his films to date, including his latest, 881 (2007), featuring song-and-dance street performances that proliferate in the ‘ghostly’ seventh month of the Chinese calendar, share the theme of social marginalisation, what distinguishes them is the manner in which this critical reflection on society is represented on screen. Aesthetically, Tan is not only unmistakably of the MTV generation for whom post-modern pastiche and parody, rather than social realism, reigns, but, like the American director Spike Jonze, Tan also ‘cut his teeth on music videos’,⁹ winning awards for his music videos as early as his late teens.¹⁰What is paradoxical, as I want to suggest in this chapter and illustrate below, is that 15 does not totally eschew social realism but rather pushes it to an extreme documentary realism. Nevertheless, rather than present a linear narrative in which the bleak reality of the marginalised is played out for social critique, 15 fragments the narrative with a pastiche of musical interludes, arcade-game simulation and animation that playfully puts any sense of realism into relief. The result is a film that cannot be read merely as social-realist critique, but rather is full of contradiction and ambivalence in its effect and affect.

With the release of 15 in 2003, Tan immediately became the enfant terrible of Singapore film-making. Based on his eponymous 25-minute short film that won the Special Achievement Award at the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) in 2002, the 90-minute feature-length 15 premiered uncut at the 2003 SIFF where all 1,200 tickets were snapped up in just four days.¹¹ It subsequently stirred up a controversy when, for its general release, the Board of Film Censors granted the film an R(A) (Restricted [Artistic], for audiences aged twenty-one and above only) rating but demanded twenty-seven cuts.¹² As a result, Tan became, in his own words, ‘the poster-boy of the anti-censorship movement’¹³ and was named in 2004 by Time Asia magazine on its ‘20 Under 40’ list of ‘Asian heroes’, in which he was categorised as an ‘iconoclast’.¹⁴ He also responded to the cutting of 15 by poking fun at the censorship system with a short film Cut (2004), which includes a musical item sung to the tune of Abba’s Thank You for the Music: ‘Thank you to the censors/The scenes you’re chopping/Thanks for all the crime you’re stopping’.¹⁵ Predictably, the authorities, represented by the Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts, were not amused, nor did they ‘appreciate such unbecoming attempts to undermine the standing of a public institution’.¹⁶

15

Based on the experiences of the real-life street kids who assume the lead roles, 15’s narrative centres on the lives of five fifteen-year-old boys as they play truant, devise gangsta raps in preparation for a school singing competition, engage in gang fights, endure the pain of tattoo and body piercing, smuggle drugs from Malaysia into Singapore, search for buildings to jump off and commit suicide, watch porn on video and on the Internet, and role-play with a blow-up sex doll while worrying about their maths test, not having a celebration birthday cake and being thrown out by their parents. The film presents the flip side of a stereotypical Singapore in which economic growth is ‘almost always the backdrop of both international and local constructions of the Singapore Story as synonymous with Success’.¹⁷ As with Khoo and Neo, Tan’s interest is not so much in the Singapore Success Story as in the Singapore Failure Story, with success and failure measured chiefly in academic and economic terms. The best education prospect for the teenagers in 15, as one of them discloses his aspiration in the film, is the Institute of Technical Education, whose acronym ITE signifies colloquially as ‘It’s The End’.¹⁸

Drawing upon ‘elements of the marginalised and the ready-to-be-discarded’ like Khoo and Neo do can be seen as an ‘intentional act of subversion’ that deflates ‘the triumphalism by pointing to the underbelly of the nation where failures are too well hidden under the new affluence’.¹⁹ However, Tan’s version of the Singapore Failure Story is aestheticised in ways that make the measure of its subversive force difficult to ascertain. Following the opening credits, the film begins with a low-angle shot of a high-rise housing estate in the background and a lower round tower in the middle of the foreground. Two of the characters, Melvin and Vynn, sit atop the roof of the entrance to the tower, and Melvin sings two lines of a song about Vynn committing suicide by jumping off a building and becoming flattened like a roti prata (a popular Singaporean Indian dough pancake dish).²⁰ The tune of the song is taken from the Singapore national anthem whose original lyrics are in Malay, Singapore’s national language. It is safe to presume that the boys, like many Chinese Singaporeans, do not understand the meaning of the Malay lyrics in the anthem.²¹ With Melvin’s miscomprehension and mischievous adaptation of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: One Film at a Time – Again
• 1. 15: The Singapore Failure Story, ‘Slanged Up’
• 2. Big Shot’s Funeral: Performing a Post-modern Cinema of Attractions
• 3. Black Cannon Incident: Countering the Counter-espionage Fantasy
• 4. Blind Shaft: Performing the ‘Underground’ on and beyond the Screen
• 5. Boat People: Second Thoughts on Text and Context
• 6. Centre Stage: A Shadow in Reverse
• 7. A Chinese Ghost Story: Ghostly Counsel and Innocent Man
• 8. Chungking Express: Time and its Displacements
• 9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural Migrancy and Translatability
• 10. Crows and Sparrows: Allegory on a Historical Threshold
• 11. Durian Durian: Defamiliarisation of the ‘Real’
• 12. Ermo: (Tele)Visualising Urban/ Rural Transformation
• 13. Farewell My Concubine: National Myth and City Memories
• 14. Flowers of Shanghai: Visualising Ellipses and (Colonial) Absence
• 15. Formula 17 : Mainstream in the Margins
• 16. The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai
• 17. Hero: The Return of a Traditional Masculine Ideal in China
• 18. In the Mood for Love: Intersections of Hong Kong Modernity
• 19. Kekexili: Mountain Patrol: Moral Dilemma and a Man with a Camera
• 20. The Love Eterne: Almost a (Heterosexual) Love Story
• 21. Not One Less: The Fable of a Migration
• 22. The Personals: Backward Glances, Knowing Looks and the Voyeur Film
• 23. PTU: Re-mapping the Cosmopolitan Crime Zone
• 24. The Red Detachment of Women: Resenting, Regendering, Remembering
• 25. Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles: Redeeming the Father by Way of Japan?
• 26. Spring in a Small Town: Gazing at Ruins
• 27. A Time to Live, A Time to Die: A Time to Grow
• 28. A Touch of Zen: Action in Martial Arts Movies
• 29. Vive L’Amour: Eloquent Emptiness
• 30. Wedding Banquet: A Family (Melodrama) Affair
• 31. Woman, Demon, Human: The Spectral Journey Home
• 32. Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By
• 33. Yellow Earth: Hesitant Apprenticeship and Bitter Agency
• 34. Yi Yi: Reflections on Reflexive Modernity in Taiwan
• Chinese Names
• Chinese Film Titles
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright