Contents - National Museum of Singapore

Transcription

Contents
4
Foreword
6
Editor’s Note
8
10
15
World Cinema Series
Cine-Concert Georges Méliès
Partie de campagne / A Day in the Country and
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe / Lunch on the Grass by Jean Renoir
22
Visions of the East: Asia through French Eyes
26
Animation Nation
28
46
58
Writings on Cinema
The Disappearing Singapore(an)? by Vinita Ramani Mohan
Cinq gars pour Singapour (1967) by Ben Slater
The Magic of Cinema by Ranjana Raghunathan
72
Word on the Ground
Towards a Cinema to Come by Daniel Hui
76
Write to Us
77
Credits
78
About Us
79
Ticketing Information
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Getting to the Museum
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Les cartes vivantes / The Living Playing Cards by Georges Méliès (1905)
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Foreword
When the National Museum of Singapore closed for redevelopment in April
2003, it had arrived at a turning point in its history. Housed in a 116-year old
colonial building, the institution was in dire need of a re-birth, but the first step
in this process was not propitious. We lost our existing audience as soon as
we moved into our temporary site at Riverside Point. It did not take us long to
realise that Brewerkz, a watering hole and the building’s anchor tenant, had
more resonance than we did.
Our interim space included a former Eng Wah cinema which only sat 193. It
screened the 3D Singapore Story, which even by then exuded the staleness of
an old textbook. To maximise on this cinema, our thoughts inevitably turned to
film. In 2003, a cohort of talented young filmmakers emerged on the scene with
their short films – fresh, technically excellent, and exciting to watch.
We asked a few of them to work with us on Rivertales, an interactive museum
display about the Singapore River. Royston Tan made a short filmic poem
which cast an old man who had spent years working as a coolie and as an
odd jobs labourer along the River. His was a story of reflection set against the
changing banks of the River - once flowing with bustling trade, later cleaned
up and reinvented with stylish new restaurants and bars. Royston’s colleague,
Victric Thng, made for Rivertales a number of filmic companions with a cast of
teenagers. Rivertales was designed as a mystery crime game, and it eventually
became rather well-liked by our young student audience. This was how film
found its way into our museum exhibits, making story-telling a dynamic process
for us to reach out to a new audience.
At the icy cold former Eng Wah cinema, the Museum managed to find new
friends in the warm and burgeoning circle of young filmmakers. They were later
commissioned to work on the new Singapore History galleries in the revamped
museum on Stamford Road. We changed our programming, adding a strong
film component. Singapore Short Cuts, an annual programme dedicated to
showcasing a new crop of short films made in Singapore, was inaugurated
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in this cinema, January to June, 2004. It was an impressive selection of
works - Victric Thng’s Locust, Sherman Ong’s The Ground I Stand, Tan Pin
Pin’s 80km/h, and Ho Tzu Nyen’s Utama – Every Name in History is I, which
became a starting point for Sejarah Singapura, a special filmic exhibit which
we later commissioned for the Singapore History Gallery.
In April of the same year, we collaborated for the first time with the Singapore
International Film Festival (SIFF), screening 40 films and drawing avid
film-goers. The most memorable moment was the full-house screening of
Carma Hinton’s Morning Sun, and her talk in Mandarin on her life in China
as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution. This talk drew a score of her
generational counterparts from Singapore’s Chinese high-schools, who had
hitherto not set foot in our Museum.
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Once film entered our Museum, life was never the same again. The medium
changed the way we curated exhibitions and it opened our mind to so many
other methods of storytelling - the core of our business. Film brought us closer
to many new visitors. It was therefore natural that we designed the standard
museum auditorium to function as a high quality cinema in the new museum
building. Since the re-opening in December 2006, our film programme has
played an important role in the growth of an appreciative audience, drawn to
the regular screenings of classics and auteur retrospectives.
Now, eight years after our first foray into film, we see some areas for
improvement and further growth. When Usmar Ismail’s classic Lewat Djam
Malam / After the Curfew (1954) is restored next year, it will be our second
film restoration project. We hope to steadily gain momentum as we undertake
a larger role in film archiving in the region. And starting from this issue, the
Cinémathèque Quarterly will include essays that we hope will foster critical
discourse on film. These are our contributions towards enriching audiences
and visitors in Singapore.
Lee Chor Lin
Director
National Museum of Singapore
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Editor's Note
The Cinémathèque Quarterly was born out of the realisation that Singapore
does not have a single publication dedicated to intellectually engaging writing
on cinema. By this we mean something better than the bite-size review with
the generic star rating and the perpetual emphasis on the latest Hollywood
blockbusters. Apart from blogs and websites run by dedicated cinephiles and
filmmakers, there is very little that documents Asian and Singapore cinemas.
There is also insufficient space for existing and emerging writers from the
region (or based here) to write and to be read. The Quarterly was created to
redress this imbalance and to give proper credence to stimulating, thoughtprovoking essays.
Our first issue is, rather aptly, dedicated to a consideration of ourselves.
By ‘ourselves’, I refer as much to Singapore, as I do to Singaporeans. We
begin by looking back at the recent Singapore Short Cuts, the eight edition,
co-presented with The Substation’s Moving Images programme, which
concluded in August this year. The essay considers the impressive array of
narrative works, experimental shorts and naughty, subversive outtakes that
featured in this year’s programme by exploring the idea of disappearance
– of one’s community, culture and finally, of one’s sense of ‘self’.
We also consider how Asia has been imagined, portrayed and used as a
backdrop through European eyes. In the first half of October, we showcase
Visions of the East: Asia Through French Eyes – a remarkable journey into
20th century French films shot in countries that included Vietnam, North
Korea, Cambodia, India and Singapore. Echoing this programme, we have
Ben Slater’s essay on that riotous and rare piece of filmmaking by Bernard
Toublanc-Michel, Cinq gars pour Singapour / Five Ashore in Singapore
(1967). We had hoped to screen the film, but the print remains elusive.
Nonetheless, we felt it important to include a critical consideration of
Toublanc-Michel’s work and what it tells us (or not) about Singapore as
a locale for filmmaking in the 1960s.
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Heading back to the turn of the 20th century, we enter into the imaginarium of
the remarkable theatre magician-turned filmmaker Georges Méliès. Emerging
film writer Ranjana Ragunathan hones in on the figure of the Brahmin, the fakir
and the rajah, as well as the imaginary depiction of Singapore in Méliès’ films
and wonders whether there is more to these fantastical explorations than a
merely kitsch and orientalised representation of the ‘East’. Part of the World
Cinema Series, Cine-Concert Georges Méliès in November will introduce
audiences to a small but heady selection of Méliès’ silent short films, featuring
metamorphosis, fertility and illusions. The programme will run in conjunction
with Dreams & Reality: Masterpieces of Painting, Drawing & Photography
– an exhibition from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Finally, we end with a short piece in our Word on the Ground section, in
which we hope to feature the voices of filmmakers themselves – flashes of
ideas; the trials and tribulations of filmmaking and ruminations on the artistic
process. For our inaugural issue, we feature a powerfully-worded manifesto on
the future of cinema (and humanity) from one of Singapore’s most promising
young filmmakers, Daniel Hui, in which he asks us all to step over the edge,
to fall and to celebrate what may emerge when we accept that ‘this too,
shall pass’.
So to the solitary cinephile sitting in his/her apartment crafting a thoughtfullyworded critique or essay on a remarkable piece of filmmaking, we say: write to
us. Write for us. We look forward to introducing readers to writers we love, but
we’re just as excited by the prospect of providing a space for emerging writers
who have begun discovering cinema.
Enjoy.
Vinita Ramani Mohan
Editor
Cinémathèque Quarterly
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Partie de campagne / A Day in the Country by Jean Renoir (1936)
Image © Joseph Burstyn-Photofest
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• 1 November, 13 December
7.30pm / Gallery Theatre, Basement
$18 / $14.40 Concession (Cine-concert Georges Méliès)
$8 / $6.40 Concession (Partie de campagne and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe)
Prices exclusive of SISTIC fee
World Cinema Series is a monthly screening of works by the boldest and
most inventive auteurs across the world, from renowned classics to neglected
masterpieces. Witness the wonders, possibilities, textures as well as the
revelatory moments that have contributed to the rich history of cinema. Take a
leap of faith and discover the art of cinema that continues to affect and inspire
us on the big screen – as it was meant to be seen – with the World Cinema
Series, shown every second Tuesday of the month at the National Museum
of Singapore.
This quarter, we draw parallels between cinema and art that will be
exhibited as part of the Dreams & Reality: Masterpieces of Painting,
Drawing and Photography from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris exhibition. Just
as the impressionists and post-impressionists responded to the onset
of modernity by visually rethinking the world around them, cinema, a
newly emerging medium, served as a platform for previously unexplored
forms of visual expression. In November, we return to one of the pioneers
of cinema and the first cine-magician Georges Méliès, who used the
cinematograph to undertake crafty excursions into a mythological and
subconscious realm. In December, we present the films of Jean Renoir,
who echoed and interpreted the impressionistic aesthetics of his father,
the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
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World Cinema Series
• Tuesday 1 November, 7.30pm
Cine-Concert Georges Mélies
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Director Georges Méliès
1898–1908 / France / 105 min / 35mm / Rating TBC
Co-presented with the Embassy of France
With support from Steinway Gallery
Silent with live-piano by Lawrence Lehérissey and live-narration by
Marie-Hélène Lehérissey (in French) and Hossan Leong (in English)
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In conjunction with Dreams & Reality: Masterpieces of Painting, Drawing
and Photography from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris
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World Cinema Series
“A magician who put the cinematograph
into a hat and took out Cinema.” – Edgar Morin
Leave your habitual ideas and expectations of cinema at the door and enter
the imaginarium of Georges Méliès. Be transported to the wonderful period
that marked the advent of cinema. Listen to the resonant harmonies of a piano
and the playful voice of a narrator as the inanimate jumps alive on screen with a
flicker that illuminates the darkened theatre.
In this exclusive travelling cine-concert of Georges Méliès films that
commemorates his 150th birthday, a definitive selection of films from Méliès’
oeuvre will be accompanied by Méliès’descendents Lawrence Lehérissey and
Marie-Hélène Lehérissey who will be performing live piano improvisations and
narration, a practice that stays true to the way these films were presented at
the turn of the 20th century.
Méliès was a charismatic magician whose pivotal encounter with the
cinematograph in 1895 resulted in an expansion of the creative possibilities
of the new technological medium. As a pioneer of cinema, Méliès drew
from his interests and experience in magical theatre, breathed life into the
cinematograph, explored the limits of what the medium was capable of, and
pioneered cinematic narratives suffused with magic, wit and wonder.
Méliès performed magic in front of the camera as well as in the editing
room. His films explored the chimerical and oneiric possibilities of cinema,
foreshadowing movements such as surrealism and subsequent uses of the
medium to depict the fantastical. His experiments in creating illusionary effects
through editing and manipulation of moving images are in many ways, the
genesis of special effects in contemporary cinema.
Cine-concert Georges Méliès features a selection of films from Méliès
extensive corpus that will provide audiences an insight into Méliès enigmatic
personality and the recurring narrative tropes in his works. The programme
includes films such as The Man with the Rubber Head (1902), a tale of an
alchemistic shopkeeper (played by Méliès himself) who blows up his own
head, and also iconic films such as the carnivalesque A Trip to the Moon
(1902), the first ever science-fiction narrative shot on film.
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Programme Line-up
Le mélomane / The Music-Lover (1903)
La tentation de Saint Antoine / The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1898)
Barbe-Bleue / Blue Beard (1901)
Le diable noir / The Black Imp (1905)
La Voyage dans la lune / A Trip to the Moon (1902)
La chrysalide et le papillon / The Brahmin and the Butterfly (1901)
Le merveilleux éventail vivant / The Wonderful Living Fan (1901)
La fée Carabosse / The Witch (1906)
Impressionniste fin de siècle / The Conjurer (1899)
L’homme-orchestre / The One-man Band (1900)
Le sacre d’Edouard VII / The Coronation of Edward VII (1902)
Dislocation mystérieuse / An Extraordinary Dislocation (1901)
Les cartes vivantes / The Living Playing Cards (1905)
L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc / The Man with the Rubber Head (1902)
Le cake walk infernal / The Infernal Cake-Walk (1903)
Au royaume des fées / Kingdom of the Fairies (1903)
Le Fakir de Singapour / The Indian Sorcerer (1908)
Georges Méliès
The iconic Georges Méliès stood at the threshold of the theatrical
traditions of the 19th century and the birth of cinema in the 20th
century. He formed a link between these two milieus and jumpstarted
the aesthetic use of the cinematograph. He did this by looking back and
drawing from his experience in magical performance and the narrative
conventions of theatre, as well as by looking ahead at the use of special
effects in cinema.
Born in Paris on 8 December 1861, Georges Méliès was the youngest
of three children. His parents ran a footwear manufacturing business that
was flourishing by the time of Méliès’ birth. Envisioning that he would
be the one to take over the family business, his parents sent him to a
prestigious boarding school where he received his baccalaureate. In this
period, Méliès already demonstrated an interest in the arts and yearned
to learn painting at the École des Beaux Arts, an aspiration that was
thwarted by his family’s insistence that Méliès was to pursue a formal
and utilitarian education. While making do with private painting lessons,
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Méliès excelled at the mechanical work in his family’s boot factory, which
provided him with the technical skills for his future innovations in cinema.
Méliès’ calling to the art of cinema came in two phases. Firstly, he had an
eventful business trip to London in 1884, in which he immersed himself
in the world of theatrical spectacles and developed a passion for magic
performance. Committed to becoming an illusionist, Méliès dedicated
most of his time practicing and performing to friends and family upon
his return to Paris. Following his father’s retirement, Méliès sold his
share of the business to his brothers and bought the Theatre RobertHoudin, in which he developed his own illusions and magic tricks and
performed regularly. Then came his epiphanic moment when he viewed
a demonstration of the Lumière Brothers’ cinematograph in 1895.
Méliès was held spellbound by the realisation that technology could
bring illusion closer to reality. Keen on recreating the spectacles that he
performed at the Theatre Robert-Houdin, Méliès opened the world’s first
movie studio and started his own production company in 1897, directing
531films between 1896 and 1914.
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With the increasing commoditisation of the cinema industry, Méliès’
studio was forced into bankruptcy in 1913, and he spent the rest of his
working years undertaking odd jobs, performing in touring variety shows
and working as a toy salesman.
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However, his contributions and importance to cinema was recognised
and he was given a home by the cinema society and received the
Legion of Honour award which was presented by Louis Lumière. For the
remainder of his life, he was often visited by film historians, filmmakers,
as well as the surrealists who admired his films. We continue to watch
Méliès' films with a sense of wonder and admiration because his films
made an unprecedented contribution to cinema and to the way we
willingly suspend our disbelief when confronted with the moving image.
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Live-Piano: Lawrence Lehérissey
Lawrence Lehérissey, a professional piano player since 18, studies
composition and improvisation at the French National Music Academy.
He has travelled around the world performing live-piano to the films of
his great-great grandfather Georges Méliès. He is also the co-founder
of the band Improbable and a member of the band Les Portugaises
ensablées.
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Live-Narration: Marie-Hélène Lehérissey
Marie-Hélène Lehérissey is Georges Melies’ great granddaughter.
Before becoming the organiser of Georges Méliès‘ estate through
the collection of the association Les Amis de Georges Méliès –
Cinémathèque Méliès, Marie-Hélène worked as an editor for film and
television. Her live barkings follow the tradition of narration that was
commonplace during the screenings of silent films in the 1900s.
Hossan Leong
Hossan Leong, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (The Order
of Arts and Letters) is one of Singapore's most loved and recognised
actors. Fluency in the French language has led Hossan to work with
the Alliance Française and Sing’theatre for whom he appeared in
A Singaporean in Paris and the unforgettable No Regrets: Tribute to
Edith Piaf. In 2006 Hossan was named Ambassador for Paris 2012
and was awarded the Prix des Ambassadeurs Francophones
(Francophone Ambassador Award).
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Partie de campagne / A Day in the Country
Director Jean Renoir
1936 / France / 39 min / 35mm / Rating TBC
In French with English subtitles
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe / Lunch on the Grass
Director Jean Renoir
1959 / France / 92 min / 35mm / Rating TBC
In French with English subtitles
In conjunction with Dreams & Reality: Masterpieces of Painting, Drawing
and Photography from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris
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Partie de campagne / A Day in the Country (1936)
Image © Joseph Burstyn-Photofest
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Partie de campagne is an adaptation of the short story of the same title by Guy
de Maupassant, a friend of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
The two men, though friendly enough, admitted that they had little in common.
Renoir said of the writer, “he always looks on the dark side.” For his part
Maupassant said of the painter, “he always looks on the bright side.” In his film
adaptation of the Maupassant story, filmmaker Jean Renoir strikes a remarkable
balance between Maupassant’s darkly cynical rendering of the bourgeoisie,
while retaining the joy and sensuality in his father’s bucolic paintings.
Set in 1880 on the banks of the Loing river, south of Paris, the film follows
a family of Parisians, the Dufours, on their day-trip to the countryside. While
Monsieur Dufour and his son-in-law take off on their own, Mme Dufour (Jane
Marken) and her beautiful daughter Henriette (played by Sylvia Bataille) are
approached by Henri and Rodolphe (played by Georges Darnoux and Jacques
Brunius respectively) – a pair of young bourgeois men living in the area. An
innocent afternoon in the country metamorphoses into a passionate and
hedonistic encounter between the Dufour women and the two men.
Filming on Partie de campagne ceased prematurely due to poor weather
conditions and insufficient funds and the film itself was released in 1946,
a decade after it was shot. Nonetheless, it was hailed as an unfinished
masterpiece and as one of Renoir’s most enduring cinematic works.
As much a paean to the countryside, as it was an incisive critique of
bourgeois conventions, the film distils in its brief running-time, the
essence of Renoir’s ethos, which would recur in his subsequent films.
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Le déjeuner sur l’herbe / Lunch on the Grass (1959)
Image © Kingsley-Union Films-Photofest
Evoking Manet’s 1863 painting of the same name, Renoir’s Le déjeuner
sur l’herbe explores the role of science, technology and the mass media in
daily life. Its theme is simplicity itself – the opposition of science and nature,
technology and passion.
The world of modern science is represented in the film by Professor Etienne
Alexis (Paul Meurisse), a proponent of artificial insemination. He regards
passion as a vestigial characteristic of human beings of which they should be
cured like the common cold. He is engaged to be married to Marie-Charlotte
(Ingrid Nordine), a health fanatic, and the stern head of the European Girl
Scout movement. He is French, she German, and their spiritless marriage
will herald the formation of a new European union dedicated to the rational,
and thereby perfect, human being. However, an excursion into the countryside
sends Alexis into the arms of the beautiful peasant girl Nénette (Catherine
Rouvel) by means of the mistral, a feverish wind generated by the pan
pipe of the Dionysian figure, Gaspard (Charles Blavette). The wind
arouses people’s instincts and excites their appetite for food and sex.
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Alexis foregoes his previously held notions of rationality, science and artificial
insemination. Mesmerised by the vision of Nénette bathing in the nude, he now
heartily embraces instinct, passion and sex. Alexis, the scientist, comes to the
conclusion that “perhaps happiness is a submission to the natural order.”
He rejects Marie-Charlotte in favour of Nénette, who is pregnant with the
child they have conceived. The marriage of science with nature is the future
of the new Europe.
Renoir admitted that Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is the only film in his entire body
of work where he made a conscious attempt to evoke the paintings of his
father Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the great Impressionist painter. This is evident in
the film’s primary location on the grounds of Les Collettes, the former Renoir
family property at Cagnes-sur-mer where Pierre-Auguste painted many of his
late works, such as the magnificent series depicting bathers.
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Jean Renoir
Francois Truffaut and Orson Welles described Renoir as "the greatest
filmmaker in the world". There is no doubt that Renoir has dominated
both French cinema of the classical period and the international
pantheon of great auteurs.
The second son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Jean Renoir grew up in the artistic milieu of turn-of-the-century Paris.
His father’s positive, poetic realism became a point of reference for
Renoir, who also inherited his father’s sympathetic attitude toward the
commoner. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s legacy contributed to Jean Renoir’s
relative financial independence which would greatly shape his career
path as a filmmaker.
Renoir’s early career served the ambitions of his wife, Catherine
Hessling, whom he directed in several silent films, such as La fille de
l’eau / Whirlpool of Fate (1925), Nana (1926) and La Petite marchande
d'allumettes / The Little Match Girl (1928, with Jean Tedesco). These
early films display Hessling’s expressionist performances, in contrast
with Renoir’s naturalistic use of actors in his later films. Yet Renoir’s
realism goes hand in hand with the theatrical, most of his films alluding
to, or staging, spectacles.
In the early 1930s, Renoir and Hessling divorced. This precipitated
Renoir’s deliberate attempts to liberate himself from his father’s
enormous legacy. He began crafting his films with a raw realism,
replacing studio interiors with outdoor locations, lending his films an
unpolished but undeniably optimistic quality. With films such as Boudu,
sauvé des eaux / Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), his voice
matured, displaying a radical novelty particularly visible in the anarchist
attitude of Boudu, whose vagabond’s rebellion against society’s petty
rules upsets even the household of the poor antiquarian who rescued
him from drowning. Madame Bovary (1933) and Toni (1935) further
highlighted Renoir’s sympathy for outcasts and the working class, and
his denunciation of the bourgeoisie.
In the mid-1930s, Renoir put his talents to the service of the left-wing
Popular Front of France with intelligent, committed films such as Le
crime de Monsieur Lange / The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) and
La vie est à nous / The People of France (1936). Renoir did not let
politics get in the way when he made Partie de campagne / A Day in the
Country in 1936, a miniature masterpiece and the film closest in spirit to
his father’s paintings. Renoir reached his zenith with the humanistic antiwar epic La grande illusion / The Grand Illusion (1937),
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which set the standard for all prison camp escape films and La règle
du jeu / The Rules of the Game (1939), a parable about class conflict
during a weekend hunting party at a stately mansion. The latter, his most
personal film, is also his most complex. Regularly cited as one of the
best films ever made, its depiction of amoral, uncaring nobility is packed
with subtle, venomous humour and cruelty, yet imbued with a humanistic
spirit. As a whole, Renoir’s films of the 1930s are a model for all realist
cinema, influencing contemporaries such as William Wyler and Orson
Welles, as well as Italy’s post-war neorealists such as Luchino Visconti.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Renoir fled to Hollywood with
the help of the American father of documentary, Robert Flaherty. His
Hollywood films Swamp Water (1941) and The Southerner (1945) were
unique in transferring Renoir’s realism and attitude to the American Deep
South – the United States’ most class-stifled region. Most of Renoir’s
Hollywood output received mixed reception in America. Darryl Zanuck,
head of Twentieth Century-Fox, summed up Renoir’s Hollywood career
thus: “Renoir has plenty of talent, but he’s not one of us.”
Renoir headed to India to realise The River, based on Rumer Godden’s
eponymous novel. It was Renoir’s first colour film, and it reunited him
with his cameraman nephew, Claude Renoir Jr. This meditative account
of childhood, shot on location in Bengal, suggested a new spiritual or
religious dimension in Renoir’s work. Released in 1951, it was the first
of several colour films of great beauty, with Renoir becoming one of the
pioneers in the use of Technicolour in French feature productions.
After completing his second colour film, Le carrosse d’or / The Golden
Coach (1953) in Italy, Renoir made a triumphant return to French cinema
with French Can Can (1954). The popularity and success of the film
quickly reinstated him in the French canon. Renoir was also considered
a role model by the proponents of the French New Wave in the fifties.
He continued making films in France until the late sixties with works
such as Le testament du Docteur Cordelier / The Testament of Doctor
Cordelier (1959), Le déjeuner sur l’herbe / Lunch on the Grass (1959),
and Le Caporal épinglé / The Elusive Corporal (1962). Renoir received
an Academy Award for his lifetime contribution to cinema and the French
Commandeur de la Legion d'honneur in 1975.
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The Red Lantern by Albert Capellani (1919)
Image courtesy of Cinémathèque Royal de Belgique
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Visions of the
East: Asia through
French Eyes
• 4–16 October
Gallery Theatre, Basement
Presenting Sponsor Societe Generale
Co-organiser The Embassy of France
With support from Steinway Gallery and Institut Français
Visions of the East: Asia through French Eyes is a film programme that
explores the way in which Asia has been portrayed and imagined through
the history of French cinema. From the earliest recorded film footage of
Indochina and Japan by the Lumière Brothers and the orientalist epics
of the 1910s, to groundbreaking films from the 1950s and 60s by Alain
Resnais, Pierre Schoendoerffer and Louis Malle and contemporary
French films about Asia, the programme examines both the physical and
imagined landscapes of the East as seen through the eyes of French
filmmakers amidst the social and political changes taking place in France.
Spanning across Asia with portrayals of Vietnam, China, India, North
Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore, the programme features
well-known and key French films about Asia such as La 317ème section /
The 317 Platoon, Indochine and L’amant / The Lover as well as rare gems
such as footage of 1920 Singapore from the Pathe Gaumont Collection
and a special programme of French television documentaries about
Singapore from the 1960s and 70s. Other highlights of the programme
include newly commissioned music performed live for a selection of early
French films from 1897–1920 and the silent classics The Red Lantern
and Hara-Kiri.
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Programme Line-up
•
• Tuesday 4 October
La
(1
La 317ème section / The 317th Platoon by Pierre Schoendoerffer
(1965 / 100 min / NC16)
•
Hi
• Wednesday 5 October
Legong: Dance of the Virgins by Henry de la Falaise
(1935 / 55 min / M18)
Ballets de Bali by Jean Rouch (1953 / 19 min / PG)
St
by
• Thursday 6 October
Macao, l’enfer du jeu / Gambling Hell
by Jean Delannoy (1939 / 90 min / PG)
In
by
• Friday 7 October
Moranbong, une aventure coréenne
by Jean-Claude Bonnardot (1958 / 90 min / PG)
Im
(7
•
•
•
• Saturday 8 October
Impressions of Asia from Early French Cinema 1897–1933
(78 min / NC16) With live piano music accompaniment by Shane Thio
The Red Lantern by Albert Capellani (1919 / 70 min / PG)
With live piano music accompaniment by Robert Casteels
Hara-Kiri by Marie-Louise Iribe and Henri Debain (1928 / 85 min / PG)
With live music accompaniment by Vivian Wang, Leslie Low and Bani Haykal
•
Lo
Le
(1
In
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•
• Sunday 9 October
Ro
Fa
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(1
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Calcutta by Louis Malle (1969 / 105 min / PG13)
India Song by Marguerite Duras (1975 / 120 min / M18)
Nocturne Indien by Alain Corneau (1989 / 105 min / PG)
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• Monday 10 October
La 317ème section / The 317th Platoon by Pierre Schoendoerffer
(1965 / 100 min / NC16)
• Tuesday 11 October
Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais (1959 / 90 min / PG)
• Wednesday 12 October
Stupeur et tremblements / Fear and Trembling
by Alain Corneau (2003 / 107 min / NC16)
• Thursday 13 October
Inju, la bête dans l’ombre / Inju: The Beast in the Shadow
by Barbet Schroeder (2008 / 105 min / R21)
• Friday 14 October
Images of Singapore from French Television 1964–1973
(72 min / NC16)
• Saturday 15 October
Loin du Vietnam / Far from Vietnam by Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude
LeLouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais
(1967 / 115 min / PG13)
Indochine by Régis Wargnier (1992 / 159 min / NC16)
L’amant / The Lover by Jean-Jacques Annaud (1992 / 115 min / R21)
• Sunday 16 October
Roundtable Discussion: Sylvie Blum-Reid, Pierre Rissient and
Farish Ahmad-Noor Moderated by Ben Slater
Cinq et la peau / Five and the Skin by Pierre Rissient
(1982 / 95 min / R21)
L’empire du milieu du sud / Empire of the Mid-South
by Jacques Perrin and Eric Deroo (2010 / 86 min / NC16)
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Animation
Nation
• 11–15 November
Gallery Theatre, Basement
Animation Nation is a festival dedicated to animation films organised by
the Singapore Film Society.
This year the festival runs from November 11–15. The programme
includes a retrospective of Japanese director Satoshi Kon's films,
a showcase of international shorts from the Stuttgart Festival of
Animation, Singapore short works for DigiCon and others. A more
complete programme will be out at www.sfs.org.sg in October.
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I Want to Remember by Sherman Ong (2011)
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Writings on Cinema
The Disappearing
Singapore(an)?
Vinita Ramani Mohan
Reflecting on the eight edition of the Singapore
Short Cuts programme, Vinita Ramani Mohan
wonders whether the haunting preponderance of
disappearing places, cultures and identities in this
year’s shorts marks a new kind of Singaporean film.
Every year, Singapore Short Cuts provides audiences
with a comprehensive and diverse panoply of short films
that push the boundaries of what defines a ‘Singapore
film’. With Eric Khoo’s films Mee Pok Man (1996) and
12 Storeys (1997), a vivid portrait emerged of the anomie
seething beneath the surface of the city-state’s ubiquitous
public housing apartment blocks and eating houses. In
contrast, Royston Tan’s exquisitely made elegies for iconic
places and ways of life in Singapore, such as Hock Hiap
Leong (2001)1 and Sin Sai Hong (2006) giddily and
unabashedly celebrated being Singaporean and being in
Singapore. In many ways these films, along with the more
commercially-oriented features of Jack Neo, defined the
‘Singapore film’.
This year’s Singapore Short Cuts programme
(August 6–7 & 13–14 2011), also the eight edition,
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The Disappearing Singapore(an)?
has served to once again foreground these
questions. Is there such a thing as a ‘Singapore film’?
Do Singaporean filmmakers have a distinct voice
and what are those voices articulating? Does that
voice have to speak to some sort of an ‘authentic’
Singaporean experience? Does Singapore have its
own ‘national cinema’? These questions fortunately
remain unanswerable.
The short film format, in particular, is valuable because
it reveals the limits of such questions, often posed with
respect to feature films, which are expected to have
greater traction and a longer distribution life span. As Tan
Pin Pin stated in her director’s statement and interview,
the short film format enables the filmmaker to “push the
boundaries of cinema”, since they rarely reap substantial
financial rewards.” 2 At the same time, the format provides
filmmakers with the opportunity to visually document
cultures, histories and characters in what Tan Shi Jie,
director of The Hole, calls a “concentrated formula:
taking a giant conception and reducing it down to
fundamentals.” 3
The ‘fundamentals’ that seemed striking in this year’s
programme related to anxiety about disappearance
– disappearing places, disappearing people and a
disappearing self. This isn’t the alienation and dysfunction
of Khoo’s films from the 1990s. It is not even the damning
dystopia of Royston Tan’s 15, whose inhabitants have
written off their own lives before life has hardly begun. It is
something altogether more nuanced, hinting at what critic
Mark Cousins refers to when he writes about flashback,
as “not a narrative sequence belatedly revealed, but as an
undigested memory that intrudes the present.” 4 In some
of this year’s shorts, these ‘undigested memories’ are
not revealed in flashback, but instead exist in the present,
altering the landscape with the shadows they cast.
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Writings on Cinema
Anonymity & Disappearance
In August 2009, Wired magazine journalist Evan Ratcliff
wrote an article about voluntary disappearance and
how people fake their own deaths when the pressures
of life – bad relationships, a burdensome mortgage,
rising debt and impending unemployment – become too
difficult to bear. In the article, he cites psychologist Fred
Montanino’s analysis of what happens to people who live
under fake identities (in this case, with respect to witness
protection programmes). Montanino mentions how people
undergo “severe social distress”, “a pervasive sense of
powerlessness” and refers to the emotional instability that
is caused “when the social fabric is torn” – when people
are ripped out from a reality that is familiar to them and
placed within one that is not.5
The experience of disappearing in America seems like
the antithesis of life in an intensely mediated, efficiently
policed and densely populated city-state like Singapore.
Can one disappear in Singapore? In some of the shorts
this year, there is the hint of a related anxiety: what
happens when we stay, but like Alex Proyas’ Dark City
(1998), the landscape around us and its inhabitants
disappear unexpectedly? What if we simply cease to be
because we are forgotten?
In the 11.30 minute short aptly titled The Impossibility of
Knowing, filmmaker Tan Pin Pin shoots portraits of seven
locations in Singapore, each marked by a traumatic event.
The film speaks to permanent disappearance: death and
destruction. At an old, run-down abandoned house at 17
Jalan Batai (near the Lower Peirce Reservoir and park in
central Singapore), a skeleton was found in a squat toilet.
Though unidentifiable, the narrator (Singapore theatre/
film actor Lim Kay Tong) states that it could have been
that of a woman who had lived at the house with her two
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daughters. Continuing across the country, Lim’s sombre
narrative voice documents crimes and accidents like a
police blotter in a newspaper: a rare Sambar deer hit by
a vehicle on the Seletar Expressway; a teen suicide at
Draycott Park; a gutted, blackened mosque in Marine
Parade destroyed in a fire started accidentally by an
antagonised teen; a construction worker killed during the
downtown Nicoll Highway collapse; a teen drowning at
a rain canal in west-central Singapore and two possible
suicides at a housing development board estate in
Toa Payoh.
There are no people in these vignettes, no ‘digital bread
crumbs’6 that will lead us to the dead and the story of
their lives. There isn’t even the hint of the memory of these
anomalous and tragic incidents – at least, not at first
glance. The city – its highways, suburbs – seems devoid
of human existence. But Tan’s photography-inspired
shots compel the audience to linger at these innocuous
and unspectacular locales. When we do, we sense these
‘undigested memories’ like a fleeting shadow. The use
The Impossibility of Knowing (2011) by Tan Pin Pin
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Writings on Cinema
of a narrator is a kind of trick: we are given the facts,
but without any further elaboration on the causes and
consequences of each event, the facts conceal more than
they reveal. The city has shape-shifted and the dead, it
seems, were never there in the first place.
There is a conspicuous preoccupation with bodies
and quietus in many of this year’s shorts. In Atsuko
Hirayanagi’s Wake (9.03 minutes), Mike, a demolition
site inspector surveys old apartments ear-marked for
demolition. Signs of ordinary lives are only apparent from
the detritus that remains – the pen marking etched into a
wall recording the height of a young child, growing year
to year; broken crockery and kitsch wall hangings like the
head of a stag. Surveying a scarcely furnished apartment,
Mike finds a half-filled application form for an employment
pass lying on a table in a dusty room. A red ang pow
packet with the name ‘Justin’ on it and a $20 bill inside
is stuck to a mirror. Inside another room, Mike finds the
skeletal remains of a body under bed sheets, prompting
him to not only organise a funeral for the elderly deceased
Wake (2010) by Atsuko Hirayanagi
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man, for which the estranged son Justin shows up, but to
re-examine his own solitary existence.
Though Hirayanagi’s film finds its emotional centre in a
father-son / familial narrative, the film far more successfully captures the anxiety associated with a figurative
disappearance. Mike may be afraid of dying alone, as we
all are, but the very real prospect of never being mourned,
of simply ceasing to exist and disappearing from a
community’s collective memory, is far more terrifying.
The sparse, abandoned homes he surveys are in contrast
to his own apartment, its centre a veritable mountain of
bric-a-brac, old newspapers, half-eaten food, beer cans
and junk, as well as old photographs and children’s
trophies. Though things contain memories, Mike’s nest,
his literal cocoon, only serves to heighten his sense of
being no one – another man waiting to die.
In Sherman Ong’s 15-minute dance film I Want to
Remember, the desire to repeat a story and to keep
alive the memory of a lover who suddenly disappeared
I Want to Remember (2011) by Sherman Ong
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is captured through a series of flashbacks as Rahim,
the narrator – a possible participant in the political
upheavals of the 1960s pre-independence Malaya –
speaks to an investigator about the turbulent separation
of Singapore from Malaya. However, in some instances,
the disappearance isn’t voluntary. As Ratcliff writes in
his article, some attempts are botched because people
inherently want to be found. In Ong’s film there is a sense
that Sufei, Rahim’s lover, didn’t intend on disappearing
and the story comes to a somewhat neat resolution.
So much of how we define ourselves is determined by
how others perceive us and literally see us. Two films in
this year’s programme take a poignant and dispassionate
look at people who, though ubiquitous in Singapore’s
social landscape, are often unseen and unheard. In Daniel
Hui’s 21-minute short Rumah Sendiri, it’s the figure of the
domestic migrant worker. In Afiq Omar’s 22-minute short
Comfort, it is the filmmaker’s own father, a NTUC-Comfort
taxi driver.
Rumah Sendiri (2010) by Daniel Hui
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Hui
Artist Seth Price remarked in an interview regarding
his book about disappearing,7 that while one way
to disappear would be to “renounce the world of
work, of gainful employment and documents and
contracts”, another way would be to “throw yourself
into production.” 8 In the latter instance, one simply
disappears into work: a person becomes a productive
body performing a task. Omar and Hui’s films are
fascinating companion pieces because they succeed in
re-humanising working bodies, while avoiding a didactic
overtone about how such workers/employees ought
to be treated.
In his interview for the Singapore Short Cuts programme
book, Hui pointedly stated that Rumah Sendiri
differentiates itself from a film like No Day Off (2006)
by Eric Khoo which, said Hui, “demonises middle class
society to the point of making the maid a martyr.” Instead,
the short is described as a “collaborative effort” made
with input from Yanti, the domestic worker who works and
lives in the Hui household and is the focus of the short.9
Comfort (2011) by Afiq Omar
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Writings on Cinema
The film is devoid of dialogue, apart from a song that Yanti
sings in Bahasa during the film’s final minutes. For the
entire 21 minutes, we watch her go about the tasks of
the day – airing the home; feeding the dog; hanging out
the sheets to dry and ironing the clothes. There is nothing
incendiary, nor sentimental about the film. Yet, the song
that Yanti sings at the end, and the fleeting glimpse at
the camera (the smile) before the film ends, is striking.
Yanti’s song is from elsewhere, a social reality she doesn’t
inhabit now. Here again, is the hint of that undigested
memory, that other life. Hui carefully avoids foregrounding
the “severe social distress” or “sense of powerlessness”
that Montanino talks about, which rights activists and
advocates would keenly emphasise when talking about
the lives of domestic workers. But the song and that
fleeting glance is enough.
Afiq Omar’s film Comfort is a picture of contrast only
in that its central ‘character’, Omar Ali, is a gregarious
man and works in a profession where some degree of
interaction is a necessity. He drives across the island,
variously dropping off his daughter and passengers
through the course of the day, taking meal breaks and
musing on a 17-year career as a taxi driver and his hopes
for when he retires. Omar Ali’s enthusiasm is infectious,
not affected. That the filmmaker’s father is a natural before
the camera helps to drive the film forward effortlessly.
But it is his ability to capture his father’s spiritedness
without creating a maudlin home movie that makes
Comfort one of the strongest films of this year’s selection.
Another kind of Disappearance?
Nearly twenty years ago, Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao
Kun said that Singaporeans have undergone two phases
of cultural dislocation – the first when their forefathers left
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their countries of origin, thus becoming physical orphans,
and the second, when Singapore began its push for
urban renewal and modernisation, creating a generation
of ‘cultural orphans’. He observed that the search for
rootedness, identity and belonging would be futile “unless
you go through a process of searching...a process which
usually needs to be traumatic.” 10 But he also presciently
wondered if Singaporean artists could take advantage
of this cultural poverty by absorbing the cultures and
trials of other nations, transcending what he felt was the
limits of ‘historical experience’.11 In a sense, he spoke
about disappearing and fully, intensely experiencing
other cultures.
The narratives of both Anthony Chen’s Lighthouse (23
minutes) and Tan Shi Jie’s The Hole (18 minutes) are,
in and of themselves, fairly idiosyncratic – both deal
with families and are driven by absent father figures and
mothers who must assure familial continuity for their
children. But they depend very much on the rhythms of
the landscape and the cultural milieu in which they were
The Hole (2011) by Tan Shi Jie
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Writings on Cinema
Thin Air (2011) by Kirsten Tan
Lighthouse (2010) by Anthony Chen
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made (UK and Japan respectively) to tell their stories.
In Lighthouse, a woman recently abandoned by her
husband, quietly implodes and takes her three children on
a road trip to a lighthouse. They never get there, but going
somewhere – anywhere at all – is a way to cathartically
deal with loss. In The Hole, the filmmaker unabashedly
pays homage to the curious mix of stoic sternness and
gentle acquiescence that characterises so many of
Yasujiro Ozu’s films, in a short that explores a widow’s
growing uneasiness at her adult son’s unwillingness to
marry and start a family.
Tan
Along with a film like Thin Air (12.13 minutes) by Kirsten
Tan, they are striking because they seem to answer
to Kuo’s call – to transcend cultural boundaries and
attempt to deeply absorb the rhythms and struggles
of communities other than our own. Is it then worth
pondering this: who are we if we can so effectively
disappear into another culture?12
One thing is certain: these films might spell the beginning
of a transnational cinematic practice. At any rate, this
would not be unprecedented. In his essay on the limits of
a ‘national cinema’, Andrew Higson states that “the film
business has long operated on a regional, national and
transnational basis”.13 He goes on to say that filmmakers
are, and will be, “itinerant” and that “all nations are in some
sense diasporic”.14 As Singapore becomes a society
with a large population of recent immigrants forming
new diasporic layers on the historically pre-existing ones,
filmmakers in Singapore may find themselves making films
about entirely new cultural milieus within the boundaries
of the country, that will change the face of Singapore’s
own ‘national cinema’.
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But we witness something quite exceptional when a
filmmaker suggests the transcendental possibilities in
disappearing, in letting go of whatever it is that defines
us. In Libertas, a 3-minute pencil sketch animation short
by Singaporean filmmaker Kan Lume and Indonesian
artist Megan Wonowidjoyo, the female narrator tells the
story of her journey to the sacred site of Uluru in Australia,
soon after her brother’s sudden suicide. The landscape,
the woman and the empty desert roads, initially conveyed
in minimal grey-black outlines suddenly bursts into a
mishmash of dark, vigorous scratches, accompanied with
gusting winds as she seems to disappear into a literal
black hole. Here, the landscape is unmediated and nonjudgemental, allowing the narrator to declare and own
her identity as an artist, while simultaneously liberating
her from the shackles of identity, place and community
– a paradoxical kind of freedom.
Can anxiety at some point, cross over into delirium?
Ang Soo Koon’s 1.42 minute Birthday Cake is a
magnificent and heady mix of nostalgia and madness.
Libertas (2011) by Kan Lume & Megan Wonowidjoyo
Bir
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Cut to a soundtrack composed of counting songs and
games from Sesame Street, what begins as a lovely
rendition of birth and childhood suddenly turns in the
film’s 38th second, into something entirely different.
The neat, sequential counting of candles on a birthday
cake is crowded out by a mélange of voices – children’s
voices shout numbers in a chorus; male and female voices
teach how to count and jostle for our aural attention. The
cake itself is piled with all the numbers from 1 onwards (to
death?) and what began as a celebration, ends with hints
of senility: the final candle on the cake is the number ‘zero’
and the singular singing voice has returned, but we’re no
longer nostalgic and there is nothing left to count. Made
for a class assignment on working with the 16mm format,
Ang’s film takes less than two minutes to convey the
profound truth that we all, finally, disappear. When
the fairytale says “The End”, it is, indeed, the end.
Birthday Cake (2011) by Ang Soo Koon
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Vinita Ramani Mohan is a contributing editor for Kyoto Journal and
Editor of the Cinémathèque Quarterly. She was the Singapore
International Film Festival’s resident publicist, researcher and
writer for the 2002, 2004 and 2005 seasons. A former journalist
with TODAY newspaper, she has also written for BigO (Singapore),
Exclaim! (Canada), Ekran (Slovenia) and Criticine (Southeast Asia).
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I cite these filmmakers because they have, over the years, garnered
attention in the international arena as ‘Singaporean’ filmmakers
and have made films that dwell squarely on life in the city-state.
I also cite some of these earlier films as they pre-date the
establishment of the Singapore Short Cuts programme.
Singapore Short Cuts (8th Edition) – A Programme of the
National Museum of Singapore Cinematheque Co-Presented with
The Substation Moving Images. Programme booklet (National
Museum of Singapore), 6.
Ibid, p. 42.
Mark Cousins, Widescreen: Watching Real People Elsewhere
(Columbia University Press, 2008), 18.
Ratcliff, Evan: “Gone Forever: What Does it Take to Really
Disappear?” August 13, 2009 p. 6. Wired Magazine, Issue 17.09
http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/gone-forever-what-does-ittake-to-really-disappear/ (accessed August 22, 2011)
Ibid. This is a term Ratcliff uses with respect to voluntary
disappearance.
Seth Price: How to Disappear in America (New York:
Leopard Press, 2008)
Spaulings, Reena: Interview with Seth Price.
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/seth-price/ (accessed
August 22, 2009)
Singapore Short Cuts (8th Edition) – A Programme of the
National Museum of Singapore Cinematheque Co-Presented with
The Substation Moving Images. Programme booklet (National
Museum of Singapore), 45. Also see Hui’s blog post on the film
here: http://mono-no-awareness.blogspot.com/2006/08/erickhoos-no-day-off.html (accessed August 29 2011)
Kuo Pao Kun, Commentary. Art vs Art: Conflict & Convergence,
The Substation Conference 1993. Also see: Our Place in Time:
A Conference on Heritage. Opening Notes by Kuo Pao Kun,
Artistic Director of The Substation (16 August 1994), on the
fourth anniversary of The Substation.
Ibid.
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In his opinion piece on language and identity, playwright Alfian
Sa’at astutely and poignantly considers the possible consequences
of the homogenising policies of the state. One simple consequence
might be that we begin to think of Singapore as a culturally vacuous
space, not worthy of being parsed and plied for stories. See:
Alfian Sa’at: “Is Hokkien my Mother-Tongue?” The Online Citizen,
September 8, 2009 (accessed September 2, 2011).
Andrew Higson: “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema”
in Cinema and Nation. Edited by Mette Hjort & Scott Mackenzie
(London & New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 67.
Ibid, p. 64-65.
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Poster, Cinq gars pour Singapour by Bernard Toublanc-Michel (1967)
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Writings on Cinema
Cinq gars pour
Singapour (1967)
Ben Slater
Ben Slater takes a look at an elusive French film
about five Marines on a surreally violent romp through
Singapore that comes enticingly close to letting us in
on life on the island in the 1960s.
“After reading your report I feel that I know
Singapore inside out.” 1
Once upon a time, if you were making a film and wanted
to conjure up Singapore, you only needed the residents
of your local Chinatown, a job-lot of wooden planks, bits
and pieces from the fancy-dress shop and a parrot. But
post-war, or specifically post-Independence Singapore,
was a different entity. It demanded to be visited rather
than imagined; it had textures and atmospheres that
no studio carpenter could recreate. With affordable air
tickets filmmakers could be tourists, breaking into farflung tropical countries with suitcases full of cash, phone
numbers of fixers, lightweight cameras and the gift of the
gab. No wonder then, that so many foreign-made films
from the 1960s shot in Singapore concern espionage and
secret missions. Travelling light but with an agenda was
glamorous – they felt like spies, they were spies, capturing
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Cinq gars pour Singapour (1967)
images like secrets. Cinq gars pour Singapour (neatly
translated, with rhyme intact, to Five Ashore In Singapore)
is already a double-agent, a French film pretending to be
American. The motley crew of actors belong to various
and mixed nationalities, and that’s not counting the
Swedish-French blonde bombshell and the Italian heavy
who plays a Chinese bad guy. Somehow the hybridity of
these sorts of bizarre European co-productions filters all
the way through the credits.
Filmed (I assume) in 1966 and directed by Bernard
Toublanc-Michel, previously assistant to nouvelle vague
luminaries Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, the film’s
story is adapted from a Jean Bruce paperback published
in 1959. Bruce was the creator of the ‘French James
Bond’, OSS 117, to whom there’s a none-too-subtle nod
during the opening credits, when the film’s protagonist,
the blandly titled and performed Art Smith (played by
Sean Flynn, more later) is picked up at Payar Lebar
Airport by a car parked in lot number 117.
Cinq gars enjoys the spectacle of arriving in Singapore
so much that Art Smith enters twice. Once by plane,
complete with bureaucratic close-ups of entry visas, when
he’s told by a knowing local girl that “we have Smiths
and Browns arriving everyday”, and later by boat after a
rendezvous with the other four titular Marines, dropping
anchor at Collyer Quay. This latter sequence, in terms of
its historical documentation of Singapore, is the film’s
highlight. The now-demolished Quay itself teems with
people, and our five guys strut their stuff through the
beautiful entrance hall while the film’s title song promises
“Somewhere in Singapore… we’ll find pretty girls.” The
camerawork is loose, handheld and buzzed on the energy
of a new place and experience. They hit the street, jostled
by trishaw hustlers, and jaywalk over to the General Post
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Bird’s eye view of Clifford Pier and Collyer Quay (1960s), photographed by
Chiang Ker Chiu, Image courtesy of National Archives of Singapore
50
Clifford Pier (1969) photographed by Lim Kheng Chye,
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Office (now The Fullerton Hotel, a few feet from where
Jack Flowers – the protagonist in Saint Jack 2 - told the
CIA to “fuck it” a decade later), diving into a labyrinth
of street stalls, shops, heat and food. The cameraman
captures all this lurking behind pillars, shooting across
roads, leaning out of the windows of higher buildings.
It’s guerrilla and gorilla filmmaking, as the actors-playingMarines leer at local girls, marvel dumbly at tat in the
shops and gape incredulously at a noodle-consuming
pedestrian.
The film was shot entirely on location, and there’s a
tension between the roving eye of Jean Charvein, the
cinematographer, regarding Singapore as a landscape to
be absorbed and recorded in all its myriad wonders, and
the two-fisted narrative, which casts various sites around
the island as an arbitrary series of obstacles and props to
be smashed over and destroyed.
The plot is simple and goofy. Seventeen Marines on shore
leave in Singapore have gone missing in a month. Art
Smith is sent to solve the mystery, with four tough guy
Marines led by Kevin (Marc Michel slumming it after being
Jacques Demy’s leading man and the enigmatic prisoner
in Jacques Becker’s Le Trou), who tells Smith that the
missing men “dissolve in the midst of revelry” after getting
drunk and meeting a girl “or something that approximately
resembles one”. Singapore, a zone of escape and erotic
possibility, has become a new, covert battlefield.
So, our five heroes, including English boxer Terry Downes
(with incomprehensible cockney drawl) and Denis Berry,
the French-born son of blacklisted American director John
Berry, hit town, pretending to be regular Marines. They’re
as charmless and wooden as porn actors. The dialogue
is painfully stilted and highly functional (lots of numbers,
ye,
ore
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Pagoda Street, Chinatown on the eve of Chinese New Year (1967)
Image © Singapore Press Holdings Limited, reprinted with permission
52
Temple Street, Chinatown at night on the eve of Chinese New Year (1967)
Image © Singapore Press Holdings Limited, reprinted with permission
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67)
on
orders and repetition). In the lead, Sean Flynn, seems
coolly disinterested in being charismatic, acting to cash
in on his father’s name (his first lead role was in The Son
of Captain Blood [1962]). Cinq gars was his last film and
it’s as if he quit before the shoot started. Just four years
later he would disappear completely, into the badlands of
Cambodia as a photo-journalist, never to be seen again.
Before long the lads are creating havoc around
Chinatown. They start a trishaw race, drunkenly goading
the poor drivers. During this raucous ‘comedy’ there’s a
blinking cutaway to a handle-bar, and for a split-second
we see a metal-framed family photograph belonging to
a driver. A sliver of documented humanity caught on the
fly. They hide from police in a cinema that has a ‘Majulah
Singapura’ banner hanging above the box office, a
reminder of the country’s freshly independent status (that
and the predominance of Malay spoken by both police
and villains). On screen there’s a newsreel about the
Vietnam war; Toublanc-Michel’s attempt, albeit briefly, to
problematise the military fun and games. Indeed, the next
section of the film, where the Marines hit a sleazy dive
(‘The Paradise Limited’) and bully a luckless mama-san,
rejecting the “ready for Boogie street” hostesses as too
ugly, and start a demented fight with the girls (fists versus
stilettos), carries an authentic whiff of the nihilism, racism,
violence and misogyny of an American soldier letting off
steam in Asia. As Monika, the film’s archetypal Caucasian
woman in a cheongsam, comments in a show-stopping
monologue, these men aren’t interested in the beauty of
women, only “the smell of death”.
The team are desperately trying to get kidnapped, and
finally they get their wish, intoxicated by loudly bubbling
champagne and “pretty girls” (one of whom, we’re told,
had danced with William Holden) in a ‘Private Club’
67)
on
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Cathay Building with Cathay Hotel (1950),
Image courtesy of National Archives of Singapore
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(a hotel restaurant) belonging to a fez-wearing smoothie
improbably named Ten-Sin (all the ‘Chinese’ characters
have these kinds of names). Events escalate and
gradually, through a series of interminable fist fights,
gun fights, explosions, torture sequences and chases,
we travel vicariously around Singapore in ’66, wishing
we were in the company of less brutal, more
appreciative tourists.
They fight on a beach on the East Coast at dawn; clean
up in a suite at the now-demolished Cathay Hotel (where
the windows are cleaned by Samsui women), track down
information at Pulau Brani, the kampong on water, which
features some stunning footage before a house is blown
up; they gatecrash the mama-san’s funeral in Chinatown,
harassing an elderly Chinese woman who actually gets
some lines; they run around the lushly green and jungly
Keppel Golf Course, and finally get to a vast mansion in
Telok Blangah, the villain’s lair.
Ta-Chouen (played by Italian B-movie veteran, Andrea
Aurelia) is a tubby Fu-Manchu first seen draped on a
circular bed, smoking opium and surrounded by halfnaked girls, leading our amoral heroes to declare him
“a gentleman of good taste”. One of the harem is the
aforementioned Monika (the extraordinarily intense Marika
Green, from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and aunt of
Eva Green), who shows up teasingly throughout the film.
When Art Smith confronts her on the bed, silently angry
at her sexual betrayal (sleeping with the enemy and a
Chinese), it’s the film’s only dramatic moment, cutting
back and forth between their impassive, beautiful faces.
The soldiers torture Ta-Chouen in his own chamber
(with electrodes to his head and punches to the face),
until they find out about a new rendezvous on the beach
(rustic Sentosa this time). In a pleasantly realistic detail,
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Ta-Chouen smuggles comatose Marines out of Singapore
in the back of a ‘Cold Storage’ truck belonging to Kun
& Company (2 Kuching Road, Singapore 4). Finally Art
Smith and a buddy discover the missing Marines’ fate,
to be kept on a tanker out to sea in the ship’s deep
freezer. The soldiers are literally kept on ice, part of some
diabolical experiment of Ta-Chouen’s. After all the action
and forward momentum of the film, it’s appropriate that
the heroes should spend the last ten minutes stuck in
a dark room slowly freezing to death. The meat-headed
become meat. Or they would have done if they weren’t
rescued. By the preposterous closing, Art Smith and
Monika are in loving embrace and all the soldiers are
apparently defrosted.
The problem with Cinq gars is not its inherently colonial
view of Singapore as an exotic playground for male
adventure, which could so easily have been simulated in
a studio backlot, but rather that at times the Singapore in
the film proves to be so tantalisingly real. It breathes, and
the camera is present to capture the moments, the details
and the expressions, but then we return to these deadfaced young men and their search for more dead-faced
young men. We are shown but kept distant from the life of
the city in 1966, a vanished place and a people we want
to properly encounter, not just the Smiths and Jones who
still arrive every day.
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Ben Slater has written about film for many international
publications including Screen International, Cahiers du Cinema
and Vertigo. His book, Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in
Singapore was published in 2006 and he writes an irregular blog
on foreign-made films set and shot in Singapore at www.sporeana.
blogspot.com Currently he's a lecturer at the School of Art, Media
& Design at Nanyang Technological University.
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Cinq Gars Pour Singapour, DVD, directed by Bernard
Toublan-Michel (France/Italy: 1967)
Saint Jack, DVD, directed by Peter Bogdanovich (USA: 1979).
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La chrysalide et le papillon / The Brahmin and the Butterfly by Georges Méliès(1901)
Image from BFI
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Writings on Cinema
The Magic of
Cinema
Ranjana Raghunathan
Looking at the depictions of the Brahmin, the fakir
and the rajah in the silent films of early 20th century
cine-magician Georges Méliès, Ranjana Raghunathan
finds anxiety, ambiguity and complexity buried
beneath Oriental tropes.
A Brahmin1 plays the ‘flute’ in an exotic jungle setting,
and what emerges is a giant caterpillar instead of a
snake. The caterpillar raises its head, the Brahmin picks
it up and places it in a huge basket shaped like an egg.
The caterpillar is transformed into a beautiful butterfly
woman. The butterfly woman flutters above the basket
and the Brahmin tries to flatter and capture her into a
fabric cover, but she dances in a lively manner and avoids
being ensnared. Eventually, he drapes her body with a
fabric, perhaps to portray a substitution trick. However,
two maidens enter the jungle and remove the fabric cover
to reveal a princess. The Brahmin falls to his knees, the
princess pushes him with her foot and he turns into a
caterpillar that follows her into the jungle.
The scene elaborated above is not out of a dream but a
short film entitled The Brahmin and the Butterfly /
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La Chrysalide et le Papillon (1901) by the early French
theatre magician-turned-filmmaker Georges Méliès
(1861–1938). It is one of his many films that feature
rajahs, fakirs, sorcerers, conjurers and Brahmins. Méliès’
choice of titles for his films are intriguing – The Rajah’s
Dream / Le Rêve du Radjah ou la forêt enchantée (1900),
Le Fakir de Singapour / An Indian Sorcerer (1908),
The Miracles of Brahmin / Les Miracles de Brahmine
(1900), Tchin-Chao, The Chinese Conjurer / Le
Thaumaturge chinois (1904), The Palace of Arabian
Nights / Le Palais des mille et une nuits (1905). These
films depict, through magic, mystery and illusion, ‘other’
worlds – both imagined and real – and provide an ideal
entry point into exploring Méliès’ oeuvre.
The Exotic East
In his seminal work on the European imagination of the
‘East’, postcolonial theorist Edward Said demonstrated
how identity is both paradoxical and a construct,
indicative of the complex identities of postcolonial people
throughout the world today. He drew attention, also, to
the link between text and ‘context’ (the world).2 Where do
Méliès’ films figure in this theorisation of identity? What
do his portrayals and his imaginary realm mean today – as
we decode history (the time the films were made) from the
vantage point of the present? Is there an image beyond
the archetypal symbol of an Indian stereotype (a snake
charmer), or the dominant symbol of the Far East?
A partial foray into Méliès’ vast array of short films
shows that he succeeded in effortlessly creating new
impressions while simultaneously perpetuating Europe’s
deep-seated fascination with, and anxiety about, the
‘exotic’ East. The archetypes and symbols of the ‘East’ or
the Orient in his films have a ‘timeless’ quality to them
– the bearded fakir, a turbaned rajah, the flute of an Indian
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snake charmer, the images of elephants in an elaborately
ornate bedroom, the palatial spaces, the flowing robes
of a Chinese conjurer, his plaited hair, the kohl-lined eyes
of a Brahmin, a seducer of white women, a trickster, a
magician. While these images seamlessly feed into, and
are the product of, the impressions constituted by the
colonial experience, they also exhibit that fascination
with the unknown: Méliès the theatre-magician, lauds the
oriental conjurers and magicians whom he mimics and recreates. If identity is a paradox, this potpourri of portrayals
depicts just that – a complexity that is undecipherable,
like the worlds of dream and magic.
Realms of Magic and Rituals
Snake charmers are typically magicians and traditional
healers; a fakir is a wandering ascetic and a Brahmin is
usually a priest, an ascetic or a scholar. All these figures
ostensibly connect to another world through esoteric
practices and through rituals. Rituals, both banal and
spiritual, are the very portals through which cultural
identity can be experienced. Despite their seemingly
anachronistic nature, they carry the kernel of the
possibility of something transcendental. As a person who
grew up in a highly ritualised Brahmin household listening
to (and often chanting without understanding) mantras,
participating in rituals with a naive curiosity about their
significance and listening to family members who rebuked
my skepticism, Méliès’ films are oddly resonant.
When Méliès’ rituals of magic conjure the Brahmin, as
a magician he occupies a position of power. Yet in the
modern context, it is the Brahmin who occupies the
highest position of privilege in the Indian society fissured
on the basis of caste. It is this privileged access to the
transcendental realm of esoteric rituals that enables him
to ‘other’ the non-Brahmin and to justify a project
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of exclusion, just like the justification for colonisation.
This is the ambivalence of identity that Said talks about
– something paradoxical and constructed – that is evident
in Méliès’ rendition of the oriental realm. Additionally,
the realm of magic, much like religious rituals, involves
manipulating reality, from a position of power, by
supernatural means or knowledge privy only to the
magician (or a Brahmin or fakir).
Méliès explored the possibilities of cinema by recognising
that a filmmaker is a modern day conjurer, a creator
of spectacles. Early cinema has, according to French
filmmaker and critic François Truffaut, two potentials: on
the one hand ‘spectacle’, the engagement with fantasy,
on the other hand ‘research’, the engagement with the
real everyday life.3 The potential for trickery and illusion
often led early critics to characterise cinema as a form of
‘magic’. Much like religious rituals, cinema then became
something miraculous, something that could be subjected
to belief (and the suspension of disbelief thereof) rather
than being merely another scientific innovation. The
rituals of magic performed through gestures with special
objects, the rituals of portraying mysterious worlds (both
the world of dreams and the ‘exotic East’) and the ritual of
filming them became Méliès’ realm.
Film theoreticians and critics of his work see his films as
“trick-oriented” and not narrative oriented, considering
narrativity and theatricality secondary in his work.4 Indeed,
the magic-oriented cinema of Méliès is the precursor
to special effects movies, of the handling of a machine
for the purposes of a cinematic representation of other
worlds and of fantasy. While it is easy to see Méliès as
the father of the fantasy genre, the extraordinary layers
and insights that his films provide compel some to view
him as an auteur, as a narrative artist.5 Elizabeth Ezra’s
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study makes a compelling argument for recognising
Méliès as an auteur by revealing the complexity and
coherence of his oeuvre. Others before him had
discovered how to make moving pictures, but it was
Méliès who enriched the technique and scope of the new
medium by introducing into it the aspects of fantasy and
by using the medium to tell a story. Though his films were
regarded as a branch of theatre art, they are replete with
movement and imagination.
It is in The Rajah’s Dream, that one can see a unification
of the worlds he imagines – the exotic east and the dream
world, and the anxiety associated with the attempt to
control both these worlds. The film painstakingly recreates
an imagined, archetypal Indian rajah’s palatial home. There
is the ornate bedroom with an elephant-face sculpture
as the pillar and an elephant trunk on the bed cover; the
rajah is decked in an elaborate costume complete with a
turban, sword and robes. Underlying this luxuriance, there
is the dream world which forces the rajah to confront
his primal fears – of large insects (a butterfly yet again),
The Rajah’s Dream (1900) © Lobster Films Collection
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waking up in another world where chairs vanish as one is
about to sit, a demonic tree and a woman who responds
to the rajah’s attempt at seduction by bringing him to an
execution block with a summoned female army. Perhaps
this was Méliès’ cinematic metaphor to demonstrate
the futility of trying to control and transform reality – as
a magician, as a king or as a coloniser. The repeated
use of caterpillars and butterflies in his shorts shows
a fascination with metamorphosis – the element of the
magical inherent in everyday reality. Of all his films, The
Rajah’s Dream seems to reveal a filmmaker who was not
merely subjecting the East to the European gaze, but a
filmmaker whose vulnerability is evident. The ‘East’ or
the ‘Orient’, though stereotypically depicted and even
caricatured, is nonetheless, beyond Méliès’ grasp; much
like the subconscious self that is unknown, mysterious
and isolated.
‘Singapour’ as the Oriental Location
In Le Fakir de Singapour (1908), as a lady dusts a framed
photograph of a fakir portrayed predictably in a huge
turban, elaborate flowing robes and a beard, the fakir
(Méliès) himself emerges from the photograph. He sits
the lady down and presents to her his magic tricks of
conjuring myriad objects (chickens, babies, and the lady
herself) and the lady becomes enraptured by his illusions.
This same narrative trajectory reappears in Tchin-Chao,
The Chinese Conjurer (1904), except that the elaborate
setting and the costumes are an imaginary rendering
of the Far East. The conjurer has small eyes, a thin long
moustache, robes woven with Chinese script and long
plaited hair. The stage appears to be in front of a building
that could very well be found today at Singapore’s
Chinese Gardens.
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Writings on Cinema
Tchin-Chao, The Chinese Conjurer (1904) © Lobster Films Collection
Le Fakir de Singapour (1908) © Lobster Films Collection
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The Magic of Cinema
Much like his other films, these films too are characterised
by an elaborate and exotic oriental setting, in this case,
apparently Singapore. These films were made at the
turn of the 20th century when Singapore was an active
entrepôt in South East Asia and a centre for IndiaChina trade, under British colonial rule. The merchant
community of Singapore agitated against British rule for
greater local representation in the administration. The
Chinese Protectorate worked towards controlling the
abuses of coolie trade and protecting women forced
into prostitution. Singapore was a shared space where
people came together through struggles due to a
shortage of decent housing and poor health standards.
The birth of Singapore’s first Chief Minister David
Marshall, the construction of several Chinese Taoist
temples like Hong San See and Koon Seng Ting, the
discovery of the Sembawang Hot Springs are just some
developments and events that took place in this period.
Of course, Méliès was neither an ethnographer, nor a
documentarian. His films capture very little, if anything
at all, of the burgeoning trading port city of Singapore in
1908. But the images rendered in these two films carry
the undercurrents of these struggles – to exist, to claim an
identity, to understand freedom. In Méliès’ portrayal of the
‘Other’ there appears to be a sardonic self-critique. The
coloniser is parodied, reduced to mimicking the ‘other’ by
donning disguises and costumes, yet never being able
to translate the complexity of what was going on in an
emerging part of the world.
The peculiarly Singaporean cultural landscape – its mix of
Chinese, Indian and indigenous Malay cultures – is hinted
at in the mishmash titles and sets that Méliès created. In
his world, there are both fakirs and Chinese merchants
in Singapore. Though this more likely reflects the
generalising tendencies inherent in an uncritical rendition
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Writings on Cinema
of any culture, it ironically points to a city (Singapore) that
would soon come to be characterised by plural identities
and diasporic communities.
The Theatre
Edgar Morin, a French philosopher and sociologist,
argued for the fantastical effects of cinema to be
embraced, rather than disavowed.6 The significance of the
cinema, Morin argues, is that it completely externalises
the imaginary processes. Cinema gives us immediate
access to the “internal theater of the mind: dreams,
imaginings, and representations of this little cinema that
we have in our head”.7 The imaginary, for Morin, is the key
aspect of the human mind and its negotiation with the
world. By reclaiming and reinforcing the imaginary,
cinema establishes our very being.
As a theatre magician and filmmaker, Méliès simply
demonstrated the magical possibilities of cinema – the
illusion of life moving before us. The illusion is at the heart
of cinematic trickery just as it is at the heart of conjuring
tricks. The powerful impression that cinema first left on
early audiences was due in part to the fact that they
were seeing moving images for the very first time. It drew
audiences because they could witness transformation or
metamorphosis and explore the mysteries of life and death
through the passage of time. Méliès’ films became the
theatre where he enacted these multi-layered mysteries
of the universe – through sleight of hand and camera
tricks – weaving an illusion of an illusion within an illusion.
His dreamscapes were also made possible because
he was working in the era of silent cinema. Before the
advent of sound, the audience had to contend with these
surreal images that created a monologue in the theatre of
the mind. This is the most powerful possibility of Méliès’
cinema – of being in a fantasy realm while conscious, of
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Méliès in his Toy Shop, Image courtesy of Zamora Productions
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Writings on Cinema
exploring the unknown without any fear of harm and of
the many voyages possible, without departing from one’s
shores. They evoke contradictions, inconsistencies and
dreamlike desires and escapades that defy interpretation
in part because there is no coherent narrative. Méliès
reveled in this aspect of the human mind, and perhaps
attempted to make his audiences sensitive to a critical
way of perceiving and thinking about themselves and the
world around them.
Within months of its invention, film became a commodity,
and Méliès was bankrupted by sharp practices in the
marketplace by 1913. After being driven out of business,
he spent his time as a toy salesman in a railway station.
His films seem to reflect this internal dialectic of the
magical possibilities of this new technological innovation
and their usurpation by market forces. Today, under the
burden of modern societies and the commodity fetishism
that clasp our existence, Méliès offers us a retreat into
dreamscapes where we might reclaim our individual and
collective identities; to be truly free from the effects of
reification caused by modernity. His films were perhaps
part of a ritualised call to the universe – through magic,
through other worlds, through dreams – to witness the
possibilities of film, beyond their appeal as a form of
entertainment. His films can thus be seen as his statement
of an incantation, and as the incantation itself. Was it the
light projected onto the darkness of our existence?
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The Magic of Cinema
Ranjana Raghunathan has recently discovered the myriad
creative and narrative possibilities of experimental cinema and
art - a process that is proving to be transcendental. She is deeply
fascinated by, and committed to hearing, the stories of marginalised
communities in both India and Singapore. She is currently a
freelance researcher with a non-profit organisation in Singapore.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Name used to designate one of the four varnas (popularly known
as castes) in a traditional Hindu society. Members of the Brahmin
caste are generally expected to belong to the priestly class,
traditionally fire-priests. The Brahmin in Méliès’ film La Chrysalide
et le Papillon is ostensibly a snake charmer, a witty portrayal of an
‘Indian’ magician
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)
Sarah Wood, “Trickery and Illusion: The Magic of Cinema,”
Luxonline, http://www.luxonline.org.uk/education/learning_tours/
trickery_and_illusion(1).html (accessed August 31, 2011)
Andre Gaudreault, Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality:
Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès (Journal of Popular
Cinema & Television, 2002), 110.
Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (Manchester University Press,
2000)
Drake Stutesman, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man: An Essay in
Sociological Anthropology by Edgar Morin (Film Quarterly Vol 60,
No. 3: University of California Press, 2007), 94
Ibid., 95
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C
th
Ev
its
ne
w
(e
al
fil
no
ci
ev
its
ba
no
m
In
th
st
in
–
id
ha
a
sh
ou
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Word on the Ground
Towards a Cinema to Come
Daniel Hui
Cinema is in turmoil. Like the world, it is beginning to realise
that the established systems can no longer support themselves.
Everyday, we see its desperate attempts at resuscitating
itself. The gimmicky novelty of new technology (how many
new video cameras are really going to 'revolutionise' the
way we make films?); the arbitrariness of film festivals
(even our so-called 'cultural gatekeepers' admit that it has
always been about who you know, and not how good your
film is); the increasing anonymity of filmmakers (there is
no longer any personality in either art cinema or commercial
cinema, no longer a point of view; every art film behaves like
every other art film, and commercial cinema never breaks out of
its genre conventions). One could argue that these things existed
back when cinema (as an art, as an industry) was invented. But
no, not to this extent. Ours is the age of saturation. We see so
much that we see nothing at all.
In the past, there was a struggle between the filmmaker and
the silent, stoic, indifferent images. Now, there is no longer
struggle, only a sort of mute fear, as if confronted with the
infinite. And that's why cinema these days no longer speaks
– or, worse, chooses not to speak, as in the invention of that
idiotic technology, Steadicam, or in the popularisation of the
hand-held camera aesthetic. A filmmaker no longer has to choose
a point of view (the very meaning of breaking a scene down into
shots) – just include it all and hopefully some good will come
out of it!
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Word on the Ground
In the past, even a constructed set announces to itself: 'I
have conquered nature, I have created my own image!' We
find ourselves drawn to these images, not because they show
us human grandiosity, but because they show us human folly,
hubris, Icarus' Fall. But even more so, because we struggle to be
human, because being human is ultimately a doomed enterprise,
and can only lead to its own death. Such is the natural death of
all the arts, of which cinema is only but one.
Cinema is sick. Commercial cinema is repulsive; auteur cinema
has sunk deeply into its own excrement; even third cinema has
become co-opted by cinephiles so as to lose whatever meaning
it might have once had. We live in an all-enveloping system that
denies any exteriority: 'Yes, you can be an individual; you can
be unique, as long as you are individual and unique within our
approved guidelines. Don't stray too near to the limit there. Be
careful. You might actually be ignored. And we all know that
being ignored is even worse than not existing at all, right?'
So what is to be done? We mustn’t refuse to engage, which is
the attitude that Hollywood has adopted. It's not surprising at all
that Hollywood only concerns itself with making 3D live action
cartoons. It has already predicted its own death. But, like Chang’e,
it flies to the moon so as to not face its own mortality – it is not
immortality that is gained, but rather an even more prolonged
process of death, where life is strictly not allowed to interrupt.
Hollywood films are hard to watch today because it is like
watching a cadaver artificially reanimated dripping sickly juices
on our faces.
No, we mustn’t refuse to engage, just as the bulk of political
authority, especially in Singapore and the U.S. has commanded us
to do. Look the other way, and pretend that struggle and suffering
has been completely eradicated. Indulge in your pleasures (of
which art has become the highest temple), so that you can still
retain what is left of your artificial, constructed, politically-approved
'in
th
be
a
ca
ho
M
O
ph
w
w
th
ca
to
to
ou
'G
fo
an
ab
Fr
I
as
vi
m
an
D
fil
Da
Se
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'I
We
w
y,
be
e,
of
ma
as
ng
at
an
ur
Be
at
is
all
on
e,
ot
ed
pt.
ke
es
al
us
ng
of
ill
ed
Towards a Cinema to come
'individuality'. As long as you feel something, you would know
that you're still alive. Art has come to replace emotion. Art has
become accomplice not to murder, but to the prolonging of death,
a cryogenically frozen life, an artificial immortality. It is a malignant
cancer. And after all, cancer cells are cells which have forgotten
how to die.
Maybe it is good that cinema is dead then! Not dying, but dead!
Old things have to die for new things to happen. Western
philosophy has a fear of the end, but we don't have to fear it,
we just have to face it so that we can begin again. Maybe now,
we can begin to find new ways to engage with the world, with
that terrifying world of indifferent images – nature. Maybe we
can begin to connect with other people, to learn how to live
together, to learn not to kill. It is to start saying: 'I can learn
to love.' But not before we renounce art, which shuts us within
our own feelings, which makes us assume we are the supreme
'God' of our universes, but in actuality makes us remain ciphers
for political power. Maybe the theater can become a classroom,
and cinema can regain its lost opportunity to teach us things
about our world, about our ways of life, about the unimaginable.
Freedom is terrifying, and people are afraid of terrifying things.
I propose a non-violent form of violence. The new cinema – just
as the new people – should be, and can only be, violent. A
violence in everything that refuses to be assimilated, subjugated,
made into a political subject. To be, in every form of thought
and emotion, radical singularities, only singularities, only human.
Death to humanity, long live humans! Death to cinema, long live
films!
Daniel Hui is a filmmaker and writer. His films have been screened at film festivals in Rotterdam,
Seoul and Bangkok among others. He is one of the founding members of 13 Little Pictures.
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Write to us
Submissions are eagerly encouraged. We’re keen on writings on cinema that
include, but are not limited to:
Ed
Vi
–
–
–
–
–
–
Pr
Zh
overviews of a director’s work;
photo essays celebrating or studying images in a film;
explorations of one particular film or groups of films;
analysis of moments within a film;
situating a film within its historical/political context;
stories or narrative non-fiction pieces inspired by films.
G
LS
We are not looking for academic treatises, nor are we interested in lightly
journalistic film reviews. We’re keen on writing that is sharp, intelligent and
knowledgeable, though not without humour. Each piece should be between
1,500 to 2,500 words long.
For submissions and letters to the editor, email:
[email protected]
Pr
Pr
Co
Au
©
Th
C
Th
or write to:
The Cinémathèque Quarterly
National Museum of Singapore
93 Stamford Road
Singapore 178897
Th
is
All
ac
for
ho
ov
of
Na
to
ex
do
Na
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Credits
Editor
Vinita Ramani Mohan
Programme Text
Zhang Wenjie, Warren Sin, Low Zu Boon
Graphic Design
LSD Corporation
Printing
Procolor Separation and Print
Cover Image
Au royaume des fées / Kingdom of the Fairies by Georges Méliès (1903)
© Photofest
The Disappearing Singapore(an)? © Vinita Ramani Mohan, 2011
Cinq gars pour Singapour (1967) © Ben Slater, 2011
The Magic of Cinema © Ranjana Raghunathan, 2011
The Cinémathèque Quarterly October–December 2011
is published by the National Museum of Singapore
All information is correct at the time of print. Every reasonable care has been taken to ensure the
accuracy of information within, hence, neither the publisher, editor or writers may be held liable
for errors and/or omissions however caused. Every effort has been made to identify copyright
holders. We deeply regret that if, despite our concerted efforts, any copyright holders have been
overlooked or omitted. Any reproduction, retransmission, republication, or other use of all or part
of this publication is expressly prohibited, unless prior written permission has been granted by the
National Museum of Singapore or the appropriate copyright owner. The Museum reserves the right
to make changes and modifications to the programme without prior notice. The views and opinions
expressed by the writers in this publication and the speakers and facilitators in the programme
do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or the official policy and position of the
National Museum of Singapore.
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About Us
About the National Museum of Singapore Cinémathèque
The National Museum Cinémathèque focuses on the presentation of film in its
historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts, with a strong emphasis on local and
regional cinema. Housed in the 247-seat Gallery Theatre, the National Museum
Cinémathèque offers new perspectives on film through a year-round series of
screenings, thematic showcases, and retrospectives that feature both essential
and undiscovered works from the history of cinema. Besides the presentation
of film, the National Museum Cinémathèque is also active in film preservation,
especially the heritage of Asian cinema, and has worked with regional film
archives to restore and subtitle important film classics. With an imaginative
and diverse programme that includes Singapore Short Cuts, World Cinema
Series, and Under the Banyan Tree, the National Museum Cinémathèque aims
to create a vital and vibrant film culture in Singapore.
w
SI
10
Co
C
va
sh
ap
Na
pr
G
(6
ww
About the National Museum of Singapore
With a history dating back to its inception in 1887, the National Museum of
Singapore is the nation’s oldest museum with a young soul. Designed to be
the people’s museum, the National Museum is a custodian of the 11 National
Treasures, and its Singapore History and Living Galleries adopt cutting-edge
and varied ways of presenting history and culture to redefine conventional
museum experience. A cultural and architectural landmark in Singapore,
the museum hosts vibrant festivals and events all year round – the dynamic
Night Festival, visually arresting art installations, exciting performances and
film screenings – in addition to presenting lauded exhibitions and precious
artefacts. The programming is supported by a wide range of facilities and
services including F&B, retail and a Resource Centre. The National Museum of
Singapore re-opened in December 2006 after a three-year redevelopment.
Fi
G
PG
PG
N
M
R2
Fo
w
For details, please visit www.nationalmuseum.sg
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Ticketing Information
s
d
m
al
s
of
www.sistic.com.sg / (65) 6348 5555
SISTIC counters islandwide or National Museum Stamford Visitor Services:
10am – 7.30pm
Concessions
Concession rates for most programmes are available to students (full-time, with
valid student pass), seniors (aged 60 years and above, with valid identity pass
showing proof of age), NSF (with valid 11B pass), agnès b. Members (only
applicable for World Cinema Series programme), National Museum Volunteers,
National Museum Members, NHB Staff and MICA Staff. Passes have to be
presented when purchasing tickets.
General Enquiries
(65) 6332 3659 / (65) 6332 5642
www.nationalmuseum.sg
Film Classification Guide
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(General) Suitable for all ages.
PG
(Parental Guidance) Suitable for all,
but parents should guide their young.
PG13 (Parental Guidance 13) Suitable for persons aged 13 and above,
but parental guidance is advised for children below 13.
NC16 (No Children Under 16) Suitable for persons aged 16 and above.
M18
(Mature 18) Suitable for persons aged 18 years and above.
R21
(Restricted 21) Suitable for adults aged 21 and above.
For the latest film ratings of out programmes, please log on to
www.nationalmuseum.sg
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Getting to the Museum
MRT
B
Train
Bras Basah MRT Station (5-minute walk)
Dhoby Ghaut MRT Station (5-minute walk)
City Hall MRT Station (10-minute walk)
Bus
YMCA Bus-stop (08041)
SBS: 7, 14, 14e, 16, 36, 64, 65, 111, 124, 128, 139, 162, 162M, 174, 174e, 175
SMRT: 77, 106, 167, 171, 190, 700, 700A, NR6, NR7
SMU Bus-stop (04121)
SBS: 7, 14, 14e, 16, 36, 111, 124, 128, 131, 162, 162M, 166, 174, 174e, 175
SMRT: 77, 106, 167, 171, 190, 700, 700A, 857, NR7
Taxi
Pick-up and drop-off points are at the Fort Canning entrance or the Stamford entrance.
P
Car
Limited parking facility is available at the National Museum. Other parking facilities are available at
YMCA, Park Mall, Singapore Management University and Fort Canning Park.
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Contents - National Museum of Singapore

Transcription

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