Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Essay for Printed Projects: Issue 11

Sopawan Boonnimitra
February, 2009
For Printed Projects - will be presented at Venice Biennial in June 09

Southeast Asian Cinema in the Reflection of Post-Third-Worldist Cinema: A Contemplative Space for Dialogue


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On the brink of the world economic collapse, Southeast Asia is caught in-between. While many countries have taken their steady turn in economic prosperity over the past decade, the new crisis promises yet another apocalypse. By being at the other end of the consumer chain than the West, Southeast Asia is left to ponder on its own as there are no more products to be made and sent to be assembled somewhere in China before being shipped to the West. Many of the countries are yet again facing a re-examination of the self, as happened during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Such a complex process is perhaps best epitomized by the art practices and filmmaking in the region since then. While these art practices and films are locally rooted, they have also found fame elsewhere and become a main attraction in international venues, particularly since the beginning of the new millennium, where the focus on cinematic works has shifted significantly from East Asia to Southeast Asia, particularly through the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Raya Martin (the Philippines), Nia Dinata (Indonesia), Riri Riza (Indonesia), and Ming Nguyen-Vo (Vietnam), among many others that have circulated internationally.

These cinematic works combine the local roots of folktales and storytelling with the influence of Western aesthetics, particularly the Western avant-gardes and European art cinema. The strategy is similar to what Rey Chow has described as ‘auto-ethnography’ in the work of Zhang Yimou. For Chow, Zhang “is showing a ‘China’ that is at one subalternized and exoticised by the West” and the ethnicity of his films returns “the gaze of orientalist surveillance, a gaze that demands of non-Western peoples mythical pictures and stories to which convenient labels of otherness such as ‘China’, ‘India’, ‘Africa’, and so forth can be affixed”.[1] While successfully accommodating to Western tastes and standards set by the elite group who runs international film festivals, these films capture the imagined Southeast Asia in the midst of urban decay, state censorship, gender inequality, as well as presenting what Zhang Yingjin calls ‘the magic ingredients’, as he refers to the international success of Fifth Generation Chinese films, which include: primitive landscape (including savage rivers, mountains, forests, deserts), repressed sexuality and its eruption in transgressive moments of eroticism, gender performance and sexual exhibition (including homosexuality, transvestism, adultery, incest), and a mythical or cyclical time frame in which the protagonist’s fate is predestined.[2]

While these elements of exoticism and primitivism continue to be explored in the above films, as with the Fifth Generation films, they have created a complex space for an on-going dialogue between Southeast Asia and the West as well as with the self. Whereas these filmmakers acquire different modes of filmmaking from the mainstream of their own countries and dominant modes of Hollywood filmmaking and pursue a more alternative path favoured by international film festivals, in a way it is not a surrender to the cultural power of the West but rather these films position themselves critically vis-à-vis their own filmmaking industry and dominant ideology and are used as a mask to counter the dominant narrative of the nation as a unified entity. Their transgressive intentions are borne out by trouble with the authorities and they have been under the pressure to censor out parts of the films, such as four scenes in Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (Thailand, 2006): the monk playing with the motor plane, the monk playing the guitar, the doctors drinking whiskey, and the young doctor getting an erection in the hospital; the controversial subject of polygamy from women's point of view in Dinata’s Love for Share (Indonesia, 2006); and the accusation by the authorities that Ming-Liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Malaysia/Taiwan, 2006) portrays Kuala Lumpur in a bad light.

These films have then become a means to re-engage with the self in the way that Ella Shoha describes as ‘post-Third-Worldist’, where she refers to cinematic practice, mostly in Africa and the Middle-East, that “conveys a movement 'beyond' a specific ideology--Third-Worldist nationalism” more than a decade ago.[3] In this sense, these films are similar to their Sixth Generation counterpart in China instead of the Fifth, as they are more concerned with their own internal problems. These films pose a significant question of what it means for the people today in Southeast Asia as the whirlwind of nationalism swept the region after the Asian financial crisis as well as the US-led intervention of Iraq and the current financial crisis. It is an attempt to investigate the discourse of nationalism from the viewpoint of the Other, whether sexually, racially, geographically, and so on, as well as an attempt to move beyond a critique of the colonialism experienced by many countries in the region. While these sets of films are in no way to be seen as a single entity, as indeed the region itself is not, with its diversity ranging from religion and politics to culture, they nevertheless point to the same desire to re-imagine what has been lost in the memory of the past and its absence in the physicality and visuality of the present time.



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Mekong Delta/Day

The stunning image of the flooded landscape of Ca-Mau, the last frontier at the Southern tip of Vietnam, where the lowland meets the sea. The camera follows the undercurrent with images of various life forms.

Voiceover:
“I have always lived in Ca Mau, with the dry and flooding seasons. From the time before independence, I only remember the flooding seasons. The water would cover the land, rotting everything: the grass and the houses, the buffaloes and the men.”

(The opening scene of Buffalo Boy, directed by Ming Nguyen-Vo)

We are taken into an unknown world by the images before us: the Mekong Delta, the land where water permeates all forms of life in Nguyen-Vo’s Buffalo Boy (2004); the deep tropical forest where monkeys talk and phantom tigers live in Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004); a series of hospital dreamscapes in Syndromes and a Century; an ever-foggy Kuala Lumpur in Ming-Liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone; or an operatic rural landscape of Indonesia in Gurin Nugroho Riyanto’s Opera Jawa (2006).

We are transposed to a different time and place, to a primitive desire where the boundaries between life and death, man and beast, real and imagined, past and present, present and future, and so on, are blurred. Though the elements of exoticism and primitivism are still in place, as I suggested above, for me these unknown worlds, coupled with the slow pacing and the still quality of the images, as well as other elements such as the repetitive sounds, are a step beyond an exoticised visuality and a move into what I call a ‘contemplative space’. It is a space that needs to be defined and escapes an easy explanation. It is a meaning that needs to move away from the discursive West-East binary. The process of finding such meaning will then reveal the complex exchange between the local and the Western, where these images aim to dazzle as well as the process of reinvestigating the self. As Chow suggests, ‘the production of images is the production not of things but of relations, not of one culture but of value between cultures’.[4] These spaces remind us of the limits of our understanding if we attempt to understand them from either point of view, the Asian self or the West.

In a way, this ‘contemplative space’ is similar to the one Weerasethakul invites us into, the unknown journey of the purely visual of non-knowledge, where we stare into the darkness in the middle of two parts of his film Tropical Malady.[5] It is a kind of void that inhabits the in-betweenness employed both structurally and thematically in Weerasethakul's films, from city to jungle, from past to present, from darkness to light, and so on, where we are forced to look into and fill in the gap of the in-between. It is a point of clash between primitive past and modernised future, colonial past and capitalist future, that we can see in one clear motion of the present, crystallised in the fume floating up towards the end of Syndromes and a Century.

Weerasethakul’s latest film, Syndromes and a Century, continues his two-part structure in the exploration of the memories of his parents’ love stories before they met. Without obvious narratives, the film builds around memories and emotions in two hospital settings, marked by temporal and geographical differences, one in the past and the other in the present, one in the countryside and the other in the big city of Bangkok. In the two parts of the film, played by the same characters as in Tropical Malady, the audience is encouraged to fill in the void and move beyond the seemingly binary structure. But instead of leading us to the unknown space by darkness, as in Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century leads us towards it by light, either the natural light in the first part or the artificial one in the second half, which brings about ‘visibility’ and a possibility of ‘knowledge’, as the Thai name Sang Sattawat or ‘light of the century’ suggests. Moreover, in the same way as Tropical Malady tests our limits of perception in relation to knowledge, the light of Syndromes and a Century also makes us question what is beyond our field of vision and knowledge.

While the first part of the film revolves around the hospital in the countryside, where the story is infused with a sense of the mythical and folktales, the second part focuses on the modernized hospital where the audience is introduced to the lingering image of the statue of His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla (the present King’s father), known as the "Father of Modern Medicine". For Michel Foucault, in his attempt to examine the state of modern power and power relations embedded in institutions, the hospital is no different to a prison, school, factory or similar institution, where behaviours are shaped and internalized by each individual through a set of norms and regulations.[6] Likewise, the hospital Weerasethakul portrays in the second part can be seen as an embodiment of Western modern knowledge that attempts to regulate and influence contemporary life. It is fitting that this film was commissioned by New Crowned Hope to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, an artist whose works have given light through his music from Europe and influenced the rest of the world, from one light of the century to the one in the present in Syndromes and a Century.

However, the hospital here is not presented as a proud legacy of Western enlightenment but is instead filled with images of a drunken doctor, a rather hellish basement, a dentist singing to his patient, a room full of disabled people with artificial legs, etc, coupled with mythical and supernatural tales in the first part. Weerasethakul has constructed a kind of space beyond the discursive practice of modern medicine, a void where the clash is taking place. These images are not simply a criticism of medical practice, as they are made out to be by the Thai censorship authorities, which include a member from the medical board, but is more or less a question he poses to our perception and knowledge of the hospital and its practice as a prime example of Western power/knowledge.

Weerasethakul does not settle for an easy interpretation but keeps us floating and dreaming of possibilities, like an ethereal soul on a journey from one life to another to find meanings. Towards the end of the film, the camera slowly follows the fume being sucked towards the dark tunnel of a pipeline, a kind of black hole in the hospital basement, resonant of the darkness of a total solar eclipse. It is a space where light is totally omitted. It is both the beginning and the end of all things. Nothing exists beyond this point. Weerasethakul comes close to leading us to nirvana, the ultimate aim of Buddhism, to reach the ineffable state of extinction from all desires and attachments.

The image of the Mekong Delta, described above, in one of the few films made by a Vietnamese director, Buffalo Boy, the last frontier between land and water, a place for the living and the dead, is a space that is a testament to the past, present and to the things to come in the future.[7] Through the age-old cycle of dry and flooding seasons, it has become a kind of anthropological site where every layer underneath is unearthed and reveals its history. The floodwater, according to Nguyen-Vo, is “a metaphor for the passing of real time in underwater decay, and of historical time in wars and colonization”. It is a source of both death and life. In Buffalo Boy, the forces of nature remind us once again of how they remain indifferent to human struggle, in the life of farmers, doctors and patients in two different places and times. There is a never-ending life cycle where one cannot find the point of beginning or ending, as in the last scene where the girl is told that she is holding her great-grandfather’s bones in her hand and the same voiceover, supposedly the father's voice, is attempting to explain: “Where should I start? With the dry season or the flooding season?” The dialogue between generations opens up and takes place in this last frontier. What was once lost is re-discovered and marked in the memories of those in the present.

In a country like Vietnam, with its history of colonization by the French, Japanese and Americans, the colonial past has just become a fleeting memory amidst the human struggle against the forces of nature and amongst themselves. The carcasses have piled up and gradually become part of the earth awaiting to be evacuated. They remain there as part of life, changing their form, eroding and decaying; nothing is permanent. It is like the soil in the Delta District which seems to be inscribed with a long-lost history, but as time goes by it becomes nothing more than fertile soil in which to grow vegetation for the life of different generations. In the post-Post-Third-Worldist cinema, it no longer makes sense to talk about Vietnam in colonial terms, nor to do so about India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and so on, where we tend to reduce the complexity of the representation, as I suggested earlier. It is also worth reminding ourselves of Chow’s suggestion to read the non-West in such a manner as to draw out its unconscious, irrational, and violent nuances, so that it can no longer simply be left in a blank, frozen and mythologised condition known perfunctorily as an “alternative” to the West.[8]



[1] Rey Chow, Primitive Passion: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 170-171.
[2] Zhang Yingjin, Ed. and introduction. China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 118.
[3] Ella Shohat, "Framing Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender and Nation in Middle Eastern/North African Film." Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 (1997) <http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/shohat.htm>.
[4] Rey Chow, Primitive Passion: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 60.
[5] For further discussion of Tropical Malady see Sopawan Boonnimitra’s PhD thesis’s Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd: Contemporary Urban Conditions with Special Reference to Thai Homosexuality.
[6] For further discussion see Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977).
[7] Although Minh Nguyen-Vo migrated to America in his early years, Buffalo Boy is still one of a few films to be directed and mostly worked on by a Vietnamese crew.
[8] Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. xxi.

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