Nomadic trajectories: mapping short film production in Singapore 1

Abstract

The short film form in Southeast Asia is a potent form of cultural production and one that contributes compellingly to the development and continued growth of the region’s moving image culture. This essay provides a preliminary theoretical framework within which to map the intricacies of the short film within Southeast Asia and offers a case study of short film production in Singapore. The essay grapples with the polymorphous and itinerant qualities of the production, distribution, and/or exhibition of short films through the concepts of modes of production, object, text, and/or trace. It identifies and examines two key traces in contemporary Singapore film production: merantau and motley urbanisms.     

Postcolonial film historiography in Taiwan and South Korea: The Puppetmaster and Chihwaseon

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the ways in which postcolonial historiography is inscribed in cinema. Two representative films of Taiwan and South Korea, The Puppetmaster by Hou Hsiao‐Hsien ¹ 1. Names in Chinese, Korean and Japanese are written in the order of family name followed by given name. For example, Hou Hsiao‐Hsien, Im Kwontaek. and Chihwaseon by Im Kwontaek are compared, not only to understand the working of de‐colonization in the cinematic apparatus but also to understand the impact, effects of colonial history. The notion of postcolonial filmmaking as an alternative construction of the archive is evoked to locate film practice in the intersecting spaces of repository, historiography, cinematic representation and social memory. Hence, these two films are cited as instances of illuminating retrospection on fractured pasts, the almost‐invisible archive and the future cinematically envisioned by suggesting a sustainable postcolonial episteme in the age of global spectatorship.     

Autonomy and subordination in Thai history: the case for semicolonial analysis 1

ABSTRACT

Methods of postcolonial analysis can make a major contribution to refining understandings of modern Thai history and culture. However, the fact that Thailand was not colonised has incited a widespread resistance to postcolonial studies in the field. Conservative Thai studies scholarship dismisses the very possibility of postcolonial analysis of ‘never‐colonised’ Thailand. Even critical scholars who highlight similarities between Thailand and its once‐colonised Southeast Asian neighbours doubt that methods based on deconstructing the coloniser/colonised relation capture the specificity of a society whose history places it outside the strict contours of that binary. This study responds to both the conservative and critical objections to postcolonial analyses of Thailand by revisiting the originally Marxist notion of Thailand as a semicolony of Western empire. It is argued that a post‐Marxist reading of Thai semicolonialism can challenge conservative resistance to comparing Thailand to former colonies and also provide a basis for critical dialogue with postcolonial studies. While the Marxist frameworks that gave birth to the notion of semicolonialism lost influence after the end of the Cold War, the term is still widely used in critical Thai studies, although now in a theoretically impoverished form. The aim of this study is to reinvigorate semicolonialism with renewed theoretical force by investigating why the notion has outlived its Marxist origins and specifying the critical work that it continues to do, albeit implicitly, in post‐Marxist Thai studies. Such an understanding can provide a basis for a more comprehensive account of imperialism that incorporates the experiences of the empirically significant but still theoretically neglected category of non‐Western non‐colonies such as Thailand.