Programme and Abstracts 4 Oct 2011 - WKWSCI Home - Nanyang ...

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Conference on Film and Cinema in Singapore (6‐7 October 2011) Jointly organised by Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore CONVERGENCE AND SLIPPAGE BETWEEN FILM AND HISTORY: REVIEWING INVISIBLE CITY, 17 YEARS AND SANDCASTLE LOH KAH SENG Independent Scholar, Singapore lkshis@gmail.com KENNETH PAUL TAN Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore spptank@nus.edu.sg Film‐maker Tan Pin Pin said in an interview that the social impact of film is overrated. While this might be true generally, films can also help shape public opinion and agenda. Tan’s Invisible City (2007), Martyn See’s 17 Years (2007) and Boo Junfeng’s Sandcastle (2010) are recent local films which are helping to define the landscape of Singapore public history. The films reflect as much the concerns of the present as the content of the past. In dwelling on the history of leftwing political activism after World War Two, the films highlight contemporary anxieties in several ways. One, the focus on the difficulty and fear of recalling and reconciling with contentious pasts, particularly detention without trial, indicates a selective reading of history; the films exclude a critical examination of the ideologies and historical contexts of the 1950s and 1960s, or the modernist impulses shared by other political actors, including opponents of the left. Two, the films might be viewed as a form of social advocacy through the use of oral history and memory, enabling the articulation of voices which hitherto had been submerged. Yet, in looking at political and student activists, the approach is elitist, running counter to the original spirit of oral history. Third, as memory shifts in response to new experiences, testimonies convey as much about new identities as historical events, blurring the lines between history, memory and biography. Nevertheless, despite these issues, the films’ roles in translating historical material to a public medium and helping the nation to reconcile to its ambivalent pasts is something historians should not ignore or dismiss out of hand. This paper will attempt to examine both slippage and convergence between history, as another way of representing the past, and film. Loh Kah Seng is an independent scholar whose work investigates little‐studied subjects in the social and cultural history of Singapore and Malaysia and explores linkages between past and present in public history, oral history, social memory, heritage, and archival access. He is author of two books, Making and Unmaking the Asylum: Leprosy and Modernity in Singapore and Malaysia (2009) and The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History (2010), in addition to numerous articles published in peer‐reviewed journals. He is currently working on book projects on the social and economic impact of the British military withdrawal from Singapore in the late 1960s and on interdisciplinary approaches to oral history and memory in Southeast Asia (edited). Kenneth Paul Tan is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He has written widely about Singapore, mainly on (1) governance (focusing on meritocracy and pragmatism), democracy, and civil society; (2) the creative city and culture industry (focusing on film, television, and theatre); and (3) race, gender, and sexuality. He has published in leading international journals such as Asian Studies Review, Critical Asian Studies, International Political Science Review, and PS: Political Science and Politics, and is the author of Renaissance Singapore Economy, Culture, and Politics (NUS Press, 2007) and Cinema and Television in Singapore: Resistance in One Dimension (Brill, 2008). He is also founding chair of the Asian Film Archive's board of directors.
Conference on Film and Cinema in Singapore (6‐7 October 2011) Jointly organised by Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore WRESTLING IN THE SHADOW OF AN ICON: TIME AND THE OTHERNESS OF MALAY FILMS IN SINGAPORE IVAN KWEK Independent Researcher, Singapore quack2@singnet.com.sg Writings on Singapore film had tended to present an evolutionary account of its history, which includes a so‐called Golden Era of Malay films, often with some reference to its most prominent personality, the late P. Ramlee, and how the industry eventually went into decline. The Malay films produced around this period (1950s and 1960s) have been studied, discussed, written about, and telecast on television umpteen times. The narratives concerning the rise, development and fall of Malay films in Singapore are certainly well‐rehearsed and sustained. This paper reconsiders these narratives in the light of anthropological understanding of the work of myths. By myths, I refer, not to its common usage as an untrue account, but as a social narrative that expresses prevailing ideals, ideologies, values, and beliefs. As far as myths go, it draws on archetypal figures (like P. Ramlee as a superhero) to offer exemplary models for social life. To be sure, it is not nostalgia as such that concerns me in the paper, but rather, how the (glorious) past has been reproduced and sustained as the other to the present. It raises questions regarding the place of Malay films in present day Singapore. Put another way, the paper asks the question: what is the time of Malay films in Singapore The question may seem awkward but it is calculated to underscore the possibility that its time may be other than the present. This is not merely a philosophical mind game for, as I hope to show, it raises issues concerned with the power to produce the otherness of Malay films in Singapore. Ivan Kwek has a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. At SOAS, he was trained in the anthropology of media as well as critical media and cultural studies. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a minority‐language television channel in Singapore. His work straddled questions of ethnicity, religion and statehood, transnational media and identifications, and television production practices. Currently, he works as both an independent researcher and a freelance documentary producer. As a researcher, Ivan is currently working on a project concerned with the commodification of culture and ethnicity; while as a producer, Ivan is now working on what he called a collaborative multi‐vocal documentary. He was previously a lecturer at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.
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