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 JACK NEO AS A PARADIGM OF THE CULTURAL MATERIALISM OF SINGAPOREAN FILMS STEPHEN TEO Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore steo@ntu.edu.sg The films of Jack Neo are usually considered lesser vehicles in the Singapore cinema because of their populist tendencies. Neo, however, is an iconic figure whose work exudes cultural materialism as an ideological process and abiding characteristic reflecting mainstream values in society. The paper proposes a historical‐contextual view of Neo’s films as representative of a trend of cultural materialism in Singapore cinema which one may trace to the era of P. Ramlee, Shaw Brothers, and Cathay. Cultural materialism may thus be identified as an aesthetic force marking the Singaporean cinema from its classical heyday in the 1960s to its renaissance in the 1990s and to its present development in the new century. Apart from Neo’s films, other Singaporean films in the contemporary era, such as Singapore Dreaming (2006) directed by Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen, and Gone Shopping (2007) directed by Wee Li Lin, exhibit classic formulations of cultural materialism. The paper will verify moments in Neo’s films to define more explicitly the values and constraints of cultural materialism and its impact on Singapore media and cinema. Stephen Teo is presently associate professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Before joining NTU, he was a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore from 2005‐2008. Teo is the author of Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), Wong Kar‐wai (BFI, 2005), King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (Hong Kong University Press, 2007), Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film (HKU Press, 2007), and The Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). His next book The Asian Cinema Experience will be published by Routledge.
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 DHOOM, RANGFAB, BOMBAY CAFÉ: BOLLYWOOD MEDIA ASSEMBLAGES IN SINGAPORE ANJALI GERA ROY Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, India agera_2005@yahoo.com Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in the Bollywoodization of Indian cinema, called attention to the emergence of an entire culture industry from ringtones to fashions centered on cinema at the turn of the twenty first century that came to signify Bollywood in the global imaginary.(2003) Following the formalist or interpretative analysis of newly discovered popular Hindi cinematic texts in the last two decades or so, film theory has turned to unpacking the uses and gratifications of ‘Bollywood’ extending beyond the cinematic. It focuses in particular on media assemblages that relocate the visual economy of the cinematic text to other visual texts and economies such as aural, tactile and even olfactory to reproduce sub‐continental ‘sensuous geographies’ through viewing and watching Bollywood films in multiple exhibition spaces. These studies reveal the pleasure of Bollywood cinema to be part of a complex desiring machine in which the meanings produced by the cinematic narrative function in a complex system of signification formed through the intersection of discursive with material practices. They engage with the practice of cinema going in India and in the Diasporas by locating them in a complex media assemblage through which the cinematic text acquires social centrality. For Singaporean populations, watching Indian movies is imbricated with a wide range of material practices – music, dance, art, fashions, food, advertising and so on through which complex meanings are produced. Viewing cinema as “a socially embedded set of practices”, this paper will examine multiple spaces produced by Indian cinema to demonstrate the social centrality of Indian cinema for Singapore’s diverse ethnicities. Anjali Gera Roy is Professor in the Department of Humanities of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. She has published essays in literary, film and cultural studies, translated short fiction from Hindi, authored a book on African fiction, edited an anthology on the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and co‐edited another on the Indo‐Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry. Her new publications include a co‐edited volume Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (Delhi: Pearson Longman 2008) on the Indian Partition of 1947 and a monograph Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond (Aldersgate: Ashgate 2010). She is now researching the transnational flows of Bollywood cinema and has recently co‐edited with Chua Beng Huat an anthology The Travels of Indian Cinema: From Bombay to LA(Delhi: OUP forthcoming).
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