Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network

Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network Symposium: “Archives, Activism, Aesthetics” Maohui Deng (University of Manchester) ‘Wandering Across Time: Pasts and the Present in Singapore Cinema’ This presentation argues that the trope of wandering in films about dementia offers the potential for a nuanced articulation of issues surrounding memory in relation to cinema’s capacity to shape national narratives. Specifically, I will use Boo Junfeng’s 2015 short film Parting to explore the ways in which Singapore cinema uses the trope of the person living with dementia wandering to enter and traverse the nation’s discursive sphere of history and historiography. Focusing on the temporal collision/coalescence experienced by the person living with dementia, I first explore the ways in which wandering blurs the line between the past and the present in Parting, arguing that in traversing space, the person living with dementia is also traversing time. Then, I suggest that the case of people living with dementia wandering in Singapore cinema adopts a specific point of view that is emblematic of the nation’s wider issues of forgetting and remembering, which takes on a particular inflection that results in an architectural environment that has little or no history attached to it. Finally, I argue that the trope of wandering in Parting works to subtly reshape Singapore’s narrative of national vulnerability that is harnessed by the government to justify its authority. Biography MaoHui Deng is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, where he is researching into issues of time and dementia in cinema. He is also the Postgraduate Representative for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) and is a Board Member of the Insight Film Festival. Merv Espina (Green Papaya Arts Projects, Quezon City via Skype) and Uwe Schmelter (Goethe-Institut), ‘What if you are color-blind? Goethe-Institut and the Mowelfund film workshops in Manila, 1980s-1990s’ More halfway house than institute, Mowelfund became the home of an awkward gang of friends that turned into an alternative cinema movement, a petri dish that synthesized the DNA now found everywhere in Philippine film and experimental media practice. Mowelfund was far from parochial: it had a very German and international presence through frequent collaborations with the Goethe- Institut Manila under the direction of Uwe Schmelter. Amidst the backdrop of riots and revolutions, punk rock and politics, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EDSA Revolution preceding it, the Goethe-Institut and Mowelfund brought German film artists to Manila, with the likes of Christoph Janetzko, Birger Bustorff, and Harun Farocki, to conduct filmmaking workshops. A number of the films produced in these workshops were shown in the Berlinale’s Forum program in 1989 and subsequently held in the archive of the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art. Some of these prints are the only surviving copies of these works. The screening program and discussion succeeding it takes off from several films co-produced by the Goethe-Institut and focuses on co- influences, shared sensibilities, their sideways idiosyncrasies, and attempts to situate their legacy in Philippine contemporary art and film histories. Biography Merv Espina is an artist and researcher. He is also program director for artist-run interdisciplinary platform Green Papaya Art Projects, and cook-janitor for WSK, a media art kitchen and annual “festival of the recently possible”. He co-founded Philippine moving image screening and archiving initiative The Kalampag Tracking Agency (2014~), and the sonic arts platform Kamuning Public Radio (2016~). Recent co-curatorial work include SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2017), MISFITS: Pages from a loose-leaf modernity (2017), and VIVAEXCON – Capiz 2018, the 14th edition of the Philippines’ longest-running biennial art festival. He lives and plays in Metro Manila. Fang-Tze Hsu (University of Singapore) ’When Dead Labor Speaks with a Gendered Accent: Nguyễn Trinh Thi, John Torres, and Their Found Footage’ Cinema has often functioned as a critical point of entry for reflection on and critique of subject formation, including subject formation amid the colonialism, neocolonialism and nation-building regimes of the post-World War II period. However, to what extent may moving image media, including documentaries, feature films, experimental shorts, etc., also be understood to help enunciate historical realities beyond the grand narratives of dominance? Invoking aspects of Marx’s labor theory of value, the late film scholar Paul Willemen proposed that “image-discourses, and thus the technologies associated with them, provide a particularly propitious terrain for narrations venting the tensions associated with the dead labor issue.” This paper proposes that, in the context of Cold War Asia, one particularly effective way of drawing out such tensions is by focusing on the asynchronicity between a film’s sounds and images. Examples of “acousmatic listening” are drawn from Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Eleven Men (2016), John Torres’ People Power Bombshell: A Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016) and other of their works. In addition to their shared inquiries regarding the unsettled past and their resonating approaches of repurposing found footage, these works utilize non-diegetic sound elements, namely narration and voiceover. Based upon such dialectical tensions between the visible and the audible, I attempt to situate a gendered regime of representation by historicizing how during the post-war period the ‘c’ of cinema comes to stand for capitalism, colonialism, and cold war, and how the cinema constituted by this trinity has been suffused with patriarchal violence. In other words, instead of focusing on questions of what the contents of artists’ films are about, this presentation will shed light on why and how the artists produced these films – a preliminary inquiry establishing a firmer grounding from which to approach the question of meaning. Biography Fang-Tze Hsu is an independent researcher and curator. She holds an MA in curatorial studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme of the National University of Singapore. Her dissertation research, Cold War in the Acoustic Unconscious: Artist Films in Okinawa, Taiwan, and Philippines, has been supported by the President’s Graduate Fellowship and the FASS Promising Graduate Scholar Award. From 2010 to 2013, she served as the digital manager for the Asia Art Archive. She was appointed as a curator for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2013. In 2016, she co-curated Negative Horizon:5th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, 2016, and presented the curated research project, Working-Through: Vandy Rattana and His Ditched Footages, at the Cube Project Space, Taipei. Her other cross-disciplinary research projects include Singaporean artist Loo Zihan’s Artists' General Assembly: The Langenbach Archive (2013), FIELDS: An Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of Cambodia (2013) co-organized by the SA SA BASSAC (Cambodia) and the ST PAUL St Gallery (Aotearoa, New Zealand), and On Site: A Centennial Retrospective of Robert Capa at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her research interests include contemporary knowledge formation, Cold War aesthetics, memory, philosophies of technology, and the embodiment of artistic praxis in everyday life. Her writings can be found in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, ARTCO Magazine (Taiwan), and LEAP (China). Tito Imanda (Goldsmiths, University of London), ‘Building Grassroots Film Community with a Traditional Performance Art Group in Highland Java’ Building Grassroots Film Community with a Traditional Performance Art Group in Highland Java. This is a part of a thesis project exploring how collaboration between urban filmmakers and a Javanese traditional performance group shapes the latter’s adaptation to film. The project has practical and research goals. The practical part is to make a collaboration enables the traditional performers to explore a new medium for their arts and to express their cultural messages through film. Meanwhile, the research goal of this project is to record, to understand, and to make analysis of this process, hoping to lay a groundwork for further collaborations and researches in other contexts and with different communities. At the end, the thesis tries to answer the research question: “how does collaboration contribute and facilitate the group’s adaptation of its aesthetics and expression to film?” Biography Tito Imanda is an anthropologist and filmmaker. His master thesis from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication in New York University (2007), is about the political economy of the Indonesian film industry. In 2008-2013 he developed and managed a film school at a university in Jakarta. These days he is mostly in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, finishing fieldwork for his PhD program at the Department of Media and Communication, Goldsmiths, University of London, with thesis topic: collaborative filmmaking with a wayang orang group from the foot of Mount Merapi. He is also the Head of Research and development at the Indonesian Film Board. Ekky Imanjaya (University of East Anglia), 'Archive-led Research, New Film History, and Classic Indonesian Exploitation Cinema' For years, textual analysis or ontological approaches is a common thing among

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