The Filipino Film Industry 23 NICANOR G
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EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL VOLUME 6· NUMBER 2 SPECIAL ISSUE ON SOUTHEAST ASIAN CINEMA Cinema, Nation, and Culture in Southeast Asia: Enframing a Relationship I WIMAL DISSANAYAKE The Filipino Film Industry 23 NICANOR G. TIONGSON The Rise and Fall of the Film Industry in Thailand, 1897-1992 BOONRAK BOONYAKETMALA The Rise of the Indonesian Film Industry 99 SALIM SAID Asia and the Global Film Industry II6 ELIZABETH B. BUCK Book Reviews 134 JULY 1992 The East-West Center is a public, nonprofit educational institution with an international board of governors. Some 2,000 research fellows, grad uate students, and professionals in business and government each year work with the Center's international staff in cooperative study, training, and research. They examine major issues related to population, resources and development, the environment, culture, and communication in Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center was established in 1960 by the United States Congress, which provides principal funding. Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific governments, as well as private agencies and corporations. Cinema, Nation, and Culture in Southeast Asia: Enframing a Relationship WIMAL DISSANAYAKE THIS PAPER consists of four interrelated parts. In the first, I wish to dis cuss the implications of cinema as a specific cultural practice. The second part is devoted to an examination of the notion of culture as it impinges on cinematic practice. The third part seeks to examine the centrality of the notion of ideology as it relates to cinema as a signifying practice, while the fourth is devoted to brief analysis of some films produced in ASEAN in the light of the earlier discussions. The overall aim of the paper is to underline a central problematic confronting ASEAN film scholars as they search for ways and means of enriching the cinemas of their respective countries as a textual practice intimately involved with questions of cultural construc tion and national identity. Films are generally examined as works of art or instances of mass enter tainment or products of industry or exemplification of technological inno vation with inadequate attention to the fact that they are cultural practices in which the artistic, entertainment, industrial, technological, economic, and political dimensions are inextricably linked. As a consequence of our failure to recognize the importance of this fact and the tendency to discuss cinema as art or entertainment or industrial product without seeking to examine the interlinkages, we have, by and large, been unsuccessful in assessing their true import. As a result of the spread of modern cultural studies programs, it is grad ually dawning on more and more film scholars that films need to be seen as significant social products; hence, the complex ways in which social meanings are engendered through films have been thrust to the fore of dis cussion. Films have become one of the most important and popular media I 2 WIMAL DISSAN A Y AKE of entertainment in the modern world, and hence we need to map out the ways in which they have become a means of pleasure and significance to so many people in our cultures. This means that we need to pay more and more attention to questions of film as a cultural practice and the complex interrelationship between art and entertainment, industry and audience, narrative and culture, form and ideology, image and its consumption, dis course and power. Film can most usefully be understood as a specific signifying practice. Let us consider the three words contained in this phrase a little more carefully. Signifying suggests the acceptance of film as constituting a system of mean ing in a nexus of articulations. The word practice calls attention to the mode of these articulations; taking the film to be a site of the production of meaning, it brings into focus such vitally important questions as the posi tioning of the subject and the play of author and reader the film constitutes. The word specifically underlines the need to see films in relation to the par ticularities and distinctiveness of its enterprise, and how it differs from other comparable signifying practices. The word specific in this context draws attention to the semiotics of filmmaking focusing on the codes and systems in operation as well as on questions of writing, image, sound, music, and so forth. As Heath points out, "specificity" is thus, both those codes particular to cinema (codes of articulation, of dialogue and image, codes of scale of shot, certain codes of narrative organization etc.), . and the heterogeneity in its particular effects, its particular inscription of subject and meaning and ideology. Directed in this way, the study of film is neither "contents" nor "forms," but breaking the deadlock of that operation, of the process of film and the relations of subjectivity in that process. (Heath 1981 ) As he goes on to point out, such a direction posits a basic interaction among three domains: the condition of film production and distribution, the individual film, and the general apparatuses of cinema; so we have the industry, the text, and the apparatuses. This interrelationship among the three domains need to be understood if we are to attain a true grasp of film as a signifying practice (Heath I98I). Film being complex systems of signification, our analytical focus should be directed toward such intrinsic components as camera, lighting, sound, music, scene, and editing as well as extrinsic elements like the nature of the industry and the wider cultural practices of which cinema is a significant part. CINEMA, NATION, AND CULTURE 3 Films are cultural events; but they are not autonomous in that their meaning and significances are derived in large measure from the cultural matrix in which they operate, as well as their relationship to other films. The term "intertextually" commonly used by literary critics and cultural analysts denotes this significant relationship between a given film and the copies of other films that have been produced before, in terms of meaning. As Janet Staiger observes, intertextuality is not simply a moment in a text or some relation between two texts but rather a central and continuing reflectational activity (Staiger 1989, 399). It involves the remote determi nations of processing a filmic narrative by repeatedly referring to other texts. It can best be comprehended as an ongoing circulation of textuality. It is important to bear in mind the fact that in film analysis cinema is never merely the display of an object or the transmission of a message; it always has to be seen as the contested terrain of meaning where complex relationships between people and classes operate. As David E. James points out, the photochemical processes involved in projecting a film on the screen and its reception by our senses constitute a far wider process than appears on the surface. Each exists only as a moment in a wider cir culation; the psychic and material economies are pivotal to the social sys tems that are responsible for the production of the film (James 1989). Cin ema, according to this line of thinking, can be understood as a social relation among people mediated by images. What is interesting about film is that its sounds and images reflect both the way in which it was produced and the reason for its production. The dynamics of cultural production are as complex as those of mate rial production. At one level we can see cultural production related to cin ema as the conjunction of the raw materials that go into making films and the human effort required to transform these raw materials into works of willed art and entertainment and the manifold relationships that are involved in this process. As one produces a film under the existing indus trial system, one is also producing a whole web of social relations around that saleable commodity. Christian Metz characterized the configurations of materials and social processes that go to produce the film text as cin ema. When seen in this light, we can assert that cinema is a process of social production that situates men and women in specific positionalities in relation to film industries, social relationships, and cultural discourses. In the modern world, in most countries, film constitutes a part of the larger entertainment industry. In the commercial cinema, film came to be 4 WIMAL DISSANAYAKE perceived as yet another commodity in which the social relationships of its production are reflective of the capitalist economy in general. In commer cial cinema, cultural production and commodity production are inte grated, and two overlapping domains of activity playa critical role here. They are the ideological and the material. Commercial cinema generates in the audiences the wants (what Marcuse would see as false needs), the fears, the anxieties by which they are situated in the capitalist society. The forms of mass entertainment are cultural products in both the ideological and material senses. The material production process is complete only when the viewer buys the ticket at the counter. As with all other commodi ties in the market, in film too, the consumer is all important. As we stated earlier, the commercial cinema constitutes the mediating agency of diverse relationships among industrial entrepreneurs, finan ciers, directors, actors, writers, technicians, theater owners, distributors, publicists, critics, scholars, and a vast array of audiences. What is interest ing to observe, however, is that often this complex process of mediation is ignored or downplayed and filmic communication is conceived of as a simple art of communication between director and actor on the one side and the viewers on the other. It is very important, therefore, to recognize that it is this nexus of social relationships taken in their entirety and full complexity that constitutes commercial cinema; any effort at a deeper understanding of cinema must come to terms with the full force of that fact.