Projections of An/Other Space: The Cities of Three Contemporary Southeast Asian Cinemas — The Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand PDF

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ART IN A BORDERLESS WORLD 175 PROJECTIONS OF AN/OTHER SPACE: THE CITIES OF THREE CONTEMPORARY SOUTHEAST ASIAN CINEMAS—THE PHILIPPINES, INDONESIA AND THAILAND Joseph T. Salazar The attempt of Third World countries to define their of local tastes. While this helped organize the industry national cinem...

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ART IN A BORDERLESS WORLD 175

PROJECTIONS OF AN/OTHER SPACE: THE CITIES OF THREE CONTEMPORARY SOUTHEAST ASIAN CINEMAS—THE PHILIPPINES, INDONESIA AND THAILAND Joseph T. Salazar

The attempt of Third World countries to define their national cinemas demonstrates the unconscious consequences of unifying international practices and the compromises made by different societies and cultures to accommodate the power implied by the infinite networks and systems in which they take place. Film’s reconstruction of urban space as the center of national affairs is one manifestation of the very function of accommodating power defined and determined at a global scale. Even if cinema is often regarded as a low form of mass entertainment in Southeast Asia, its practice as an economic, social and cultural device has always been at the heart of many countries in the region. State censorship and the freedom of expression, the success of a local film abroad, the imminent extinction of local filmmaking because of Hollywood, and other issues affecting filmmaking and its exhibition have all made their mark on the collective life of the region’s nations. Films in Southeast Asia have also codified the very structure of how audiences understand their realities. Locating Nations in Urban Spheres: Philippine and Indonesian Cinemas Central in this inquiry is the positioning of film within an agglomeration of social, economic, cultural and technological shifts influencing the region. Cinema first entered the consciousness of many nations in the region since the 1890s. Despite the fact that film is not indigenous to Southeast Asia, film has thrived and been appropriated widely in different countries through a massive effort on the part of local filmmakers to apposite the medium to reflect local concerns, and project visions and narratives that are significant to their respective local audiences. In the Philippines, these efforts resulted to the alteration of theatrical forms for the silverscreen, paving the way for the popular melodramas in contemporary Philippine cinema. Local films localized the cinematic medium, incorporating not only stories and contexts familiar to local audiences but also the manner in which films were to be manufactured and distributed. By the late 1970s and the early 80s, filmmaking in the Philippines has been transformed into a lucrative commercial enterprise with stringent formulas and conventions that demonstrated the mastery

of local tastes. While this helped organize the industry to target the widest possible markets for maximizing profit during that time, it became disadvantageous as many films relied on conventions that eventually dulled audience appreciation (Lumbera 1984). An influx of notable films arose in the same period, and challenged the industrial and economic functions attributed to the medium which many exploited as a source of revenue. Lino Brocka paved the way for the reconceptualization of cinema as a social and cultural apparatus, one which addressed the need to revaluate and reformulate the identity of the nation and the systems it perpetuates in an attempt to uphold that identity. It was in this period that Manila’s socio-political and economic spatial transformations were questioned. Once a parochial and idyllic setting, Manila is projected as an urban location besieged by the promise of a good life on one hand, and despair, poverty and exploitation on the other. Two major films emerging from that era—and still considered by many local critics to be the most significant in the country—are Lino Brocka’s Maynila, Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila, In the Claws of Neon, 1975) and Ishmael Bernal’s Manila By Night (1980). In these films, Manila is depicted not only as a setting but also as a symbol characterizing the conflicting ideals projected on the city. Adapted from the novel of the same title by Edgardo M. Reyes, the exploration of Brocka’s Manila happens through the eyes of the probinsyano Julio Madiaga who searches the city for his childhood sweetheart, Ligaya Paraiso. He works as a low-paid construction worker, and experiences the maltreatment of the city’s numerous systems. When Julio finally finds Ligaya trapped in Misericordia as a sex slave of a Chinese businessman, the city’s exploitative nature becomes clear to Julio. Refusing the trap of city life, he does all he can to take himself and Ligaya away from the nightmare that became their life in Manila. If Brocka’s Manila is a locality indifferent to the aspirations of its inhabitants, for Bernal it is a place of renewed dreams. By taking a look at the inhumanity breeding in Manila’s crevices, the film features a number of characters whose lives connect through their acceptance of the city. Working in Manila’s underworld, they are able to imagine their life apart

Are We Up to the Challenge?: Current Crises and the Asian Intellectual Community The Work of the 2005/2006 API Fellows

176 SESSION VI from the traditional and feudal dreams they once held. They endure the hardships and poverty of the city and reconfigure their lives to accommodate its uncanny and unbelievable living conditions. Not surprisingly, Manila in Philippine cinema from the last decade has been projected as a tense locality polarized between the rich and the poor. This dialectical relationship has been the persistent logic structuring the filmic representations of Manila. Cinema, as these two films prove, becomes a crucial apparatus in determining the social, economic and political positions of its subjects within the confines of the national agenda. These films have been crucial in providing a device for understanding and representing the different systems that affect the determination and location of identities within a vast array of urban networks. This implies that cinema’s value can be understood beyond, first, its function as an industrial enterprise that has paved the way for new means of accumulating wealth for its producers and shareholders. These two films provided an important synthetic narrative that foregrounds the various social, political and economic conditions that mediate in the experience of urbanization. Second, and more importantly, these two films underscore the fate of the city’s image in numerous films to come after it, signifying its role in determining the manner in which urban space is formulated, perceived and reconstructed. Like Philippine cinema, Indonesian cinema seems to suggest that the experience of its capital is not only determined by the place itself, it is also produced and manufactured in a number of ways by the different cultural tools and constructs that pertain to it. Since contemporary city spaces undergo processes of production, distribution and consumption, it is possible to also see them as constructs narrating ideological positions that influence the manner of how we understand and imagine its purpose and functions in connection to the entire nation. Boasting of a rich archive of films that project a multitude of ideals regarding its capital Jakarta, one can see in the history of Indonesian cinema an ongoing discourse regarding the capital’s transformation from an idyllic but promising setting into a modern dumpsite besieged by despair, poverty and exploitation. The 1955 film by Usmar Ismail Tamu Agung (Exalted Guest) is about the much-awaited visit of a dignitary from Jakarta to a small isolated village, Sukaslamet (‘Playing it Safe’) near a mountainous area in East Java. Here, Usmar Ismail examines modernization and the political control of the center with much skepticism. While the movie was set entirely in the remote village of Sukaslamet, the role of

the national center is put into question immediately at the early stages of Indonesia’s nation-building efforts. The village mistakes a quack doctor for their exalted guest. They welcome him with pomp festivities and reveal to him the hopes of a better life they expect the government to bring to them. The quack doctor could do nothing for the village, but in the course of finding out the truth, the villagers and its leaders discover that they themselves could provide much of the reform they needed from the capital city. Widely acclaimed as a brilliant political comedy, Tamu Agung’s satire is primarily directed at the increasing role of charismatic political leadership from the national center in the newly created Republic of Indonesia, which had gained independence only five years before the film was made. Like the problem posed by Tamu Agung regarding the presence of the capital and its role in the development of the communities located outside it, much of Indonesian cinema constantly reflects on how developments at the center of the nation are brought out to the peripheries. However, unlike the buoyant disposition shown in the 1950s film by the villagers of Sukaslamet towards their own initiatives and participation in the development of their own locality, many Indonesian films probe the capital itself and its contained systems, questioning in the process how one can be able to penetrate such a powerful and unchangeable center whose activities and preoccupations assume a central position in the nation’s affairs neglecting the concerns of various local identities and their respective cultural and religious heritage. The period from the 70s up to the early 90s saw the emergence of directors such as Teguh Karya, Ami Priyono, Wim Umboh, Sjuman Jaya, Garin Nugroho and Arifin C. Noer. These directors tackled pressing issues that besieged Jakarta’s divisiveness. Indonesian cinema prior to 1998 articulates these divisions through the deployment of narratives concretizing the makebelieve boundaries of the city’s segregation. Different narratives and images projecting specific features of urban space ritualize the very presence of categories such as gender, race, age, religion, social and economic classes, all of which provide the means of enabling and containing cultures and identities situated in the city. These images of Jakarta in popular cinema reinforce the concept of the national capital as a threatening locale as it solidifies into a setting populated by individuals with no coherent and singular concept on which to ground their collective identity. Jakarta crystallizes in film as an impenetrable city, bearing no shared national experience for its inhabitants to infiltrate and appropriate its many systems for their own use. Interestingly enough, many of the concerns projected by cinema after

Are We Up to the Challenge?: Current Crises and the Asian Intellectual Community The Work of the 2005/2006 API Fellows

ART IN A BORDERLESS WORLD 177

1998 have mutated into forms that suggest Jakarta’s transformation into a fiercely competitive and highly commodified setting, multiplying the struggles that its citizens need to confront in order to gain control. While many critics I have spoken to contend that many of the films produced after 1998 seem to have no social relevance, I see these films as products indicating the manner in which power and control is manufactured in contemporary Indonesia. If the last three decades problematized segregation because of differences in culture, gender and class, films after 1998 expose the fact that such segregation has only muddled up the social avenues to facilitate the mobility of its citizenry. Instead of finding different identities a place within the city’s confines, the control of much of the lifestyles and systems occupying the city has been transferred to the newly constituted yet notably voiceless and still powerless middle class. The City as Global Locus: The Case of Thai Cinema If the Philippines and Indonesia have managed to reconstruct the functions of their respective cinemas by looking at them as agents capable of producing and manufacturing concepts of space pertinent to the mobilization of modern states, Thailand’s cinema is still regarded as a medium or artistic form detached from the travails of everyday life. Often regarded as escapist fanfare that is not taken seriously even today, the historic development, collective sensibility and critical appreciation of Thai Cinema reflect this meager status assigned to it and its supposed lack of importance on the socio-cultural affairs of the nation. This detachment needs to be understood in relation to the gruesome events that the Thai media is still recovering from. Thai cinema, like the Philippines and Indonesia, did take its first steps in realigning the functions and concerns of their filmmaking practices. With the escalating social and political turmoil in the 1970s, Thai cinema became respondent to calls for radical change and development. Local productions became more critical of the social and political conditions surrounding the nation’s affairs. The 14 October 1973 uprising following the release of Khao Chue Karn was a significant turning point not just for Thai history but also for the country’s filmmaking and film viewing practices as well. For one, local viewers became interested in films that made comments on the turmoil and unrest characterizing the period, and many film companies registered increased profits from this kind of audience demand. However the involvement of the film industry seemed to extend beyond finding a marketable formula. For the first time in its history, the

film industry mobilized itself for different causes such as the raising of funds for the National Student Centre of Thailand. By then, Thai cinema had realized its impact on political issues surrounding the country’s collective affairs as many of its workers strove to use the medium to influence the public imagination. Media freedom during this period was short-lived as tensions between left- and right-wing forces escalated. On 5 October 1976, newspapers published a photograph of Thammasat University students reenacting the hanging and killing of two student protesters the month before. The photograph depicted one of the students impersonating the King’s son Prince Vajiralongkorn. This culminated in a bloody brawl between police and student protesters in Thammasat University where at least a hundred students protesting were killed, and at least a thousand arrested. The military took control and the National Administrative Reform Council (NARC) was established, signaling a dramatic and ironic turn in Thailand’s venture into democracy. These events put an intermittent stop to the media’s progressive stance in examining the affairs of the state. Thai cinema would never be the same again. The following years saw the industry negotiating between what once was seen as an open society and the painful consequences of challenging those holding power. Thailand has also begun to open itself economically at this time. The active promotion of foreign investment in the 1970s helped create an industrial sector with practices and lifestyles that seemed to be in discord with prevailing traditional norms. By the 1980s an export-oriented manufacturing sector, based on laborintensive output such as textiles and garments, began to develop. As the economic and political transactions became more and more concentrated in the nation’s developing capital, a number of films zeroed-in on the lives of the numerous laborers migrating towards these industries, documenting the activities available to them and how this new environment and the practices they espouse affected the nation’s progress. Security guards, factory workers, prostitutes, taxi drivers and blue-collar workers became the subjects of many of these films, and their lives demonstrated the skepticism to the steps the nation have made towards achieving progress. While these films continued to actively explore the socio-political changes affecting the nation, many of them were caught up with the woes of challenging the boundaries of free speech. The events in Thammasat impressed upon many filmmakers that they could not question the systems governing their collective affairs for fear of another tragedy. The uncertainty

Are We Up to the Challenge?: Current Crises and the Asian Intellectual Community The Work of the 2005/2006 API Fellows

178 SESSION VI and apprehension brought about by the Thammasat tragedy became such a formidable force that the local industry became cautious in engaging issues that could be perceived hostile to the state. With harsh censorship laws that remain unchanged since 1930, filmmakers have taken the initiative to censor themselves in matters deemed too sensitive in the nation’s affairs. Even after the government curbed the entry of foreign imports by taxing them heavily in 1977 to give way for the local industry to produce more films, the products were of a questionable quality. Socio-political issues were so volatile at this point in Thai film history that it became easier during this period to get away with sex and violence onscreen rather than talk about more pressing topics that needed public attention. Sex flicks became rampant and somehow gave Thai cinema momentary profits. This development could easily be frowned upon from a moral standpoint. In some way however, this was also one means for the local industry to continue liberalizing itself. Through films depicting sex and violence, freedom of expression was cultivated, although a bit inadequate. Filmmakers made features on lifestyles, identities and cultures commonly relegated to the fringes of society. Themes involving homosexuality, bisexuality and the objectification of women came to the fore. Vichit Kounavudhi’s First Wife questioned the prevalent practice of men taking mistresses. However, no matter how much these films championed the need to allow free ideas to surface, the productions they made did not completely bring into focus the issues that their subject matter was supposed to advocate. Instead, many of these films only managed to trivialize them in their attempts to maximize profits. Until today, the 1976 Thammasat tragedy is still affecting Thai cinema. Films continue to be regarded as brainless entertainment and no serious study has been made to explain its connections to local customs and culture. Not many filmmakers strive to transform the medium into something more than an escapist fanfare prioritizing public consumption. Comedy and horror appear as the dominant genres, poking fun and fright even at subject matters of a sensitive nature for fear of provoking negative attention from the censors.

stake nor impact in the nation’s affairs. This comes as an ironic development given the relative commercial success Thai cinema has enjoyed in the last few years. It has been at the forefront of Southeast Asia in finding an international audience. The cult success of the action flick Ong Bak, the multi-million dollar budget of the historical epic The Legend of Suriyothai and the winning of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady of the Jury prize in the 2004 Cannes Film Festival is unparalleled in the region. Thailand is also producing the greatest number of film features in Southeast Asia, surpassing that of the Philippines, whose output has declined in recent years. Similarly, the 1997 financial crisis has proven the mettle of the local film industry. While many other businesses collapsed, Thai cinema remained afloat and even managed to register growing profits at a time when, theoretically, locals were believed to be unwilling to spend on movies.

It is in this context that the urbanization and development of Bangkok is brought into focus. Compared to the filmic representations of Manila and Jakarta that strive to characterize urban space and the manner in which it controls the identities of the subjects contained by it, Bangkok in Thai cinema remains an empty void: a token space whose features are shapeless. Its citizens remain f...