Under the Banyan Tree - The Wizard of Oz, Singin' in the Rain

The National Museum Cinematheque continues its popular "Under The Banyan Tree" series of outdoor screenings:

Fri 25 April - The Wizard of Oz

Sat 26 April - Singin' in the Rain

It's free! Turn up early to get good seats on the lawn :)

SIFF 2008 -- Milky Way Liberation Front, Keronchong for Pak Bakar, After the Rain

Leaving the cinema after the end credits for Milky Way Liberation Front rolled, that was the end of SIFF 2008 for me. I was already tired when we sat down to watch that movie. It was a good way to end the festival. Milky Way Liberation Front was fun, a long string of gags that gently poke fun at indie filmmaking, film festivals and the people who participate in them.

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Like his first short Datura, Abdul Nizam's Keronchong for Pak Bakar is distinguished by impressionistic editing with strong narration and the use of vocabulary with religious undertones. There isn't a clear narrative or chronological momentum, but the mix of image and narration can be slightly hypnotic.

I agree with Tan Pin Pin's comments about the film: the work is concerned more with Abdul Nizam's relationship with Abu Bakar bin Ali than with the latter's past. In fact the documentary strongly suggests that the Abdul Nizam in the film is seeking a father figure identified with the golden age of Malay cinema. This search is expressed early in the movie as a search to know more about movie legend P Ramlee, through which Abdul Nizam discovers serendipitously that the man who lensed many of his movies lived just above him. At one point, Abdul Nizam expresses in regretful tones how he discovered too late that his hardworking father had loved film stars and movies. Throughout, Abdul Nizam is extremely respectful - even protective - towards Abu Bakar.

The material used in the documentary come from two major sources. The first is clearly the recorded footage from Abdul Nizam's conversations with Abu Bakar. The second is more mysterious -- footage of a train journey up Malaysia to Penang, ostensibly taken while location scouting for a feature film on P Ramlee's life (according to Abdul Nizam the project eventually fell through).

Empty spaces feature prominently here, partly illustrating Pak Bakar's current solitude. When I asked Abdul Nizam why he weaved in the silent, lonely sequences from his train journey, he indicated that it was partly to convince Abu Bakar to come out of his solitude more often, perhaps to work on film again.

That documentary left the audience with far more questions about Abu Bakar Ali than answers. Why did Abu Bakar stop working on films? Why does he mostly talk about technical matters -- for most of the documentary he is fiddling with an old Bolex handheld camera -- and nothing about himself?

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I'm still surprised that SIFF screened Royston Tan's latest short "film" After the Rain before Keronchong for Pak Bakar. Rose-tinted nostalgia and banal cliches (the father coughs to prefigure his eventual death) pliantly placed in the service of the government's ideological imperatives. This is an unabashed propaganda piece.

The SFS since 1958 -- A History

Jan Uhde and Yvonne Ng Uhde, authors of Latent Images: Film in Singapore, included a comprehensive history of the Singapore Film Society in their book (later CD-ROM).

They've generously consented to let us reproduce that section on our homepage.

However, records from the 1960s and 1970s suggest the Film Society might have been active even before 1958. A January 1961 Sunday Times article noted that the Singapore Film Society had been "in existence for six years." Similarly, in February 1971, film critic Koh wrote that the society "had been in existence for some 16 years." In the 19 March 1985 edition of The Singapore Monitor, Wong Sing Yeong claimed that "the Singapore Film Society was formed in 1956 to complement the commercial cinema by screening less popular art films."

Click here to read the complete extract.

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Latent Images is a key academic work on the history and development of Singapore cinema. I recommend the CD-ROM version, released 3 years after the book with some updates. It also contains video clips - interviews and footage of the former Shaw studios at Jalan Ampas.

If you're interested, you can get it online from the Asian Film Archive.

Where're our film critics?

NUS Assoc Prof Dr Kenneth Paul Tan has a new book on Singapore cinema (well, and TV too) out in mid-Mar 2008:

CINEMA AND TELEVISION IN SINGAPORE: Resistance in One Dimension
By Kenneth Paul Tan

Series: Social Sciences in Asia, 16
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 16643 1
ISSN: 1567-2794

Through close readings of contemporary made-in-Singapore films (by Jack Neo, Eric Khoo, and Royston Tan) and television programs (Singapore Idol, sitcoms, and dramas), this book explores the possibilities and limitations of resistance within an advanced
capitalist-industrial society whose authoritarian government skillfully negotiates the risks and opportunities of balancing its on-going nation-building project and its "global city" aspirations. This book adopts a framework inspired by Antonio Gramsci that identifies ideological struggles in art and popular culture, but maintains the importance of Herbert Marcuse's one-dimensional society analysis as theoretical limits to recognize the power of authoritarian capitalism to subsume works of art and popular culture even as they attempt consciously — even at times successfully — to negate and oppose dominant hegemonic formations.

I'm all for more academic writing about film, but it's clear that the films here are props for what's really a social science work.

So where's the writing that analyses the films in and of themselves, or with respect to other films? Is the odd article on Criticine enough?

Fab Feb Films!

SFS is showing 4 movies in February. In addition to our Core Screenings at GV Marina on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday:

SFS Talkies @ The Picturehouse returns this Saturday, 2 Feb, with Errol Morris's acclaimed 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line. (read more here) (earlier post)

(btw, Werner Herzog had promised Morris he would eat his shoe if Morris completed his first feature Gates of Heaven (1980). Morris did, and Herzog ate his shoe. Now that is integrity.)

On Tues 12 Feb, catch Juraj Herz's disturbing The Cremator (Spalovac mrtvol), the latest film in the World Cinema Series -- our collaboration with the National Museum Cinematheque.

(I'm especially looking forward to this one. Herz studied, worked and did military service with Jan Švankmajer.)

And if you're still hankering for more, the National Museum's presenting more good stuff in conjunction with its Greek Masterpieces exhibition:

Wed 27 Feb - Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (Orphée) (1950)

Thurs 28 Feb - Miklós Jancsó's Electra, My Love (Szerelmem, Elektra) (1974)

Fri 29 Feb - Theodoros Angelopoulos's Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kythira) (1984)

Sat 1 Mar - Don Chaffey's Jason and the Argonauts (1963) - Outdoor screening! Free!

"This Film Is Not Yet Rated"; Censorship Uncensored - 1 Feb 2008

Looks like Cathay has finally decided to put This Film Is Not Yet Rated on general release. They've had the print since 2006, when this documentary was first shown - once - as part of The Picturehouse's 1st Anniversary celebrations.

In what looks like a tie-in event, Cathay is organising "a panel of industry players" who will talk about their censorship experiences here. They're coy about the details though -- no word yet on who's actually going to speak.

Censorship Uncensored

FRIDAY 1st FEBRUARY at 7.30pm The Picturehouse Lounge
FREE & OPEN TO PUBLIC

Find out more about CENSORSHIP IN SINGAPORE for yourself! Curious about the whole film rating process? What are the steps a film must go through for a rating? What does an NC16 rating mean for a film? Join us at The Picturehouse Lounge for a open dialogue session with a panel of industry players who will breakdown the local ratings system and sharing some of their own experiences with the censorship process. Speakers include the Chairman of the Consultative Panel at MDA, a representative from a Major Film Distribution company and local independent film maker.

RSVP your place at thepicturehouse@cathay.com.sg to avoid disappointment. Subject line:RATED Explores.

Holy hexadecimal! - "Dystopia"

Singaporean directors tackleleth the 10 Commandments, and their fruits shalt be gathered into a feature film - Dystopia

Culturepush has an interview with Nicholas Chu, one of the prime movers behind Dystopia:

Dystopia is about a distant future, a very grim future that we are heading towards and in which people have forgotten about the very first moral imperatives known to men. This reflects on the current situation and the world that we are living in. And if we do not stop and reflect on our actions, we may just be moving to the world that is seen in dystopia.

The project came about when two other directors at apostrophe films and I started talking about the state of films made in Singapore. Most of the movies are either horror flicks or movies about heartlanders. We were kind of jaded that the audiences were interested in these two genres of movies and decided to expose them to something visually and content different.

After a year or so, we eventually decided to do something about it and roped in ten different directors for our Dystopia project; Jeevan Nathan, Mike Chew, Christina Choo, Boi Kwong, Randy Ang, Ric Aw, Bernard Tan, Lawrence Ong, Terence Teo, and myself.

Read the rest of the interview.

Two names ring a bell. Without resorting to the almightly Google -

- Ric Aw scooped first prize in the Professional Category in 2005's Panasonic-MDA Digital Film Fiesta with Buy Me Love.

- Randy Ang (together with Nicholas Chee) started Originasian Pictures, which made Becoming Royston and set up Sinema Old School.

The End for D&O Video

Film buffs on our little island are really spoilt for choice these days. Cathay and GV bring in non-Hollywood fare regularly now, the National Museum has monthly screenings, and what you can't find there, at SIFF or at SFS screenings, you can get via the Internet (legally or otherwise).

But once upon a time, all these weren't available. Film buffs had to rent VHS tapes (gee, remember those?) . And D&O Video at Tanglin Shopping Centre was the place for foreign films and hard-to-find cinema gems.

Sadly, D&O's closing its doors this weekend. According to Paul Rae on the ArtsComm mailing list:

As you may know, D+O is/was no ordinary video store. It's closing from Monday, so if you fancy getting your hands on some decent films and TV series v cheap - not to mention a small piece of Singapore video history (as you may know, the cut vids come with their own descriptions of the cuts, as specified and phrased by this proud Republic's fearless moral guardians), head for Tanglin Shopping Centre - 2nd or 3rd floor...I can't remember, today or tomorrow.

And for enquiries about bulk buys, contact Mr Odell (Jnr) on 92960766

Lucky 7 website up

The Singaporean anthology film Lucky 7 gets a website over at Wordpress. It's premiering at the Rotterdam Film Fest, and has been rated R21 without cuts and will be premiering at SIFF. Check their blog for more updates!

Singapore Int'l Film Fest 2008 website up

Just some basic info for now, but we're hoping this year's selection will be good. Head on over to http://www.filmfest.org.sg/

Love and Pride Festival: 25-27 Jan 2008

It's not the first GLBT film festival here (that honour goes to Short Circuit, founded by homegrown gay activist and sharp essayist Alex Au in 2006), but Golden Village's Love and Pride Film Festival is the first gay-and-lesbian-themed feature film festival in Singapore.

Yes yes, it's an attempt to make money off old film reels GV already probably owns, but this is Singapore, remember? GV's shown some gumption in programming this festival (even if the PR seems to be pretty low-key). At least, it's a chance to catch Lee Ang's Brokeback Mountain and Sundance darling Quinceanera again.