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Royston Tan's Films: Local Notoriety /
International Acclaim
by Dr Kenneth Paul Tan
[spptank@nus.edu.sg]
Chair, Asian Film Archive
& Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore
(adapted excerpts from forthcoming book Resistance in a
One-Dimensional Society: Film and Television in Singapore)
In 2004, barely even a decade into his career as a filmmaker,
Royston Tan was named one of Time Magazine’s 20 Asian heroes
under the age of 40. The magazine celebrated him as an
“iconoclast.”1 In fact, the foreign media often try to fashion
him as a rebel and an artistic freedom-fighter of sorts.
Singaporean filmmaker Eric Khoo regards him as a “hero to the
city’s independent artists.”2 And Tan, also, has positioned
himself as martyr for the cause of artistic freedom, vividly
describing his brush with the Singapore censors in terms of
being “stabbed really badly”3 and having “my child [the heavily
censored feature film 15 (2003)]… disfigured.”4 He has said that
he feels “like an outcast,”5 “constantly living with… rejection
from people.”6 As an artist described as having a “strong social
conscience,”7 he has made films that try to give a voice to the
marginalized in society,8 films as diverse as 15, 48 on AIDS
(2002), Careless Whisperer (2005), and even the
state-commissioned The Old Man and the River (2003).
Tan has said, “when I don’t like something, I will criticize it
in my films.”9 He has asserted defiantly that he makes films
without worrying about what the government wants – “I just do
it… the more you don’t want me to do it, the more I will do it
to show it to you.”10 Indeed, a government minister has gone on
record to criticize one of Tan’s short films for attempting to
“undermine the standing of a public institution,”11 to wit the
Board of Film Censors lampooned in his short film Cut (2004).
Tan believes that he has been “blacklisted” by the authorities,
watched closely by the film censors, and shunned by funding
agencies in Singapore. 12
Tan, who “thinks in pictures, not words,”13 has an intuitive eye
for visual beauty, an innate sensitivity to music, a cheeky and
flamboyant sense of humor, and most of all a talent for putting
together films that are simple yet challenging on so many
levels. But he has also acknowledged how playing the rebel in
straight-laced Singapore has contributed to his meteoric
success, half-joking that he “owe[s] the minister a favor… ever
since he mentioned my name, there’s been calls.”14 Interestingly,
an interviewer observed that Tan “relish[es] putting up a
sideshow as the unwitting, anti-establishment hero.”15 The
international media and many within the local arts community
have also derived much gratification from the mythology that has
grown around Tan, the “slow learner” and “late bloomer” who rose
from humble beginnings to become a critically acclaimed
filmmaker,16 and the rebel whose films win prestigious awards
overseas but are vandalized in his own smugly conservative and
censorious Singapore, a country whose contradictory aspirations
to become a “renaissance city” with a thriving creative industry
have made it an international laughingstock.17 Renaissance
Singapore, eager to invest in a climate of creativity and to
attract tourists, investors, and members of the global creative
class, has undoubtedly seen a significant increase in state
funding for the arts. 18
Tan’s mission, it would seem from the selection in this Asian
Film Archive Collection DVD Royston’s Shorts, is to preserve
through art those places in Singapore that have deep meaning for
him. As Singapore transforms into a global city clone,
indiscriminate urbanization threatens to demolish these places
and replace them with contextless buildings that lack character
and historical depth. Hock Hiap Leong (2001) in particular and,
to a lesser degree, The Blind Trilogy (2004) seem to convey this
sentiment. This sense of loss in a de-spiritualized and overly
materialistic world extends also to the mainly expressive and
communicative difficulties that people face in negotiating their
human relationships, particularly within the family. Estranged
relationships and a deep longing for an almost impossible
reconciliation are themes that are especially prominent in Sons
(2000), Mother (2002), Monkeylove (2005), and Jesses (2000).
But Tan is probably best known for 15, a notably jarring feature
film (originally a short film) that digs beneath the veneer of
an orderly Confucian society of high achievers to reveal a
rarely acknowledged underclass of violent youth gang members
whose lifestyle of aimlessness, brutality, obscenity, drugs,
tattoos, and body piercing does not fit the officially favored
image of polite society steeped in “Asian values.” By forcing
audiences to confront the hidden realities of their comfortable
existence, Tan negates the smug, affirmative, and conformist
society that he finds himself in. Tan’s international success as
a Singaporean filmmaker has depended, and to a degree will
probably continue to depend, on his ability to make films that
are resistant to Singapore’s glossy image as a safe and clean,
blandly modern and superficially cosmopolitan global city, where
the authentically local must either mimic or give way to the
international (a theme explored in New York Girl [2005]), or it
must be repackaged into a happy caricature of calm and
contentment that is in line with nation building and its
underlying politics of national identity and values.
Tan is also well-known for his short film Cut, a cheekily
satirical and unrestrainedly campy musical short film that he
made in response to the excessive censorship that 15 suffered at
the hands of Singapore’s censorship board. Both films, and the
stuffy reaction of Singapore’s bureaucratic authorities, have
endowed Tan with a notoriety by which his career has probably
profited, as he continues to receive international attention as
an anti-establishment hero and, more importantly, the critical
acclaim that continues to open up new opportunities for his
filmmaking. Admitting that he devotes a large part of every year
to commercial work (becoming a “prostitute to earn a living”
19),
Tan is utterly grateful for his large circle of friends who,
every year, set aside some money to help support his filmmaking
efforts.20 The success of his films have also had to depend in
many ways on their ability to benefit from the administrative
and economic establishments that make possible the kind of
national arts funding and commercial arts market needed to
sustain a local filmmaking industry. Similarly, for the
proposals vividly outlined in the Renaissance City Report of
2000 to come to any kind of fruition and in that way help to
move the Singapore economy forward, the capitalist state will
need talented people like Tan whose local notoriety transforms
into international acclaim.
To a considerable degree, Tan’s relationship with the
Singaporean authorities is both antagonistic as well as
interdependent.
NOTES
1 Anthony Spaeth, “20 Under 40: The Bold and the Young,” Time Asia 164:15
(October 11, 2004).
2
Eric Khoo, “Royston Tan,” Time Asia 164:15 (October 11, 2004).
3
Terry Ong and Charlie Young, “Filth and the Furore,” South China
Morning Post (July 6, 2004), 5.
4
Jake Lloyd-Smith, “Singapore Filmmaker Takes Cut at Censors,”
Houston Chronicle (July 24, 2004).
5
Bryan Walsh, “Street Survivors,” Time Asia 162:8 (September 1,
2003).
6
Royston Tan, Interviewed by Kenneth Paul Tan (Singapore, March
29, 2005).
7
“Bravado Hero,” The New Paper (October 18, 2004).
8
Eric Khoo, “Royston Tan,” Time Asia 164:15 (October 11, 2004).
9
Royston Tan, Interviewed by Kenneth Paul Tan (Singapore, March
29, 2005).
10
Royston Tan, “Boys’ Own” (interviewed by Ben Slater), BigO
(August 2002).
11
Steve Rose, “Bunny Peculiar,” The Guardian (November 24, 2004).
12
Terry Ong and Charlie Young, “Filth and the Furore,” South China
Morning Post (July 6, 2004), 5; Royston Tan, “’Skew Me, You
Rebel Also Meh? X’Ho Meets Royston Tan: An Interview,” Program
booklet of 0104: A Showcase of Royston Tan’s Short Films
(Singapore, March 26-27, 2005).
13
Tan Dawn Wei, “Making a Scene,” The Straits Times (April 24,
2006), 4.
14
Jake Lloyd-Smith, “Singapore Filmmaker Takes Cut at Censors,”
Houston Chronicle (July 24, 2004).
15
Tan Dawn Wei, “Making a Scene,” The Straits Times (April 24,
2006), 4.
16
“Wowing Audience with His Films,” Temasek Polytechnic website
(2004), http://www.tp.edu.sg/tp4u/beyond/car_roy.htm, (accessed:
May 30, 2006).
17
Neil Humphreys, “Size Really Does Matter!” Today (September 6,
2003).
18
Ministry of Information and the Arts, Renaissance City Report:
Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (Singapore, 2000).
19
Royston Tan, “’Skew Me, You Rebel Also Meh? X’Ho Meets Royston
Tan: An Interview,” Program booklet of 0104: A Showcase of
Royston Tan’s Short Films (Singapore, March 26-27, 2005).
20
Royston Tan, Interviewed by Kenneth Paul Tan (Singapore, March
29, 2005).
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