It was April 2002. The Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) was raging on
like a small war against mediocrity. Fresh from England, feeling self-conscious
in sandals, I managed to secure a press pass, and attended jury screenings at the
SIFF (after each session, everyone would pile into a people-mover vehicle to head
for the obligatory nasi padang – Malay food – at the Rendez-Vous Hotel, whose manager
is a film fan who supports the festival every year with this culinary kindness.
Philip Cheah, the festival director, would offer me a place in the van, but I would
decline. Not totally out of shyness, but I was busy, rehearsing a play in Little
India, and couldn’t dally with cinephiles, much as I wanted to).
One morning, we were at the Alliance Francaise for the local shorts competition
screening. What were my expectations? Not high, I suppose. Cheah had told me that
in previous years, juries had been so underwhelmed by the quality of the films that
they refused to give out all the prizes. My only previous experience of short films
from Singapore had been a fairly disastrous screening of student work at the Substation
(a local arts centre); the documentaries were passable tertiary fare, but any attempt
at fiction clunked hard.
The Alliance was a fairly large hall, with a few hundred seats. The jury sat on
the back row. I was at the aisle, ready to leave in case of emergencies. Lights
faded. The film began, and it was real film – celluloid. For twenty-plus minutes,
I sat rapt. When it was over I was filled with the desire to watch it again, immediately.
There was that feeling when you hear a great pop record as a teenager, something
that swoons with all the complex emotions – dark energies and romantic yearnings
– of that moment when you stumble out of childhood. If it gets its sonic hooks in,
you have to own it, to be able to play it again and again.
Royston Tan’s 15 left me with something close to that. The adolescent world it presented
was utterly alien to my own--Southeast Asia, race, gangs, crime, brotherhood, bad
education. I was completely seduced by the image-rush, and the strong emotional
track that pulled the viewer through. At the time, I wrote for the UK film magazine,
Vertigo (to justify that much-coveted press pass), and the following contains something
about 15:
“At its core is a portrait of two fifteen-year old boys – fighters, thieves and
pill-poppers, but essentially they are kids. Tan portrays them as they see themselves
– locked in a speed-cut zone of ceaseless techno and advertising imagery. Tracking
shots through a nervous system; tattooed and naked in a desert; darkly comic threats
to rival gangs sung blankly into camera; fighting incidents rendered as videogame;
a birthday cake in the face explodes like a wound; charged dialogues in the crevices
of void decks. Deep in their locked-off world, which exists as the taboo bad-trip
flipside to Singapore’s consumer-driven society, Tan opens up a well of extraordinary
tenderness, friendship and vulnerability.”
Along with 15, the others on the competition shortlist of short films included Wee
Li-Lin’s Holiday, Han Yew Kwang’s The Call Home, Sun Koh’s My Secret Heaven, Leonard
Yip’s Eve Of Adha, and special mention should go to Los Angeles exile Sandi Tan’s
coolly satirical Gourmet Baby, which was shown ‘out of competition’. It was a bumper
crop, although I probably didn’t realise it at the time. 15 came from nowhere. It
was so--and I don’t use this word lightly--perfect as a short film that the others
were left for dust. I didn’t even remain on the back row of the Alliance for the
duration of the programme. Partly because I had to be somewhere, and partly to avoid
the awkwardness of exiting with the jury, I sneaked out during My Secret Heaven.
That group of filmmakers – let’s call them the ‘Class of 2002’ – is well represented
in the DVD collection Singapore Shorts, assembled and produced by the newly established
Asian Film Archive, an organisation based in Singapore and dedicated to the presentation,
archiving and discourse of filmmaking in the region. Royston Tan is on there, but
not with 15 (which he subsequently expanded into a feature film of the same title);
Wee Li-Lin as well, and both Sun Koh and Han Yew Kwang are represented by their
2002 entries.
Certainly the ferment for this wave of short filmmaking was in place a good few
years before (and that’s evident from earlier works on the DVD), but it felt like
2002 was a watershed year – a moment when something crystallised and the form was
suddenly ripe with possibility. No SIFF competition line-up has been able to match
it since. But now there are other outlets: festivals, venues, screens and opportunities
for film-makers to show their work. They proliferated like a virus after that watershed.
Short films were in theatres and galleries; short films were on TV, on plasma screens
in shopping centres, on buses, on the seat-backs of taxis, on the internet, on your
community centre wall, on 3G phones. Post-2002 Singapore seemed to go short-film-crazy,
and it hasn’t really recovered.
We could be cynical. Anyone can make a short film. It is the poor step-cousin to
the big daddy of cinema – the feature flick. The tech is cheap (and getting cheaper)
and if your friends were willing, … No need to sustain more than a quick joke, a
twist in a tale, a journey between places. Content was less important than finishing
the damn thing. Entire sub-genres were created in the explosion.
There was the ‘Disconnected Modern Lovers’ film: shot in food-courts, shopping malls,
underground tunnels and Changi airport, where two attractive leads fail to meet
while their Mandarin voice-overs explained the poetics of the situation. Wong Kar-Wai
was patron saint.
Another was the ‘HDB Whimsy’ film, where adolescents and children are misunderstood
by various arguing parental figures amidst a backdrop of high-rise flats, metal
grilles, cramped washrooms, Indian sundry shops, mee pok (pork noodle) stalls and
tragicomic void decks (of public housing apartments).
Then, there was the ‘Singapore Underground’ film, where we get to glimpse the bleak
isolation and dark transgressions that lurk on the edges of the Lion City. Fruitless
attempts to locate depth in a city of surfaces.
Yes, anyone can make a short film, but to make a good one--now, that’s another thing.
The stakes are often raised by the diminished running time. The rhythms are new,
unpredictable; no falling back on a three-act structure. With less room for the
story to develop, there isn’t room for narrative drift or an inch of slack. Every
moment and second counts. With a short film, you need impact and confidence. Slow
build-ups are out. Set the mood quickly; let the images unfurl. Take the audience
somewhere, but do it soon.
Some crazy people really enjoy watching two hours of shorts in a row. I find it
far more exhausting and difficult than any kind of feature. Each short requires
a new level of attention. When one ends, you reset the defaults and start again.
This is tiring to do. The result: audiences for shorts can be remarkably impatient
and unforgiving, as I was watching My Secret Heaven that first time.
Well, I watched it again, or rather, watched it properly for the first time on the
Singapore Shorts DVD, and my opinion isn’t much changed. It’s well-made, for sure,
but it is the apotheosis of ‘HDB Whimsy’--cute kids, overacting actresses, cramped
flats. Working-class parental aspirations for their children expressed through torturous
piano lessons. Yes, the main girl is very sweet, and gives a good performance, and
her fake-out suicide is a heartbreaker, but the film is caught between social commentary
and the lyrical ache of this child’s fantastic escape, and neither of them catches
fire.
The family is a dysfunctional stereotype; the same one that was on show in Jack
Neo’s I Not Stupid (in cinemas at the same time as SIFF 2002), where an outwardly
cold and/or brutalising Mother is countered by a passive but more-in-touch-with-his-feelings
Dad. Call it, When Chinese Matriarchs Go Bad. The naturalism of My Secret Heaven
never allows the film to truly absorb the world-view of the child. She remains at
a distance: cute, spunky and in her disobedience, somewhat of a mysterious object
rather than a living, dreaming being. That is the most interesting element of the
film: the character’s wilful, wrong-headed and boundless refusal to do what has
been imposed on her.
The compilers and curators of Singapore Shorts decided that ‘Distance’ should be
the theme of the DVD, and that’s certainly present (although I think my idea of
distance is different from theirs) but watching the short films in a sequence of
my choosing, I am struck by how many of them deal with (Dis)obedience. Rules are
broken; social norms are rejected; parents and teachers are constantly disobeyed.
In the light of Singapore’s one-party, authoritarian history, this is a fascinating
trope.
Wee Li-Lin’s Autograph Book could be a sequel to My Secret Heaven, with the twelve-year
old girl now older and unpopular in school, but with a covert and unexplained penchant
for defacing textbooks. Both shorts could play as unofficial ‘prequels’ to Sex:
The Annabelle Chong Story. And I don’t mean that quite as flippantly as it sounds.
Wee’s focus is the emotional hot-house of middle-class adolescence, and although
it plays out in a girls’ school full of stereotypes (class bitch, bimbo cheerleader,
misfit, probable lesbian, ah lian , self-righteous teacher), this suits the good-natured,
stylised register of the film. The direct-to-camera speeches (where the characters
voice out what they have written in each other’s
autograph books) are the neat visual
devices that save the day. In her work before and since Autograph Book (including
her 2002 entry Holiday), Wee has specialised in mostly cosy, vaguely uncomfortable
situation comedy; at worst they are stilted and trite, at best they mine a seam
of offbeat humour that lifts them beyond primetime.
It’s still a world away from 15, and begs the question: what would the female equivalent
of 15 be like? This issue of gender is worth a quick detour. In the last decade,
Singapore feature films have been overwhelmingly masculine and frequently misogynistic.
In 15, the feature-film version, women enter the frame only as sex dolls or harping
shrews. Then, there is Eric Khoo’s continuing series of impossible objects of beauty
and desire; Jack Neo’s ugly girls, super-kiasu* wives or ruthless mistresses; the
battered, abused whores and wives of Djinn’s Perth; and the assorted female body
parts of Zombie Dogs. It’s a very distressed landscape. Countering this, the short
film scene has yielded many distinctive female film-makers. Some like Tania Sng
and Gek Li San are not included here. Their voices may be marginalised by the lesser
visibility of the form (compared to features), but at least they are active.
Navigating the DVD menu of Asian Film Archive’s Singapore Shorts, we pass from children
to young adults, and come to what is probably the most haunting film of the collection,
Bertrand Lee’s Birthday.
The pair of working-class, Chinese (speaking) rebels that carry the long-short (about
30 minutes) have gotten married, with a kid at a painfully young age (the guy could
pass for 18; both give superb performances). We see him being retrenched in the
opening sequence (a recurrent scene in Singapore film and TV from Jack Neo’s Money No Enough onwards), and then we move into the hermetically-sealed vault of the couple’s
HDB flat, where they prepare for their son’s birthday. Over the course of that night
and the following day, their relationship implodes. The financial insecurity they
face is killing her, and although the sex is still good, these beautiful losers
lock themselves off into private states of anger, denial and resentment.
Lee’s notes about the film inform us that it may be the last day of their marriage,
and this explains the man’s last-ditch attempt to revive a sense of nostalgia about
their past through a visit to the coast, but I wasn’t so sure. My feeling was that
the lovers needed to push their marriage to the edge in order to feel anything –
something.
Lee, who has experience in ads, knows where to put his camera, and he pushes and
pulls us towards and away from his characters in a very measured, assured rhythm.
In one exquisite moment, they glumly share a cigarette through a windscreen of a
moving car – a shot that simultaneously celebrates togetherness, and commiserates
with their aloneness. It may be one of the most powerful and stylish images in all
of Singapore’s brief cinematic history.
Along the way, the lovers shout, copulate, trespass and vandalise, but there is
a disobedient streak in the film itself. Lee avoids the usual inclusion of the couple’s
parents (which are never referred to), who could have been so easily wheeled out
to explain or disapprove of their offsprings’ lifestyle choices. This seems like
a minor miracle, and is so against the grain of Singapore short films, that it marks
Birthday out as profoundly different.
In an accident earlier this year, Lee lost his leg, and has withdrawn from filmmaking.
In an interview with The Straits Times, he described being psychologically unable
to watch films, let alone think about making them. Let’s hope that given time he
can return.
After the collapsing, nuclear family of Birthday, we segue into Tan Pin Pin’s Moving
House, a judgement-free visual essay on the lengths an extended family will go to
in order to be obedient. When their ancestors’ graves are scheduled to be exhumed
by order of government bodies (to clear the way for new housing estates in land-scarce
Singapore), two families (the DVD contains both Tan Pin Pin’s original ‘home movie’
about her own family, and the longer Discovery TV version about another family)
set out to excavate the burial sites, and carry out a new set of rites to smooth
the journey from one resting place to another.
Here, obedience takes two forms: that boundless loyalty to their deceased loved ones, bearing witness to the premature re-appearance of their bony, decayed remains;
and an unspoken commitment to the ‘powers-that-be’ that have imposed this humiliation
upon the living and the dead in the name of progress.
In both versions of the film, Tan captures the way the families are cheerful and
relaxed in their reverence – no ‘to-camera’ bitterness about the “gah’men”, as Singaporeans
call the authorities. The vibe: we have no choice. The ritual must be completed,
so let’s get on with it as peacefully and respectfully as possible. I’m aware that
this a very ‘local’ reading of the film, and I wonder whether the interest of Western
juries and TV commissioners in
Moving House stems simply from its bizarreness, the
matter-of-fact way that bones are lifted from the dirt, rather than the larger implications.
Tan honed a certain sensibility for pointed documentary with Moving House, in which
simple but effective editing choices say more than an hour of editorial narration.
She also established her proximity to her subjects, close enough to let them talk,
but far away enough to cast a cool eye (I can’t help returning to Distance!).
Her latest mini-feature, Singapore GaGa, extends and develops this practice further.
Again, it is finely tuned to Singapore’s idiosyncratic tensions, and I wonder what
responses it gets outside the island. A multi-stranded tapestry of interviews themed
around sound and music in the Lion City, Singapore GaGa cumulatively reveals an
alternative history of the republic, which counters the official line (she assembles
a cast of mild-mannered misfits, has-beens, outsiders, rebels and mavericks).
This implicit engagement with political discourse is extremely rare in Singapore,
largely because any film deemed ‘partisan’ is actually illegal. The ongoing investigation
into documentary filmmaker Martyn See, whose short-film portrait of Opposition figure
Chee Soon Juan (called Singapore Rebel) caught the attention of the police before
it could be screened, stands as a warning to all other film-makers: Don’t Go There.
Royston Tan’s contribution to the Singapore Shorts is Mother, a piece in the DVD
compilation that returns us to disobedience once more. Found-footage of home movies
from the 70s/80s unspool and flicker as an actor recites a prose poem in Mandarin
about a delinquent’s profoundly unfilial hatred of this mother. It sounds angsty,
but it’s actually more layered than my crude description suggests. For one thing,
Tan doesn’t pretend that the footage directly relates to the narration; rather,
it becomes a signifier for all families – sometimes for a past that seems idyllic
but may be hiding something, and sometimes for a childhood that our narrator may
have wanted but never had. His litany of cruelty acted upon his mother repeats itself
into oblivion, and you are left hanging at the end with a few tons of unspoken regret.
Tan made Mother the year before 15 (the short version), and you could trace some
connections between the benumbed teens of that film (who almost never discuss their
families), and Mother’s outpouring. That year, he also made Hock Hiap Leong, the
short that launched him on the international film circuit. It is something else
entirely, a blatantly and knowingly nostalgic lip-sync routine in praise of a decrepit
coffee shop. The real companion piece to Mother, however, is the more lyrical Sons
from a year before that, which marries the slick, advertising honed eye of Hock
Hiap Leong with the poignant disconnect of the later film. Tan is something of a
chameleon. Even if you’d seen all the shorts that preceded it, 15 (the short) still
came as a surprise. That film of course, should be included here, but it remains
a touchy issue. The feature-length 15 was horribly censored in Singapore while it
was celebrated uncut abroad. Attempts to revive the short version (which had sailed
under the radar because of its limited appearance at SIFF) have failed. Forget ordering
the UK DVD on Amazon – it gets sent straight back, rejected. Within Singapore, 15
(in both versions) is in real danger of becoming a lost movie.
Tan has just finished shooting his second feature, and is destined to burn very
bright, but his relationship with government agencies (they fund him or give him
awards, then censor or chastise him) epitomises the fatal ambivalence that the authorities
have towards the arts in general. They are not willing to pay the cost (hearing
stuff they don’t want to hear) of brilliance and originality.
OK. Back to the DVD. Han Yew Kwang explains that the idea of
The Call Home was not
his, but rather presented to him as he was preparing to make a ‘thesis’ film. The
film is another long-short, twenty minutes cataloguing details in the life of Kasi,
an Indian construction worker who strives to live with dignity as he serves his
time in Singapore, but rapidly succumbs to the temptations of life away from home
(smoking dope, booze, possibly whores) and the miseries of dormitory life and tedious
labour. It’s hard to tell how ‘authentic’ Han’s portrait of this way of being is.
He has a measured, unobtrusive way of shooting, and the details feel right (although
in three years of working and walking in Little India, I’ve never seen a worker
crying at a payphone). The film, however, emulates Kasi’s life rather too closely,
and it winds up edging into boredom.
It’s a very worthy issue, and seeing it on arrival in Singapore in 2002 it seemed
like it was a powerful statement, but I can’t help thinking there are other approaches.
Construction workers in Singapore are among the most voiceless and marginalised
groups on the island. Domestic workers (maids) and their predicaments received much
media attention, and their rights are frequently discussed. Han’s film makes Kasi
into an object of pity, and we go through all the appropriate emotions as we pity
him, but what then?
Malaysian director Yasmin Ahmad is currently in the early stages of developing a
project about a construction worker in Singapore. Anyone familiar with Ahmad’s mixture
of the magical romance and earthy humour will realise that she could take the material
into radically different territory. As for Han, he has just finished his first feature,
a slapstick comedy in Mandarin.
The two odd films out are Jason Lai’s Three Feet Apart and Eva Tang’s While You
Sleep. The former, a Flash animation film, seems to be included by virtue of its
explicit intersection with the ‘Distance’ theme. While it was bold to put one animated film amidst a programme of live action, Lai’s film doesn’t hold its end up, and
it adds nothing to the DVD. It’s a one-gag flick, and even if it’s meant to be a
sad joke, and the comment it makes about communication and technology is all in
the notes, we don’t even need to see the film. The other one, While You Sleep, is
a student piece, shot in freezing London-standing-in-for-Japan with a Japanese cast,
in black and white – all for no clear reason. Tang builds a tentative narrative
about a single mother whose life-saving operation requires her to be unconscious
for a few days. In her absence, the daughter bonds with the quasi-senile grandmother;
her brother plays with his PlayStation 2; and their estranged father makes a pathetic
attempt at reconciliation. Its slight, minor-key observations are based entirely
on moments layered on top of moments, and this reveals a hint of Tang’s potential,
but nothing more.
My exhausting viewing marathon concludes with Locust by Victric Thng, a director
often touted as Singapore’s leading ‘experimental’ film-maker. Thng is a stylist,
for sure, knowing how to combine pleasing images with a poignant Mandarin voice-over.
For three minutes, Locust presents footage of a huge swarming crowd (in China during
winter, perhaps?). Faces move in and out of focus; the mass anonymity of the group
fleetingly giving way to individuals, their smiles and personalities. It concludes
on a repeated, slowed-down fragment of two young men sharing a moment of tenderness
amidst the seething rush. It’s a well-made piece, a short film as a declaration
of love (a good companion to Tan’s Mother), and I’m curious as to where Thng will
go next. My hunch is that he could thrive, away from the constraints of the cinema
or TV space – video installation may be better suited to his atmospherics.
A little Googling reveals that Locust has played in a slew of Gay & Lesbian
film festivals around the world, none of which are cited in the DVD’s ‘Screening
History’ section. I’m not quite sure what they’re afraid of. So, the ‘Class of 2002’
morphs into the ‘Class of 2005’ if indeed this DVD provides the signpost along a
journey for this eclectic assembly of talents. Short films have such a limited life, so the Archive can be commended for finding a place for them to retire, and hopefully
to be visited often by the public. It’s clearly not a commercial exercise, but a
labour of love.
The strength of the DVD is that it shows how this generation of filmmakers have
fresh, distinctive and ‘other’ voices, something that the creatively conservative
major media in Singapore (print, TV, film) generally avoid like the plague.
The short film epidemic I mentioned earlier has given rise to a wide variety of
dubious talent contests with heavyweight corporate sponsors. As PR exercises they
are effective: making a lot of noise about how ‘open access’ these networks are
(and the attendant rhetoric about digital tech), but I seriously doubt that the
next Bertrand Lees or Tan Pin Pins will emerge from this process. Rather we’ll have
more (and inferior) variations on HDB Whimsy, Disconnected Lovers and Singapore
Underground to add to the ever-growing pile.
The best work here is personal, and even the films that I really dislike on the
DVD never feel like the shameless ‘Calling Cards’ which are the norm in Europe and
America – shorts that only exist to show off their makers’ skills and get jobs.
At the same time, I doubt that any of these film-makers are naive enough to think
that they can expand into features or TV without suffering compromise to the very
elements that make them stand out--another paradox. Until Singapore learns to truly,
properly, deeply nurture the talents that are already out in the open, then the
Class of 2002 or 2005 and all the future classes may have to remain in school.
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Article originally commissioned for publication in the SPAFA Journal by SEAMEO-SPAFA.
Reprinted here with their kind permission.
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