A voice for elephants: Kirsten Tan’s Pop Aye and environmental dialogue in Southeast Asia

Abstract

One of cinema’s foundational films, Thomas Edison’s 60-second actuality film Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) documents the tragic circumstances surrounding the first appearance of an elephant on screen. As the title makes explicit, the film records the killing of an Asian elephant named Topsy, a circus performer, in front of a small crowd at Coney Island. Topsy was fed poisoned carrots, electrocuted and strangled, with the electrocution ultimately killing her.1 The film was used to demonstrate the power of electricity, a new invention at the time, and was initially played on the Edison kinetoscopes. The ‘shock’ of the film, as Lesley Stern has described, functions like an electrical charge transferred to the body of the spectator, decentring human perception and knowledge.2 This early inscription of the human/animal/cinema interface has been reprised in contemporary Southeast Asian cinema to explore more recent human activities in the Anthropocene. Kirsten Tan’s Singapore-Thailand...