Southeast Asian Independent Cinema TILMAN BAUMGÄRTEL, ed. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 304p.

Southeast Asian independent cinema: Essays, documents, interviews Edited by TILMAN BAUMGARTEL Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 273, Notes, Bibliography, Index. Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia Edited by MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ and BENJAMIN MCKAY Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Pp. 239, Illustrations, Bibliography. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000131 Given the heterogeneous geographies and disjunctive histories of Southeast Asia, any attempt at discussing the region's cinema must always err on the side of the plural. In turn, discourses on its independent cinema must attend to contesting notions of independence. Through what forms of relationality can cinema become independent? And independent of what? Such questions are posed by both Southeast Asian independent cinema and Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia, the first two published collections of literature devoted exclusively to the study of the field. The appearance of the two titles within the same year marks a milestone not only for the region's independent cinema, but also its screen culture as a whole, considering that previous discussions of Southeast Asian films were mostly framed within the larger context of Asian cinema. Comparing the two collections to earlier titles such as Being & becoming: The cinemas of Asia (ed. Aruna Vasudev, Latika Padgaonkar and Rashmi Doraiswamy, Macmillan India, 2002) and Contemporary Asian cinema: Popular culture in a global frame (ed. Anne Tereska Ciecko, Berg, 2006) also reveals the shifts in approach, for their chapters are titled not after countries but issues and ideas--a reflection of the post-national paradigm in which Southeast Asian independent cinema operates today. Southeast Asian independent cinema is divided into three sections: 'Essays', 'Documents' and 'Interviews'. The first two essays by John A. Lent and editor Tilman Baumgartel give a broad overview of the region, foregrounding the affinities shared by the independent filmmaking practices of its different countries. Lent's 'Southeast Asian independent cinema: Independent of what?' identifies three forms of independence: of government control, of the studio system and of traditional film aesthetics. While his arguments are mostly cogent, the attempt at designating aesthetic independence as a category in itself is questionable, for it obscures the social realities and economy of means from which 'independent' aesthetics often emerge. Meanwhile, Baumgartel's 'Imagined communities, imagined worlds: Independent film from Southeast Asia in the global mediascape' takes as its key theoretical reference Arjun Appadurai's concept of 'imagined worlds'. Theorised by Appadurai as transnational relational fields through which people, media, technologies, finances and ideas circulate, these 'imagined worlds' are insightfully posited by Baumgartel as 'zones of territorial and cultural disjuncture' (p. 31) in which independent films in the region are made, challenging the Andersonian 'imagined communities' formed through mainstream, state-sanctioned cinema. Another notable essay is Alfian bin Sa'at's 'Hinterland, heartland, home: Affective topography in Singapore films'. Analysing films such as 12 Storeys (1997), Eating Air (1999) and Singapore Dreaming (2006), Alfian puts forth a compelling thesis on how the heartland, referring to the neighbourhoods of high-rise public flats where most Singaporeans live, operates as an imperfect hinterland for a country with none to call its own. Less convincing is the added claim that such images of the Singaporean heartland bear the traces of the kampungs as depicted in Malay films of the sixties, which smacks of romanticism and retroactive rationalisation. Intan Paramaditha's 'Cinema, sexuality and censorship in post-Soeharto Indonesia' also offers keen insights. Through a historical examination of the uneasy relationship between cinema and public morality in Indonesia, Paramaditha illustrates how the shift towards a post-Soeharto institutional environment did not ease censorship laws concerning cinematic depictions of gender and sexuality, but merely transferred the power to oppress from a paternalistic regime to a social climate governed by revived Islamic values. …

Plaridel • Vol. 9 No. 2 • August 2012 Tilman Baumgartel’s Southeast Asian Independent Cinema (2012) is an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the independent (“indie”) filmmaking revolution in the Southeast Asian region. Its exploratory project – integrative film scholarship in the region – fleshes out critical issues and discourses in independent cinema, such as its definition and diversity of forms, global context, practitioners (particularly their artistic manifestos and insights on their own filmmaking), crossroads with economy (e.g., mainstream cinema) and culture (e.g., religion), and prospects. Through this venture, the book reinforces a macro perspective in looking at independent cinema, and poses a significant question: Is it possible for Southeast Asian people, albeit their divergent political, economic, and social milieus, to find common ground – as regards to how their history, Filipino Indie by Way of Southeast Asian Independent Cinema Jose C. Gutierrez III

This study shed light on gay stereotypes as depicted from mainstream films and independent films by determining (1) the gay stereotypes portrayed in the films, (2) the deviations from the gay stereotypes, and the (3) implications of the gay portrayals on the present concept of Filipino gays. Employing the descriptive content analysis, the researchers selected and examined carefully four (4) films entitled Manay Po and Markova: Comfort Gay and two independent films, Masahista (The Masseur) and Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros). The gay stereotypes depicted in the selected movies are the effeminate gays and discrete gays. The effeminate gays are portrayed in the films as cross dressers, parlorista, with flamboyant lifestyle and feminine mannerisms. On the other hand, discrete gays are shown as bisexual males, with masculine and female self-image. However, there is a deviation from these gay stereotypes that is the “same sex marriage” among gays as portrayed in the scenes from the movie Manay Po. Of the films reviewed, it was only Manay Po that captured both types of gay males at the same time. Majority of the stereotypes depicted in the films leaned towards the “bakla” who is the very subject of ridicule and discrimination in a macho and paternalistic society like the Philippines. However, unlike the effeminate “bakla,” the discreet is well accepted. Those who have revealed their sexual orientation, but remained discreet in theirappearances, earned the respect and admiration of their colleagues. Keywords - gay, stereotypes, bisexual, independent films, effeminate.

The rise of independent cinema in Southeast Asia, following the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers there, is among the most significant recent developments in global cinema. The advent of affordable and easy access to digital technology has empowered startling new voices from a part of the world rarely heard or seen in international film circles. The appearance of fresh, sharply alternative, and often very personal voices has had a tremendous impact on local film production. This book documents these developments as a genuine outcome of the democratization and liberalization of film production. Contributions from respected scholars, interviews with filmmakers, personal accounts and primary sources by important directors and screenwriters collectively provide readers with a lively account of dynamic film developments in Southeast Asia. Interviewees include Lav Diaz, Amir Muhammad, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Eric Khoo, Nia Dinata and others.

This chapter gives an overview of the Southeast Asian independent cinema and addresses a number of core questions: In what ways is this cinema independent? What is the cinematic and social significance of these films? How have they been discussed in the literature on Southeast Asian cinema? To what extent can these films be seen as part of a pan-Southeast Asian film movement? As a new type of independent filmmaking that emerged suddenly and rapidly gained success, Southeast Asian independent cinema would appear to conform to this idea. At the same time, independent cinema must negotiate the existing structures of the market, which creates a dominant, profit-driven or mainstream cinema. In order to explore more fully, it is necessary to examine Southeast Asian independent cinema's regional identity. The problems involved in discerning a set of clear, pan-regional qualities within Southeast Asian independent cinema makes it difficult for us to view it as a fully homogenous film movement.

Several films today include the narratives of Muslim communities. Due to the vast array of movies on the subject, Muslim communities’ representation has opened many representations and interpretations, whether positive or negative. The independent film “Women of the Weeping River” (WOTWR), by Sheron Dayoc, is one of the many indie films in the Philippines that includes the Muslim community. Using the lenses of Stuart Hall (1997) “Theory of Representation,” the researchers focused on how producers utilize elements of the film in crafting their representations towards cultural groups. This study focuses on this film to elaborate the potential of independent cinema in terms of minorities and highlight social issues. In the case of WOTWR, the study also emphasizes how the Muslim community throughout the film also portrays Islamic women and the film’s influence regarding the formation of viewers’ perspectives towards the selected cultural group. Through an analysis of WOTWR, this study also aims to discuss how indie films can break away and are capable of breaking away and alluding to mainstream cinema milestones. Several frameworks like Yihan Wang’s “Ethnic Boundary and Literature/Image Representation,” Mark B. Feldman and Hsuan L. Hsu’s “Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation,” and Karin Hamm-Ehsani’s “Intersections: Issues of National, Ethnic, and Sexual Identity in Kutlug Ataman’s Berlin Film Lola und Bilidikid,” were utilized in close reading, providing the reader with several perspectives. The study proved that independent film such as WOTWR is a powerful tool when it comes to representation because of having the privilege of autonomy.

New York City has played a vital role in the history of American cinema. This bibliography draws together divergent strands of scholarship that approach the topic of New York City and cinema from multiple perspectives. The iconic cityscapes and distinctive cultural milieux of New York have provided both setting and subject matter for countless movies, whether filmed on location or recreated in Hollywood studios. There is a significant body of work that addresses New York onscreen, analyzing urban narratives and Genres and the use of locations, architecture, and specific areas of the city. This work has explored how cinema has engaged with the changing nature of New York over time, and investigated the representation of the city’s neighborhoods and ethnic groups. An important subsection of this scholarship pursues New York’s special relationship with particular film genres, such as The City Symphony, Musicals, Film Noir, and the Romantic Comedy. In the critical literature, New York has frequently been associated with the work of specific directors, including Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee, as well as key figures in experimental film such as Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol. New York has also been an important site for film production and exhibition. Although the American film industry has been predominantly based in Southern California since the 1910s, New York has always been Hollywood’s second city. In the studio era, it was home to the studios’ corporate headquarters and a string of highly profitable first-run theatres. Although filming in the city has waxed and waned, New York has always played an influential role as a regional production hub, a source of talent, and a center for film criticism. The city can claim a pivotal role in the development of early cinema, and it therefore holds a privileged place in histories of early film production and exhibition. New York has also operated in multiple ways as a counterpoint to Hollywood and a crucible for independent or alternative film culture. Experimental filmmaking has flourished in New York, especially in the mid-20th century, and the city has long operated as a vital hub for independent distribution as well as fostering a network of underground and nontheatrical exhibition spaces. This is addressed in intersecting bodies of work on experimental and independent film, and on New York Film Culture. There is now an extensive critical literature on the wider relationship between cinema and the city (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies article The City in Film by Pamela Robertson Wojcik for a more general cinema-city bibliography). This bibliography only includes sources that focus (in whole or in part) on New York City in particular.

The present study examines the portrayal of gender nonconformity in 36 American films released from 2001 to 2011. Mainstream and independent films with at least one character portrayed in a gender transgressive way were chosen for analysis. The films were coded at two levels: (1) the entire film, and (2) the individual characters. The entire films were coded for mainstream versus independent production, genre, and screen time of gender nonconforming characters. The characters were coded for the type of gender transgression, the characters’ demographics, and their purposes in the plot. The most common purpose of the non-conforming characters was humor, especially in mainstream films. Exploring identity was a much less common purpose and these films were far more likely to be independent films. The non-conforming characters were far more likely to identify as a static identity, man or woman, rather than anything else. Gender identity was almost always presented as something simple, static and binary.

As the tabloid reality show ascended, independent cinema was deep into the phase of ‘indiewood’ in which larger companies and studios were sponsoring marketable indie films. The infamous case of several Southern California teens who burgled a string of celebrity homes was the basis for both the E! reality show Pretty Wild (2010) and the Sofia Coppola film The Bling Ring (2013). The Bling Ring imposes the structures of Coppola's auteurism and a more conventional storyline, leaving the affect low and one-toned. Pretty Wild, with the tabloid reality genre of semi-scripted entertainment, allows for gaps and fissures in storyline and character development leading to affects high and low which can leave viewers perplexed but still interested. Looking at the film from a broader perspective, The Bling Ring's failure, both aesthetically and commercially, is another example of current independent cinema lacking in substance and execution. As the term ‘independent cinema’ has become more elastic since the last golden age of the 1990s, the difference of these films, aesthetically and socially, from mainstream fare has diminished. Tabloid reality television presents a more promising territory for viewer engagement and social change than the current world of independent cinema.

(2013). Independent Cinema in South East Asia. South East Asia Research: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 171-176.

We will create, through sheer force of will, an independent games revolution, an audience and market and body of work that will ultimately redound to the benefit of the whole field, providing a venue for creative work, as independent cinema does for film, as independent labels do for music. (“Designer X” 2000) In popular culture, the label ‘independent’ is commonly associated with music or movies but rarely with computer games. Since the proclamation of the Scratchware Manifesto in 2000 the development of an independent games movement has advanced - e.g. the institutionalisation of the San Francisco Independent Games Festival - however, the question game designer and theorist Eric Zimmermann raised in 2002 is still significant: “Do Independent Games Exist?” (Zimmermann 2002). In this article, the still substantially unexplored cultural sphere of independent games will be examined from a comparatistic perspective using the concept of the (US) independent film as an example. Starting point for the following reflections is that, with regard to economics and aesthetics, American independent film as an established alternative practice is said to be a role model for the characterisation of the emerging independent games movement. Neverthless, the question remains whether independent film can be a suitable example at all. Embedded in the issue what constitutes the independence of independent film is a relational logic inasmuch as the answer requires to not only analyse what is described as independent or claims to be independent. In fact, the very concept prompts the question from what the independent is independent, from what does it differ and distinguish itself and by which means. The main reference for the American independent film will, of course, be Hollywood mainstream cinema. It has yet to be sorted out on the basis of which features independent films can be distinguished from mainstream films. Geoff King points out three distinguishing level of criteria that can be transferred to the cultural practice of independent games:

Performing Region in Southeast Asian Film Industries Jasmine Nadua Trice (bio) What does it mean to invent a regional cinema? Film and media scholars have long troubled the conventional cartographies used to map cinemas by nation-states, turning to models based on global flows and deterritorialization or local sites of production and reception.1 How does region become a spatial logic for film production, distribution, and reception? Inspired by work in critical border studies, I would like to propose a shift from the concept of region as a fixed, geographic area to the idea of region as a historically contingent practice, a reterritorializing performance that emerges amid a confluence of specific cultural and economic circumstances. Such conditions lead to organizing practices and institutional networks that work above and below the nation-state, that seek new scales for collaboration and exchange. I find performance theory especially valuable for considering regional film organizing because it emphasizes the projected, fictional dimensions of cultural forms. As Diana Taylor argues, “Performance moves between the as if and the is, between pretend and new constructions of the ‘real’”; it “can be understood as process— as enactment, exertion, intervention, [End Page 188] and expenditure.”2 Scholars in production studies have made use of performance theory to describe the complex dynamics of industrial practices.3 What if we also use performance to understand region as a verb, to see regioning practices as processes of film-industrial world-making? How might this disrupt the fixity of spatial categories and help us to understand the material conditions in which such performances become necessary, even desired, within particular industrial and institutional filmmaking contexts? Region is always, to some extent, fictional. In the case of Southeast Asia, debates around regional borders often turn to proto-or anti-statist spatial formations. For example, much scholarship discusses the lowland political structure of the mandala, which had no fixed territorial boundaries, its influence fading with distance from a central core.4 In another alternative mapping, James Scott offers an anarchist history of the highlands region known as the Zomia, stretching from Vietnam to India, that focuses on a diverse range of indigenous communities that choose to remain stateless.5 The area that would later become Southeast Asia has also been seen by its larger neighbors as Suwarnadwipa or Goldland (from the perspective of India) and Nanyang or South Seas (in China). Region, here, is porous and dispersed, less a territory than a concept. Such relational cartography grafts onto more contemporary maps of global film production that privilege larger, globalized industries.6 What is interesting about Southeast Asian cinema is the way that film organizations and practitioners have taken on region as an externally imposed, scalar category, a relic of the so-called Cold War, and reshaped it into a desired fiction. This in itself is not unusual, necessarily. Regional co-productions have been a means of consolidating technological and financial resources, often for big-budget, blockbuster movies.7 But in Southeast Asia, the notion of a regional, filmmaking identity is not rooted in state or commercial imperatives. Rather, film practitioners draw regional boundaries through affective affinities and performative identities, staged for international and regional networks. Loosely cohered filmmaking scenes and entangled networks of film festivals, arts funders, and state cultural bodies become staging grounds for tactical performances of what a regional cinema might look like. In their most utopic iterations, such regioning practices [End Page 189] promise cosmopolitanism without globalism, locality without parochialism; they recenter those areas often pushed to the peripheries of global film culture. Regioning practices are often complex, reflexive, and provisional, as the following accounts suggest. Founded in 2017, Purin Pictures is a private fund dedicated to supporting “independent cinema in Southeast Asia.”8 It began as a project of the Thailand-based Purin Foundation, led by filmmaker Visra Vichit-Vadakan.9 While the foundation initially focused on social development projects, its emphasis eventually shifted toward filmmaking. Four Thai filmmakers now manage the fund, which supports grants for production and postproduction. They aim to highlight “underrepresented voices in SEA cinema,” offering at least one grant each session to first-or second-time women filmmakers. The organization explicitly sees its mission as compensating...

This book explores the range and dynamism of contemporary Asian cinemas, covering East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia), South Asia (Bollywood), and West Asia (Iran), in order to discover what is common about them and to engender a theory or concept of "Asian Cinema". It goes beyond existing work which provides a field survey of Asian cinema, probing more deeply into the field of Asian Cinema, arguing that Asian Cinema constitutes a separate pedagogical subject, and putting forward an alternative cinematic paradigm. The book covers "styles", including the works of classical Asian Cinema masters, and specific genres such as horror films, and Bollywood and Anime, two very popular modes of Asian Cinema; "spaces", including artistic use of space and perspective in Chinese cinema, geographic and personal space in Iranian cinema, the private "erotic space" of films from South Korea and Thailand, and the persistence of the family unit in the urban spaces of Asian big cities in many Asian films; and "concepts" such as Pan-Asianism, Orientalism, Nationalism and Third Cinema. The rise of Asian nations on the world stage has been coupled with a growing interest, both inside and outside Asia, of Asian culture, of which film is increasingly an indispensable component – this book provides a rich, insightful overview of what exactly constitutes Asian Cinema.

Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia. Edited by May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. viii, 258 pp. 31.95 (paper). - Volume 72 Issue 2

ABSTRACTThe article gives an overview of the recent upsurge of independent cinema in South East Asia. I argue that these films are examples of a new transnational cinema for the lack of alternative: as the political and social situation in the countries where they have been made does not allow for their inclusion into the mainstream of the national cinema, they have turned to an international market to find an audience. I argue that a new generation of film-makers has been empowered by the easy and cheap access to digital video. Thanks to digital cinema technology, film-makers from South East Asia have the opportunity to produce their alternative and often very personal works. Using Arjun Appadurai's influential essay ‘Disjuncture and Difference’ (1996) as a theoretical framework, I discuss some of the specific traits of recent independent films from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Singapore and the Philippines, and point out their genuinely transnational nature with regard to distribution and reception.