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

Abstract

Southeast Asian Independent Cinema TILMAN BAUMGARTEL, ed. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 304p.The prolific production of independent films in one of fastest growing economic regions of world impels filmmakers, critics, and scholars to seriously study Southeast Asian (hereon referred as SEA) cinema as a distinct area of filmmaking within global cinema. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, edited by German scholar of Southeast Asian cinemas Tilman Baumgartel, is a contribution to growing discussion of SEA cinematic developments.Essays that constitute book's first part identify conceptual framework and themes in recent Southeast Asian indie films. John Lent's definitions of in terms of governmental regulation, financing, and fresh styles and methods of filmmaking may serve as an index through which cinemas in region are to be examined. The editor's own essay extends Benedict Anderson's imagined communities to film and television in region but hesitates to argue that indie movies are not as popular as other media (such as television melodramas and mainstream films), thereby making contentious idea that through independent cinema, peoples of Southeast Asia imagine and construct their communal identities. If so, this is only at a very limited level. Indeed, there may be a strategic essentialism here in sense that national or cultural essences posited by non-Southeast Asians in region's indie productions are largely ignored by Southeast Asians themselves. What are objectives of SEA filmmakers in portraying different realities-poverty, local traditions, etc.-in different lights, when these themes are largely not patronized by their fellow citizens presumably hooked on technologically superior Hollywood and escapist local films?1) To these problems of relevance to a national audience, Baumgartel offers possibility of seeing such films in a post-national context. His application of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's dimensions of global cultural economy raises important issues: multi-national productions of SEA indie films, immigrant nature of SEA indie filmmakers, international financing, government support, utility of internet social networking programs, relations with local audience, ingenious distribution techniques, exposure to world/other cinemas that inspired SEA directors to make their own films, video piracy, and socio-political subject matters in contemporary SEA indie cinema. In conceptualizing region's independent cinema, Baumgartel pertinently points out difference between imagined worlds of SEA film-makers and those of their fellow citizens and governments. It is this difference that plays out multifarious contradictions that continually debate notions of independence in SEA cinema.Alfia Bin Sa'at and Ben Slater analyze fraught film histories and geographies of Singapore in light of its separation from Malaysia and its exceptional development in last half century. Sa'at's Hinterland, Heartland, Home: Affective Topography in Singapore explains shared film histories of Malaysia and Singapore and looks at contemporary Singaporean films in light of studio era (1950s and 1960s) specific history of which small country surrenders to Malaysia. The urban-rural dialectic in revival period (1990s) of Singaporean cinema traces its origins to post-war (note: Malaysian) studio era when kahwin lari narrative (marriage of lovers from different class backgrounds) dominated. Films of 1960s and 1990s have a striking similarity in that they create hinterland or rural area-now heartland in highly urbanized Singapore-as ideal and morally upright while opposing this to developed but corrupting topography of city. Now, kampong or village life is only inscribed in autobiographical accounts of those who have lived in it, and hence, according to Sa'at, the social trauma of hinterland-to-city dislocation becomes a kind of inherited post-memory (p. …