The Cinematic Forest and Southeast Asian Cinema

Abstract

The Cinematic Forest and Southeast Asian Cinema Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn (bio) As a cinephile and a film scholar, when I think of Southeast Asian Cinema, I think of the forest. I think of a mysterious jungle where humans encounter animistic animals, spirits, and forces in the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul; a vast forested landscape, shot in black-and-white long takes in the films of Lav Diaz; a deep, dense, precolonial jungle in the work of Filipino auteur Raya Martin; a haunted rainforest on the Malaysian-Singaporean border in a film installation by Boo Junfeng; the woods, as a transitional space between realistic and speculative worlds in the work of Pimpaka Towira.1 In this contemporary art cinema, the forest is not simply a mere background for human stories. Instead, through specific aesthetic choices, the forest in these films becomes a powerful and complex cinematic assemblage. As a recurring presence, or representative space, within Southeast Asian cinema, the forest has received far less scholarly attention than studies of film form, auteurism, political histories, and transnational reception. While discussions of regional cinemas often draw from these kinds of national cinema frameworks, what these studies can miss is an attention to the specific, material, and topological nature of the region. In what follows, I propose an alternative cartography or framework shaped by the cinematic forests of Southeast Asia. [End Page 182] “It was the most beautiful tropical landscape unfolding before my eyes with a rich variety of fine undergrowth palms of different sizes, some as thin as sticks,” wrote an Austrian painter, Eugen von Ransonnet, the first time he saw Singapore in 1876.2 This description evokes a striking image of the rich ecosystem of the forest, which covered the majority of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century. The present state of the forest, however, offers a stark contrast. In 2019, the journal Nature Communications indicated that while Southeast Asian forests “are home to nearly 15% of the world’s tropical forest” and are habitats for “nearly two-thirds of the world’s floral and faunal diversity,” they are also a “hotspot” for deforestation.3 By 2100, without protection, more than 40 percent of the region’s biodiversity will be disappeared completely.4 Between the colonial era and the current ecological crisis, histories of the region’s forests consist of multilayered and entangled narratives of conflict and exploitation. During the colonial period, the forests of Southeast Asia were perceived by the Imperial imagination as a bountiful resource, resulting in conflict between the colonizers and the nationalists. The Cold War era saw widespread exploitation and commercialization under the dictatorial regimes of many Southeast Asian countries.5 The forest continues to be embedded within national discourses and is managed as a part of national projects.6 It can also be viewed as a site for national religious practices.7 Beyond processes of modernization and nation-building, however, the forest is also a space where premodern cosmologies and beliefs still exist and is thus a place that carries “different notions of boundaries to those formalized in the colonial period.”8 One important theoretical framework we can draw from to understand the forest in Southeast Asian film is the Zomia. First coined by historian Willem van Schendel to describe a vast area of forested land that stretches across parts of South, Southeast, and East Asia, the designation Zomia was popularized by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009), where he uses it to map a geographical area that resists state borders.9 The Zomia, as imagined by Scott, emphasizes narratives [End Page 183] of the forests that are excluded from national histories of the region. In what follows, I will show how Southeast Asian cinema responds to these historically and ecologically entwined narratives through its depiction of the forest in the Zomia region. However, instead of adopting already-established regional theoretical frameworks to understand the Southeast Asian cinematic forest, I propose that we need to think in reverse by starting with the forest and letting it guide us to imagine the possibilities of what “Southeast Asian cinema” might mean. What is a cinematic forest? As an...