The Value of an Impoverished Aesthetic

Abstract

The Thai film, The Iron Ladies, is the story of a gay, lesbian and transsexual volleyball team that surprises everyone by winning the Thai national championship. It was a huge commercial success when it first appeared in Thailand in 2000; and following a further enthusiastic reception at the 2000 London Film Festival, it became the first Thai film to be commercially distributed in the UK. But when the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), a venue with a strong avant-garde tradition and a reputation for promoting East Asian auteurs, included the film as the centrepiece of its summer 2001 schedule, it attracted interestingly hostile reviews. This paper explores the passage of The Iron Ladies from Thai commercial hit, to film festival favourite, to art-house flop, demonstrating the tensions that exist between the different modes of ‘world cinema’ spectatorship. The film's failure at the ICA indicates that connoisseurship remains an authoritative structuring principle of world cinema spectatorship. Nevertheless, in certain circumstances, connoisseurship can be undermined, as shown at the London Film Festival, when the screening became an event. Visibly to appreciate the film became a collective act of queer identification in public space.