Viddsee

Abstract

Nearly a decade ago, Kenneth Chan traced a brief genealogy of queer Singapore cinema culture in his essay “Impossible Presence: Toward a Queer Singapore Cinema, 1990s–2000s” (2012). Despite the lack of state-funding and limiting Films Acts on film exhibition and production, alternative voices of queer sexualities exist on screen between the interstices of mainstream Singapore cinema. Filmmakers work around state restrictions by presenting their works at international film festival circuits, or through integrating queerness into heteronormative modes of cinematic narratives and styles. Following Chan, this paper agrees with cinema’s ontological ability to cultivate queer spaces of expressions but rearticulates this potential with an attention to new digital landscapes that expand cinematic circuits beyond traditional theatrical releases to include video-on-demand and subscription-on-demand platforms and other video streaming sites. Today, cinematic industries reflect Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture (2006) where online distribution, consumption, and discussion of films create new media landscapes of collaborative sense-making. Using Viddsee as my case study, I argue that the online video streaming site founded in 2013, which features curated Southeast Asian short film format, functions as an assemblage of spatial, temporal, and corporeal intersections that enables queer filmic praxis to grow alongside dominant discourse surrounding mainstream national cinema. Analysing “Purple Light”, a short film by Javior Chew, Cecilia Ang, and Charlene Yiu, both in terms of textual and institutional significances, I trace the affective structures evoked that redefine relationships between audience and screen, individual and community, which enable queer cultural artefacts to thrive rather than disguise.