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...
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Oct 19, 2021
Jennifer A Bailey + 2
Open Access
