<videovortex> Welcome to the Institute of Southeast Asian Film Studies

[tilman baumgärtel]

THE INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN FILM STUDIES

The Cinema of the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia,
Vietnam, Cambodia et al

http://southeastasiancinema.wordpress.com

Welcome to the Institute of Southeast Asian Film Studies

by Tilman Baumgärtel

I never wanted to have a blog.

Blogs seemed like yet another internet timewaster to me, in the same
league as social networks sites, RSS feeds, trackers and Twitter. And to
start a blog in 2009, is really tired - especially for somebody like me
who has written on all things internet for more than a decade and used
to think of himself as ahead of his time, not as the last one to pick up
on internet fads.

When working on a book on the independent cinema of Southeast Asia, it
occurred to me that a site that trusses the material on Southeast Asian
cinema (that is few and far between on the internet) could actually be
quite useful. That is about the scope of this endavour: to collect links
to the few articles that come out on cinema from Southeast Asia.

Before I moved to the Philippines in 2004, the only film from this part
of the world that I had ever seen was Bobby Suarez´ grindhouse martial
arts movie Cleopatra Wong, and I had no idea that this was a movie from
Singapore/Philippines, just something vaguely Asian. But then again,
where did this catholic convent come from? (I have since written a
lengthy paper where I argue that Suarez´ films from the 1970s are an
early attempt at filmic globalization.)

The Philippine mainstream movies that I watched on the plane to Manila
(Jologs and Lastikman) did not exactly wet my appetite for more of the
same, and I think in my first year in the Philippines I saw only one
other local film. At that time cheap digital cameras had just become
available in the region, and soon young film makers, that would have
never been able to make a regular, studio-financed film, started to make
low-budget independent films. Some of these films started to make the
international film festival circuit, a very few did even well in the
local cinemas. (See an article I wrote in my first enthusiasm about all
this here.) I got hooked. After writing about the internet, and in
particular about net.art from the mid-90s onwards, I found myself
entangled in yet another digital revolution.

As I started to teach at the Film Institute of the University of the
Philippines, I had access to one of the best collections of Philippine
movies anywhere. (Only a handful of classic Philippine films are
available on regular DVD, most of them without subtitles, so I was very
lucky to be able to see all these old films. And to have students at my
disposal who I could make translate films from Tagalog as a retribution
for lateness and other tardiness, he he…)

I took a class on Philippine film history with my friend and colleague
Rolando Tolentino, and gradually started to learn about the amazingly
rich and multi-faceted film history of my host country. At the same
time, I travelled a lot and made it a point to pick up as many DVDs and
VCDs (an obscure video disk format only in use in Asia) as I could fit
in my backpack in countries like Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia or
Cambodia. Other film scholars and movie buffs that I got to know during
these travels and at various film conferences supported my research by
providing me with copies of hard-t0-get films from their own
collections. And I started to write on the subject, both for academic
and for popular publications.

I never wanted to have a blog. But now I wish I would have started it
four years ago to document this learning process, and write about the
films I saw, the festivals and conferences I attended, the conversations
I had with film critics and colleagues. As I am about to leave the
Philippines and relocate to Cambodia, I finally decided to get started.

I am very grateful that I was given the opportunity to learn about (and
to actually see!) these movies. The films from Southeast Asia are
internationally more or less unknown, but I ended up being quite
fascinated by how these films negotiate the local and the global:
homegrown dramatic and narrative traditions on the one hand, and the
suppossedly international language of cinema on the other hand. In that
sense, they might be among the most important cinematic comments on a
post-colonial and globalized present, and that does not only go for the
contemporary independent films, but also from the movies of the 1950s
and 1960s that often engage in much more direct way with the effects of
colonialism than one would expect from movies that aimed first and
foremost to entertain. There are huge difference in terms of film
culture between the different countries of the region. But to me they
all seem to share the desire to come to terms with the contradiction of
trying to develop a national cinema in a post-national world.

I hope with this blog I can somehow pay back my debt of gratitute for
having access to the slightly esoteric world of Southeast Asian cinema,
and provide a useful service to people interested in cinema from the
region. Amen.

-- 

Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel
Check out my new blog:
THE INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN FILM STUDIES
The Cinema of the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia,
Vietnam, Cambodia et al
southeastasiancinema.wordpress.com