Tropics, city and cinema: Introduction to the special issue on cinematic representation of the tropical urban/city
Chua Beng Huat
The essays in this issue transect three very big and loose concepts – tropics, city and cinema. Each signifies a range of meanings that stretch from very narrow specific definition to having determining effects on the minutiae of everyday life. 'Tropics', especially in its adjectival form, narrowly signifies hot weather. Significantly, at this mundane level 'hot weather' immediately 'determines' life. 'Heat' induces 'stupor', thus incapacity to labour. Little wonder then that Lee Kuan Yew, the statesman who helmed the transformation of Singapore from a declining port city to a complex advanced capitalist economy, singled out air-conditioning as the most important invention of the twentieth century (George, 2000). Without it, Singaporeans would be somnambular zombies for a significant part of every afternoon, the frenzy of activity, including work, would be impossible. As for 'city', the concept has never been a coherent physical unit with clear boundaries, as the 'hinterland' is constantly taking on urban qualities and practices in what is also called the 'urbanization of the rural'. Furthermore, with globalization, the reach of cities extends beyond the nation as they link up with the global city network, at different scales and with varying degrees of success. Finally, 'cinema' is a ubiquitous quotidian entertainment; the often air-conditioned and darkened viewing space and the individualized seating provide privacy in the crowd and combine with the action on the big screen to deliver respite from the stresses of daily urban life. However, in the ways a film frames its reality on screen and structures its narration, cinema is unavoidably a mode of representation of 'reality', from documentary realism to allegory to fantasy, in different temporal registers, from the present to imagined future. As 'a new way of encountering reality and a part of reality thereby perceived for the first time' (Shaviro quoted in Clarke, 1997: 2), the ideological effects of cinema resonate beyond the darkened theatre space to provoke critical reflections on the actually existing environment, a necessary prelude to social and political action.
Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore
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The essays in this issue transect three very big and loose concepts – tropics, city and cinema. Each signifies a range of meanings that stretch from very narrow specific definition to having determining effects on the minutiae of everyday life. 'Tropics', especially in its adjectival form, narrowly signifies hot weather. Significantly, at this mundane level 'hot weather' immediately 'determines' life. 'Heat' induces 'stupor', thus incapacity to labour. Little wonder then that Lee Kuan Yew, the statesman who helmed the transformation of Singapore from a declining port city to a complex advanced capitalist economy, singled out air-conditioning as the most important invention of the twentieth century (George, 2000). Without it, Singaporeans would be somnambular zombies for a significant part of every afternoon, the frenzy of activity, including work, would be impossible. As for 'city', the concept has never been a coherent physical unit with clear boundaries, as the 'hinterland' is constantly taking on urban qualities and practices in what is also called the 'urbanization of the rural'. Furthermore, with globalization, the reach of cities extends beyond the nation as they link up with the global city network, at different scales and with varying degrees of success. Finally, 'cinema' is a ubiquitous quotidian entertainment; the often air-conditioned and darkened viewing space and the individualized seating provide privacy in the crowd and combine with the action on the big screen to deliver respite from the stresses of daily urban life. However, in the ways a film frames its reality on screen and structures its narration, cinema is unavoidably a mode of representation of 'reality', from documentary realism to allegory to fantasy, in different temporal registers, from the present to imagined future. As 'a new way of encountering reality and a part of reality thereby perceived for the first time' (Shaviro quoted in Clarke, 1997: 2), the ideological effects of cinema resonate beyond the darkened theatre space to provoke critical reflections on the actually existing environment, a necessary prelude to social and political action.
Interweaving these three concepts – tropics, city and cinema – produces a complex imaginary. For example, the idea of dystopia, which is not encountered in the orderliness – however chaotic in appearance – of urban everyday life, is best projected in futurist terms on the cinema screen; paraphrasing Clarke (1997: 6), the dystopian alter ego of modernity is arguably framed more forcefully in filmic representations of the city than in any other aesthetic form and medium. The complex imaginary defies any attempt to theorize it as a unitary concept. This makes every possible exploration of this imaginary fragmentary, always apprehended from a particular perspective with specific methodological tools. Every essay in this themed issue thus stands as one fragment, whose comparability and connections to each other are to be discovered in the reading of the essays as a 'single' text. That is, instead of conventionally expecting the writer-analyst to cross spatial and cultural boundaries to provide comparative knowledge, comparative knowledge of the cinematic representation of the tropical city is to be derived from the reading, with the authors focusing their analysis on selected films that represent particular cities.
Displacing nature
Among the multiple constellations of meanings that may be derived from the concept of the 'tropics', those connected to 'nature' remain predominant. For example, almost all the essays in an earlier themed issue of this journal on 'Constructing the tropics' (Driver & Yeoh, 2000) focus on 'nature' in the tropics – on colonial imaginations of the tropics as 'lands of great natural abundance, alive with luxuriant vegetation and exotic birds and animals, and blessed with perennially warm climates' (Arnold, 2000: 7), or the flip side, as 'sites of physical risk to the westerner, in the forms of disease, insects, large mammals and vicious tribes' (Naylor, 2000: 50) or, finally, as lands with 'exploitable' natural resources – and including Darwinian naturalist visions (Martins, 2000), climate and masculinity (Duncan, 2000), and a biogeographical construction of the Malay Archipelago (Taylor, 2000).1
Only one essay in 'Constructing the tropics' examines the 'tropical' in urban context; in the ways in which tropical plants (nature) are incorporated into roof gardens and city parks as expressions of what the author calls 'tropical modernism' (Stepan, 2000). Significantly, this incorporation of nature is in effect a displacing of nature from the centre of the imagination of the tropics. And urban planning is one of these procedures of displacement. In urban planning, nature is displaced such that it attains a 'residual' status, inserted after the planners have considered all other functional demands, regardless of the often excessive rhetoric of the need for 'nature' (read: green spaces) in planning discourse. This residual existence is exemplified precisely by 'rooftop' gardens, a 'representation' whose function is to remind us of nature. Other avenues for creating representations of nature through different modes and media of aesthetic practice include cinema, the focus of this themed issue.
Before getting to the concerns of cinema, another effect of displacing the centrality of nature from the tropical imagination needs to be registered. One particular aspect of the colonial European conception of the tropics as its geographical and environmental other (Driver & Yeoh, 2000: 1) is 'a belief in the intrinsic "inferiority" of tropical to European temperate environments' (Arnold, 2000: 7), a presumed inferiority that engendered an ideological assumption of 'the primitivism of the social and cultural systems', the better to facilitate its colonization of the tropics (Duncan, 2000; Naylor, 2000). Displacing nature from the centre of this genealogy of tropical imaginary is thus a necessary step towards what one might say is the 'decolonization' of the tropics in geographical imagination. The tropics must be rid of this western-colonial-centrism and emerge analytically equal to other global regions. The 'city' is an appropriate vehicle to achieve this displacement/decolonization because, as suggested, in the urban/city context, nature is incorporated – substantively and ideationally residual. As an analytic category, 'city in the tropics' is on the same conceptual plain as all cities, unevenness of actual development between cities notwithstanding; the unevenness is to be explained more in terms of history than ideology of 'nature'.
The tropical cinematic city
To bring the city into focus is to foreground the built environment – to take its physicality, including architectural edifices, as the embodiment of accumulated capital (Harvey, 1973: 228) and its infrastructure as facilitator of collective consumption (Castells, 1977: 459–62). A city is never grasped in its entirety, but apprehended in a fragmentary manner through the spaces and places where the daily lives of citizens are enacted and reproduced. In these everyday activities, the abstract unity of the city meets the anthropological reality of the city (de Certeau, 1984: 95). The moments of apprehended fragments are experienced directly, remembered after the fact and/or recorded by different modes and media – memorialized in writing, painting, photography and cinema.
Every 'seeing-perceiving' moment can be likened to a single snapshot; in this sense, a photograph is 'a reproduction of the real' (Heath, 1981: 26). But 'photographic realism' is a thin veil for the work of framing – the construction – of the photographic image itself. Framing is the means through which a photographer, the image-maker, invests the image with meanings, a signifying practice. A given space with its constitutive objects, people and events is rearranged, being either framed in or out, in the 'photographic space'–'geography as given' is transformed into 'geography in photograph', with the 'real' being at risk of being known exclusively through the photograph in an instance of 'imaginative' geography (Schwartz, 1996). The reference to the 'real' is but an alibi for the ideological, the signifying practice. A photograph is therefore always an instance of ideological practice in the precise sense given by Marx, the 'naturalization of the historical' (Barthes, 1972: 109–59).
A movie is a series of photographs moving at 24 frames per second. The constant and sudden, often disjunctive changes are given coherence by a narrative which specifies the sequential placement of the framed images, keeping the images moving in a direction from a beginning to an end (Heath, 1981: 12–13). The aggregated effect of the 'recontextualization of spaces and places within filmic narration' (Natter, 1994: 204) transforms a given city into a 'cinematic city' which re-presents the 'city' in and through a montage of fragmentary images.2 A cinematic city is an instance of what Aiken and Zonn (1994: 20) refer to as 'geography of the mind'–'an ideologically charged cultural creation whereby meanings of place and society are made, legitimized, contested and obscured' (Hopkins, 1994: 47).
Cities are a ubiquitous backdrop for cinemas. Yet, or perhaps precisely because of this ubiquity, David Clarke (1997: 1) writes in the opening of his editorial introduction to the book The Cinematic City: 'So central is the city to film that, paradoxically, the widespread implicit acceptance of its importance has mitigated against an explicit consideration of its actual significance'. In the emerging scholarship in 'Asian' film studies, cities in which films are set are often analytically eclipsed by the ideological preoccupation with the 'nation/national'. For example, studies of mainland Chinese films, which arrived at the global screen with the now famous 'Fifth Generation' directors, including the high stylist Zhang Yimou, generally focus on how the 'nation/national' is ideologically represented (Lu, 1997) through the perennial theme of the authoritarianism (traditional-familial or contemporary-communist) intrinsic to Chinese patriarchal culture (Chen, 2000: 200). This 'national' interest extends to analysis of Hong Kong cinema, threaded through as it is with concerns of 'Chinese' identity and national politics (Zhang, 2004; Berry & Farquhar, 2006).
By focusing on the city, the essays in this themed issue emphasize the modernity of countries and people in the tropics in the age of global capitalism. Together, they reveal the types and levels of ideological work films can do in the context of their production, circulation and consumption in different historical contexts, particularly the present. All the essays show that the inscription of particular ideological interest at the point of production determines to a very significant extent the way the referenced city is transformed into the cinematic city. The cinematic city is ideologically inscribed in a particular manner to partake in the symbolic politics, and often 'realpolitik', that are germane to its local, national and transnational audiences. As the medium through which the 'city' is communicated and disseminated, the cinematic city mediates not only how the city is known, but also how politics is imagined and political problems can be 'resolved'. The multiple levels of meanings that a cinematic city can evoke for different audiences defy any suggestion of a singular focus or reading of any particular film.
The essays
This themed issue is motivated by the desire to displace a temperate-centric, colonial-interested discourse of the 'tropics/tropical', in which a concept of nature is central, so as to free the tropics/tropical, particularly tropical Asia in this instance, from western-centric discourse as an act of decolonization of the mind. In examining the representation of the urban/city in cinema, the essays focus on the way 'tropicality' is ideologically thematized, or is not. Where it is thematized, analysis discloses the intentionality behind the way 'nature' is constructed/represented for a particular ideological purpose. 'Nature' loses its givenness. Where nature is not given any particular attention by the filmmakers, the salience of 'tropicality' is minimal. In such instances, diegetic attention shifts to contemporary urban lives, opening up and bringing to the fore the multiple ways in which life in tropical Asia may be represented beyond the limited and restricting imaginary dominated by 'nature'. As in all instances, representation of the city in each frame and in an entire film narrative, in documentary mode or in fiction, is never innocent. Analysis of the cinematic city discloses the filmmaker's ideological interests that have been inscribed in the diegetic spaces and narratives which intervene in the perception, knowledge and subsequent action of its audience/citizens.
One mode of western imagination of the 'tropics' is as a place of 'romance', never without blue sky, light clouds and gentle breeze that sways the trees. It is therefore a place for 'escape' from life in the West, be it from the drudgery of the mundane or from a past that demands forgetting. This romantic tropics, Wendy Gan (2008) demonstrates, can be found in 1950s Hollywood representations of Hong Kong as a metonymic for the 'exotic orient'. This intentionally mistaken construction is in sharp contrast to Hong Kong's real climate of seasonal typhoons that wreak havoc with the life of the city annually. Perhaps surprisingly, similar romantic representations of the tropical are found in Hong Kong cinema of the same period. However, here the representation was commercially determined, as the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia then constituted (and continue to be) a very substantial portion of the transnational audience of Hong Kong cinema; indeed, much of the funding for the Hong Kong film studios was generated from Southeast Asia, in particular Singapore (Wong, 2006). In contrast to 'romance', in Return to Pontianak, lush tropical vegetation is evoked by the film's Singaporean director as an irrepressible margin that haunts contemporary Singapore (Siddique Harvey, 2008), which in the process of urbanizing its population and modernizing its economy has tried to suppress its hot and humid tropicality through modern air-conditioning.
Untamed nature is not the only margin of modern Singapore. Marginalization is a social phenomenon inscribed on the underprivileged inhabitants of the city. Such marginalized inhabitants, including low end migrant workers such as domestic maids from developing Asia, are 'seen but not noticed' by those more successful and respectable. Theirs is a spectral existence in urban Singapore. Although essential to the Singapore economy, their spectral presence renders them socially dispensable, readily replaceable by yet another spectral body. This social dispensability is brought to its ultimate expression in The Maid, in which a Singaporean huaren couple plan the ritual murder of their new Filipina maid, to transform and transport her as a ghost-bride for their mentally handicapped dead son during the annual Hungry Ghosts Festival.3 The social dispensability is emphasized by the fact that the couple have already committed an undiscovered murder of another Filipina maid earlier in the diegetic narrative.
Sophie Siddique Harvey's analysis of the spectral urban provides a conceptual transition in this themed issue. The remaining four essays are set in various cities in the 'tropical' zone. As the characteristics of the natural environment are not featured as themes in any of these films, 'tropical' is only denotative of the geographical location of the cities. The films focus on the unfolding social and political lives enacted within the city as a given setting. Continuing the marginalization theme, the marginalization of individuals and groups is often made highly visible through spatial differentiation. Parts of the city come to be known to all as 'enclaves', such as ethnic enclaves and enclaves of disrepute, where multiple social deviances are concentrated with agglomerative negative imaginaries and effects. Such marginal spaces, however, are resources for filmmakers to project counter-representations and critiques of the mainstream imaginary of the city. Independent filmmakers of Malaysia, Khoo Gaik Cheng (2008) demonstrates, have used marginalized places and spaces in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, for just such critique, disrupting official and mainstream triumphal narratives of economic development and progress of the Malaysian nation.
The essays of Tess Do and Carrie Tarr (2008) and Ashley Carruthers (2008) both analyze cinematic and music video representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. The turbulent history of this Vietnamese city is marked by its very name change: from being Saigon of the colonial era to being named after the 'father of the nation' of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam brings in train the history of the revolutionary wars, first against the colonial French and then the protracted civil war between the communist north and the US-supported south. Little wonder that films set in this city would have history and politics as their main themes and focus. Do and Tarr nicely select for analysis a set of four films that together trace the political and social transition and transformation of colonial Saigon to 'socialist' Ho Chi Minh City, with its incipient, if not fully fledged capitalism. Carruthers' essay analyses how Vietnamese musicals and music videos produced outside Vietnam by post-civil war Vietnamese diasporic enterprises are received/consumed by a diasporic Vietnamese audience in Australia. In a community where biographies of exile are synchronous with the history of the triumph of the 'evil' communist regime in the 'homeland', a very complex set of sentiments are deployed to frame the demands for and reception of how the 'homeland', including Ho Chi Minh City is to be represented.
The final essay takes the politics of cinema beyond the representational into the realm of actual politics of the nation and its constitutive regions. Although India is known to the world of films through Hindi movies from Bombay, the Indian film industry is made up of regional cinemas, including Telegu films, a major constituent of south Indian cinema. S.V. Srinivas (2008) shows that the history of the Telegu film industry is inextricably tied to shifts in the regional political history of southern India; thus the production centre for Telegu films was shifted from Madras (now Chennai), the capital of Tamil Nadu State, to Hyderabad, the capital city of the state of Andhra Pradesh, formed in 1956. The formation of the new state also resulted in a bisection of the city into new and old, a division frequently represented in Telegu films with the old city as 'the site of criminal activity and backwardness' (Srinivas, 2008: 92). However, as Srinivas demonstrates, the politics of the new state is by no means settled and divisions continue to multiply, divisions that constitute both source and representation in different genres of contemporary Telegu cinema, with occasional inversions of the old city as a fantasy utopian space.
Conclusion
Since the 1990s, an emergent academic Asian film studies has focused attention predominantly on Chinese films from the People's Republic of China, the Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan, and Korean films. The relative insignificance of regional South Asian cinema is due to the absence of international audiences, while that of Southeast Asian cinemas is partly a consequence of the small number of productions annually from the respective film industries. The tropical location of the cities in which these films are produced, set and cinematically represented allows them to be discursively organized under the trope of 'tropical urban', which does not imply any substantive comparability, let alone similarities, between the cities in question. What the essays in this issue analyze are the modes of cinematic representation of cities in the tropical belt, of 'cinematic cities'. Such representations may be read as ideological contestations and resolutions of issues – spatial, political and cultural – that are germane to the local political and cultural context, from city to region to nation. In the essays, we see different sets of representations being deployed as means of mediating the audience's knowledge, reflections and concerns with the cities in question and/or in which they reside. In projecting imaginaries of the city that are different from conventional mainstream representations, such ideological representations and mediations contain the potential for reimagining and reconfiguration of the urban/city in question.
Endnotes
1 For a comprehensive study of colonial understanding of nature in Southeast Asia, see Savage (1984).
2 Hopkins (1994: 50) puts this point in general terms: 'The cinematic place is not, therefore, limited to the world represented on the screen (a geography in film), but the meanings constructed through the experience of film (a geography of film)'.
3 The term huaren is used in Singapore to refer to Chinese ethnicity to avoid confusion with 'Chinese' as national identity, which refers strictly to citizens of the People's Republic of China. I adopt this Singaporean term denotatively here, that is, without any connotation of presumed cultural identity of specific Chineseness.
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Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
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