Wednesday 30 September 2009

ChitraKarKhana: Khirkeeyaan


Featured above is Khirkeeyaan: Episode01: streets (YouTube URL)

Khirkeeyaan (khirkee-window / yaan-vehicle)
KhirkeeYaan is an exploration of an open-circuit tv system as a local area network communication, micro-media generation and feedback device.

It employed security apparatus,otherwise used for surveillance and 'secret' use. Television sets and cheap surveillance equipment, coupled with an RF modulator, mics, audio mixer and metres of coax cable were laid out to form collaborative conversation systems for the 'use' of the community-at-large. TV's and electricity, consent and participation were sourced on-site(s) often drawing from a multitude of sources.

Four sets of cameras,TVs and mics were planted within a 200 metre radius of each other. The cameras sat on top of the TVs and the audio-video from the four views were connected to a quad processor and audio mixer. This quadrant comprising of sound and image from all four locations was fed back to the TVs, allowing the subject/viewer/performer/audience to interact with others in the frame. Video became the ‘site’ for these interactions and conversations.

ChitraKarKhana’s prior media projects have employed cheap and accessible DIY video and editing software, hardware and skills to produce on-site 'televised' media. This project pushes that envelope of site,community media and technology further. Importantly,here the 'filmmaking' is automatic, made possible through eye-level communication, real-time feedback and the absense of cameraman and editor. The technology is even cheaper; no computers and DV technology, but commercially applied CCTV and CATV equipmnet.

The 'televisation' produced conversations, performance, and rapidly-evolving subjectivities, all happening in 'local' time. The 7 episodes were generated through 7 sets of installations in different neighbourhoods in and around Khirkee Extension, New Delhi over 3 weeks, during Shaina Anand's associate residency at Khoj studios, April, 2006.

KhirkeeYaan Episodes in OGG (right click to download):


Links:
evilareve's YouTube channel
ChitraKarKhana main site
KhirkeeYaan site

(All info above from KhirkeeYaan)

Monday 28 September 2009

Baul Without Boundaries

What kind of video geek doesn't like online film festivals? Those with bad internet connection that's who!
Oh well. Free wifi is free wifi. So it took a while to get me my Indian music fix from this video featured in Culture Unplugged:



Baul Without Boundaries : Director: Sutapa Deb | Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2009
Synopsis: Baul is one of the few widely known and appreciated types of folk music in Bengal. Baul is not only a kind of music, it is basically a Bengali religious sect. The members of the sect are themselves called Bauls, and the songs they sing are named for them, Baul-gAn (Baul songs). The filmmaker travels to various parts of Bengal searching if the golden days of Baul singers are over.


Links:
Original URL
Filmmaker-journalist Sutapa Deb's Wikipedia page

Dictionary of War: Piracy

Tilman Baumgärtel on Piracy, from the 2008 Taipei Biennial edition of the Dictionary of War:



Tilman Baumgärtel
Taipei, October 25th 2008, 11:00 - 11:30

Watch Video - Download Torrent

This paper looks at the phenomenon of media piracy on the internet and in real space. As I live in the Philippines, I will focus on the piracy here, but my remarks will not be limited to the local situation. I will look at the phenomenon of piracy as such and try and outline some observations about how piracy works. First of all, I will look at piracy as a means of distributing films, and - drawing on interviews with some traders of pirated media material - on how the piracy market functions in the Philippines. I will also discuss the effect that the access to quality films has on the local film culture and media literacy in general and on the teaching of film in particular. Then I will discuss the unprecedented rise of media piracy in the last couple of years as one of the most prominent issues of the "digital millennium". The "Pirates of the New World Image Order" (Patricia R. Zimmermann) are not only piggy-backing on the new globalized economy that has arisen due to the world-wide deregulation and liberalization of markets in the 1980s and 1990s. They are also profiteers of a number of technological developments in the computer sciences such as the international expansion of the Internet, which has challenged traditional notions of copy right and intellectual property on a very fundamental level.
Related links:
Original URL
Tilman Baumgärtel's homepage and Southeast Asian cinema blog

Saturday 26 September 2009

Karacoma: I.K.T.S



I.K.T.S by Karacoma
2nd Camera-Operator by Shopian Said
Assistant Director by Saiful Lizam
Lyrics by Sam Siren
Music by Sam/Mawie/Adi/Jaz
Recording Engineer by Mawie
Mixed by Simon Efemey at Chapel Studio, Lincolnshire
Mixing Engineer by Marcel Legane

everything else by Adam Groves of Visual Dimensions



the mervert: BUZZ!
Oi! So have you seen the Karacoma video by that Adam Groves dude?
http://www.adam-groves.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLemQfLffiE
fara fara wong wong: dork!
yeh. just did.
the mervert: Well? What do you think? Should we put it on the blog?
fara fara wong wong: mwahahahahaha!
go! it's cute... LAH! hihihihihihi!
you say lah in brunei right? or is that just a sing thing?
the mervert: Bitchard.
But don't you think it's a bit rough?
fara fara wong wong: it's cuuuute... brunei video babies making baby steps...
making itti-witti metal videos
and it's METAL damnit >:-)
metal in brunei! so exotic!
so cuuuute...
oh! and i just saw that playlist aljazeera episode on metal in the middle east (aka west asia!)
the mervert: Finally! Told you to see it months ago!
fara fara wong wong: "why heavy metal? we live in heavy metal." cue bullets and bombs. heh! that's da shit!
the mervert: Told you you'd like it!
Anyway... Actually pleasantly surprised at least some of the "veteran" Brumetal scenesters are still up and about.
And making videos too!
fara fara wong wong: ooooh.
aaaah.
yeh. so fringe.
so this adam dude is a white guy?
the mervert: I'm not sure. I think he's half-half.
He seems prolific. Hoping to talk to him before I fly next month.
fara fara wong wong: checking his blog.
he english write weird like... LAH!
the mervert: Must be local then (?)... Fascinating character. His punk band's not bad too.
fara fara wong wong: don't exoticize him!
the mervert: I'm not! You started with that pun.
So do we put this on the blog?
fara fara wong wong: i said yes already.
you're being stupid mervert.
the mervert: Don't call me "Mervert"!
fara fara wong wong: but you are a mervert!
the mervert: Aiyo!
Heh!
So you think it's up to par?
fara fara wong wong: up to par? weh?
we have standards?!
the mervert: Ermmm...
Got me there.
I told the esteemed Master Ocampo to come up with some smart-ish mission-vision for the blog project. But...
Well...
Guess we're all lazy bastards.
fara fara wong wong: heh! koala boy needs to get laid...LAH!
the mervert: Stop with the LAHs. It's getting old.
fara fara wong wong: lalalalalalalalalah!
anyway, also saw adam's apartment thriller.
it's not too bad for a short.
adam's got a thing for beating up chicks huh?
nasty!
brunei bdsm?!
the mervert: Hah! As opposed to Brunei BSB?! >:-)
fara fara wong wong: and that jasmin chick's quite cute too.
the mervert: Yes, she is. Heard she's an RBA FA.
fara fara wong wong: aha!
see!
see! you are a mervert!
lalalalalalalalalah!
the mervert: Bitch...
You mentioned! I'm just seconding the motion.
fara fara wong wong: hook line and sinker~
foo!
the mervert: :-p
fara fara wong wong: ah. so.
i'm starting to have serious doubts about what yer actually "researching" there
hihihihihihihihi
the mervert: Hey! Don't dis.
This is serious shit I'm doing.
fara fara wong wong: so you say.
hey! i gotta sleep, man.
if you're not gonna put this on the blog then i will!
i'm gonna put in this little chat of ours too.
the mervert: Don't! Not yet!
At least edit it!
fara fara wong wong: too late!
YOU can ALWAYS edit it off afterwards, you know!
the mervert: No. Lazy bitch. Don't do that. That would look so unprofessional...
so...
uh... blog-like.
fara fara wong wong: it IS a blog.

more linkies:
YouTube URL
the Visual Dimensions channel
Karacoma's Myspace
Karacoma's Leading To Rock page with other Brunei rockers!

Wednesday 23 September 2009

ANACBANUA trailer

Based on contemporary anlong, a Pangasinan-language poetic form, ANACBANUA (The Child of the Sun) is the first digital feature film in the Pangasinan language.

This film will have its Philippine premiere during the 11th Cinemanila International Film Festival at Taguig City beginning from the second week of October 2009. 

Filmmaker Christopher Gozum, a Pangasinan native hailing from Bayambang, finished part of postproduction work for this film in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he works as a videographer. Gozum's last work, "Surreal Random MMS Texts for a Mother, a Sister, and a Wife who longs for You: Landscape with Figures" (2008), filmed almost entirely with a Nokia cellular phone, was produced during his first year abroad as a Philippine migrant worker in Riyadh. This too displayed Gozum's poetic penchant, basing the narrative on Carlos Bulosan's “Landscape with Figures,” one of the poems from Letter from America (1942), which detailed Bulosan's own biographical situation as a migrant Filipino in America.

The embedded video of the ANACBANUA trailer below may take a while to load. You can go straight to the original ExposureRoom link to see the film in lower resolutions for lower bandwidths, or download, embed, and link the film trailer to your own website.



Trailer
Duration:  00:04:23
Definition:  SD
Dimensions:  768 x 576
Size:  305.59MB
File Type:.flv
Download link: ExposureRoom

Related links:

Tuesday 22 September 2009

Yasmin Ahmad’s Films: facts about Amir Muhammad’s new book

From the KLue blog:

Yasminahmadsfilms_big_std

Yasmin Ahmad’s Films: facts about Amir Muhammad’s new book

Friday, 18/09/09 - 17:18PM Filed in Blog by zedeck


The world of Malaysian moving pictures, aside from its recent triumphs, have also been afflicted by a singular tragedy: the passing of beloved filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad on 26 July.
It seemed as if the entire nation went into mourning. There were heartfelt tributes from fellow filmmakers, the press, members of the public. More unscrupulous bodies, such as Kosmo!and Mangga Online, published exposes of Yasmin's private life - and were roundly (and rightly) criticised for it.
Three months on, we are still mulling over what Yasmin's films mean to us, and what sort of effect her life - and death - has had / will have on Malaysia.
Enter Amir Muhammad's Yasmin Ahmad's Films. When we ask him what, exactly, his new book is about, Amir says: "I want to keep it a secret."
However, he is kind enough to drop a hint: a tribute of Yasmin he wrote for Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope. Go read! The article's postscript reads:
"He decided to write the forthcoming book Yasmin Ahmad's Films (Matahari Books, ISBN 9789834484514) after realizing this article leaves many things unsaid."
~
So the book is new stuff by you? When was it written?
Yes it's by me, and it's over 60,000 words long!
It was written entirely in the fasting month, in two weeks, from 2 to 15 September. We are now in the proofreading stage. It consists of 8 chapters - and the names of the chapters are written right there, on the doughnut that is on the cover.
Where did the book come from? What prompted you to write it?
[When Yasmin passed away] I was depressed and even angry. But depression and anger alone won't make the type of book that I wanted to write. I was then commissioned by Cinema Scope to write an article about her in August, and after I finished it I felt that I had much, much more to say.
I was prompted to really start the book when I heard about another death, of a Filipino friend of mine named Alexis Tioseco. He was a film critic, only 29, and I think he would have wanted to read it - although it certainly isn't an orthodox book of film criticism.
I didn't sleep at night for two whole weeks and I even fell ill, but I went on with it.
How much is the book going for?
On Amazon.com it's USD20! Local price, we don't know yet. Depends on how many pages, and what type of paper we choose.
My royalties go to the newly established Mercy-Yasmin Ahmad Fund for Children, so I don't want the price to be too low.
When will it launch?
It's already set to launch in Seoul on 19 November. Some nice folks thought it should be launched there, at an international conference on multiculturalism and film - so who am I to refuse? So I said yes, even though the book wasn't even fully written yet. But hey, all writers need deadlines.
Back in Malaysia, I would love to do a series of events based on the book, in colleges and so on. Representatives from Mercy will also be joining in to encourage volunteerism among the yoof.
~

Our interests are piqued. Once again: Amir Muhammad's Yasmin Ahmad's Films is already available for pre-order on Amazon.com!



Go here for the original link.

Friday 18 September 2009

Radioactive Sago Project: Alcohol

What the hell happened to this blog?! I leave you two geeks alone and you turn it into a borefiesta!
You guys relax, have a beer, have some Alcohol:

ALCOHOL
Music by Radioactive Sago Project
Directed by Mark Galvez & Dustin Uy
Produced by Mina Caliguia
An Artfarm Asia Production

This track is from the Eraserheads tribute album UltraElectroMagneticJam (2006).

Links:
Youtube channels of two Artfarmers: emmshin and dcloud (aka Dustin Uy, one of the co-directors of this here vid)
Artfarm Asia (currently inactive)
Radioactive Sago Project: myspace, blog, wiki

Cardboard monuments:

City, language and 'nation' in contemporary Telugu cinema

S. V. Srinivas
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Correspondence to S. V. Srinivas (email: svsrinivas99@gmail.com)
KEYWORDS
city • Telugu cinema • language • region • identity • representation

ABSTRACT
This paper looks at how the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and production centre of the Telugu film industry, has been represented in recent popular cinema. It outlines the history of a new mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to delocalize the city. Criminalization of the city's older inhabitants, who are marked by either religion (Islam) or their 'non-standard' dialect of Telugu, often accompanies this move. In the process, any claims that they might have on the city are delegitimized. Okkadu, a major commercial hit, restaged the country versus city dichotomy and the antagonisms complicated by cultural and political tensions between the three constituent regions of Andhra Pradesh. This film follows the late 1990s trend in the film industry to recreate entire cityscapes within the studio, ensuring that location shooting in busy city streets and neighbourhoods merely returns us to the grandeur of lavish and 'realistic' studio sets. It reconstructs Hyderabad's most recognizable monument, the 400-year-old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood. This paper looks at how and why the city of Hyderabad, especially its older parts, for which Charminar is a metonym, is rendered into a fantasy space in the film.

References  |  Full Text: HTMLPDF (Size: 114K)  | Related Articles | Citation Tracking

The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 87 - 100
Published Online: 13 Mar 2008
Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City:

The Lover/L’Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung cu and Bargirls/Gái nhay
Tess Do 1 and Carrie Tarr 2
1 School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
2 School of Performance and Screen Studies, Kingston University, London, UK
Correspondence to Carrie Tarr (email: c.tarr@kingston.ac.uk)

KEYWORDS
Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City • Vietnamese cinema •  Đổi mới (Renovation) • cinematic city • globalization • nostalgia

ABSTRACT

This article addresses representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City in four films made since Đổi mới, the opening up of Vietnam to western influences, initiated in 1986. The Lover/L’Amant (1992) is a Franco-British heritage film which reconstructs the city from a Eurocentric neocolonial perspective, while Cyclo/Xích lô (1995), a French-funded film made by a France-based Vietnamese filmmaker, is a contemporary poetic thriller which treats the city expressively as the site of present-day corruption and violence. The nostalgia evident in these two ‘outsider’ films is contrasted with the more complex views of the city in two state-funded low-budget ‘insider’ films by local Vietnamese filmmakers, Collective Flat/Chung cu (1999) and Bargirls/Gái nhay (2003); the first, an intellectual fable set in the decade or so following reunification/Independence in 1975 which recalls an attempt at collective living, the second, a hugely popular treatment of contemporary urban realities, both corrupt and progressive. Examining how the mise-en-scène and narratives of the city differ from film to film, the essay takes the representation of the city through changing historical, political, social and economic times, from colonial-orientalist Saigon to corrupt, capitalist Ho Chi Minh City via the slow degeneration of the postwar socialist/collectivist experiment. In so doing, it confirms the importance of the films’ moments and contexts of production in the construction of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City as a cinematic ‘city-text’.

References  |  Full Text: HTMLPDF (Size: 233K)  | Related Articles | Citation Tracking

The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 55 - 67
Published Online: 13 Mar 2008
Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak


Sophia Siddique Harvey 
Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
Correspondence to Sophia Siddique Harvey (email: sophfeline@earthlink.net)
KEYWORDS
spectral tropicality • Singapore • The Maid • Return to Pontianak • horror • folk beliefs • the uncanny

ABSTRACT

Contemporary, postcolonial Singapore has tamed, managed, and essentially disavowed its tropicality, aptly captured symbolically as the 'air-conditioned nation'. This essay traces how two recent Singapore horror films, The Maid (2005) and Return to Pontianak (2001), evoke the 'return of the repressed' as a form of haunting that I call 'spectral tropicality'. The films image and imagine this spectral return through unruly bodies (citizen subjects, female domestic workers, ghosts and vampire-ghosts) and uncanny landscapes (the jungle and city). In particular, the films and this analysis examine two sociocultural spectres lurking beneath Singapore as a tropical urban city-nation: the female domestic worker (The Maid) and ethnoracial folk beliefs (The Maid and Return to Pontianak). The Maid features the Hungry Ghosts Festival in the Chinese religious calendar, ghost marriages and an engagement with yin and yang energies, while Return to Pontianak deals with Malay folk beliefs of semangat ('life force'), and the pontianak, a female vampire-ghost. The Maid attempts to integrate Chinese folk beliefs into contemporary Singapore's cityscape, particularly the architecturally conserved Chinatown shophouses, while Return to Pontianak displaces Malay folk beliefs onto the tropical forest, which is mapped as a threatening other(ed) space and serves as Singapore's tropical doppelganger. Both films suggest that these folk beliefs have an unruly presence within the state's seemingly harmonious and meritocratic ethnoracial ideologies.

References  |  Full Text: HTMLPDF (Size: 103K)  | Related Articles | Citation Tracking

The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 24 - 33
Published Online: 13 Mar 2008
Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Tropical Hong Kong:

Narratives of absence and presence in Hollywood and Hong Kong films of the 1950s and 1960s
Wendy Gan
School of English, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Correspondence to Wendy Gan (email: wchgan@hkucc.hku.hk)
KEYWORDS
Hong Kong • Southeast Asia • film • regionalization • exoticism • tropical

ABSTRACT

Despite being subtropical, Hong Kong, in both Hollywood and Hong Kong films of the 1950s and 1960s, is often filmically represented as tropical. This subtle climatic elision, I argue, holds a particular political valence that varies according to filmic tradition. In Hollywood narratives, Hong Kong's tropicality is a means to exoticize and, ultimately, marginalize the realities of the local. It is a way to turn Hong Kong's physical presence into an absence. In Hong Kong films in that same cold war environment, the relative blandness of the city is an attempt to realign its film industry with the free nations of Southeast Asia. For Hong Kong films, the strategy of tropicalization was thus a means to turn away from China and redefine Hong Kong as part of a network of capitalist, modern, overseas Chinese cities located in the sunny tropics of Southeast Asia.

 References  |  Full Text: HTMLPDF (Size: 120K)  | Related Articles | Citation Tracking

The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 8 - 23
Published Online: 13 Mar 2008
Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Tropics, city and cinema

I shall be reposting more abstracts and links to the full texts featured in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Volume 29 Issue 1 (March 2008). Chua Beng Huat's introductory essay in this issue will explain:


Tropics, city and cinema: Introduction to the special issue on cinematic representation of the tropical urban/city
Chua Beng Huat
Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Correspondence to Chua Beng Huat (email: soccbh@nus.edu.sg)

 References  |  Full Text: HTMLPDF (Size: 78K)  | Related Articles | Citation Tracking

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.



To see more of the above text, and many more like it, go here and here:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd