Fields of study can fall into a stage in which, caught between obscurity and broader awareness, writers sense an obligation to reintroduce something that feels familiar. Film sound is one such example, evidenced by the inevitable self-conscious mention by authors that they are addressing an understudied topic, soundtracks overlooked by an ideology of the visible writ large. Southeast Asian cinema is arguably another. Roughly two decades on from the commencement of its growing presence on the world cinema scene, critical studies of these films still harbor a need to reintroduce them to new audiences. The impetus to do so may be necessary as long as knowledge and awareness lag behind those of better known or better established traditions. Nevertheless, Southeast Asian cinema probably requires continual contextualization for a few unique reasons. These circumstances shape the constitution of Southeast Asian Independent Cinema.
The title itself couples together a pair of epistemologically fraught terms. The first is “independent,” which Tilman Baumgärtel and John Lent ably expand on in the introductory and first chapters respectively. Writing ostensibly for Western readers open to acquainting themselves with unfamiliar film traditions, but whose idea of global cinema remains heavily tied to the programs of major film festivals based in cosmopolitan venues, Baumgärtel opens with an anecdote about Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Palm d'Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), before presenting a thumbnail history of contemporary Thai cinema that began with Wisit Sasanatieng's stylized western Tears of the Black Tiger (2000), the nation's first invitee to the famous French festival. Baumgärtel's presumed readers are audiences of “New Wave” and “art-house” films, for whom those terms are clearly defined in critical discourse and exhibition markets. These spectators largely understand their niche of “independent” films against the corporate, hegemonic oligopoly of Hollywood studios.
The term means something else in another context, however. Southeast Asian independent films may be in a sense located in a margin within a margin. As Baumgärtel's characterization of this film culture as “not part of the Grand Narrative of World Cinema” (p. 2) suggests, regular Western consumers of world cinema have to redefine the word. A few things become immediately clear. First, these films are produced with little by way of financial resources. Second, a regionally coherent definition of the cultural mainstream is elusive. It is constituted differently in each country, and frequently involves state, partisan, traditional, or religious politics. Just as Baumgärtel considers the films' scale of production small enough to equate them (questionably) with “microcinema” (p. 3), the histories that they document or reflect could be no more than local micropolitics, so to speak, that stop at national borders.
Nevertheless, that measure of caution and nuance adopted for the concept of “independent” cinema is suspended when Third Cinema is subsequently mooted as a potentially applicable paradigm for the region's filmmaking (p. 6). Etymologically rooted in the Third World, Third Cinema is a critical category coined to describe, politicize, and encourage anti-capitalist, noncommercial, revolutionary film style and practice. Southeast Asian films within the book's purview rarely adhere to those requisite tenets of form, praxis, and ideology. Compared to Third Cinema's Latin American origins, Southeast Asian filmmaking's ties to Marxism are insignificant. Because Baumgärtel only draws the parallel briefly, it would be wrong to belabor this beyond pointing out that Third Cinema is a critical method that is both popular and problematic. The other source of hermeneutic instability within the title, “Southeast Asia” itself, is a geopolitical artifact from Cold War–era area studies, manufactured in concert with the US State Department's anti-communist excursions across the globe. Instead of exploring those contingencies, Baumgärtel builds his theoretical foundation for Southeast Asian Independent Cinema in an early chapter that triangulates Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai. Is it reasonable to hold this book accountable for lacking more self-consciousness? Perhaps not, but it would have complemented if not reinforced Baumgärtel's and Lent's meaningful exposition of “independent” film's many connotations.
The book's sample of films and filmmakers over-represents those from Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and to a lesser extent Malaysia. The selection includes names familiar to those acquainted with the slates of prominent European film festivals: directors such as Weerasethakul, Sasanatieng, Eric Khoo, Tan Pin Pin, Royston Tan, Yasmin Ahmad, and Amir Muhammad. The list may be restrictive but manages to cover germane areas in some nations' political and cultural histories. For example, an essay on Singapore demonstrates how race and class are implicated in the central idea of space in the land-scarce nation-state, while another reveals how nostalgia and historical recuperation are complicated propositions for a country that has been independent for only fifty years. Readers will also be initiated in the significance of realism and the documentary tradition in Indonesia, which is still grappling with the potential of freedom and liberty amidst the legacies of Suharto's regime. And interviews with well-placed members of Malaysia's independent filmmaking collective provide an instructive map of racial and ethnic fault lines in the society's increasingly sectarian politics. Together the chapters provide a helpful roadmap for future research.
The collection conscientiously chooses not to be exclusively academic. Its contributors include filmmakers, popular critics, and artists. A cluster of traditional research essays are followed by creative statements and manifestos, and finally by interviews with activist filmmakers. They lend the book a lively and empirical sense of what is happening on the ground. Alternatively, it can also be interpreted as a symptom of the paucity of work on a group of national cinemas in the process of coming into their own. At a time when Anglo-American film studies is well removed from authorship studies, and when national cinema writing is almost required to be theoretically informed, Southeast Asian Independent Cinema testifies to the state of regional filmmaking as well as film scholarship. For those working on the area, this is a formative but exciting moment.
