Feminist Documentaries in Singapore
Feminist Documentaries in Singapore
By Liow Xin Li
Abstract
The study of the documentary genre has been particularly generative in feminist film scholarship since the 1980s. The narrative form and content of feminist documentaries, including the entire filmmaking process, are particularly effective in raising awareness about women’s issues and other social problems in order to galvanise political change. In this project, I mobilise theories of the feminist documentary to understand how Singaporean documentaries offer viable gestures of feminist resistance and effect social change, especially in a media landscape as repressive as Singapore’s. I argue that state ideology in Singapore outlines the boundaries of national discourse in such a way that has limited national imaginaries to linear configurations, as well as silenced and marginalised alternative voices a bid to maintain sole authorship of the country’s history and to consolidate political authority. As such, I posit that documentaries function as a politically effective avenue for expressing the marginal, and expanding our configurations of the national imaginary. In particular, I focus on Sandi Tan’s Shirkers (2016), Eva Tang’s The Songs We Sang (2015), and Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore GaGa, arguing that they articulate various gestures of resistance to repressive state ideology, as well as carve out pathways in navigating Singapore’s pernicious political landscape.
Introduction
The increased focus on the documentary genre as an effective vehicle for articulating feminist concerns and enacting effective political resistance marked a turn in feminist film scholarship in the late 1970s (White 125). With its ‘alleged superlative grip on truth and transparency,’ the documentary genre’s ability to realistically depict women’s material experiences articulated new ways of ‘understanding and naming’ the historical marginalisation and oppression of women, foregrounding the voices of erased and marginalised women at crucial points in history (Warren 2; Lesage ‘The Political Aesthetics’ 515). In the 1970s to 1980s, however, feminist scholars neglected the documentary genre due to debates surrounding documentary realism, arguing that realist documentaries replicated reality faithfully and ‘naively,’ and were thus ‘complicit with ideologies of patriarchy and capitalism’ (Warren iv). Only in the late 1980s did the genre gain traction once again (Walker and Waldman 3). This was in part due to the increasing accessibility of VHS cameras, which led to more self-produced documentaries, as well as how the entire process of making documentaries effectively manifested feminist aspirations of enacting cultural and structural resistance against not only the patriarchy but oppressive, dominant power structures like racism and capitalism in general (Lesage ‘Feminist Documentaries’ 2; White 129). This shift came at a point where feminist film scholarship had seemingly hit a rut in its consistent theorising of the ideological, psychoanalytic and semiotic aspects of cinema from the 1950s to 1960s, which limited criticism to the realm of ‘textual analysis and subject positioning’ (White 125). Within such a context feminist film theory thus expanded beyond a narrative analysis of cultural texts to include material filmmaking practices as a politically effective mode of structural resistance. As White notes, ‘women’s film production has been the most prominent model of resistance and opposition to the status quo ... being a constant reference and dynamic ground for theoretical work’ (125). At the same time, feminist documentaries expanded beyond critiquing gendered oppression specifically to incorporate a broad resistance against dominant, oppressive ideologies and societal power imbalances, which are often enacted along the intersecting axes of gender, race, class and sexuality, etc., by various social actors and institutions.
I turn to three Singaporean documentaries in light of these concerns: Eva Tang’s The Songs We Sang (2015), Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore GaGa (2005) and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers (2016) to examine how they manifest feminist aspirations of enacting effective political resistance towards dominant power structures and oppressive state ideology. I single out the state in particular because, in Singapore, the state is the dominant force outlining the boundaries of political and public life, engineering linear historical narratives and marginalising alternative historical accounts in order to legitimise its political rule (Harvey 85; Loh 6). I refer to the state and the People’s Action Party (‘PAP’) interchangeably in light of the PAP’s hegemonic political authority over the city-state ever since the country’s independence in 1965 (Harvey 85). Such hegemony is consolidated in a variety of ways, the indoctrination of The Singapore Story being one example of it. Briefly, The Singapore Story is the ‘official’ account of Singapore’s history as narrated from the perspective of the ruling elite, which has been inducted as part of Singapore’s education system since 1997 in a bid to ensure that young Singaporeans embrace the narrative of the nation-building project (Barr and Skrbiš 35). In order to serve its ideological and political ends, the state has claimed sole authorship of the country’s history and become the official articulators of politics, silencing alternative accounts of Singapore’s history and non-conforming expressions of national and political identity (Loh 6; Tan ‘Choosing What To Remember’ 233). In a psychoanalytical reading of Singapore’s political culture, academic Kenneth Paul Tan writes:
‘The politically emasculating state assumes the superior status and controlling position of the patriarch — originating, elaborating and defending the “law of the Father” that has taken the form of an official national discourse that defines the conditions of possibility for what can be legitimately thought, expressed, and communicated in Singapore.’ (‘Who’s Afraid of Catherine Lim’ 48)
As such, it is imperative that films and cultural texts work to destabilise such repressive impulses, work to provoke historical and political consciousness, and offer alternative conceptualisations of power.
I focus in particular on Singaporean documentaries because the documentary genre remains an understudied aspect in Singapore film academic scholarship, and because the genre holds great potential for effective feminist resistance against oppressive ideology. The fact that the above three documentaries have achieved local and international acclaim points to their success in realising to some extent their feminist potential. By examining these documentaries not only on the level of their narrative content and form, but also their position in the larger ecosystem of the local film industry, I argue that they offer viable gestures of resistance and pathways to navigating a politically repressive landscape. Shirkers’ non-chronological, non-linear narrative form offers alternative ways of understanding time and history, while The Songs We Sang articulates erased histories and silenced voices in ways that provoke social consciousness. Singapore GaGa circumvents dominant film distribution and circulation traditions, carving out pathways for independent films and creating opportunities for collective engagement: characteristics of feminist filmmaking. To this end, I will analyse these documentaries within a feminist analytical framework that is tied to methods of resistance, liberation and emancipation from oppressive power structures.
Documentary and Feminist Film Theory
In the late 1970s, an increasing focus on the documentary genre emerged, theorising that actual, material filmmaking practice was a politically effective mode of resistance (White 129). In ‘Imagining Impact: Documentary Film and the Production of Political Effects,’ Meg McLagan points out that the ‘different modalities across multiple platforms and networks’ that social and political documentaries now exist in constitute an ‘alternative space of investigation, debate, and active question of traditional channels of knowledge production and validation’ (306). Filmmakers could now circumvent traditional pathways of circulation in the industry and overcome financial obstacles without compromising their level of outreach. For example, the emergence of digital outlets such as social media platforms and video-on-demand (VOD) meant that documentarians no longer needed to secure screenings in major theatres in order to reach their target audience or to be financially viable. Furthermore, the availability of documentaries on video-hosting websites and on portable DVD formats also meant that documentarians could more directly engage with their target audience via various online and physical avenues. Virtually, documentarians could attach hyperlinks to specific social organisation websites on their video-hosting platforms; physically, they could approach the audience after screenings to introduce such organisations, as well as other avenues and opportunities through which they could take concrete action, thus moving them from ‘passive viewers to active agents of change’ (Verellen 7). This is especially pertinent to my analysis of Singapore GaGa because the film was similarly circulated by Tan Pin Pin out of theatres and in school auditoriums, creating opportunities for students to engage affectively with the film.
On the production side, a documentary requires gathering of archival material, securing interviewees, searching for locations, etc., which create ample opportunities for interaction among producers, participants, activists, decision-makers and citizens, ultimately stitching together a ‘heterogenous range of actors from disparate realms who have no inherent existence as unified community except through the mediation of film’ (McLagan 316). The ‘effective construction of such a community’ through the medium of documentary production thus reinscribes the political and historical significance of a social issue or phenomenon that may have been marginalised by dominant narratives and power structures, and could even be mobilised for social action, thus marking a politically effective space for resistance (White 129). This is particularly relevant to The Songs We Sang, as Eva Tang, in the production of her documentary on Singapore’s Chinese folk-song culture xinyao, staged a public concert at Bras Basah Complex in 2014, which had stitched together, albeit briefly, a unified community of xinyao enthusiasts.
Content-wise, the documentary genre proves especially effective in provoking social consciousness and enacting social change as well. A crucial figure in feminist documentarian studies, Vietnamese-American filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha argues in her essay ‘Documentary Is/Not A Name’ for the sociopolitical function of the feminist documentary as one that resists the totalisation of meaning by figures of subjectivity and authority. Her documentary Reassemblage (1982) focuses on not ‘speaking for’ the Senegalese women she is documenting, but ‘speaking nearby.’ The focus on centring the voices of the documentary subjects instead of trying to impose meaning on their narratives and histories is crucial for Minh-ha. For her, the desire to ‘capture raw, unfiltered reality’ and ‘[pursue] naturalism’ characteristic of social documentaries is politically ineffective because the film-maker is positioned as the ‘almighty voice-giver, whose position of authority in the production of meaning continues to go unchallenged, skilfully masked as it is by its righteous mission’ (83). Documentarian techniques such as the voice-of-god narration exemplifies attempts to predetermine meaning, which often speaks for and over the actual subjects of the documentaries. Ultimately, this only reifies the power hierarchy between the subject and object, filmmaker and film object (Minh-ha 85).
On the other hand, the feminist documentary and filmmaker is aware of the artifice of the genre, and recognises that their position as a source of reference is not the only single figure of authority and Truth, but only one among many others. In Minh-ha’s words: ‘meaning can therefore be political only when it does not let itself be easily stabilised, and when it does not rely on any single source of authority, but, rather, empties or decentralizes it’ (84). The feminist documentary does not replace one source of authority (the Master ideology) with another (their own counter-ideology), but seeks to challenge ‘the very constitution of authority’ (89). This reading of the feminist documentary is crucial to understanding The Songs We Sang and Shirkers as documentaries that embed methods and narratives of resistance against the status quo.
State Ideology in Singapore: Linearity and Erasure of Histories
Before I analyse the three documentaries, I first elucidate how state narratives are constituted in hierarchical, linear terms, in ways that demarcate the boundaries of national discourse and erase alternative histories and voices. In particular, I focus on how The Singapore Story, as the ‘centrepiece of the official nation-building project,’ has privileged the ruling elite as the sole source of authority and reference on Singapore’s history (Barr & Skrbiš 18). By amplifying and circulating favourable narratives while erasing others, the boundaries of national discourse are shaped in ways that marginalise alternative histories (Loh 2). I elaborate specifically on Lee’s portrayal of Nanyang University’s (abbreviated as ‘Nantah’ in Mandarin) closure in 1980, and how his linear narrative of Chinese-educated student activists legitimised the eventual crackdown on Nantah, affording no space for Nantah students to contest how they were being treated. This provides a historical context against which to read Eva Tang’s The Songs We Sang. In charting the historical trajectory of xinyao, a Singaporean folk-song movement that sustained its peak from the late 1980s to the 1990s, Tang’s documentary features interviews with Nantah alumni who were also its pioneer figures. I will also examine how Shirkers’s narrative structure offers a non-linear, non-hierarchical approach to understanding time and history, resisting the linearity that has constituted the state’s narratives and political authority.
To first offer a broad description of The Singapore Story, it is an ‘official’ account of Singapore’s history as narrated by the ruling elite for various ideological and political purposes, including constructing Singapore’s national identity and justifying the PAP’s political legitimacy (Barr and Skrbiš 35). Historical events in Singapore are narrated one-dimensionally through the lens of the ruling elite, more specifically through the dominant perspective of the man known as Singapore’s ‘Founding Father’ — Lee Kuan Yew. As Tan notes, Lee Kuan Yew’s two-volume memoirs, The Singapore Story, in 1998 and From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, in 2000, as well as a few other volumes written by ‘the formidable Founding Father,’ have come to serve as ‘foundational scripture for The Singapore Story‘ (‘Choosing What to Remember’ 236). Other than Lee Kuan Yew, other members of the PAP Old Guard, including S. Rajaratnam, C.V. Devan Nair, and George Yeo, have also contributed to Singapore’s myth-making and become ‘principal narrators of the nation’s history,’ transforming their own experiences into the party’s account of what ‘really happened’ (Hong and Yap 33).
In particular, Lee’s linear narrative of Communist ‘threats’ in The Singapore Story demarcates the boundaries of discourse, marginalising alternative voices and limiting how we configure history. In his article ‘Positioning the Student Political Activism of Singapore,’ Huang argues that Lee’s initial appreciation of the dynamism and political commitment of Chinese-educated student activists paved the way for a natural narrative transition into viewing them as formidable Communist foes who had to be eradicated for the sake of ‘national security’ and ‘political stability.’ Later, this would develop into a deep mistrust of student political activism, Chinese-educated students, and Chinese independent schools (Barr and Skrbiš 95). Chinese students were thus framed in Lee’s linear narrative as natural agents of Communism prone to violence and social instability, their activism inextricably linked to what he saw as the Communist propensity for violence, ruthlessness, and a militant capacity to destabilise society. This would set the stage for Nantah’s closure in 1980, a historic loss that was strangely met with no overt opposition. As Kwok explains in her article ‘Chinese-educated Intellectuals in Singapore,’ it was not acquiescence but a case of ‘lack of publicly articulated opposition’ (507). Due to the PAP’s harsh crackdown on perceived Communists and Communist-sympathisers among the Chinese-educated, no one could speak up about Nantah’s demise for fear of being arrested or publicly shamed (Kwok 507). The rapid institutionalisation of English as the language of commerce, science and technology’ further caused the Chinese-educated and Chinese-speaking sector of the population to become increasingly marginalised in a society that privileged the English-educated in terms of ‘political power, economic position and social prestige’ (500). The closure of Nantah meant that this group of people no longer had any concrete institutional expression. Marginalised and silenced, they had no effective way to resist how they were being treated or to contest the public’s negative perception of them. This erasure of the history and memory of Nantah from public consciousness is further fuelled by general youth political apathy today (Huang 422). Those born post-independence especially, are increasingly politically apathetic and have no interest in learning about non-’official’ aspects of Singapore’s history (Huang 423). Those who do know of Nantah’s history only see the closure of Nantah as a regretful but necessary move due to the increasing economic viability of adopting the English language, divorcing Nantah’s closure from its sociopolitical context (E. Lee 447). The history of Nantah as a ‘people’s institution’ that was erected due to the labour and financial contributions of philanthropists, businessmen, and Malayans from all walks of life, as well as its historical and cultural significance as the ‘zenith of the history of Chinese education in Malaya,’ is no longer widely remembered as such today (G..K. Lee 237; Kwok 507). Such is how the state engineers an official national discourse that outlines the boundaries of what can be legitimately remembered and expressed in society.
Furthermore, such repressive impulses are often justified in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development.’ As Kwok explains, the institutionalisation of the English language in Singapore was introduced to increase Singapore’s economic competitiveness and facilitate global flows of trade and commerce (499). By subsuming all other imperatives under Singapore’s exigent economic priorities, national imaginaries are shaped by pervasive narratives of linear progress and forward propulsion. In ‘The Construction of National Identity,’ Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh argue that the state forwards such narratives via annual National Day Parades, constructing national imaginaries in the service of the PAP’s ideological values and political authority. Values relating to ‘development and economic success, such as social discipline, efficiency and technological rationalism’ are actively promoted as necessary values of progress; for example, citizens were exhorted through a mass display to ‘keep fit’ and ‘stay alert for economic progress’ (Kong and Yeoh 233). Continually reinscribed in state rhetoric and National Day Parades, the ideology of progress, pragmatism and excellence become intrinsic to the national character in ways that configure the citizens’ imaginations to be in line with linearity and forward impetus. They function as tools by which the state exercises disciplinary power, ‘producing and regulating citizen-subjects scripted according to narratives of progress, competitiveness, pragmatism and survival’ (Harvey 86). There would be no space afforded for alternative configurations or pathways towards the national imaginary outside of that prescribed and sanctioned by the state.
Sandi Tan’s Shirkers (2016)
Thus, it is in this context that I turn to Sandi Tan’s Shirkers (2016) to examine how the medium of documentary enables knowledge production of alternative histories, as well as offers alternative configurations of history. Shirkers is an autobiographical film that documents the journey that filmmaker Sandi Tan undertakes to excavate a personal traumatic past. In 1992, when her filmmaking mentor Georges Cardona absconded with the cans of reel containing the movie she made with her friends in Singapore, also titled Shirkers, the crew was devastated. Only when the cans were returned in 2011 by Cardona’s ex-wife after his death did Tan decide to embark on a journey to retrace the traumatic event, roping in her friends and the people privy to the production of the original Shirkers in 1992. Thus, Shirkers (2016) was born. Although the film does not explicitly deal with Singaporean politics or marginalised histories the way the other documentaries do, I argue that Sandi’s negotiation of her personal trauma offers insight into alternative conceptualisations of history and narrative that run counter to the linearity of dominant state narratives. Furthermore, the documentary brings us back to Singapore’s cultural history in the 1990s through Sandi’s personal archival materials and interviews with film critics, evoking vivid pictures of counter-lives and alternative histories.
First, Shirkers enables the creation of an assemblage of personal archival materials through which an alternative history of Singapore cinema in the 1990s is evoked. In an interview with Philip Cheah, editor of an underground rock magazine BigO, he states that Singapore’s relationship to the arts scene in the 1990s was one of ‘strict censorship across music and film,’ where ‘a lot of the great classic albums were banned’ (9:32). Sandi’s account of Singapore’s cultural history, however, reveals an underground arts scene that was thriving in spite of such laws. Various archival materials, including photographs of Sandi and Jasmine in their childhoods, of their ‘crazy shrines,’ feisty letters to the authorities of the Film Society, issues of BigO and the collages Sandi and Jasmine made for it, issues of Exploding Cat, an underground zine created by Sandi and her friends in the 1990s, proof of an ‘underground video-taping syndicate’ created by Sandi and her cousin in Florida, are pieced together in a fragmented, disorganised fashion (11:50). In particular, the creation of Exploding Cat represented a sort of defiant feminist subjectivity in response to undertones of sexism in the underground Singapore arts scene. When her collages are rejected by BigO, Sandi dismisses them as ‘a lame boys’ club’ for which they were ‘too punk’ (12:03), suggesting her burgeoning feminist subjectivity in a media landscape governed by not only repressive state laws but also patriarchal social rules. Another instance of such feminist subjectivity arises in her narration of how she built ‘crazy shrines’ in Jasmine’s house in an attempt to escape the exhaustion of ‘always being expected to shine,’ a notion reminiscent of the state’s rhetoric of progress and excellence. The ‘shrines’ and the space of Jasmine’s house thus become a space of alternative self-expression and identity. In putting together this fragmented jigsaw puzzle of Singapore’s cultural history in the 1990s, Shirkers not only paints a picture of alternative histories but also presents expressions of individual agency that run counter to the state’s desire to regulate and control citizen-subjects according to ‘scripted narratives of progress’ (Harvey 85).
Furthermore, Shirkers reconfigures our traditionally linear understanding of history by making visible the importance of the absent and marginal in the making of history. After Cardona’s disappearance with the 70 cans of reels in 1992, Sandi narrates that the pain of the loss caused her to hear ‘distress signals’ experienced in the form of ‘pings’ when she watched Rushmore (1998) and Ghost World (2001) (1:00:09). On screen there is an intercut of visually similar scenes from both movies to her own scenes in Shirkers. That the aesthetic and vibe of these critically acclaimed films created in 1998 and 2001 (when the original Shirkers footage was still missing) echo the style of the original Shirkers points to the fact that Shirkers was indeed part of a global cinematic heritage and would have been a crucial addition to Singapore’s film canon had it been released in 1992. Tan confirms this in an interview with Vogue, stating that the 1992 Shirkers ‘fit into the whole spectrum of indie films made in the 1990s … it had a place in the world, had it existed.’ In local film canon, Tan states that there was ‘a push to start this indie film community in Singapore in the late 1990s, and that ‘Sophie, who is a film history buff, thinks Shirkers was actually the moment the indie film scene began ... in books it would begin a couple of years later with Eric Khoo’s Mee Pok Man. Shirkers (2016) thus raises important questions about the absent and erased in the making of history, and whether such narratives, histories and voices have a right to be a part of history. As much as it pointedly did not exist, at the same time, it did — to the people who had made it, who had lived through the making of it. Sophie expresses as much when she points urgently to her heart and her head, asserting that 1992 Shirkers did exist to her personally, even if not in the local film canon (1:30:07). The film raises other questions, as well, about the material conditions that allow these stories to be told, since 2016 Shirkers would not have existed were it not for the retrieval of the lost 1992 footage. In this way, 2016 Shirkers makes visible the importance of the absent and the marginal to the reconstruction of history, as opposed to traditional configurations of history as a linear continuity of progress.
Such a notion is reminiscent of Minh-ha’s argument on the feminist documentary, that it does not replace the Master ideology with its own counter ideology, but challenges the very constitution of authority. In its presentation of alternative histories, Shirkers does not attempt to indoctrinate its viewers with ideologies counter to that of the state’s. But, by drawing attention to the material conditions that allow history to ‘happen,’ and the ways in which certain narratives and voices are erased from history due to certain historical conditions, 2016 Shirkers expands our understanding of what history is and can be. It highlights the importance of seeking out the erased and marginal in the reconstruction of history, and of empowering these stories to be told. It challenges the very way in which we understand and imagine the constitution of history (or, authoritative versions of history), and allows us to reconfigure our understanding of history in a way that affords space for the erased, marginal and alternative.
Eva Tang’s The Songs We Sang (2015)
To further understand the place of marginalised voices in history and how its expressions gesture towards resistance in a politically repressive landscape, I now turn to Eva Tang’s The Songs We Sang, a xinyao documentary that provokes sociohistorical consciousness and opens up spaces for rethinking dominant narratives. To briefly describe xinyao, it is shorthand for ‘新加坡年轻人创作的歌谣’ (the songs composed by Singapore youths). In a study of xinyao, Lily Kong explores how, as a practice of singing and song-writing, it contributed to the ‘construction of identity and empowerment of youth communities among Mandarin-speaking youth’ in its early stage of development (4). Tang’s documentary features interviews with pioneer figures of the movement, such as Nantah alumni Pan Cheng Lui, Ken Chang, and Chew Wee Kai, whose desire to grasp on to a diminishing cultural identity in an English-dominated society pushed them to express themselves via the only avenue they knew how to. These pioneer figures, along with various stakeholders such as the singers and songwriters themselves, distributors, school interest groups, radio broadcasting stations, and newspapers, each articulate their position in shaping what we know today as a momentous cultural movement. These voices were marginalised by the country’s drastic shift to the more economically viable English language in the 1980s, which eventually led to the closure of Nantah. By centring these voices, Tang’s documentary unifies a range of voices to form an alternative history, thus opening up spaces for rethinking dominant narratives of the period.
In particular, Tang’s use of voice-over narration is striking in how effectively it centres the voices of the documentary subjects without attempting to ‘speak for’ them. As previously noted in my analysis of Minh-ha’s ‘Documentary Is/Not A Name,’ the voice-of-god narration, often vocalised by the privileged, authoritative filmmaker in an attempt to impose meaning, suppresses the voices of the documentary subjects and reifies the power hierarchy that rendered them marginalised and silenced in the first place. In The Songs We Sang, however, at no point is the documentarian’s voice inserted in a didactic manner that controls the narrative. Rather, the voices of the interviewees are privileged; it is their voices that narrate over and intersperse the black-and-white archival footage and stills (9:29; 14:46; 21:09). The oral interviews provide the aural narrative, while the footage and images serve as visual evidence, reinscribing a forgotten past and enhancing the interviews’ authenticity. The interviews of Pan Cheng Lui, Ken Chang, and Chew Wee Kai playing over the sepia historical stills of their 1979 concert thus centres their authentic lived experiences in a way that allows the viewer to sympathise with their grievances with the state’s drastic language policies. Similarly, there is another interview at the 31:20 mark with the Yayun Group, one of the most prominent names in xinyao. Situated right after a one-minute black-and-white archival footage of Chinese students in the 1980s struggling in their transition from Chinese to English, the Yayun members’ light bantering about being unable to pronounce or recognise English words establishes an emotional narrative that guides the viewers’ understanding of the preceding footage. Instead of the filmmaker’s voice, it is the actual lived experiences of the marginalised group that speak for themselves, articulating a collective sense of loss and marginalisation. The interview takes on a more sombre note when one of the members speaks of how they happened to be part of a ‘generation that [inevitably became] the sacrificial lamb’ in the shift to a predominantly English-educated Singapore. Under the jesting thus lies the bitter grievances of this sacrificed generation, the ‘paradoxical’ minority group within the majority Chinese population (Kwok 503). Therein the tension and nuances of the socio-political context surrounding Singapore’s language policies in the 1980s are invoked through the focus on the voices and experiences of Nantah alumni and xinyao groups.
Silences and ellipses are employed to similar effect as well. In a particularly emotionally climactic moment, alumni Ken Chang speaks of the sense of loss and worthlessness Nantah students were made to feel by the state’s drastic language policies (18:26). The interview trails off with Chang holding back tears in a close-up shot for five seconds, before the screen fades into black. In that brief pocket of sobriety, the viewer is invited to imagine and intuit Chang’s depth of grief caused by that very personal sense of loss and displacement. By playing upon the viewers’ very own imagination and emotions, Tang arouses sympathy in a more personal and powerful way than if Chang had ever finished his sentence. This technique is repeated in a similar way at the end of the film, when Koh asks: ‘That sincerity in our hearts, what is it? That is a question for everyone.’ The film image pauses at his restrained expression for a full three seconds while he contemplates all the emotional, political and historical baggage of the xinyao movement, before fading into black. Again the viewer is invited to sit with Koh and consider retrospectively the entire documentary they have just watched; to end the film on a question is to invite a questioning, a rethinking of all that we thought we knew about xinyao, of Singapore’s drastic language policies, of Nantah’s closure, of an entire cultural movement that eventually petered out due to an increasing lack of sociohistorical consciousness and general cultural amnesia amongst the youth (Huang 423). These ellipses render the film less didactic than introspective, more reminiscent than political. To argue that such light-handed techniques have an effective political impact in provoking sociohistorical consciousness might be a stretch, but it is easier to understand the documentary’s politically subdued tone in light of the state’s strict censorship laws. To escape the IMDA’s censorship, resistance could only be gestured to, not overtly demonstrated. Indeed, the documentary escaped censorship and went on to become the most commercially successful Singaporean-made documentary of all time, grossing a total of SGD115,000 over its 40-week theatrical run (IMDB ‘The Songs We Sang’). Even Singapore’s Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong, endorsed the film during the 2016 National Day Rally speech, and again in a public Facebook post in July 2016 (‘The Songs We Sang’; ‘I love Xinyao Songs’). Despite Tang voicing her explicit intention of ‘helping us [Singaporeans] understand that history is composed of many intertwining human stories,’ a gesture that opposes the state’s hegemonic impulse to claim sole authorship of history, the film managed to become widely popular and successful, sparking conversations and book spin-offs in an attempt to preserve xinyao’s history (Ho, 2017). In gesturing towards resistance in a light-handed manner, the documentary managed to reach a wider audience than if the film had been overtly political and risked potential censorship or even a ban. In effectively navigating Singapore’s precarious media landscape, the film ultimately achieves Tang’s intention of provoking sociohistorical consciousness and propelling marginalised histories into the realm of the collective.
Furthermore, the production and circulation of the documentary attests to the particular ability of the genre in reinscribing marginal histories and carving out communal spaces for them. In July 2014, during the production of the documentary, Tang and her crew pulled together a free-of-charge xinyao concert at Bras Basah Complex. The Complex is loaded with historical significance for xinyao singers and enthusiasts as a location where xinyao concerts were often held in the early 1980s (Chan 2014). In situating a ‘xinyao reunion’ at the Complex, Tang meaningfully connects the xinyao movement across various temporalities and stitches together a community of enthusiasts, who are living evidence of xinyao’s historical legacy and cultural significance. This community made up of a range of individuals from disparate realms would not have been brought together if not for the production of the documentary; the fact that more than 1,000 people attended the concert at Bras Basah thus produces an indelible historical imprint (The Straits Times ‘1,000 Fans Brave Rain at Bras Basah’). This imprint is further deepened by the various forms the documentary has circulated in its afterlife, including a book spin-off, a dedicated Facebook page, an in-progress DVD, and even a release on popular streaming site Netflix. As McLagan argues, the advent of digital technologies has generated a documentary’s ability to take on ‘different forms of life, to exist in different modalities, extended across multiple platforms and networks,’ rendering the film’s impact inconceivably far-reaching (306). In particular, the Facebook page provides an online avenue by which the director has continued to facilitate further community engagement with the film, posting updates about xinyao or about the release of the film into DVD. In this way, the film’s impact extends beyond the temporality of cinema halls to carve out a space for itself, to establish itself in a public, collective consciousness; via the documentary, xinyao’s legacy made its mark in a history that would not have otherwise embraced it.
Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore GaGa (2005)
For Singapore GaGa (‘GaGa’), I focus on the circulation and distribution of the film; in particular, how it manifests feminist aspirations in offering a model for collective film exhibition, distribution and circulation in Singapore. In ‘Singapore GaGa Tours Singapore,’ an essay Tan Pin Pin wrote herself about the ‘meandering journey Singapore GaGa took around Singapore before it came to have [such a] successful run at The Arts House,’ the director reflects on the entire distribution process of the film (131). From debuting at the Singapore International Film Festival, to barely securing a spot at independent arts centre Substation, to screening it in schools with ‘shoddy video projectors and sound systems,’ to finally exhibiting it at The Arts House, the film’s ‘journey’ had inadvertently ‘inverted the whole distribution paradigm,’ and manifested ‘an experiment in a way of filming, a way of living’ (132–7). The film circumventing dominant film traditions to carve out alternative film distribution pathways in Singapore is consistent with the film’s feminist representation of Singapore’s ‘unofficial’ soundscapes that are often overlooked and ignored in dominant state narratives. Academics and film critics Jini Kim Watson and Sophia Siddique Harvey have produced valuable analysis on GaGa’s narrative focus on the aural landscape and history of Singapore. In ‘Aspirational City,’ Watson argues that GaGa’s exploration of Singapore’s aural history through interviews with a trained harmonica teacher, the woman behind the subway announcement, a war veteran singing anti-Japanese songs and more, ‘reveals disregarded perspectives of the city, and deconstructs the spatial imaginaries that underpin triumphant narratives of Singapore’s rise’ (543). Watson is particularly insightful in her analysis of how GaGa’s aural focus on ‘the unheralded, the ignored and unproductive‘ resists the ‘‘optical and visual’ tendencies’ of state capitalist logic (546). In a similar vein, Harvey examines how the film ‘decentres the ocular as the dominant mode of perception’ to ‘articulate sonic pathways towards Singapore’s national imaginary’ (87–9). Harvey’s lucid analysis of GaGa as a film that ‘refuses to be seduced by the comforts of linear narrative and closure,’ that ‘destabilises [the state’s] narrative of grand forward propulsion,’ resonates with what I have argued thus far — that cultural texts should work to resist the state’s repressive impulses in constructing celebratory, linear historical narratives (86, 92). As Watson and Harvey have argued, Singapore GaGa is a prime example of just such resistance. As such, I endeavour to contribute further to discourse about GaGa by focusing on the afterlife of the documentary, on the material conditions and structures that have empowered the circulation of the film and how GaGa’s trajectory has manifested viable pathways to feminist film-making.
First, the film has charted an unprecedented distribution pathway for independent, experimental films in the industry, especially politically inflected films that gesture towards resistance instead of replicate state narratives. Niche experimental films like GaGa face various obstacles in distribution. As Tan writes, the cinema’s system of distribution naturally favours ‘blockbusters with big stars or special effects’ that have “instant drawing power,” making them profitable off the bat. For example, as I previously noted, Singapore’s most commercially successful local films belong predominantly to Jack Neo, whose success can be explained by the ‘instant drawing power’ of his established household branding and consistent ‘low-brow comic formula’ involving numerous Mandarin and Hokkien puns, appealing ‘especially to a Chinese-speaking mass audience’ (K. P. Tan, ‘Imagining the Chinese Community’ 146). On the other hand, a ‘boutique’ film like GaGa with an ‘unusual final form,’ whose ‘best marketing tool was via word-of-mouth,’ would most likely be pulled off cinema screens within a week (Tan 314). This creates a vicious cycle where only films that have already garnered a certain level of interest will rake in even more visibility and recognition, while experimental and avant-garde films with niche target audiences would fade even further into the periphery. Local media posed another obstacle for GaGa as well. Tan writes that local media were not interested in reviewing GaGa because ‘they would only cover cinema releases, and five screenings at the Substation did not constitute as one’ (Tan 135), whereas Neo’s films, for example, would be widely advertised and reviewed in local newspapers and television prior to its release in cinemas, garnering widespread attention and interest. In Singapore, local media is largely state-affiliated and tend to reproduce narratives favourable to the state and government, an observation I have noted previously as well in how the state outlines the boundaries of acceptable and authorised discourse (Fong 203). That Neo’s films are so widely promoted by local media outlets that predominantly reproduce state narratives, and that Neo’s films themselves tend to reiterate and propagate such narratives, is not a coincidence. Thus, apart from the cinema’s unfavourable system of distribution, avant-garde films (especially those inflected with themes of political and social resistance) face obstacles in outreach also due to the unfortunate state of local media in Singapore.
That is precisely why GaGa’s successful outreach is so momentous: it executed viable strategies out of the periphery and effectively pushed the boundaries of visibility for such films in Singapore. In brainstorming ‘alternative avenues’ to get the film screened, negotiating continuously with Substation and The Arts House, personally putting together a press kit and press material, screening the film at ‘stuffy school halls,’ and relying on a ‘word-of-mouth marketing plan,’ the director and her crew created a unique, specific combination of publicity methods that ultimately got the film screened to more than 8,000 paying viewers (Tan 136). In effect, the various networks GaGa went through to garner publicity, including the Substation, the Arts House, international press, local bloggers, universities, and schools, mapped an independent arts scene in Singapore — one that, like GaGa’s target audience, is made up of those whose ‘patriotism is tempered by worries about Singapore’s political process’s inability to accept different and discordant voices,’ and are invested in an ‘alternative, independent, and more truthful representation of Singapore’ (137). A space for producing, representing, and circulating alternative narratives dedicated to democratising Singapore’s history-making manifested tangibly via GaGa, a space and avenue experimental films could capitalise on should they run into similar problems with local media and unfavourable cinema systems. That such information has been made readily available in the form of an online essay (another ‘modality’ that the documentary now exists in, in McLagan’s words) ensures its accessibility to future experimental filmmakers as well, providing a precedent model for them to effectively navigate and achieve visibility in a repressive media landscape. Thus, GaGa effectively delineated a network of organisations, distribution collectives and event spaces with a feminist commitment to alternative or marginal narratives.
Secondly, GaGa’s ‘school tours’ effectively captured an impressionable target group, arousing their interest in marginal facets of Singaporean identity. (Tan 136–7). As I previously noted in my analysis of McLagan’s essay, the increasing portability of documentaries in DVD format meant that films could now traverse locations and overcome geographical barriers, allowing documentarians to engage more directly with their audience and move them into active agents of change. GaGa’s journey through the school auditoriums manifest this very potential of the documentary in effecting social consciousness and change. Tan describes how she stayed after the screening of GaGa to answer students’ questions about it, and how the film facilitated educational thought-exercises on national identity, actively engaging the youth in rethinking how the state construction of the national imaginary conflicts or corroborates their own. Through an unprecedented distribution strategy afforded by the modern portability of documentaries, GaGa effectively captured a student audience that might otherwise never have such a direct opportunity to ‘know about another Singapore that is outside the one represented by mainstream media’ (136). In a particularly moving paragraph, Tan writes:
‘The question that capped it for me was one asked by a young boy from Bedok View Secondary School. “Excuse me, Miss Tan, does this mean I can make my own film about Singapore with just any camera?” Somewhere during the screening, it had dawned upon him that Singapore was waiting for him to define it with something as simple as a handheld camera. I hope he never lets go of this thought.’ (136)
In opening up the possibility of constructing a collective national imaginary to these students, GaGa productively nudged emergent subjectivities in the direction of self-determination and individual agency. As Harvey argues, the power of GaGa lies in its ability to ‘ignite a conversation about what it means to feel not only a collective Singaporean identity but an individual one as well’ (91). While appealing to a target audience that already has a ‘healthy skepticism about the Singapore presented to them by the mass media’ achieves Tan’s aim of provoking consciousness about ‘ignored or forgotten’ voices, it is through inspiring an impressionable age group and cultivating their budding interest in marginalised Singapore perspectives and histories that GaGa truly realises its rich potential. The fact that GaGa managed to be so widely welcomed in these neighbourhood schools that are state-funded further points to how the film has deftly navigated a politically repressive landscape, as a piece of work that does not directly challenge the PAP’s authority but still gestures towards resistance by merely exploring other (marginal) facets of Singaporean identity. Thus, by making school tours an intrinsic part of GaGa’s distribution strategy, Tan effectively manifested feminist filmmaking aspirations of raising consciousness about marginal narratives and the possibility of shared national imaginaries.
Conclusion
Thus far, I have argued that Sandi Tan’s Shirkers presents an alternative feminist history of Singapore cinema in the 1990s and reconfigures our understanding of history in the process, and that Eva Tang’s The Songs We Sang draws upon the history of xinyao to evoke sociopolitical consciousness about historical events like Nantah’s closure in 1980, empowering the articulation of marginalised voices. I have also drawn upon the circulation strategies of Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore GaGa to posit that the film carves out viable distribution pathways for independent, politically inflected films in Singapore. Although these films do not deal explicitly with political themes as do documentaries like Zahari’s 17 Years, Singapore Rebel or To Singapore, With Love, they still do offer viable gestures of resistance in both their feminist commitment to exploring marginal narratives, as well as their effective navigation of a media landscape as repressive as Singapore’s that has allowed them to achieve widespread visibility as well as international and local acclaim alike. In doing so, I hope to cultivate a greater appreciation for the genre of documentary in Singapore cinema. In today’s world, feminist commitments to deconstructing power imbalances, resisting injustice and oppressive ideology are more imperative than ever. Documentaries are a great filmic vehicle for such feminist aspirations, with the ability to deftly draw out nuances of social resistance, express the marginal and alternative, and effect social change. Only by making an effort to seek out such films and by supporting independent filmmakers can such documentaries fulfil its fullest potential.
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Liow Xin Li is currently an undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University, School of Humanities, in the English Department. She is graduating in 2022.
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