South East Asia Research

This article explores the cycle of Thai teen movies that emerged in 1985, reaching the height of their box-office success with the first phase of urban multiplex expansion, before fizzling out around 1999 as prestigious heritage films took over. Widely dismissed as a culturally impoverished period in Thai film history, the teen movies provide immensely rich material for analysing the cultural politics of contemporary Thailand. They were reviled because the more attractively their defining signatures – the ‘music video’ rite-of-passage drama and the ‘school skirts and shorts' comedy – appeared to appropriate the sakon (global, international) vernacular of pop culture, the less thai and the more ‘imitative’ such films seemed to be. This article traces the period in Thai cinema history from the consolidation of the conglomerate ‘music video’ teen movies to the moment of their delegitimization at the onset of the 1997 economic crisis. It is grounded in the hypothesis that there is nothing in industrial terms, or in terms of the underlying aesthetic mode, substantially to differentiate heritage films from the conglomerate teen films that precipitated them. The connection between the two genres of film is there in the same monopolistically integrated mode of production as well as in the personnel responsible for them; in the primacy in each case of marketing and promotional tactics; and in a textual mode distinguished by pastiche and a strong degree of visual excess, rendering ‘Thailand’ in each case a fantastical dream space displaying a certain ‘look’. In lieu of such similarities, the contrasting cultural status of heritage films and teen films underlines the point that the idea of quality in Thai cinema is overdetermined by the ideal of displaying an appropriate combination of the thai and the sakon. By visiting the teen cycle as an illegitimate, though industrially formative moment of contemporary Thai cinema, the paper asks to what extent the yoking of that connotation of the national self, thaithai (‘Thai-style’), to filmic form, and of the Thai subject to cinema spectatorship, implies a bourgeois speaking position alone.

In the late 1990s, only two women filmmakers made a mark in the Malay film industry - Shuhaimi Baba and Erma Fatima. Their films capture the attitude, spirit and vision of Mahathirism with regard to gender, sexuality, race relations and Malay(sian) identity. They show women who are comfortable with modernity and urban living, yet who have not lost touch with their adat (customary) roots, family values and community spirit. These cinematic positions metaphorically reflect the ideology of UMNO's ‘moderate’ stance on women and modernity as compared with the position of PAS and other religious ‘fundamentalist’ groups. This paper focuses on Erma Fatima and her career and films.

This article discusses the first Indonesian film to deal with specifically gay rather than waria (male to female transvestites) subjectivities. The 1980s was a period that saw growing public consciousness of the gay subject position, and the release of this film in 1988 may be seen as the first cinematic attempt to react to this new level of awareness. For this reason, it can be argued that the film says as much about Indonesian perceptions of the gay world as it does about the reality of life as a gay man in Jakarta. The movie has been criticized for its pessimism and negativity regarding the portrayal of gay life in Indonesia, the main character being imprisoned for murder in the final scene. This stands in contrast with more upbeat representations in the recent film, Arisan. However, despite a generally pessimistic ending, the film's portrayal of homosexuality is perhaps more complex, particularly with regard to how family, friends and even psychiatrists relate to the principal gay character. This article argues that rather than the lead character's homosexuality being the reason for his eventual demise, it is his perceived hypocrisy that leads to his ultimate incarceration.

This article considers the representation of war in Vietnamese cinema by engaging in a gendered exploration of the legacy of war. By taking gender as an analytical category and cinema as a form of representation, the article examines the largely unexplored issue of the impact of war on female identity in Vietnam. Through the discussion of two recent Vietnamese films, Dòi cát (Sandy Lives) and Bên không chông (Wharf of Widows), the article draws attention to the contradiction between wartime empowerment and post-war disempowerment of women in Vietnam. It argues that, while representation of the de-feminized woman/soldier received much imaginative attention because it fitted well with state-sanctioned interpretations of the war as a collective patriotic sacrifice, the representation of the impact on female identity, on the other hand, was given little consideration since it conflicted with traditional gender configurations in Vietnamese society.

The emergence of ‘global culture’ has been taken to indicate the end of distinctive local cultural forms, especially with regard to cinema. The focus on Western screen cultures, however, does not do justice to the complexity of Asian cultural production; nor does it consider the different role that local filmmaking may take in non-Western contexts. This paper considers the very small national film industries in three of the ‘socialist’ nations of South East Asia. Film cultures were shaped by colonial experiences, then dramatically interrupted by the Second World War and subsequently by the struggles over nationalism and independence that ultimately came under the sway of ‘socialism’ and the domination of the Soviet system. Recently, with some liberalization of government policies, independent filmmakers have again emerged at the same time as Western film on DVD and VCD has suddenly become available both legally and illegally. The past and current situation regarding film in these nations is discussed.

This paper explores the relationship between food and national identity in ancient Siam and modern Thailand, as represented in the texts and films linked to Anna Leonowens, particularly Anna and the King and The King and I. While the fictional romantic relationship between the Indo-British governess and King Mongkut (Rama IV) has been critically analysed, little attention has been paid to the state banquet organized by the king. In 1860s Siam, state banquets provided an opportunity to demonstrate the civilized status of the Siamese monarch, and hence the kingdom. Developing and building on the concepts of political commensality and culinary colonialism, the paper explores the importance of demonstrating civility through food.