31st
The Status of Indie
The Life article on the Singapore International Film Festival that came out a few days ago posed the question if the film selection of this year’s 23rd edition was edgy and fresh enough. I don’t think having a Bruce Beresford retrospective necessarily damns the programme as old and stuffy, but certainly, there’s less Asian fare (Asian film awards remain, so do the Silver Screen Awards, but there’s only 3 films in the Singapore Panorama section.*)
One should have known that there would be a change in programming direction when last year’s directors Yuni Hadi, Zhang Wenjie and Jasmine Ng resigned after citing differences with the festival’s management, and when academic Kirpal Singh stepped up to take the helm. The article cited Singh saying that he was choosing quality over edginess, which implied that edgy films sometimes were cheap, revealing a deep schism with regard to the issue of alternative taste.
The festival seems to be experiencing a crisis of identity in the last few years, and it mostly has to do with the question of what defines ‘alternative’ in Singapore. Although the film festival has prided itself for not following the mainstream, the term ‘alternative’ itself has undergone further diversification mostly due to several factors: multiplication of media channels and diversification of their distribution, changes in film-making technology and the changing position of film vis-a-vis the arts in Singapore. I’m guessing that when the festival began in 1986, the founders must have had identified a niche for alternative films contrary to the usual Hollywood blockbuster which included foreign arthouse cinema fare, simply because there were very few avenues available for their procurement (D & O video was one of the few outlets you could rent similar films.) This was also the period of time when the censors were particularly unforgiving, hence the festival could easily make a name for itself by being iconoclastic and even rebellious with its selection of liberal foreign films. Also, Philip Cheah, the film festival’s director and programmer until recently, as the editor of alternative pop culture magazine BigO, cut a figure whose taste merged two different notions of ‘alternative’, mixing film/art-school canonical erudition with pop cultural sensibilities. The film festival programme had correspondingly reflected his taste: the line-up had always included films featuring subcultural/independent music and related cultural aspects, alongside more typical arthouse classics and reflective documentaries.
I’m sure the festival must have thrived in the ‘90’s into the early 2000s, because that was when alternative (i.e. grunge) became officially hip, with a supposed wave of democratization in culture which was defined on the intellectual end by intertextual pastiche. Guerilla-type film-making, identified in the works of directors such as Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, burst onto the scene; their combination of smart, witty scripts which played upon traditional Hollywood conventions shot on shoe-string budgets proving to be irresistible to audiences. Also, the diversification and proliferation of media channels (which paralleled the emergence of uber-media conglomerates) saw a certain flattening of distribution channels. Innovations in technology such as increasingly accessible versions of video editing software and the internet, as well as changes in media formats, meant that media material could be produced and distributed easily to audiences. These innovations also meant that technically, anyone could be a film-maker.
And if anyone could be a film-maker, the range of films available to the audience was bound to increase. As original ‘indie’ directors become mainstream and adopt more sophistication in technique and wield bigger budgets, as usual, the vanguard of ’alternative’ has to be found in rawness, obscurity and authenticity. Because HD frees directors and producers from the cost of film stock, there’s been a prolific generation of films from Asia and other parts of the world, heralding exponential possibilities and also, a fair share of duds. Paradoxically, as the number of films available increases, so does the need for curators and programmers to gatekeep. I have to admit that some of the stuff I had watched on my 2008 SIFF blitz was simply not great — Kan Lume’s Dreams From a Third World was conceptually interesting and it had its moments, but most of it felt plodding and while I’m sure the art direction was deliberately kept simple and sleazy, the stylistic dimension of the film didn’t quite add to its overall effect. Film-making is an expensive business, but surely more can be done with HD instead of films churned out with aesthetics more akin to the home videos that we can all produce with our video cameras.
Although some of these films don’t quite meet the mark, there exists a lot of other films which, though comparatively unpolished to those from more established arthouse directors and production houses, have something truly different and creative to offer (Malaysian film Sell-out! comes to mind), and a platform must be given for these films to find their audience. And even if these filmmakers somewhat fail in their attempts, they must be given a space for feedback. I’m sure as filmmakers experiment with their formats, they’ll find new stylistic ways of engaging the audience. Conversely, audiences need to be exposed to what filmmakers are currently doing and taught how to watch films in new ways. It becomes important for the film festival to showcase films that don’t follow Hollywood formulae, especially as arthouse has turned somewhat formulaic itself with auteur-ism. This is particularly significant here as film increasingly gains credence as an legitimate art form; as film authorities here increase funding for local filmmakers to produce films, they will, no doubt, require these films to fulfill the criteria of drawing in reasonable profits and/or achieving popular acclaim which will push filmmakers towards the centre and not the margins, where the space for testing and experimentation is usually found.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with enjoying a beautifully made independent film and one should enjoy films of quality. But given this day and age, when foreign films with prizes from other more notable film festivals are likely to be released on DVD for rental, and other smaller international film festivals have emerged to provide audiences with more options, the SIFF must ask what its role is in the film scene here. If its ambitions are only limited to showcasing quality films to the audience, then the direction as suggested by the programming would suffice. If it wishes to do something for the film scene in the region, then it must recognize that the film industry here (and in the region) has not matured enough for us to come up with Cannes/ Berlin-quality sophistication, and unless film schools here pick up the slack to organise film festivals to showcase the ‘edgier’/fringe Asian stuff, the SIFF is the best bet we have to promote regional filmmaking. And experimentation doesn’t necessarily mean cheap.
* - Disclaimer: my impression of the film programme is derived from a survey of the website
