The Films of Chookiat Sakveerakul and the Mainstreaming of Queer Romance in Contemporary Thai Media Culture
Thomas Baudinette (Macquarie University)
a pan-Asian queer popular culture form focused on the celebration of romantic entanglements between handsome young men. Shifting the focus of Thai queer media history away from the previous scholarship’s emphasis on independent cinema – chiefly, the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul – I situate Sakveerakul’s popular teen romances Love of Siam (2006) and Dew, Let’s Go Together (2019) within the growing formalization and mainstreaming of queer romantic narratives in contemporary Thai media culture. I first position Love of Siam (2006) as a “pre-cursor” to the explosion of BL soap operas that have dominated Thai consumer culture from the late-2010s onwards by exploring how the massive success of Sakveerakul’s film with young female audiences revealed the economic potentials of queer romance in Thailand. I then consider how Dew, Let’s Go Together responds to the initial runaway success of Love of Siam. I argue that, unlike Love of Siam which sought to “hide” its queer cinematic interventions through heteronormative marketing campaigns and narrative conventions, Dew, Let’s Go Together instead participates in the generic and promotional norms of BL’s pan-Asian media culture. In particular, I place an emphasis on how the latter film responds to the importance of fandom for handsome young male actors to the BL industry in Thailand. In contrasting these two films and reflecting on Sakveerakul’s public comments concerning the rise of BL media in Thailand, I ultimately reveal that queer romance has shifted from a subversive topic in Thai cinema to a mainstream, popular form with strong market potential.
Anita: Stardom and Cultural Memory in Hong Kong Cinema
Chin-pang Lei (University of Macau)
French director François Truffaut indicates that an extremely successful film is usually more a sociological event than an artistic achievement. As a biographical musical drama film about the late legendary Hong Kong star Anita Mui, Anita (2021) is not only a commercial success that grossed more than 60 million Hong Kong dollars at the local box office, but also a sociological event that caused heated discussion on the city’s culture and collective memories. Known as the “daughter of Hong Kong”, Anita Mui is not only a pop star whose career reflects the heyday of Cantopop and Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, but also one of the city’s most recognized icons.
Recounting the vicissitudes of her life, the film simultaneously traces Hong Kong’s ups and downs in the past decades. This paper examines how the film makes use of her stardom and life story to construct a cultural memory that resonates with the city’s structure of feelings today. Linking to the nostalgic films in the past twenty years, such as the Golden Chicken series (2002, 2003 and 2014), Echoes of the Rainbow (2010) and Gallants (2010), the nostalgic sentiment manifested by Anita reflects the anxiety of today’s Hong Kongers.
Popular culture bears representativeness in Hong Kong: it is perceived as the core of Hong Kong culture and the carrier of Hong Kong identities. Significantly, cinema has a privileged position in Hong Kong culture. As a sociological event, Anita shows that cinema is the cultural production most associated with the collective emotions in Hong Kong.
“Spare the Brahmin”: Anxiety, Cinema, and Representation
Sudha Tiwari (UPES)
This paper proposes to use a few letters written by Brahmin readers to the Filmfare editor in late 1970s. These letters are used as a reference point to address the Brahmin anxiety and sense of victimhood over their ‘negative’ representation in the south Indian New Cinema. It has barely been a decade since Dalit Studies turned its focus particularly on Hindi cinema, and how it has ignored or misrepresented Dalits. During this academic turn, discovering these letters of complaint was bewildering, as Brahmins, the most privileged caste group in India, were complaining of misrepresentation. These letters criticised films like Agraharathil Kazhuthai, Ghatashraddha, Nirmalyam, and Samskara. Using historical and socio-cultural analysis, the paper will contextualise the films in their respective regional nuances. The paper will mainly probe into the claims made in the letters through precise film analysis, by examining the inter-caste relations depicted, dominant/submissive characters, stereotypes being used and their effect, the impact of choice of genre (social realism) in the treatment of caste, caste and the body (Samskara), and caste in the villages. The paper will also deal with aspects of production, as some of these films were financed by Film Finance Corporation, working under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. In this light, an attempt will be made to use Stuart Hall’s idea of representation (1997) to answer questions like who constructed the representation in these films and why, what meaning is produced, what ‘reality’ is represented, and how does the representation relate to the ‘reality’.
Through a Glass Brightly: The Translingual Practice in The Great Buddha+ (2017) and Classmates Minus (2020)
Yuan Li (University of Southampton)
Taiwanese-language cinema has been interpreted into the reflection of the local Hokkien and Hakka speaking people in Taiwan entangled in the post-war socio-historical transitions, especially in the 1960s, albeit being categorised linguistically. Seemingly as the opposition to the state-sponsored Mandarin-language cinema, the narrative and aesthetic features attached to Taiwanese-language cinema are majorly melodramatic and low-budget. Besides, it is also termed ‘Taiwanese-dialect cinema’ in some publications to highlight Taiwanese-language cinema as the ‘subversive pleasures’, which is popular only among the Taiwanese-language speaking audience, against the Mandarin-language cinema as the governmental propaganda.
In the light of language usage in films, Huang Hsin-yao’s The Great Buddha+ (2017) and Classmates Minus (2020) echo Taiwanese-languages cinema retrospectively. Continuing the concerns in his debut feature The Great Buddha+, Taiwan independent filmmaker Huang Hsin-yao’s Classmates Minus depicts the unbreakable gap of the social strata in contemporary Taiwan from different angles: classes, genders, and ethnic groups. By adopting Tijana Mamula’s notions of ‘thing-presentation’ and ‘word-presentation’, my paper argues that Huang’s films should be recognised as new Taiwanese-language cinema. Diverting from the monophonic representation of Hoklos in previous Taiwanese-language cinema, Huang’s films have constructed a carnivalesque space for multiple linguistic and social groups, both on and beyond the screen. By using his point of view as the thing-presentation and his voiceover narration as the word-presentation, the director leads the viewers to transcendent among multiple social and linguistic identities. Comparing to the Taiwanese-language cinema, which was made in post-war Taiwan, Huang’s new approach offers a glimpse of the ‘liminoid positions’ of the ordinary people who are living in Taiwan presently.