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Actors Sun Pithhaya Phaefuang and Ma Yanling in the performance of 21 April, 6 p.m. Performance Still. Courtesy Elaine Chiew |
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Image 3. Lost Cinema. Installation view. Courtesy Elaine Chiew |
In fact, the placement of the smaller video channel has the effect almost of gagging the larger narration, but it also raises another question (almost sci-fi): do we dream in technicolour? The meanings of these vignettes also shift depending on the film it is referencing. We are all somewhat familiar with In the Mood for Love, given its worldwide circulation, but not so much Eric Khoo’s 12 storeys (Singapore, 1997), an interweaving of four stories happening within the ubiquitous Singapore HDB block. Apichatpong’s film, Tropical Maladies (Thailand, 2004), also has a segmented structure — bifurcated into two separate narratives, the first is a romance between two men and the second a mysterious tale about a soldier bedevilled by the spirit of a shaman. It won the Jury Prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, and was also the first Thai film to win a “Big Three” film festival prize. Tan says that to him, all three movies are ultimately about love, and he chose them because they were his favourite directors.
Tan plays with the thematics of all three films in his versions — as the stage lighting changes from a throbbing red to a hallucinatory blue, the live actors begin to touch. Both slowly disrobe, to reveal the costume from Khoo’s 12 storeys. The woman’s undoing of the frog buttons of her cheongsam is sexually charged and exaggerated, highlighting perhaps the fetishisation of Asian femininity. The arched foot feels like a metonymic reference to the bound feet custom of olden days. They touch and caress, and this seems an ironic reflection of the theme of isolation and fraught communication issues tackled within Khoo’s quadruple stories where you have intimacy (sexual as well as physical given the cramped space of an HDB flat), but you don’t necessarily have closeness.
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Performance Still of 12 storeys vignette. Courtesy Elaine Chiew |
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Performance Still of 12 storeys vignette. Courtesy Elaine Chiew |
Here, the male live actor becomes androgynous, and his gyrations are balletic and also jerky, as well as highly feminised and sexualised, a commentary in itself on how society expects women to hold and position their bodies. The soundtrack here changes to a dialogue snippet from 12 storeys.
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Performance still of Tropical Malady. Courtesy Elaine Chiew |
When the lighting changes to green, we are in Tropical Malady, and the actors grapple and tussle with each other in raptor-like and rapturous fashion — sex is survival, but then survival is also sexual. This may seem trite, but its meaning is surely pursued through each gesture and interaction between the actors, given the slow pace, optimal for absorption and reflection. Cinema as a medium is about accessibility, and Brian Gothong Tan draws upon his experience from theatre and his background degree in experimental animation from the California Institute of Arts in 2005 to produce a startlingly visual and easily engageable conversation about the role of our subconscious in powering our creative expression, as well as the link between performance and cinematic arts.
Lost Cinema is on show at Earl Lu Gallery Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore from 21 April to 6 May, 2018.