Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Chua Beng Huat, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

Recent debates in world cinema have taken on the question of neoliberal globality, asking whether the international transits of cinema via film festivals and art cinema distribution are wholly implicated in global capital, or whether there are opportunities for resistance within this system. Filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-liang and Jia Zhangke engage questions of economic precarity and globalized labor, but their films nonetheless circulate to privileged international art film audiences. What might it mean, then, to default on capitalism’s promises of cinematic value? Drawing from a project on the concept of “default cinema,” Dr Rosalind Galt will examine ideas of refusal and resistance in contemporary transnational Asian cinemas.

In dialogue and response, Dr Gerald Sim will consider the applicability of “default” in Southeast Asian cinema, including the oeuvre of Yasmin Ahmad. On the surface, the late Malaysian director’s visually austere melodramas connect her stylistically to Tsai and Jia, even though she remained largely disengaged from economic commentary, supplanted as it were, by emotional narratives of interracial love and cross-cultural connection. But as her luminescent career in international advertising attests, she possessed great dexterity in the trafficking of neoliberal ideas and values. Does her work offer an alternative allegory of “default”? Or might it represent an ideological counterpoint?

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Rosalind Galt is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. Her work interrogates the relationships between cinematic form and geopolitics, with a particular interest in questions of history, aesthetics and gender. She is the author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006) and Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia UP, 2011), and the coeditor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford UP, 2010). She is currently coauthoring a book on queer cinema and global politics.

Gerald Sim is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where he specializes in American cinema, national cinema, and critical theory. His theoretical writing is informed by historical materialism, which drives recent essays in Rethinking Marxism, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Projections. A forthcoming work in Discourse about Edward Said’s influence on critical race film studies will foreground a contracted monograph, an historical materialist study of film studies’ engagements with race.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Jonathan Lee at jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg indicating your name, email, organisation/affiliation and contact number.