Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Chua Beng Huat, Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, NUS 

ABSTRACT

Malaysian Yasmin Ahmad’s multilingual film dialogue aurally expresses a postcolonial sensibility. I analyze sequences from her oeuvre – Rabun (2003), Sepet (2005), and Gubra (2006) – for their sonic and linguistic meanings, before using her style of film sound as a basis to discuss her specifically postcolonial cinema aesthetics. Situated astride global film culture and established Malaysian cinema, Ahmad’s postcolonial sensibility gravitates toward interracial romance melodramas set in globalized social and cultural milieus. These films are locally popular among Malaysia’s middle-class and have become one of the country’s rare festival successes abroad. Attending also to the underserved field of film sound, this study places Ahmad’s style against broader observations of Malaysia’s emergent national cinema, and discerns her postcolonial character beyond usual tropes of hybridity and fragmentation. I mobilize philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on Listening, and on contemporary society in The Sense of the World, to theorize the films’ regard for Malaysian postcolonialism’s nexus with globalization – a marriage between the national’s abundant cultural signification and capital’s insistence on apoliticism and ahistoricism.

The presentation highlights Ahmad’s fondness for staging interethnic squabbles in different languages, but with imperfect or absent subtitles. World cinema scholars like Shih ShuMei and Abe Markus Nornes might argue that these disjunctures disrupt social and textual unity, thus foregrounding cultural difference and textual incoherence. I layer their logic with a further analysis of how Ahmad’s intricate soundscapes steer attention away from dialogue’s linguistic meaning, towards the purely acoustic pleasures of dueling cultural phonemics or prosody – what the dialogue simply sounds like. Nancy’s concepts of “ecouter” and “resonance” are useful here. Ahmad’s ethnic cacophonies of regional dialects and accents expressively convey postcolonial subjectivity in two registers. To fluent domestic listeners, the unique aural clashes between different languages are also comedically inflected, and create an emotionally dialectical cadence marked by familial affection and hostility; whereas for unacculturated foreign audiences who can nonetheless distinguish linguistic variances, the sequences offer a cinematic experience that is thoroughly aural, spatially marginalized, and yet seductively immersive.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gerald Sim, PhD, is Associate Professor of film studies at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema, forthcoming in 2014 from Bloomsbury Academic. His Senior Research Fellowship at ARI in 2013 marked the start of his current project on postcolonial film aesthetics, of which this research is a key part.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg