ARI Working Paper Series

After having lain dormant for some twenty years during the period 1973 to 1991, the Singaporean film industry is experiencing something of a revival. Films produced since the early 1990s have been resolutely ‘local’ in their portrayals in an effort to ground this emergent cinematic modernity. Only a handful of these films have, however, received any international attention; most remain ‘too local,’ ‘too colloquial’ to be exportable further afield. The question that this paper explores is what particular vision or version of the local can simultaneously also manufacture a brand of foreignness that is assimilable by international audiences.

Through an overview of films from the revival period, this paper will show that the images which do travel successfully overseas are those that portray the dark side to Singapore’s road to economic modernisation, the failed processes of an Asianised modernity. It is these images, representing one vision of an ‘authentic’ social reality, that is recognizable by international audiences in the context of previous successes by Asian films utilising a shared form of (local) expression. My question is whether we can read these images as a particular kind of ‘slang’– a vagabond expression that represents a filmic vernacular that also strategically invokes a cinematic modernity for the Singaporean film industry.

This argument may extend to other (emergent) Asian cinemas that also participate in the production of this particular brand of foreignness. Thus, the paper will also provide initial speculations towards the regionalisation of cinema and ask whether such a move might be desirable or what its purpose might be.