“Artistic practices are a powerful kind of government,” reflected visiting Professor Tony Day in his talk last Thursday, entitled “Time and Freedom in Asian Film.” Day, who taught Asian Performance Studies at the University of Sydney for 20 years and currently teaches Modern Chinese history at Wesleyan, discussed how Asian cinema can act as a medium for social commentary and even transformation. Specifically, he talked about the ways in which recent developments in Asian cinema can break down cultural barriers. He opened his speech with an image of the iconic Great Wall of China crumbling into a field of blossoming flowers, which illustrated his point literally. Each of the four highlighted films – “Vertical Ray of the Sun,” “Sepet,” “Tropical Malady,” and “Good Men Good Women” – questioned some segregationist aspect of Southeast Asian society.
Using a clip of the Vietnamese film “Vertical Ray of the Sun,” Day explained how director Tran Anh Hung uses shots of conversations between women to explore the issue of patriarchal society. In traditional Vietnamese manner, Tran depicts the individual character only in relation to the family and the “world of the home.” He then questions this by involving his characters in incestuous relationships, which creates great tension and instability.
Tran, Day said, manipulates the passage of time in order to evoke a specific reaction from his audience.
“Memories of revolution and war, though dispersed throughout the film, are largely replaced by a melancholy sensation of cyclical time,” Day said.
Through these means, Tran is able to convey a larger message that “love and its sorrows are timeless and forever the same.”
The film “Sepet,” meaning “slant-eye” in English, is a commentary on race relations in Malaysia. Day showed a clip in which a Malaysian man reads to a woman from the diary of an Indian man. After the man is finished, the woman remarks, “Different land, different language, and yet we can feel what was in his heart.” Director Yasmin Ahmad presents a utopian image of the country with what Day refers to as “utopian time,” which resists any kind of structure.
In “Tropical Malady,” a film set mostly in the jungles of Thailand, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul alludes to the country’s prevalent urban corruption, as well as the idea that cities symbolize sex and money. Its depiction of a homosexual romance goes against the norms of mainstream Thai media.
“[Tropical Malady] suggests a more powerful meaning of temporality than exists in contemporary Thai life,” Day said.
The final film, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien’s “Good Men Good Woman,” represents the violence of the country’s history by following a group of actors re-enacting a mid-20th century battle against the Japanese. Day commented on Hsien’s use of long shots to “spatialize time and temporalize space.”
The film also deals with lingual divisions between Taiwanese, who speak several variations of Chinese as well as Japanese. One of the film’s critical scenes involves an exchange between two soldiers who misunderstand each other due to the differences in their Chinese dialects.
“The human agency of freedom is defined and evaluated through relationships,” Day concluded, adding, “Families, rather than nations, are the wellspring of freedom.”
He is currently working on a sequel to his book, “Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia.”
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