Precarious Landscapes developed as part of Sine Screen’s ongoing series ‘Vulnerable Histories’, which seeks to counter set narratives through works which seek to activate histories – ones that have frequently been overshadowed, or sit in the margins of the official unified narrative. As Trinh T Minh Ha writes, “The function of any ideology in power is to represent the world positively unified. To challenge the regimes of representation that govern a society is to conceive of how a politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it.”
Throughout Precarious Landscapes, we are interested in non-fiction, experimental and speculative works which engage with both political content and forms, aware that subjects can be doubly oppressed through the form in which a ‘story’ is told. Precarious Landscapes scrutinises the ways in which these politicised landscapes in East and South East Asia have been contentiously represented by various clashing ideologies. These lands bear the ghosts of violence, displacement, colonialism and currently, continue to face ecological threat from extraction, tourism, and climate change. Of course, apart from these histories, the landscapes are also the homes to the daily lives of its inhabitants – spaces of commune, rituals, labour. How can cinema deal with the (im)possibilties of representing such converging realities without recreating a hierarchical, and reductive lens to these very landscapes?
Programme 01 takes on this question of representation through questioning the ‘cinematic frame’. In filmmaker, writer, scholar Trinh T Minh Ha’s No Master Territories, she notes how the classical documentary genre is plagued via its attempts at ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ when filmmaking itself is a manipulated form of reality. She writes, “The ‘close-up’ is condemned for its partiality while the wide angle is claimed to be more objective”. We are aware of how the frame can be exclusionary and seek to cut-off or fetishise and co-opt certain images, but we are also aware of how the frame is porous, multi-layered and how, often the background of an image can prove to be the most evocative and striking element.
In Letters to Panduranga (2015) by filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi – who is regarded as one of the pioneers of moving-image scene and independent cinema in Vietnam – Thi destabilises the omniscient, singular authorial form associated with documentary by taking an epistolary form – structured by a letter exchange between a man and a woman, who variously consider the ethics of film-making. Centred around the Vietnamese government’s plans to build nuclear plant in the spiritual heart of the matriarchal community of the Cham indigenous group in Ninh Thuan (formerly known as Panduranga), the film questions how two outsider can ‘represent’ this present reality, and the almost mythologised history of the Cham community. The female narrator chooses portraiture as her form – with varying close-ups and long-takes that reveal the women at the heart of this community, while the male narrator chooses landscape imagery – both negotiating with the power dynamics of such images, and variously what such rhythms of distance and proximity variously omit and reveal.
This question is further probed by Thai artist Tulapop Saenjaroen’s A Room With a Coconut View (2019) through his break-out short film set in Bangsaen, a tourist city part of the filmmaker’s coastal home province in Chon Buri. Featuring multiple frames-within-frames, from a stock image of an island beach overlaid with a wide-shot of an ocean, to warped, contorted, bleeding and pixelated images, Saenjaroen’s images are constantly on the brink of exploding, denying any stability to the visual form. The film features three voices: first, the automated voice of Kanya, a hotel-rep tour-guide, who guides the foreign tourist Alex through glitzy images of an expected tourist city. Kanya’s monologue is destabilised by Alex’s own automated voice – questioning images, their associations and the possibility of a ‘real’ experience as a tourist trapped in a cycle of constantly reproducing the images of the island: “Is there anything not literally in the frame that you want to tell me?” he asks. In the latter half, a third automated voice emerges, Tessa, who places herself as the narrator of the film, taking the film to a new form of collapse and entropy.
In Kim Minjung’s work “The Red Filter is Withdrawn.” (2020), Kim takes Hollis Frampton’s seminal ‘A Lecture’ (1968) as a foundational text of her film on Jeju island. As Frampton’s essay echoes: “We can never see more within our rectangle, only less,” Kim probes what can be observed through the rectangular frames of the coastal caves and military bunkers across Jeju Island. What can be seen are the skies, the tree, the ocean – but what is scrutinised beyond the frame, what is left in the unseen across the landscapes are the island’s histories of violence, of occupation, massacres and uprisings. As a result, Kim’s frames are porous and produce a relational mode of spectatorship between the seen and unseen, which speak to the contested and silenced stories of the seven years of unrest on the island from the Independence Day in 1947 and the police brutality which led to unthinkable deaths, to the insurrection that the event sparked and a US-backed military crackdown by the Korean government against the ‘Reds’, which lasted until 1954. The camera constantly varies between close-ups and long-takes, within the caves, and from the ocean looking out towards them – a constant navigation of the opaque qualities of these stone voids.
Thao Nguyen Phan’s Becoming Alluvium (2019) rethinks various narrative, mythological and literary frameworks through which the Mekong River has been represented. Taking Lao and Khmer folktales, against excerpts from Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and The Gardener by Rabindranath Tagore, Nguyen Phan considers the history and spiritual significance of the River and the way it facilitates daily life along its banks against commercial activity and ecological threat. Images of waste contrast against an animated construction of a fairytale, against an image of a family picnicking at the shore. Ecological concerns are never far away from mythological worlds in Phan’s loosely associative essay film.
Yuyan Wang’s Look on The Bright Side (2023) can be thought of as a bridge between our two programmes – it starts within an accelerating tunnel frame, circular and enwrapping, before widening to reveal a sensorial found-footage montage of multiple light sources – particularly artificial light – from cities emitting a glow from far away, to close-ups of pixelating light sources and the bright glow of a smartphone. Wang’s film considers contemporary society’s relationship to light and darkness – one characterised by consumption, distraction, entertainment, extraction and of course, considers our relationship to cinema, an art of the lights. ‘Look on the Bright Side’ is a sensorial examination of dark and light, of the effects produced through this montage of light – variously beautiful, alienating, spectacular, futuristic but also indicative of a world on the edge of collapse.
Written by Cici Peng
