Speaker: Thong Kay Wee. Outreach Officier at Asian Film Archive & Creative Producer of State of Motion (Singapore).

Films take place over time and this paper proposes film education by way of retracing these places through particular chapters of Singapore film history. Using the Asian Film Archive’s event State of Motion 2016 as a case study, the spotlight will be placed on Singapore locations appearing in classic old films, bringing to fore what is usually regarded as backdrop to the narratives, freeing them from the grip of the fictive and re-presenting them as sites and receptacles of real and lived history.
With the 2016 project, attention was given to a selection of 20th century Cathay-Keris’ studio films made during the golden age of Singapore Cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. The research traversed through trends of situating movie making in traditional villages, newly reclaimed lands, skyscrapers, and iconic sites. The highlight of the project came in the format of a film history-cum-visual arts tour, when further artistic interventions were invited to expound on the dialogue from these slate of films, enabled by the attention on history, locality and story telling.
With films regarded as documents of time, the paper seeks to encourage the imagining and examining of an ever-changing Singapore landscape in the larger context of national history and social memories.

Date: Tuesday, November 8th