Singapore GaGa

新加坡风

"Singapore GaGa is a 55-minute paean to the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape. It reveals Singapore's past and present with a delight and humour that makes it a necessary film for all Singaporeans. We hear buskers, street vendors, school cheerleaders sing hymns to themselves and to their communities. From these vocabularies (including Arabic, Latin, Hainanese), a sense of what it might mean to be a modern Singaporean emerges."

- a documentary by Tan Pin Pin

【来自http://www.tanpinpin.com/sgg/story.html】

Ying is my favorite. 

2:13 "Do you know which country invented this hook, miss? It's brilliant."

3:58 The Skater's Waltz 

 The Impossibility of Knowing 

- another interesting documentary by Tan Pin Pin

At my studio along Serangoon Road, Singapore I often walk past a hotel called Fortuna Hotel. It is a nondescript hotel with 60 rooms, catering mainly to Indian tourists.

I happen to be old enough to know that this hotel is built on the same site where Hotel New World once was. The hotel collapsed in 1986 because of a gross engineering miscalculation. On that spot, 33 people died and many others were injured.

Walking past this building you would hardly know that this happened. I wonder how many other people like me, walk past that space and think about that tragedy.

It occurred to me that I held something within: a subjective list of places that I cannot forget because of the tragedies, incidents, accidents that identify them. Each of us harbours an inchoate list in our minds.

For this documentary, I visit these spaces in my list. There are many locations in it you may not have heard about as they did not make the headlines. Most are ordinary spaces:  a corridor, a neighbourhood mosque, a canal. Looking at them, you would not have known what had happened. There are no marks or commemorative plaques.

Despite Singapore’s hyper-urban and sterile appearance, this terrain is still wrought over with human emotions. A place may just be a place to some but be frought with meaning for others. It is the subjectivity of emotional nodes connected to geography that fascinate me.

The title The Impossibility of Knowing refers to the limits of images, the limits of what we see and can know, from what we see. It also refers to the act of construction of meaning by the director. The process is tenuous and highly mediated. You never know the truth as it were.

【來自http://theimpossibilityofknowing.wordpress.com/about/】

【粵】现实是过去的未来

Reality/Presence is the Past's Future

某人已把我的Div三做了，名字也取得很好聽。世界真系小小小，直到今天一看他的簡歷才發現曹斐的好幾個作品都是他做的攝影師。

        我们每天的日常生活里充斥着各种荒诞的事件。影片由20多个发生在城市里的事件拼贴而成：一个拿不到赔偿金而扬言自杀的男人；一个在路中央手舞足蹈的疯子；一群在高速路上失控的猪；随意乱过马路的行人；在消费过程中出现的假钞；在建筑工地里发现的文物；城市的河流里既有打着环保旗号的游泳队伍，又有不怕肮脏的渔夫，甚至还有一条逃跑出来的鳄鱼……

作者阐述：　

　

        在两年间我收集了DV爱好者拍摄的各种素材，并决定做一部有自己风格的城市交响曲。一直以来，城市交响曲形式的纪录片都没有展现现实的声音，如沃尔特鲁特曼的《柏林：城市交响曲》、吉加维尔托夫的《带摄影机的人》和戈弗雷吉里欧的《失去平衡的生活》。但这次，绝对不需要配乐，这部城市交响曲里交织着各种现实的声音和事件。　　

        黄伟凯，1972年生，广东人，1995年毕业于广州美术学院国画系，2002年作为自由工作者开始独立拍片。

【來自http://movie.douban.com/subject/3632550/】

Born in 1972, Huang Weikai is a Guangzhou-based filmmaker with a degree from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He began creating films as a freelance artist in 2002.

Director’s Note：

    When I began shooting this film, I told myself not to be concerned with what a documentary “should be like”, or to worry about the meaning of “vérité” or “truth.” Both a documentary and a feature are films observing different sets of rules. What I set out to make was a film anyway. A wast majority of people hold that documentary is monotonous, lengthy and uninteresting, because the cliche of documentaries ruins the appetite of audience. A young filmmaker is not to produce a model of a standard documentary but to try to produce a creative piece of work, even he may risk committing very stupid or naive mistakes.

    The most attractive aspect lies in uncertainty. During the shooting, neither I nor the people I shot had any idea what would happen next. We seemed to be in a floating boat, in the vast ocean, accepting the challenges that befell us. But that is only what the filmmaker felt. The people you shot may ask: “what is the difference between today and yesterday; why are you still shooting? In front of the camera, his life is mobilizing and changing. It is even more dramatic than a feature movie. His songs are also very expressive, so the interviews sometimes are replaced by performance, which is in fact more capable of expressing his emotions and delivering the information to target audience and sometimes even play the role of the narration.


【來自http://www.reelchina.net/directors/huangweikai.htm】

"Weikai assembled the footage from over one-thousand hours of footage he collected from other, amateur filmmakers, and while stitching this footage together, he followed but one rule: No successive scenes could come from the same source tape. It's a film that aspires toward democracy, that hopes to represent the multitude.

And yet, a priori to these ideas and gestures, Disorder is simply a gripping, stirring, occasionally shocking experience. Part of this is due to Weikai's playful juxtapositions: Men jostling with a pig, trying in vain to coax it back into a truck; panicking policemen, quelling a contextless near-riot, shoving someone's mother into a wagon; a shirtless, unhinged man crossing a busy intersection, only he has nowhere to go; another shirtless man, armed with grievances, disarmingly lucid about why he is perched on the railing of a bridge. These are all unrelated scenes, captured by unrelated cameras. But mostly, the power of Disorder rests in the associations we draw from Weikai's raw materials, the narratives we surmise, the moments that are savagely funny or miserably sad, if that's what you want them to be. Perhaps you thought some of the scenes—grainy messes of inscrutable action—resembled a music video.

After the film, Weikai discussed this emerging idea of a distinctly Chinese "absurdity"—a condition of life related to but distinct from previous expressions of the absurd, like Kafka or magical realism. This was a theme many Chinese artists were contemplating, he explained, and it offered a fascinating way to think about Disorder in particular, and the documentary genre in general. While this was a film about the everyday effects of globalization and progress, it wasn't a polemic about causes. It was about a common, daily effect: this was a film about people who had accepted a measure of absurdity in their lives. This was the ruling condition of all the scattered scenes, from the cop—powerless, ultimately—brokering a deal between two aggrieved citizens, to the family—bemused but not shocked—who happen upon an orphaned baby in the brush."

-- Hua Hsu

【來自http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/10/huang-weikais-absurd-new-film/64480/】

【粵】Some Arti Dim Sum

    NEW MASSES! 

No One Will Grant Us Deliverance, Not God, Nor Tsar, Nor Hero!

(from 歐寧 Ou Ning's notebook. He and Cao Fei found 別館 the Alternative Archive.)

Cantonese Speak Cantonese

"In July 2010, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Guangzhou Committee, in a written proposal to mayor of Guangzhou, suggested increasing Standard Chinese (Mandarin) programming in the General Channel and News Channel of Guangzhou Television (GZTV). The proposal sparked widespread controversy, met with fierce criticism in Cantonese-speaking cities including Guangzhou and Hong Kong and eventually triggering a protest in Guangzhou."

[來自 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_use_of_Cantonese_by_Guangzhou_Television]

陳揚 (Chen Yang, nicknamed Chen Sir), the most outspoken GZTV host and critic, has remained very popular in Guangzhou after he was forced to leave. Almost everyone in Guangzhou knows him. His show was a must during dinner time with my family. "In Guangzhou, Chen Yang has countless fans and his name is widely known. He is not a star, and he even lacks a college education, but the way he satirizes current malpractices and the unique hosting style he employs have helped him won the hearts of many people and many awards. He brought forward 'New Cantonaisism,' advocated the philosophy of 'Friendly Guangzhou and Just Guangzhou.' Chen Yang has almost become a cultural icon in Guangzhou. After his program was cancelled, some audiences even held this poster high:

"Chen Sir, Guangzhou Supports You!"

The Disappearing Goat City (Guangzhou)

a documentary by 謝文君 & 粵拍粵掂

謝文君 (Xie Wenjun), my Cantonese peer, went to a film school in Beijing and made a documentary about Guangzhou as his senior project. Though I don't really like this film in terms of the style or narration or whatever, I deeply appreciate the spirit behind this film, along with a film workshop (粵拍粵掂) Xie founded in Guangzhou after he graduated that attracts lots of young people.

曹斐 (Cao Fei) is the first Chinese female artist chosen by the PBS program ART21 (Art in the 21st Century; the most internationally acclaimed Chinese artists are mostly in this program, e.g. Xu Bing and Cai Guo-Qiang). Cao was born in Guangzhou in 1978 and graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. One thing I found really special about Cao Fei is that she's very different from the earlier famous Chinese artists who uses calligraphy, gunpowder, and whatsoever "Chineseness." Her art is more about local stories with a sense of lightheartedness and lots of references to local culture. I wrote about her and other Cantonese artists (e.g. one of China’s first art avant-garde groups, Guangzhou based - The Big Tail Elephant Group) as a semester long project for a Hampshire course Deterritorialized Spaces: Border Cultures.

The following are my favorite ones of Cao Fei's work, especially the PRD Anti-Heroes. I came across this piece in the 維他命空間 (Vitamin Creative Space), a very no frills local independent space (not even a gallery) located in the middle of nowhere - 赤岗东新港商业城内光速网吧3楼. Its location is actually very absurd and surreal because it's on the 3rd floor of an internet cafe, to which you need to go through a very crowded outdoor market where all the small business people might have no idea about the existence of such nutritious and creative brain juice. The Vitamin Space mainly focuses on Cantonese artists and has its own publications, which is pretty rare. I was surprised that I found its books in the Printed Matter in NYC. I watched the whole PRD Anti-Heroes dvd in the Vitamin and had been trying to find a copy of it. But I'd never seen it again until ART21 uploaded small snatches of it on youtube. Awesome but not perfect!

珠三角梟雄 PRD Anti-Heroes, 2005

This performance uses documentary style interviews, anecdotes, local legends culled on the internet, widely publicized press reports of goings-on in the Pearl River Delta's hot spots, other first-person accounts of life, and traditional Cantonese opera.

A parody of propaganda phrases: “One World One Dream” and “building a harmony society”   

Cantonese Kong Fu character holding signs with Cantonese slangs

A Satire on the Beauty Contest

From the artist statement:

If we say that “Heroes” are part of the “History” that is well known to all of us, then “Anti-Heroes” lie in that part of history that remains unknown and anonymous... An anti-hero can take on a variety of roles and professions including that of coolie, beggar, gambler, hawker, garbage collector, tobacco seller, vendor of pirated CD’s, shoe polisher, or repairer of pots and pans, mainly doing all of the undocumented jobs outside the reach of local government administration. These people who do not have a social system of their own to rely on, and who tend to be outside the mainstream’s line of vision, are rapidly spreading to all of society’s nooks and crannies, living a subterranean life that is both separate from and at the same time interdependent on the outside world.

Online Urbanization: 人民城寨 RMB City

The RMB City is a n interactive project aims to depict an artificial island that is built in the 3D virtual world of the Second Life --> a postmodern collage of landmarks and urban over-development.

at least enjoy the music, 4:12 -!

P.S.: 

Cao Fei's earlier work

A letter from her mother when Cao was little

当今之现实比漫画更漫画 

I haven't reconnected with 廖冰兄 Liao Bing-Xiong ever since elementary school because I'd taken Liao for granted in a while, which means he was among a list of famous names that everybody knows but doesn't go beyond the level of simply knowing the names. Liao is an older generation artist who's most famous for his political satire illustrations. His sister's name is Liao Bing, so his name's Liao Bing Brother/Xiong. His work is very dark, intense, and metaphorical, which is a pretty clever way to deal with censorship.

禁鳴 No Honking/Speaking 

燃血求知 Burn Your Blood to Study

Try to imagine impressionist dot painting: 

Here, dots = human heads

Shinjuku Boys & Dream Girls

Actually I didn't watch these movies in an academic situation e.g. a gender studies class, but while going through piles and piles of pirate movies in Guangzhou. I was amazed by these serendipitous cinematic discoveriez:

新宿好T們 Shinjuku Boys

A film by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams

England, 1995, 53 minutes

"From the makers of DREAM GIRLS, SHINJUKU BOYS introduces three onnabes who work as hosts at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo. Onnabes are women who live as men and have girlfriends, although they don't usually identify as lesbians. As the film follows them at home and on the job, all three talk frankly to the camera about their gender-bending lives, revealing their views about women, sex, transvestitism and lesbianism. Alternating with these illuminating interviews are fabulous sequences shot inside the Club, patronized almost exclusively by heterosexual women who have become disappointed with real men. This is a remarkable documentary about the complexity of female sexuality in Japan today." (from Women Make Movies

http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c222.shtml) 

宝塚歌劇団 Dream Girls (The Takarazuka Revue)

 P.S.: 

研究中国女人史时...