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
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.
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