7 - Singapore
from Part Two - Asia and Ocenia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
[T]he idea of ‘national cinema’ has given way to ‘transnational film studies’ … [I]nstead of following the rush to abandon the national altogether, we [ask] what happens to the national in transnational film studies. We [call] for the final abandonment of the old national cinemas model, which assumed nation-states were stable and coherent and that films [of a particular nation-state] expressed singular national identity.
(Berry and Farquhar 2006: 195)Introduction: Conflicting Nationalisms
Singapore on screen testifies to the fact that this small nation has both benefited from, and paid the price for, its historical position as the premier port in South East Asia. As the gateway between ‘east’ and ‘west’ and even ‘north’ and ‘south’, the city-state has long been territory to and for the global traffic in people, ideas, images, cultures and capital, including film. Singapore cinema thus has simultaneously local, national and transnational dimensions, similar to the country's multiracial, multicultural, multi-religious and multi-linguistic environments. The inherent contradictions result in considerable complexity. In this chapter we limit our discussion to Singapore cinema of the last two decades or so, a period that coincides with this cinema's revitalisation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cinema of Small Nations , pp. 127 - 143Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007