![\"Jonathan](\"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Streiblephoto.jpg\")
<\/a>Jonathan Kahana, Dana Polan and Hannah Zeavin.
Photo by Dan Streible<\/p><\/div>\n
Is not a picture worth a thousand words?\u00a0 Perhaps it helps if one knows the back story.\u00a0 Jonathan Kahana flew to New York from the West Coast to be on this panel at NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies with Hannah and Dana Polan.\u00a0 They were examining John Huston’s documentary Let There Be Ligh<\/em>t (1946), which I have certainly taught more than once at NYU many years ago when I was an adjunct there.\u00a0 Before the event, Jonathan gave me a call to express his sense of disorientation.\u00a0 He and I had been on a panel together at the previous SCMS conference.\u00a0 Now he was on a panel with my daughter.\u00a0 Dana’s presence is also worthy of comment, for he played a small but interesting role in Hannah’s early intellectual development.\u00a0 As a very young girl (would she have qualified as a toddler?), Hannah had figured out that people whose first name ended with an “a” sound were female.\u00a0 Her own name being a good example but there were many others (Noa Steimatsky or Gloria Monti, for instance).\u00a0 So she was beginning to figure out the apparent logic of how this world operates\u2013\u2013and then Dana Polan dropped by.\u00a0 She was visibly puzzled since he violated her understanding of how the gendered world was organized and named.\u00a0 It was probably her first act of necessary intellectual revision.<\/p>\n I was not at this occasion but the event was documented by Dan Streible, who had crashed on my couch many years ago when he was doing research in NYC. Hannah was about five and he brought a reading glass as a kind of house present. Hannah was immediately fascinated about this instrument of investigation and she would ask about Dan (the man with the magnifying glass) for many years afterwards.<\/p>\n Dan’s joint portrait<\/p><\/div>\n Now let me add one more fact\u2013\u2013 about that workshop that I proposed, which was turned down.\u00a0 Jonathan Kahana was supposed to be one of its members. In fact, its chair.<\/p>\n Brian Winston Comes To Yale<\/p><\/div>\n Exhibit B:<\/strong> November 4th.\u00a0<\/em> I took my first course in the history of documentary with Brian Winston at NYU’s Cinema Studies department\u2013\u2013it must have been in the late 1970s.\u00a0 Almost a decade later, after the success of my documentary Before the Nickelodeon<\/em>, I had the chance to teach the same course\u2013\u2013filling in for George Stoney who was pursuing other opportunities.\u00a0 It proved to be one of the more disconcerting experiences of my life as I periodically heard myself Here is the important point:\u00a0 Although Brian Winston came to Yale to discuss “The State of Documentary Studies Today,” it was not me who brought him to Yale.\u00a0 Film Studies Program chair John MacKay and Brian are part of a European-based group which is studying the newsreel. John was eager for Brian to stop off at Yale while on his US tour, and I volunteered to organize it.\u00a0 John, as I remind him all too frequently got into Film Studies in significant part by being a teaching assistant in my two lecture courses (Intro to Film Studies, Film Theory and Aesthetics), for its in there that he saw his first two Vertov films.\u00a0 And so I happily find myself the indirect relay. Meanwhile undergraduates from my Contemporary Documentary Film and Video class looked on.<\/p>\n \u00a0****<\/p>\n \u00a0 In fact, the weekend of events began on Thursday evening when I had dinner with some friends and junior colleagues who were at Stockholm University in the Media Studies Department: Laura Horak had been my advisee as an undergraduate at Yale.\u00a0 She received her Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley and<\/p>\n With Laura Horak, Joel Frykholm, Doron Galili, and Kim Fahlstedt<\/p><\/div>\n was at Stockholm as a post-doc.\u00a0 I had met Joel Frykholm when teaching two summers ago at Stockholm University and ended up serving as a respondent for an early cinema panel he organized at the annual SCMS conference last year.\u00a0 I had met Doron Galili when he was a graduate student at University of Chicago.\u00a0 More recently he had been a visiting lecturer at Oberlin College, where he kindly brought me in as a guest scholar-filmmaker.\u00a0 In that small world category he is now a Post Doc at SU.\u00a0 Kim Fahlstedt, who is working on an early cinema dissertation, had been my teaching assistant when I taught at SU two years ago.\u00a0 I could not have survived without his terrific support. So it was a reunion of sorts.<\/p>\n I spent much of Friday preparing and\u2026<\/p>\n Making Coffee before the Defense: John Fullerton and Kim<\/p><\/div>\n Pre-meeting Greetings: Stephen Hughes and Tytti Soila<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n I spent much of Friday preparing and on Saturday went to the Film House where the Cinema Studies Section is based and where the defense was taking place:<\/p>\n Tytti Solia Welcomes<\/p><\/div>\n John Fullerton Greets<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nadi in the Hot Seat<\/p><\/div>\n Jan Olson Asks a Question<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The audience<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Congratulations from Mom<\/p><\/div>\n \u2026and Dad.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n With Nadi’s permission I am presenting my remarks and some accompanying photographs. Once again my camera was working.\u00a0 He began by saying that he plans to revise the dissertation still further and turn it into a book–as well as some articles.\u00a0 My comments, designed to point towards the dissertaiton’s achievements as well as areas for further exploration and analysis, had that in mind.\u00a0 At various moments, Nadi responded to my comments.\u00a0 Those are reflected here, but I have offered Nadi the chance to add comments to this blog (within the blog itself) at some future date.<\/p>\n My Remarks at Nadi Tofighian\u2019s Dissertation Defense<\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0It is a pleasure and an honor to be here to celebrate the defense of Nadi Tofighian\u2019s dissertation Blurring the Colonial Binary: Turn-of-the-Century Transnational Entertainment in Southeast Asia<\/i>.\u00a0 I would like to thank Vice Dean Tytti Solia, Professor John Fullerton and others in the Department of Media Studies who made this possible.<\/p>\n These rituals are important and I contrast them to ours in the United States, particularly at Yale.\u00a0 The day I left New Haven for Stockholm–Wednesday, we completed the dissertation defense of one of my students\u2014Josh Glick.\u00a0 Four faculty members, including me, had written up our evaluations and comments, which were presented to the American Studies faculty at a lunch time meeting.\u00a0\u00a0 Dr. Glick\u2019s dissertation was passed.\u00a0 On Monday, Josh thought we were meeting on Tuesday.\u00a0 On Tuesday he learned we were meeting on Wednesday.\u00a0 On Wednesday evening, while waiting for my plane, I filled him in on the results via email.\u00a0 He passed and everyone thought his dissertation would make a swell book with some more revisions.\u00a0 Josh found the process rather anti-climatic.\u00a0 Here at Stockholm University Nadi presents us with a completed book, and it is fair to say that he will not be waiting around for an email to find out if he passed or not.<\/p>\n Toasting His Successful Defense<\/p><\/div>\n Of course I come to this event in the role of the opponent, who adds the necessary drama and spice to the proceedings.\u00a0 I like to think I was chosen for a few reasons.\u00a0 First, it continues and so enhances my relations with the Department of Media Studies where I taught a course on Media and American Politics two summers ago.\u00a0 Second, I assume that my profile has somehow become sufficiently established, so my readiness to serve as an opponent is well known.\u00a0 That is I have been the friendly opponent of Tom Gunning and cinema of attractions for some 20 years.\u00a0 Tom, as many of you know, has an honorary degree from Stockholm University and is one of my best friends.\u00a0 Of course, there are scholars for whom I have been a strong opponent with whom I am on less friendly terms, but I am confident that Stockholm University has no relations with them!\u00a0 In any case, I anticipate remaining on friendly relations with Nadi after this defense.<\/p>\n The final reason for my presence today has more to do with my own interests and engagement with the subject of Mr. Tofighian\u2019s dissertation.\u00a0 Indeed, it seems to me that it has much to do with how we first met: \u00a0at a conference on the Origins of the Cinema in Southeast Asia in Quezon City in August of 2005.\u00a0 Nadi was living in the Philippines completing a master\u2019s thesis on Jose Nepomuceno, who has generally been hailed as the Philippines first native filmmaker.\u00a0 And he gave a paper on the distribution of Nordisk Films in Asia.\u00a0 Most of us, however, were busy pursuing local or national cinemas.\u00a0 For instance in my usual oppositional fashion I was investigating the history of early cinema in the Philippines to about 1912-13 and giving our host and my dear friend Nick Deocampo a hard time of it.\u00a0 Others were looking at cinema practices in Siam\/Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and so forth.\u00a0 Each of us was operating within individual \u201cnational\u201d silos.\u00a0 So one of the fundamental questions\u2014perhaps the fundamental question\u2013\u2013that came out of that conference had to do with the relations and interconnectedness of these different national or proto-national colonial cinemas. In this respect, Nadi\u2019s dissertation is a bold effort to explore this interconnectedness on the level of the transnational circulation of entertainment.\u00a0 He shows how circuses and other amusement entities crossed colonial boundaries as they moved from India and Ceylon into Southeast Asia\u2014Siam, Malaysia, Java, Vietnam and the Philippines.\u00a0 He argues that \u201cAlthough Southeast Asia as a concept was non-existent, at the turn of the century, it existed as a form of cultural entity, primarily through networks of shipping, trade and cultural amusements.\u201d (p 17) He treats these geographic entities\u2014which have a wildly divergent histories and systems of government as a whole\u2014by examining the impact of transnational entertainments, particularly the cinema, on these societies and the ways they blurred political boundaries.\u00a0 He also emphasizes the blurring of boundaries between colonizers and colonized.\u00a0 With circuses as a precedent, Tofighian argues that the cinema provided an opportunity for diverse racial and economic groups to come together in a shared public space.\u00a0 That is there is a break from previous forms of cultural life, which were strongly segregated along ethnic-racial-cultural lines.<\/p>\n Tofighian must have taken away another insight from the 2005 conference on Origins of the Cinema in Southeast Asia.\u00a0 Our knowledge about Malaysia and particularly Singapore was scant. Because of his work on Scandinavian film in Southeast Asia, he understood Singapore as a pivotal site for commerce in the region and so did extensive, often apparently exhaustive research in newspapers from that city, other Straits Settlements and the Malayan states under British rule.\u00a0 He also did more selective and limited research in newspapers from the Philippines, the Dutch West Indies, Vietnam and Bangkok.\u00a0 It is my impression that many of these materials had not been previously consulted by cinema scholars.\u00a0 Nadi thus uncovered a rich vein of pertinent information and he mined it\u2013-gaining a much better sense of the frequency of exhibitions, the films shown, prices, location and so forth.\u00a0 This is a major achievement and I learned a great deal from it.\u00a0 For instance, the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Asia in general is something I had not adequately appreciated through my American eyes.\u00a0 It was a war that disrupted the binary, which had European Whites as dominant while Asians occupied lesser positions.\u00a0 Most particularly there was a wave of Japanese film exhibitors who moved into Southeast Asia even as the war was going on\u2013\u2013and showed films of this struggle to large audiences in Singapore, the Straits, Bangkok and elsewhere.\u00a0 They represented a New Asia.\u00a0 They were simultaneously promoters of a Pan-Asian sensibility but also of a world in which Japanese occupied a position similar in many ways to European colonizers.<\/p>\n I should add that Nadi utilized an impressive array of secondary literature on the history of British Imperialism and that grounded much of his newspaper research on Singapore.\u00a0 This then was the resource dialectic that informed his intellectual project.<\/p>\n I\u2019d like to develop and explore some other parts of the dissertation in the course of posing some questions but is there anything that you would like to add or correct at this point?<\/b><\/p>\n The dissertation does an excellent job of detailing the history of newspapers particularly in Singapore.\u00a0 And they appear in the bibliography. I note you visited the national libraries in quite few countries, but not surprisingly the universe of newspapers in larger than you could exhaust.\u00a0 For instance, my work on early cinema in the Philippines has used the Manila Times<\/i> which you don\u2019t use\u2014but rather use half a dozen other papers instead.\u00a0 We also live in an era where digitization is more or less rapidly revolutionizing the process of research, particularly newspaper research. Question 1) With the use of newspapers as the backbone of this project, I wonder if Mr. Tafighian could tell us a little bit about this process, its limitations and what perhaps you had to leave unfinished and unsurveyed.\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n This is my first point of engagement.\u00a0 And I say this as someone who is struggling with the opportunities of our new era of research methodologies.\u00a0 But I think your arguments and insights could have been strengthened by doing a random word access of at least two trade journals\u2014the New York Clipper<\/i> in the US and The Era<\/i> in London.\u00a0 For instance I did a random word access of the term \u201cSingapore\u201d in the New York Clipper<\/i> for 1890-1900 and think I came up with about 40 hits.\u00a0 These included letters from managers of circuses, some of which you mention in your dissertation.\u00a0 Likewise in the Era<\/i> and the Clipper<\/i> I received quite a few hits for the magician Carl Hertz, one of the early pioneers of film exhibition in Southeast Asia and someone you mention.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He might actually challenge a notion of a cultural Southeast Asia in the 1890s.\u00a0 Hertz first shows films on shipboard headed to Capetown, then stops in South Africa, moved on to India and Ceylon\u2014then Australia and New Zealand before stopping in Java and Singapore.\u00a0 Whether he goes to Manila is unclear\u2014he claims to have been chased out of there by the Spanish American War but did he ever get there?\u00a0 Or did he get there but have to leave before performing?\u00a0 In any case he was in Hong Kong, Nanking, Shanghai and Hawaii before reaching San Francisco.<\/p>\n At the party, Nadi’s sister was the Master of Ceremonies<\/p><\/div>\n In short Hertz soon ended up back in London, having completed a round-the-world tour.\u00a0 He demonstrates that there is a level in which we can now talk about the circulation of a global world performance culture; and film complemented and then arguably dominated this circulation.\u00a0 Now there may be other entertainment groups\u2014notably circuses\u2014that move within a more limited geographical boundaries but the manager of Warren\u2019s Circus wrote the NY Clipper<\/i> from Shanghai and describes performing in Burmah, Ceylon Java, Malaysia, Cochin China, the Philippines, China and Japan.\u00a0 Just as clearly some of the \u201cAustralian Letters\u201d suggest a circuit that constructs the British Empire from South Africa to India and Australia and perhaps Hong Kong.\u00a0 So while there are trade routes that bind different parts of Southeast Asia together they also bind its constituent parts together in what might be the orient or the East \u2013while some amusement companies participated in a subset of the global economy, which was the British Empire.\u00a0 This would be particularly true for theatrical companies performing in English.\u00a0 Magicians, circuses and cinema did not have these kinds of constraints.\u00a0 Let me say that as you turn elements of this dissertation into articles and other forms of scholarship, you might also fruitfully perform random word searches of other newspapers such as the London Times<\/i>, the San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>.<\/p>\n In any case, the nature of these circuits may change over time.\u00a0 Singapore becomes a regional center for cinema but one that is smaller\u2014connected to the Straits Settlements and Malaysia and to a lesser extent parts of the Dutch West Indies and Siam\/Bangkok.\u00a0 Since\u2013\u2013as your dissertation points out (pp 138-144)\u2013\u2013 Levy Hermanos had offices in the Philippines, those offices rather than its Singapore office probably handled Filipinos\u2019 need for films.<\/p>\n Party Time<\/p><\/div>\n 2) So my second question<\/b> is to challenge you and ask you if there is not more work to be done on the complex picture of what constitutes a regional culture\u2014and how this culture is related to a global cultural economy on one hand and to the local on the other.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It seems to me that one important achievement of your dissertation involves explicating how cinema was being used to promote the British Empire and Singapore\u2019s place within it.\u00a0 In the first stage, you argue that cinema is presented as a technological novelty, which is a demonstration of British and European intellectual and technological supremacy.\u00a0 Here you use Brian Larkin\u2019s work on Nigeria (Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria<\/i>).\u00a0 But you then point out that this technological supremacy more or less rapidly disappears\u2014beginning in the very early 1900s and certainly fully by 1905 when there were the various Japanese Cinematograph exhibitors.\u00a0 So you seem to use Larkin briefly but then suggest that the situation in Southeast Asia is different than Africa.<\/p>\n 3) I wonder if you could develop more the difference between West Africa and Southeast Asia.<\/b>\u00a0 That is, it seems to me that British Colonialism in West Africa versus Southeast Asia (Singapore in particular) were soon different enough so that you might have profitably explored these differences\u2014rather than note a relatively brief moment of similarity and then drop it.\u00a0 That is, if you were to argue for a regional culture with certain characteristics, it would be important to show how this region\u2013\u2013Southeast Asia\u2013\u2013differs from others.\u00a0 These arguments can be made most readily through comparisons.\u00a0 And such comparisons will inevitably modify any conclusions.<\/p>\n Again Blurring the Colonial Binary<\/i> is very effective at showing how the cinema was an effective ideological apparatus for the British Empire in Singapore, from the showing of Queen Victoria Jubilee films in 1897 through films of her funeral and King Edward VIII\u2019s coronation and the subsequent Dubar in India.\u00a0 Even the Russo-Japanese War films in which England\u2019s ally\u2014the Japanese\u2014won.\u00a0 But it also seems to me that overall the dissertation exaggerates the homogenization.\u00a0 These films had different resonances in different parts of Southeast Asia.\u00a0 That is, while you offer some new, interesting and valuable information on the cinema in the Philippines, the Philippines was a completely different situation.<\/p>\n The nickelodeon boom\u2014the rapid proliferation of small, stable and cheap movie theaters\u2014occurred in the United States from mid-1905 to mid 1907.\u00a0 This occurred in Manila in 1902-03\u2014earlier than the US and earlier than elsewhere in Southeast Asia\u2014indeed, it is the earliest example of this phenomenon in the world. How and Why?\u00a0 The end of the Filipino-American War in 1902 produced a rapid expansion of cinematografos or cinemas and other forms of theatrical presentation of motion pictures.[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Moving pictures quickly found a key role in Manila\u2019s theatrical culture. The names for many of these theaters indicated that they were not extensions of the new American regime but offered an alternative public sphere (to evoke Miriam Hansen).<\/p>\n Film screenings were generally complemented by local theater performances.\u00a0 Their precise nature needs to be better understood since \u201cseditious plays,\u201d usually written in Tagalog by Filipinos who opposed the American occupation, flourished in the 1902-1906 period.\u00a0 In many instances, writers, directors and actors were arrested while some writers were convicted and went to jail for violating the Sedition Act, passed on November 4, 1901.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 The American colonial government declared,<\/p>\n Until it has been officially proclaimed that a state of war or insurrection against the authority or sovereignty of the United States no longer exits in the Philippine Islands, it shall be unlawful for any person to advance orally or by writing or printing or like methods, the independence of the Philippine Islands, or their separation from the United States whether by peaceable or forcible means or to print, publish or circulate any handbill, newspaper, or publication advocating such independence or separation.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n Overall the combination of films and plays suggests a mix of cosmopolitan sophistication that was connected to the French films of M\u00e9li\u00e8s and Path\u00e9 and an anti-American, nationalist rhetoric that was tied to the live performances (even if the plays were not explicitly advocating independence) Both acted, at least implicitly, as a rejection of the colonizing power.<\/p>\n Congratulations to the new Doctor<\/p><\/div>\n The situation in Singapore was completely different and again, completely different than the situation of the French in Indo China.\u00a0 Singapore did not exist until it became a British port.\u00a0 As Nadi points out, it was a British creation.\u00a0 All of its residence had come from elsewhere within the last 60 or so years or less.\u00a0 People\u2014Chinese, Europeans, Indians, Arabs and so forth went there to work in the city as business and shipping hub.\u00a0 The British Empire provided them with protection.\u00a0 So the situation in Singapore and the Philippines were in most respects\u2014politically and culturally\u2014polar opposites.\u00a0 Likewise we can understand while the present-day Vietnamese government still sees the cinema of the colonial period as fundamentally French cinema\u2014not Vietnamese in any sense.\u00a0 Cinema was not always simply or primarily a technological novelty as it was in Singapore in the outset.\u00a0 If we consider the Lumi\u00e8res\u2019 early film programs in France, they were clearly about three things: Family, State and Nation.\u00a0 The role of family was generally played by the Lumi\u00e8re family, the state was the military and the nation was represented by monuments such as the Champs Elysee or the Eifel Tower.\u00a0 We might note that these were the three terms of the Vichy government in World War II.\u00a0 Lumi\u00e8re programs had a similar configuration in Vietnam.\u00a0 But such early programs had a very different configuration when they were shown in the Philippines\u2014no military scenes, and views from around the world including scenes of Mexico, a former Spanish colony.\u00a0 Filipinos could see themselves as part of an international community that included nations that had won their freedom from Spain.\u00a0 This is of course, implicit.<\/p>\n Tofighian did his master\u2019s thesis on Jos\u00e9 Nepomuceno, who made his first films in the late 1910s.\u00a0 In his dissertation, Nadi refers to Nepomuceno as the first Filipino filmmaker. In this regard, I have championed Edward Meyer Gross and his wife and movie star Titay Molina who collaborated on a series of feature films in 1912 and beyond\u2013\u2013which is not to downplay the role of Nepomuceno.\u00a0 But a couple of things are worth noting.\u00a0 First Gross and Molina really did blur the binaries of colonized and colonizer in all sorts of ways.\u00a0 He wrote and she starred in a play about Jose Rizal in 1905, before making the filmed version of it in 1912: The Life and Death of Jose Rizal<\/i>.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Nadi identifies the manager of the Walgraph, Filipino M. E. Quiros as the first person who lived in the Philippines and took films there, including one of a procession in honor of Rizal\u2019s death on December 30, 1904. (pp 211-212) These were often local news films that carried a pro-Filipino and indirectly anti-colonial message.<\/p>\n 5) So I wonder, why\u2013\u2013 having identified the earliest Filipino filmmaker, you make nothing of it\u2014even bury it in your footnotes.\u00a0 Why?<\/b><\/p>\n Even in Singapore, I think there could be a deeper probing of social relations such as the fascinating category of Eurasians, which is an obvious manifestation of blurring boundaries.\u00a0 The term in the Philippines is Mestizo. Here again these blurring of boundaries may well have had different associations and values.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>channeling Brian during my first year of lectures. I was speaking Winstonese.\u00a0 By then Brian had left NYU for Penn State, then University of Wales (Cardiff) and is now at University of Lincoln (England) where he was Dean of Communications and briefly a Pro Vice Chancellor.\u00a0 Currently the first Lincoln Chair of Communications at that University, he was touring with his newly published anthology, The Documentary Film Book\u00a0<\/em>(BFI\/Palgrave, 2013)\u2013\u2013to which I made a contribution: “Problems in Historiography: The Documentary Tradition Before Nanook of the North<\/em>.” It presents a much longer historical trajectory of “the documentary tradition” even as it strives to think through issues involving genre and media specificity that the field of documentary studies needs to address. Here I will note that there is a certain tradition of student’s work appearing in collections assembled by their teachers and mentors.\u00a0 Some 35 years later, Brian and I finally pulled it off. What’s interesting is that Brian looks pretty much the same as he did in 1980.\u00a0 Wish I could say the same.<\/p>\n
\n<\/a>Much of Brian’s talk reprised his introduction to The Documentary Film Book,<\/em> which I saw in print for the first time when he arrived with book in hand. I am always intrigued with the different histories of documentary, which vary depending on nation (or even locale) from which they originate.\u00a0 To some degree there is an Anglo-American variant but Brian made me realize that as a Brit, he has had to struggle with the hegemonic influence of John Grierson far more than have many American practitioners.\u00a0 (I was exposed to Vertov and Cinema Verit\u00e9 long before I read anything by Grierson.) The discussion got more interesting\u2013\u2013and certainly more passionate\u2013\u2013 when Brian turned to contemporary documentaries.\u00a0 <\/a>He expressed his adamant opposition to The Act of Killing<\/em> which Joshua Oppenheimer had recently brought to Yale (while I was in Stockholm–see below).\u00a0 So Brian and Josh Glick (then on the cusp of being my former<\/em> advisee) went toe to toe on this one, while I had to stand by, unable to comment.<\/p>\n<\/a>Exhibit C.<\/strong> November 9th.<\/em> I traveled to Stockholm University to serve as the Opponent for a dissertation defense in Cinema Studies section of the Department of Media Studies:\u00a0 Nadi Tofighian was set to defend his dissertation Blurring the Colonial Binary: Turn-of-the-Century Transnational Entertainment in Southeast Asia<\/i><\/a>. These occasions remain significantly more elaborate rituals than is common in the United States.\u00a0 First, the dissertations are printed.\u00a0 It are real books with an ISPN number (though I have just given you the link to Nadi’s on-line version).\u00a0 So they are definitely more polished than the average dissertation one encounters as a reader in the US.\u00a0 Besides the Opponent who is brought in as a\u00a0 hired gun, there is the Dissertation Advisor (in this case John Fullerton) whose job is essentially over and must sit quietly in the role of silent Proponent.\u00a0 Then there are three evaluators who may ask a question or two at the defense, but they are essentially there to decided the outcome: the choices are either “pass” or “fail.” The process is overseen by a chair, in this case Vice Dean Tytti Soila. After the outcome is announced there is a celebratory champagne toast and lunch for the relevant faculty.\u00a0 That evening the newly approved Doctor of Philosophy puts on a party for friends, family and colleagues. Even the Opponent, who has fortunately failed to convince the jury that the dissertation should be rejected, is invited\u2013\u2013and makes a toast.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>So this is one of my most serious criticisms.\u00a0 Blurring the Colonial Binary<\/i> focuses on Singapore\u2014and it seems to me that it situates the cinema there perfectly.\u00a0 But then you homogenize it by tracing, for instance, the issue of musical performances across Southeast Asia or exhibition practices more generally.\u00a0 The dissertation does suggest differences in European\/native relations between the Netherlands East Indies but it seems to me that this is the tip of the iceberg.\u00a0 The blurring of colonial binaries\u2014that is, while relations between the colonizer and colonized in Singapore may have been similar in the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong, they must have been different in Bangkok and certainly the Philippines.\u00a0 More on that in a moment, but I thought I should give you a chance to respond to these reservations.<\/p>\n
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