David C. L. Lim (editor) - Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention

This book discusses contemporary film in all the main countries of Southeast Asia and the social practices and ideologies that films either represent or oppose. It shows how film acquires signification through cultural interpretation and how film also serves as a site of contestations between social and political agents seeking to promote, challenge or erase certain meanings, messages or ideas from public circulation. A unique feature of the book is that it focuses as much on films as it does on the societies from which these films emerge: it considers the reasons for film-makers taking the positions they take; the positions and counter-positions taken; the response of different communities; and the extent to which these interventions are connected to global flows of culture and capital.

The wide range of subjects covered includes documentaries as political interventions in Singapore; political film collectives in the Philippines; films about prostitution in Cambodia; patriotism in Malaysia; and the Chinese in Indonesia. The book analyses films from Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, across a broad range of productions such as mainstream and independent features across genres (for example comedy, patriotic, political and historical), alongside documentary, classic and diasporic films.

David C. L. Lim is Senior Lecturer at the Open University Malaysia, where he manages and teaches courses in Literary and Cultural Studies.

Hiroyuki Yamamoto is Associate Professor at the Center for Integrated Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.

Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia

Series Editor: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald

RMIT University Melbourne

Editorial Board:

Devleena Ghosh, University of Technology, Sydney

Yingjie Guo, University of Technology, Sydney

K.P. Jayasankar, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay

Vera Mackie, University of Melbourne

Anjali Monteiro, Unit for Media and Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay

Laikwan Pang, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Gary Rawnsley, University of Leeds

Ming-yeh Rawnsley, University of Leeds

Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney

Jing Wang, MIT

The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of media, culture and social change in Asia.

1 Television Across Asia

Television industries, programme formats and globalisation

Edited by Albert Moran and Michael Keane

2 Journalism and Democracy in Asia

Edited by Angela Romano and Michael Bromley

3 Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia

Copyright, piracy and cinema

Laikwan Pang

4 Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia

Edited by Benjamin Cole

5 Media and the Chinese Diaspora

Community, communications and commerce

Edited by Wanning Sun

6 Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema

No film is an island

Edited by Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam

7 Media in Hong Kong

Press freedom and political change 19672005

Carol P. Lai

8 Chinese Documentaries

From dogma to polyphony

Yingchi Chu

9 Japanese Popular Music

Culture, authenticity and power

Carolyn S. Stevens

10 The Origins of the Modern Chinese Press

The influence of the Protestant missionary press in late Qing China

Xiantao Zhang

11 Created in China

The great new leap forward

Michael Keane

12 Political Regimes and the Media in Asia

Edited by Krishna Sen and Terence Lee

13 Television in Post-Reform China

Serial dramas, Confucian leadership and the global television market

Ying Zhu

14 Tamil Cinema

The cultural politics of Indias other film industry

Edited by Selvaraj Velayutham

15 Popular Culture in Indonesia

Fluid identities in post-authoritarian politics

Edited by Ariel Heryanto

16 Television in India

Satellites, politics and cultural change

Edited by Nalin Mehta

17 Media and Cultural Transformation in China

Haiqing Yu

18 Global Chinese Cinema

The culture and politics of hero

Edited by Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley

19 Youth, Society and Mobile Media in Asia

Edited by Stephanie Hemelryk
Donald, Theresa Dirndorfer
Anderson and Damien Spry

20 The Media, Cultural Control and Government in Singapore

Terence Lee

21 Politics and the Media in Twenty-First Century Indonesia

Edited by Krishna Sen and David T. Hill

22 Media, Social Mobilization and Mass Protests in Post-colonial Hong Kong

The power of a critical event

Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan

23 HIV/AIDS, Health and the Media in China

Imagined immunity through racialized disease

Johanna Hood

24 Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia

Edited by Andrew N. Weintraub

25 Online Society in China

Creating, celebrating, and instrumentalising the online carnival

Edited by David Kurt Herold and Peter Marolt

26 Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas

The Amoy-dialect film industry in Cold War Asia

Jeremy E. Taylor

27 Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Cultural interpretation and social intervention

Edited by David C. L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto

This edition published 2012

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2012 David C. L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto for selection and editorial material. Individual chapters, the contributors.

The right of David C. L. Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

With the exception of chapter 7, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Chapter 7 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Film in contemporary Southeast Asia/edited by David C. L. Lim and
Hiroyuki Yamamoto.

p. cm. (Media, culture and social change in Asia)