Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention (Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415626188 ISBN 13: 9780415626187

Publisher: Routledge, 2012

Synopsis

This book discusses contemporary film in all the main countries of Southeast Asia, and the social practices and ideologies which 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 include documentaries as political interventions in Singapore; political film-makers’ collectives in the Philippines, and films about prostitution in Cambodia and 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, historical genres) alongside documentary, classic and diasporic films.

About this title

Review:

"This is a very useful contribution to the field. As the editors state, no book on the region has been published since David Hanan’s edited book, Film from Southeast Asia (Hanoi: SEAPAVAA, 2001), and this book fills that gap." - Felicia Hughes-Freeland; Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43:1, 197-199 (2013).

About the Author:

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. 

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0415626188
• ISBN 13: 9780415626187
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Lim David C. L.