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Restricted vision: Censorship and cinematic resistance in Thailand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2022

Noah Keone Viernes
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Abstract

Film censorship screens the nation as a ‘way of seeing’ that is both fundamental to the art of governance and vulnerable to the flexibility of contemporary global images. In Thailand, this historically-conditioned regime arose in the geopolitics of the 1930 Film Act, the Motion Pictures and Video Act of 2008, and a coterminous regulation of visuality as a form of cultural governance. I pursue a close reading of two banned films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nontawat Numbenchapol, respectively, to illustrate the aesthetics of film censorship in light of the development of a national cinema, especially to consider the strategies that film-makers use to negotiate the governance of vision.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 634 - 657
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Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2022

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Nontawat Numbenchapol, Chalida Uabumrungjit, Kissada Kamyoung and Sompot Chidgasornpongse.

References

1 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ‘Who can save my flying saucer?’, The Guardian, 14 Sept. 2007; https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/sep/14/1.

2 Personal interview, Nontawat ‘Ble’ Numbenchapol, Bangkok, 19 Aug. 2015.

3 The film can be viewed online here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/boundary/135178142.

4 Shapiro, Michael J., Cinematic geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Berger describes the historical trajectory of visual governance as a modern development, as in the compositional contrast of class in the case of early 17th century Dutch painting, or the development of ‘authority’ in male representations of the passive female subject. In the latter case, the regime of looking is maintained in frames where subjects recognise the dominating gaze of spectators, thereby internalising the act of being seen. Berger's analogy of ‘the surveyed’ is about territorialising bodies in space for an intended viewer. Berger, John, Ways of seeing (London: Penguin, 1972)Google Scholar.

6 Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 217–51Google Scholar.

7 Smoodin, Eric, ‘“Compulsory” viewing for every citizen: ‘Mr. Smith’ and the rhetoric of reception’, Society for Cinema and Media Studies 35, 2 (1996): 17Google Scholar.

8 Morton, Stephen, States of emergency: Colonialism, literature and law (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

9 In visual practices, as Ariella Azoulay observes, the life of images operates at the everyday level as a ‘civil action’ determined over time by a complex itinerary of visual encounters and political events. See Azoulay, Ariella, The civil contract of photography (New York: Zone, 2008), p. 138Google Scholar.

10 See also Rose, Gillian, Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (London: Sage, 2001), p. 12Google Scholar.

11 Peleggi, Maurizio, ‘The aesthetics and politics of royal portraiture in Thailand’, Ars Orientalis 41 (2013): 84Google Scholar.

12 ‘The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless. Or, to put it another way, the camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual (except in paintings). What you saw depended upon where you were when. What you saw was relative to your position in time and space. It was no longer possible to imagine everything converging on the human eye as on the vanishing point of infinity.’ In his commentary on the shift from the timeless painted gaze to photographic ephemerality, Berger could have pursued the geopolitical production of camera vision, but he is more interested in the role of oil painting. In a related example, he considers the way Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533) was painted with an expanded realism of tactile objects ‘to the few who could read the illusions’ to internalise the gaze of expanding colonial empires. And Berger does suggest that geopolitics is concealed by the tendency in art history to amplify a painting's metaphysical meanings. Berger, Ways of seeing, pp. 18, 94.

13 Woodhouse, Leslie L., ‘Concubines with cameras: Royal Siamese consorts picturing femininity and ethnic difference in early 20th century Siam’, Trans Asia Photography Review 2, 2 (2012)Google Scholar; http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0002.202/--concubines-with-cameras-royal-siamese-consorts-picturing?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

14 Barmé, Scot, ‘Early Thai cinema and filmmaking: 1897–1922’, Film History 11, 3 (1999): 312Google Scholar.

15 Ibid.

16 George Katsiaficas, Asia's unknown uprisings: People power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947–2009 (Oakland, CA: PM, 2013), p. 404.

17 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).

18 See Thawatt Mokarapong, History of the Thai revolution (Bangkok: Chalermnit, 1972); Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), p. 35.

19 The Film Act of 1930 created a Film Censorship Board (FCB), derived from various bureaucratic ministries (Education, University Affairs, Religious Affairs, Military, etc.). According to the Thai Film Archive, pressure to regulate the circulation of new imagery (likely of the decadent city) had been voiced in newspapers since 1919. An existing Entertainment Act lacked a specific application to film, and film-related amendments were never passed. Rama the VII ordered the drafting of the Act in 1928, passed in 1930, enacted in 1931, one year before the military overthrow. See Film Archive, A century of Thai cinema: Exhibition's Handbook, ed. Dome Sukvong, Adisak Sekrattana and Chalida Uabumrungjit (Bangkok: Film Archive; Amarin, 2013), p. 65.

20 Hamilton, Annette, ‘Video crackdown, or the sacrificial pirate: Censorship and cultural consequences in Thailand’, Public Culture 5, 3 (1993): 520CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 See Brian Mertens, ‘Apichatpong bids to shackle Thai cinema’, ArtAsiaPacific 55, Sept./Oct. 2007; http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/55/ApichatpongBidsToUnshackleThaiCinema.

22 See Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

23 ‘The distribution of places and roles that defines a police regime stems as much from the assumed spontaneity of social relations as from the rigidity of state functions … The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.’ See Rancière, Dis-agreement, p. 29.

24 Jacques Rancière, The intervals of cinema, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2014), p. 122.

25 Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of actuality: Japanese avant-garde filmmaking in the season of image politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 100–101.

26 Lim, Samson, ‘Murder! in Thailand's vernacular press’, Journal of Asian Studies 73, 2 (2014): 373CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Chaloemtiarana, Thak, Thailand: The politics of despotic paternalism (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2007), p. 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 105.

30 Teh, David, Thai art: Currencies of the contemporary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), p. 62Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., p. 63.

32 See Klima, Alan, The funeral casino: Meditation, massacre, and exchange with the dead in Thailand (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 From diasporic Vietnamese video stores in Orange County, California, to underground circulation of Todd Haynes’ Superstar, Lucas Hilderbrand makes a case for how the ascendancy of videotape opens an ‘aesthetics of access’ that contravenes the use of copyright in the official policing of vision. See Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent vice: Bootleg histories of videotape and copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

34 See Harrison, Rachel, ‘“Somewhere over the rainbow”: Global projections/local allusions in Tears of the black tiger/Fa thalai jone’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, 2 (2007): 194–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Siriyuvasak, Ubonrat, ‘The media, cultural politics and the nation-state’, Manusya: Journal of Humanities 3, 1 (2000): 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Ibid.

37 Lisa Brooten and Supinya Klangnarong, ‘People's media and reform efforts in Thailand’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 5, 1/2 (2009): 103.

38 ‘Kra-suang wa-tha-na-tham khuen ik khrang muea wan thi 3 tulakhom 2545 doi mi pha-ra-kit sam-khan khrop-khlum ngan dan sa-sa-na sin-la-pa lae wa-tha-na-tham (‘pra-wat krasuang’)’ กระทรวงวัฒนธรรมขึ้นอีกครั้ง เมื่อวันที่ ๓ ตุลาคม ๒๕๔๕ โดยมีภารกิจสำคัญครอบคลุมงานด้านศาสนา ศิลปะ และวัฒนธรรม (‘ประวัติกระทรวงวัฒนธรรม’), Ministry of Culture; http://www.m-culture.go.th/th/ewt_news.php?nid=1 (last accessed 30 Aug. 2016).

39 Simon Montlake, ‘Making the cut’, Time, 11 Oct. 2007; http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1670261,00.html.

40 One of the best discussions of this re-emergence can be found in Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker's discussion of ‘Social order and Thai culture’. See Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thaksin (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2009), p. 167–70.

41 Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. ii.

42 See Ingawanij, May Adadol, ‘Nang Nak: Thai bourgeois heritage cinema’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, 2 (2007): 180–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnika Furhman, Ghostly desires: Queer sexuality and vernacular Buddhism in contemporary Thai cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 47–86.

43 Glen Lewis, Virtual Thailand: The media and cultural politics in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 152.

44 The article appeared in the independent-minded Thai Film Journal and seemed to suggest a possible role for independent cinema. In that same issue, Uthis Hemaemool praised Apichatpong's inaugural feature documentary Mysterious object at noon (2000) [dok fa nai mue man] as an alternative surrealist method of deterritorialising nationhood.

45 Meryam Dahbhoiwala, ‘A chronology of Thailand's war on drugs’, Article 2, 2/3 (2003): 10–16; http://alrc.asia/article2/2003/06/a-chronology-of-thailands-war-on-drugs/.

46 But even without the charismatic dominance of Thaksin's executive personality, the bureaucracy had already engaged in the regulation of behaviour. For instance, then-Interior Minister Purachai Piemsomboon set about policing and raiding popular nightlife spots earning the name ‘Mr. Clean’ as part of Thakin's promotion of ‘traditional values’. See Daniel Lovering, ‘Raids become part of Bangkok's club scene’, Washington Post, 28 Nov. 2004; https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/11/28/raids-become-part-of-bangkok-club-scene/98e3d547-88a0-48c4-9896-a24551f72a32/.

47 Panu Traivej, ‘prakotkan thi khrai khon nueng hai pai chak chiwit khong khrai ik khon’ [One person's phenomenal disappearance from the life of another] in Phu-ru phu-tuen phu-trom trom [The wise, the awakened, the sufferer] (Bangkok: Nanmee, 2008), pp. 75–89; Pinyo Traisuriyathamma, ‘krungthep paris Jang lae Cindy bon tha-non sai kao thi pha rao klap ma phop kan [Bangkok, Paris, Zhang and Cindy on an old road that brought us together]’, in Kammasutra: sex amnat songkhram achayakam lae khwamrak [Kama sutra: sex, power, war, crime and love] (Bangkok: Open Books, 2009), pp. 68–77.

48 See Tejapira, Kasian, ‘Toppling Thaksin’, New Left Review 39 (2006): 5–37Google Scholar; Phongpaichit and Baker, Thaksin, p. 260; Winichakul, Thongchai, ‘Toppling democracy’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, 1 (2008): 11–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 This low angle tracking shot, a unique aesthetic feature of this film's most subtle political statements, is repeated near the end of the film in a slow-motion long take that sees an exhaust-clouded room drain smoke back into an exhaust pipe. A 360-degree circular pan eerily captures a nation on the intake of industrial exhaust.

50 Thailand has the highest number (64.4 million) of practising Buddhists per capita in the world and its practitioners comprise 93.2% of the population. But these figures do not properly account for the divisions within Thai Buddhism itself. See ‘The global religious landscape’, Pew Research Center, 18 Dec. 2012; http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-buddhist/.

51 James Quandt, ‘Exquisite corpse: An interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’, in Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ed. James Quandt (Wien: SYNEMA, 2009), p. 125.

52 For its visual relevance, an interesting passage can be found in the chapter ‘Signs and cases’ where Foucault demonstrates the link between modern medical vision and authority over the body where ‘the sovereignty of the eye gradually establishes itself — the eye that knows and decides, the eye that governs’. See Michel Foucault, The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 88–9.

53 Benedict Anderson, ‘The strange story of a strange beast: Receptions in Thailand of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Sat Pralaat’, in Quandt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, p. 174.

54 Personal interview, Chalida Uabumrungjit, Thai Film Archive, Bangkok, 17 Aug. 2015.

55 More recently, Özge Özdüzen writes how Kazim Öz used the technique against the Turkish government's censoring of his film Zer (2017), which recalls a 1938 uprising and massacre of the Kurdish at the hands of the state. See Özge Özdüzen, ‘Combatting authoritarianism: Commoning through video activism and political film-making after the Gezi protests’, in The aesthetics of global protest: Visual culture and communication, ed. Aidan McGarry, Itir Erhart, Hande Eslen-Ziya, Olu Jenzen and Umut Korkut (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

56 See, for example, the Internal Security Act (Oct. 2007). Human Rights Watch, ‘Thailand: Internal Security Act threatens democracy and human rights’, Human Rights Watch, 5 Nov. 2007; https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/11/05/thailand-internal-security-act-threatens-democracy-and-human-rights.

57 See Ali Jaafar, ‘World news’, Sight & Sound, 8 Feb. 2008; Pajee Parinyaporn, ‘Freedom on the big screen: Thai filmmakers seek changes in the law that keeps censors in control of what can be shown in theatres’, The Nation (Thailand), 6 June 2013.

58 May Adadol Ingawanij, ‘Disreputable behavior: The hidden politics of the Thai Film Act’, Vertigo 3, 8 (2008); https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-3-issue-8-winter-2008/disreputable-behaviour-the-hidden-politics-of-the-thai-film-act/.

59 One recent Thai trailer remarks, ‘Nai lok khong rao, rao yang me khao, thi rao mai khoei mong hen’ [In our world, we still have them, whom we've never seen]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vip1xqyh1IE.

60 Anthony Kuhn, ‘Thailand's film ban offends transgender people’, National Public Radio, 2 Feb. 2011; https://www.npr.org/2011/02/10/133436113/thailands-film-ban-offends-transgender-people.

61 Melalin Mahavongtrakul, ‘Redefining what's “appropriate”’, Bangkok Post, 27 Nov. 2017.

62 By the time Insects was released in 2017, even the administrative court had to rule that ‘the film did not harm national security, religions, or the monarchy’. Tanwarin was elected to the parliament in the April 2019 elections as a member of the progressive Future Forward party. But the party was disbanded and in 2020 Tanwarin was also removed from parliament in one of many highly-controversial decisions of the Constitutional Court. See ‘Court confirms ban on LGBTI film over 3-second sex scene’, Prachatai, 28 Dec. 2015; https://prachatai.com/english/node/5734.

63 Nontawat Numbenchapol, ‘Boundary: Fa tam phaen-din sung’ [@boundarymovie], Facebook, 23 Apr. 2013; https://www.facebook.com/boundarymovie/photos/a.539182882780942/578122008887029/?type=3&theater.

64 ‘Poet kham-phi-cha-ra-na nang “Fa tam phaen-din sung” ham chai nai ra-cha-a-na-chak’ [In consideration of the national ban on screening the film ‘Low sky, high land’], Prachathai, 24 Apr. 2013; https://prachatai.com/journal/2013/04/46369.

65 The significance of this ‘plural’ narrative turn in cinema is useful for thinking about Stanley Tambiah's theory of the ‘galactic polity’. Tambiah considers centre–margin relations as subject to the projection of a centre: or, as he states, as ‘a torch with its light radiating outward with decreasing intensity’. Power needed a coinciding of the material with the spiritual which, he concludes, was once the mission of court poetry. Tambiah, Stanley J., ‘The galactic polity in Southeast Asia’, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, 3 (2013): 509CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 The short film recalls two others. Kong Rithdee's Noise (2011) was assembled in the aftermath of the May 2010 Red Shirt crackdown from archival video footage at the Bangkok Post as a critique of reconciliation efforts and the reconstruction of retail districts that functioned as geographic centres for the protests. Danaya Chulphuthipong's Night Watch (2015) demonstrates the contradiction between the appearance of normality and the televisual flow of the 2014 military coup in her own recordings of the evening as soundtracked to the noise of an audio drone. Nontawat's Bangkok noise (2007) can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/68777866.

67 ‘The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.’ Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 238.

68 I've re-translated several parts of the original intertitles for clarity: ‘phuea sang sa-tha-na-kan sai rai rathaban’ as ‘carried out in order to implicate the government’, ‘pen kan kra-tham khong ra-tha-ban lae tha-han’ as ‘blamed the crackdown on the government and the military,’ and ‘hen kae nguen’ as ‘easily-manipulated’.

69 Jacques Rancière, Film fables (New York: Berg, 2006) p. 111.

70 For instance, (1:48) ‘the Red Shirt protestors were killed by a military crackdown in this area. Most of them came from the countryside’; (1:58) ‘Almost 100 people were killed’; (2:04) ‘Some Bangkokians and the anti-Red Shirts groups praised the government and the military for dispersing the Red Shirts’. A copy of the document can be seen here: ‘Poet kham-phi-cha-ra-na nang “Fa tam phaen-din sung” ham chai nai ra-cha-a-na-chak’ [In consideration of the national ban on screening the film ‘Low sky, high land’], Prachathai, 24 Apr. 2013; https://prachatai.com/journal/2013/04/46369.

71 May Adadol Ingawanij, ‘Watch out for consensus’, Seanema: experimental and other cinemas, art, southeast asia, 27 Apr. 2013; https://artyseanema.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/watch-out-for-consensus/.

72 For historical context, see Vail, Peter, as, ‘Thailand's Khmer “invisible minority”: Language, ethnicity and cultural politics in North-eastern Thailand’, Asian Ethnicity 8, 2 (2007): 120Google Scholar; Murakami, Tadayoshi, ‘Buddhism on the border: Shan Buddhism and transborder migration in northern Thailand’, Southeast Asian Studies 1, 3 (2012): 366Google Scholar.

73 The event is significant because the soldiers were forced to retreat, leaving behind military vehicles and weapons, to set up the pretext for a more aggressive military intervention five weeks later in the heart of Bangkok's retail district.

74 May Adadol Ingawanij, ‘Transistor and temporality: The rural as modern Thai cinema's pastoral’, in Representing the rural: Space, place, and identity in films about the land, ed. Catherine Fowler and Gilian Helfield (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), pp. 80–100.

75 Ibid., p. 87.

76 International Court of Justice, ‘Request for interpretation of the judgment of 15 June 1962 in the case concerning the Temple of Preah Vihear (Cambodia v. Thailand), summary of the judgment 11 November 2013’; http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/151/17716.pdf (accessed 15 Feb. 2017).

77 Winichakul, Siam mapped, p. 96.

78 Nontawat, ‘Boundary: Fa tam phaen-din sung’, Facebook.

79 Ben Child, ‘Thailand bans documentary about Thai-Cambodia boundary dispute’, The Guardian, 24 Apr. 2013; https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/apr/24/thailand-bans-documentary-boundary.

80 Interview, Nontawat Numbenchapol, Bangkok, 19 Aug. 2015.

81 See Jacques Rancière, The politics of aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004).

82 Hamilton, ‘Video crackdown’, p. 519.

83 เหตุที่ไม่สามารถจัดงานได้เนื่องจากเจ้าหน้าที่ทหารเห็นป้ายประชาสัมพันธ์ งานจึงได้ติดต่อมายังคณะและอาจารย์ที่ปรึกษาโครงการ เพื่อแจ้งว่างานครั้งนี้ ยังไม่ได้ขออนุญาตเจ้าหน้าที่ทหารและวัฒนธรรมจังหวัด. See ‘Thahan sang got chai nang Mor Burapha Bang Saen Rama ot du samsip nang san nak seuksa + Fa Tam Phaendin Sung’, Prachatai, 25 Apr. 2015; http://prachatai.org/journal/2015/04/58957.

84 The ongoing project, facilitated by veteran Thai filmmaker Pimpaka Towira, consists of a series of rigorous workshops that partners many of the country's most well-known directors with young filmmakers in the southern Thai borderlands. The initial workshops culminated in ten short films screened domestically and globally, and also led some of these young filmmakers to high-profile workshops at the prestigious Busan Film Festival.