Itinerant Cinematic Practices In and Around Thailand during the Cold War

Abstract

Itinerant Cinematic Practices In and Around Thailand during the Cold War May Adadol Ingawanij This article returns to an untimely cinematic practice.Watching feature-length narrative films in rural and urban Thailand, and around the northeastern and southern borderlands, during the mid-20th century did not necessarily mean going to cinema theatres.Spectators experienced and encountered moving images on screen across multiples networks and proliferating exhibition sites.It was not exactly commonplace to project 35 mm film prints inside a theatre auditorium in which the machine for illuminating and animating images on the screen was hidden away in the projection booth, whereby the sounds filling the auditorium were mechanically reproduced recordings inscribed onto the audio track of the celluloid strip.This model of the filmic apparatus, previously mythologised as universal, tended to be applicable in a much more restricted context, in a proportion of the subtitled screenings in Bangkok's first-run cinemas.Yet even among these venues in the capital city, built in the architectural style of international modernism to stage fantasies of embodying global consumer culture, Thai and foreign language narrative films were, in fact, quite often transformed into multimedia live performance events.Often, in these modernist picture palaces, film screenings became, instead, shows advertising the presence of voice artists performing dialogues and sounds accompanying the projected images.Such events transforming the projection of celluloid prints into live performance were part of a cinematic practice 1 with an extensive reach even though it had peripheral cultural status.During the period in question, the predominant modality of cinematic encounter and experience would have been via itinerant makeshift cinema.Mobile film troupes criss-crossed 1 In this article, I often use the term "cinematic practice" over "cinema".This is partly to defamiliarise the still too commonly held assumption about the latter term as a cultural and industrial form defined by exhibiting/projecting feature-length films on a single screen in a range of market contexts, accompanied by repertoires of fandom.But it is also to signal that the question asked concerning the apparatus or dispositive of itinerant makeshift cinema, and the broader theoretical issue of conceptualising the interfacing of animism and cinema, is one to do with an ontology of cinematic practice rather than the creation of film styles.The phrase cinematic practice signals bodily experiences and encounters with mediated sounds and images as part of a spatial-temporal ambience or an environment.In this sense, the concept of cinematic practice implies the time-space of embodied contact and being in which the distinction between inside and outside, self and other, are blurred, and it implies immersion in spatially and temporally non-static, mediated worlds.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.