Coping with the Past: History in Thai Contemporary Films

Dr LIEW Kai Khiun

6th Annual Southeast Asian Cinema Conference

Circuits of Exchange (within)in Southeast Asian Cinemas

Re-Modernizing and Re-Primordialization Thai Films and the Construction of Thai-ness

•Spared from Colonialism: Thai Exceptionalism in Southeast Asia

•Selective “modernization” and “Westernization”

•Monarchy and tradition as guarantee of Thailand’s sovereignty and well being

•Post-1997 Thai films as providing spatial and temporal imaginations to read and re-read Thailand’s treatment of its more modern past.

Reading Subversive Subaltern

Fantasies within the Dominant Text

•Engagement with Modernity

•Socio-political hierarchies and mobility

•Identity and place

Becoming Modern: Appropriating Technology, attaining Equality

Nong and Teng: Protecting modern Thai Cinema

First Flight: Peasant to Pilot

Violence of Modernity

Overture: Resisting Mechanization of Society

Dang Bireley: Urban alienation, modern nihilism

Subaltern Primordialism

Siam Renaissance: Re-defending history

Ong Bak and Tom Yum Goong: Defending Heritage

Conclusion

•Retaking the past

•Framing of subaltern consciousness and the fracturing of history

•Postmodern reinvention of prosthetization of Modernity and Memory.