Time and Freedom in Contemporary Southeast Asian Film
Tony Day, Visiting Professor, Wesleyan University

Making and viewing films in Southeast Asia have a history that stretches back to the early twentieth century. Still understudied, the impact of film on the cultures and politics of the region has been enormous. Since the 1980s, but particularly in the last ten years or so, films have become the vehicles for powerful artistic statements about the struggle for freedom in Southeast Asian societies. I want to focus on four movies that were widely acclaimed either domestically or internationally: Ada Apa dengan Cinta ("What's the Matter with Love, " 2002, Indonesia); Mùa hè chieu thang dung ("summer solstice" or Vertical Ray of the Sun, 2000, France/Vietnam); Sepet ("Slant-Eye," 2004, Malaysia); and Sud pralad (Tropical Malady, 2004, Thailand). The films we are going to consider pose the question of what freedom means in terms of the trajectories of individual lives in relation to lovers, families, communities, and the natural world. I am particularly interested in investigating the ways in which time/temporality is both represented and utilized in technical ways by the directors of these four films in order to develop the theme of freedom and how it can be experienced in everyday life.

Tony Day is an independent researcher living in New Haven. He was Visiting Professor of History at Wesleyan University in 2006-2007 and will be teaching again at Wesleyan in Spring 2008. His most recent publications are an edited volume of essays, Identifying with Freedom: Indonesia after Soeharto (Berghahn, 2007), and an essay for a special issue on world literature for the journal MLQ, "Locating Indonesian Literature in the World."

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