Itinerant Cinematic Practices In and Around Thailand During the Cold War
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q199v
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1353/sen.2018.0001
- Title of journal
- Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 9
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2425-0147
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is one of the first systematic research publications on itinerant cinema during the Cold War period in and around Thailand, which proposes concepts and methodologies aimed at advancing the fields of film theory and art history related to Southeast Asian practices. Ingawanij conducted extensive primary research over nearly ten years. Her analysis is based on rare archival materials that had not been previously studied, and she draws on oral histories accumulated for the first time as part of the primary research process.
The research originated in Ingawanij’s Leverhulme Trust fellowship (2009–12) on the Cold War and cinema in Thailand. While researching this project she grew interested in itinerant, open-air film projection practices during the Cold War era. The importance of this practice in challenging received assumptions about national or regional cinematic modernity, and whose potential to extend theoretical thinking on media archaeology and epistemology of Southeast Asian art history, remains little understood. To address these concerns through historical and theoretical exposition, Ingawanij conducted large-scale archival research into Thai and English language newspapers, memoirs, fiction, films, visual materials, and other Cold War ephemera. With research assistance, she generated an oral history archive of around 40 interviews with voice performers and projectionists of itinerant Cold War cinema.
The article challenges the established mode of historicising national and regional cinematic modernity through focusing on elite, urban, theatre-bound filmmaking and viewing practices. Its attentiveness to itinerant cinema’s entanglement with war infrastructure and ritual practices dialogues with emergent fields of film and media archaeology, and media ecology. Its analysis of itinerant cinema as indeterminately modern and traditional speaks to key methodological issues in Southeast Asian art history.
The article was published in a special issue on ‘movement’ in Southeast of Now, a significant journal on contemporary and modern art focused on Southeast Asia.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
