Broken Art

February 28, 2009

By The Diplomat

In July 2006, a multi-artform spectacular called Ramakien: A rak opera — “rak”means love in Thai - was staged at New York’s Lincoln Center. Based on Thailand’s national myth, the ambitious production brought rock-stars together with classical dancers, musicians and leading visual artists. The critics were unflattering.

Back home, attention focused on reports of on-stage fisticuffs between two of the show’s celebrity principals, one of whom had stepped over a traditional Khon mask, an inexcusable faux-pas. The episode sparked a storm of debate about who owns the country’s cultural signage, and who has the right to represent it abroad. The brouhaha was particularly unbecoming for OCAC, a marginal branch of a ministry that considers itself the guardian of Thailand’s aesthetic tradition.

In matters of symbolic propriety, the buck stops with the military elite – defenders of the old trinity of “Monarchy, Religion, Nation”. They have greater sway than anyone over the national imagination and the media. This was all too clear in the bloodless coup d’état that toppled Thaksin just two months later. Unsurprisingly, the post-coup period saw a spike in official worrying about threats to the social and religious order. Several lèse majesté cases were dramatised to justify illiberal moves against the media; one saw the authorities block video-sharing website Youtube for almost six months. But the tension was nowhere more keenly felt than in the film industry, flaring around the banning of Sang Sattawat (Syndromes and a Century), the latest feature by Thailand’s star art-house director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Home and Away: Film and Insecurity

Despite decades of inundation by foreign product, and little state protection, Thai cinema has prospered. From the late 1970s into the 1990s, the local industry churned out over a hundred features per year. The last decade has seen a cluster of auteurs snaring prizes at Cannes and other prestigious festivals. Meanwhile, in the mainstream market, a conspicuous hike in production values (and budgets) has earned Thai blockbusters international releases.

It is all the more ironic then, that the Cannes-anointed Apichatpong should find himself in the “export-only” folder. The figurehead of a burgeoning indie film scene, Apichatpong has won worldwide acclaim for his lyrical and unconventional films, weaving personal experience and dream with the folk traditions of the country’s impoverished Northeast, where he grew up. Due for local release in April of last year, Syndromes contained four scenes that alarmed the censors, including a monk playing guitar, and doctors drinking whisky and kissing, images as innocuous for most Thais as they are for Westerners. But it was an inopportune time to be playing around, however gently, with conventions of status and respect that are still widely observed.

Seizing the opportunity to flex its moral muscle, the Censorship Board demanded the offending scenes be cut, invoking arcane provisions of the 1930 Cinema Act. The director refused, instead cancelling the film’s release. The film community voiced its dismay, starting a “Free Thai Cinema” campaign to demand long-overdue updates to the Act. A new bill was rushed through the interim legislative assembly in December, without heeding their concerns.

The cinephiles’ umbrage was real, but their incredulity was disingenuous. For on the merry-go-round of Thai political history, every hiccough is attended by this symbolic cultural policing. Historian Craig Reynolds has traced this dynamic through the annals of Thai nationalism, right back to the establishment of the current Chakri dynasty in the 18th century. Officials have always reached for pictures of cultural continuity to paper over perennial political discontinuities, be they sovereign or constitutional.

It has been claimed that culture is a key plank not just of Thailand’s national pride, but of its national security. With the revered King Bhumibol in his eighty-first year, and the divisive Thaksin set to return to Thailand’s political arena, we are sure to see it tested.

Will his comeback mean a revival of the creative economy? It’s hard to say – he enjoyed more political traction from his purchase of English football club, Manchester City. But one thing is certain: Thailand’s artists won’t be banking on it.