Production Culture in Southeast Asian Cinema: The Way Filmmakers Tells Aesthetics and Practices in Production.

This paper investigates the way in which filmmakers make sense of what they are doing as film artists in the Southeast Asian film industry including Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia among others. Based on in-depth interviews, observations, and analyses of industry documents, it investigates the cultural practices and belief systems of production artists to explore the textual implications of production conditions behind the look and sound of Southeast Asian Cinema.
Despite the cultural diversity of Southeast Asia and multiple disjunctive moments in the history of the region, previous scholarly attentions have been unbalanced by focusing heavily on a few successful individual directors (Bernards, 2017), the government's policy (Corey, 2013), and the role of international film festivals (Baumgä rtel, 2012). Given the heterogeneous geographies and disjunctive histories of Southeast Asia, any scholarly attempt at discussing the region's cinema needs to go beyond seeing it as a self- unified group, but more as a refraction, a kaleidoscope, and to see Southeast Asian cinema as having different blocs, groups, and tensions.
In this context, I pay closer attention to the complex relationship between the styles, contexts, and technologies of the cinema, to move this study towards a more sophisticated understanding of film culture through a detailed analysis of the guts of film production which has been obscured and generalized by film and media scholars under the monolithic label of “the industry.” For Southeast Asian filmmakers, their production site is a battlefield where cultural identities, aesthetic conventions, production techniques, power relationships, globalization, and the imagined audience are tested and negotiated. The study not only documents an important yet comparatively unexamined Southeast Asian cinema, it also draws on film and social theory to situate film production as a multi- dimensional cultural activity.