Images of the city-nation: Singapore cinema in the 1990s

Singapore's cultural landscape in the 1990s is marked by the PAP government's bid to market Singapore as a global city, while frantically trying to maintain a sense of a Singaporean culture, heritage, and national identity. Therefore, the PAP government functions as a strong and cohesive force in managing Singapore's cultural consciousness in the 1990s. It is within the heavily regulated cultural landscape of this city-nation that I map the explosion of works by Singapore filmmakers in the nineties.The body of the dissertation begins with a chapter that maps Singapore's pedagogical landscape. This landscape encompasses the realm of cultural production to illustrate the power that the pedagogical wields in the development of film production infrastructure and the way in which film production has been historicized. Chapter Two engages in a performative reading of Singapore film history which seeks to theorize both the diversity of filmmaking in the 1980s, and the intense burst of theatrical feature filmmaking in the 1990s.Section Two introduces the concept of (other)ed spaces which function as performative locations. Filmmakers engage with the thickness of Singaporean cultural life within these spaces to offer compelling and competing voices of what it means to be Singaporean. Chapter Three maps the (other)ed space of cultural memory as a battleground. Here, the filmmakers tactically deploy strategies of queering, hybridity, implosion, allegory, and difference to implicitly challenge the PAP government's official history which has long been marketed as a form of cultural memory.Chapter Four situates Singlish as an (other)ed space in which filmmakers adopt the explosive signifier of race to illustrate that Singlish serves as the cultural broker language between the various races. Chapter Five introduces the contentious (other)ed space of the heartland. Filmmakers utilize the interplay of various languages and dialects to frame the rising class-consciousness between the cosmopolitans who live in private housing, and those living in the heartland or government subsidized housing. Finally, projections, offers glimpses into the emerging phenomenon of pan-Asianism, the potentials of digital video, and the increasing impact of globalization on the Singapore film industry.