Dag Yngvesson is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of cinema and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia. His scholarly and practical work focuses on the history and politics of form in cinema and media in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. His latest publication, “Centering Peripheries: The Return of Regionalism in Indonesian Independent Cinema,” appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. His most recent film, Banyak Ayam Banyak Rejeki (Many Chickens, Lots of Luck), premiered online on Mubi in January 2021 and is currently making the rounds of Asian and international film festivals and conferences.
Over the past two decades, mass media as we knew them have been transformed by the global expansion of the digital. Yet a closer look at media histories in Southeast Asia muddies distinctions between the broad, resultant categories of “old” and “new” media. As I will show, throughout the Malay world in the early-mid 20th century, a powerful mixture of audience expectations, formal and technological experimentation, market forces, and the need to localize transnational trends created a paradox of modernization: then-emergent technologies of representation like motion pictures appeared to be pulled backward in time by the magnetic draw of regional and local theatrical forms. The paradox only deepens from the perspective of the present, as the hauling “back” of film, and the opening and fragmentation it produced, anticipated the contemporary dismantling of established cinematic norms brought about by the proliferating screens, platforms and versions of the digital era. The explosion of Thai cinematic “versionists” from the 1930s-1970s is merely the most obvious example of this, regarding films not as fixed products, but as heterogenous collections of elements that can be “taken apart” and fundamentally altered during exhibition. In Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the region at the time, such cinematic adaptations were the rule rather than exception. The result, I argue, was an archipelagic “Malay” cinema premised on constant fracturing or “versioning” according to the dictates, styles and languages of public spheres in cities, villages, islands and other subnational locales. Closely reading key scenes from West Sumatran-Jakartan Usmar Ismail’s Lewat Djam Malam (After the Curfew 1954), I will show how this archipelagic approach draws on and develops intermedial understandings of cinema, while imagining the nation, its borders, and its “homogeneous empty time” as always already adulterated by local, regional and transnational flows.