Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her most recent article, “The Critique of Anti-Comminist State Violence in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” appears in Asian Cinema early this year. Currently, she is working on her book manuscript tentatively entitled, Sovereign Screen: Early Cinema and Politics of Media Modernity in Thailand. This project focuses on the beginnings of Thai cinema—particularly on its intermedial relationships to prose and poetry and its complex intertwinement with the epistemological understandings of sovereignty during the modernizing stage of Siam. The monograph traces the linkage between classes, film cultures and constructions of modern sensibilities in Thailand from the period of the absolute monarchy to the Siamese Revolution.
One of the most exciting and pivotal moments in the history of early Thai cinema revolves around the event of film production and distribution of the arguably first feature film, Miss Suwanna of Siam (1923). It was actually a co-production between a filmmaking team from Universal Studio and local Thai talents mostly drawn from the royal court. Unfortunately, the celluloid of the film cannot be found either in Thailand or in the US. Despite this loss, printed magazines and official documents suggest many occasions of state intervention. One prominent case was the government’s request to ban the film from being screened in the US. On the one hand, the royal government’s initial goal to have the film promote the country demonstrates a deeply-rooted anti-colonialist and patriotic mentality as some critics stated that the film would represent Thais as different from the rest of “the colonized subjects in Asia.” On the other hand, the request to control the distribution emerges from the fear of cinema’s indexical potentials, and therefore, contradicting the popular desire of the Thais to represent themselves and to have their “places’ in the global circulation of cinema. This paper draws from this contradiction, and yet will add to the story a hitherto overlooked evidence–the one stating that the American director, Henry McRae, did not have any intention to create a new fictional story about Siam. In fact, learning that Vajiravudh would direct and act in his own staged play, Phra Ruang, McRae made a request to the royal court to simply film King Vajiravudh on stage. The fact that Miss Suwanna of Siam ended up being a melodrama composed completely anew and specifically for the international in lieu of the images of the King’s sacred play, underlines a very nuanced reservation and anxiety among the ruling class toward this new medium. I argue that for the ruling class of Siam to make sense of and take cinema back from the hand of the increasingly democratized masses, it is pivotal that they create a new aesthetic hierarchy. The residues of Miss Suwanna of Siam exemplify the new hierarchy and emphasize the classist mode of mediation not only between theatre and cinema but also between the royally trained acting and the peasant’s one. This paper eventually invites us to consider the emergent field of intermediality also in relation to the emergence of cinema and its early mode of circulation outside the Euro-American contexts.