24 February 2021

Bangkok Screening Room


Bangkok Screening Room

Bangkok Screening Room, the boutique independent cinema, will be closing at the end of next month. Like other entertainment venues in Bangkok and elsewhere, BKKSR has borne the brunt of the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. All cinemas in Bangkok were closed in April and May last year, during the country’s first coronavirus lockdown, and since reopening they have been operating at limited capacity to maintain social distancing.

BKKSR opened in 2016, and quickly established itself as the city’s leading arthouse cinema. It offered a unique Hollywood and world cinema repertory programme, plus screenings of contemporary Thai indie films, and revivals of Thai classics. The BKKSR team also curated seasons dedicated to marginalised filmmakers, including an LGBT+ Film Festival, a Global Migration Film Festival, and a Fem Film Festival.

BKKSR’s inaugural screening was The Third Man, starring Orson Welles, and fittingly this classic film noir will also be the last film screened there, on 31st March. (It will also be shown on 19th, 21st, 23rd, 25th, 27th, and 28th March.) BKKSR is the second Bangkok cinema to close as a result of the pandemic, after the Scala shut its doors last year. (Also, Cinema Oasis has been closed indefinitely since last March.)

23 February 2021

Cinema Lecture

Vertigo
Persona
In March and April, the Thai Film Archive will show a range of classic films introduced by academics and film critics. The Cinema Lecture season includes Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo on 3rd April and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona on 24th April. The screenings are free of charge.

Vertigo, voted the greatest film ever made in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll, has previously been shown at Bangkok Screening room in 2016 and at Cinema Winehouse in 2018. Persona was screened twice in 2014, at Thammasat University and Jam Café.

18 February 2021

Politics and Ideology
of Thai Film Censorship

Friday Forum
I will be giving an online lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies on 19th March (midday, US central time), with an introduction by historian Thongchai Winichakul. The lecture, Politics and Ideology of Thai Film Censorship, will be streamed on Zoom (ID: 979 8213 2663), and a video will be available on the Center’s website after the live stream. (The lecture will begin at midnight on 20th March, Thai time.)

The Center describes the session as follows: “Matthew Hunt wrote a book on Thai film censorship that includes interviews with ten directors whose films have been cut or banned. In this lecture, he will present an overview of the history of film censorship in Thailand, examine the consequences of the rating system, and show how filmmakers are finding ways to comment on Thailand’s volatile contemporary politics.”

16 February 2021

Mike Ward S’eXpose

A long-running defamation case came before the Supreme Court of Canada yesterday, when lawyers representing comedian Mike Ward argued that his stand-up routine about Jérémy Gabriel was not discriminatory. Gabriel suffers from Treacher Collins syndrome, and Ward joked about attempting to drown him because he had not yet died from this genetic disorder.

The gag was part of Ward’s live show between 2010 and 2013, and is included on his live DVD Mike Ward S’eXpose (‘Mike Ward exposed’). In 2016, the Human Rights Tribunal of Quebec awarded Gabriel $35,000 in damages, and this decision was upheld by the Quebec Court of Appeal last year. A final verdict from the Supreme Court is expected in the next few months.

15 February 2021

Thai Cinema Uncensored


Thai Cinema Uncensored

The first print review of Thai Cinema Uncensored has been published, in The Big Chilli magazine. The full-page book review is on p. 25 of the January issue.

05 February 2021

“Smartmatic seeks to recover
in excess of $2.7 billion...”

Smartmatic, the voting technology company whose systems were used in Los Angeles County to process votes in last year’s US presidential election, is suing Fox News and three of its hosts for $2.7 billion. The company’s lawsuit, filed in New York yesterday, states: “Smartmatic seeks to recover in excess of $2.7 billion for the economic and non-economic damage caused by Defendants’ disinformation campaign as well as punitive damages.”

The lawsuit, which is almost 300 pages long, argues that Fox News presenters Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro spread outlandish conspiracy theories in the weeks after the election, seeking to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s victory by falsely alleging fraudulent voting in Democratic states. This fake news campaign began in earnest on 12th November 2020, when former President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was interviewed on on Lou Dobbs Tonight and falsely claimed that “this was a stolen election.”

Of course, these allegations were also repeated on a daily basis by Trump himself, who refused to concede the election. The ultimate impact of such dangerous misinformation, and the culmination of Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in American institutions, came on 6th January with the unprecedented storming of the US Capitol.

Fox News defended another of its most popular hosts—Tucker Carlson—against defamation charges last year, arguing that his show should be viewed with “an appropriate amount of skepticism”, though Fox Business has decided to cancel Lou Dobbs Tonight, its highest-rated show. Giuliani is also named as a defendant in the Smartmatic case, and in a separate defamation lawsuit by another voting technology company, Dominion.

video

04 February 2021

“Vicious, vindictive, despicable...”

The Meaning of Mariah Carey
Mariah Carey’s sister, Allison Carey, is suing the pop star for “heartless, vicious, vindictive, despicable and totally unnecessary public humiliation” after the release of the best-selling autobiography The Meaning of Mariah Carey last year. In the book, the singer wrote: “my sister drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine, inflicted me with third-degree burns, and tried to sell me out to a pimp.” Her sister’s lawsuit, filed at the New York Supreme Court on 1st February, will almost certainly be dismissed, as it does not actually dispute any of the claims in the book.

“If things go wrong,
the government cannot sue...”

Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit is now facing another lèse-majesté charge, relating to a television interview he gave to Al Jazeera English broadcast on 29th January. Thanathorn highlighted a hypothetical consequence of the deal between AstraZeneca and Siam Bioscience to produce coronavirus vaccines in Thailand. He noted that—as Siam Bioscience is a Crown Property Bureau company, and thus ultimately under the King’s prerogative—“if things go wrong, the government cannot sue the owner of the company.”

Thanathorn made similar comments in a Facebook Live video on 18th January, and is facing lèse-majesté and Computer Crime charges as a result. He was also charged under the Computer Crime Act in relation to another Facebook Live video, streamed on 29th June 2018. After his Future Forward Party was dissolved by the Constitutional Court last year, it was rebranded as Move Forward, a progressive movement calling for military reform, which may explain the continuing intimidation of Thanathorn by the authorities.

02 February 2021

A Good True Thai

Sunisa Manning’s debut novel, A Good True Thai, is set during one of Thailand’s brief spells of democratic rule, a period bookended by the massacres of 14th October 1973 and 6th October 1976. The book’s title is a reframing of the traditional notion of ‘Thainess’, the insistence that ‘good’ Thais (khon dee) value nation, religion, and monarchy above all else, while progressives are regarded as unpatriotic.

The novel’s three central characters (friends Det and Chang, and their mutual love interest, Lek) are university students caught up in the intense political atmosphere of the period. For example, Lek reacts to the infamous Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper’s headline accusing Thammasat students of lèse-majesté: “It must be a mistake! Lek brandishes the page at her brother... No wonder the city roils. They think the students have staged a hanging of the Crown Prince.”

A Good True Thai was published in October 2020, when a new generation of students were demonstrating against the military and the monarchy: as it was in the 1970s, ‘Thainess’ is currently being challenged and redefined. Although it was written before the recent protests, the book is therefore extremely timely.

A Good True Thai has superficial similarities with other novels set during periods of political instability. Uthis Haemamool’s Silhouette of Desire (ร่างของปรารถนา), for example, takes place against a backdrop of the 1991, 2006, and 2014 coups. Duanwad Pimwana’s ในฝันอันเหลือจะกล่าว (‘unspoken dreams’) is set during the PDRC protests. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Win Lyovarin’s Democracy, Shaken and Stirred (ประชาธิปไตยบนเส้นขนาน) traces sixty years of Thailand’s modern political history.

The book has more in common with films such as Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark (ดาวคะนอง) and Pasit Promnampol’s Pirab (พีเจ้น). Both Manning’s book and Anocha’s film are self-referential, featuring protagonists who are also writing a book and making a film, respectively. Pasit’s short film, like Manning’s novel, dramatises a student’s decision to join the Communist insurgency.