Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:01  

October 18, 2015, the Harvard Film Archive screened Snakeskin. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the discussion that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Daniel Hui.

David Pendleton  0:19  

Good evening, everyone, and welcome adventurous cinephiles, to a very special evening here at the Harvard Film Archive. My name is David Pendleton. I oversee the public programming here. And we're very proud to be presenting the local premiere of a remarkable film by a very promising young filmmaker. The film is Snakeskin and the filmmaker is Daniel Hui, who will be here to present his feature-length mixture of essay, documentary and science fiction that made its premiere last year. It's Daniel Hui’s second feature film, the previous one being Eclipses from 2011. And he's made a number of short works as well.

Snakeskin has been feted on the festival circuit at such prestigious places as Lisbon, Marseille, the Art of the Real in New York, all events that celebrate cutting-edge mixtures of nonfiction and experimental cinema. And Daniel arrives to us fresh from Yamagata. The Yamagata Film Festival in Japan where he won the top prize in the New Asian Currents section. Yamagata being one of the most important and adventurous film festivals in Asia or anywhere, for that matter, began by the illustrious documentary-maker Ogawa whose work we featured in a retrospective of just a couple of years ago here.

Daniel is originally from Singapore, but he's been based in the US for a number of years now, including studying filmmaking at CalArts with the likes of Thom Andersen, Billy Woodberry, Rebecca Baron and James Benning. And similarly, perhaps, Hui’s film is both an examination of Singapore's past and present and at the same time, an essay that dislocates or questions words like here and home. The title of the film seems to me to be an allusion to the number of layers of narrative threads that Hui juggles and interweaves in the film. On the one hand, as I mentioned, Snakeskin examines the layers of Singapore's history, from the the founding myth of the arrival of the Chinese to the British colonial period, to Japanese occupation during World War Two to the anti-colonial struggle, and the post-colonial present, which finds Singapore firmly under the control of the People's Action Party, which has controlled it since it separated from Malaysia in 1965 and under whose one-party rule, political opposition is severely circumscribed, and there's little room for independent media.

At the same time, the film is also a consideration of the richness of this past and present, including what we might call a multicultural situation with significant Malay, Chinese and Indian populations all living together. There's more specifically a bit about Singapore's film history in the film and also a bit of science fiction about time travel.

As we watch Daniel's images in Singapore, these images being often of significant historical sites in Singapore—whether or not their significance is evident—we hear a number of voices on the soundtrack, each voice telling her or his own story, as we work out the relationship between what we hear and what we see. And as the stories gradually begin to intersect and overlap.

You'll see the film begins somewhat austerely—with an elegant austerity, I'd say—but if you answer its call to consider the power of the image and the power of storytelling as creative forces, it blossoms into a beautiful and moving work.

Before I bring the filmmaker up here—and he will of course be here afterwards to discuss the film with you—I want to thank the organization Crows and Sparrows, a consortium of local folks based both in the local filmmaking and documentary community, as well as on the campuses of MIT and Harvard, for helping us with the series logistically and for getting the word out. We have Genevieve Carmel from Crows and Sparrows with us. So please thank her. And please welcome Daniel Hui up to the podium.

[APPLAUSE]

Daniel Hui  5:31  

Thank you guys for coming tonight. And I want to thank the Harvard Film Archive and Crows and Sparrows for bringing my film here. I'm really excited and honored to be here tonight, because I'm always in your seats. And we're regulars here. And it's really exciting to be showing my work here for the first time. So thank you again.

I don't want to talk too much about this film, I guess I like people to discover it. I think if you look at a synopsis, most synopsises of the film will say that it's about the history of Singapore, but I really think that it's about the present and the future of Singapore, so maybe hopefully we have to, we can have a conversation about that and about remembering and imagination. Thank you guys.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  6:29  

And now the discussion with David Pendleton and Daniel Hui.

David Pendleton  6:37  

Join me in welcoming back Daniel Hui.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for the film.

Daniel Hui  6:59  

Thank you guys for staying to the end.

David Pendleton  7:07  

As usual, maybe I'll start by asking a question or two. Unless there's somebody who wants to jump in right away. You have that right. But it usually helps if I start with a question or two.

And maybe we could start by talking fairly concretely about your practice, like the way you made this film. Because it has such an elegant but very complex structure, I'm wondering if that structure is something that grew as you were making the film, or if the text existed—that we hear on the soundtrack—if you wrote that, to start with... Which came first, the text or the images, or back and forth? And how did you come to build this thing, piece by piece?

Daniel Hui  8:03  

Well, it started because I wanted to make a landscape film. I had some leftover footage from my previous feature film, which were all landscapes, and I wanted to make a film out of that. So some of the footage you see is from 2011, 2010. But then, as I started doing research and I started getting more into making the film, I shot more footage, so like probably 10% is from the previous film so it kind of started with the images, but then as I did research, it kind of grew and grew. It was supposed to be a short film, but became longer and longer and as I met more and more people, it then got even longer and bigger. So then I started writing characters based on all the research I had done, all the historical research. So pretty much everything you see on screen, all the characters are real. And then I gave it to the people to play and then rewrote the script in their words and then it kind of became like this.

David Pendleton  9:08  

When you say the characters are “real,” you mean they're all they're all real people that you met?

Daniel Hui  9:13  

Yeah, they are based on real people. People that I have met or people that I met while I was doing research.

David Pendleton  9:21  

So if the film started with landscapes, and then– I'm fascinated by this relationship then between the soundtrack—where we hear the people talk—and then the image track where we see the landscapes and it seems like the it's really the the text that brings those two things together... and various moments of sync dialogue. Can you say a little bit about why you chose these moments where we actually see people talking on screen versus voiceover? There's a lot of voiceover and I know that voiceover is something you use in a lot of your other films if I'm not mistaken.

Daniel Hui  9:58  

Well, I wanted to break the format, you know, so I started out with this concept of landscapes with voiceovers, and I wanted to keep breaking the form so that it doesn't become this very rigid form. So I wanted to slowly introduce sync sound, and slowly introduce interviews and break the interview format and have fiction, and just keep playing with these boundaries, I guess, transgress the boundaries...

David Pendleton  10:31  

And can you say a little bit then about your– You said that the film is about Singapore, the present of Singapore, the future? I'm wondering to what extent are these formal transgressions that you were interested in related to your ideas about Singapore of the present or Singapore...? For one thing, I thought that—especially because when I watched the film, I recognized your voice—and I thought that the texts that you read at the beginning and the end about a young man's relationship to an older sort of father figure or authority figure in this very ambivalent relationship, I tended to read that as kind of a political allegory to some extent. Although I feel like when I asked you about that before, you were kind of resisting that reading. I guess, I'm wondering, in what ways are the formal strategies of the film related to ideas that you have about Singapore or about the political content of the film?

Daniel Hui  11:27  

Well, I think I was just really uncomfortable with... Well, I am just really uncomfortable with authority. So you know, the authority of the sound and the image, the authority of having sync sound, for example, and you take that for granted. And then especially when you work on film, you realize that it's completely separate things. And, you know, when you watch a film, we always take that for granted, sync sound, so I wanted to break that authority, and I guess I was thinking about history too. The way we construct an historical narrative, and then it becomes, you know, history with a capital H. It becomes an authority. So I wanted to keep breaking that authority, I guess. So even when it comes to like, the text in the film, so the texts first started as just pure information and the landscapes that you're seeing. But eventually, as I included more and more in the titles, I got kind of uncomfortable with the authority of the text, too. So I wanted to break even that authority, so the text becomes jumbled up at some point; it becomes kind of a nightmare of authority, you know, so yeah, it was very important.

I mean, the whole form of documentary and fiction, they're also kind of a form of authority where you are forced to work within a set of rules. And I was just uncomfortable with working with rules all the time. So I wanted to keep breaking those rules myself, even my own rules, so 

breaking the illusion of the filmmaker’s authoritative figure to– Even when I was conceptualizing the voiceover, first, I was just thinking of having one voice throughout the entire film, which would be my voice, but then I got uncomfortable with me as a filmmaker being the authority telling what the audience should think. So I started introducing all these voices, trying to challenge my own authority as a filmmaker.

I mean, back to the political situation in Singapore, I think, Singaporeans, we're very respectful and kind of grateful to authority. And I think that's very disturbing. I think it's a very Asian Confucian thing. And so I kind of want to challenge that mindset a little bit with the film.

David Pendleton 13:59  

I mean, it struck me also that this proliferation or the number of voices on the soundtrack, in some ways ,seems to relate to some points that the film is making about what we might call the “multicultural” situation in Singapore today. And the film points out that Singaporean cinema in the past, in the Cathay Studios era, seemed to be more sort of supportive of this sense of Singapore as a multicultural space than present day Singaporean cinema. Am I reading that correctly?

Daniel Hui 14:33  

Yeah, I mean, I think presently Singaporean cinema is very Chinese dominated. I think the government and a lot of the filmmakers today—a lot of filmmakers are Chinese—so a lot of people kind of situate Singapore in this Chinese continuum, which is like China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and then Singapore, because Singapore is a predominantly Chinese population. But I think it's really mistaken to think of Singapore that way, because it's Southeast Asia, you know, Southeast Asia has this very specific colonial past, which forced a lot of different races and different ethnicities to kind of coexist together. So it's very different from the Chinese continuum that people like to think of ourselves as. But if you watch Singaporean films these days, a lot of the filmmakers are Chinese, the films are in Chinese, and they speak to only a Chinese audience, and I'm always very uncomfortable with it. So I kind of want to reclaim that part of history and part of our identity for today.

David Pendleton  15:39  

I mean, it seems like one of the ways to– Oh, I'm sorry, there's a question. No, no, no, go ahead. Go ahead. I'll tell you what, wait till Amanda will bring you a mic, so we can all hear you.

Audience 1 15:51  

Hi Daniel. First of all, my name is [?Renzi?], and I'm from Singapore as well. And I want to say, thank you very much. I think that was a very wonderful film that we just watched. I do have a question. I mean, I think it's great that you are focusing on the multicultural aspect of our country's history. But there is a very real and very dark history of racial tension and racial violence in Singapore, like the riots in ‘64, Prophet Mohammed on 13th of May in 1969. And I was wondering why in the film, like that part of history seems to be a bit glossed over and not touched on as well. And secondly, this is more of like a random question, but I noticed the line from the RI school song was the end of the film. Are you an RI boy as well? [LAUGHS]

Daniel Hui

Oh, me too. So that's why I put that song in!

David Pendleton  16:33  

I missed the second question...

Daniel Hui  16:35  

It’s the part at the end where I see the fire, which is–

David Pendleton  16:41  

Oh all those lyrics, “the golden days are gone…”

Daniel Hui  16:43  

No, before that in the jungle, where he sees the fire that Stamford Raffles held, the torch that comes from the Promethean flame, which is a very... The Raffles Institution is this very elite school in Singapore—which I guess both of us went to—and they actually, it's very interesting, because that school is very much part of the col– It was started by Stamford Raffles [who] is a person who came to Singapore. So it was one of the first schools in Singapore, and it was a British school. And it still continues to today. It has always been an elite school, and it still is an elite school. So it's very much a remnant of the colonial past. And it kind of reinforces the idea that Singapore—modern Singapore—only started in 1819, when Stamford Raffles and the British came to Singapore. So that was a bit like a loaded reference that only I guess, people from the Raffles Institution would know. But anyway–

Audience 1

I was just curious.

Daniel Hui

And well, back to your question about the racial riots. Well, May 1969 was KL so not exactly Singapore, but the thing was, I think the racial riots are what the current Singaporean government always use to justify their racial policies. So I'm not sure if you know the situation in Singapore. But we have this so-called Racial Harmony Day on the day that the racial riots happened in 1964, ‘63 and ‘64. So it's a day to commemorate the riots, and to show how much progress we've made from then, but I think ironically, because the government keeps harping on the fact that there can very easily be racial tension, so a lot of subjects have become taboo, such as race. I think part of the reason why this film was kind of controversial in Singapore too was because I was talking about race, and that's kind of taboo for Singaporean culture these days, in a sense, making it taboo makes it makes the racial tension even more entrenched, because we can't talk about it, and so I've always been uncomfortable with that. And I think in the film, there was this part where I said, “We like to believe that the different races live in tension, rather than harmony. And so we always have to preserve that careful balance.” And I think, actually, that's much more detrimental to our society than if we confront the racial tension head-on. Instead of having this very utopian and actually unreal idea of racial harmony, why don't we talk about how we actually have real racism in Singapore still? But we just don't want to talk about it, you know, so. Thank you. Thanks for the question. Nice to hear a Singaporean voice. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  19:51  

Are there other questions in the audience? I want to follow up… Could you say a little bit more for those of us who don't know about these race riots? Who were the parties to this? I mean, I know that the main populations are the Malay, the Chinese-speaking populations and the South Asian or Indian populations…?

Daniel Hui  20:09  

And the Malay population. Actually, it was mainly the Chinese population. So the racial riots were between the Chinese population and the Malay population. So it was a very contentious period [in] Singapore, because there was a time when we had just merged with Malaysia. And so, who actually started the racial riots is a huge point of contention. The Malaysian side says that Singapore caused the racial riots and the Singapore side says that Malaysian forces instigated the riots. But either way, the riots were the reason why Singapore separated from Malaysia, because we felt that we cannot coexist in this very tense situation, because Malaysia, as you know probably, is predominantly Malay, and Singapore is predominantly Chinese. So it was used as an example that Singapore cannot coexist with Malaysia.

David Pendleton  21:10  

Thanks. You're here as a filmmaker and not as a historian of Singapore, but thank you!

Daniel Hui  21:15  

Well, no, I did two years of research on Singapore history, so...! [LAUGHS] I feel like [it was] a PhD thesis. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  21:20  

But to bring it back to the film to then, I'm thinking now about the voiceovers again, and the different languages or how many– What are the different languages that that we hear in the film, like, how much of it is in Chinese and how much of it is in...

Daniel Hui  21:38  

It’s pretty much all in English, Singlish.

David Pendleton

That's right.

Daniel Hui

But there are like some lines in Chinese and some lines in Malay, but it's pretty much in Singlish, which I feel is really, truly representative of Singaporean culture, because it's a mix of all cultures, and we had to find a way to communicate, so we came up with this Pidgin language called Singlish, which is, you know, as you can tell, not that easy to understand for foreigners, but it's a language also that the government is not very happy about; they try to discourage the use of Singlish and encourage the use of proper Standard English instead. So it was very important for me for the film to be in Singlish, actually.

David Pendleton  22:26  

And do you always show it with subtitles? Or are the subtitles usually in places where they don't speak Singlish?

Daniel Hui  22:33  

Yeah, it's only for places that don't speak Singlish. And eventually in Singapore it was shown without subtitles. It was mainly because there was this one character who spoke in very heavy Singlish and nobody else in Singapore could understand him. And I thought like, if I subtitled him, I had to subtitle everyone to be fair.

David Pendleton  22:57  

Are there other questions in the audience?

I mean, I'm curious about the use of science fiction in the film. Well, let me take a step back from that.. You were talking about you have this problem with authority. But it seems like there’s also in the film, these related ambivalences towards history and towards cinema as well, like we hear at the beginning, the voiceover and then the narrative, saying that “These images that my grandfather shot are evil, and if they're arranged in the right order something horrible will happen,” and later on, somebody talks about images as something that [replaces] reality and make it less real. At the same time, it seems like the film itself is an example of ways that cinema can help us reimagine the real... imagination, as you mentioned at the beginning. I guess I'm interested in your critiques of history and of cinema and how that relates to your description of the film in the introduction as about imagination and about memory.

Daniel Hui  24:04  

Well, I always go back to this thing that Serge Daney wrote at one point, he was saying that cinema is about arranging signs and gestures and everyday life into something that has a coherent meaning. And that in itself is very political. I mean, I don't believe in political cinema, because I think cinema is already politics, you know, so, and when it becomes politics, it has the danger of becoming the authority, and it has the danger becoming history and authoritative history. And I guess I'm very wary about that for a film that is critiquing authoritative history. I guess the predominant emotion, I would say, that I felt when I was making this film was doubt, and I think doubt is very important. Too much importance is placed on faith and not enough on doubt. And especially in our political culture in Singapore, we need to have more doubt, so I guess the film is a very doubtful film. Right? Don’t you think?

David Pendleton  25:29  

That's really interesting. Yeah. No, that's a really interesting, interesting way of– Because I mean, I thought about it in terms of—maybe because we have Thom Andersen, one of your teachers, coming to present a film inspired by Gilles Deleuze writing about cinema—but that philosopher talks about the “power of the false,” this idea that the false is not opposed to the real, but it is opposed to the true and we can use the power of falseness to engage creatively with reality. And I feel like this film is sort of an interesting example of that. And the thread about the time travel, right, this idea that there could be multiple strands of history, and we might be on different strands at different times...

Daniel Hui  26:14  

And also not to take our history for granted, or our present day for granted, which I think a lot of us in Singapore often do, and probably the rest of the world too.

David Pendleton  26:25  

Yeah, I think you could say that about this place. But yeah, but to encourage people to engage in it, and even think about how can you rewrite it or change it?

Oh now here comes some hands. We're going to Genevieve, and then we'll go there in the middle.

Audience 2  26:49  

Could you explain more about why you chose 2066 as the point in the future from which we're watching this film?

Daniel Hui  26:56  

Yeah, it's a Bolaño reference. So while I was conceptualizing the film, I read Savage Detectives and that was a huge influence on me, because it showed how you can construct something through multiple points of view. You can approach a totality with multiple points of view. And you as a reader try to make sense of the truth through all these very conflicting and sometimes contradictory points of view. And I think that was what I was trying to recreate in the film. I think, as a person who is engaged in history too, you're often faced with that. And it was very real to me, too, when I was doing research for this film, because a lot of the so-called alternative or revisionist history was written in the form of memoirs, like personal memoirs of people who lived through those times. And a lot of the times they contradict each other—even the details of big events—they are totally contradictory. So how do you as a person who is from this time and who did not live through that era, how do you reconstruct that past? And how do you find the truth? And I think you can. I think we can do that.

David Pendleton  28:19  

There was a question there.

Audience 3  28:24  

Daniel, I was wondering if you were planning on making another film about Singapore? And what that would be about?

Daniel Hui  28:34  

Yeah, no, all my films are... I'm kind of obsessed with Singapore. I'm always so angry with Singapore that it kind of fuels my creativity. So my next film, I want to adapt Dostoyevsky's Demons to a Singaporean context, because I think especially now, it's so pertinent to Singapore right now. Because I realized it's very easy to blame the government for what's wrong with our country. But our people voted in the government. You know, we voted in the government. In the last elections, we had a huge swing back to the PAP, actually a huge, huge swing back. So it was very, very surprising for all of us, including PAP supporters. SoI guess, in my next film, I want to examine the psyche of Singaporeans a bit, you know, why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Even people who are not happy with the PAP would still vote for the PAP which, you know, so….

David Pendleton  29:50  

Other questions? There's a question.

Audience 4  29:59  

Hi, I have a question about your choice of overlaying the text with certain landscape images. Like in certain cases, it made obvious sense, for example, with images of Pulau Ubin and images [UNKNOWN] Pulau Ubin, but then there are other images, where, for example, the narrator was talking about how she saw Miss Salmah doing something bad, but the landscape that we saw wasn't related to that at all. And I was wondering if– Because I was kind of reading into it, but not really sure how to because it just seemed two really jarring stories are being told [INAUDIBLE]

Daniel Hui  30:43  

Yeah, so I mean, part of it goes back to what I was saying earlier. I want always to break the format of the film, so that the images don't become authoritative. But also, to have a soundtrack that sometimes intersects with the image and sometimes goes completely in different ways. I want to use images and sounds in different ways. And sometimes at the same time. Sometimes images and sound can be demonstrative, sometimes it can be just metaphors, you know, sometimes I use them more intuitively, because I don’t know if you remember the scene where the Japanese ghost cat was talking about being away from home in Singapore, and I showed images of large ships at sunset, and that was really just because like a few large ships at sunset—and that's a very common sight in Singapore—but I always feel this sense of melancholy and nostalgia for your homeland when I see these ships, so I wanted to use the images as a kind of emotional, rather than demonstrative reading of the text. So they kind of play off each other. Same with sound. Sometimes I will put sound in that [doesn’t] really mesh with the film just for the sake of rhythm, just for the sake of emotion. And sometimes they are demonstrative, like sync sound.

David Pendleton  32:20  

So sometimes these elements carry meaning and other times they're meant to carry tone or affect or emotion.

Daniel Hui  32:26  

Yeah. Which is also a kind of meaning I guess.

David Pendleton

That's true.

Daniel Hui

Yeah.

David Pendleton  32:32  

But that's a good example of what I meant about the power of the false too, is that you have the choice as a filmmaker to present an image of a cat and to tell us that it's actually the reincarnation of a Japanese soldier, so the image is completely retexture recontextualized and given a whole new meaning.

Daniel Hui  32:52  

Yeah. I mean, that was really just because I didn't know how to shoot a ghost. I mean, everybody has avatars in the film, but the ghosts didn't have any avatars. I was thinking, what can I use as an avatar?

David Pendleton  33:05  

Everyone has a what in the film?

Daniel Hui

An avatar.

David Pendleton

Oh, an avatar.

Daniel Hui  33:10  

Yeah. So I was like, “Oh, we could use a cat.” Then I originally wanted the cat to be speaking Japanese. I thought it would be too funny. [LAUGHTER] So I just made it subtitles.

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

David Pendleton  33:32  

The question was, did you write the reminiscences of the Japanese soldier or did you find that in the course of your research?

Daniel Hui  33:40  

The story of the Japanese soldier himself was my imagination. But I wanted to use the Japanese soldier to talk about the student leader, who was actually a real person. And there was actually a story about the student leader. So this person in real life, he was a very active student leader in the 50s. And very active in the riots and organizing people. And then he got arrested by the colonial government and got put in prison for ten years. So while he was imprisoned, Singapore merged with Malaysia and separated and became independent. And he was only released after the PAP got into power—many years after the PAP got into power—so the PAP was also keeping him in prison. And when he got out of prison, he became a total PAP person. He did a total 180 and joined the PAP organizations and everything. So that was actually the end of that story. But, as it escalated to like the deaths and suicide, I thought it was too much and you need to have some happy ending, so I gave the cat a happy ending. He was reunited with the person he loves. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  34:59  

There was a question in the back. You want to ask it?

Audience 5  35:07  

It’s gonna be maybe controversial but several times you have used shots of the cat obviously. Maybe you admire or consciously or unconsciously Chris Marker and in the program, I don't know who dubbed you as being a Chris Marker influence, but I'm puzzled by that comparison.

Daniel Hui  35:34  

Me too! [LAUGHS] I was totally not thinking of Chris Marker. [LAUGHS] But you know when you make some semi-essay film, people always compare you to Chris Marker. Plus I have a cat, so it has to be Chris Marker, but no, I–

David Pendleton  35:53  

And it's the the the science-fictiony aspect of the fiction too.

Daniel Hui  35:58  

Right, the science fiction

David Pendleton  35:58  

That also tweaks people to think...

Daniel Hui   36:01  

But when I was editing the film I got stuck. And then I put on Sans Soleil just for inspiration and it got me even more stuck. I just saw five minutes and I couldn't watch it anymore. I actually made a point not to watch any essay films because they got me really, really stuck. So I started reading instead. And watching film noir. Film noir helped me a lot. It unblocked my mind. So yeah, I think I owe more to Jules Dessin or Robert Siodmak than Chris Marker. Which we saw Phantom Lady before this. It's amazing. [LAUGHS] Really glad that Phantom Lady played before this. Anyway, sorry. I tend to ramble.

David Pendleton  36:53  

That's okay. You can keep rambling. Though the hands are starting to come up now. So there's a gentleman back there. And then a gentleman over here. Raise your hand so that Amanda sees who I'm talking to. Oh, you’ve got the mic. Okay.

Audience 6  37:06  

Hello. And Hi, Daniel. I really like the film. I think it's a film about hauntology. It's this constant spectral presence of the authority, personal memory and history, which does not only draw all the characters back to the past, but as you said, it's a film about the future. And all these haunting recollections and memories actually foretells the lingering presence in the future. So the directionality of these two things are really interesting, how you excavated them. But then my question is about a very, very practical one. It has nothing to do with narratives and everything. Has this film be shown in Singapore? And will it be shown? And if you can pass the censorship, or maybe has already passed? So what are the challenges that you foresee? What's going to happen in the future if you want to bring this film to Singapore?

Daniel Hui 38:03  

Yeah, well, we showed the film in Singapore as part of a film festival in May, and it got into a lot of trouble. So Lee Kuan Yew had just died. And I think everybody was really emotional at the time. So the government was delaying the classification of the film until like, the day before the screening so that nobody would come to the film. it backfired because it sold out in two hours. But so in Singapore, you have to apply for a license to show the film. Basically, if you don't, they can arrest you. So they finally approved the license the day before the screening and only for that screening. And since then, the film festival that showed the film has shut down because they showed the film. And we haven't had any luck trying to show it in Singapore again. So I think that might be the very last screening in Singapore. Very sadly. So yeah. So I could give you a copy and you can pirate it among your friends. [LAUGHS] It'll be the best way to show the film.

David Pendleton  39:20  

There's a question over here.

Audience 7  39:31  

My question was very similar, having been caught up in the past and the future and the present, but I want to ask you a different direction. Although I was interested where in Singapore, the film festival was that it was shown. But separately, when you filmed the present, you showed the street lights, and the camera was moving. And you showed it in a variety of different ways. And I was just curious, if you would talk about how you decided to show the street lights because that to me was the present? So I'm interested in the way you were visualizing that and how you just decided to choose a moving camera, sometimes pausing on a porn store or moving in another direction. I'm just curious about how you chose to present the present.

Daniel Hui  40:22  

I'm trying to think back to my mental state at the time. Yeah, I don't know. I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember why I took that. Sorry, I don’t have a coherent answer for you. [LAUGHS]

David Pendleton  40:39  

What about the festival screening? Where did that take place?

Daniel Hui 40:42  

It took place in the museum. It is called the Singapore Art Museum. And so basically, the museum and the festival got into a lot of trouble for screening the film. So these days, they try not to outright ban the film, because that leads to a lot of backlash internationally. So they didn't want to ban the film, but they didn't want the film to be seen either. So they were giving the festival and the museum a lot of trouble so as to set an example for future exhibitors to not take that risk anymore, you know. So in a way, it encourages the film curators and film exhibitors to self-censor. And I think that's the real problem with Singapore. It’s not that the government is oppressive in this sense, is that repressive in this sense? Oppressive, I guess. But that we internalize that form of thinking, and we often self-censor, and do that own oppression to ourselves, even before the government can do it to us basically because of fear, you know, so.

David Pendleton  41:58  

Yeah, Maria. Jeremy will bring you a mic.

Audience 8  42:07  

I’m really interested in some of your musical choices, and especially the Bill Dixon. Like I was wondering, like what your relationship to [INAUDIBLE]

David Pendleton  42:20  

Do you want to talk about who Bill Dixon is? ‘Cause I know who Don Cherry is, but I personally don't know who Bill Dixon is.

Daniel Hui  42:27  

Oh, he’s an avant garde trumpeter. Yeah. And composer, American. But it was the easiest [piece] to clear actually. We had a hard time finding the rights holder. But then when we found the rights holder, we just sent them an email. And they said, “Oh, you know, let me ask the Bill Dixon estate.” And we were like,”Yeah, we have no money” and everything. So if you could give us a good rate. And then the Bill Dixon estate came back to us and said, “Oh, yeah, use it for free.” So it was the only one that we didn't have to pay for. [LAUGHS]

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

Yeah, I mean, we wrote them an email with my statement and a synopsis and all that. So I'm not sure if they allowed us to use it for free because they liked the idea, or maybe they're just supportive of other artists. But that was great. We were happy. But that was a really obscure track. I think the CD that it was on is out of print or something. So yeah, it was really hard to find the rights for that one.

David Pendleton  43:42  

I wanted to go back to that moment. There was a woman who was asking the question about the story about Miss Salmah. And the image that we see is not really the story about Miss Salmah, because if I remember correctly, that's the image that seems to be like the Singapore Gay Pride from a couple of years ago, which raises the question of a whole other dimension of identity. I mean, we've been talking about ethnic identities that coexist here. And now there's this other level. And I felt like there was one stratum of the film that was about the ways in which different kinds of identities are either oppressed or proliferate or are promoted. And I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about the future of these identities in Singapore, in the world, the proliferation of them? Because on one level, this image of the fire that consumes everything, there seems to be this sense that these identities will at some point also get dissolved into some sort of consuming fire?

Daniel Hui  44:45  

Well, hopefully, I mean, the gay issue in Singapore is very much a remnant of the colonial past too, because we have the same law that a lot of ex-British colonial countries have such as India, the exact same Penal Code 377. A, and we've been trying to repeal it for the longest time. But you know, the government doesn't want to budge because it thinks that the majority of the population is conservative. Again, another result of colonialism in Singapore.

David Pendleton  45:17  

That same sex activity is illegal.

Daniel Hui  45:19  

Yeah. So I mean, I kind of used those images, because I wanted to show how activism can continue in today. Although it's a bit of a stretch to call a gay pride parade activism, of course.

David Pendleton  45:35  

It seems very calm and peaceful, kind of.

Daniel Hui  45:39  

Yeah, it is. And the interesting thing about the gay pride parade in Singapore is that it’s organized by corporations. And actually, the gay rights movement in Singapore is led very much by huge corporations such as Google and Barclays Capital, totally paradoxical and totally contradictory as well, because, you know.

But anyway, I wanted to show how activism has kind of changed in a sense. And, you know, the gay pride parade is pretty much the biggest demonstration in Singapore. Because actually demonstrations in Singapore are illegal. So you have to apply for a license to demonstrate, basically, you have to apply to the police for a license, which kind of defeats the purpose of demonstration. But so usually, demonstrations are not well attended at all because, you know, people are still afraid, and all that. But the gay pride demonstration is actually the most well attended demonstration. So I thought, you know, it's interesting how activism has survived today in a completely different form. I mean, I'm not exactly happy about the direction it took, either. But at the same time, it's great that people are standing up for a cause. And it's a cause I believe in too, obviously. So there is a parallel between the demonstration in the 50s; it was very much left wing and people were rebelling against the colonial government. And as compared to the demonstrations in the present day, which is very much corporatist and very apolitical actually. So, yeah. I don’t know if that answers your question at all.

David Pendleton  47:23  

Yeah, it wasn't a pointed question. I was just interested in more about what was behind those images.

Daniel Hui  47:29  

Yeah.

David Pendleton  47:33  

Are there other questions from the audience? Yeah, I'm gonna ask one real quick question. And then if you have a question, this will be your last chance.

But can you say a little bit about Yusnor Ef? And how you got to know him, how he came to be in the film? Because I mean, there's so much fiction in the film, but he actually is somebody who is a very important lyric writer and screenwriter in the Singaporean film industry in the 50s and 60s, if I'm not mistaken.

Daniel Hui  48:04  

Yeah. Yusnor Ef is another very interesting character, actually, I can go on and on all these stories, but, Yusnor Ef and I had some common friends, so I just asked them to introduce me and then emailed him. And then he wanted to help young filmmakers. So in a way, he's very generous. But at the same time, after I made the film, a lot of people came to tell me that, Yusnor Ef was actually not an important character at all in the 50s and 60s. He's really important today because he's kind of very much like a historian of the past, while using his vantage point of being active in that time. So it's kind of interesting that he, in a way, kind of rewrote his own history as well.

David Pendleton  48:54  

I see. He's one of the survivors of that sort of golden era. So he can present himself as the person who sort of saw everything.

Daniel Hui 49:01  

I mean, there are a lot more survivors, but I couldn’t get in touch with them in time before I finished the film. And a lot of them don't live in Singapore anymore. When the film industry died, the whole film industry moved to KL, in Kuala Lumpur, and then it died a second death there actually. After a few years, it completely died. And there was no film industry. It was taken over by TV for a long time. And only in the past twenty years or so, the film industry in both Malaysia and Singapore, started to come up again. And there are a lot of theories about why the film industry in Singapore died. I mean, a lot of people were saying–

David Pendleton  49:38  

This happened in the 1980s, 90s?

Daniel Hui  49:41  

No, the Malay film industry in Singapore died in the 60s, so right when it merged with Malaysia. I mean, there are a lot of conspiracy theories, of course, but I think the main reason is because Singapore was trying to build an identity as a Chinese nation. And Malaysia was trying to build an identity as a Malay nation and having this Malay cinema in Singapore is incongruent to both narratives. So it just naturally went to Malaysia.

But it's interesting because Singapore in the past used to be the nexus of Malay intellectual cultural activity and has always traditionally been—even though it was a predominantly Chinese place.

David Pendleton  50:21  

Well, and if the Shaw Brothers had an outpost there, it was obviously an important filmmaking center.

Daniel Hui 50:27  

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically made films that traveled all around Malaysia and Indonesia. So it was a very important. It was like the Hollywood of the Nusantara region, as it's called, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia.

David Pendleton  50:45  

Okay, any last questions? Then I'd like to thank you for sticking around, for your interest. And thank you very much, Daniel, for the film.

Daniel Hui 50:55  

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

©Harvard Film Archive

A Singaporean filmmaker and film writer, Daniel Hui made a dramatic impression as soon as his first remarkable feature, Eclipses, was released in 2011. Garnering comparisons to filmmakers—such as Chris Marker, Lav Diaz and Matt Porterfield—who meditatively work within the realm of the docu-fictive hybrid, Hui studies Singapore through what appear to be limitless mirrors, reflecting the many facets of truth told by myth, memory and recorded history. Actively and successfully fostering the unique voice of a new Singaporean cinema, Hui also founded the independent film collective 13 Little Pictures, which produced his second, immediately acclaimed feature Snakeskin. We are excited to welcome Daniel Hui here for an evening to screen and discuss his free-associative revision of history by way of both nonfiction and science fiction.

A striking vérité snapshot of present-day Singapore that doubles as a semi-mystical cinematic incantation conjuring ghosts from the country’s history, Daniel Hui’s Snakeskin ingeniously compresses past, present and future. In 2066, the lone survivor of a cult projects footage shot by his divine leader, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Stamford Raffles, the British statesman who founded Singapore. Both living and dead subjects candidly reminisce about love, race, revolution and the Malay film industry as muted images from 2014 of the city-state’s streets and harbors—key locations of the cult’s future founding—flash by. – Film Society of Lincoln Center