“The attorney general has decided to indict Thaksin on all charges...”

The Office of the Attorney General confirmed today that former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra will be indicted for lèse-majesté and violation of the Computer Crime Act, in relation to an interview he gave in South Korea almost a decade ago. An OAG spokesman said this morning: “The attorney general has decided to indict Thaksin on all charges”. Thaksin was not present to answer those charges, as he tested positive for coronavirus yesterday. His hearing has been postponed until 18th June.

The charges relate to a short video clip from The Chosun Daily (조선일보), recorded on 21st May 2015, in which Thaksin implied that privy councellors were behind the 2014 coup. Thaksin has made similar claims in previous interviews: on 20th April 2009, he told the Financial Times that the Privy Council plotted the 2006 coup, and he made the same allegation to Tom Plate in Conversations with Thaksin. On 27th March 2008, he publicly accused Prem Tinsulanonda, Privy Council leader at the time, of masterminding the 2006 coup.

Thaksin’s passports were revoked by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 27th May 2015, in a preemptive decision pending a police investigation into the Chosun Daily video. Two days later, lèse-majesté charges were filed against Thaksin on behalf of Udomdej Sitabutr, army chief at the time (raising questions about the politicisation of the military). After Thaksin was indicted today, his lawyer Winyat Chartmontri said: “Thaksin is ready to prove his innocence in the justice system.” That stance may change if the case goes to trial, as those accused of lèse-majesté almost always enter guilty pleas. (Defendants pleading guilty often receive reduced sentences.)

When Thaksin returned from self-imposed exile on 22nd August 2023, it seemed that he and the military had reached a mutually beneficial truce. However, the military giveth and taketh away: Thaksin has been wrong-footed several times, and every act of leniency granted to him has come with strings attached. He was released on parole on 18th February, yet the very next day he appeared at the OAG (in a wheelchair) after the Chosun Daily case was suddenly revived. His application for a royal pardon was accepted, though it only partially commuted his prison sentence. Senators endorsed Srettha Thavisin, the leader of his proxy party, as Prime Minister, though a group of forty senators has now petitioned the Constitutional Court to investigate Srettha.

Srettha is accused of violating article 160 of the constitution by appointing Pichit Chuenban, Thaksin’s disgraced former lawyer, as Prime Minister’s Office Minister. Pichit was jailed for six months in 2008 after blatantly attempting to bribe a judge on Thaksin’s behalf with ฿2 million in cash. Article 160 states that government ministers must “not have behaviour which is a serious violation of or failure to comply with ethical standards”, which would seem to apply in Pichit’s case. (It’s worth noting, though, that exceptions can be made: the court ruled that Thammanat Prompao was qualified as a minister in the 2019 military government despite his criminal record for heroin smuggling, as he was convicted outside Thailand. Indeed, he is currently serving as Minister of Agriculture in Srettha’s cabinet.)

The court accepted the petition against Srettha on 23rd May, though it voted (by a majority of only one) not to suspend the Prime Minister while the investigation is ongoing. With both Thaksin and Srettha now under investigation, it seems clear that a warning message (at the very least) is being sent, reminding Thaksin that his deal with the military was not made on equal terms. And with the opposition Move Forward Party facing the prospect of dissolution by the Constitutional Court, the military may have decided that holding its nose and cooperating with Thaksin is no longer necessary.

Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History

Many Western readers were first introduced to Japanese manga by Frederik L. Schodt’s seminal book Manga! Manga! in 1983. One of Schodt’s chapters was titled A Thousand Years of Manga, situating manga within the entire tradition of Japanese visual culture. This approach is also adopted by Japanese manga scholars, and by the country’s cultural institutions, as it establishes manga as both artistically significant and inherently Japanese. Similarly, recent books such as Eric P. Nash’s Manga Kamishibai and Adam L. Kern’s Manga from the Floating World link manga to earlier, largely unrelated forms of Japanese art for commercial reasons: putting manga in the title sells more copies.

In his book Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History, published in 2022, Eike Exner challenges this concept of an apparently unbroken line from ancient scrolls to modern manga, debunking the “tradition of historiography that for nearly a century has sought to establish a continuity between present-day narrative Japanese comics and centuries of domestic visual art preceding them.” Exner argues that manga represents a break from traditional Japanese art, and that it developed instead as a result of innovations adopted from American comics. He shows how early US comic strips utilised new devices such as speech bubbles, which were later employed by Japanese mangaka: “Japanese and American comics came to rely on transdiegetic content like speech balloons instead of external narration to tell stories. Such audiovisual comics first developed in the United States and from there moved to Japan.”

Specifically, he cites the Bringing Up Father comic strip, which was first serialised in Japan in 1923. This American comic was popular in Japanese translation, and the following year it inspired the Japanese strip フキダシ (‘easygoing father’) by Yutaka Asō, which shared Bringing Up Father’s use of transdiegetic devices. Schodt also identified the link between these two strips, noting that フキダシ was “a direct spin-off of Bringing up Father, but its everyday-life situations and the self-effacing character of its hero had a quality Japanese readers naturally warmed to. Initially, the American influence was obvious”. But Schodt saw this as a fad rather than a paradigm shift: “Japanese newspapers realized the power of comic strips to attract readers and began hiring Japanese artists who used American styles. Foreign comics were exotic but, in the end, alien. Japanese comics were a smash hit.”

Exner is careful to avoid accusations that manga is a mere imitation of American comic style: “It would be simplistic to say that modern comics were “invented” in America and “copied” by the Japanese.” Instead, he argues that the relationship between the two cultures is one of cross-fertilisation, as the creator of Bringing Up Father was himself inspired by Japan’s ‘floating world’ woodblock prints: “The influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints on George McManus, whose Bringing Up Father in turn became the most influential and longest-running graphic narrative in prewar Japan, exemplifies the complexity of transnational cultural influence.”

Exner’s research is pioneering—“no manga historiography has focused in depth on the influence of American newspaper strips on narrative manga”—and represents a compelling new approach to manga studies. He suggests that the impact of American comics on manga has previously been downplayed as it “complicates the popular account of contemporary manga as the culmination of domestic popular art, which may explain why few have been interested in the recovery of this foreign influence.”

High Bias:The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape

High Bias, by Marc Masters, was published last year, the sixtieth anniversary of the compact cassette. It’s subtitled The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, as tapes have a reputation for sacrificing sound quality in favour of convenience. Masters embraces this imperfect audio experience, even suggesting in his introduction that wow and flutter sounds “kind of cool”. This feels too much like the misleading memes associated with cassettes online, but the book’s main chapters fortunately avoid such clichés.

Masters covers the invention of the cassette by Lou Ottens for Philips in 1963, and the introduction of the Sony Walkman personal stereo in 1979. Ottens appeared in the documentary Cassette (directed by Zack Taylor, Georg Petzold, and Seth Smoot), and Masters draws on unused extracts from that film’s interviews with Ottens. The book also looks at the recent cassette comeback, a resurgence in sales similar to the vinyl revival, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Miniaturisation led to even smaller analogue cassette formats, the tiniest being the picocassette developed by Dictaphone. Compact cassettes were the highest-selling physical music format between 1984 and 1990, though they were overtaken by CDs in 1991. Two books, The Art of Sound by Terry Burrows and Analogue by Deyan Sudjic, are devoted to cassette decks, boomboxes, and other vintage audio equipment.

A History of Advertising:The First 300,000 Years

A History of Advertising, the first comprehensive history of advertising, was published in 2022. While the original edition was illustrated in colour throughout, the paperback edition published this year has grayscale illustrations. The book, by Jef I. Richards, is subtitled The First 300,000 Years, but that vast timespan is not meant to be taken literally. As Richards acknowledges, “there are many possible starting points for advertising history,” but they are all less than ten thousand years old. In fact, more than half of the book is devoted to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

A History of Advertising is deeply researched and unprecedented in scope, and Richards has written the first complete narrative history of advertising. Previous books on the subject have all been limited in various ways: Mark Tungate’s Adland covers the ad industry rather than the ads themselves, Stephane Pincas and Marc Loiseau’s A History of Advertising has plenty of images but very little text, and Peter Russell and Senta Slingerland’s Game Changers covers only the last sixty years. The nearest equivalent is Simon Veksner’s less comprehensive 100 Ideas That Changed Advertising.

Murdered Justice

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the 2014 coup. Just two days after the military takeover, Thai Lawyers for Human Rights was established to provide pro bono legal support for activists detained by the junta (what was euphemistically described as ‘attitude adjustment’) or prosecuted for lèse-majesté.

The Murdered Justice (วิสามัญยุติธรรม) exhibition at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre marks ten years of both the coup and TLHR. It includes casings from rubber bullets fired by riot police, the bloodied shirt worn by New Democracy Movement member Sirawith Seritiwat when he was attacked by thugs in 2019—previously shown at the Never Again (หยุด ย่ำ ซ้ำ เดิน) exhibition—and a 2016 leaflet campaigning against the constitution drafted by the junta.

The first section of the exhibition is headed “Land of Compromise”, in reference to a quote from an impromptu interview during a royal walkabout. The wall text describes the phrase as “the expression that, at least after the 2014 coup d’état, beneath the “smile” lies the enforcement of laws and violence to thwart change.” (This is also quoted in the PDF exhibition catalogue, p. 87.) At the exhibition, and in the catalogue, “Land of Compromise” is juxtaposed with a large portrait of Netiporn Sanesangkhom, a pro-democracy protester who died in prison this month after going on hunger strike.

‘Land of compromise’ has previously been quoted by several artists to make the same point as the Murdered Justice exhibition. Videos by Elevenfinger and Petchnin Sukjan both flash the words “LAND OF COMPROMISE” on screen accompanied by the sound of rubber bullets being fired. The phrase also appears in Anuwat Apimukmongkon’s exhibition A Blue Man in the Land of Compromise, and in the lyrics to songs by Paeng Surachet and Speech Odd.

Murdered Justice opened yesterday, and runs until 26th May. The exhibition coincides with the launch of a new book, Ten Years Ago (ผู้ต้องหาเสรีภาพ 1 ทศวรรษ รัฐประหาร 2557 กับการต่อสู้ของผู้ต้องคดีการเมือง), edited by Veerapong Soontornchattrawat and Noppon Archamas, which profiles some of the political prisoners assisted by TLHR. Noppon is also the editor of Dissident Citizen (ราษฎรกำแหง)

Tawee Ratchaneekorn: A Retrospective Exhibition 1960–2022

Tawee Ratchaneekorn: A Retrospective Exhibition 1960–2022 (ทวี รัชนีกร: ปรากฏการณ์แห่งอุดมการณ์) was held at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2022, accompanied by a lavish exhibition catalogue signed by the artist. The catalogue includes an interview with Tawee, and essays (in Thai and English) on his art and its political context.

Throughout his sixty-year artistic career, Tawee’s work has consistently drawn attention to socio-economic inequality. Walking around the exhibition, a surprising motif became apparent: many paintings, none of which were flattering portraits, featured golden crowns. Other paintings satirise self-serving Thai politicians and military generals.

The catalogue includes an erratum slip correcting a mistake in one of its essays: both the Thai and English versions mention the ‘14th and 16th October incidents’. As the erratum slip makes clear, this should refer to 14th October 1973 and 6th October 1976, the dates of two historical massacres. Another essay in the catalogue makes a similar error—citing the ‘16th and 19th October incidents’—though this has not been corrected.

Highlighting these errors might seem like nitpicking, but they are not mere typos. Although the two massacres are among the most notorious events in modern Thai history, they have been whitewashed to such an extent that many people cannot tell them apart. The title of Aomtip Kerdplanant’s short film 16 ตุลา (‘16th Oct.’) comments on this by conflating the two dates. Similarly, the book Prism of Photography (ปริซึมของภาพถ่าย) describes “accounts which confuse the two events, often fusing them into one”.

Red Poetry

Supamok Silarak’s film Red Poetry (ความกวีสีแดง) will be shown at Doc Club and Pub in Bangkok, Lorem Ipsum in Hat Yai, and Alien Artspace in Khon Kaen on 26th May, as part of the Wildtype Middle Class 2024 season. It will also be screened at Chiang Mai University on 4th June, at Vongchavalitkul University in Korat on 7th June, at the University of Phayao on 13th June, and at Bookhemian in Phuket on 23rd June. The documentary is a profile of performance artist Vitthaya Klangnil, who co-founded the group Artn’t. A shorter version of the film—Red Poetry: Verse 1 (เราไป ไหน ได้)—had its premiere at Wildtype 2022.

Red Poetry shows the intense endurance and commitment Vitthaya invests in his protest art. A durational performance—sitting near Chiang Mai’s Tha Pae Gate for nine full days—led to his collapse from exhaustion. In another action, he climbed onto Chiang Mai University’s main entrance, repeatedly slapped himself in the face, and jumped into a pond. Before reporting to the police to answer charges of sedition, he vomited blue paint outside the police station.

The film ends with Vitthaya’s most extreme action: he carved “112” into his chest, in protest at the lèse-majesté (article 112) charges he faced after exhibiting a modified version of the Thai flag in 2021. He was convicted of lèse-majesté last year, and received a suspended sentence.

Supamok’s film was screened three times as part of the 27th Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 27): in the online Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน), at the main festival itself, and in the Short 27 Awarded Film Screening programme. It has previously been shown in Chiang Mai (most recently in February), Salaya, and Phatthalung.

Strangers on a Train

The House Samyan cinema in Bangkok will show Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Strangers on a Train next month, with screenings starting on 14th June. The film begins with two men, Bruno and Guy, meeting by chance in a train carriage. Guy (played by Farley Granger) is a famous tennis player, and Bruno (Robert Walker) recognises him and starts a seemingly innocent conversation.

Very quickly, Bruno’s questions exposes Guy’s private insecurities, and Bruno makes a theoretical proposal: that he will kill Guy’s unfaithful wife if Guy kills his father. Guy laughs dismissively at the idea, and leaves the train. But after Bruno carries out his end of the arrangement, he pressures Guy to do likewise. Guy is trapped: he can’t go to the police, because Bruno would claim that they had plotted the scheme together.

The plot is from Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name, which Hitchcock adapted with Czenzi Ormonde and Barbara Keon. Novelist Raymond Chandler had been originally contracted to write the script, though Chandler disliked collaborating with Hitchcock. He regarded Hitchcock’s contributions as interferences whereas, for Hitchcock, collaborating on a script was the most enjoyable part of the creative process.

The novel’s central premise remains unchanged in the film, as it’s such a perfect Hitchcockian scenario. But there was a major structural alteration: in the book, Guy does indeed kill Bruno’s father, whereas in the film he doesn’t. Highsmith’s book is about the corruption of innocence: Bruno’s pervasive persistence ultimately drives Guy to murder, much as Iago poisons the mind of Shakespeare’s Othello.

Hitchcock’s film, on the other hand, explores the persecution of innocence, with a framed man under constant suspicion, a theme he dealt with equally directly in The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, and The Wrong Man. Other Hitchcock preoccupations are present too: the idea of the perfect murder is a conversation topic in both this film and Shadow of a Doubt, and there are Oedipal overtones to the mother-son relationships in Strangers on a Train, Psycho, and Notorious.

Walker’s performance is outstanding, and he perfectly captures the character’s decadence and obsession. In fact, Bruno is the most engaging character in the film, and the audience is manipulated into sympathising with him. Hitchcock’s villains were often more charming than his heroes: Uncle Charlie, for instance, in Shadow of a Doubt, Norman in Psycho, and Tony in Dial M for Murder. Bruno is also another in a line of Hitchcock’s implicitly gay characters, like Brandon and Phillip in Rope, Leonard in North by Northwest, and Mrs Danvers in Rebecca.

The theme of doubling is a significant aspect of the film, recalling the doppelgänger in The Case of Mr. Pelham and the two Charlies of Shadow of a Doubt: two leading men (gay/straight; guilty/innocent), two archetypal love interests (Madonna/whore), and two detectives (good cop/bad cop). The standout sequence comes before Guy’s tennis match, when the spectators’ heads turn like metronomes, following each volley of the ball, while Bruno stares conspicuously ahead. Despite a melodramatic ending, this is one of Hitchcock’s greatest films.

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences, published in 2021, is the fourth volume in the Global Exploitation Cinemas series. Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson coined ‘Nordsploitation’ as an umbrella term referring to the exploitation cinema of the Nordic region (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The book offers an alternative history of Nordic cinema, focussing on marginalised and censored films: “The Politics of Nordsploitation is primarily interested in ‘forgotten’ films that are typically categorized as cheap and irrelevant by cultural authorities”.

The authors discuss the excesses of 1970s exploitation movies, and the moral panic over VHS horror films in Sweden, which predated the UK ‘video nasties’ controversy. Gustafsson even consulted a doctor to verify a notorious moment of eyeball violence in Thriller (En Grym Film) that was rumoured to utilise a real human body. (The GP “leaned towards it being fake”.) But, surprisingly, it’s the austere Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) that they cite as “in many ways the quintessential Nordic exploitation film”.

The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick

Banned by Stanley Kubrick! Finally released after more than fifty years! In this case, the hyperbole is true: Kubrick blocked the publication of Neil Hornick’s The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick in 1969, and it was published for the first time last month.

Hornick was commissioned by Peter Cowie’s Tantivy Press to write the first book on Kubrick’s films, and Kubrick agreed to cooperate, though he drew up a prohibitive contract giving him the right to veto anything in the manuscript that he disliked. Famously, Kubrick was a control freak, and he was demanding final cut on Hornick’s book.

Cowie had planned to release a series of books on major filmmakers, modelled on A Ribbon of Dreams, his own monograph on Orson Welles. He would eventually commission and publish works on a handful of (mostly European) directors, though Kubrick would not be among them.

Once Hornick had finished his manuscript and submitted it to Kubrick, he received a lawyer’s letter informing him that the director “does not approve” of its contents. Months went by, with Kubrick declining to clarify his objections, and refusing to return the manuscript. As Cowie was bound by the contract, Hornick was forced to abandon the project.

At the same time that Kubrick was stalling over Hornick’s manuscript, film critic Alexander Walker was also writing a book about the director. Unlike Hornick’s, Walker’s work—Stanley Kubrick Directs—was just the puff piece Kubrick was looking for, and he cooperated extensively with Walker. Stanley Kubrick Directs was published with Kubrick’s endorsement, while The Magic Eye was shelved until this year.

Kubrick’s decision to abruptly turn his back on one author (Hornick) and switch his attention to a rival (Walker) would be repeated years later during the preproduction for AI. Kubrick worked with several collaborators on the AI script, one after the other, cutting off contact with each in turn. Ian Watson, Brian Aldiss, and Sara Maitland have all subsequently revealed how Kubrick summarily dispensed with their services once he had found a replacement writer.

The Magic Eye now includes a timeline of the protracted legal case, and a foreword by Filippo Ulivieri, author of 2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke (2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke) and Stanley Kubrick and Me (Stanley Kubrick e me). Ulivieri notes that Kubrick’s delaying tactics were similar to his treatment of Arthur C. Clarke: he refused to approve the manuscript for Clarke’s novel 2001 until after the film was released, keeping Clarke and his publisher in limbo.

Mango Art Festival 2024

The Mango Art Festival 2024 at River City in Bangkok (running from 7th to 12th May) includes a new series of paintings by Wittawat Tongkeaw. As in his exhibition 841.594, the colour blue dominates his recent work. (On Thailand’s tricolour flag, blue symbolises the monarchy.) His paintings are for sale, and each price ends with 112. (Lèse-majesté is article 112 of the criminal code.)

In Wittawat’s exhibtion The L/Royal Monument (นิ/ราษฎร์), paintings of sunsets represented a desire for transition. Displayed at the Mango Art Festival are paintings of sunrises, with orange skies signifying the rising popularity of the progressive Move Forward Party (whose logo is orange). Titles include Blue vs. Orange (showing the sky split between the two colours), Blue to Orange (in which the sun is rising over the sea, implying that the almost entirely blue sky will become orange), and Hope (a sky filled with blazing orange light).

Wittawat’s work over the last decade has been dominated by political symbolism, which has the potential to arouse scrutiny from the authorities. But another painting at the Mango Art Festival gives the artist some plausible deniability: depicting clouds in a blue sky, it’s wittily titled It’s Just the Sky, Nothing More. Wittawat used a similar painting of a sky in his provocative installation Creation-Conclusion (เริ่ม-จบ) at The L/Royal Monument.

Fiction/Nonfiction

Next month, the Thai Film Archive at Salaya will show a season of films that blur the lines between documentary and fiction. The Fiction/Nonfiction season begins on 1st June with Robert Flaherty’s classic Nanook of the North, regarded as the first documentary feature despite its staged sequences and anachronisms.

Later screenings include the docudrama Tongpan (ทองปาน) also on 1st June, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Come Here (ใจจำลอง) on 5th and 18th June, Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s Railway Sleepers (หมอนรถไฟ) on 6th and 18th June, and the compilation film Lumiére! on 9th and 19th June. (Tongpan has previously been shown at Noir Row Art Space, Cinema Oasis, and Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.)

Super Soft Power

Thai police are investigating a Netflix special hosted by the popular stand-up comedian Udom Taephanich, following complaints about his show Super Soft Power (ซูเปอร์ซอฟต์พาวเวอร์), which was released on 1st May. Udom is accused of mocking King Rama IX’s notion of ‘sufficiency economy’, and charges against him have been filed by Sonthiya Sawasdee and disgraced former MP Parina Kraikupt (both of whom were previously members of the pro-military Palang Pracharath Party).

The ‘sufficiency economy’ concept simply encourages people to live within their means. In his show, Udom doesn’t challenge the notion of ‘sufficiency economy’ itself; instead, he criticises the hypocrisy of influencers who falsely claim to adhere to ‘sufficiency economy’ principles. Sonthiya has accused Udom of spreading misinformation about ‘sufficiency economy’, while Parina has filed lèse-majesté charges against him.

Sonthiya has previously filed charges against four singers for mild political satire, and against a former Miss Thailand Universe for disrespecting the national flag. Two years ago, Udom was investigated after complaints about the political content of his previous Netflix special, Deaw 13 (เดี่ยว 13).

Country Home Sheriff

Oat Montien’s exhibition Country Home Sheriff opened at JWD Art Space in Bangkok on 2nd May, and runs until 14th July. Country Home Sheriff both celebrates and questions the cowboy as a male role model in Thai culture, examining its influence on both gay and straight ideas of masculinity.

For Oat, this subject is deeply personal, as his late father styled himself as a cowboy, and was the landlord of the Country Home pub, from which the exhibition takes its name. When his father died, Oat inherited his cowboy accoutrements, which he wears in videos shot for the exhibition. This raises Freudian issues, hinted at in the triptych video installation The Exquisite Fall (อัสดง), which is the exhibition’s centrepiece.

In another video—Oasis (โอเอซิส), from his Desert Lasso series (บ่วงบาศก์ทะเลทราย)—Oat stars as a gay cowboy having a tryst with his lover in the middle of the desert. Oat is one of a select few Thai artists to have produced such explicit videos, the others being Vichai Imsuksom (The Secret Room), Ohm Phanphiroj (The Meaning of It All), and Thunska Pansittivorakul (Avalon/แดนศักดิ์สิทธิ์).

What these works of queer video art have in common, apart from their transgressive content, is their participatory nature: in each case, the artist appears on camera to perform with their partner. Oat’s appearance is more performative, as he is playing a character (the cowboy), though it’s also more multi-layered, as he is representing his late father, and both personifying and subverting an archetype of masculine identity.

Nang Nak

Nonzee Nimibutr’s classic horror movie Nang Nak (นางนาก) will be shown at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya this month (on 4th and 24th May), as part of a season paying tribute to actor Winai Kraibutr, who died earlier this year. Winai played the male lead in Nang Nak, which was his breakthrough role.

Nang Nak was most recently shown at the Archive in 2021, to celebrate Halloween. It was also screened during Halloween in 2020, at Lido Connect. Bangkok Screening Room included it in their Halloween season in 2019. It had an outdoor screening in 2018. It was shown at the Archive in 2013, and at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in 2010.

Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and the ‘Video Nasties’ Panic of the 1980s

David Kerekes and David Slater followed Killing for Culture, their definitive history of real death on screen, with See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy, a comprehensive account of the ‘video nasty’ phenomenon, published in 2000. Both books have since been expanded and updated, more than twenty years later: a new edition of Killing for Culture appeared in 2016, and a second edition of See No Evil was released last month, retitled Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and the ‘Video Nasties’ Panic of the 1980s.

‘Video nasty’ was a pejorative coined by the UK press in the early 1980s, when violent horror movies like Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust were released uncensored due to a lack of regulation over the emerging videocassette industry. After a campaign by the tabloids, police began charging video distributors under the Obscene Publications Act, and a list of thirty-nine actionable films was compiled by the Director of Public Prosecutions. In 1984, legislation was introduced requiring certification of all videos by the British Board of Film Classification.

See No Evil was the only book to cover every aspect of the ‘video nasties’ controversy: the films themselves, the moral panic whipped up by the media, the police prosecutions, the debate surrounding the influence of film violence, and state censorship of films on videotape. There have been other books on the subject—notably the academic study The Video Nasties, edited by Martin Barker; and John Martin’s chronology of press coverage, The Seduction of the Gullible—but See No Evil told the full story for the first time.

The second edition, Cannibal Error, is almost 200 pages longer than See No Evil. The main text has not been updated, but there are some new appendices, including a guide to the current availability of the original ‘video nasty’ films (by David Hinds) and interviews with senior BBFC staff. The new title—which will take some getting used to—is a pun on the film Cannibal Terror (Terreur cannibale), and a reference to the misinformation surrounding the ‘video nasties’.

Kerekes also edited the influential counter-culture journal Headpress, and his other books include Sex, Murder, Art (a monograph on director Jörg Buttgereit). Jake West (Video Nasties) and David Gregory (Ban the Sadist Videos!) have both made ‘video nasty’ documentaries, the Monthly Film Bulletin (vol. 51, no. 610) published an analysis of the DPP’s list by Julian Petley and Kim Newman, and Newman wrote a concise history of the ‘video nasties’ in Sight and Sound (vol. 31, no. 5).

This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement

In 2011, the first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, launching a feminist campaign to assert female sexual autonomy and reclaim the epithet ‘slut’. In a Guardian op-ed published a few weeks later (9th May 2011), Gail Dines and Wendy J. Murphy argued that the SlutWalk movement was fighting a lost cause: “The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption. The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph (12th May 2011), Germaine Greer supported the SlutWalkers, though she cautioned that it is “difficult, probably impossible, to reclaim a word that has always been an insult.” (And she should know, having attempted a similar reappropriation of the c-word in the 1970s.) Greer pointed out that, although ‘slut’ has always been a pejorative, it also refers to slovenly women rather than promiscuous ones: “Yes, I am a slut. My house could be cleaner. My sheets could be whiter. I could be without sexual fantasies too—pure as the untrodden snow—but I’m not. I’m a slut and proud.” In Womanwords, Jane Mills shows that, like many misogynist terms, it was previously a unisex pejorative.

Katharine Whitehorn was the first feminist to confront slut-shaming and reappropriate ‘slut’ as a positive term. Writing sixty years ago in The Observer (29th December 1963), she self-identified as a slut in the word’s original sense: “Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?... Honest answers should tell you, once and for all, whether you are one of us: the miserable, optimistic, misunderstood race of sluts.”

This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement, edited by Alyssa Teekah, Erika Jane Scholz, May Friedman, and Andrea O’Reilly, was published in 2015. The book’s standout chapter is Dirty Talk, a scholarly cultural history of ‘slut’ by Nancy Effinger Wilson, who seeks to “dismantle the misogynist ideology on which the word’s pejorative meaning is predicated.” It also features yes i am a slut (written entirely in lower-case) by Clementine Morrigan, who proudly, but unconvincingly, proclaims herself a slut in the sexual sense: “yes i am a feminist and yes i am intelligent and yes i do choose to say yes i am a slut.”

Censor Must Die

It’s fair to say that Ing Kanjanavanit has had her battles with the film censors. In an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, she described the state censorship board as “a bunch of trembling morons with the power of life and death over our films.” Two of her films were banned in Thailand—My Teacher Eats Biscuits (คนกราบหมา) in 1998, and Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) in 2012—though both bans have recently been lifted, and the films will be screened later this year.

Ing’s documentary Censor Must Die (เซ็นเซอร์ต้องตาย) shows producer Manit Sriwanichpoom receiving the censor’s initial verdict on Shakespeare Must Die, and follows him as he appeals against the ban at the Ministry of Culture and files a case with the Office of the National Human Rights Commission. (The documentary was made in 2013, though it was another decade before the ban was finally revoked, following a judgement by the Supreme Court.)

Censor Must Die’s most revealing scene takes place at the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture: in the lobby, a TV plays a video demonstrating the traditional Thai method of sitting in a polite and respectful manner. The video encapsulates the Ministry’s didactic and outdated interpretation of Thai culture, and it was parodied by the mock instructional video “How to Behave Elegantly Like a Thai” in Sorayos Prapapan’s film Arnold Is a Model Student (อานนเป็นนักเรียนตัวอย่าง).

The documentary premiered at the Freedom on Film (สิทธิหนังไทย) seminar in 2013, was shown a few months later at the Thai Film Archive, and had private screenings at Silpakorn University and the Friese-Greene Club. It was last shown at Cinema Oasis, the cinema Ing and Manit founded in Bangkok, on 20th March 2020. Censor Must Die returns to Cinema Oasis this week, screening on 3rd, 4th, 5th, 10th, and 11th May.

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards, published earlier this year, contains storyboards and production illustrations from some of Hitchcock’s most famous films, including classics such as Vertigo. But the main attraction of Tony Lee Moral’s book is its chapter on Psycho, with a four-page spread of storyboards by Saul Bass. Although some of the Bass drawings have been reproduced elsewhere, Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards includes more than 100 of them, some of which are previously unpublished.

The Bass storyboards for the Psycho shower scene are “undoubtedly the most widely discussed sequence in the history of storyboarding,” according to Chris Pallant and Steven Price in their book Storyboarding, which includes a chapter on Hitchcock’s storyboards. Cinefantastique magazine (vol. 16, no. 4–5) printed a set of shower scene storyboards, and the same sketches appeared on the cover of Fionnuala Halligan’s book The Art of Movie Storyboards.

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards doesn’t address the authorship controversy surrounding the shower scene. Bass claimed that he not only storyboarded the sequence, but also directed it, though this was refuted by Psycho’s cast and crew. Cinefantastique challenged the Bass claim (in an article by Stephen Rebello), though Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham endorsed it in their book Saul Bass.

Once Upon a Time at Sanamluang...

Preecha Raksorn’s Once Upon a Time at Sanamluang... opened yesterday at VS Gallery in Bangkok, and runs until 23rd June. The exhibition explores the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University from two opposite perspectives: revisionist history and state propaganda. Preecha focuses on a single image of the event: the famous photograph by Neal Ulevich of a vigilante preparing to hit a hanged man with a folding chair.

Last year, Preecha created A Long Time Ago at..., a large, brightly coloured painting based on Ulevich’s black-and-white photo. The painting reproduces the original image meticulously, with one exception: the noose around the dead man’s neck is missing. This omission, which effectively brings the victim back to life, hints at the revisionist nature of the exhibition.

Preecha reproduced his painting as a line drawing on A4 paper, and gave copies to sixteen people representing a range of ages and occupations, asking them to colour in the drawing in their own styles. With this series, Let’s Color, the artist sought to discover people’s attitudes towards the massacre, and the extent of their knowledge about it, given that Thai school textbooks make only minimal reference to the event.

Of the the sixteen Let’s Color respondents, only five added the missing noose to their illustrations, suggesting that the state’s suppression of information about the event has been successful. One person, Kwanchai Sinpru, ignored the lines of Preecha’s template and instead overlaid his own paintings of the incendiary media coverage that led to the massacre: a จัตุรัส (‘square’) magazine interview with the monk Kittivuddho Bhikku (29th June 1976), and a Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper headline. The most creative response was by Apisit Sitsuntiea, who cut out the drawing to create a paper sculpture in the shape of a crown.

To demonstrate how the massacre is whitewashed by the national curriculum, the exhibition includes a reproduction of a passage from a history textbook that makes only fleeting references to the event. The page (History Lesson of October 6th) has been placed on a lectern, behind which are three framed paintings of massacre victims (Hang Me, Oh Hang Me). This installation resembles a traditional classroom, although in Thai classrooms the three frames would hold portraits of kings and queens instead.

The exhibition was inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, in which Tarantino rewrites the Manson Family murder of actress Sharon Tate, creating a fictional happy ending in which Tate survives and Manson’s followers are killed. Preecha uses similar dramatic licence, drawing a comic strip of twenty-six panels, Once Upon a Time at..., in which the hanged man removes the noose from his neck, fights back against the vigilante, and escapes. Over the years, many artists have reproduced elements from the Ulevich photograph, though Preecha’s comic responds to it in a unique and original way.

Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room

Liz Truss is, by a country mile, the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister in history, in office for only forty-nine days. The Economist magazine (15th October 2022) calculated that the Truss premiership had “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce”, and the Daily Star newspaper proved that an actual lettuce could stay fresh throughout her entire term of office. (Harry Cole and James Healey wrote an excellent Truss biography, Out of the Blue.)

Truss has written a new memoir, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room (subtitled Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment in the US). But it’s not a conventional account of her premiership: “I do not see it as simply a chance to tell the detailed inside story of my time in government and justify every decision I made while I was there.” (Similarly, Theresa May wrote that her book was “not an attempt to justify certain decisions I made in office or to provide a detailed retelling of historical events.”)

Instead, Truss expresses her grievances about everything from the trivial (why would nobody help her book a haircut?) to the critical (why did economic institutions oppose her reckless fiscal policies?). Apparently, nothing was her fault: even though she asked Jeremy Hunt to become Chancellor before informing her close friend Kwasi Kwarteng that he was being sacked, she blames a leaker for revealing Hunt’s appointment on Twitter, where a shocked Kwarteng read about his replacement.

Summarising her premiership, Truss writes: “Things did not work out as I had hoped. My time in Downing Street was brief, and I did not have the chance to deliver the policies I had planned.” That first sentence brings to mind Hirohito’s famous understatement, when his country surrendered in 1945: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

“ข่าวสารเรา control ไม่ได้ แต่หนังเรา control ได้” (‘we can’t control the news, but we can control movies’)

Ing Kanjanavanit’s film My Teacher Eats Biscuits will finally be shown in Thailand, more than twenty-five years after it was banned. Ing re-edited the film in 2020, and this director’s cut—ten minutes shorter than the original version—was approved by the film censorship board last October. It will go on general release on 16th May. Although its Thai title (คนกราบหมา) remains the same, its English title has been changed to the more prosaic Dog God.

My Teacher Eats Biscuits was banned on the eve of the inaugural Bangkok Film Festival in 1998, along with the Singaporean drama Bugis Street (妖街皇后). On the opening night of the Alternative Love Film Festival later that year, Ing showed a video of her meeting with a parliamentary committee discussing My Teacher Eats Biscuits, and screened Bugis Street in defiance of the ban. Police raided the Saeng-Arun Arts Centre during the screening of Bugis Street, though they left the auditorium shortly afterwards.

The film was banned on the grounds that it satirised religion. As the director explained in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored: “This is like banning John Waters’ Pink Flamingos for bad taste!” In other words, the religious satire was the whole point of the film. (In that interview, Ing alleged that one member of the censorship board, a Chulalongkorn University professor, dominated the board and led the decision to ban the film. Another reason for the ban was that the censors misinterpreted a character, Princess Serena, as an impersonation of Princess Galyani.)

Like Pink Flamingos, My Teacher Eats Biscuits is a low-budget, independent movie shot on 16mm. (Coincidentally, Pink Flamingos was also passed by the Thai censors last year.) A plot synopsis—a monk catches another monk in the act of necrophilia, and a woman establishes a cult of dog worshippers—gives the false impression that My Teacher Eats Biscuits is offensive or blasphemous. In fact, the film has a camp sensibility (which it shares with Pink Flamingos), and its tone is clearly parodic.

The film begins with a voice-over by Ing, describing her character’s previous incarnation as a devout monk. He reports the necrophile monk to his abbot, who seems completely unconcerned. Disillusioned by Buddhism, he burns his saffron robe, and is reincarnated as a woman, Satri, played by the director. At the end of the film, Satri explains her rejection of organised religion in an extended monologue: “I had to free myself from the pollution of the yellow robe, which, in my eyes, became a symbol of corruption.”

Satri’s cult is exposed as a fraud by two undercover investigators, though the film presents Buddhism as equally hypocritical. When an investigator tells a senior monk (who drinks whiskey) about the cult, his response is: “A dog in a monk’s robe is not so bad.” Reflecting on this, the investigator concludes: “With monks like him, no wonder the image of Buddhism gets worse and worse.” We are later informed that he has left to investigate “a drunken orgy with seven senior monks.”

After the ban, My Teacher Eats Biscuits was rarely seen, either in Thailand or elsewhere. As critic Graiwoot Chulpongsathorn wrote in 2009, it is “a film so controversial that it has been ‘disappeared’ from history.” It was shown at the Goethe-Institut in Bangkok in 1998, and at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science on 17th December 2009. At the Chulalongkorn screening, Ing explained that the necrophile monk character was based on a news story about a real monk, and that when she told this to the censors, their candid answer was: “ข่าวสารเรา control ไม่ได้ แต่หนังเรา control ได้” (‘we can’t control the news, but we can control movies’).

The film had three European screenings in 2017. It was shown at the Close-Up Film Centre in London; at the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt, Germany; and at the Cinéma du réel (‘cinema of the real’) festival in Paris.

When Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) was banned in 2012, Ing had the dubious distinction of being the only Thai director with two films banned simultaneously. Now both films have been passed by the censors—the Shakespeare Must Die ban was lifted in February—and they will both return to Thai cinemas this year. My Teacher Eats Biscuits and Shakespeare Must Die appear to be early beneficiaries of a liberalised censorship policy announced by the National Soft Power Strategy Committee (คณะกรรมการยุทธศาสตร์ซอฟต์พาวเวอร์แห่งชาติ) in January.

1974:The Best Year of the Movies

Next month, Bangkok’s Doc Club and Pub will begin a season of classics from 1974, which it describes as the best year of the movies. Of course, it’s debatable whether 1974 (now fifty years ago) was the greatest year in cinema history, but there’s no denying that the season includes some outstanding films. The Godfather II, Chinatown, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) will all be shown as part of 1974: The Best Year of the Movies.

The season begins with Ali, showing on 12th, 15th, 18th, 21st, and 24th May. Chinatown will be shown on 18th and 23rd May, and 2nd June. The Godfather II is shpowing on 22nd May, and 2nd and 8th June. Ali was previously screened at Doc Club and Pub in 2022, and at the Thai Film Archive earlier that year. The Godfather II was shown at the Scala cinema in 2018. Chinatown was shown at Smalls in 2018.

Nitade Movie ClubSalò

Even almost fifty years after it was released, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) remains one of the most controversial films ever made. (When it was screened at London’s Compton Cinema Club in 1977, the venue was raided by the police, and even a censored print was seized by the vice squad two years later.) Salò will be shown at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Communication Arts on 17th April, as part of the Nitade Movie Club weekly screening programme.

Nitade Experimental Shorts: The Other Cinema

Weerapat Sakolvaree’s short film Nostalgia will be shown at Chulalongkorn University on 10th April at a screening organised by Nitade Movie Club. The event, Nitade Experimental Shorts: The Other Cinema, features two sessions—Deconstructing Emotions and Decolonized by Time—each lasting exactly 100 minutes. Nostalgia will open the second session. It has previously been shown at the Chiang Mai Film Festival (twice), Bangkok University, Future Fest 2023, Wildtype 2022, and the 26th Thai Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 26).

Movie Night at Prince Theatre

Bangkok’s Prince Theatre continues its daily film screenings, Movie Night at Prince Theatre. Highlights this month include The Celebration (Festen), the first Dogme 95 production, on 19th April; and the Orson Welles masterpiece Citizen Kane on 25th April.

The Prince Theatre was established as a cinema in 1917, and was converted into a film-themed hotel a year after its centenary. Citizen Kane was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2017 and at Cinema Winehouse in 2018.

FIAF Congress 2024

Apiachtpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ) will be screened in 35mm at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 21st April, as part of the FIAF Congress 2024. The event is organised by the International Federation of Film Archives, and the screening is in recognition of the director’s status as the first Thai recipient of an FIAF Award.

Syndromes and a Century was shown most recently at the Archive during the 23rd Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 23), and it was also screened there earlier in 2019. The film’s censorship in Thailand sparked a campaign to reform Thai film regulation, as discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored.

Outstanding!The Relief from Rodin to Picasso

Outstanding! The Relief from Rodin to Picasso, held last year in Frankfurt, was the first exhibition since 1980 to survey the modern history of relief sculptures. Its scholarly catalogue (edited by Alexander Eiling, Eva Mongi-Vollmer, and Karin Schick) is only the second English-language book on the subject, and the first—Relief Sculpture by L.R. Rogers—was published fifty years ago.

Outstanding! begins with an explanation of the three traditional categories of relief (bas-relief, haut-relief, and relief en creux), though the exhibition defined the relief more broadly: the impressive collection of works on display included examples of mixed-media assemblage and trompe-l’œil paintings. The catalogue was originally published in German as Herausragend! Das Relief von Rodin bis Picasso.

Show Me the Movies!Recommended by Martin Scorsese

Doc Club and Pub will show a short season of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films (as part of their Show Me the Movies! strand), including Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, starting later this month. 2001 will be shown on 25th and 28th April, and 4th May. It has previously been shown at Arcadia in 2022, at the Scala in 2017, and at the Thai Film Archive in 2013.

The Celebration Tour in Rio

Madonna will end her Celebration Tour, which began last year, with a concert on the beach at Copacabana in Rio on 4th May. The event, which is expected to be attended by more than a million people, will be broadcast live by the Brazilian TV channel Globo. (The Celebration Tour in Rio will be the first live TV transmission of a Madonna concert since HBO broadcast the Drowned World Tour in 2001.)

One of the highlights of the Celebration Tour came when Kylie Minogue joined Madonna on stage earlier this month to sing Can’t Get You Out of My Head. The set list was modified slightly at some venues: Madonna performed an a cappella version of Express Yourself on the American leg of the tour, she sang Sodade in Lisbon, and I Love New York in New York. On selected dates, she sang Frozen, Take a Bow, and a cover version of This Little Light of Mine. In Chicago, she performed This Used to Be My Playground live for the first time in her career.