Singapore Cinema and Italian Neorealism, A Comparison1

The type of films that are made in Singapore hardly resem­ble the big bud­get spec­tac­u­lars of Hollywood cin­ema, which now make up a large major­ity of what is shown in the­atres. What then is the influ­ence that has made Singapore films the way they are? It has been said that Singapore cin­ema mim­ics Italian Neo-realism, a film move­ment dur­ing the 1940s, which took place in Italy. That much would seem to ring true, but only to a cer­tain extent. In order to see how much of an influ­ence Neo-realism films have on Singapore cin­ema, let us com­pare a cou­ple of promi­nent Neo-realism films with some well known films borne out of Singapore. Both Neo-realism and Singapore films pos­sess sim­i­lar qual­i­ties that clearly show the former’s influ­ence on the lat­ter. One such sim­i­lar­ity lies in the ten­dency to por­tray films that reflect con­tem­po­rary issues in rela­tion to the soci­ety and the coun­try. In the case of Italian Neo-realism, a film like “The Bicycle Thief” reflects the social sta­tus of Italy dur­ing the post World War II period that it is based on. In the film, the soci­ety of the time is por­trayed to be plagued with poverty; one whereby jobs are scarce and where peo­ple fight hard in order to earn enough to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. This qual­ity is sim­i­larly present in most of the films on the Singapore front. In the film “I Not Stupid”, the film­mak­ers depict the highly stress­ful sit­u­a­tion that local stu­dents have been placed in as they strug­gle through in keep­ing up with the stan­dards of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem of the coun­try. It por­trays social issues in regards to the form­ing of ‘classes’ and ‘ranks’ between stu­dents and their par­ents in rela­tion to the grade cat­e­gories the stu­dents have been placed in by the ‘stream­ing’ sys­tem in pri­mary edu­ca­tion. Another qual­ity that links the two camps is the way in which film­mak­ers of both sides deeply ground their films in real­ity. The films are usu­ally set in real­is­tic sit­u­a­tions and por­tray char­ac­ters that cham­pion the every­day life of urban, work­ing class folk instead of plac­ing focus on the upper class cit­i­zens or on fan­tas­ti­cal set­tings and char­ac­ters. Once again for Italian Neo-realism, “The Bicycle Thief” acts as an exem­plar for such a qual­ity in its por­trayal of the events involv­ing a fac­tory worker in his search for his stolen bicy­cle and the dif­fi­cul­ties and fail­ures he goes through in doing so. Likewise for Singapore cin­ema, a movie like “Money No Enough” bears just as much of such a trait in its por­trayal of work­ing class char­ac­ters con­cern­ing them­selves with mon­e­tary issues and how they are affected by gov­ern­men­tal poli­cies regard­ing money mat­ters. Yet, despite the strong pres­ence of such a char­ac­ter­is­tic in most Singapore films, it should be noted that this sim­i­lar­ity with Neo-realism films is not always present. With visual effects and Computer Graphics (CG) becom­ing more and more acces­si­ble to film­mak­ers all around the world, Singapore made films such as the recent “881” and “Ah Long Pte Ltd” have begun to include depic­tions of some­what fan­tas­ti­cal sit­u­a­tions that take away from real­ism rather than fur­ther enhanc­ing it; evi­dent in instances where char­ac­ters seem to pos­sess some­what super­hu­man abil­i­ties and pow­ers. The third and last sim­i­lar­ity we are going to take a look at is present in the dual faceted nature of films from both camps. One facet presents a reportage view of what­ever social con­di­tions that are present at the given time period of the film, while the other con­cerns the moral­ity or moral strug­gles in peo­ple as por­trayed in char­ac­ters. In “Bicycle thief”, the Neo-realism film­maker ‘reports’ in a way on the polit­i­cal and social sit­u­a­tion of poverty in the soci­ety in its real­is­tic por­tray­als. By doing so, the film indi­rectly calls out for reforms and changes to be made. As for the moral facet, it sur­faces when the main char­ac­ter of the film finally breaks down and suc­cumbs to temp­ta­tion when he him­self tries to steal a bicy­cle out of utter des­per­a­tion. Similarly, in terms of Singapore cin­ema, “Ah Long Pte Ltd” ‘reported’ some­what on the prac­tices of loan sharks that are con­sid­er­ably promi­nent in cer­tain parts of Asia and the harm they cause to the pub­lic. Its por­tray­als, though accom­pa­nied by some­times exag­ger­ated and slap­stick sit­u­a­tions, call out for the ceas­ing of such cruel and harm­ful prac­tices. The moral issue is this case, arises when a young teenage girl whose par­ents are killed as a result of such prac­tices, lashes out to claim vengeance upon those respon­si­ble by use of sim­i­larly vio­lent and cruel meth­ods. It ques­tions the moral­ity of the seek­ing of vengeance and the use of vio­lence against vio­lence, cru­elty against cru­elty. Yet as promi­nent as are the sim­i­lar­i­ties between Neo-realism and Singapore films, so are the dif­fer­ences between them. One of the most appar­ent of these dif­fer­ences stands out in the use of actors for films of both camps. In Italian Neo-realism films, mostly non-actors or a mix of both pro­fes­sional as well as non-actors are picked to fill roles in the films. This means that peo­ple are mostly picked to fill roles based on their suit­abil­ity to a par­tic­u­lar role rather than their expe­ri­ences as actors or their abil­ity to act. “The Bicycle Thief” for exam­ple, has its main char­ac­ter, a fac­tory worker, played by a man who was in fact an actual fac­tory worker before join­ing the film as a cast mem­ber. This is some­thing that greatly dif­fers in Singapore made films. In fact, it is one area that Singapore films actu­ally more closely resem­ble Hollywood or Hong Kong pro­duc­tions. Singapore cin­ema makes use of mostly pro­fes­sional actors that largely con­sist of rec­og­niz­able names from tele­vi­sion or stage. The prac­tice can be seen in a film such as “Just Follow Law” in which house­hold names like Gurmit Singh and Fann Wong are cast at the main char­ac­ters. The dif­fer­ences of course, do not stop there. One of the other dif­fer­ences present is in the nar­ra­tive struc­ture adopted by films of either side. Neo-realist films had dur­ing its time, sought to break the stan­dard nar­ra­tive struc­ture of films from other regions and films that came before Neo-realism; films that focused heav­ily on nar­ra­tive con­ti­nu­ity. Neo-realism brought out con­tent that was more episodic in nature and con­tained loose cause and effect con­nec­tions. It meant that events could sim­ply just take place with­out proper jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for its occur­rence and that at times, what would be con­sid­ered as a ‘cause’ in a cause and effect chain would yield no ‘effect’. In such instances, even mood and emo­tion could some­times change dras­ti­cally with­out clear moti­va­tion or jus­ti­fi­ca­tion if any at all. One good exam­ple to show this qual­ity is in the film “Rome, Open City”. In this exem­plary Neo-realist film, the death of a char­ac­ter is shown to hap­pen with no rea­son or rhyme what­so­ever and the effect of her demise is never por­trayed or addressed in the film. The death sim­ply hap­pens and is almost imme­di­ately ‘pushed aside’ as the film returns to show sub­se­quent events com­pletely unre­lated to what is shown pre­vi­ously, never return­ing or ‘look­ing back’ to the event again all through­out the rest of the film. In addi­tion to the episodic nature and loose cause and effect of these films is the lack of clo­sure in their nar­ra­tion. This is some­thing that can be evi­dently seen in “The Bicycle Thief” in its use of an open-ended finale with the father and son walk­ing on towards an unknown fate. On the other side of the fence, Singapore films rather con­trast­ingly, adopt mostly a mix of both stan­dard nar­ra­tive and episodic struc­tures. In numer­ous cases, events are not only shown to have proper cause and effect chains, but also con­tain proper build-up towards emo­tional scenes fol­lowed by an even­tual release of emo­tions and the allowance for what is shown to set in. As can be seen in the film “881”, the events por­trayed in the film fol­low the char­ac­ters in a nar­ra­tive that tells of a group of ‘Ge Tai’ singers in their pur­suit to emerge tops in the year’s per­for­mance while at the same time inter­weav­ing it with episodic con­tent that depict char­ac­ters in sit­u­a­tions that may or may not relate to their prepa­ra­tion to the final per­for­mance day. In stark con­trast to the exam­ple in “Rome, Open City”, the inter­ac­tions between char­ac­ters here move on to setup the final out­come of the film con­cern­ing the death of a major char­ac­ter. In this case, the effects of the death are instead given suf­fi­cient screen time to draw out, work­ing in hand with the vic­tory of the pro­tag­o­nists to offer proper clo­sure to the film. The final dif­fer­ence we will look at con­cerns the use of sound in Neo-realist and Singapore films. Italian Neo-realism deals with sound entirely in post pro­duc­tion. Once again draw­ing upon the exam­ple of “Rome, Open City”, the film had all of its footage filmed entirely in silence. Sound was only later added onto the recorded footage in post pro­duc­tion to pro­duce its final prod­uct. Films of Singapore cin­ema how­ever, tend to make use of both sound that is recorded on loca­tion as well as that which is done in post pro­duc­tion. This is evi­dent in prac­ti­cally all of Singapore made films in their use of on loca­tion dia­logue with sound effects being a mix of on loca­tion and post cre­ated and music that is done in post pro­duc­tion. Not all of the var­i­ous sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences between Italian Neo-realism and Singapore cin­ema have been dis­cussed, yet the com­par­i­son of some of the more promi­nent sim­i­lar­i­ties shows truth in the opin­ion that Singapore cin­ema does indeed draw influ­ence from Neo-realist films. The evi­dent dif­fer­ences between the two camps how­ever also point out that the films made in Singapore do not mir­ror Neo-realism is its entirety, bear­ing not only pos­si­ble influ­ences from other film move­ments and trends as well as some qual­i­ties per­haps unique to Singapore cin­ema. Written by Eugene Tan