Fri, 28 Feb 2025 | 7.30pm – 9pm
Venue: Objectifs Workshop Space
Organised in collaboration with the NUS Malay Studies Department
Free admission, please RSVP here.
Please note that as this is a film screening x reading group, participants will be required to finish the reading beforehand in order to partake in the programme. You may access the reading at this link.
Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street is an essayistic voyage of leaps, disjuncture, misleads, and occasional dead-ends. A bewildering read, likely to be influenced by Surrealism in the 1920s, it comprises meditative fragments of extreme brevity, cryptic ellipses, and satisfying length on a range of subjects and formats – dreams, cities, childhood, diary, writing advice. One can start reading back to front, from the middle then either way, it doesn’t matter. The fragments of prose hang together like a collage, which may only make ‘sense’ if we appreciate what collage does and the effect it creates. Headings with the name of a city do not tell us much about the place, upsetting the relationship between ‘title’ and ‘content’.
We may find similar experimentations with form and content in the film Dance of the Humble Atheist by Toh Hun Ping, in which the filmmaker meditates on ‘death, faith, the possibility of the afterlife, the natural world, consciousness, and time.’ A larger question we will explore in our discussion is: Where, when, why, and how do we make space for and embrace incoherence, absences, empty spaces, non-linearity, nonsense, and irrationality? Engaging the essay and film as companion pieces, this Film Club x Reading Group session invites readers to unpick and unravel our taken-for-granted notions of ‘form’ that structure our experience of art and culture.
The discussion will focus on the following ‘fragments’ from One-Way Street: No. 113, Chinese curios, Gloves, Mexican embassy, Construction site, Teaching aid, Post no bills, No. 13, Arc lamp, Loggia, Travel souvenirs, Polyclinic, Legal Protection of the needy, To the Planetarium. Access the reading here.
The session will be led by Alicia Izharuddin.
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish writer and philosopher whose influential work on art, history, modernity, and capitalism has become a protean and prophetic lens for our collective past, present and future. Although he wrote mainly about the ruins and emerging cultures of Paris and Berlin, the essence of his arguments about how we write and experience the historical present, how we experience art, and how we must engage with the relentless onslaught of capitalism are relevant to us living at a time defined by both ruin and perpetual states of emergence.
Key themes that animate Walter Benjamin’s well-known writings can be appreciated in Southeast Asian filmmaking. The Objectifs Film Club x Walter Benjamin Reading Group is a space for re-reading Benjamin’s work through Southeast Asian films about cultural memory, collective pasts and futures, post-colonialism legacies, and affect in an age of information overload.
About Dance of a Humble Atheist
An existential journey of semi-abstract imagery inspired by the filmmaker’s personal ruminations on death, spiritual faith, nature and the cosmos. From the funeral of a dying being, a wondrous cornucopia after life, to a phosphoric revolt of consciousness. This silent film is created entirely via frame-by-frame animation, using digital scans of over six hundred individually sculpted ceramic reliefs. With production support from Pinch Ceramics Studio (Singapore).
About the facilitator
Alicia Izharuddin is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow in Gender and Sexuality at the National University of Singapore where she teaches courses on film and gender in Southeast Asia. She is committed to the public engagement of academia through organising reading groups in bookshops and women’s rights organisations. An interdisciplinary scholar in gender studies by training, she has taught at the University of Malaya, Harvard University, and held prestigious fellowships at the Harvard Divinity School and Leiden University.
About the filmmaker
Toh Hun Ping is a video artist, experimental filmmaker and film researcher. His video works explore and express themes of mental instability, alternate realities, resistance and existence. He employs experimental moving image-making methods from film-scratching, bleaching photographs, merging materials (mud, meat, nails) with video stills, to stop-motion animation with ceramic reliefs. The works have been presented in exhibitions and film festivals in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, Boston and Bangkok. As a film researcher, he is investigating the history of filmmaking in early-mid 20th century Singapore, and has served as researcher-writer and video editor for projects organised by The National Museum of Singapore and Asian Film Archive (‘State of Motion’). He also started the Singapore Film Locations Archive, a private video collection of films made in and about Singapore, and runs a website about the intrigues of old Singapore film locations (sgfilmlocations.com).
About the NUS Malay Studies Department
The NUS Malay Studies department aims to promote intellectual awareness to the concerns of the globalised Malay world through world-class teaching and research. It is home to the interdisciplinary synthesis of local, decolonial, and western approaches to Malay cultures of Southeast Asia and beyond. The department also maintains strong links with the local community in terms of policy studies, public intellectual engagement and social service.
About the Objectifs Film Library
The Objectifs Film Library is an initiative by Objectifs that aims to be a resource for film lovers in Singapore and the region. Currently, the collection is focused on short films from Southeast Asia.
Users will be able to rent some of these films to watch in the comfort of their homes, and a wider selection is available exclusively at our centre.
Access the Objectifs Film Library here.
When: 28 Feb 2025, 7.30pm - 9pm
