doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00315.

Tropics, city and cinema: Introduction to the

special issue on cinematic representation of
the tropical urban/city
Chua Beng Huat
Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Correspondence: Chua Beng Huat (email: soccbh@nus.edu.sg)

The essays in this issue transect three very big and loose concepts – tropics, city and
cinema. Each signifies a range of meanings that stretch from very narrow specific
definition to having determining effects on the minutiae of everyday life. ‘Tropics’,
especially in its adjectival form, narrowly signifies hot weather. Significantly, at this
mundane level ‘hot weather’ immediately ‘determines’ life. ‘Heat’ induces ‘stupor’, thus
incapacity to labour. Little wonder then that Lee Kuan Yew, the statesman who helmed
the transformation of Singapore from a declining port city to a complex advanced
capitalist economy, singled out air-conditioning as the most important invention of the
twentieth century (George, 2000). Without it, Singaporeans would be somnambular
zombies for a significant part of every afternoon, the frenzy of activity, including work,
would be impossible. As for ‘city’, the concept has never been a coherent physical unit
with clear boundaries, as the ‘hinterland’ is constantly taking on urban qualities and
practices in what is also called the ‘urbanization of the rural’. Furthermore, with
globalization, the reach of cities extends beyond the nation as they link up with the
global city network, at different scales and with varying degrees of success. Finally,
‘cinema’ is a ubiquitous quotidian entertainment; the often air-conditioned and dark-
ened viewing space and the individualized seating provide privacy in the crowd and
combine with the action on the big screen to deliver respite from the stresses of daily
urban life. However, in the ways a film frames its reality on screen and structures its
narration, cinema is unavoidably a mode of representation of ‘reality’, from documen-
tary realism to allegory to fantasy, in different temporal registers, from the present to
imagined future. As ‘a new way of encountering reality and a part of reality thereby
perceived for the first time’ (Shaviro quoted in Clarke, 1997: 2), the ideological effects
of cinema resonate beyond the darkened theatre space to provoke critical reflections on
the actually existing environment, a necessary prelude to social and political action.
Interweaving these three concepts – tropics, city and cinema – produces a complex
imaginary. For example, the idea of dystopia, which is not encountered in the orderli-
ness – however chaotic in appearance – of urban everyday life, is best projected in
futurist terms on the cinema screen; paraphrasing Clarke (1997: 6), the dystopian alter
ego of modernity is arguably framed more forcefully in filmic representations of the city
than in any other aesthetic form and medium. The complex imaginary defies any
attempt to theorize it as a unitary concept. This makes every possible exploration of this
imaginary fragmentary, always apprehended from a particular perspective with specific
methodological tools. Every essay in this themed issue thus stands as one fragment,
whose comparability and connections to each other are to be discovered in the reading
of the essays as a ‘single’ text. That is, instead of conventionally expecting the writer-
analyst to cross spatial and cultural boundaries to provide comparative knowledge,
comparative knowledge of the cinematic representation of the tropical city is to be

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29 (2008) 1–7

© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
2 Chua Beng Huat

derived from the reading, with the authors focusing their analysis on selected films that
represent particular cities.

Displacing nature

Among the multiple constellations of meanings that may be derived from the concept of
the ‘tropics’, those connected to ‘nature’ remain predominant. For example, almost all
the essays in an earlier themed issue of this journal on ‘Constructing the tropics’ (Driver
& Yeoh, 2000) focus on ‘nature’ in the tropics – on colonial imaginations of the tropics
as ‘lands of great natural abundance, alive with luxuriant vegetation and exotic birds
and animals, and blessed with perennially warm climates’ (Arnold, 2000: 7), or the flip
side, as ‘sites of physical risk to the westerner, in the forms of disease, insects, large
mammals and vicious tribes’ (Naylor, 2000: 50) or, finally, as lands with ‘exploitable’
natural resources – and including Darwinian naturalist visions (Martins, 2000), climate
and masculinity (Duncan, 2000), and a biogeographical construction of the Malay
Archipelago (Taylor, 2000).1
Only one essay in ‘Constructing the tropics’ examines the ‘tropical’ in urban context;
in the ways in which tropical plants (nature) are incorporated into roof gardens and city
parks as expressions of what the author calls ‘tropical modernism’ (Stepan, 2000).
Significantly, this incorporation of nature is in effect a displacing of nature from the
centre of the imagination of the tropics. And urban planning is one of these procedures
of displacement. In urban planning, nature is displaced such that it attains a ‘residual’
status, inserted after the planners have considered all other functional demands, regard-
less of the often excessive rhetoric of the need for ‘nature’ (read: green spaces) in
planning discourse. This residual existence is exemplified precisely by ‘rooftop’ gardens,
a ‘representation’ whose function is to remind us of nature. Other avenues for creating
representations of nature through different modes and media of aesthetic practice
include cinema, the focus of this themed issue.
Before getting to the concerns of cinema, another effect of displacing the centrality
of nature from the tropical imagination needs to be registered. One particular aspect of
the colonial European conception of the tropics as its geographical and environmental
other (Driver & Yeoh, 2000: 1) is ‘a belief in the intrinsic “inferiority” of tropical to
European temperate environments’ (Arnold, 2000: 7), a presumed inferiority that
engendered an ideological assumption of ‘the primitivism of the social and cultural
systems’, the better to facilitate its colonization of the tropics (Duncan, 2000; Naylor,
2000). Displacing nature from the centre of this genealogy of tropical imaginary is thus
a necessary step towards what one might say is the ‘decolonization’ of the tropics in
geographical imagination. The tropics must be rid of this western-colonial-centrism and
emerge analytically equal to other global regions. The ‘city’ is an appropriate vehicle to
achieve this displacement/decolonization because, as suggested, in the urban/city
context, nature is incorporated – substantively and ideationally residual. As an analytic
category, ‘city in the tropics’ is on the same conceptual plain as all cities, unevenness of
actual development between cities notwithstanding; the unevenness is to be explained
more in terms of history than ideology of ‘nature’.

The tropical cinematic city

To bring the city into focus is to foreground the built environment – to take its
physicality, including architectural edifices, as the embodiment of accumulated capital
(Harvey, 1973: 228) and its infrastructure as facilitator of collective consumption
Tropics, city and cinema 3

(Castells, 1977: 459–62). A city is never grasped in its entirety, but apprehended in
a fragmentary manner through the spaces and places where the daily lives of citizens are
enacted and reproduced. In these everyday activities, the abstract unity of the city meets
the anthropological reality of the city (de Certeau, 1984: 95). The moments of appre-
hended fragments are experienced directly, remembered after the fact and/or recorded
by different modes and media – memorialized in writing, painting, photography and
cinema.
Every ‘seeing-perceiving’ moment can be likened to a single snapshot; in this sense,
a photograph is ‘a reproduction of the real’ (Heath, 1981: 26). But ‘photographic
realism’ is a thin veil for the work of framing – the construction – of the photographic
image itself. Framing is the means through which a photographer, the image-maker,
invests the image with meanings, a signifying practice. A given space with its constitu-
tive objects, people and events is rearranged, being either framed in or out, in the
‘photographic space’ – ‘geography as given’ is transformed into ‘geography in photo-
graph’, with the ‘real’ being at risk of being known exclusively through the photograph
in an instance of ‘imaginative’ geography (Schwartz, 1996). The reference to the ‘real’
is but an alibi for the ideological, the signifying practice. A photograph is therefore
always an instance of ideological practice in the precise sense given by Marx, the
‘naturalization of the historical’ (Barthes, 1972: 109–59).
A movie is a series of photographs moving at 24 frames per second. The constant and
sudden, often disjunctive changes are given coherence by a narrative which specifies the
sequential placement of the framed images, keeping the images moving in a direction
from a beginning to an end (Heath, 1981: 12–13). The aggregated effect of the ‘recon-
textualization of spaces and places within filmic narration’ (Natter, 1994: 204) trans-
forms a given city into a ‘cinematic city’ which re-presents the ‘city’ in and through a
montage of fragmentary images.2 A cinematic city is an instance of what Aiken and
Zonn (1994: 20) refer to as ‘geography of the mind’ – ‘an ideologically charged cultural
creation whereby meanings of place and society are made, legitimized, contested and
obscured’ (Hopkins, 1994: 47).
Cities are a ubiquitous backdrop for cinemas. Yet, or perhaps precisely because of this
ubiquity, David Clarke (1997: 1) writes in the opening of his editorial introduction to the
book The Cinematic City: ‘So central is the city to film that, paradoxically, the widespread
implicit acceptance of its importance has mitigated against an explicit consideration of its
actual significance’. In the emerging scholarship in ‘Asian’ film studies, cities in which
films are set are often analytically eclipsed by the ideological preoccupation with the
‘nation/national’. For example, studies of mainland Chinese films, which arrived at the
global screen with the now famous ‘Fifth Generation’ directors, including the high
stylist Zhang Yimou, generally focus on how the ‘nation/national’ is ideologically
represented (Lu, 1997) through the perennial theme of the authoritarianism
(traditional-familial or contemporary-communist) intrinsic to Chinese patriarchal
culture (Chen, 2000: 200). This ‘national’ interest extends to analysis of Hong Kong
cinema, threaded through as it is with concerns of ‘Chinese’ identity and national
politics (Zhang, 2004; Berry & Farquhar, 2006).
By focusing on the city, the essays in this themed issue emphasize the modernity of
countries and people in the tropics in the age of global capitalism. Together, they reveal
the types and levels of ideological work films can do in the context of their production,
circulation and consumption in different historical contexts, particularly the present. All
the essays show that the inscription of particular ideological interest at the point of
production determines to a very significant extent the way the referenced city is
4 Chua Beng Huat

transformed into the cinematic city. The cinematic city is ideologically inscribed in a
particular manner to partake in the symbolic politics, and often ‘realpolitik’, that are
germane to its local, national and transnational audiences. As the medium through
which the ‘city’ is communicated and disseminated, the cinematic city mediates not only
how the city is known, but also how politics is imagined and political problems can be
‘resolved’. The multiple levels of meanings that a cinematic city can evoke for different
audiences defy any suggestion of a singular focus or reading of any particular film.

The essays
This themed issue is motivated by the desire to displace a temperate-centric, colonial-
interested discourse of the ‘tropics/tropical’, in which a concept of nature is central, so
as to free the tropics/tropical, particularly tropical Asia in this instance, from western-
centric discourse as an act of decolonization of the mind. In examining the represen-
tation of the urban/city in cinema, the essays focus on the way ‘tropicality’ is
ideologically thematized, or is not. Where it is thematized, analysis discloses the inten-
tionality behind the way ‘nature’ is constructed/represented for a particular ideological
purpose. ‘Nature’ loses its givenness. Where nature is not given any particular attention
by the filmmakers, the salience of ‘tropicality’ is minimal. In such instances, diegetic
attention shifts to contemporary urban lives, opening up and bringing to the fore the
multiple ways in which life in tropical Asia may be represented beyond the limited and
restricting imaginary dominated by ‘nature’. As in all instances, representation of the
city in each frame and in an entire film narrative, in documentary mode or in fiction, is
never innocent. Analysis of the cinematic city discloses the filmmaker’s ideological
interests that have been inscribed in the diegetic spaces and narratives which intervene
in the perception, knowledge and subsequent action of its audience/citizens.
One mode of western imagination of the ‘tropics’ is as a place of ‘romance’, never
without blue sky, light clouds and gentle breeze that sways the trees. It is therefore a
place for ‘escape’ from life in the West, be it from the drudgery of the mundane or from
a past that demands forgetting. This romantic tropics, Wendy Gan (2008) demonstrates,
can be found in 1950s Hollywood representations of Hong Kong as a metonymic for the
‘exotic orient’. This intentionally mistaken construction is in sharp contrast to Hong
Kong’s real climate of seasonal typhoons that wreak havoc with the life of the city
annually. Perhaps surprisingly, similar romantic representations of the tropical are
found in Hong Kong cinema of the same period. However, here the representation was
commercially determined, as the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia then
constituted (and continue to be) a very substantial portion of the transnational audience
of Hong Kong cinema; indeed, much of the funding for the Hong Kong film studios was
generated from Southeast Asia, in particular Singapore (Wong, 2006). In contrast to
‘romance’, in Return to Pontianak, lush tropical vegetation is evoked by the film’s
Singaporean director as an irrepressible margin that haunts contemporary Singapore
(Siddique Harvey, 2008), which in the process of urbanizing its population and mod-
ernizing its economy has tried to suppress its hot and humid tropicality through modern
air-conditioning.
Untamed nature is not the only margin of modern Singapore. Marginalization is a
social phenomenon inscribed on the underprivileged inhabitants of the city. Such
marginalized inhabitants, including low end migrant workers such as domestic maids
from developing Asia, are ‘seen but not noticed’ by those more successful and res-
pectable. Theirs is a spectral existence in urban Singapore. Although essential to the
Tropics, city and cinema 5

Singapore economy, their spectral presence renders them socially dispensable, readily
replaceable by yet another spectral body. This social dispensability is brought to its
ultimate expression in The Maid, in which a Singaporean huaren couple plan the ritual
murder of their new Filipina maid, to transform and transport her as a ghost-bride for
their mentally handicapped dead son during the annual Hungry Ghosts Festival.3 The
social dispensability is emphasized by the fact that the couple have already committed
an undiscovered murder of another Filipina maid earlier in the diegetic narrative.
Sophie Siddique Harvey’s analysis of the spectral urban provides a conceptual
transition in this themed issue. The remaining four essays are set in various cities in the
‘tropical’ zone. As the characteristics of the natural environment are not featured as
themes in any of these films, ‘tropical’ is only denotative of the geographical location of
the cities. The films focus on the unfolding social and political lives enacted within the
city as a given setting. Continuing the marginalization theme, the marginalization of
individuals and groups is often made highly visible through spatial differentiation. Parts
of the city come to be known to all as ‘enclaves’, such as ethnic enclaves and enclaves
of disrepute, where multiple social deviances are concentrated with agglomerative
negative imaginaries and effects. Such marginal spaces, however, are resources for
filmmakers to project counter-representations and critiques of the mainstream imagi-
nary of the city. Independent filmmakers of Malaysia, Khoo Gaik Cheng (2008) dem-
onstrates, have used marginalized places and spaces in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur,
for just such critique, disrupting official and mainstream triumphal narratives of eco-
nomic development and progress of the Malaysian nation.
The essays of Tess Do and Carrie Tarr (2008) and Ashley Carruthers (2008) both
analyze cinematic and music video representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. The
turbulent history of this Vietnamese city is marked by its very name change: from being
Saigon of the colonial era to being named after the ‘father of the nation’ of the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam brings in train the history of the revolutionary wars, first against
the colonial French and then the protracted civil war between the communist north
and the US-supported south. Little wonder that films set in this city would have history
and politics as their main themes and focus. Do and Tarr nicely select for analysis a set
of four films that together trace the political and social transition and transformation of
colonial Saigon to ‘socialist’ Ho Chi Minh City, with its incipient, if not fully fledged
capitalism. Carruthers’ essay analyses how Vietnamese musicals and music videos
produced outside Vietnam by post-civil war Vietnamese diasporic enterprises are
received/consumed by a diasporic Vietnamese audience in Australia. In a community
where biographies of exile are synchronous with the history of the triumph of the ‘evil’
communist regime in the ‘homeland’, a very complex set of sentiments are deployed to
frame the demands for and reception of how the ‘homeland’, including Ho Chi Minh
City is to be represented.
The final essay takes the politics of cinema beyond the representational into the
realm of actual politics of the nation and its constitutive regions. Although India is
known to the world of films through Hindi movies from Bombay, the Indian film
industry is made up of regional cinemas, including Telegu films, a major constituent of
south Indian cinema. S.V. Srinivas (2008) shows that the history of the Telegu film
industry is inextricably tied to shifts in the regional political history of southern India;
thus the production centre for Telegu films was shifted from Madras (now Chennai), the
capital of Tamil Nadu State, to Hyderabad, the capital city of the state of Andhra Pradesh,
formed in 1956. The formation of the new state also resulted in a bisection of the city
into new and old, a division frequently represented in Telegu films with the old city as
6 Chua Beng Huat

‘the site of criminal activity and backwardness’ (Srinivas, 2008: 92). However, as
Srinivas demonstrates, the politics of the new state is by no means settled and divisions
continue to multiply, divisions that constitute both source and representation in differ-
ent genres of contemporary Telegu cinema, with occasional inversions of the old city as
a fantasy utopian space.

Conclusion
Since the 1990s, an emergent academic Asian film studies has focused attention pre-
dominantly on Chinese films from the People’s Republic of China, the Hong Kong SAR
and Taiwan, and Korean films. The relative insignificance of regional South Asian
cinema is due to the absence of international audiences, while that of Southeast Asian
cinemas is partly a consequence of the small number of productions annually from the
respective film industries. The tropical location of the cities in which these films are
produced, set and cinematically represented allows them to be discursively organized
under the trope of ‘tropical urban’, which does not imply any substantive comparability,
let alone similarities, between the cities in question. What the essays in this issue
analyze are the modes of cinematic representation of cities in the tropical belt, of
‘cinematic cities’. Such representations may be read as ideological contestations and
resolutions of issues – spatial, political and cultural – that are germane to the local
political and cultural context, from city to region to nation. In the essays, we see
different sets of representations being deployed as means of mediating the audience’s
knowledge, reflections and concerns with the cities in question and/or in which they
reside. In projecting imaginaries of the city that are different from conventional main-
stream representations, such ideological representations and mediations contain the
potential for reimagining and reconfiguration of the urban/city in question.

Endnotes

1 For a comprehensive study of colonial understanding of nature in Southeast Asia, see Savage
(1984).
2 Hopkins (1994: 50) puts this point in general terms: ‘The cinematic place is not, therefore,
limited to the world represented on the screen (a geography in film), but the meanings
constructed through the experience of film (a geography of film)’.
3 The term huaren is used in Singapore to refer to Chinese ethnicity to avoid confusion with
‘Chinese’ as national identity, which refers strictly to citizens of the People’s Republic of China.
I adopt this Singaporean term denotatively here, that is, without any connotation of presumed
cultural identity of specific Chineseness.

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