Ruling Aesthetics: Intermediality, Media Modernity and Early Thai Cinema (1868-1942)
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Date
2020-09-24
Authors
Chunsaengchan, Palita
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
My dissertation investigates the unexplored connections among cinema, prose and poetry in Thai history, extending from the period of the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) through the decade following the Siamese Revolution of 1932. Across the various chapters, I expand the archives both of early Thai cinema and Thai literary history. I draw together readings of Sanookneuk (1886), the first fictional work of Thai prose, film reviews written as Thai poetry (1922), governmental letters calling for censorship of the purportedly first Thai film (1923), as well as promotional essays in English on the state-sponsored film, The King of the White Elephant (1941). I consider how early cinema not only destabilizes a rigid structure of a national historiography, but also shapes interactions between different social classes. The dissertation traces three pivotal conceptions of cinema: first as a disciplinary technology, then as popular culture, and finally as a nationalized mass medium. My dissertation accounts for cinema’s entanglements with other media, for how these entanglements profess aesthetic instructions that become a dispositif of the modernizing Thai state as well as for how cultures of cinema and media in Siam manifest and respond to the national project of modernization. The negotiation between cinema, media and modernity reveals natures of different sovereign powers as well as complexities of the institutional politics in staging and managing the formation of Thai modernity. I, therefore, deploy the term “media modernity,” in my dissertation to capture such problematics and discussions of the intertwinement of early cinema, media and modernization and, yet, to also complicate some hegemonic accounts in Thai history that often isolate cinema from the epistemological constructions and sensibilities of modernity as well as separate aesthetic regimes from the politics of the nation.
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Keywords
Early Thai Cinema, Film Historiography, Media Modernity, Siam/Thailand, Thai Modernity