When I started my first academic job at the University of Malaya, I was determined to take, in my own limited way and with varying degrees of success, the tutorial session outside the university confines. These were organised as monthly feminist reading groups that invited members of the public to join in a discussion of (English-language) feminist essays on housework, anti-imperialism, homocapitalism, among other things.
Now that I live in Singapore, I decided to continue this and change things up a bit, by collaborating with Objectifs to screen short films by Southeast Asian filmmakers and engage with audiences in a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s essays. Last year, the Indonesian filmmaker Riar Rizaldi, the attendees, and I were in rapturous conversation about the ways Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ illuminated in new and profound ways his genre-defying short film, Kasiterit.
This coming 20th June at Objectifs, I will be in conversation with the Singaporean filmmaker Wong Chen-Hsi to discuss her film, Conversations on Sago Lane, and one of Benjamin’s best known, if rather mystical, essays, ‘The Storyteller’. More information on the event below:
What does it mean to tell the story of our lives? Through the act of retelling and recounting, are we making and remaking myths about ourselves from the material of our circumstance? As we live in an age crowded with competing narratives, where do our stories live and go as we approach the inevitability of the end? Do they eventually die out like a gentle flame that completely consumes ‘the wick’ of one’s life, as Walter Benjamin states?
These are questions we will explore in the Objectifs Film Club on 20th June, where we will screen Wong Chen-Hsi’s short film Conversations on Sago Lane, followed by a group discussion of the film alongside Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, ‘The Storyteller’. The screening and discussion are an invitation to meditate on the polyvalent power of the story in forming posterity and social connection.
The session will be led by Alicia Izharuddin, with filmmaker Wong Chen-Hsi in attendance.
Click here to register and attend.
Alicia Izharuddin 