Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the economic miracle that is Singapore, is no more. Amidst the encomiums accorded to him, there has also been the odd comment that freedom of expression suffered during his regime.
We will not go into the politics of that as this column is dedicated purely to cinema. I arrived in Singapore as a wide-eyed 20-something in the mid-90s, delighted with the fact that one of the world’s leading movie channels had offered me a producer’s job. Rightly concerned with the several padded resumes they had received from India, my bosses set me to work at the lowest rung of the pecking order – the in-house censor.
The channel would submit all programming to the powers that be and they in turn would send back a list of cuts, mostly sex, violence and language, and it was my job to take them out and manage the edit in a way that was not jarring to the viewer. Thankfully, this job lasted a mere few months and I was soon promoted to more edifying tasks.
In India, access to world cinema was limited to film festivals, the Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut and grainy bootlegs scavenged from video libraries. In Singapore, however, there were cinemas dedicated to the best of world cinema and one could enjoy these films in air-conditioned comfort, if partially cut. It was under Lee Kuan Yew’s regime that Peter Bogdanovich shot Saint Jack , based on Paul Theroux’s 1973 novel, on location in Singapore in 1978. The production knew about Singapore’s stringent rules, and given the novel and the film’s subject matter — an American running a brothel in Singapore for soldiers on furlough from the Vietnam War — they took no chances.
Much like many international productions shooting in India today do, they submitted a fake script titled Jack of Hearts , and filming went off without a hitch, with authorities none the wiser. Saint Jack released in 1979 and was banned in Singapore in 1980, for language and nudity.
Saint Jack is no masterpiece, but as a historical record of the island city, it is invaluable since many of the locations in the film have long been bulldozed in the name of modernity.
When Amazon launched its international DVD delivery service, Saint Jack was one of the first titles I looked up and ordered. Much to my delight, the postal authorities did not impound the disc (as they had many others) and Saint Jack arrived at my desk unscathed and we commandeered one of the edit suites for an impromptu and illegal staff screening. Singapore lifted the ban in 2006, but with a rating of 18.
In 1990, Lee Kuan Yew ceded the mantle of Prime Minister to Goh Chok Tong, and accorded himself the title of Senior Minister. It is during this phase that independent Singaporean cinema that was not afraid to criticise the system, albeit obliquely, took off and the world’s eyes opened to Eric Khoo and Jack Neo.
If Lee Kuan Yew did not endorse this wave of cinema, he definitely did nothing to stop its growth. Rest in peace.
