Invisible histories of our city

In one of the final scenes, an archeologist spelt out the label from a bottle he had found, to his assistant who was taking notes. "Y, E, O," he said. Then, "H, I, A, P...."

I wondered how many in the audience recognised the name "Yeo Hiap Seng", for it's a name that no longer appears on the company's beverage containers, except in small print. The brand name they use is now "Yeo's". On top of the evolution of the name, I also wonder if some younger Singaporeans might find it even more fascinating that the name was found on a glass bottle.

"You mean, those drinks were not always sold in cans?"

* * * * *

 
Every week, every day, every hour that passes, our world changes. Occasionally, we are there to observe the change, and more rarely, we are participants in it, incorporating it into our personal experience. 

But most of the time, events take place outside our gaze, often outside our time, and we will not know what has happened unless somebody has recorded it and that record is integrated into our knowledge of the world.

We take it for granted that that recording is done, at least for the "important" things, and that our knowledge of where we came from, and how things got to be the way they are rests on secure foundations. We put confidence in history as we know it, and since history is the parent of the present, we invest the same confidence in our understanding of the present.

Alas, the fact is, the documenting of history is very much a hit-or-miss affair.

There is always much more happening than there is time to record them. Even when we know at the moment that what is happening is important and should be documented -- which is seldom -- we tend to put it off to another day, "when we have the time". The net result is not difficult to imagine: it is not recorded at all.

Or it is, but it was recorded on a medium or technical platform that is now obsolete. It's written in a language that no one can read, or a roll of film that our digital age cannot handle. Other times, we can see it alright, but since no annotations were made, we can't figure out what the record represents.

Every single home has something like this. A photograph taken somewhere and at some time we don't remember, showing faces we no longer recognise. We flip the picture over, hoping for a few words to give us a clue... and there's nothing.

Even when records are available, they are always seen through filters. Singapore's political history, for example, is a highly filtered narrative, and peeling off the intervening frames is fast becoming one of the most exciting things to do.

* * * * *

 
After her successful foray into the little-noticed soundscapes of our city, in Singapore GaGa, documentary-maker Tan Pin Pin's latest work is Invisible City, which takes a look at the documenting process itself -- at the private citizen level.

"I decided to seek out people who, like me, choose Singapore as the topic of their work. I don't mean where Singapore is the setting for their work, but where Singapore is the main subject," she said.

"I was curious," she added, "about whether I was the only person who found this country so interesting."

She found more than a handful, and talked to them about what they were up against in their own endeavour.

There's Ivan Polunin and his reams and reams of 1950s film footage in his storeroom, some of which were of native communities living in the mangrove swamps of Singapore and Malaya. Now in 80's, he is desperately trying to digitise them and add commentary. Memory is already failing, but the bigger question is where this material will go to after he's gone. Where it goes will have a huge impact on whether it gets stashed away again, or becomes accessible.

There's Marjorie Doggett who took some beautiful pictures of grand old buildings in the 1950's, many of which are now gone. She herself is ill and frail, and other than the visual, it's hard to know why she did what she did and what she thought of all the changes Singapore has since seen.

There's Guo Ren Huey who fought with communist forces during the 2nd World War against the Japanese Occupation. He tells his story to Izumi Ogura, a journalist for Asahi Shimbun, but the story that is eventually published is only about a song that he and his wife sang during those days in the jungle. Why did the journalist filter away the stories of war and politics to focus on the song? How is our grasp of history affected when even the recorders of it are tailoring their writing to suit their needs?

The one with the biggest beef against filtering is Han Tan Juan, a student activist in the years before independence. He showed Pin Pin photographs of what is now termed the "student riots", and asks why history is written to pin the blame for the unrest on the students. Some of his photographs show sit-ins and passive resistance, others show policemen beating students with truncheons. He asks, "which side is resorting to violence?"

But not everybody in the film is old. Not everyone has a personal score to settle. Some, like director Pin Pin herself, are just motivated by curiosity. Invisible City follows a young archeologist, Lim Chen Sian, as he excavates a military bunker position on Sentosa's Mount Serapong. The things he finds are not more than 60 years old, and may seem trite compared to the stuff dug up by archeologists in other parts of the world, but as he told Pin Pin, there's still a big difference: What he finds is Singapore's history, which has more meaning to him than any other kind.

* * * * *

Tan Pin Pin is now a very polished documentary maker. She weaves together footage taken at various times, of different people, such that it gradually dawns on the viewer what the common thread is that ties them all together. She takes her time to let her interviewees speak; even their pauses are significant.

Each case shows something about the struggles we have to overcome to document experience: masses of unorganised material, technological obsolescence, human mortality, social and commercial filtering, political filtering, and not least a huge question mark about a long-term repository.

By the end of the film, I was slumped in my seat, feeling quite defeated. Ken Kwek, a Straits Times journalist, told me on the way out that far from showing us how history is recorded, the film showed "how big the gaps are". 

It's all very well to know what you know; that smug confidence can be very assuring, of course. But it's more important to know what you don't know, because that will you off on a quest of discovery. Invisible City is capable of doing that.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

None

Addenda

None