ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter seeks to articulate the ways through which films like Singapore GaGa (Tan Pin Pin, 2005) engage with the contemporary filmic fabric of Singapore’s urban imagination. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Singaporean filmmakers image and imagine life, vitality and living in the city-state of Singapore. As evocative cultural texts, films like Singapore GaGa deploy a sensuous vernacular that speaks to Singapore’s shifting, transient urban landscape and its complex socio-cultural and ethno-racial fabric. Singaporean films that I examine in my book, Screening Singapore: Sensuous Citizenship Formations and the National, engage with the complexity and multiplicity of the senses. Rather than privileging the ocular, where sight and vision predominate, their films make sense and embody the haptic, the tactile, the odorific, the optic and the sonorous.
