ABSTRACT
In their iconic text on the modern city Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter lamented that despite its "good will and good intentions", modern architecture has failed to materialize a city which carries the greater good, hopes and liberalism of its people. In this sense, Collage City sets the urbanistic, poetic and political contexts for Tan Pin Pin's Singapore films. Space is not the point of Tan Pin Pin's films. Nonetheless, her use of space, in its subtle and tangential way, is inseparable from the meanings of her films, however diverse or similar these meanings may appear to the individual viewer. This strategic use of space and its ability to demonstrate the physical, the socio-political, and the psychical is nowhere better exemplified than in the hypnotic scene in Snow City where Inuka, the first polar bear born in the tropics, swims in his artificial arctic habitat.
