A young man arrives on a long-distance bus in a frontier town on the Thailand–Laos border. At a bus station café he befriends a precariously employed, landless labourer named Tongpan, who has twice been forced off the land as dam and reservoir construction robbed him of his livelihood, either denying him access to water or flooding his crops. Listening to Tongpan’s tale, the young man persuades him to attend a seminar to debate a new dam proposal, believing that his testimony will make a valuable contribution to the discussion. At the seminar, Tongpan listens in silence to a host of experts, local politicians, and intellectuals, as they debate the merits of the proposed dam and the wider politics of large-scale rural development projects. With little opportunity to share his first-hand experience or contribute to a discussion dominated by the competing abstractions of the technocrats and intellectuals, Tongpan slips quietly away and returns to his home, to discover that for lack of medical treatment his wife has died of tuberculosis. After the seminar the young man visits Tongpan’s humble shack but finds it abandoned. Tongpan and his four young children have disappeared. 

Tongpan (Isan Film Group, 1977) is a dramatisation of events that took place in 1975. The group who initiated the film did so after attending a seminar in northeast Thailand on the United Nations Mekong Development Scheme, organised by the International Quaker organisation, American Friends Services Committee. They were: Paijong Laisakul, at that time a political science graduate from Thammasat University; Khamsing Srinawk, a renowned short story writer and socialist intellectual; and Michael Morrow, a journalist with the Far Eastern Economic Review. Paijong had met the real Tongpan in the border town of Chiang Khan, the site of the proposed dam, where he was scratching out a living as a pedicab rider, sometime timber smuggler, and occasional prize-fighter. Like his filmic counterpart, the real Tongpan had accepted an invitation to the seminar. The death of Tongpan’s wife and his disappearance are all based on real events known to the group. But as much as Tongpan is about the problems faced by the real Tongpan, and other landless rural workers like him, the film is also a story told by and about the young student activist who arrives at the frontier with a desire to learn and listen, a belief that discussion can enlighten, and that enlightenment can lead to social change. It is a film about the tragedy of the rural precariat, but it is also a film about an idealistic, youthful activist. As such it is a film that invites reflection on the stubborn distance and asymmetries between these two figures. The luckless labourer lends the film its title, but the student activist provides the framing narration with which the film begins and ends.

That we read the youthful male stranger as a student is not only because he wears the garb of post-’68 global counterculture – the workers’ peaked cap, unbuttoned, untucked shirt, and bell-bottom denim. It also follows from the film’s prologue. The English language text that scrolls up the screen before the first sounds of Tongpan – a pail dunked in the water of an irrigation ditch accompanied by the busy descant of birdsong – situates the film in a specific historical moment. Condensed in a few short sentences, it relates the momentous events in Bangkok in October 1973 in which a student-led mass protest overthrew a military dictatorship. It reads: “For the first time in Thai history working people reached for power. A military junta fled into exile, and the students from the city went into the countryside to tell the farmers.” The prologue concludes by telling us that the film was conceived “in the light” of that popular uprising.

At the end of Tongpan, the voiceover – that of a fictional student who has journeyed to the countryside and is now returning – provides another vital historical coordinate, reflecting melancholically as he does on the stifling effect of the 1976 military coup on free and open discussion. The film then closes with an acknowledgement of the collective effort of many people in making the film, and a single credit: produced by the Isan Film Group (Khana Phapphayon Isan). Tongpan was therefore born in the precarious afterglow of revolution and completed in the dark shadow of brutal reaction. The truncated credits, the absence of any named individual contributors, reflects that chilling climate of reaction and a well-founded fear of retribution. 

The phenomenon of students spreading out across the country after the fall of the dictatorship, educating farmers about the electoral system and the constitution drafting process, followed a practice established earlier in the Cold War era in Thailand. As the historian Prajak Kongkirati notes, at a time when fewer than 5 percent of the country’s population had access to a university education, the social category of the student was highly prestigious, but it also carried the weight of expectation.1 Students were an elite cadre, the nation’s leaders in waiting, and on their shoulders hopes of national progress rested. As the student movement grew in influence in the late 1960s and the early ’70s, student activists gave the privileged category of the student a different inflection, internalising what Prajak terms a notion of social debt, the idea that their privileged status should be used to benefit society and its less advantaged members in particular. Participation in rural development projects was one way in which the obligations of privilege were repaid. The idea of social debt and the activities through which that debt was paid could be coupled with a paternalistic and patriotic ethos of duty and sacrifice, the leadership role that is the burden of the educated. It could also conform to and support the developmentalist rhetoric of a modernising Thai state. 

Yet the encounter between metropolitan students and rural workers could be shifted in a more radical direction. It could be a more transformative encounter, not one in which social hierarchies would melt away exactly, but one in which they were acknowledged and worked through, a context of reciprocal learning and critical reflection. The three-year suspension of military rule from 1973 to ’76 accelerated that process of radicalisation. This period has been characterised as a time of creative and intellectual effervescence, according to Benedict Anderson, an “extraordinary new era in (Thailand’s) national life.”2 With the lifting of censorship after October 14, he writes, “a steadily swelling torrent of critical poetry, songs, plays, essays, novels and books flooded first the capital and later the provinces.” Radical and progressive literature from an earlier period banned under conditions of dictatorship was rediscovered by a new generation of readers in new editions, anthologies and collections. The re-publication of Jit Phumisak’s The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today in 1973, 15 years after it was first published and subsequently banned, brought into circulation a highly original analysis of rural exploitation informed by a Marxist conceptual framework centred on relations of production and class antagonism. Jit’s groundbreaking text repositioned the monarchy as “the committee chair” of an exploitative feudal class, a remnant of a backward social order, inverting its self-presentation as an agent of economic development and champion of democracy.3 Translations of anti-colonial and liberationist writings recently published in affordable English language paperbacks were issued in rapid succession. In 1974 Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Paolo Freire’s pioneering Pedagogy of the Oppressed were both translated into Thai. This flourishing print counter-culture – journals, magazines, books, and bookshops – nurtured student-intellectual activist networks, providing a compressed initiation in a new political vocabulary and new models of praxis through which the idea of social debt and, more broadly, the purpose of education and what constitutes knowledge might be debated and radically rethought. 

In contrast to this counterculture centred on the alternative press, the broadcast media, radio, and television channels, many owned by the Thai military, provided a platform through which right-wing campaigns of intimidation were waged and violence incited. And what about cinema? Was there in this precarious interval a cinema of the student revolt and of the Thai new left, a counterpart to the radical print culture? The odds were against it. For one thing, there was no infrastructure in Thailand through which radical filmmaking from a decolonising world could circulate. It was far easier to pick up a paperback translation of Fanon or Freire and then riff on those ideas in print, than it was to encounter contemporary forms of counter-cinema coming out of the Third World and find the means to extend the language of those films in a cinematic vernacular shaped by national circumstance. Another obstacle perhaps was the disdain of some leftist intellectuals for all forms of Western mass culture, cinema included. How then did Tongpan get made? 

The Isan Film Group 

The biographies of Paijong Laisakul, Mike Morrow, and Khamsing Srinawk, the three individuals who developed the idea of filming Tongpan’s story, are case studies in Cold War-era mobility along pathways that bound the United States and Southeast Asia. The US regarded Thailand as its closest ally in its fight against communist expansion in Southeast Asia. As the war in Indochina intensified, large numbers of US military personnel were stationed on bases in rural provinces, transforming local economies and impacting ways of life. Bordering Laos, the northeast region of Isan became a key target of US aid assistance designed to contain the threat of communist insurgency and facilitate the presence of the US military. The effects of Thailand’s Americanisation were complex and paradoxical. The US military presence was a focus of student protest. Meanwhile, the horizons of increasing numbers of young Thais were expanded through educational scholarships and exchanges. Once in the US, many were exposed to dissident campus culture and the anti-Vietnam war protest movement, a political education unanticipated by the sponsors of educational mobility. 

Paijong was 25 when she started work on Tongpan in 1975. Born in the northeast city of Ubon Ratchatani, later the home of one of the largest US military bases in the country, she describes her family as very poor: her father was a bookkeeper for an auto parts shop, her mother a hairdresser. Aged 16, she went to the US as an exchange student and later joined Thammasat University, at that point the centre of student activism and radical praxis, as a politics undergraduate. At Thammasat she was one of a small minority of students who were not from upper middle-class backgrounds. She worked to support herself through her studies and threw herself into student activism, helping to organise the demonstrations of October 14, 1973. After graduating from Thammasat she worked as a research assistant in another university before joining the Far Eastern Economic Review as an assistant reporter where she met her collaborator and future husband Michael Morrow. 

Michael Morrow (right), courtesy of Frank Green, the film’s cinematographer.

Morrow was a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, covering economics and business stories on Thailand and Hong Kong, and at that point dividing his time between the two countries. Some years earlier, in July 1967, as a 22-year-old International Relations student from Dartmouth College, he had arrived in Saigon on a 30-day tourist visa with $60 dollars in his pocket. He stayed for three years, founding the Dispatch News Service, a small but highly influential investigative news agency which exposed a number of stories embarrassing to the US military, including the My Lai massacre. After a period of frontline war reporting, Morrow was thrown out of Vietnam by the Saigon government in 1970. He then worked undercover in Laos and northeast Thailand, filing stories on the US bombing of the Pathet Lao, the so-called “Secret War,” for the Washington Post. Weighing his options as the US war machine was powering down, he opted for the Far Eastern Economic Review. On the side, he set up Petroleum News South East Asia, a magazine focused on the region’s petroleum industry. The timing was astute. After the OPEC energy crisis oil companies were eagerly exploring alternative sources of crude oil supply in regions beyond the Middle East, and investors needed to navigate a rapidly changing market. It was money made from this magazine that provided the initial funding for Tongpan. 

Khamsing Srinawk (right) and Paijong Laisakul (left), courtesy of Frank Green, the film’s cinematographer.

Writing under the penname Lao Khamhom, Khamsing’s first short stories appeared in print in 1957, the same year that Jit Phumisak’s The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today was published. Both writers emerged during a period in which progressive writers drew inspiration from the revolutionary ruptures in Russia and China. Surprisingly perhaps, in the decade after World War II, radical writers thrived, operating in the cracks opened up by the competitive manoeuvrings of rival factions of the political elite. These spaces, always precarious, emphatically disappeared with the dictatorship from 1958. Political repression intensified and an anti-communist witch-hunt swept many intellectuals into jail. Khamsing avoided this fate; he returned to his home district Bua Yai in Isan, and for the following decade set aside his pen and tended a farm. After a year in the US working for the publishing house Time Life, he returned to Thailand and began writing regularly for the Social Science Review, an eclectic journal of critical opinion and commentary.

Khamsing’s short stories possess a subtly ironic touch. He writes portraits of rural lives, sharply attuned to the geometries of power within which those lives are enmeshed. The characterisation is vivid, grounded in the way people without strings navigate the reality of their precarity with few illusions, with cunning, curses, and belligerence. He does so without the didacticism that characterises some later disciples of social realist literature. In 1975, at the time of the AFSC seminar, Khamsing was Thailand’s best-known short story writer. Both Khamsing and Witthayakorn Chiangkul, another writer a generation younger, worked on early script outlines of Tongpan. Khamsing drafted the initial two-page treatment, which Wittiyakorn was asked to expand, though in the end most of the script development was undertaken by Paijong and Morrow. It was Paijong who completed the script and wrote the dialogue. Nevertheless, Khamsing’s other important contribution behind the camera was to bring the crew to his home district to shoot the film. Khamsing’s local contacts, including fellow members of the Socialist Party of Thailand, provided practical assistance and security for the group. In Bua Yai they struck lucky, casting a charismatic former boxer and first-time actor, Ong-art Ponethon, in the role of Tongpan. 

Ong-art Ponethon as Tongpan, courtesy of Frank Green, the film’s cinematographer.

The activist, the journalist, and the writer, these three, all present at the AFSC seminar, were later joined by others. Frank Green, another American who Morrow had met in Malaysia, had a used 16mm camera that he had bought in San Francisco. A fine art graduate from Stanford University, Green was a professional stills photographer working temporarily in Singapore whilst on route to Thailand, looking, as he puts it, “for a project to sink his teeth into.”4 He brought a striking compositional instinct to the collaboration, an unerring ability to extract raw intimate poetry from the everyday. Another collaborator, Surachai Janthimathorn, was a prominent activist and musician who formed the folk band Caravan in 1974 with other activist culture workers from Isan. Touring the countryside, Caravan crafted politically engaged songs that transposed elements of the dissenting US folk revival with the soundscape and instruments of the region. Paijong recalls persuading him to help direct Tongpan, believing that his experience of connecting musically with a rural audience in the northeast would be helpful in directing the actors. Later, Euthana Mukdasanit, another Thammasat University graduate involved in the activist arts network, was recruited to direct the film’s seminar sequences shot by Swedish cinematographer Claes Bratt. 

The production team included seasoned activists, organisers, a musician, and writers – experienced storytellers with words. Why did they make a leap into the unknown? Why decide to make a film? A former colleague at the Far Eastern Economic Review recalls that Morrow, returning from the AFSC seminar, wrote up Tongpan’s story as an article for the paper, but the magazine had refused to run it. Human interest stories were not their thing, and maybe the questions raised about the casualties of rural mega-projects were found jarring. Paijong says it was Morrow’s idea to make a film. Looking back, Morrow himself provides the following insight: 

Making a film held the potential to convey both the immediate reality and the mythical significance of the Isan situation to a bigger, broader audience. Film gave us a better shot than anything that we might have attempted in print – to reach the farmers who lived there, many of whom were illiterate, as well as the people in Bangkok and elsewhere who had never considered the problem or the place.

Filmmaking also suited the difficult creative collaboration we were attempting. We were people from the city and from the countryside, intellectuals and peasants, professionals and, mostly, amateurs. We were from Thailand, the US and Europe. Our views were not precisely aligned. We could barely communicate. To commit the story to an interpretive visual narrative was to attempt the art of the possible.

Those of us involved in the creative leadership were Marshall McLuhan’s children; still, we precursed the electronic revolution that made dynamic visual imagery ubiquitous. Film was exotic and difficult, and thus challenging and exciting. Ego was involved.5

As McLuhan’s children, the creative team were not strangers to cinema, but neither could it be said that cinephilia was their common ground. The group were not operating in a context in which cinema’s role in society, its relationship to liberation struggles, was the object of intense intellectual debate and committed praxis. Instead, they were people whose paths had crossed in the contact zone of Cold War-era Thailand, providing a fresh impulse to experiment, and they each brought their idiosyncratic inventory of encounters with alternative cinematic forms. Paijong recalls an open-air screening of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother, based on the 1905 novel by Maxim Gorky, at Thammasat University during her time as a student. But she adds, “I actually forgot it for a long while because I never connected myself with movies. It was not my ambition to be a filmmaker.” As an occasional correspondent for Le Monde Diplomatique, Morrow had made short trips to Paris where he partook of the informal schooling of a generation of cinephiles: 

I spent much of my time there in basement art cinemas, I didn’t know much about Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Rossellini, Fellini, Kurosawa, Sayajit Ray, etc., but the films enthralled me. I remember our discussing Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour is still my favourite film. […] In Saigon, I had helped Mike Rubbo with Sad Song of Yellow Skin – and even had a bit partbut I knew next to nothing about the filmmaking process when we started Tongpan.6

First-hand familiarity with Mike Rubbo’s experiments in reflexive documentary extended an appreciation of frame-transgressing devices in the films of Federico Fellini and in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. 

Local people gather to watch the filming of Tongpan, courtesy of Frank Green, the film’s cinematographer.

The Student and the Landless Labourer

The student in Tongpan is not at all an archetypal figure of the student leader. He is not an orator, keen to hold the floor, oblivious to his audience. He doesn’t assume the mantle of leadership. Rather he is a listener, softly spoken, earnest, diffident even. He arrives alone without the ballast of a group of peers. Stepping off the bus he weaves his way past the group of pedicab riders looking for a fare and walks tentatively around the fringes of the bus station, taking in the unfamiliar scene. Pausing to watch the musicians busk, he ducks into the café for shade and a cool drink, hoping perhaps to meet a local farmer. There he waits, trying to ignore the boisterous clack of table football behind him, and we too are caught up with his waiting. Tongpan emerges from the anonymity of the crowd. The lively scenes at the bus station are shot with an observational eye full of peripheral incident, pedicab riders picking up passengers, vagrants milling around; a man in the background tinkers with a motorbike, hawkers wares shaded by sheets flapping in the breeze. When Tongpan enters the coffee shop we realise we have seen him already, out on the street riding his rickshaw. When the student asks him his name, he pauses and replies, “Tongpan,” a smile breaking across his face, a moment of recognition for us marked by the return of the opening song. 

What sort of a character is Tongpan? Initially what we learn about Tongpan is what he tells the student – his experience of losing his livelihood from a dam that controlled the water supply he used for irrigation, his attempts to find alternative ways to subsist. He is first cautious about the seminar, telling the student that people in the town have been warned not to mix with students. Later, he agrees to go. What does he expect of the seminar? Switching to Isan dialect he tells his wife that there will be important people there, that things might change. Sceptical, she asks if he knows how to speak to “big people.” He replies decisively, “I have to speak.” Standing tall and looking like a man primed for the fight as he dons his cleanest dirty shirt, he says, regardless of whether or not the dam can be stopped, “We have to go a few rounds.” 

In her brilliant book on the history of farmer student alliances and solidarity in the mid-1970s in Thailand, Tyrell Haberkorn touches on the clash of expectations that sometimes marked the program of political education taking students into rural areas.7 Under the terms of the program, students were charged with propagating a narrow conception of politics, one that equated democracy with elections and voting, but that was distant from the issues of livelihood and material survival that mattered most to farmers. These dissonant expectations are evoked by the sudden shift of register that occurs when the film cuts from the unruly space of the shack from which Tongpan and the student depart, to the sound of his crying children, to the controlled and bounded environment of the seminar room. There is an ambiguity in the academic’s speech that opens the seminar. He states that “the seminar is a good exercise in democracy.” An exercise? Democracy, he adds, “gives people an opportunity to say what they think.” He hopes that the local people (chao baan) will say what they feel so that “it can be seen that [they] are aware and responsible in matters of national importance.” In a wonderfully ironic juxtaposition, this earnest speech concludes while the image cuts to a shot of Tongpan’s middle son raising aloft a skinny frog plucked from the scrub next to their house. What seems to matter most is the appearance of the free exchange of opinion among representatives of different “stakeholders,” and it matters as a totem of the democratic society coming into existence after the fall of the dictatorship. While the academic stresses the symbolic importance of ordinary people being present at the seminar, in practical terms their knowledge and their experience is granted no value there. Only when all the other parties present have spoken – the energy experts, policymakers, engineers, administrators, officials, and the progressive intellectuals – do we hear from the chao baan, the ordinary local people. To what purpose? 

Tongpan’s silence and discomfort throughout the seminar is juxtaposed with scenes that recapitulate and expand on the experiences that he related to the student, experiences that cannot be voiced at the seminar. These scenes show Tongpan and his family’s exhausting toil irrigating the land, the flight into the forest by fellow farmers who can no longer scratch a living from the land and the paucity of fish in the lake after the damming of the river. As Tongpan’s wife Faan gets sicker, the scenes get darker in tone, not so much the hardship of everyday labour but starker scenes of pain and humiliation, each punctuated by a return to the seminar in the present. These scenes are bruising moments of emotional and physical pain. The emotional charge of the scenes is intensified by the fact that they are also witnessed by Tongpan’s eldest son, a boy old enough to understand his mother’s suffering and his father’s pain. Tongpan tries to get a loan from the landlord whose chickens he raises, in order to pay for medicine for Faan. Later that night he returns home roaring drunk, having been refused. Swaying unsteadily under a full moon, he rages at the injustice of providing unpaid labour to his landlord. Entering the chicken coop, he slashes wildly at the frantic birds, watched by his son who was woken by the commotion. Later, in a prize fight for a 500-baht stake (around a few thousand baht in today’s equivalent), Tongpan is beaten unconscious in front of a pumped-up crowd, eager for blood. He slumps on the ropes, his body broken.

These visceral scenes, which owe much of their impact to an intimate choreography between Green’s kinetic camerawork and Ong-art’s mesmerising presence, bring us into emotional proximity with the bruising reality of Tongpan’s life. Yet the film also astutely refuses to grant us access to Tongpan’s thoughts; we are several steps behind him. We can easily guess that his patience with the seminar debate is finally exhausted and he slips away, but we don’t see him go. Walking home from the bus stop, his middle child runs across the wasteland to meet him with the news that their mother has died. There is a long close up of Tongpan’s anguished face, followed by a point of view shot as his other children walk towards him, his eldest son’s face streaked with tears, a shot fractured and expressively blurred. What will he do now? How will he care for his children? Where will he go? We last see him at the funeral where he sits in silence as his neighbours irreverently ask the departed Faan to visit them with the winning lottery numbers. After that scene, Tongpan vanishes. 

In the end, the student is also an enigmatic figure. He does not speak at the seminar. There are many shots of him listening, sometimes making notes, but what does he really think of this “experiment” in democracy? It is harder to guess at the student’s thoughts than it is to grasp Tongpan’s more legible disillusion. The student does tell us that after the seminar he searched in vain for Tongpan, and that he was imprisoned after the October 6 coup. His voice-over says that people do not come together to talk anymore. What we don’t know is whether the student’s faith in the seminar as a space in which the voices of ordinary people could be heard is broken or intact. A critical take on the liberal faith in the deliberative public sphere, in the “experiment in democracy,” comes from within the seminar itself. Khamsing, playing himself in that scene, says “in any underdeveloped country, anyone who wants to change things has to have supporting power; and apart from the pen, the microphone, the car and three or four degrees each, what power do we have?” This is “the tragedy of academics.” It is a bracing blast of pessimism of the intellect, an antidote to the abstract liberalism which opens the seminar. Implicitly, it is a reminder of the wider context of political reaction threatening to engulf Thailand’s rural areas in which farmer and student leaders were being assassinated. 

Stylistically, the film subtly contrasts the hermetic space of the seminar and the lived spaces of Tongpan’s material existence. Both image and sound suggest an enervating discontinuity between these spaces, rather than lively contact between the lifeworld and the formal sphere of public debate. In the scenes from Tongpan’s lifeworld there is an openness to contingent events and to the imprint on film of the brute materiality of the environment, an openness inverted in the seminar scenes which centre on the speaker and the spoken word. Tongpan registers this inversion through abrupt shifts in the soundscape. A polyphonous acoustic track that teems with the unruly noises of rural life – the two-stroke putt of a motorbike, the chatter of birds, children crying – narrows to the speaking voice, the formal cadences and platitudes of oration. In his email correspondence, Morrow writes that the desire was:

[to] get across to the audience that the film documented current events, but that it also had its feet in history’s mud and its head in the existential problem of Thailand’s future, the latter unresolved but of the greatest importance.8

Siegfried Kracauer associates the value of film with permeability, film’s openness to the flow of life from which it emerges. For Kracauer this is a potentiality best realised by the looser composition of the episodic film, a film that is “full of gaps into which environmental life may stream.”9 p255-6.] Tongpan is a film with its feet in history’s mud in this sense. The scenes from Tongpan’s lifeworld are episodes whose temporal and causal relationship to each other, and to the film’s present, is ambiguous. There is a corresponding permeability of the image to the world from which it emerges. A film that not only has its feet in history’s mud but is covered in dirt from head to toe. It hardly matters whether this is due to the influence of neorealist filmmakers on some in the group, or an openness to contingency that reflects the very limited means of production. Austerity is there on the screen; it is what we see and how we see it. Tongpan is punctuated by the beaten object world of the town on the Thailand–Laos border: the gaping rip in the sun-shade propped on the ground, the street kid who distractedly kicks a leg out at a passing motorcycle, the Pepsi signs and ripped movie posters, the chipped paint on the table football figures, and the buffalo which turns to the camera while scratching its ear with its back leg and advances towards it with interest. A cinematic image permeated with physical reality invites a viewer whose attention is dispersed, roaming across the fringes of the image. “Snatched from transient life,” writes Kracauer, such images “not only challenge the spectator to penetrate their secret but, perhaps even more insistently, request him to preserve them as the irreplaceable images they are.”10

Surachai Janthimathorn, the musician (right) and other members of the cast, courtesy of Frank Green, the film’s cinematographer.

Even as ambivalence characterises Tongpan’s portrait of the encounter between the student and the peasant, there is one other important formal element that keeps the film alive in our present and open to the future: the use of raw rhythmic song, a pentatonic blues performed with the singer’s voice (Surachai), a drum, and a kaen (bamboo mouth organ). At the beginning and the end of the film, coinciding with the student’s arrival and departure at the bus station, he walks past the musicians, like a busking Greek chorus, another mediation of suffering that is part of the fabric of the town. The student watches from a distance as the musicians’ silhouettes dance along the market stall’s cloth awning like shadow puppets projected on a screen. Later, as the seminar seems to be heading toward an impasse, music again erupts. This time there is a disjunctive leap into the epic. The singer’s face is painted ghostly white, a mynah bird on his shoulder. He is standing, hunched and swaying in a bone dry, mud-cracked landscape, singing a lyric of the “starving northeast land” over a hypnotic rhythm. The student appears, dancing incongruously, framed by the musicians, neither with them nor apart. An existentially loaded tableau. 

Aftermath, afterlife

The filming of Tongpan was completed in mid-1976 amidst mounting right-wing violence across Thailand. During elections in April a spate of shootings and bombings targeted left and reformist parties. The previous month vigilantes threw hand grenades at protestors in downtown Bangkok, killing several people. Dozens of student leaders, progressive politicians, trade union and farmer activists were the victims of political assassination. On October 6, 1976, police and extreme right wing paramilitary groups massacred students who had gathered at Thammasat University. After the massacre, the Thai military seized control of the country and introduced martial law, thousands were arrested and jailed. An estimated one million books, pamphlets, and documents were seized and destroyed in the aftermath. The AFSC seminar on dam building and its participants were later vilified in a right-wing newspaper. It published a photograph of the seminar, labelling the American participants KGB agents and the Thai intellectuals communist cadres.

The footage that would become Tongpan was safely beyond the reach of the Thai authorities. There were no labs that could process 16mm film in Bangkok, so each completed reel of film had been dispatched to Hong Kong for processing. No rushes were available to the crew during the shoot. As Green observes, the crew were eating on credit, rushes were unimaginable. As political tensions mounted, they felt the urgency of wrapping the shoot and getting the remaining footage out of the country. Paijong and Green followed the footage to Hong Kong where Morrow was based, and work began on post-production. Paijong then travelled on to Sweden where she was granted political asylum. She sold the distribution rights for Tongpan to Sweden’s TV2, and was given generous access to their editing facilities to complete post-production work, including laborious redubbing and sound synchronisation. TV2 then premiered the film, broadcasting it in a primetime slot. Surachai joined the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), which was conducting armed struggle against the Thai state. So too did Khamsing, though after a falling-out with the CPT he departed for exile in Sweden, briefly overlapping with Paijong’s time there. Green later joined Paijong in Stockholm, and took over the distribution of the film. “I was determined not to let the film disappear,” he says. “I put everything I had into it.” The distribution work was a full-time commitment for at least two years, with Green traveling across Europe, lugging film prints by hand, sleeping on couches and writing letters to European TV stations. Later, he ran the distribution operation of the film from the office of his father’s company in California, and the film found a new audience on university campuses in the US. In 1978, after seven months in Sweden, Paijong returned to Thailand. She remembers: 

There was a lot of talk about Tongpan and some screenings in Bangkok, but at that time I didn’t feel that I should go and talk about the film. I was maybe shy about being on the stage, speaking to the public. I didn’t know what I had done was important. Surachai would present the film, which I thought was right. But when he went out, he would talk about me, he would talk about Paijong. Actually, nobody knew who Paijong was, I wasn’t famous. It was just one name that slipped out, nobody paid attention.11 

From left to right Frank Green, Khamsing Srinawk, Michael Morrow and Paijong Laisakul donating a 16mm print of Tongpan to Dome Sukavong of the Thai Film Archive in 2006

Revisiting the film now throws up many different interpretive possibilities. Recently, a film festival in Europe presented Tongpan in an auteurist programming strand dedicated to Euthana Mukhdasanit, labelling him a “forgotten master of Thai cinema,” despite his small role in the completion of this important work. Euthana had directed the seminar sequences in the film, in themselves relatively unremarkable in cinematic terms, and in the ensuing years had gone on to become a successful film director. The impulse to elevate a master is a strange compulsion in film festival exhibition. Above all, cinema is a collaborative art. In this case, presenting a film as the work of a master, an example of mastery, seems especially misleading. Serendipity rather than mastery would seem a better way of grasping the essence of Tongpan, along with historical contingency and comradeship, if we understand by that latter term a praxis of solidarity quite different to the one proposed by the CPT at the time. 

It is worth remarking that in this case, the trope of the master repeats a tendency stretching back decades, to designate as the creative source of Tongpan one or other of the male artists who are already prominent in Thai public life. Consider the extensive sleeve notes that accompany the Smithsonian Folkways Songs for Life collection, which states that the Isan Film Group “worked with Surachai Janthimathorn to create the first ‘people’s film’ from Thailand about the desperate situation of the peasants in the northeastern region.” A variation on this theme can be found in the Bangkok Post newspaper’s feature article from October 2006, marking the presentation of the original negative print of Tongpan to the Film Archive Thailand. The article begins: “this is a story about fate – and faith. Two Americans met in the town of Johor Bahru to talk about making a film centered on a man about whom they knew very little.” Here, the creative animus behind Tongpan is presented as the work of the two Americans, Green and Morrow.

Given this inclination to credit the men involved, it is surely not too late to bend the stick the other way, to acknowledge the vital creative role and the commitment of Paijong Laisakul. After all, it was Paijong who was there from beginning to end. She completed the script that was in part based on her own encounter with Tongpan. On location Surachai described her as “the director of the director,” the one who kept him on the page. When the actor playing the student was self-conscious about dancing to Surachai’s music, it was Paijong who coaxed him, wearing down his reluctance by dancing with him on the other side of the camera. In Stockholm, working alone on a TV studio’s Steenbeck through the summer of 1977, she taught herself how to edit and completed editing the film. Paijong says: “I was the one with a lot of free time, so I volunteered to get involved. People came into the movie and left. They were interested for a little while and then left. I stayed from the beginning to the end so that’s why I felt that it was my production.” Coordination of collective effort and commitment through time, rather than singularity of vision, was what the production needed in order to be completed, and to bring Tongpan into existence. 

Tongpan’s son fishing at the lake, courtesy of Frank Green, the film’s cinematographer.

Tongpan is a landmark environmental film, one that was extraordinarily prescient in dealing with threats to the Mekong’s riverine ecosystem and the livelihoods of those who depend on it. The Pa Mong dam, which was the focus of discussion in the re-enacted seminar, was never built. But dam building and its geopolitics remains highly controversial in the Mekong region in this century. The film’s relevance today as a work that addresses the environmental impact of large-scale infrastructural projects is a measure of the questions it tabled: Whose interests are served by rural mega-projects? How is the concept of the national interest used to impose sacrifices on the most powerless and disadvantaged groups in society? While Tongpan is often remembered as a film that tells the story of a suffering peasant, it is also unusual in the way it approaches the issue of development through the question of governance and accountability. How are decisions on development projects made? Whose voices are heard? With great foresight it looks through and beyond the authoritarian/democratic binary and invites us to think about the ways in which inclusion may be tokenistic and voice co-opted. Given the inexorable rise of consultative ideologies, and of consultation as a technology of governance in both authoritarian and ostensibly democratic contexts, Tongpan is truly a film for our times. 

Tongpan is now, rightly, recognised as a pioneering Thai independent film, a courageous venture taken under extraordinarily challenging circumstances. Revisiting the film now encourages us to think more deeply about the internationalism of the group, their experience of movement across borders and from Isan to the metropole, not as a peculiar fact, but as an element intrinsic to the filmic vision. Rather than an example of a “people’s film,” the making of Tongpan was an act of solidarity and commitment that exemplifies the productivity of different modes of outsiderness, a quality the film theorist Paul Willemen once attributed to Third Cinema.12 As such, it is productive to see Tongpan as a spontaneously occurring form of Third Cinema, that is, it embodies Third Cinema as a serendipitous moment rather than a movement of the intelligentsia. Its hallmark is a lucid, interrogative yet humble gaze, neither romanticising nor disenchanted, at an encounter across immense social divides. As Paijong puts it: 

We projected the life of Tongpan as outsiders. In movies where you have a central character you usually project him as if you know everything: what he thinks, what he is, his dreams, his ideas, his suffering. But Tongpan was presented in a way that said we know very little about him, which was actually true. We knew very little about Tongpan. We just saw him from the outside.13 

Acknowledgement: With grateful thanks to Frank Green, Paijong Laisakul and Mike Morrow. Thanks also to Peera Songkhünatham and May Adadol Ingawanij. 

Endnotes

  1. Kongkirati, Prajak. “Thailand: The cultural politics of student resistance.” In Student activism in Asia: Between protest and powerlessness, pp. 229-257. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
  2. Anderson, Benedict R. O’G . “Introduction”. In B. Anderson & R. Mendiones (eds.) In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era. Duang Kamol, 1985.
  3. Reynolds, Craig J. Thai radical discourse: The real face of Thai feudalism today. No. 3. SEAP Publications, 1987.
  4. Frank Green interview with the author.
  5. Michael Morrow E-mail correspondence with the author.
  6. E-mail correspondence with the author.
  7. Haberkorn, Tyrell. Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northeast Thailand. University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
  8. Email correspondence with the author.
  9. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton University Press, 1997 [orig. pub. 1960
  10. Kracauer, Siegfried. Ibid, p257.
  11. Paijong Laisakul interview with the author
  12. Willemen, Paul. “The Third Cinema Question.” In Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Indiana University Press, 1994.
  13. Interview with the author.

About The Author

Richard L. MacDonald is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published on historical and contemporary film and screen culture (film projection, film education and criticism, and the film society movement), and on memory, images and archive practices. He is currently working on a field guide to shade infrastructure in Bangkok.

Related Posts