I've been thinking about Tan Pin Pin's 'To Singapore With Love' (have yet to watch it) and how we can collectively respond to instances of censorship. The first line is of course to mobilise support (petitions, letters, etc) to try to convince the authorities to rethink (and reverse) their decision.
That struggle for freedom of speech and information is crucial. But there is another aspect which should not be neglected, which is that censorship also means that the artist loses a potential source of income. It is already difficult for independent filmmakers to recover the cost of making their films. What more if the film is not passed for public screenings, television sales and DVD distribution.
We need to be able to assure our artists that they will not become financially vulnerable if they tackle subjects considered taboo by the state. Of course there are artists who are willing to suffer personal losses in the service of their art. And they are often romanticised for disdaining profit and money. But those who seek to create a viable livelihood from their art are no less deserving of our respect, especially when they find their revenue channels strangled by paranoid and self-serving regulations that many of us disagree with. We need to be able to provide a back-up plan, a safety net, the shields to protect our most interesting voices from the punitive blows of an authoritarian state.
So what can we do? How can we try to convert our social capital (the value of our social networks) into actual capital for our censored artists? How can we give them the encouragement to keep on creating work in a hypothetical censorship-free environment? When a work is censored, it is in a sense made non-existent, so how do we commodify that absence? I have an idea: monetise the censorship instead. The filmmaker can put up copies of the MDA-ban letter for sale. This will send a middle finger signal to the censors--instead of impoverishing artists, their documents are instead converted to currency for the artists. Howasboutit?
Alfian Sa'at
*Article first appeared on https://www.facebook.com/alfiansaat/posts/10152271789442371