This documentary, “The Impossibility of Knowing” was commissioned by the DMZ Korean International Film Festival. It world premieres at the 2nd DMZ Korean International Film Festival in Sep 10. It is 12 min long.
The Impossibility of Knowing came into being because I was wondering if the video camera can capture the aura of a space that has experienced trauma. I made a list of places I knew about where accidents had happened and we filmed them. But my camera did not “capture” anything. It could be due to the limitations of physics, but the canal remained a canal, the house, a house. Maybe the aura we sought doesn’t exist or we just did not have the requisite gift to see the aura. Maybe you can see better than us.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
At my studio along Serangoon Road, Singapore I often walk past a hotel called Fortuna Hotel. It is a nondescript hotel with 60 rooms, catering mainly to Indian tourists.
I happen to be old enough to know that this hotel is built on the same site where Hotel New World once was. The hotel collapsed in 1986 because of a gross engineering miscalculation. On that spot, 33 people died and many others were injured.
Walking past this building you would hardly know that this happened. I wonder how many other people like me, walk past that space and think about that tragedy.
It occurred to me that I held something within: a subjective list of places that I cannot forget because of the tragedies, incidents, accidents that identify them. Each of us harbours an inchoate list in our minds.
For this documentary, I visit these spaces in my list. There are many locations in it you may not have heard about as they did not make the headlines. Most are ordinary spaces: a corridor, a neighbourhood mosque, a canal. Looking at them, you would not have known what had happened. There are no marks or commemorative plaques.
Despite Singapore’s hyper-urban and sterile appearance, this terrain is still wrought over with human emotions. A place may just be a place to some but be frought with meaning for others. It is the subjectivity of emotional nodes connected to geography that fascinate me.
The title The Impossibility of Knowing refers to the limits of images, the limits of what we see and can know, from what we see. It also refers to the act of construction of meaning by the director. The process is tenuous and highly mediated. You never know the truth as it were
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Country of production: Singapore
Year of production: 2010
Duration: 11 mins 31 sec
Original Format: HD 1920x 1080 25p
Available Screening Format:
- HDCam 1080i 50
- HDCam 1080i 59.94
- DigiBeta PAL
- DigiBeta NTSC
Sound: Stereo
Visual: Colour, 16:9
Language: English
Subtitles: None
Website: http://theimpossibilityofknowing.wordpress.com
Print Source: Tan Pin Pin pin (at) tanpinpin.com
