I know Jasmine and Sophie are much angrier, still, because they didn’t have the process of making the film. (This reminds Tan of Although Tan’s doc can become weighed down with self-pitying narration and repetitive imagery, it’s also wide awake to her lost movie’s resonance, as film meta-history ellipsis (the early work can never be reconstructed because Cardona threw away all of the sound), as personal coming-of-age saga (us-versus-them sisterhood all the way, with scant attention paid to boys), and as “a time capsule of Singapore, both real and imagined”. It’s selfish, but it’s very freeing for me to be able to release that energy and have them be angry on my behalf so I don’t have to feel it. And you just have to figure out what goes where against which script. But she has a memoiristic story to tell first, in which she grew up absurd in Singapore as a square-peg girl in a round-hole country, enduring a teenage 1980s and 90s desperately scrounging for transgressive international music and film, even producing her own widely read zine and pirating VHS tapes.
And there are volunteers for that job.
When you find somebody you think gets you and sees you, it somehow overrides all of what people are saying around you. It would have been a revolutionary addition to the indie canon. Her extraordinary documentary reflects on her shattered creative dreams and explains what happened when the footage was unexpectedly returned to her years later. The subgenre may have begun with the BBC film Luckily for Tan, the pristine footage of her 1992 work is thick on the ground. And I have unalloyed pleasure in their success. We didn’t really think in terms of appropriate and not appropriate in those days.
But I just didn’t think the rules would apply, because this was somebody I thought really got me.
Shirkers is one of those films that seems almost too good to be true. So for me, that is the closure. And I enjoyed the movie a great deal. As a teenage punk, Sandi Tan dreamed of making a movie, and a charismatic older man promised to help – until he vanished with the finished reels. Even if they found Georges, I think he’s so squirmy and so squirrely that he would just slip out of the crack. And then my sound designer’s in LA. And somehow, it had pretty much the same spirit of the original, just with higher level talent.
In this documentary, she tells the tale of her lost and found film. I mean we crossed so many lines that the rules didn’t seem to apply. There was virtually no film production going on in the country at the time, according to Philip Cheah (the BigO magazine editor, who has a small role in Tan’s film), aside from some occasional Filipino-style pulp.Tan had dreams of filling the vacuum, and by the time she was 18, she and her friends fell under the wing of one Georges Cardona, an expat film teacher and a kind of passive-aggressive Svengali-cum-Zelig whose manner seduced filmmaking comrades wherever he went, and who claimed to be the model for the James Spader character in The summer was a frazzling blur of semiprofessional filmmaking, with Tan taking the lead role herself, as we see in the stylised footage, which absolutely has the kitschy downtown style already pioneered by John Waters and Jim Jarmusch and co-opted by legions of New Wave music-video directors, only with a distinctive Singaporean mealiness.
Filmed in 1992, the original Shirkers was an indie road movie starring Tan as a 16-year-old serial killer named “S”. Or you could take a completely experimental approach and have a bunch of kids unrelated to me put it together. In this documentary, she tells the tale of her lost and found film.A bracingly bizarre true-life saga of indie filmmaking gone squirrelly and disastrous, this new doc explores the unmaking of another film, which itself was – or seemed destined to be – Singapore’s punk-era generational anthem movie, a teen-written, candy-coloured amateur phantasia-experiment that might’ve triggered a national super-indie New Wave that never happened.
I went from mood first, listened to the music and got into the mindset of what it felt to be an 18-year-old just bursting with energy and ideas.