Deadpoet’s Cave

Last night, Coleman previewed Invisible City, a documentary by Tan Pin Pin. He writes about… rubbish! Well, he wasn’t saying the film was rubbish, far from it! He was reflecting about how the film made him think about what we consider to be trash:

What do we do with rubbish? We discard it… But fast forward a millennium or two, the rubbish we try so hard to discard may become a treasure for some in that generation. Just ask the archaeologists.

I can’t help but consider how some of us view mundane self-exhibitionistic blogger-diarists who blog about mundane happenings in their life… Maybe it’s digital rubbish to us today. But a century from now, it might become an important digital archaeological site to help future generations to understand this generation.

Or that Yeo Hiap Seng bottle that the naughty schoolboy conveniently discarded into the bushes in 1959 - that might turn out to be a notable find for an archaeologist today in Singapore. Which I learnt to be true today, while watching Tan Pin Pin’s new documentary, Invisible City.

Or Ivan Polunin’s colour footage of the streets and markets of Singapore in the 50s, also shown in Invisible City. Those scenes would have been boring if you were to watch it 50 years ago, but there I was a just now, staring intently and soaking in those fascinating mundane scenes: a lady at the market choosing an egg, a man pushing a cart of food, the colourful pillars of the shophouses…

I’m definitely going to enjoy this when it opens! Oh, just found Yawning Bread’s review in my feeds too.

Screening Information
Invisible City will run at The Arts House (Old Parliament),
from 22 July to 12 August 2007.
Tickets at $8 for adults and $6 for students (with ID).

There will be three preview screenings prior to those dates. Free admission is by registration only:

• 19 July 2007, 8pm at the University Cultural Centre, NUS
  (What’s this pop up to tell me to use IE?? Grrr…)
  For registration, email cfaregister [at] nus [d0t] edu [d0t] sg or call 6516 4229.
• 20 July 2007,8pm at 72-13
  For registration, email tworks [at] singnet [d0t] com [d0t] sg or call 6737 7213.
• 21 July 2007, 8pm at The Substation.
  For registration, email movingimages [at] substation [d0t] org or call 6337 7535.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

• Invisible City
• About Singapore
• Red Dot Design Museum and Singapore City Gallery
• The old voice of MRT