การสัมมนาวิจัยระดับนานาชาติ “Texts, Trails, Towns: Legacy Media, Film Memories, and Fan Tourism” (มรดกสื่อ ความทรงจำ และการตามรอยภาพยนตร์ )

จัดโดย สถาบันวิจัยภาษาและวัฒนธรรมเอเชีย ร่วมกับ the Asian Cultural Council, the University of Southern California, คณะมนุษยศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์, ศูนย์วิทยาการขั้นสูงด้านมนุษยศาสตร์และสังคมศาสตร์ประยุกต์ และสถาบันวิทยาการขั้นสูงแห่งมหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์ ด้วยการสนับสนุนจาก ภาควิชาภาษาไทย คณะอักษรศาสตร์ จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย และคณะมนุษยศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยเชียงใหม่

รับชมผ่านการทอดสดทาง RILCA, Mahidol University

หมายเหตุ : การบรรยายเป็นภาษาไทยพร้อมสรุปภาษาอังกฤษ หัวข้อสุดท้ายบรรยายเป็นภาษาอังกฤษพร้อมสรุปแปลภาษาไทย

บทคัดย่อที่ 1 : Shrines of Cultivated Senses: Narrating Space, Atmosphere, and Memory of Cinema in Modern Thai Fiction 
วิหารแห่งการขัดเกลาผัสสะ: พื้นที่ บรรยากาศ และความทรงจำเกี่ยวกับภาพยนตร์ในวรรณกรรมไทยสมัยใหม่

บทคัดย่อ และประวัติโดยย่อของผู้นำเสนอ

Chairat Polmuk 
Chulalongkorn University

Abstract
Palaces of distraction, optical fairylands, and shrines to the cultivation of pleasure—these are the evocative terms German critic Siegfried Kracauer uses to characterize cinema in his 1926 essay “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces.” Proposing distraction as a central affective force in shaping mass-mediated subjectivity, Kracauer’s essay offers a framework to explore the relationship between cinema, modernity, and sensory experience (Hanson 2011). In this paper, I investigate how Bangkok’s cinematic architecture is portrayed and remembered in poems, short stories, memoirs, and novels published between the 1920s to the 1940s. Through an analysis of literary configurations of cinematic space, atmosphere, and memory, the paper aims to bring an intermedial aspect of film history into the study of cinema and the formation of “sensuous citizenship” (Chua 2021) within the Thai cultural context.

Biography 
Chairat Polmuk is Assistant Professor in literary studies at the Department of Thai, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, where he teaches Southeast Asian languages and literature, cultural theory, and media studies. Currently, he also serves as Director of Chulalongkorn University’s Southeast Asian Studies program. Chairat received a PhD in Asian Literature, Religion and Culture from Cornell University. His research focuses on affective and intermedial aspects of post-Cold War literature and visual culture, especially in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. His writings appear in Routledge Handbook of Theravāda Buddhism, Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: The Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asian and the Pacific, and Journal of Mekong Societies. He is a member of the editorial collective of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.

บทคัดย่อที่ 2 : The Afterlives of Love of Siam
การคืนชีพของรักแห่งสยาม

Natthanai Prasannam 

Abstract
Love of Siam (dir. Chookiat Sakveerakul, 2007) was the sensation in Thailand and across Asia since its premiere, featuring a romantic and melancholic relationship between two boys in the secondary school uniform, family drama, Catholic intervention, and teen culture of the 2000s. The film was launched before the expansion of Yaoi/Y or Boys Love/BL—one of the most influential LGBTQ media in Thailand and Asia. 

The cultural impact of the film has led to its status as Thailand’s Film Archive’s film heritage and one of the canonical films in the reign of King Rama IX. The prestige of the film is, however, measured by the fact that it has later been re-positioned as an inspirational source of Thai BL. In the public discourse, Love of Siam is continuously commemorating its anniversary. The legacy remains in memory and screen cultures. 

This presentation aims to explore the creation of Love of Siam’s afterlives since the late 2000s through the lens of cultural afterlives. The data are collected from academic writings, criticisms, and media discourse. The film has been included in academic discourse and cultural criticism since its launch, as it somewhat defines the characteristics of Thai queer cinema of the 2000s and later on. Intermedial texts also perpetuate the film’s afterlives, as the band featured in the film launched their albums between 2007 and 2012. The leading actors of the film pursued their acting careers in the televisual and theatre sectors. The commemorative practices of Love of Siam are where memory culture and film culture intersect. The commemoration significantly emerged on its fifth anniversary. The commemoration has resonated among cinephiles. Governmental institutions and the private sector have rescreened the film. One of the iconic screenings is a part of the Bangkok Outdoor Cinema Festival in July 2022 at Siam Square. That was when the cast and crew of different political ideologies reunited. Their differences were caused by the socio-political unrest since the 2010s. The film’s director, Chookiat Sakveerakul, was actively engaging in commemorative practices when he launched his novelisation of the film in 2018; the original archival screenplay was also included in the publication. That was when the film was growing more and more associated with the Thai BL culture, which was on the rise since 2014. The film was eventually located within the history of Thai BL. It was revisited by BL fan meeting events and tropes in BL novels and their screen adaptations since the late 2010s. The film is also employed as a frame for the interpretation of the queer media. Overall, the afterlives of Love of Siam reveal how a filmic text can be located in a memory culture and mnemonic practices conglomerate with film or screen culture. The audiences are thus potentially members of the mnemonic community enhanced by the film. 

Biography 
Natthanai Prasannam received his PhD (Film Studies) from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He now teaches contemporary Thai literature and screen studies at the Department of Literature, Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand. He also serves as a founding director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Applied Humanities and Social Sciences, Kasetsart University Institute for Advanced Studies. Prasannam has pioneered new areas in Thai scholarship: cultural memory studies, adaptation studies, intermediality studies, book history and BL/Y studies. His current research touches upon Thai Y literary and screen media as national/transnational creative industries. Email: natthanai.p@ku.th

บทคัดย่อที่ 3 : The historiography and futurity of film locations and fan tourism in Thailand
ประวัติศาสตร์นิพนธ์และอนาคตกาลของสถานที่ถ่ายทำภาพยนตร์และการตามรอยในประเทศไทย

Wikanda Promkhuntong
Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University

Abstract
This paper is divided into two parts. The first part draws on the project funded by the National Research Council of Thailand and the British Academy that investigates the phenomenon of fan tourism at the height of its local tourism boom from the early 2010s until before the pandemic (https://www.filmfantourism.org/). Looking into this period and tracing back to the different waves of tourism related to film locations since the post-Cold War, the paper invites a reflection on how different eras bring about different research agendas, concerns, enthusiasm, and detachment into this subject. Arguing that film fan tourism begins and sustains with the fans but also relies on other stakeholders and their mobilities that bring about its futurity to film culture, city development, and tourism, the second part of the paper offers a case study on unpacking this through the bygone sites that have enduring visits in the last 50 years. Drawing on an ongoing writing on the fans of Bruce Lee and memories of Pak Chong and The Big Boss (1971), this second part proposes the study of film fan tourism through the notion of homing/re-grounding and ‘the new mobility studies’ that pay attention to infrastructures and modes of transport as well as embodied practices and stopping points where material, cultural, and social agents intersect in intimate ways. Pilgrimage sites are away from home, yet fan studies writings highlighted how they are cultivated as meaningful/sacred places/spiritual homes for one’s self (be it our existing identity, our memories, or the aspiring hegemonic playful self). This sense of symbolic home would always encounter other senses of home associated with different stakeholders (including business owners and the locals). Sometimes, these meanings clash. Other times, they complement. Apart from exploring these homes/stopping points, I highlight the importance of examining modes and moods of mobilities that make these sites alive and link to interested parties wanting to nurture a city with cultural memories. These practices include tracing the city development and modernist transport projects that led to the employment of the town as a film location, the present-day commutes and disruptions, affective mapping through memories of the locals, and fan re-enactments at the film locations.

Biography 
Wikanda Promkhuntong is an Assistant Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University. A significant part of her work explores the discourses around and practices of screen industry agents, from artists/auteurs/stars to cinephiles/fans. Writing from the geographical context of Thailand, her research also explores film cultures in relation to fan tourism and historical film receptions. Her recent publications include a monograph on Film Authorship in Contemporary Transmedia Culture: The Paratextual Lives of Asian Auteurs (2023) and the exploration of past and present film productions in the global South and creative labour solidarity published in Transnational Screens and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

บทคัดย่อที่ 4 : “Nice to (Not) Know You: The Residual Impact of Legacy Media and Cinema on Thailand’s Inbound/Outbound Inter-Asian Package Tourism”
“ยินดีที่(ไม่)รู้จัก: ร่องรอยผลกระทบของมรดกสื่อและภาพยนตร์ต่อแพกเกจทัวร์ของประเทศไทยกับการท่องเที่ยวในเอเชีย”

Brian Bernards
University of Southern California
Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University

Abstract
As part of a larger research project on the transborder flows of migrant labor, popular culture, and tourism in inter-Asian cinema, this presentation narrates my recent experiences participating in Thailand-based package tours originally designed to capitalize on the popular media and cinema that first inspired the craze of outbound Thai travel to South Korea in the 2000s and brought hordes of inbound mainland Chinese tourists to Thailand in the 2010s. First, I discuss the lasting impact of early Korean Wave K-Dramas like Winter Sonata and Dae Jang Geum on the infrastructure of Thai tourism to South Korea. Although such K-Drama-oriented tours were once satirized in Thai director Banjong Pisanthanakun’s wildly popular 2010 film, Hello Stranger, my Thai-language “Happy Together Snow Lovers’ Korea Tour” revealed that two decades after these dramas reached peak popularity in Thailand, they remain anchoring referents on tourist routes that strikingly resemble those taken in Hello Stranger, with visits to Nami Island, Gyeongbokkung Palace, the Han-ok Village, and Namsan Seoul Tower punctuated by K-Drama-oriented narration from the tour’s Thai guides. Next, I discuss the residual impact of the domestic-box-office-shattering mainland Chinese hit comedy, Lost in Thailand, on Mandarin-language package tourism in Chiang Mai, tours facilitated through online mainland Chinese agencies but that rely on local Sino-Thai guides. More than a decade after the film, my Lost in Thailand-themed tour introduced Chinese visitors to Chiang Mai’s history, religious culture, and local products through reference to the familiar shooting locations from the film, including Wat Buppharam temple, the Chiang Mai University campus, and the Lost in Thailand village outside the city center. In both cases, the appeal of the original media product itself has largely faded from the priorities of snow-seeking northbound Thai travelers to South Korea and tropical safari-seeking southbound mainland Chinese tourists to Chiang Mai. Yet the legacy media and cinema still provide a key lens through which the culture of the other is introduced, and their impact on the infrastructure of Thailand’s inbound and outbound tourist industry is indelible, creating—as each tour revealed—pathways for migrant labor, markets for new products, and translated narratives of cultural forms and customs with novel points for comparison and contrast. 

Biography 
Brian Bernards is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature (U of Washington Press, 2015 / NUS Press, 206) and co-editor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia U Press, 2013). His articles have appeared in journals such as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, positions: asia critique, and Asian Cinema. He is currently working on two monographs, Inter-Asian Cinema: Migrant Labor, Popular Culture, Tourism and Translingual Micro-Affections: Sinophone Flash Fiction and Short Film in Southeast Asia. He is also co-editing a volume with Elmo Gonzaga entitled Inter-Asian Media Frictions: Creative Labor, Co-Production, and Outsourcing. He is currently serving as Visiting Professor of Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia (RILCA) at Mahidol University, supported by an Individual Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council (ACC). Learn more at http://www.asianculturalcouncil.org/