About

Palita Chunsaengchan is a film and media scholar based in Minneapolis. She teaches Southeast Asian cinema and media cultures at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarly work includes a book manuscript titled "Chimeric Cinema: The Formation of Thai Film Culture," which is currently under review. In addition to her academic writing, she is developing a screenplay for her first short film, inspired by her second book project that explores professional migration for cinema and media-related jobs in Southeast Asia. This forthcoming book is tentatively entitled "Cinematic Savior: A History of Migration and Work in Southeast Asian Cinema."

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Art
• Gender studies
• Political Science
• History
• Art history
• Advertising
• Ethnology
• Anthropology
• Philosophy
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Archaeology
• Business

Selected publications

• Home Away From Home:

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2024-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Anthropology

  Loaded with historical evidence about colonization in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) and Dutch governmental, corporate, and missionary filmmaking in the colony between 1913 and 1930, Celluloid Colony also explores debates in film history concerning placement and archival values of colonial nonfiction films, especially those made to serve as propaganda. This complexity and the arranged marriage of two distinct disciplines—history and film history—may appear daunting at first. Luckily, author Sandeep Ray, a historian, scholar, visual artist, and creative writer, has an incredibly good command of his prose and is a systematic thinker and writer. Ray organized his data and arguments in a way that is accessible to general readers. So those interested in the project but who know very little about either the colonial history of Indonesia, film historiography, or both should fear not.Celluloid Colony begins the introduction, “A Case for Outcasts,” lamenting the reasons why the Dutch East Indies film archives had been hitherto overlooked and how visual works, especially films, have barely been treated as primary sources of historical evidence. These two points are intertwined and reflect Ray's attempt to not only make this archive visible as objects of study for film history but also to make historians pay more attention to their disciplinary oversight and discomfort in the way they source, read, and treat visual materials. In chapter 1, “Situating Early Non-fiction Film in Colonial Studies,” the book discusses the periodization of nonfiction and documentary films in film history and the ethnographic value of early nonfiction films in the collection, as well as how colonial films generally have been treated either as too propagandist to have any archival value or as merely reflecting the violence of the European colonizers. Chapter 2, “Obscurity and Rehabilitation of the Dutch East Indies Propaganda Film Collection,” traces the filmmaking initiatives of the Colonial Institute in 1910. Films produced during this period provide visual evidence of the everyday life of Native peoples and were used to disseminate knowledge about the colony as much as to persuade Dutch citizens to take pride in and sustain colonial rule. Ray then tackles Vincent Monnikendam's Mother Dao, the Turtlelike (1995), which compiles footage and images from the early Dutch East Indies propaganda collection. Though some historians consider the film's reliance on editing manipulative and historically inaccurate, Ray contends that the film helped revive the interest in this specific film collection and revealed the complex system behind filmmaking and possible shifts in colonial mentality and policies. The film also serves as a jumping-off point for chapter 3, “The Colonial Institute and Propaganda Film (1912–13),” in which the author discusses the motifs of the Colonial Institute and their desires to engage in “propagandistic efforts to project an image of solidarity and, . . . indebtedness towards the East Indies” (64). The main star of this chapter is J. C. Lamster, a veteran turned filmmaker who was appointed to Java and Bali in 1912. Ray highlights the multiplicity of themes elaborated in Lamster's works—culture, labor, modernity, agriculture—at a time when “the Netherlands attempted to change its image from a mercenary, domineering, colonizing power to a friend of the East Indies” (65).In chapter 4, “Corporate Films (1917–27),” Ray examines the shift to corporate-funded films that promote colonial economic activities and serve as a rare visual record of “scientifically based large scale production” (125), transmigration between islands, and the Indigenous labor force. In chapter 5, “Films with a Mission (1923–30),” Ray turns to missionary filmmaking, the evangelical publicity that followed the tremendous popularity of Flores Films (1926), and an analysis of the aesthetic styles and topical focuses characterized both by the religiously induced missions and potential influences from contemporaneous documentaries like Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922). Celluloid Colony ends with chapter 6, “Dismantling the Picturesque.” The chapter is a thoughtful criticism of the generalized conception of colonial cinema—that it “hinged on the picturesque” (189), on “the positive aspects of colonial rule that strived to be aesthetically pleasing” (191), or, in other words, that it remained unaltered until anti-colonial efforts or decolonization. This ending note confirms the author's main argument and circles the readers back to the start.My readers might have already picked up the main argument from the outline above. It is straightforward: these nonfiction films, though they were produced within a colonial agenda and mentality and could thus be termed as propagandist, hold “ethnographic value and are rare primary sources of historical evidence” (188). Owing to these qualities, they deserve to be studied more thoroughly by both colonial historians of the Netherlands East Indies and film historians alike.As a film historian from Southeast Asia, I find it thrilling that historical and film materials from the region can help us revisit questions concerning methodology and film historiography. I also praise the Eye Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid) for making the films available to a larger audience and thus making this book possible. Even for readers not interested in film history or the aesthetics of colonial cinema, Celluloid Colony is remarkable for its scope and ambition. It is not often that we come across a project that not only challenges our preconceived notions about colonial representations but also asks us not to “fixate on the wretchedness of colonialism” (196). Ray's book invites us to let this film archive speak for itself—to let the films “[lead] us to sites of memories and legacies that can only add to our knowledge of the past” (196). Celluloid Colony thoroughly initiates a much-needed, if difficult, conversation.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Wer</i> Viewership and Queer Imag(in)ing: Thai Soap Opera <i>Shadow of Love</i> and Boys Love Media

  TRaNS Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia · 2024 · 3 citations

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Art

  Abstract This article brings film/media theory into Southeast Asian research through a revisionist queer approach. It contains two goals: addressing some recent developments about queer imag(in)ing in Thai media whilst reappraising the fundamental question of spectatorship via screen theory. Taking into account the more general issue of media specificity and the particular textual device of identity/gender-switch in several recent Thai television serials, we propose the notion of wer viewership: a mode of viewing practice that features viewer-text interaction through the perceptual-cognitive processes, and is characterised by wer /excessive aesthetics, multiple meanings, and diverse pleasures. Resonant with camp reading, wer viewership underlines how the viewer actively makes sense of the ambiguities about gender, particularly those along the extra-/diegetic interface. We use Thai soap opera Shadow of Love to illuminate the wer /excessive aesthetics rendered through its identity/gender play bordering on the extra-/diegetic divide, and the enhanced pleasures and meanings thus available to its extradiegetic active viewers. We stress, though, the expanded queer imag(in)ing in Shadow is not of total free interpretation, but is animated in relation to both the evolving discourses about gender/sexuality in Thailand, and the popularising homoerotic Boys Love (BL) media across Asia in recent years.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Poeticizing Cinematic Experiences: Traditional Thai Poetry in the Early Film Magazine <i>Phappayon Siam</i>

  The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This article analyzes Thai poems that discussed the early days of cinema in three weekly issues of Phappayon Siam from 1922. Published among other prose writings, the poems depicted the poets’ moviegoing experiences, the splendor of cinema, and references to Buddhism using archaic words and Sanskrit literary forms. The article examines the unusual connection between traditional poetry and modern cinema and argues that this convergence not only reshapes the way we think about the hegemonic narratives about prosaic influences on cinema but also the scope of indigenous investment in traditional religious figures and their relationship to cinema and modernity.

  PublisherDOI

• BOOK REVIEW: Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability, by Gerald Sim

  Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

  PublisherDOI

• The critique of anti-communist state violence in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

  Asian Cinema · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or-awarded Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) has ostensibly been embraced by both critics and scholars alike as international art cinema and for being constitutive of a canon of world cinema from the vantage of Southeast Asia. This article, however, takes a detour to focus particularly on the film’s engagement with Thai politics and its complex intertwinement with Buddhism during the period of anti-communism. I specifically look at how the film replicates religious beliefs and indigenous practices, such as the structure of kamma and reincarnation as redemption, that were used by the right-wing military government to justify a series of anti-communist pogroms. I argue that by hijacking such religious narratives and translating them into cinematic form, the film manages to eschew the risk of being suppressed by censorship, or, at worst, of reproducing the state-imposed narrative on the appropriation and accomplishment of such violence in the name of the nation. This article aims to shed light on how the film criticizes not only the past – what historically happened – but also the way we come to understand the history of such atrocious event and relate to it as our national history.

  PublisherDOI

• Ruling Aesthetics: Intermediality, Media Modernity and Early Thai Cinema (1868-1942)

  Scholars' Bank (University of Oregon) · 2020-09-24

  dissertationOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  My dissertation investigates the unexplored connections among cinema, prose and poetry in Thai history, extending from the period of the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) through the decade following the Siamese Revolution of 1932. Across the various chapters, I expand the archives both of early Thai cinema and Thai literary history. I draw together readings of Sanookneuk (1886), the first fictional work of Thai prose, film reviews written as Thai poetry (1922), governmental letters calling for censorship of the purportedly first Thai film (1923), as well as promotional essays in English on the state-sponsored film, The King of the White Elephant (1941). I consider how early cinema not only destabilizes a rigid structure of a national historiography, but also shapes interactions between different social classes. The dissertation traces three pivotal conceptions of cinema: first as a disciplinary technology, then as popular culture, and finally as a nationalized mass medium. My dissertation accounts for cinema’s entanglements with other media, for how these entanglements profess aesthetic instructions that become a dispositif of the modernizing Thai state as well as for how cultures of cinema and media in Siam manifest and respond to the national project of modernization. The negotiation between cinema, media and modernity reveals natures of different sovereign powers as well as complexities of the institutional politics in staging and managing the formation of Thai modernity. I, therefore, deploy the term “media modernity,” in my dissertation to capture such problematics and discussions of the intertwinement of early cinema, media and modernization and, yet, to also complicate some hegemonic accounts in Thai history that often isolate cinema from the epistemological constructions and sensibilities of modernity as well as separate aesthetic regimes from the politics of the nation.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Shiyan Chao

  Chulalongkorn University

  1 shared

• Thosaeng Chaochuti

  Chulalongkorn University

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Comparative Literature

  University of Oregon

Awards & honors

• Imagine Fund Special Events 2022
• CLA Single-Semester Leave (Fall 2025)
• The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residency, Serving as CLA pa…
• Grant-in-Aid, Awarded by the Research & Innovation Office fo…