Thursday May 7th Ring of Fury (1973)
A 2017 restoration of this obscurity was uploaded onto YouTube by the Asian Film Archive a few days ago.
Ring of Fury was meant to be the first Singaporean martial arts film however the film was banned. Filmed guerrilla style, director James Sebastian did not obtain official permits to shoot on local locations.
On its own, Ring of Fury is probably nothing to write home about. The plot is a fairly by-the-numbers revenge story. But the context of its production, and its purgatorial afterlife make for a fascinating case study about false-starts and history in cinema. In this way, it makes a decent companion piece to Sandi Tan’s Shirkers, another film about a vanished Singaporean film.
It was a real privilege to see Ring of Fury thanks to the work of the Asian Film Archive. The journey that this film has been on is a testament to the importance of film preservation.
I’d highly recommend reading this article by Chew Tee Pao about the production of Ring of Fury.
Friday May 8th Amar Akbar Anthony (1977)
Actor Rishi Kapoor passed away the day after Irrfan Khan. I must confess that outside of his cameo in Om Shanti Om, I haven’t been any Kapoor films. So I decided to watch the 1977 smash-hit Amar Akbar Anthony.
The plot reminded me of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Three brothers are seperated in childhood. The eldest Amar (Vishnod Khanna) is taken in by a police officer, middle child Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan) is raised by the Catholic Church, and a muslim tailor looks after the youngest child Akbar (Kapoor).
The film follows the brothers as adults as they gradually become aware of their relationship and reconnect with their biological parents. At the same time they fall in love and find themselves entangled in the schemes of Robert, the crime lord architect of their initial separation.
This film is a lot of fun. I didn’t make the Shakespeare comparison lightly, as the plot utilises dramatic irony and twists of fate to keep the action churning. Amitabh is obviously great at vacillating between action and comedy. Watching the film makes me want to seek out more work by Jeevan, who plays the villainous Robert.
Kapoor’s performance as Akbar however delivers my favourite scene in the film. It’s a musical number where he just constantly roasts his prospective father-in-law.
It’s basically the good version of that awful song Rude by MAGIC!
Sunday May 10th Three Films by Sarah Maldoror
To commemorate the work of Sarah Maldoror (who passed away last month), the feminist film journal Another Gaze are hosting a digital event on May 12th called The Legacies of Sarah Maldoror. When you sign up on eventbrite you are emailed a link to three of Maldoror’s short films: Monamgambée (1969), Et les chiens se taiseient' d'Aimé Césaire (1974), and Léon G. Damas (1994).
Maldoror’s work examines the meaning of rebellion in the context of African independence. It’s not something I can honestly speak on with any pretence of authority, and so I am not going to go into great detail about the films here.
What I will says is that the poetic construction of her documentary Léon G. Damas led me to wonder about my own approach to cinema.
I look forward to the event tomorrow so that I may learn more.
Here is the link, so you can register for yourself.
As I near the end of writing this newsletter I have come to realise that a theme had cropped up among the films I am covering: all of them were prompted by the death of an artist in April. James Sebastion (April 20th), Rishi Kapoor (April 30th) and Sarah Maldoror (April 13th) were all artists whose contribution I only came to appreciate after they had left the world.
This wasn’t entirely intentional as I didn’t know Sebastian had died until after I had seen Ring of Fury.
I found myself questioning my own motivations for this.
It must be said that part of it comes from guilt at my own ignorance, and the fact I only seem to learn about these artists upon their deaths. When a film critic writes there is the temptation to frame oneself like Moses descending from Mount Sinai, tablets engraved with “kino kultur” and inform the lowly readers (if there are any) about the great miracles of cinema one has borne witness to. That urge to posture as an authority is done partly out of the desire for your words to be heeded.
It is something I have never really been comfortable with, because I feel like I know nothing. All I can ever do is play catch-up and try to resist in my own small way the exclusionary canonisation machine that dominates anglophone cinephilia.
I hope it’s worth something.