OUT OF THE SHADOW OF THE COLD WAR
Dead Man’s Voice, a recently discovered film set in Bangkok in the 1950s, was made with help from a US propaganda unit and will screen at Thai Film Archive this Saturday
The Cold War saw the birth of the persuasive power of cinema. In the early 1950s, the United States decided that psychological warfare was needed to thwart communist threats in Southeast Asia and so it set up a propaganda unit to produce movies, documentary films, cartoons and pamphlets to provoke a red scare among the people. The United States Information Services (Usis) was also active in Thailand during this decade of sinister geopolitics. Its main responsibility was to produce a number of narrative and documentary films which would be screened around the country to promote American-style democracy and caution people against the deadly dominance of communism.
For historians, Usis propaganda films are valuable Cold War artefacts. Unfortunately, most of the films made during those years were lost after the agency was discontinued
in the late 1990s. However recently, the Thai Film Archive made an important discovery by unearthing the oldest Thai propaganda film funded by Usis: Kham Sang
Kham Sab (Dead Man’s Voice) at the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Maryland. Hence, the film will be screened to the public for the first time this Saturday at Sala Cinema at the Thai Film Archive compound in Salaya, accompanied by a talk by two prominent Cold War scholars.
Starring some of Thailand’s top actors of the 1950s — Sawalee Pakaphan, Wasant Sunthornpaksin, Marsri Israngul Na Ayutthaya and Aree Tonawanik — Dead Man’s
Voice is a piece of history that is perfect for academic scrutiny as well as being an entertaining film made with Hollywood ambition (the director is an American, Burnett Lamont). The story is a blend of detective intrigue and ideological subterfuge while the moody black-and-white lighting and slinking camerawork evoke Hitchcock’s
Rebecca. There are murders, mysteries, a doppelganger and nocturnal flights, all of which revolve around a democracy-loving scientist who devises a talking statue that spouts communist propaganda.
In the NARA registry, two versions of the film were catalogued. One was in the 35mm format, running for 102 minutes, and the other in 16mm, running at 138 minutes (both will be screened this Saturday). Evidence suggests that the longer version on 16mm was supposed to be released in 1951 but due to a distribution snag, it was shelved. In 1954, the shorter version was released on 35mm. At NARA, the film is listed with under the title The Command That Dooms.
However, a version found in Thailand and confirmed by Wasant Sunthornpaksin, one of the actors in the film, shows that the film’s English title when it was released was, in fact, Dead Man’s Voice.
Between the 1950s to 1970s, Usis made its own propaganda films and supported Thai film companies to produce movies with anti-communist agenda, with varying degrees of subtlety. Some of Usis’ films preserved by Thai Film Archive include Bangkok, Our Capital, a 1957 documentary that portrays Bangkok as a developed, civilised city which proudly carries the flag of the free world. Meanwhile, Pattanakorn is a 1963 documentary that reassures viewers about the government’s commitment to developing the Northeast, a poor region susceptible to red influence which sits right next to communist Laos. In a 1965 feature film called
Fai Yen, a band of communist bandits try to infiltrate a rural town in the Northeast but are met with fierce resistance from the ideologically unwavering villagers. All these films can be watched on the Thai Film Archive’s YouTube channel (try the Cold War playlist).
Dead Man’s Voice, however, stands out from most Usis films because of its cinematic value: the film is elegantly shot, the black-and-white cinematography is superbly atmospheric and though the plot veers towards incredulity near the end, the narrative is engaging throughout. The pristine standard is a contrast to the majority of Thai films from the 1950s, which were shot quickly, sometimes haphazardly, on 16mm and featured no sound and thus each screening required live dubbers.
The setup in Dead Man’s Voice is also different from other Usis films: the story takes place in Bangkok with the characters being young, middle-class city people who try to solve the riddle of the scientist who lives next door. There’s a certain sophistication to the premise. Meanwhile, the anti-communist films of later years are more direct in their anti-red messaging and the stories are often set in rural provinces where ideological reinforcement seemed more pressing.
The discovery of Dead Man’s Voice is a major archival event and the public screening this Saturday will revisit an important chapter in Thailand’s modern history when the nation was caught in an ideological rivalry that found its expression in the popular and influential medium of cinema.
The film is a piece of history that is perfect for academic scrutiny