Shirk­ers

From Jodorowsky’s Dune to a film about Tim Burton’s can­celled Super­man, doc­u­men­taries about movies that nev­er got made have proved a pop­u­lar prospect over recent years. San­di Tan’s ener­getic Shirk­ers, osten­si­bly an entry in this sub­genre, dif­fers for a few reasons.

First­ly, it’s direct­ed by the helmer of the orig­i­nal film it con­cerns, which shares the same name. Sec­ond­ly, it’s about an inde­pen­dent Sin­ga­pore-made film the world nev­er got to see, rather than a Hol­ly­wood prop­er­ty. Final­ly, and most cru­cial­ly, the orig­i­nal Shirk­ers was actu­al­ly com­plet­ed. The rea­son it was nev­er released is because one strange indi­vid­ual involved in pro­duc­tion stole all of the film’s mate­ri­als once the 1992 shoot had wrapped.

The thief was Georges Car­dona, an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen teach­ing film in Sin­ga­pore, devel­op­ing a close bond with Tan and friends Jas­mine Ng and Sophia Sid­dique Har­vey, who all worked on Shirk­ers, which Tan direct­ed and starred in at just 16 years old. For two decades, the trio had no clo­sure on why Car­dona did what he did or where he went, until the man’s ex-wife con­tact­ed Tan and returned all the pre­served 70 reels of film, though with­out the sound record­ings. As Tan seeks out peo­ple abroad who knew Car­dona, she dis­cov­ers this isn’t the only artis­tic endeav­our he sabotaged.

Shirk­ers the doc­u­men­tary is assem­bled from var­i­ous media, includ­ing the pre­vi­ous­ly lost footage, ani­ma­tion, clips from oth­er movies, inter­views with for­mer crew, and the odd home movie. The result is like a mys­tery film as fil­tered through the aes­thet­ic of a scrap­book or zine, appro­pri­ate to the punk spir­it of teenage Tan and Ng’s own zine, The Explod­ing Cat.

Giv­en the con­tri­bu­tion the orig­i­nal film should have had to Singapore’s inde­pen­dent film move­ment, it feels trite to com­pare the look of the Shirk­ers footage with Amer­i­can pro­duc­tions that emerged since its ear­ly ​’90s shoot. But Tan open­ly brings up such com­par­isons her­self, describ­ing how Shirk­ers, as this spir­i­tu­al force, sent her dis­tress sig­nals dur­ing the years where she’d want­ed to for­get the whole thing and make peace with a chunk of her life being for­ev­er lost – she specif­i­cal­ly cites feel­ing pings upon see­ing both Wes Anderson’s Rush­more and Ter­ry Zwigoff’s Ghost World.

Links to oth­er films also come through both details of the documentary’s mys­tery ele­ment and its jux­ta­po­si­tions between footage of both Shirk­ers and oth­er films. Among Cardona’s var­i­ous eccen­tric­i­ties were his say­ing that he inspired James Spader’s char­ac­ter in Sex, Lies and Video­tape. Else­where, Tan demon­strates that one of the man’s key sug­ges­tions for Shirk­ers in terms of shot com­po­si­tion turned out to be a direct echo of a scene in Paris, Texas, which Tan only dis­cov­ered upon see­ing Wim Wen­ders’ film years later.

Although rev­e­la­tions are unearthed, Tan’s dig­ging doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to any cathar­sis where every­thing is tied up neat­ly. It does prove ther­a­peu­tic, though, and very enter­tain­ing and mov­ing as a por­trait of the effect of – to twist a turn of phrase for a dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tion – an artist being sep­a­rat­ed from their art. With this new Shirk­ers, now her fea­ture debut, she’s rebirthed her baby into some­thing much different.