SINGAPORE, Sept 7 — If you asked a random assortment of strangers what their ideal movie-viewing experience would be, their answers would probably sound pretty similar: Watch Netflix, while curled up with a glass of wine, or shovelling fistfuls of popcorn into your mouth in front of a screen the size of a small swimming pool.

An answer you are unlikely to get is “sitting in the back of a truck while it hurtles around the island” — which turns out to be the basic premise of Drive, the brainchild of Singaporean artist Kent Chan, presented as part of the NUS Museum’s Concrete Island — an overarching programme by the museum which looks to Tan Pin Pin’s seminal film 80km/h and JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island as starting points for thinking about Singapore.

 

As unlikely a premise as it may seem, the (admittedly limited) seats for this year’s edition — it had four showings on August 27 and Sept 3 — sold out in under 10 hours, suggesting a fair appetite for this unusual screening format.

For anyone who does not make a habit of travelling the road in an uncovered vehicle, it is a startlingly novel sensory experience even before considering the film proper — the stifling heat of the tunnels followed by the relative cool of surface air, the roar of tunnel ventilation systems, and the physical force of the wind whipping past are but one facet of the experience.

Originally inspired by Tan’s 80km/h, a single take of a journey on the PIE, this year’s Drive is in some ways a pared-down, more focused iteration of the original outing in 2012, which featured multiple works, rather than a single film.

As the truck winds its way through the city, the film is constantly re-framed through motion — a shot of somnolent movie-goers in Daniel Hui’s Watching Eclipse could be framed by the city skyline one moment, and then the searing amber light of a tunnel in the next. With the high ceiling of the truck’s roof, the view beyond the screen becomes altogether cinematic, enacting a kind of dialogue with the film screened.

So how does Chan select the films, and plan the routes?

“Terrain, texture, timespan. And a sense of urban drama, that if you think of it, is actually very cinematic,” replied the artist.

At least one other aspect which comes to the fore is the management of environmental sound, that can range from quiet to deafening. Hence, sound in the films Watching Eclipse and If Not, Accelerate are less than crucial, and very similar to live traffic sounds.

With this year’s edition of Drive having come and gone, thoughts of increasing the scale of Drive are certainly afoot.

Asked how he imagines Drive growing in time to come, Chan says he sees it evolving “with the city and its many anxieties”.

An aim, he added, is to make it an annual affair if audience interest remains high, with potentially more showtimes and more routes for the truck to travel on.

“The city is incredibly organic and tactile if we expose ourselves to it as we course through its many roads and highways. This city is never static.” — TODAY