The Name

With his film The Name (2015), Ho Tzu Nyen, a film maker and visual artist from Singapore, takes a critical look at the history of the Malaysian communist party. The Nameless (2014) was the run-up to his latest theatre piece, The Mysterious Lai Teck. The Name consists of two versions: The Name I and The Name II. The Name I was inspired by work from Gene Z. Hanrahan, the first writer who tried to put together a comprehensive history of the Malaysian communist party. The film consists of sampled clips from American movies in which a writer can be seen at work. With the American fiction, Ho constructs a life of a fictional writer documenting a history, while the question is how reliable his sources are. So many texts by Hanrahan were published that for a long time it was believed the name was a pseudonym for several writers. The spoken text in The Name I consists of fragments from different books supposedly written by Hanrahan. However... the American researcher Marc Opper reveals a different story, namely that Hanrahan was no fictional but an actual person. This discovery was the reason for Ho Tzu Nyen to make a second version of The Name. In The Name II, we hear parts of Marc Opper’s research. The basic assumption here is that the writer is not a made-up character but a ghost-writer with connections to the CIA. (see the document Gene Z. Hanrahan: Elusive Historian of the Malayan Emergency as well). The film The Name comes from Ho Tzu Nyen’s ongoing project The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, a virtual critical dictionary in which the L stands for Lai Teck and Legibility, among other things. The G stands for Gene Z. Hanrahan, Ghost and Ghost-writer, while the N stands for The Name.