A BRIEF LOOK AT MALAYSIAN CINEMA

By Amir Muhammad

Malaysian cinema has so far fallen below the radar when it comes to international festivals, but the Torino Film Festival this year screens three of our features and three shorts. This is the largest representation we have ever made in a single European festival, and sets out a note of cautious optimism for greater things.

Malaysian cinema has been one of the least exciting in East Asia due to a combination of factors, social and economic. We have one of the worst censorship systems east of the Taliban. Unlike the Taliban, our censors are still in power. The few Malaysian films that have dared to flirt with race, religion, politics and sex are chopped to bits. Although our population is 22 million, less than 5 percent go to the cinema. The rest prefer to watch pirated videos, in the manufacture of which we are world-beaters.

There is a perception of audience fragmentation, too. Malays make up about 55% of the population and proportionately more of the ticket-buying public. (Butin the two states controlled by the Islamic opposition party, cinemas, those dens of sin, do not exist). So almost all features are aimed at the Malay urban market, ignoring the sizable Chinese and Indian minorities. Malaysia makes about a dozen mainstream features a year, with the average budget of Euro 300,000. The box-office successes tend to have pop stars either acting out versions of their love-lives or portraying valiant police personnel. There are also big-screen adaptations of TV sitcoms and patriotic war movies (funded by the government). Some of these will screen in neighbouring Singapore, but that's about it.

The film industry in Malaya (as it was then called) began in the 1930s and reached its peak in the late 1950s under two studios: Shaw Brothers and Cathay. The headquarters were in Singapore, then in the same country. The earliest films were mainly adaptations from Indian movies; not surprising because the technicians were imported from India. The most beloved and prolific star of this system was P. Ramlee
(1929-1973), a writer-director-singer-songwriter who appeared in over 50 movies of various genres. Until today, his name is evoked in wonder because he was the
one person whose appeal seem to cut across ethnic, class and generational boundaries.

In the mid-60s, the collapse of the studio system, together with the separation between Malaysia and Singapore, sent the film industry into a tailspin. Without the protection of these capitalist patrons or the state, Malaysian films struggled to find a relevance – and an audience. The 1980s were an especially traumatic time as some years saw fewer than 5 films being made. A combination of government incentives and a burgeoning middle-class saw film production and audience figures go up again in the 1990s.

The two most commercially successful directors are Yusof Haslam and Aziz M. Osman, who churn out at least one film a year. Their genre movies, influenced very much by Bollywood and Hollywood conventions, have pretty much defined the parameters of contemporary mainstream cinema. In 1995, U-Wei Saari's "The Arsonist" became the first Malaysian film to screen at Cannes, and his subsequent "Jogho" (1997) was a rare movie to get foreign funding – in this case, Japan's NHK.

The digital-video generation started a few scant years ago. The advantage of DV in exploring themes and styles too risky for theatrical features is self-evident. My "Lips to Lips" (2000) was the first Malaysian DV movie, and was mainly in English. Its lead actor James Lee has gone on to become a more prolific director, with "Room to Let" (2002) being his third feature. Aside from its stylistic hommage to Malaysia's best-known filmic export Tsai Ming-Liang, it is also rare for being in Chinese. There has also been an increase in the making of independent shorts, thanks to regular screening platforms organised by the Malaysian Film Club in Kuala Lumpur. Ho Yuhang started out with experimental shorts and "Min" is his first feature; although commissioned by a TV company as a 45-minute story, he made his own, superior, 80-minute cut, which is shown here.

As an advertising director, Yasmin Ahmad virtually pioneered the format of commercials that tell very local, heart-warming, stories. Many of her ads have become part of the Malaysian collective memory in a way hardly achieved by our post-P. Ramlee films. It's therefore exciting to see her gifts applied to her 16mm feature "Rabun" (2003). A work strong in subtlety and nuance but which eschews alienating tropes of artiness, I wonder if the myopia depicted in "Rabun" is also the way for us all to start seeing things more clearly.

Kedua-dua artikel ini ditulis khusus untuk buku program Festival Filem Torino ke 21 yang akan berlangsung dari 13-21 November. Ini untuk memberikan sedikit perspektif tentang filem dan juga senario industri filem di Malaysia kerana menurut kata Amir, masyarakat di sana tidak pernah menonton filem dari Malaysia. Terima kasih Amir!