The Little Cinema of Malaysia – Out with the Old, In with the New is a paper presented by Hassan Abdul Muthalib at the Regional Seminar on Southeast Asian Cinema held in Ngee Ann Polytechnic earlier this year. Film enthusiasts, particularly local film historians might be interested in this paper as it covers the evolution of Malaysian cinema, from the beginnings of the local (Singaporean and Malaysian) film industry in Singapore, to the current Malaysian filmmaking renaissance led by the “Little Cinema of Malaysia” – filmmakers who use the digital video medium.

Retro slide from local cinema screen courtesy of the National Archives

While the paper chronicles primarily talks about the rise of the Little Cinema of Malaysia, the middle section recaps the history of local film-making, of which both Singapore and Malaysia share the same heritage:

Early Malaysian Cinema Malaysia and Singapore have a shared cinema history as both countries were once a part of British Malaya. Singapore was where the film industry started with the first feature, Leila Majnun (B S Rajhans, 1933). Both the producer and the director were, however, Indian nationals. The film’s actors were all Malays, all of whom came from bangsawan (Malay opera). They were not loath to abandon bangsawan after the Second World War and enter full-scale into films as it promised them a steadier and more lucrative income. Though the key players of the industry were Chinese, Indian, Filipinos and Europeans, cinema then was totally a Malay cinema. The films were a motley collection of tear jerkers, melodrama, horror, comedy and romance that were treated in a classicist manner. However, realist tendencies were evident in some of the films of P Ramlee, M Amin and Hussein Haniff but the melodramatic narratives continued to be maintained. A curious aspect of cinema then was the total absence of anti-colonial sentiments, in stark contrast to the literary and journalistic scene. Instead, criticism was leveled at the Malays themselves: at royalty, the rich and especially the ordinary man. Non-Malays usually appeared as comedy relief or as extras, playing leading roles in only two films, Seruan Merdeka (The Call to Independence – B S Rajhans, 1946), where for the first and only time on screen, Malays and Chinese fought the Japanese, and Selamat Tinggal Kekaseh-ku (Goodbye, My Love – L Krishnan, 1955), the first film to depict inter-racial love.

You can read the edited-for-web version of the paper here.

Tags: Malaysian Cinema, Singapore cinema, Film-making, Hassan Abd Muthalib, Little Cinema of Malaysia