Conclusion

‘These parallelisms... suppose the existence of a secret form

of time, a pattern of repeated lines’
(Jorge Luis Borges, 1979: 103).

‘What is important, what has meaning, is the journey... [and]

journeys are through history as well as through a landscape’
(Theo Angelopoulos, quoted in Horton, 1997: 98).

The previous chapters have been a series of interrupted journeys or forays into
and around Malaysian film culture, with each chapter approaching its subject
increasingly more specifically, until a selection of films made in Malaysia were
examined in detail in chapter 4 in order to illustrate the arguments presented
throughout the book. The metaphor of the journey is important and relevant,
because it suggests a movement through time and space. Movement has been
the prime characteristic of the theoretical and cultural perspectives employed
in the argument: the movement of ideas and the movement of peoples through
place and history, defined as transtextuality and transmigration. The two are
intimately linked by those ‘lines of connectedness’ frequently referred to in the
book, and each chapter is structured as a series of ‘border crossings’ that high-
light the cross-cultural nature of the enterprise. Journeys have also been cen-
tral to the histories and stories of the cultures examined in this book: the
journeys of the sojourners to the Archipelago, whether as elite or mass mi-
grants; the fearful journeys across the kaala pani by Indian laborers; the jour-
neys from the kampung to the city and back to the kampung; the journeys of
the exiled Rama and Pandavas in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; the jour-
neys of the Chinese knight-errant men and women; the journeys of Hang
Tuah. This chapter recaps and summarizes the complex and detailed argu-
ments of the previous chapters, before presenting the major conclusions of the
book.
The introduction considered the location of the analyst in relation to the
book’s argument, represented as literal and cultural journeys between Austra-
lia and Malaysia. The encounters with Malaysian cultural products attested to
the difficulties and the creative possibilities of cross-cultural analysis, irrespec-
tive of the linguistic/cultural origin of the product. The films discussed indi-
cate the heterogeneity and cultural complexity of film distribution and
exhibition in Malaysia, where Malay, Chinese, Hong Kong, Indian and Ameri-
242 Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film

can films are all shown in ‘mainstream’ cinemas and the phenomenon of spe-
cialist or ‘art’ cinemas does not exist. However, the experience of watching
these films in Malaysia did suggest a correlation between the linguistic/cul-
tural origin of the films and the ethnic compositions of the audiences.
Chapter 1, Border Crossings, confronted the more theoretical issues of cross-
cultural analysis and transtextuality, both of which are crucially connected to
cultural interaction and hybridization, epitomized by Edward Said’s essay,
‘Traveling Theory,’ which traced the movement and transformation of ideas
through space and time. Consequently, anterior and posterior cultures/texts
are connected by diasporic association, where, through processes such as
translation and adaption, ‘newness’ is constructed. The case study of the trans-
formation of the Western, as it encountered other cultural practices and narra-
tive traditions, illustrated the ways in which generic characteristics adapted to
local conditions and local genres. The journey is one of the Western’s standard
narrative devices and the case study adopted that device by traveling from the
‘capital city,’ the center of 20th century film culture – Hollywood – to its ante-
rior culture, Europe, and then to one of the so-called margins of international
culture: Asia. Along the way, aspects of the Western genre were absorbed, re-
jected and manipulated – changes that eventually affected the nature of the
genre in Hollywood itself. These border-crossings also represent my personal
historical journey through cinema, which gradually embraced European and
then Asian films and reconceived the center/margin relationship (Hollywood
versus the rest) as multi-directional ‘global cultural flows’ (Appadurai’s term).
The case study’s eventual concentration on Japanese, Chinese (mainland and
Hong Kong) and Indian films also highlights the fact that these represent the
major influences on Malaysian culture. The chapter ended at the border, be-
cause the discussion of film in Malaysia first required historical and cultural
contextualization.
Chapter 2, Malaysian Society and Culture, undertook a historical journey
through the Malay Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, but one that was
continually interrupted by a series of ‘digressions’ to societies that impacted
upon the region: India, the Arab world, China and the West. The construction
of a national cultural identity based on criteria like origin, tradition and conti-
nuity, exemplified by the Melakan Golden Age, was challenged by the volun-
tary and forced ‘lines of connectedness’ that resulted from the commercial and
cultural journeys that peoples made to and from the region. The relatively
static spatial format of this chapter glosses the space-time characteristics of the
Wayang and the Bangsawan, where predictability of place and of the conven-
tions of spatial sequencing exist alongside a non-linear and non-causal tempo-
ral scheme, which encourages narrational strategies such as coincidence and
digression. Wayang and Bangsawan were also the two major cultural forms
 Conclusion 243

discussed because they typify the complex interaction between diverse cul-
tural traditions, and because they were major influences on Malaysian films.
Chapter 3, Film in Malaysia, resumed the journey interrupted at the end of
chapter 1, by identifying influential cultural centers and tracking their interac-
tion with local practices. Each of these centers is itself a conglomerate of cul-
tural accretions, rather than a fixed set of attributes – the anterior text is always
itself a posterior text. The most powerful influence is that of India, whose com-
plex, multiple language/film culture was shaped by traditional and colonial
forms (Parsee theater) and remains the single most important influence on Ma-
laysian films up to the present. The Chinese cinema originated in Shanghai,
the most European of Chinese cities early last century and the birthplace of
Chinese modernism. The impact of Shanghai film culture extended to other
parts of China, to Hong Kong, to Indonesia and to the Malay Peninsula. Hong
Kong, originally an intermediary ‘port of call,’ emerged as the most important
Chinese filmic influence on the Malay Archipelago (as well as on much of the
Asian/African film world). In Indonesia, the presence of Chinese and Indian
cultural and filmic traditions produced quite a different cinema, which itself
stimulated the film industry in Malaya in the 1930’s. Japan’s occupation of the
Peninsula during World War II affected the local industry in terms of produc-
tion output and exhibition practices, but Japanese esthetic and filmic influ-
ences were confined to quite specific instances. Filmic interaction between
Malaysia and its close neighbors has been minimal (the Philippines, some of
whose directors worked in the Malay industry) or negligible (Thailand). On
the other hand, the Arab influence has been significant, primarily through Is-
lam; in filmic terms, the only reference is Egyptian cinema, a hegemonic indus-
try in the Arab world (and in Africa). The European impact on Malaysian film
was largely confined to the British colonial censorship system. While Ameri-
can film has been as pervasive in Malaysia as elsewhere, its overall popularity
ran (until the late 1990’s) a distant second to that of Hong Kong film and its cul-
tural influence similarly ran a poor second to that of Indian cinema.
Consequently, Malaysian films have been and remain incorporative, adapt-
ing and reshaping filmic and other cultural material, so that its cinematic iden-
tity cannot be characterized as rigidly national in terms of uniqueness.
Furthermore, it was argued that the relationship between these film cultures is
better described as interdependent, because the diverse Malaysian audiences
helped influence the genres, stars and narratives of films from places like
Hong Kong, Bombay, Madras, Jakarta and Manila. Similarly, filmmakers from
these production centers worked in Malaysian films, introducing their indu-
strial, cultural and esthetic traditions, which were always adapted to local con-
ditions. The most persistent of these factors was the almost total concentration
on the Malay experience, resulting in the absence and therefore the invisibility
244 Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film

of almost half of the population of the country, primarily the Chinese and In-
dian Malaysians.
After chapter 3’s concentration on spatial ‘lines of connectedness’, chapter
4, Malaysian Cinema, returned to the more temporal journey of chapter 2, re-
maining locally focused, while maintaining the cross-cultural perspectives
discussed in chapter 3. The chapter’s title evokes the national cinema texts
critiqued at the start of chapter 3, and chapter 4 actually employs their chrono-
logical structures, which tend to be narrativized as a scenario of ‘origin, adver-
sity, survival and triumph.’ In that respect, this chapter ‘flirts’ with the national
cinema discourse. However, the film analyses were very specific and detailed
in attempting to tease out narrative, stylistic and thematic components, that
demonstrated the problematic character of national cinema concepts such as
coherence, homogeneity, uniqueness and national identity. Likewise, the anal-
yses identified how trans-cultural interactions shaped the local film culture
and how that local culture adopted and resisted aspects of cultural influences,
or even rejected and erased them to create a particular local hybridity and het-
erogeneity. Each of the analyses demonstrated the multiple traditions and
complex intertextuality of these films, thus stressing their cross-cultural condi-
tion, synchronically and diachronically.
Hujan Panas was perhaps the most ‘Indian’ film examined. As was the
case with most Malaysian films in the 1950’s, the director was Indian. The film
adopts most of the Hindi melodrama conventions, even introducing the
‘darsan look’ in some of the early scenes. The protagonist resembles the
Devdas/Majnun figure of Indian cinema, although with an intriguing local
resolution that has features of the amuk phenomenon. Unlike the Indian
equivalent, the mise-en-scene is unadorned, while the song/dance routines in-
terrupt the narrative (as in Parsee theater and Bangsawan), but are strongly
motivated by the performance-oriented plot (more typical of the Chinese mu-
sical melodramas, some of which similarly ‘replayed’ the successful musical
career of their protagonists). Yet the film applies these diverse strategies to a
homogenous Malay world, indifferent to the reality of a multi-ethnic society
that constituted Malaya and Malaysia. Difference within the film’s Malay
community is limited to a tradition/modernity conflict between the two
women (a typical Indian melodrama situation), although the gender relations,
including the passive masculinity of the P. Ramlee figure, are more complex
than in much Hindi cinema.
In retrospect, Hujan Panas represents a model of Malay cinema that has re-
mained remarkably consistent over the past forty years. The Malay-directed
Penarik Beca continues this tradition, perhaps even emphasizing cross-cul-
tural influences to a greater extent than the earlier film – P. Ramlee always
amalgamated local and other influences in his films and his music. The film’s
 Conclusion 245

musical numbers are more integrated into the film than was the case with
Hujan Panas, but their extradiegetic ‘reverberations’ became a P. Ramlee
trademark. Gender relations are linked to class and to westernization, issues
harnessed to the kampung/city dichotomy that persists in the Malaysian cin-
ema. The Hang Tuah/Hang Jebat-like conflict also became a recurrent theme
in the ensuing films.
With Hang Tuah, this theme took center stage, although the adaption of
this Malay foundational narrative by an imported Indian director/script-
writer within the Indian melodrama tradition, introduced intertextual ten-
sions that re-interpreted the anterior Hikayat Hang Tuah text. The film’s
emphasis on personal relations and on the margin, counter and critique the
male power that dominated Melaka, the center of Malay culture. The heteroge-
neity of the work is demonstrated by the significant influence of both the Way-
ang and the Ramayana. The revisionist Hang Jebat attempted to present
Jebat’s perspective, but the analysis demonstrated that his rebelliousness is
quickly reduced to a (melodramatic) tragedy of a man in conflict with himself.
In keeping with the P. Ramlee mode of filmmaking, Hussain Haniff draws
upon Indian and Japanese cinematic references to tell this most Malay of sto-
ries. Semerah Padi is also considered to be strongly influenced by Japanese
cinema, especially that of Kurosawa; however, the Indian presence is once
again significant and both are harnessed to construct a narrative that charac-
terizes itself as a foundational text alongside the Hikayat Hang Tuah and its
filmic adaptions. The pre-Melakan setting of the film cannot mask the contem-
porary significance of this tale about the birth of a (new) nation.
Ibu Mertua-ku is undoubtedly the most heterogeneous of Malay films, in-
corporating most of the formal and thematic concerns so far discussed. Its
close resemblance to Deedar, its Guru Dutt-inspired song ‘picturizations’ and
the complex employment of darsan do not produce a clone of Indian popular
cinema. All these elements contribute to an almost self-reflexive study of vi-
sion, attraction and desire that draws on previous Malay films, like Hujan
Panas and Antara Dua Darjat, to produce a film totally focused on the Ma-
lay experience and its internal fissures – not ethnicity, but class, gender and
kampung/city tensions. Matinya Seorang Patriot replays many of these
tensions, despite it having been made more than twenty years later.
Westernization dominates the threats to kampung and (male) Malay identity,
even though western art film techniques like image/sound displacements are
eagerly included. On the other hand, Indian culture and cinema retains a pow-
erful presence, including the Mahabharata and darsan, although the film at-
tacks ‘foreign’ (especially Indian) influences on Malay culture.
Fenomena and Selubung are both ‘return to source’ narratives, drawing
on Malaysia’s East Coast kampung world for their discourses about Ma-
246 Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film

lay/Muslim identity. Both films return to the tradition of earlier Malay (and
Indian) melodramas, where women are attracted to passive males, where
‘childhood’ scenes predestine adult behavior, and where songs are ‘picturized’
within the narrative. Fenomena’s rejection of modernity/westernization sug-
gests that identity can only be found within the kampung, whereas Selubung,
adopting a more international perspective, proposes an urban Malay identity
that must continue to be nurtured and sustained by the kampung tradition.
The hybrid, cultural nature of Malaysian cinema is illustrated in Fenomena by
the animistic practice of ‘Mandi Bunga’ being combined with a forthright
‘darsan look’ by the heroine upon the Devdas-like hero. At the same time, the
increasingly intrusive presence of pop musicians in these films recalls the mu-
sical melodramas of P. Ramlee.
Like Ibu Mertua-ku, Perempuan, Isteri &... stresses vision, attraction and
desire, but does so to attack the culture that the P. Ramlee film and all previous
Malay films have valorized: the kampung world. The film’s single-minded fo-
cus on a Malay community becomes a critique of the homogeneity that has
otherwise been such a ‘blind spot’ in Malaysian cinema. The masculinity that
was a ‘given’ in earlier films is unmasked here through a rigorous analysis of
the ‘look,’ including its Indian variant, the darsan phenomenon. In a contra-
dictory way, the film’s ‘Malayness’ is not evident in its style, which exhibits lit-
tle of the cultural tradition that has informed Malaysian cinema. Therefore on
both a thematic and formal level, this film confronts some of the central ten-
sions within Malaysian society: Malay/Malaysia(n), city/kampung and
male/female sexuality. The contrast with Sembilu could not be greater, since
the latter film represents a reworking and revitalization of the characteristic
Malay cinema identified in the Hujan Panas comments above. The musi-
cian/performer, reminiscent of the P. Ramlee era, is again linked to a passive
masculinity that attempts to locate itself in relation to tradition and modernity
(as represented by the two women in the film).
The recycling of these diverse cultural materials suggests that the notion of
a homogenous national cinema is constantly eroded by the heterogeneity of
Malaysian film culture. National cinema discourse argues that difference is
typically absorbed and assimilated, but the example of Malaysian cinema sug-
gests that the tendency to homogenization is always and everywhere frag-
mented by newly introduced or pre-existing cultural material. The Malaysian
films certainly raise issues about ethnicity, religion, gender, tradition/moder-
nity, and social conditions that purport to ‘speak the nation,’ which could thus
be construed as a set of defining characteristics of national (Malaysian) iden-
tity. However, as argued in chapter 2, the homogeneity of that identity is itself
untenable. Paradoxically, the films imply the heterogeneity of Malaysian
national identity by confining their attention to a single ethnicity: the Malays.
 Conclusion 247

The ethnic singularity of the films therefore exposes the ethnic plurality of Ma-
laysian society and even the cultural hybridity of Malay culture. In that re-
spect, the Malay emphasis of the films (which exists irrespective of the
ethnicity of the producer, director and scriptwriter) remains in constant ten-
sion with the cultural hybridity of the films themselves. In other words, the
center (Malay culture) does not so much dominate and overpower the mar-
gin/the border as continue itself to be created by it through ‘lines of
connectedness’ that are inevitable outcomes of cultural activity and cultural
interaction, as characterized by that all-encompassing concept of trans-
textuality. The films therefore do not so much ‘speak the nation’ as ‘speak of,
around and beside the nation’ and the perennial conflict between construc-
tions of ‘Malayness’ and ‘Malaysianness’ may well be the most useful defini-
tion of this culture’s identity.
The nature of Malaysian society and its colonial history might suggest that
this cultural interaction is a special case, or at least only typical of
‘postcolonial’ societies. However, I would argue that such concerns with the
margin and the border are endemic to all film cultures. As I demonstrated in
the discussion of national cinema discourse, difference is typically erased in an
attempt to locate the defining characteristics of national cultural identity. Most
of the national cinema studies have been of societies that are considered cul-
turally homogenous, where differences (ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality,
class, etc.) are pushed to the margins. In that respect, heterogeneity is often
camouflaged to create the ‘compulsion to oneness,’ implicit in Stuart Hall’s
characterization of national identity. However, the ‘lines of connectedness’ be-
tween social and cultural topoi (whether local, regional, diasporic or interna-
tional) continue to function both within and between communities, and
cultural difference therefore lies at the heart of all nationally constituted cul-
tures, although rarely as obviously as in Malaysia. This suggests that studies of
national cinema need to be more conscious of the submerged or hidden hetero-
geneity within that culture, as well as between it and other cultures.
This ‘inside-outside’ pattern of cultural production also applies to the ana-
lytical process and to the analyst. My study of Malaysian films has inevitably
missed or overlooked particular Malaysian cultural norms and nuances (al-
though the very concept of a unitary Malaysianness has been discredited), just
as Malaysian film analysts would have disregarded or ignored certain issues
presented in this book, especially in chapters 3 and 4. Nevertheless, the analyt-
ical process adopted – the creative understanding approach suggested by
Willemen, discussed in chapter 1 – tries to be as intertextual as the whole pro-
duction/distribution/exhibition system and as the films themselves. This
intertextuality has been tracked through the social and cultural histories iden-
tified in chapter 2 and has attempted to avoid, even reject, the analytical ap-
248 Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film

proach identified as projective appropriation usually labeled as American-

European theory (Willemen, 1994: 212-213).
While aspects of this theoretical system have been considered (e.g. male
control of ‘the look’), its wholesale application to the films has been resisted or
modified in the context of local historical/cultural conditions (e.g. the more
passive male and the emphasis on darsan). It might have been tempting to em-
brace Mary Ann Doane’s comments on the feminization of the male in the love
story as appropriate to the P. Ramlee persona: ‘[There is] a very strong ten-
dency within the genre of the love story to motivate an apparent overemphasis
on music by situating its major male character – the object of female desire – in
the role of the musician... the male undergoes a kind of feminization by con-
tamination – in other words, he is to a certain degree emasculated by his very
presence in a feminized genre... [if partially recouped] by making him into a
respected artist, a musician’ (Doane, 1987: 97). There is an uncanny applicabil-
ity of these arguments to the male protagonist in Malaysian films, but such a
reading must be resisted, because it counters the cultural context in which
such characters exist. There is no feminization by contamination; women do
position the male as an object of desire, but he is not emasculated as a result.
His masculinity has not changed, it is just culturally different from the mascu-
linity Doane is discussing. Furthermore, the genre of the Malaysian films is not
primarily the love story – Doane’s examples include Letter from an Un-
known Woman (1948) and Intermezzo (1939) – but the musical melodrama,
where the male’s occupation as musician is generically coded.
In conclusion, every culture is local, but no culture is autochthonous, con-
trary to the Malay concept of the bumiputera as ‘sons of the soil.’ If a culture is
perceived as homogenous, it is only because of a failure to recognize its hetero-
geneity (a consequence of time) or to find it unacceptable (a consequence of
cultural policy and power). Such heterogeneity arises from interaction,
diasporic movement and transtextuality– but these processes are not unidirec-
tional. They represent ‘lines of connectedness’ that exist on multiple levels.
These lines may link a community to a homeland (the concern of much
diasporic theory), but they may also become knotted up in the ‘dominant’ cul-
ture, e.g. Malay culture, to the point where they are so intertwined that they
are inextricably contained within that dominant culture. However, difference
will always remain visible and distinct – Salleh Ben Joned suggests a
kebudayaan rojak (salad culture) for Malaysia (Salleh Ben Joned, 1994a: 56) –
and never dissolves into an illusory homogeneity.