A cinema under the palms: the unruly lives of colonial educational films in British Malaya

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

A Cinema Under the Palms: The Unruly Lives of Colonial Educational Films in British Malaya

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in Critical Studies

by

Nadine Chan

August 2015

© Copyright by
Nadine Chan
2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i

Abbreviations iii

Introduction: Instructing Unruly Empires 1

1. Disciplining Filmic Vagrancies: Venereal Disease Propaganda and the 43
Emergent Governance of an Unruly Medium

2. “They Must be Made Problem Conscious”: Economic Citizenship and the 106
Rural Lecture Caravan

3. Showing Malaya to the World: Cosmopolitan Dreams and Imperial Citizens 166
in the Filmic Imaginary

4. Cinematic Afterlives: Films of the Malayan Emergency at the Transition 229
from Empire to Independence

Conclusion: Colonial Film’s Biographical Futures 288

Select Bibliography 301

i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The members of my dissertation committee were the anchors for this project. Priya Jaikumar was
my scholarly beacon and I could not have asked for more in an advisor. Laura Isabel Serna first
introduced me to archival research and I have not looked back since. Her intellectual rigor and
untold generosity as a mentor continues to be my inspiration. Janet Hoskins encouraged me to
push my own boundaries and it is to her that I owe thanks for the innovative parts of this project.
Michael Renov’s passion for non-fiction has rubbed off on me; this project has grown immensely
from his encouragement and supportive critiques. Staff and faculty at the Department of Critical
Studies at USC, particularly Akira Lippit, Bill Whittington, Linda Overholt, Alicia White, and
Christine Acham deserve special thanks for keeping the administrative machine and department
culture running so that I would have the best environment in which to work.

Archivists and staff at the National Archives in the United Kingdom, British Library, Wellcome
Library, British Film Institute, Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, Imperial
War Museum, National Archives of Singapore, and National Archives of Malaysia handled
stacks of my documents without breaking a sweat. Tim Yap Fuen offered me an extended
welcome at the National University of Singapore’s Singapore-Malaysia Collection.

From the beginning, this project has been deeply indebted to the intellectual generosity and
encouragement of Peter Bloom at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Colleagues at USC
and from the VSRI dissertation writing group read multiple drafts of chapters before they were
fit for the public eye. Thanks also to Hassan Muthalib who has helped me maneuver various
institutional challenges in obtaining the films. Panivong Norindr, Nitin Govil, Daniella
Bleichmar, Geoffrey Benjamin, and Rusaslina Idrus were also generous with their time, ideas,
and references. In addition, feedback from anonymous readers at Cinema Journal has benefitted
parts of this work. Outside of the academy, Law Siak Hong at the Perak Heritage Society, Colin
Nicholas at the Center for Orang Asli Concerns, and David and Janice Foon at the Gopeng
Rainforest Resort took me on many road trips. Their heartfelt dedication to their work is an
inspiration and I am deeply grateful for their patience with a rookie. Thanks also to Nicholas Tse
who sheltered me in London and filmed my interviews in Malaysia. Most of all, I wish to thank
the residents of Yong Peng and Tanah Hitam who opened their pasts to me and told me their
stories.

Research for this dissertation would not have been possible without the support of a Social
Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship. Beyond granting me
the time and finances to pursue a year’s worth of research and writing, feedback from grant
readers and other IDRF recipients enabled me to push this project further than I could have
otherwise imagined. I wish to thank Daniella Sarnoff and the SSRC staff for working behind the
scenes to make my travels possible. Grants from the Visual Studies Research Institute (VSRI),
the Science Technology and Society Research Group, and the Center for Transpacific Studies at
USC enabled me to conduct crucial preliminary research at the early stages of this project. I wish
to thank Vanessa Schwartz, Kate Flint, Viet Ngyuen, Andrew Lakoff and other members of these
organizations for taking a chance on my work at its most formative. In addition, a Provost

ii

Fellowship from USC has given me two years of dedicated coursework, research, and writing
time.

My parents have given me the freedom to pursue an academic life and for that I am grateful. My
mother, Rosmawati Sulaiman, has played many roles in the making of this project. As my
translator, travel companion, and “part-time research assistant,” she has accompanied me into
chilly archives and sweaty jungles at times when I could not find the intellectual courage to go
alone. It is to Hokiat Lim that I owe the joy of completing this dissertation. I could not have done
it without his steady presence.

Whatever strengths this work possesses are the culmination of the support of all who I have
mentioned (and those who I had inadvertently left out). Its errors are entirely my own.

iii

ABBREVIATIONS

A.N.M. Arkib Negara Malaysia (National Archive Malaysia)

B.S.H.C. British Social Hygiene Council

C.O. Colonial Office

F.M.S. Federated Malay States

M.C.P. Malayan Communist Party

N.A. National Archives, UK

N.A.S. National Archives Singapore

S.S. Straits Settlements

U.F.M.S. Unfederated Malay States

1

INTRODUCTION

Instructing Unruly Empires

Liow Ket An, from the town of Yong Peng in Malaysia tells me that he does not
remember the cameramen who had come to film him at his family-run business one day back in
1953. Midway while watching the film Proudly Presenting Yong Peng (1954) however, a look of
astonishment appears on his face and he points excitedly at the screen. There he is in the film, a
young man of fifteen. Also in the film, standing beside him, is his father. Father and son were
stirring fermented soybeans and brine in large ceramic vats to make the soy sauce that they
would eventually sell. Their soy-sauce business had long since closed and, like the rest of the
town, many things have changed since that film was made. The elder Liow had passed on many
years ago. His portrait hung on the wall above us as we gathered in the younger Liow’s living
room that afternoon in March 2014, peering at the images playing on my iPad. Liow senior’s
reappearance in the film was the source of much joy and wonderment to the members of the
household. How similar the two men looked, we remarked, so much so that when Liow (senior)
appeared on the screen, Mrs. Liow mistook him for her husband (Liow junior)—an error that
resulted in much teasing. Even though his appearance in Proudly Presenting Yong Peng only
lasted for seconds, Liow asks for a copy of the film so that he might keep it for memory’s sake.
This, he explains, is the only moving-image record that he has of his father as a young man so
his grandchildren might like to see it someday.
Proudly Presenting Yong Peng was produced as a colonial educational film in 1953 by
the British government in Malaya, the Southeast Asian territory that is presently peninsula

2

Malaysia and Singapore. At the time, it was made to educate people about the benefits of living
in government-built compounds known as New Villages in which thousands of peasants had
been resettled during the social upheaval of the Malayan Emergency—the anti-imperial
communist insurgency that took place between 1948 and 1960. The film lived an active and
well-travelled life, moving from village to village across the Malaysian peninsula and the island
of Singapore on the backs of touring trucks. It was accompanied by other films bearing a similar
agenda—to bring modernity and good citizenship to millions of people in the colony.
Proudly Presenting Yong Peng was a film like many others produced by the British
government in Malaya for the purpose of “native” education. Produced by the Malayan
government though also imported from abroad since the early 1920s, these films covered a wide
range of subjects relevant to everyday life such as health and hygiene, agricultural methods,
financial management, and civic responsibility. What I call “colonial educational films,” they
were made with the intention of shaping modern colonial citizens through visual education. The
broadness of the term “educational” encapsulates how such films typically consisted of
overlapping elements from instructional, documentary, and propaganda genres expressed
through both fiction as well as non-fiction narratives. Intended to reach as wide a population as
possible in the colonies, films traveled to rural settlements through itinerant mobile cinemas and
were also screened at temporary venues such as agricultural exhibitions, classrooms, and army
barracks.
As films that were largely intended for viewing outside the dominant conventions of
commercial and theatrical cinema, the genre of colonial educational film can be considered a
subcategory of the nontheatrical.

Until recently, nontheatrical films have long been ignored or
even dismissed in film scholarship. Appearing in places such as classrooms, surgery halls,

3

military barracks, moving vehicles, itinerant outdoor venues, museums, and places of religious
worship, nontheatrical films in the first half of the twentieth century were typically small-gauge
films used for educational, industrial, and institutional purposes. For a long time, such films were
deemed to be of little commercial and artistic value. Hence, most of these films have perished
due to overuse and/or neglect and few have survived in film archives. As a result, these films
often live transient, ephemeral, and even unglamorous lives.
Attention has turned toward nontheatrical films in the last ten years, no doubt aided by
their increasing accessibility via digital online archives. Alongside the bi-annual Orphan Film
Symposium and the announcement in 2008 of a Scholarly Interest Group for Nontheatrical Film
and Media in the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, the nontheatrical has generated much
interest particularly following the recent publication of anthologies and special journal editions
that examine various “useful cinemas” in the United States.
1
These works have explored diverse
“genres” of the nontheatrical including industrial, academic, and instructional film, while other
authors have addressed the home movie as the most pervasive, yet often ignored, form of media.
2

These works have made inroads into a scholarly terrain still very much dominated by fiction
and/or commercial film while offering invaluable methodologies, frameworks, and a scholarly
community with which to approach the unique demands of researching the nontheatrical. Most
importantly, they have endorsed alternative genealogies of film that existed outside of well-
studied theatrical and/or entertainment circuits, legitimizing a long marginalized history of film
as an exciting new area of media studies.
However, most of this work has thus far been limited largely to North American contexts,
perhaps linking the field’s development too closely with the particular narratives, chronologies,
and experiences of 20
th
century America. Indeed, nontheatrical films might have been

4

encountered through different discourses in other parts of the world, as recent writing on
nontheatrical government in East Asia suggests.
3
For thousands of people in the colonies for
instance, filmic experiences consisted of educational films screened at makeshift outdoor venues
in rural villages rather than the latest imports from Hollywood at costly urban theaters. Colonial
educational and propaganda film is an area of scholarship that has long been concerned with
such nontheatrical encounters though it has not quite staked its claim in that field.
Pioneering research in the field of educational film in the colonies was carried out by
Rosalyn Smyth in her 1979 essay on the 1930s Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment in British
East and Central Africa and in subsequent articles on the Central African Film Unit and the
Colonial Film Unit.
4
Monographs by James Burns, Brian Larkin, and Peter Bloom on film,
education, and the imperial project have since deepened and broadened research in both British
and French educational film in Africa in the 2000s.
5
The field of colonial educational cinema has
also grown considerably with the publication of two anthologies on empire and film in
conjunction with the launch of the Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire online
database in 2010.
6
Aside from bringing diverse filmic encounters in the colonial world to light,
this project has spearheaded the invaluable task of making many colonial educational films from
archives in Britain available online, initiating their renewed public circulation today.
While these publications have traced important histories of educational film in Africa and
South Asia, writing on colonized Southeast Asia has been few, scattered and relatively recent.
7

An in-depth study of film and empire in British Malaya has not previously been done and this
dissertation highlights the overlooked importance of the region in this body of scholarship.
8

Along with India, Malaya was the seat of experimentation and innovation in colonial educational
film. As a decade-long, colony-wide operation, the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme of the 1920s

5

was one of the first sustained and large-scale government filmmaking efforts for “native”
education in the British Colonies. The scheme awakened minds to the idea of using the new
medium of film for imperial education at a time when the Colonial Office in London had only
just begun seriously considering cinema’s educational value in the colonies.
9
Because it housed
multiple “Asiatic” races in one location, Malaya was a unique territory that provided varied
subjects for comparisons of visual literacy. It became a site of experimentation for ideas about
colonial filmmaking that were later implemented in other British colonies.
Cradled between the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea, Malaya was an
amalgamation of different structures of colonial administration. British administrative presence
in the region began in 1819 with the founding of Singapore by Sir Stanford Raffles. In 1926, the
East India Company merged Singapore, Penang, and Melaka to form the Straits Settlements—a
Crown Colony and legally British soil. The signing of the Pangkor treaty in 1874 marked a
formal departure from former policies of British non-intervention and was the first step in
establishing British administrative influence over the rest of the Malay Peninsula. Selangor,
Perak, Negeri Sembilan, and Pahang formed the Federated Malay States (F.M.S.), which were
each managed by a British Resident.
10
The remaining Unfederated Malay States (U.F.M.S.)
consisting of Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis, and Terengganu were standalone British
protectorates with relatively greater autonomy. Following the Japanese Occupation from 1941 to
1945, these three entities were consolidated under the Malayan Union in 1946 and managed
collectively by the British until Malaya’s independence in 1957.
As one of the most profitable territories in the British Empire for its exports of tin and
rubber, Malaya’s lucrative economy attracted large numbers of immigrants from other parts of
Asia. Malaya was a multicultural collection of people of different races who spoke different

6

languages and with varying levels of literacy. Film’s portability, its relative ease in transcending
language barriers (via inter-titling, lecturers, and dubbing), and the sheer spectacular appeal of
the medium itself made it a key means of communicating to this diverse population en mass.
Able to the reach out to tens of thousands in any given week at the height of its popularity during
the Malayan Emergency, colonial educational films extended the messages of empire far and
wide.
Malaya’s diversity also generated broader conversations about what film was and how it
ought to be used. With highly cosmopolitan urban centers such Singapore, Penang, and Kuala
Lumpur where large cinema halls quickly replaced more traditional forms of entertainment,
voracious appetites for films both encouraged the use of cinema for educational purposes while
also making film a target of moral censorship in the 1920s. The debates that arose regarding film
as either useful or detrimental in the colonies resonated not just in Malaya but in the rest of the
British Empire as well. At the same time, bringing films to rural audiences who had never before
seen them necessitated the invention of mobile film technologies so as to teach people
throughout the country what it meant to be part of a larger colonial constellation. Film played a
critical role in suturing a coherent imagined Malaya when the colony was in truth divided by
different racial allegiances and political loyalties. Film therefore had a significant part in the very
fabric of Malayan society. As film production culture in Malaya developed, Malaya itself
became internationally know as a producer of first-rate documentary and educational material.
By the 1950s, the work of the Malayan Film Unit became exemplary of documentary film
production even as Britain’s own domestic industry was in decline.
11
Malaya was thus no
outpost in the steamy tropics but a site where dynamic discourses about the constitution of film
as an entity and a concept took place.

7

This dissertation has two ambitions. The first is to establish alternative genealogies of the
production, distribution, and reception of nontheatrical films in British maritime Southeast Asia
from the earliest screenings of educational films to the public in the early 1920s until the official
“end” of empire in 1957. This is a reconsideration of existing historicisms in traditional cinema
studies frameworks—traditions that analyze films from within the contexts of Western urban
modernity, commodity culture, and entertainment industries. Instead, I am interested in a
different discourse of the cinema, one where moving image spectacles are entangled with the
long-staying effects of colonial governance. This story does not always take place in urban
centers but also occurs in remote rubber plantations, where images flickered out under the stars.
Untethered from theatres and their static screens, films travelled to the remotest locations
possible on the backs of mobile film units. It is a history of mobility, where films were transient
and itinerant objects that chartered transcontinental paths and traveled along the dusty roads and
rivers of the colony in order to spread their messages of colonial modernity far and wide. This is
an account not just about film, but also about the processes of imperial governance that gave it
life.
Indeed, for the majority of the population in the colonial world, films were not simply
entertainment, but were first encountered as tools of governance. The pleasure of the moving
image was inseparable from the pervasive effects of imperial policy. Certain educational films
explicitly rendered aspects of private life (such as one’s personal hygiene or sexual desires, the
direct business of the colonial state. Other films with loftier ambitions taught colonial citizens in
both the colony and the metropole about Malaya’s place in the larger constellation of the
Commonwealth. All films sought to discipline both the individual body as well as the population

8

to become part of the machinery of the colonial state through the mechanisms of biopower.
Michel Foucault describes biopower as the power over life that is centered over the
[…] body as a machine—its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the
extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its
integration into systems of efficient and economic controls.
12

Colonial capitalism would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into
the machinery of production and the adjustment of the population into the logics of colonial
modernity. I argue in this dissertation that films became the persuasive agents that rendered such
governance possible.
However, films were not static objects—closed texts that, once produced, embodied
fossilized meanings and were destined for strict and predictable paths of circulation. Rather,
films were unruly things that were being used or received in ways that often frustrated their
intended purposes as agents of empire. Their physical bodies enabled unexpected movements
across space and time while the “openness” of their textual bodies permitted multiple
interpretations at the level of the everyday. For instance, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng did not
have a fixed identity but had life trajectories that changed as it interacted with human agents.
After Malaya achieved independence from colonial governance in 1957, Proudly Presenting
Yong Peng lay dormant in the archives at the Imperial War Museum for almost fifty years until
the year 2014 when I brought it back to Yong Peng—the place of its “birth.” Many people with
whom I have spoken to, who are themselves well into their eighties, recalled the effectiveness of
such films as propaganda for the colonial government. Others however scoffed that people were
not simpletons who were so easily seduced by government teachings. Many would attend
screenings for reasons other than to be dutifully educated. For people in the present-day town of
Yong Peng furthermore, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng became an unexpected repository of

9

personal memory and cultural heritage. Thus endowed with an unexpected afterlife, Proudly
Presenting Yong Peng found itself embodying multiple meanings alongside (and after) its life as
a tool of colonial governance.
Thus, this dissertation’s second objective is to configure films as unruly objects. The idea
of the “unruly” is a key framework in my conceptualization of film. Rather than thinking of
films as closed and finite texts, I configure films as cultural “things-in-motion”—unruly things
that may deviate from their original trajectories and frustrate the disciplinary purposes for which
they were intended.
13
Hence, the “unruly empires” in the title of this introduction doubly refers
to the colonial subject body in “need” of disciplining as well as the filmic medium itself whose
unpredictable yet powerful influence the colonial government was seeking to control.
Ultimately, this dissertation argues that even as films were instruments of empire that sought to
discipline audiences into ever increasing forms of colonial governance, films also chartered
errant paths across international borders and were received in ways that troubled their
disciplinary intentions.

Unhinging Deep Historicism: Cinematic Modernity and Colonial Governance

At its barest, the underlying politics of this dissertation is, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, to
“provincialize historicism” as it currently exists in film studies. For Chakrabarty, “historicism”
refers to the grand narratives that supported epistemologies of European modernity and
capitalism as the history and future of all human society.
14
Historicism was what made
modernity or capitalism “look not simply global but rather as something that became global over
time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it.”
15
Such logic supported

10

nineteenth century colonial domination because it posited the colonies as belonging to an earlier
historical time through a notion of human progress that began “first [in] Europe, then
elsewhere.”
16
Chakrabarty’s writing articulates the necessity for a sideways displacement of such
historicism. It raises questions about the need to address other possible means of understanding
history beyond the telos of capitalism or European modernity, for that sort of history only allows
certain stories to be told while effacing others. The role of the postcolonial is therefore to think
of the political in ways beyond universalizing histories, but not anachronistic from it. A constant
endeavor for the postcolonial scholar is to continuously ask what epistemologies underwrite our
historiography of the world and our understanding of its present.
17

To “provincialize” historicism in film studies would be to think about other histories that
ran beside (but not necessarily alongside) logics rooted in a particular experience of cinema amid
the telos of Western experiences of modernity (not to presume, of course, that this was itself in
any way singular or homogenous). Drawing on Georg Simmel, Sigfried Kracauer, and Walter
Benjamin, film historians have located the emergence of cinema within the context of turn-of-
the-century Western modernity and its corollary experience of commodity consumption in the
city.
18
Cinematic experience was rationalized through the sensory shocks and sensational
amusements of late nineteenth century urban life in Western cities. In these contexts, cinema was
one element amid many new modes of spectacle, distraction, entertainment, and consumption.
Like shopping centers, museums, and amusement parks, cinematic visual spectacles were part of
the plethora of urban hyperstimuli that competed for the fickle fancies of city-dwellers as they
“endeavored to channel the subject’s floating attention not just as a viewer but also as a
consumer.”
19
These histories situate cinema’s genealogy amid the telos of commodity culture
that was the corollary of industrial capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century.

11

As film historians have begun revising the geographies of emergent cinemas outside of
Europe and the United States, these narratives of early cinema have been revisited. Indeed, films
are things that are born in many places at different times and as Zhang Zhen notes, these uneven
emergences require a different chronology and periodization.
20
For Zhang, who writes on early
Shanghainese screen cultures, “early cinema” stands not so much for a specific “aesthetic or
period category” but as an “emblem of modernity, or rather competing visions of modernity, on
the ‘non-synchronous synchronous’ global horizon of film culture.”
21
Elsewhere, Ravi
Vasudevan calls for a “centrifugal history” as a way of understanding the cinemas of South Asia
as part of not one but many dispersed histories that include mainstream and local
“microcinemas” whose periodizations run out of sync with the big institutional histories.
22
In
Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, Jennifer Bean notes how the collection “foreground[s]
the politics of space” to challenge this lingering criticism and ponder “the radical heterogeneity
of early film and film cultures for people in diverse sectors and strata of the globe.”
23

Indeed, uneven, discontinuous, and alternative modernities across the globe frustrate
attempts at directly mapping the experience of cinema’s development in the US and Europe on
the colonial experience in Southeast Asia. While many aspects of the arrival of the cinema in
Malaya were similar to that of the Western experience, this genealogy differed in significant
ways as well. For one, the diffusion of the cinema and its ensuing experience followed the
uneven flows of colonial capital and development. The cinematograph first arrived in Singapore
in 1987 where it screened The Serpentine Dance (1895) to a packed hall of elite audiences at the
Adelphi hotel.
24
The first film screening for the general Asiatic public however only took place
in Singapore in 1902 in a waterproof tent on Fort Canning hill.
25
Cinematic modernity was also
not experienced equally and homogenously in the territory. While the larger concretions of

12

colonial presence such as Singapore, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Malacca housed
permanent theatres, exhibition venues were slow to permeate outside of these centers. By 1910,
film became a principal form of entertainment for urbanites but rural dwellers were far less
likely to have shared a cinematic experience amid the sensory assaults of urban modern life.
Instead, mobile cinemas served these outlying settlements. Commercial exhibitors such as the
Shaw Brothers and the Cathay Organization operated a number of these traveling outfits, but a
large proportion were government owned.
26
Cinemas were certainly seen as embodying the
“modern” but they were not necessarily experienced as part of “large-scale transformations of
daily experience resulting from industrialization, rationality, and technological transformations
of modern life” because these processes were not the lived experience for many in the colonies.
27

Indigenous commercial filmmaking in the Malay Peninsula and in Singapore was also
relatively late in forming. Laila Majnun (1933) is believed to have been the first Malay language
feature produced locally.
28
The 1930s saw a handful of other local productions but the domestic
commercial film production industry would not fully take off until after the Japanese occupation.
Subsisting on films from the US, Britain, and China, cosmopolitan screens offered filmgoers
views of the world beyond Malaya before views of Malaya itself. Colonial educational films
produced in the mid-1920s were really one of the first times that Malayan life was captured
onscreen. In the colonies, unlike the metropoles, the government had the upper hand in cinematic
innovation—at least until the arrival of Malayan cinema’s Golden Age in the 1950s and 60s.
This sensitivity toward “the complex and specific negotiations between local histories
and globality” in the uneven experience of modernity is one that Ana López demonstrates in her
seminal essay “Cinema and Modernity in Latin America.”
29
In Making Cinelandia, Laura Isabel
Serna attends to sites of consumption as spaces of “negotiated reading”—productive spaces

13

where Mexican audiences made sense of and produced their own unique modernity via their
engagement with US films and film culture.
30

Borrowing a phrase from Bean, to think of “cinema’s dispersed existence,”
31
for my
purposes would be to locate these discourses of modernity amid other genealogies of visual
experience. For Brian Larkin this would involve challenging that bedrock assumption of cinema
theory, “the relation between cinema and that ur-form of modernity, the commodity.”
32
While
not discounting the “modernity thesis” at all, the particular history of film posited in this
dissertation asks that one broaden the limited experience of modernity as articulated through the
contexts of European fin de siècle commodity culture that has shaped work in early cinema and
the trajectories of histories that follow.
33
As I discuss fully in Chapter 2, colonial education films
were produced, shown, and received under conditions that were different from that of the
“hyperstimulus” of modern urban life.
34
Outside the hustle and bustle of urban cities, colonial
audiences encountered the cinema in remote plantations, New Villages, and tin mines—spaces
that conjured connotations of labor, governance, and discipline rather than the amusement,
consumption, and distraction that was part of early 20
th
century Western urban modernity.
Readings of jittery, over stimulated cinemagoers in early-20
th
century Paris, would sit poorly in
situations where villagers would wait for weeks and hike for miles to attend an evening’s
program by the government’s mobile film unit. Colonial films did not address their audiences as
distracted amusement seekers but as citizens and laborers whose politics and personal habits they
sought to influence. Cinematic modernity as experienced in colonial situations was about the
production of governable citizens through the visual pleasures of the screen; put differently,
governance was an inseparable part of the modernity narrative in the colonies.

14

In other words, unlike films that were produced within entertainment contexts as part of
the explosion of consumer culture and urban modernity, colonial education films were made
distinctly as disciplinary tools. These films were usually not shown just for entertainment but
were screened in contexts intending to incorporate audiences into the machinery of empire.
Films were accompanied by a whole host of other disciplinary mechanisms exacted though the
financial system, wage-labor, health, discourses about sex and sexuality, and civil society.
Governance, rather than just entertainment, was the predominant discourse through which many
Malayans first encountered film. While films conveyed promissory ideals of what it meant to be
“modern,” the spectacle of the cinema was experienced as part of the subjugation of the
colonized to ever increasing forms of governance. The aesthetics of astonishment—ensconced in
early film studies by Tom Gunning and others as the “cinema of attractions”
35
—was complicated
by the accompanying encounter with increasingly intrusive forms of state discipline. I contend
that “modernity” and colonial governance were inseparable bedfellows before colonial screens.
Hence, even as Malayan peasants were swept away by the cinema as a spectacle of colonial
modernity, my evidence shows that they were also suspicious and mocking of it.

Conceived of as instruments of empire, colonial educational film sought to, and did, carry out the
project of colonial modernity in their efforts to produce a particular sort of modern colonial
subject. As spectacular new technologies, they were certainly part of the projection of colonial
modernity itself. Indeed, a historicist approach to the history of colonial educational film, would
stop there; presenting a genealogy of film as a product of turn-of-the-century Western modernity
that radiated across the dark corners of the world bringing modernity and enlightenment from the
center to the periphery. Such an approach would consider films as things that “belonged” to the

15

colonizers having “emerged” from the particular experience of Western modernity (which
historicism would also claim is universal).
But while colonial educational films often fulfilled their educational objectives, they were
also unruly objects that were loosened from their original intent. Colonialism’s alternative
modernities splintered a film’s trajectory into many possibilities as it moved between metropole
and colony, from a colonial to a post-colonial world, and from the reel to the eye. As I will
explain in the section that follows, films’ intrinsic unruliness, allowed them to be diverted from
the machinations of empire in multiple ways.
My research demonstrates that colonial educational film had many lives. Screenings were
not only educational experiences, but were also places of benign enjoyment, illicit pleasure, and
counter-colonial performance. They were spaces where political identities would be performed
and negotiated while also, in the postcolonial state, becoming repositories of memory where lost
places and people “lived” again. Political narratives of empire meshed with the lived experience
of postcolonial modernity through the unruly life of the film.
Hence, aside from the de-coupling of discourses of cinematic history from a parallel
history of Western urban modernity, to counter historicism also involves pondering the lives that
films lived in parallel with their “official” lives. In a sense, it involves divesting the power over a
film’s “life” from the hands of its colonial makers, and distributing that agency among all the
players—the filmmakers, the “colonized” spectators, and the film itself. Thinking of a film’s
other trajectories takes seriously the persistence of other spaces and histories that exist alongside
the grand narratives. By understanding colonial educational films as unruly objects with many
social lives that escape the preordained paths determined by its colonial creators, we disturb a
historicist trajectory of colonial educational films as part of the civilizing mission that brought

16

colonial capital and modernity to “primitive” people. While this dissertation is very much
invested in tracing how films successfully carried out their modernizing tasks, it is also in how
these films had other lives that intersect and interrupt, punctuate and puncture their “official”
trajectories as instruments of empire that this project offers to “provincialize” an otherwise
historicist account of films’ existence.

To explore how colonial educational films were able to live these multiple lives, this dissertation
treats films as things rather than just texts. As things, films moved around and have
“biographies”—births (production histories), agencies (how they influenced people), social lives
that existed both within and outside of colonial regimes, even “afterlives” where they continue to
circulate in the post-colony long after their intended use. What is important in this story is not
only the content of the films, but the films themselves as objects—the specific contexts from
which they were “born” and the apparatuses that engendered them, how they moved through
physical and social landscapes and were recontextualized, and the discourses which they
produced in the course of their life and beyond—in short, their “biographies.”
A framework used most often in anthropological, archeological, and art historical
approaches to material culture, the idea that things have biographies was an idea most cogently
put forth by the seminal anthology The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective edited by As Arjun Appadurai. To investigate the biography of a thing, says Igor
Kopytoff in this volume, one would ask the questions that one might ask of people,
What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its “status” and
in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the
thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do
people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized
“ages” or periods in the thing’s “life,” and what are the cultural markers for them?

17

How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it
reaches the end of its usefulness?
36

Kopytoff, himself a cultural anthropologist, insists that these questions ought to be culturally
informed as things themselves are culturally constituted. Essentially, the significance of
Kopytoff’s argument is the idea that things cannot be fully understood at just one point in their
existence (or only at the point of its production). Rather, their meanings are continually
constituted as they move through cultural space and time.
Not only do objects change as they move through their life careers, they also have the
capability of “accumulating histories, so that the present significance of an object derives from
the persons and events to which it is connected.”
37
Kopytoff uses the example of the ten year
lifespan of a Suku hut in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that begins as a
familial home, but, as it ages, is successively turned into a guest house, a space for teenage
gatherings, a kitchen, and then a goat or chicken house before falling into disrepair.
38

To perform a biography of film, one might study their production histories—who made
them and the cultural powers that engendered them. One might then ask how they were sent out
into the world and where they travelled over the course of their life. What were their intended
careers among particular audiences, and how did they shape the social world through which they
circulated? At this point, one may be curious as to how they were received and used—did they
fulfill their intended objectives or did they go beyond them? Did a film, like Kopytoff’s huts,
undergo particular phases of use? Finally, what happens after the film reaches the end of its life?
Perhaps we may choose to define this “death” as the end of a film’s commercial lifespan (having
been tossed away after months languishing in the discount DVD bin), or in the case of
educational film, it may be the point where the film stops being circulated when it has either

18

been deemed to be outdated or to have fulfilled its educational duties. Perhaps certain films do
not truly “die” at all; parts of them “live on” in other films as extracts or adaptations.
As Appadurai describes, a biographical approach to the life story of a thing is premised on
a particular “methodological fetishism,” a “returning our attention to the things themselves”:
[…] even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with
significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that
illuminate their human and social context.
39

In spite of Appadurai’s purported claims to center the object, some critics believed that his
approach to material culture was too predicated on subject-object relations, rather than on the
things themselves.
40
Though I endorse this criticism, I ask that the subject-object relation be
centered and retained precisely because of the value it has for postcolonial studies. Constantly
connecting the meaning of thing to the people who contextualize it reigns in the danger of
fetishizing the thing too completely and overly investing it with power. Yet, it also allows
people’s daily activities to become part of the meaning of a thing.
In its continual constitution, colonial objects move in and out of imperial regimes. John
and Jean Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution for instance, pays careful attention to the
various actors and exchanges involved in colonial situations to capture the “in-between-ness” of
indigenous and colonial processes whereby “local people actively transformed changes that
colonizers attempted to impose” through invisible and visible agencies, force and persuasion.
41

This live-ness and mobility of the thing bears particular methodological and political significance
when considering the case of colonial educational film. It permits these films to exceed and
underwrite their initial imperial trajectories.
Appadurai describes these movements in terms of “paths” and “diversions” framed
specifically in terms of commodification and de-commodification. Things tend to flow along

19

socially regulated paths and many were produced with an expected trajectory of its particular life
path in mind, until an event might set them on another trajectory.
42
As an object travels through
these different social “regimes of value,”
43
it may enter and exit the commodity sphere. In
pointing out an object’s divergences, both Kopytoff and Appadurai demonstrate the limits of
various Marxian paradigms toward material culture that set an object on a path of eternal
commoditization. Rather, they argue that when things move in-and-out of commodity status, its
commodity situation becomes a phase in its longer history or “social life.” Others have since
broadened Appadurai’s idea, leading to a whole host of other works that study how things are
recontextualized in the course of their life histories. Things do indeed pass through many
transformations in the course of their life, experiencing diverse social lives that may deviate
from the purpose for which they were originally created.
44

Appadurai and Kopytoff’s argument has liberating implications when considering the
question of “imperial commodities”—things produced within that regime and slated to circulate
within it. Cultural frameworks define the commodity candidacy of things and as such, things are
shared and circulated within determinate “regimes of value.”
45
Here, I configure educational
films figuratively as “commodities” of empire—products that were produced within that social
arena, replicated its continued function, and were circulated within and outside of Malaya as
valuable items in their capacity as cultural capital. Films cost money to produce and could be
rented and purchased for as long as their value (i.e. the transformative potential they possessed as
agents of imperial social reform) were to remain relevant. Just as commodities could traverse
commodity states, so too could films as imperial commodities move-in-and-out of the regimes of
empire for which they were made, valued, and intended.

20

Paying attention to an object’s divergent social lives makes salient what scholars in
postcolonial and subaltern studies stress: that it is necessary to dismantle a deterministic and
singularized historicism as the ultimate logic of colonial capital and modernity. Re-
conceptualizing films as things with biographies enables me to think through the surrounding
human interactions that enliven them while making room for the “unruliness” of the medium and
the possibilities of meaning that may exist beyond its imperial trajectories. As this dissertation
will show, colonial educational films led multiple social lives that both acceded to, and were
divergent from, their intended trajectories as instruments of imperial education.

The “Thingness” of an Unruly Medium

So far, I have been talking about films as “things” as if that “thingness” were in any sense stable
and coherent. Unlike an archeological object with clear physical form, such as a stone engraving
or cast-iron tool, a film exists as both a physical and non-physical object at the same time. A film
undergoes critical transformations in the very nature of its “thingness” during its journey from
the reel, to the screen, and finally to the eye. In fact, it is the instability in the very materiality of
a film that enables it to lead multiple lives.
A projectionist, upon entering the projection room, would first encounter the reels of film
sitting in large metal or plastic cans on a bench. Their very physicality exerts a notable presence.
These objects harbor life histories already; born in an editing or copy room, they had perhaps
traveled miles to reach the projection room, possibly occupying space in the hold of an airplane,
on the back of a truck, waiting in line at the border for authorization. Grappling with the material
body of the film, the projectionist might then have to lift these large and cumbersome things onto

21

a table so that he/she may begin threading the film through the innards of a projector. At that
moment however, there is a magnificent transformation. The “film” leaps from the reel being
turned by the projector, to the screen. The essential nature of the so-called “object” changes from
hundreds of heavy feet of acetate, to a play of shadows and light. And then again, we have yet
another “transformation” so to speak, when these rays of light are received by the eye of the
spectator. A film is a material object (a can of film), an immaterial projection, and a visual
experience all at once. It exists in three places and in three different states at the point of its
consumption (screening). What then is the cinematic “object” and where is its materiality? How
does this tripartite existence complicate a film’s biography and its social lives?
Film theorists of the phenomenological tradition have located the “thingness” of a film in
the embodied materiality of its ephemeral projection. For instance Laura Marks and Vivian
Sobchack approach the question of films’ materiality through a phenomenological lens.
Sobchack tells us about a “film’s body” while Marks, drawing on Deleuze, reminds us of how
the cinematic experience involves a haptic interaction with the “body” of the film. Watching film
is not solely an intellectual exercise; rather, it appeals to sensuous memory and imagination of
touch, taste, and smell.
46
In its slow pan across the surface of a silk dress for example, the camera
provokes the haptic sense of its smoothness. Marks writes, “haptic cinema, by appearing to us as
an object with which we interact rather than an illusion into which we enter, calls on this sort of
embodied intelligence.”
47
In a sense, the haptic approach “rematerializes our objects of
perception,”
48
making them, so to speak, touchable things even if they never leave the surface of
the screen.
More recent writing has also explored the material histories of the moving image in a
more literal sense. In pondering screens as material interfaces of films and their manifestation,

22

Haidee Wasson draws attention to the importance of thinking about films as material objects. For
her, a film’s materiality referred to the physical bodies of films—acetate cans, stored digital
information, VHS, and DVDs—important because their physicality determined how these
entities were used, moved, and preserved.
49
Theorizing the screen as a “textural surface,”
Giuliana Bruno positions a consideration of the visual in a haptic way such that its materiality
exists not in material elements itself but in “the substance of material relations.”
50
Others have
called for attention to the material elements of film so as to ponder their local (cultural)
recontextualizations. Contributions to the “Prints in Motion” section of Silent Cinema and the
Politics of Space, for instance, address the material instabilities of a film as a thing, essentially
tracing the “biographies” of specific prints as they move around the globe. These prints
experience material manipulation as they are moved and mutilated (through inter-titling, re-
editing, and the afterlives of junk prints), “often becoming localized to the point of no longer
resembling the text it once was.”
51

My reading of a film’s “thingness” locates its material state as fractured in both the
embodied nature of its projected body as well as in its actual physical body wrapped around the
reel. I suggest that films are splintered objects. Films move through the world as hundreds of
heavy feet of acetate, but, at the moment when the projector turns the reel, they transform into
ephemeral beings. To speak of a film’s “materiality” then would be to find the film in several
places: in its projected “body” on the screen and on retina, as well as in its physical material
form.
It becomes pertinent at this point to address Tim Ingold’s criticism of material culture
studies that, at the time of his writing in the mid-2000s, it had little to do with materials, and
more to do with materiality. Parsing out the difference between the two, he explains that when

23

one touches the surface of a rock, one touches material; one does not touch its materiality
because “the surface of materiality, in short, is an illusion.”
52
I find such a statement particularly
provocative in the study of film where part of a film’s very substance resides in the so-called
world of illusion. As Marks argues, a film’s projected body is not an immaterial entity but one
that we can “touch” through haptic visuality. Hence, I hesitate to claim that the projection is any
more of an illusion than Ingold’s rock. In this sense, my approach to the “thingness” of the film
requires a necessary entanglement between materials and materiality, object and ephemerality.
Thinking about film across its material and immaterial bodies enables me to articulate the
multiple registers across which film is “unruly.” Film is unruly both as a physical object and also
as an ephemeral text open to the temporary stains of everyday interpretation. It is a film’s
splintered materiality that makes for its exciting trajectories and forms the very basis for its
unruliness. At every point in its so-called transformation from reel to retina, there is the potential
for the film to undergo what Appadurai calls “diversions” from their preordained life paths.
These moments of transition permit unruliness caused by the waywardness of the distribution
and circulation of actual cans of film, as well as by the unpredictability with which their
ephemeral bodies would be watched and received. In this regard, colonial educational films had
multiple social lives that danced in-and-out of imperial regimes as the object itself underwent
multiple material transformations on its journey from reel to screen to eye.
First, as this dissertation explores, films (their physical bodies) themselves were itinerant
travelers that moved through physical space with surprising speed. They traversed continents and
oceans through various distribution channels and made their way around the colonies on the
backs of vehicles specially equipped to screen them to audiences in rural areas. In fact, colonial
governments found them to be such effective educational tools because of their relative

24

portability. However, this portability also made films hard to discipline. They wandered into
venues where they ought not to be screened and then, over time, refused to co-operate as they
grew old and worn out. They moved in unpredictable ways across borders, calling for the need
for import restrictions and censorship measures. This approach to media as three-dimensional
things that exist physically in the world as chemical deposits on a strip of celluloid (or a DVD
disk) is one that has been embraced in the history of photography.
53

Second, a film’s unruliness magnifies when it “transforms” into its ephemeral body at a
screening. While a film bears the intent of its makers in every shot, edit, and sound, it also carries
what Christopher Pinney describes as a “substrate or margin of access” borne by its very
indexicality.
54
Whereas a painting may exclude randomness by the definite hand of its creator,
the lens of the camera cannot discriminate. It lets in a “subversive code” that makes it “open and
available to other readings and uses.”
55
The world of the film is not closed, but rather vulnerable
to multiple possibilities of meaning. Because no film is so successful that it filters out the “noise”
entirely, film is unruly and open to determination.
Before the screen, in the space of absolute immateriality when the material reel
“transforms” into the light that meets the human eye, films become truly unruly. In the context of
colonial educational film screenings, I think of these literal and figurative spaces as contact
zones. The “contact zone,” as defined by Mary Louise Pratt, is the space of imperial encounter,
“the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come in contact with each
other and establish ongoing relations […].”
56
As places of transculturation, contact zones are
hybrid places which foreground the “interactive, improvisational nature of imperial encounters”
often left out in accounts of domination and conquest told from imperial points of view.
57
Pratt
argues that while “colonized” people had little choice about what the dominant party projected

25

upon them, they did have a say about what “they absorb into their own, how they use it, and what
they make it mean.”
58
An attempt to study colonial educational cinema therefore cannot only be
an exhaustive account of its production history, but ought to also consider the receiving end of
the propaganda machine. The space before the screen can therefore be thought of as a “contact
zone,” a frontier where the personal trajectories of everyday life meet and mingle with the
discourses of colonial governance.
59

Embracing unruliness as a framework to understand colonial educational films dislodges
audiences from being mere cogs in the imperial machine. Rather, it takes into account the
complex and entangled ways in which the imperial was lived through the everyday. Ann Stoler
cautions us against considering colonialism as “a structure imposed on local practice,”

an
“abstract force” which organized the personal and the everyday within the grammar of the
institution.
60
Indeed, colonial films were truly unruly things whose splintered bodies enabled
untamed lives outside of the colonial state’s intent. Accounting for a film’s many lives makes
room for postcolonial historiographies and alternative genealogies of film by foregrounding for
the agencies of audiences who shaped how colonial films were used in local contexts and who
determined how they were received. For Peter Van Dommelen, things gives insights into the
lives and practices of “subalterns” who are otherwise usually absent in written forms including
historical documents and literary works.
61

As this dissertation will show, films bore colonial agencies, but they also harbored
uncontrollable agencies of their own that met with the agencies of those who watched them. To
embark on the story of an unruly thing, the agency of the thing itself must first be defined and
taken seriously. Films were more than just inert and passive objects that people make, use, and

26

discard. Material culture understands things as active and autonomous—shaping human
experience, not merely reflecting it. Alfred Gell, in his canonical formulation of an
anthropological theory of art, asks us to think about art objects as social agents.
62
As “things are
made to influence the thoughts and actions of others,” art had agency because it sought to
stimulate emotional responses invested with the intentionality of their creators. Gell’s bold and
expanded definition of “art object” allows for the term to escape limited understandings of
institutional art and official “works of art.”
63
As he later states, even a living person, can be an
art object by virtue of the relations between persons and things and persons and persons via
things. Conversely, the art-object too becomes person-like in that they are sources of, and targets
for, social agency.
At its broadest, Gell’s definition of the thing as social-agent speaks directly to the very role
of colonial educational films as agents of reform. Colonial officials thought that the very medium
of film was so potent precisely because of cinema’s ability to influence the behavior of the
people who watched them. However, Gell’s framework is not simply a reductive approach to
objects as mere vehicles of intent; rather, Gell considers the formal complexity and “technical
virtuosity” of art as central to his argument.
64
The need for a spectator to learn a particular mode
of visual literacy in order to access the magical world of film demanded an equal scrutiny on
behalf of the spectator—as did Gell’s inscrutable art object. Much of this dissertation considers
the agency of colonial films and the work they were made to do as imperial instruments.
While the idea that objects are active is a central tenet of many scholars working under
the broad banner of “material culture studies,” this notion may be somewhat contentious for
certain historical schools of thought that typically attribute agency to primarily to people.
65

However, film studies is not so unaccustomed to thinking of media as things with agencies of

27

their own. After the cultural studies turn in the 70s, film and media have rarely been considered
passive texts. Media studies constantly configure films (or media) as active cultural entities,
circulating through social space and influencing the people who encounter them. For example,
the dystopic view that cinema would be the death of moral society is probably as old as the
cinema itself. The very medium possesses an “aura” that exceeds the mere filmic text that is put
together by the filmmakers. Rachel Moore writes about how the cinema holds a particular magic
over those who encounter it, such that one becomes quite beside oneself in its presence; “The
magic of cinema, its ability to touch you with no hands, elate you, shock you, though limited, as
Epstein put it, to fits and starts, is nonetheless a defining feature of the medium.”
66

As educational tools, films were active agents; this was its fundamental intention and
why films as mediums for education would exist in the first place. As this dissertation describes,
films sought to shape entire colonies through their screening, while their contents sutured
imagined communities that existed only within the film itself. Furthermore, the agency of
objects, as noted by Gell, is context dependent, rather than inherent in any object. Bruno Latour
insists that things do not exist without being full of people and that thinking about people
necessitates a consideration of things.
67
As I suggested above, it is a film’s encounter with
various human and social agents gives it meaning as it goes through the various phases of its life.

Methodologies for Unruly Things

It is curious that a project about films as objects was built on the absence of this very material
form and in many senses, this writing emerges from the detritus of that absence. The challenges
of studying nontheatrical film are many, foremost of which is the relative lack of the preservation

28

of small-gauge films in archives and libraries. As scholars of nontheatrical film have pointed out,
many such films were not preserved because they were perceived to have little value beyond
their immediate use. This problem was exacerbated in the colonies. More often than not, short
educational films made by colonial government departments did not have access to the funds and
equipment necessary to archive them—a real consideration bearing in mind the detrimental
effects of tropical heat and humidity on perishable film stock. I have found that encountering
viewable copies of colonial educational films in archives, particularly in Southeast Asia, are rare
experiences. In most cases, films were simply used and abused until they were no longer in
working condition. Many of these films were also shot and edited without a script making textual
resources a rarity.
Neither is “the thing” itself an easy singularity. When I talk about the film Proudly
Presenting Yong Peng for example, “it” is really a many-bodied creature consisting of the many
copies that “the film” (i.e. its content) inhabited over the phases of its life. Though at points in
the writing we do walk alongside the paths of specific films, this dissertation is not a biography
of a thing in any particular sense. Unlike Jennifer Hughes’s treatment of a Mexican crucifix for
example, this project does not (and cannot) trace a clean journey of one particular film across
time and space.
68
Rather it moves between the particular and the general. Instead of focusing on
any one object therefore, this study is an exploration of the imprints of a type of object or a genre
of films—namely sexual hygiene films, financial education films, race-labor films and
Emergency films—on the world around “it.”
Privileging textual analysis as the parameter of film scholarship sets up exclusionary
boundaries against filmic geographies and traditions that do not share the same industrial history
and subsequent archival preservation as more so-called “normative” texts. This dissertation’s

29

movement away from scholarship centered primarily on textual analysis thus emerged partly
from methodological necessity. While my third and fourth chapters do closely analyze particular
films which have fortunately survived the years ensconced in archives in London, most of my
writing draws from contextual material that render the films themselves in silhouette.
Alongside other works in film historiography, this project seeks to extend the limits of a
largely textual approach that has dominated the field of film studies since the 1950s.
69
Textual
analysis configures films as cultural “texts” to be “read,” their contents analyzed as insights into
larger theoretical or social phenomena. Acknowledging the historical affiliation between film
and literary studies that led to the entrenched power of textual analysis in the field, Eric Smoodin
calls for “the possibility for film scholarship without films […] using primary materials other
than films themselves”
70
as a means of accessing other ontologies of the cinema. While textual
analysis and representation studies remains valuable to my research, this approach cannot fully
account for the volatility of a film’s meaning as it moves through time and space, the diverse
ways in which it is used by people, and the different effects it has as it circulates through
multiple social environments. What is more, as Serna states, rather than being focused on
specific films, this is an approach that emphasizes “the discursive practices that comprised the
social and cultural space of cinema as an institution and an idea.”
71

In other words, what propels this story are not just the films themselves, but also the
specific contexts from which they emerged, the apparatuses that engendered them, and the
discourses that they then in turn produced. In order to perform this sort of film history, I move
beyond cinematic repositories to look for film stories in colonial archives—using namely
correspondences, reports, budgets, schedules, and journals published by the colonial government
in Malaya and its affiliations. Because people encountered films as an orchestrated component of

30

broad governmental socio-economic policy, films are not independent texts, to be analyzed only
as such. Rather, they were part of a wider grammar of colonial administration, inhabiting their
logics, and sharing their discourse. This methodological approach can also be considered an
attempt to include “other” histories of film—the nontheatrical and largely noncommercial—that
lie outside of cinematic repositories. Through these sources, I trace colonial discourses
surrounding the medium, charting how films moved through and shaped colonial society.
However, colonial archives are not without their own limitations that challenge these
ambitions. Firstly, certain colonial archives are incomplete things for practical reasons. Many
documents in Malaya from before the Pacific War were destroyed. Many of the files that remain
at the Arkib Negara Malaysia (National Archives of Malaysia) are often not intact. Others were
transferred to the United Kingdom for safekeeping. As a result, much of my research was spent
shuffling between the “metropole” and the “colony,” retracing the former trans-continental
connective tissues of empire in pursuit of these papers in order to construct some semblance of a
story from their scattered limbs. Moreover, the practice of educational film distribution itself was
not properly institutionalized through specific channels in the Malayan government until after the
Pacific War. Filmmaking projects were instead carried out through smaller departments (often
through the efforts of amateur filmmakers) that did not leave behind extensive production
records. The genesis of specific and obscure educational films are therefore hard to trace
although there are plenty of sources describing the mechanisms through which films as a larger
corpus moved and the imperial machineries that facilitated or inhibited these movements.
Colonial archives present other silences for reasons more ominous. As stated,
documentation of reception beyond the occasional note in colonial records is scant, and therefore
it cannot be my intention to reclaim these accounts with any promise toward doing so with

31

totality. Further, as Ranajit Guha argues, writing from colonial sources risk replicating the very
ellipses and occlusions inherent in their imperial logics and so we must “stop pretending that it
[we] can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it.”
72
Anthony Bogues too points out
that “the knowledge regime of colonial power” which resides in repositories of the imperial—
film and archive alike—must be confronted.
73
These sources, so to speak are already colonized.
Thus so being, they leave out the voices of the “subalterns” whose very hearts and minds the
films were trying to capture.
Doubtless, as Stoler points out, the obsessions and ellipses of the archive reveal internal
social politics that are deserving of its own ethnography.
74
As I discuss in Chapter 1 and 2,
documents from the Colonial Office in London as well as the newspapers in both Britain and
Malaya were wracked with anxieties about how “native” spectators watched and interpreted
films. Field agents wrote multiple reports about how to simplify film language so as to meet
local visual literacies that were supposedly less advanced. Even as the government conceived of
film as indispensible tools of governance in Malaya, they were also anxious about the
slipperiness of the medium and its propensity to deviate into misunderstanding and/or illicit
pleasure.
Nevertheless, the absences of Malayan voices in these records until after the Pacific War
(where they were still relatively muted), presents challenges to my efforts to discover the social
lives of films outside their colonial trajectory. Hence, my research does not stop at the archive
but seeks to probe beyond it, into that vast and un-archived resource of subaltern knowledge that
is personal memory. To recount the biographies of colonial educational cinema, one traverses
methodological boundaries to seeking interdisciplinary ways to relive cinema’s past and future
lives. The limitations of textual analysis provoke a historical exploration of reception in colonial

32

archive, while shortcomings in the archive propel me to seek these histories and cultural
significances among the living societies in which they travel and continue to influence.
In keeping with the ambition to discover how films were subject to re-contexualization at
the level of the local and the everyday, I sought out people who remember watching colonial
educational films from the late 40s and 50s, even locating “actors” who appeared in them. Their
stories reveal how films were recontextualized at the very moment of their encounter with the
local and the everyday. The repurposing of these films upon seeing them again in the year 2014
invests these things with postcolonial afterlives.
Indeed, as I have argued, tracing the biography of films would be to give equal meaning
to the production history of a film, a film’s intended agency, as well as the spectator’s relation to
the object. In contextualizing the circulation of a film and the discourses it provoked in society,
we seriously make room for the everyday lifeworlds that determine a film’s meaning. As Janet
Staiger points out, attention to reception does not elevate the power of the spectator above the
agency of the film, but considers how they interact. As reception studies is engaged with
understanding the relations between viewers and films, it too is not textual interpretation but an
attempt to “understand textual interpretation as they are produced historically,” as they are
contextualized in social formations.
75
In doing so, accounting for how films were received and
discursively produced permits multiple uses and reception of media that disrupts any singular
view of how media “ought” to have been seen and received. As Barbara Klinger so aptly
describes,
There is then a desired Rashomon-like effect in totalized reception studies, where
the researcher uncovers different historical ‘truths’ about a film as she/he analyses
how it has been deployed within past social relations.
76

33

Klinger too describes how historical reception studies encourages the researcher to avoid
provincialism by moving out of the home grounds of the film industry to discover how industry
connects with social and historical processes. While this dissertation is a cultural history of film,
my interest in how living people encountered the cinema is a response to the sort of
provincialism that Klinger (drawing on Miriam Hansen) describes as the result of ‘new’
revisionist film history’s “interest in displacing secondary and anecdotal forms of history with
primary documentation, archival research and other historiographical tools of evidence and
verification.”
77

However, an important methodological caveat must be stated. Simply by speaking to
subjects at the “source,” I do not claim to encapsulate how all Malayans watched or to write a
prescriptive story of how colonial subjects encountered the screen. Not unlike history being the
interpretive account of historians, Clifford Geertz states that,
Anthropological writings are themselves interpretation, and second and third
order ones to boot. […] They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are
‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’—the original meaning of fictiō—not
that they are false, unfactual, or merely “as if” thought experiments.
78

Indeed, interpretations are as varied as the people who watched the films. Accounts of the
everyday were deeply particular to personal situations, and one must be wary of conflating the
particular as representative of “big culture.” Moreover, my respondents were mostly children or
young teens during the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s; their accounts were no doubt colored
by the inevitable fading of memory, their present situations, and nostalgia for the past. Hence,
the work here does not claim to write a “subaltern history” or a “subaltern screen culture” that in
any way comes closer to the “truth.” The accounts here, and my interpretive writing of them,
instead seek to extend the “space” before past screens, making reception “thick,” bringing it to
life in the present and making it flexible.

34

I have already discussed how anthropological approaches to material culture may enliven film
historiography. Research in the field of media anthropology has been invested in how the
meaning of media changes as it moves through, and is appropriated by, different cultures. For
instance, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain—a groundbreaking volume that bridged
anthropology and media studies—persuaded media studies scholars to think about film and
media ethnographically.
79
Work that has since followed by media anthropologists (several of
whom were editors of the afore-mentioned volume) have since broadened the field and expanded
genealogies of media with accounts of how media objects are used in complex ways in the
everyday lives of people in other parts of the globe.
80

Photography, like film, is subject to multiple determinations in different times and places.
The contributors to Photography’ s Other Histories for example, configure photography as “a
globally disseminated and locally appropriated medium” by observing photographic practices in
specific communities around the world.
81
Christopher Pinney’s contribution to that volume,
posits “surfacism” as a feature of Indian postcolonial photographic practice that counters
“Western” traditions of photography.
82
Not unlike my framing of the “unruly” film, Christopher
Wright’s notion of the “supple” photograph traces multiple trajectories of a photograph of a Hula
girl in Papua New Guinea by considering how the “colonial gaze” is entangled with indigenous
notions of how that photograph functions within its culture.
83
Wright’s recent book on
photography in the Solomon Islands, also considers the interrelations between indigenous and
Euro-American photographic practices so as to decenter normative ideas about photography in
Western traditions.
84
While I do not do ethnographic fieldwork in this dissertation, being
concerned with the discursive practices surrounding colonial education film historically, I do

35

consider how films moved through cultural spaces and were used in local contexts on a small-
scale as an essential part of this story.
Indeed, what I am concerned with in this dissertation is not just what is depicted in films
or what they “contain” or “represent.” Rather, I am interested in how films lead their lives and
afterlives as they travel through space (through the circulatory imperial networks of distribution
and exhibition, public screenings and private viewings), and time (from the colony to the
postcolony, youth and old age). That is, I am interested in what their intentions are as things with
agency, and what goes on around them as they meet with human agents on their journey from
reel to eye. Hence, the work that this dissertation performs is in the mapping of context—the
historical and social tapestry that colonial educational films shaped and were shaped by. It is an
approach that places what things do in the world above what they mean at any one point in a
structural and semiotic sense.
85
As Nicholas Thomas so aptly points out, “objects are not what
they were made to be but what they have become” as they undergo “creative recontextualiation”
and “reauthorship” while they move about in the world.
86

Chapters in this dissertation are organized as a series of chronological case studies that explore
the agency (and vagrancy) of films as instruments of imperial education. I move through and
engage with different methodologies—archival research, oral history interviews/screenings, and
textual analysis—to answer the particular questions raised in each of the chapters. My first
chapter reveals how moral outrage over unforeseen screenings of venereal disease educational
films to “native” audiences in 1920s Singapore led to the establishment of the first
comprehensive censorship laws in the British colonies. Films themselves were unruly objects,
displaying a penchant for appearing before the “wrong” audience and for moving between

36

American and British markets too freely. While these regulations restricted films’ mobilities
within the colonies to select audiences, they could not prevent the films themselves from
dangerously slipping between education and illicit entertainment.
Demonstrating how visual education became central to colonial governance, Chapter 2
follows the operations of traveling vehicles bearing film projectors that traversed the Malay
Peninsula in the 1930s. Called Rural Lecture Caravans, these vehicles displayed films on
financial education to rural communities so as to incorporate peasants into the financial systems
of the imperial Commonwealth. Films were literally itinerant entities, traveling around the
peninsula for several months every year. This chapter establishes how colonial educational films
sought to bring the private economic practices of rural peasants under the management of the
colonial state. However, “misbehaving” audiences attended screenings for reasons other than to
be educated; incredulous spectators quarreled with onscreen representations of Malayan life
while others simply “misappropriated” film screenings as an evening’s free entertainment away
from the chores of the field.
While I have thus far addressed films intended for the education of “local” audiences in
the colonies, colonial education was an Empire-wide affair with films traveling from the colonies
to the metropole, and vice-versa. The term “colonial educational film” thus also includes films
that were produced to teach audiences in the metropole about Britain’s colonies and protectorates
abroad. My third chapter argues that such films sought to uplift the image of empire by
promoting ideas of imperial modernity and Commonwealth camaraderie to people in Britain and
around the world. Through the connective tissues of the cinematic language, these films created a
coherent Malaya in the public imagination that facilitated large-scale “national” imaginings. Film
was far more than a “reflection” of culture and society; it was the imaginative space that made a

37

plural colonial society such as Malaya possible. Yet, in spite of cinematic attempts to synthesize
a Malaya that was larger than life, the screen could not contain the violent unrest that fragmented
Malaya’s plural society. As what I call a “time-lagged medium” delayed by its material
exigencies, films struggled to keep up with their subjects who would not be still.
While previous chapters draws from in-depth archival research, my final chapter merges
archival sources with oral histories to investigate the afterlives of colonial film in the
postcolonial present. As part of my field research, I screened colonial educational films to people
who had been forcibly resettled into fenced and guarded villages by the government as part of a
military measure to suffocate anti-imperial support during the Malayan communist insurgency
from 1948 to 1960. Mobile cinemas had showcased these anti-communist propaganda films in
the 1950s to persuade civilians to comply with drastic curtailments of civil liberty at a time of
extraordinary violence and persecution. Today, these colonial educational films become conduits
for reflexive autobiography, places where old injustices could be exorcised, violence relived, and
the once living, mourned. Ultimately, I argue that colonial educational films acquire new
identities upon their resurrection in the postcolonial present. Diverged from their original
purposes as instruments of empire, colonial educational films become repositories of personal
and cultural memory in the postcolonial present.
The conclusion of this dissertation considers the resurrection of colonial educational films
in digital archives and databases such as the www.colonialfilm.org.uk and the Pathé channel on
YouTube. The preservation of rare films and their transfer to digital formats means public access
to them at unprecedented levels. For postcolonial peoples, these online archives offer colonial
images up for purposeful recontextualization as archives of national memory and heritage.
Extending the framework of film’s biographies to recent work in archive-oriented media theory,

38

my conclusion ponders what it means when films do not “die” but can be rescued from
dormancy, shedding their brittle material bodies to live again as immaterial objects in virtual
places.

1
Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds., Learning With the Lights Off: Education Film in the
United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Hediger, Vinzenz and Vonderau, Patrick (eds.), Films
that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam University Press: 2009). Charles Acland and ]
Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Geoff Alexander has published two
books that carefully detail the historical formation of academic films. Geoff Alexander, Academic Films for the
Classroom: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010). Geoff Alexander, Films You Saw in School: 1,153
Classroom Educational Films, 1958-1985 (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2014).
Journals such as Film History, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and The Velvet Light Trap for
example, have also dedicated special issues to this emergent field. Film History: An International Journal 19, no.4,
(2007). “Orphans No More: Ephemeral Films and American Culture,” special issue, Journal of Popular Film and
Television 37, iss. 3, (2009). The Velvet Light Trap 72, (Fall 2013).
2
Regarding home movies see, Patricia R Zimmerman, Reel Families, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1995). Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, eds., Mining the Home Movie: Excavation
in Histories and Memories, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).
3
Jie Li, “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company, 1932-
1940,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 22, no.2, (Spring 2014): 329-369. Tina Mai Chen, “Propagating the
Propaganda Film: The Meaning of Film in Chinese Communist Party Writings, 1949-1965,” Modern Chinese
Literature and Culture 15, no.2 (Fall 2003): 154-193.
4
Rosaleen Smyth, “The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 1927-1939, with Special Reference to East
and Central Africa,” The Journal of African History 20, no. 3 (1979): 437-450. Smyth, Rosaleen, “The Central
African Film Unit’s Images of Empire, 1948-1963,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3, no.2
(1983): 131-147. Smyth, Rosaleen, “The Post-War Career of the Colonial Film Unit in Africa: 1946-1955,”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12, no.2 (1992): 163- 177.
5
Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008). James Burns, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial
Zimbabwe (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Research in International Studies, 2002). James Burns, Cinema and
Society in the British Empire: 1895-1940 (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Brian Larkin, Signal
and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2008).
For a historical account of the formation of the Jamaican Film Unit see Terri Francis, “Sounding the Nation: Martin
Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961,” Film History 23, no. 2 (2011): 110–28.
Other notable monographs in nontheatrical film that intersect with related aspects of colonial nontheatrical film
studies include Jennifer Peterson’s Education in the School of Dreams, Alison Griffith’s Wondrous Difference, and
Paula Amad’s Counter-Archive. Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early
Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press Books, 2013). Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema,
Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Paula Amad,
Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de La Planète (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013).
6
Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, eds., Empire and Film (London: British Film Institute, 2011). Lee Grieveson
and Colin MacCabe, eds., Film and the End of Empire (London: British Film Institute, 2011). For the Jamaican Film
Unit see Terri Francis, “Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961,” Film History
23, no. 2 (2011): 110–28.
7
Tom Rice has contributed widely to this understudied area primarily through his writings on colonialfilm.org. See
also Rice’s article on the development of government film production in post-WWII Malaya. Tom Rice, “Distant
Voices of Malaya, Still Colonial Lives,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 10, no. 3 (2013): 430-51.
Hassan Muthalib also makes important contributions to colonial cinema in British Malaya as well as to
commercial cinema in Malaysia during the colonial period. See Hassan Muthalib, “The End of Empire: The Films of

39

the Malayan Film Unit in 1950s British Malaya” in Film and the End of Empire, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin
MacCabe (London: British Film Institute, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 177-196.
For instances where colonial cinema has been written about in the context of the Dutch East Indies see Eric
A. Stein, “Colonial Theatres of Proof: Representation and Laughter in 1930s Rockefeller Foundation Hygiene
Cinema in Java,” Health and History 8, no.2 (2006): 18 and Liew Kai Khiun, “Wats & Worms: The Activities of the
Rockefeller Federation’s, International Health Board in Southeast Asia (1913–1940),” web published by Asian
Society for the History of Medicine, 15–16.
In French Colonial Documentary, Peter Bloom dedicates a chapter to colonial educational film in French
Indochina titled “Infiltrate the Crowd with an Idea! Colonial Educational Cinema and the Threat of Imitative
Contagion.” Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 125-151.
8
James Burns’ recent book, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, published toward the end of the writing of
this dissertation, offers a historical account of educational film in the British Empire, including Malaya, through a
global perspective. While Burns touches on key phenomena in the history of colonial educational cinema in British
Malaya which also anchor the chapters in this dissertation (such as sexual hygiene film and the rural lecture
caravan), this dissertation is less interested the broad historical sweep of film across multiple imperial sites as it is in
the textures of how film was encountered and thought about in Malayan life. James Burns, Cinema and Society in
the British Empire 1895-1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 93-132.
9
In 1930, the Colonial Films Committee referred to the success of the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme as a good
indicator of the promising research that could be done to find out how efficiently cinema as a medium might be
employed for “native” education in other parts of the empire. Anthony Bevir, “Report of the Colonial Films
Committee,” in Report of the Colonial Films Committee, Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to
Parliament by Command of His Majesty, July 1930 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 6.
10
In each of these states a British Resident advised the Malay Sultans on all matters with the exception of Malay
religion and custom. In truth, the Resident system was an ornamental guise that gave the Sultanate a semblance of
power, with actual political and administrative power residing with the British Resident and delegated through a
puppet aristocracy from the Malay ruling class. Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia (2
nd
edition) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1982, 2001), 166.
11
See Rice, “Distant Voices of Malaya, Still Colonial Lives”, 431-432.
12
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Vol.1, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990, [1978]), 139.
13
This is a phrase borrowed from Appadurai. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of
Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, 1986:
Cambridge University Press), 4.
14
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press), 2000.

15
Ibid., 7
16
Ibid.
17
Priya Jaikumar, “Postface: an Interview with Priya Jaikumar” in Postcolonial Cinema Studies, eds. Sandra
Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2012), 2.
18
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Beyond: Spectatorship in Silent American Films (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1994). Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995). Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping:
Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Ben Singer, Melodrama and
Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia Press, 2001).
19
Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 8.
20
Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 (Chicago: University Of
Chicago Press, 2006), xvi-xix.
21
Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, xviii; citing Ernst Bloch, “Non-synchronism and the Obligation
to Its Dialectics,” trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22-38.
22
Ravi Vasudevan, “In the Centrifuge of History,” Cinema Journal 50, no.1 (Fall 2010): 135-140.
23
Jennifer Bean, “Introduction,” in Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, eds. Jennifer M. Bean, Laura Horak,
Anupama Kapse (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2014), 2.
24
“Advertisements,” The Straits Times, 15 May 1897, 2.
25
Jan Uhde and Yvonne Ng Uhde, Latent Images: Film in Singapore, (Singapore: Ridge Books National University
of Singapore Press, 2010), 188.

40

26
For information on mobile cinemas operated by the Shaw Brother and Cathay Organization, see Uhde and Uhde,
Latent Images, 22,197.
27
Ana M. López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” Cinema Journal 40, no.1 (Autumn, 2000): 49.
28
Uhde and Uhde, Latent Images,14,16.
29
López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America”, 48-78.
30
Laura Isabel Serna, Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age,
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 6.
31
Bean, Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, 1.
32
Larkin, Signal and Noise, 79.
33
David Bordwell levels several critiques against what he calls the “modernity thesis” i.e. the “baggy” logic of new
histories in cinema studies that privilege Benjaminian modernity as symptomatic of the stylistic history of the
cinema. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), 141-149.
34
Singer, Melodrama And Modernity, 73.
35
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, no. 3-
4 (1986): 63-70, reprinted in Thomas Elsaesser and Alan Barker, eds., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative
(London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56-62.
36
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66-67.
37
Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” in World Archaeology 31, no.2, (Oct
1999): 170.
38
Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things”, 67.
39
Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, 5.
40
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no.1 (Autumn, 2001): 7.
41
As explained in Peter van Dommelen, “Colonial Matters: Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial
Situations,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley, (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage
Publications Ltd., 2006), 111-112. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J., Of Revelation and Revolution 1, Christianity,
Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J., Of Revelation and Revoluion II, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African
Frontier, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
42
A mass-produced T-shirt, for example, destined for a life of utter commoditization, had the fortune of being
purchased by a rockstar. After the untimely death of said rockstar (perhaps while wearing the T-shirt), the T-shirt
was sold at an auction and purchased by a small museum for a commemorative display for this particular rockstar
where it resides behind glass walls for the next ten years. Diverted from its trajectory as a player in capitalist
exchange, the T-shirt is “enclaved” from its customary path; at least until the museum closes and auctions the T-shirt
off again to an enterprising collector who then resells it on eBay upon which it enters the marketplace again, but as a
collector’s item.
43
Appadurai, Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value, 4.
44
Appadurai’s approach has since engendered a whole series of scholarship that trace the life of things as they move
over space and time. The broadness of the object biographies approach has also generated good share of criticism,
most having to do with the looseness with which this paradigm has been applied. See Fontijn, David. “Epilogue:
Cultural Biographies and Itineraries of Things: Second Thoughts,” in Mobility Meaning and Transformation of
Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture Through Time and Space, eds. Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss,
(Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013).
45
Appadurai, Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,15.
46
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1992). Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 127-193.
47
Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), 18.
48
Marks, Touch, xiii.
49
Haidee Wasson, “The Networked Screen: Moving Images, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Size,” in Fluid
Screens, Expanded Cinema, eds. Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008),
74-95.
50
Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2014), 2-8.

41

51
Bean, Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, 73.
52
Tim Ingold, “Materials against materiality,” in Archaeological Dialogues 14, iss.1, (June 2007): 7.
53
See, for example, Elizabeth Edward and Janice Hart, eds., Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of
Images (Florence, KY: Routledge, 2004).
54
Christopher Pinney, “Introduction: How the Other Half…” in Photography’s Other Histories, eds. Christopher
Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 6.
55
Pinney, Introduction, 6.
56
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8.

57
Ibid.
58
Ibid, 7.

59
See also Serna, Making Cinelandia, 5-6.
60
Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (California: University of California Press, 2002), 23.
61
van Dommelen, “Colonial Matters”, 112.
62
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 5. The canonical
implications of this work are furthered in Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (eds.), Beyond Aesthetics: Art
and the Technologies of Enchantment (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
63
The definition of the art object I make use of is not institutional, nor is it aesthetic or semiotic; the definition is
theoretical. The art object is whatever is inserted into the ‘slot’ provided for art objects in the system of terms and
relations envisaged in the theory. Nothing is decidable in advance about the nature of this object, because the theory
is premised on the idea that the nature of the art object is a function of the social-relational matrix in which it is
embedded. Gell, Art and Agency, 7
64
Nicholas Thomas, “Foreword,” in Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),
x.
65
Karen Harvey, “Introduction: Practical Matters” in History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to
Approaching Alternative Sources (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 5.
66
Rachel More, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 3.
67
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 10-11. Also in Brown, Things, p.12.
68
Jennifer Scheper Hughes, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Relision and Local Faith from the Conquest to
the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
69
The contributors to the edited volume, Looking Past the Screen most clearly articulate this agenda. Jon Lewis and
Eric Smoodin, eds., Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2007).
70
Ibid., 7.
71
Serna, Making Cinelandia, 5.
72
Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Spivak, eds., (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77.
73
Anthony Bogues, “The Colonial Regime of Knowledge: Film, Archives and Re-Imagining Colonial Power” in
Film and the End of Empire, eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: British Film Institute, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 279.
74
Laura Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: New
Jersey, 2009).
75
Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 9.
76
Klinger, Barbara, “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies,” Screen,
38, no.2 (Summer 1997): 110.
77
Klinger, pp.5. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 5.
78

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation Of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 14.
79
Fay Ginsburg, Laila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds., Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 2002).
80
Looking at case studies of Facebook users in Trinidad for instance, Daniel Miller dislodges the assumption that
“however people in the UK or the US use Facebook, that is Facebook.” Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). See also Larkin, Signal and Noise; and Christopher Pinney, Photography and
Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).

42

81
Pinney, “Introduction: ‘How the Other Half…” in Photography’s Other Histories, 2.
82
Christopher Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the Image,” in Photography’s Other Histories, eds. Christopher
Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 201-220.
83
Christopher Wright, “Supple Bodies: The Papua New Guinea Photographs of Captain Francis R Barton” in
Photography’s Other Histories, eds. Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2003), 146-169.
84
Christopher Wright, The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2013).
85
Christopher Tilley, “Theoretical Perspectives” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Christopher Tilley, Webb
Keane, Susanne Kuchler, Mike Rowlands and Patricial Spyer (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 10.
86
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4-5.

43

CHAPTER 1

Disciplining Filmic Vagrancies: Venereal Disease Propaganda and the Emergent
Governance of an Unruly Medium

“The little black or yellow child can feast its astounded eyes on the sight of a
“Sahib” strangling a semi-nude woman with blue eyes and golden hair. To his
primitive mind such pictures must come as an amazing revelation.”
— Sir Hesketh Bell, “The Cinema in the
East,” The Times, September 18, 1926.

In 1925, the British Social Hygiene Council (B.S.H.C.) initiated a film campaign to address the
problem of venereal disease in the British Colonies and Protectorates. The B.S.H.C. aspired to
establish an empire-wide film loaning system that would allow local medical departments across
the Empire to have easy access to a library of films on social hygiene topics. The B.S.H.C.’s plan
took the Colonial Office in London by surprise. When colonial officials found out that the loan
system was already underway, responses ranged from dull suspicion to downright outrage. Films
on salacious topics such as sex and prostitution (featuring white actors in “unsuitable” sexual and
pathological situations) were running amok in the colonies igniting empire wide panics within
the Colonial Office. With their randy scenarios about tawdry white women, dramatic venereal
disease films agitated particular colonial fears about racial mixing, “native” male desire, and
threats to white prestige that could resound in off-screen life. As white women moved to the

44

colonies for work and marriage, wealthy Malay merchants, immigrant Chinese laborers and
mobile European administrators, businessmen, and soldiers became characters in a sordid play of
mobility, miscegenation, and disease.
Anxieties surrounding cosmopolitan sex were certainly at the heart of this crisis, but
bodies were not the only mobile entities. Films too were vagrant as both material objects and
cultural texts—scampering across borders (metropole and colony), slipping between empires
(British and American), and flirting with the very understandings of cinema (educational or
entertainment). In the early 1920s, the means of controlling films' movements within and
between empires were in their infancy. Film prints moved between permeable boundaries,
tracing circuits of mobility and traffic that shocked sensibilities about the sanctity of imperial
trade at a time when the British film industry was collapsing under the sheer weight of
Hollywood's dominance in the colonies. Alongside their ability to induce moral panics, films’
unruly mobility motivated new legislations that sought to control them.
The entangled policing of sex and the policing of films set in motion a series of debates
about the governance of cinema. Faced with a rudimentary system of censorship and regulation
in many parts of the empire, the latter half of the 1920s witnessed the coming together of official
committees and panels that turned their attention to the need for better regulation, what such
governance would look like, and how it could be put into practice. Examining the specific cases
of Malaya and the Straits Settlements but also addressing the British colonies more broadly, I
argue that the sexual and economic politics surrounding venereal disease films awakened new
disciplinary measures that regarded film as a volatile and unruly entity that threatened to
destabilize finely tuned racial and sexual politics of empire. As quota legislations struggled to
determine where films went, censorship measures sought to control how they were seen and by

45

whom. I read these attempts as struggles by the imperial state to discipline the very nature of the
filmic object and its various vagrancies—where it should go, and how it ought to behave. The
battle over venereal disease films was largely fought over the function of cinema in colonial
situations and the struggle to control film’s troublesome mobilities. Was film entertainment or
education; were colonial cinemas markets or polities? This debate was central in emergent
struggles to define the colonial spectator through discourses about his/her visual literacies, moral
fallibilities, and receptiveness toward the filmic medium.
The chapter begins by introducing the B.S.H.C.’s film plan and the ensuing upsets that
ricocheted within official circles. The venereal disease films arrived at a time when the purpose
of film itself came under interrogation. At this relatively early period in the ascendancy of
cinema-going as a popular activity in the colonies, questions about the role that cinema should
play as entertainment or education acquired political resonance. The relatively new genre of
venereal disease propaganda films, called the “dramatic film,” mixed both entertainment and
educational pleasures and invited spectatorships that challenged “appropriate” modes of
watching. Muddied and muddying pleasures made the world of the cinema a dangerous space
while films’ “unruliness” extended to the impossibility of dictating the multiple ways that a
spectator might watch a film. Anxious that showing venereal disease films to an Asiatic crowd in
Singapore would excite cat-calls instead of respectful learning, colonial officials were nervous
that such films might illicit unwanted pleasures from these “ill-disciplined” spectators who could
not be trusted to discern appropriate pleasures and modes of spectatorship.
I then move into broader discussions of the political and economic rationales that
underlie the moral crises surrounding cinema in the colonies. As the popularity of American film
gained ground in the colonies, the VD film debate became entangled within larger issues about

46

the immorality of Hollywood cinema. Images of American women on the screen became
embroiled with the politics of white prestige in the colonies. Such moralist discourse concealed
what were really economic concerns about the British film industry’s losing deal in the global
film trade. Without clear market protectionist measures and trade legislations for film, film reels
moved around in an unruly fashion—chartering untidy and disruptive trajectories across the
empire that had to be controlled.
To grapple with cinema’s rowdiness, government regulations rationalized colonial
cinematic space into segregated audiences based on the premises of those who could be trusted
to watch these controversial films and those who could not. Censorship and audience censuses
sought to limit the types of attendees at film screenings and thus, control ways of seeing in
colonial places. Colonial cinemas were both markets as well as polities and I argue that
apparatuses such as censorship and the census organized imperial cinemas into new biopolitical
spaces. Looking at the venereal disease film scheme in Singapore, the last section of the chapter
traces the formation of a “colonial audience” as a special category of spectators and examines the
beginnings of cinematic governance by the imperial state that accompanied this formation. Thus,
this chapter also argues that understandings of a separate audience in the colonies emerged
simultaneously with the imperial state’s disciplining of the medium. As the filmic medium itself
underwent scrutiny, colonial officials conceived of a unique “native” spectator whose perceived
filmic (il)literacies justified new regulatory measures which determined how educational cinema
would be produced, distributed, and exhibited in the British empire in the decades to follow.

47

Films for Afflicted Cities: The Venereal Disease Film Plan

First, let me begin by introducing the players involved in this story and by briefly outlining the
emergence of the venereal disease film distribution scheme itself. The National Council for
Combating Venereal Disease in London was the principal official body behind the public
education of sexual health. Since 1918, the Council had been incorporating film screenings in its
propaganda activities in Britain. With the assistance of the British Ministry of Health, the
Council had produced films for propaganda purposes in Britain. The Council soon extended its
agenda to reform social hygiene habits to other parts of the British Empire. In 1925, the Council
changed its name to The British Social Hygiene Council, (which I will also refer to as the
B.S.H.C.) to align itself with its daughter councils throughout the British Empire and to co-
ordinate better with its counterpart in the United States, the American Social Hygiene
Association.
1

In 1920, the B.S.H.C. launched the Far Eastern Commission to visit Hong Kong,
Shanghai, Singapore and Colombo. The Commission arrived in Singapore on 17th January 1921
and conducted medical lectures and demonstrations in local hospitals, community groups and
other social institutions. They brought along cinematograph projection equipment as well as
three films, one of which was an approximately ninety-minute dramatic feature on the subject of
syphilis, titled Damaged Goods (1919).
2
The Commission recommended that the medical
services and the newly established Federated Malay States Council for Combating Venereal
Disease should collaborate on public educational schemes–particularly, plans to import social
hygiene films into the colony.
The B.S.H.C.'s special interest in public education on social disease in Singapore can be

48

traced back to January 1925 when they vehemently protested the Legislative Council's new draft
bill dealing with VD and prostitution. Acknowledging the impossibility of stamping out
prostitution in a port city such as Singapore without driving it underground, the bill proposed that
to best way to deal with venereal disease would be to register all brothels and prostitutes with the
latter subject to compulsory medical examinations to keep. Singapore was a port center for
empire trade, where transient male workers of every socio economic level descended to sell their
labor or to conduct business. The constant immigration of male “coolie” laborers from China and
India resulted in a perpetual sex ratio imbalance compounded by the economic impracticalities of
keeping a wife. Sex ratios were equally imbalanced within the European community. The paltry
salaries of many British residents made the costs of maintaining a European wife at middle-class
standards of living incredibly difficult.
3
Even well into the 1920s, governments and estate
administrators discouraged their employees from marrying a white woman for fear that it would
impoverish them—poor whites being a taboo since it would reflect badly on white prestige.
4

Singapore was a city teeming with bachelors and to some extent, the Government in Singapore
considered prostitution a necessary evil.
The thought that the government would “condone” prostitution excited a barrage of
protests from moral reform groups in Britain. Countering the bill, The B.S.H.C. instead insisted
on social reform methods, which though legislations, moral uplift, and education, would
eliminate vice altogether. The B.S.H.C. also recommended a series of social, medical, legal and
administrative procedures which sought to check the spread of VD until all tolerated brothels
could be closed—beginning with those patronized by Europeans.
5
Their desire to bring
propaganda work to the colonies was part of an effort to discourage the habits of whoring and
encourage moral improvement. The B.S.H.C. was invested both in the education of whites

49

residing in the colonies as well as “natives.” Historian Philippa Levine points out that the social
nature of the disease had particular meaning for British moral reform groups because “VD was
not seen as only affecting individuals, but as something that would weaken ‘the race’” making
sexual health a national problem.
6
The spread of disease among the predominantly white male
population in the colonies would be detrimental to British racial integrity and the empire at large.
The institutionalization of venereal disease treatment in the colonies is inseparable from
the social and racial dimensions of the illness. Historically, medical groups first became
concerned about venereal disease in the colonies following the staggering numbers of infected
men among British troops stationed in Singapore. Prophylaxis was the primary means of disease
control whereby “individuals are protected from the cause and effect of specific infection.”
7
This
included distracting soldiers with good food, recreation rooms, church services, and swimming
pools, such that troops would rather spend their time and money enjoying the facilities of the
Tanglin Barracks rather than wandering the afflicted streets of Singapore. Education about the
threat of venereal disease formed a key part of the curriculum. Soldiers were warned about how,
Girls develop quickly in the East. They reach sexual maturity very early in life
(at the age of 13 or 14) and they retain their simplicity for years afterwards. They
do so in communities where the moral code is lax […]
8

The very nature of prophylactic prevention for British troops was directed at keeping soldiers
away from supposedly predatory Eastern women.
Though treatment of the civilian population did not receive the same amount of attention,
treating and preventing VD among Asiatics was pertinent for other reasons besides the risk they
posed to troops. Scholars have discussed how colonial medicine was a central mechanism in the
imposition of colonial power elsewhere.
9
Medicine was a part of the “magic” of modernity, an
extension of the civilizing mission that legitimized imperial presence. Having a healthy and

50

disease-free population resulted in a better labor force and lowered costs incurred in worker-
health related expenses. Further, as historian Lenore Manderson points out, public health
programs in Malaya were implemented soon after they were introduced in the metropole. Hence,
Manderson argues, these programs reflected contemporary changing ideas in public health in the
United Kingdom above the needs of the colony (though I would not quite diminish the influence
of local needs entirely).
10
As moral reform groups gained ground in Britain, they cast scrutiny on
the sorry state of the colonies.
Owing to the high rate of illiteracy among Asiatics in Singapore, disseminating
information on VD prevention and prophylaxis through print media was difficult.
11
In his report
to the B.S.H.C. following his research on venereal disease in Singapore, Professor Bostock Hill
recommended films as the most effective way of communicating with illiterate Eastern
populations in the Federated Malay States and the Straits Settlements.
12
Following his report,
The B.S.H.C. persuaded the Colonial Office that propaganda through films would prove
valuable, and that such a method was already seeing some degree of success in Shanghai.
13

The B.S.H.C. soon began to establish a steady supply of films to Britain’s imperial
territories through an empire wide film loans system. After submitting a request directly to the
B.S.H.C., medical departments from the colonies could obtain films free of charge. The
borrowing party would only pay for the costs of screening (such as renting a hall, projector,
operator and lecture) as well as for insurance and transit charges.
14
The formidable Mrs. Neville
Rolfe, the Secretary General for the Council, was the principal agent behind the new film
propaganda scheme. Under her direction, the Council received powerful backing and
government funds to support their work. These included a grant of GBP1000 in 1925 from
Imperial Funds to assist the B.S.H.C. in propaganda work in the British Colonies, while the

51

Exchequer Grant disbursed by the Ministry of Health financed films the BSHC produced or
purchased from 1926 to 1930.
15

The earliest of recorded film loans was to South Africa in 1921. As the program gained
ground from 1924 onward, the Council received a jump in orders from colonies and protectorates
such as Jamaica, Hong Kong, British Guiana and Australasia.
16
With the new funds, the B.S.H.C.
intended to bolster the existing scheme, consolidate distribution services, amass a larger film
collection, and make film a central part of social hygiene education in the colonies.
Upon hearing that the B.S.H.C. had been disseminating film propaganda in the colonies,
a flurry of panic took place at Whitehall (for reasons this chapter will discuss shortly). Prominent
members of the Colonial Office met several times from late 1925 until mid-1926 to discuss the
matter. O.G.R. Williams lamented in a circular correspondence that the Colonial Office did not
appear to have any legislative power to restrain the B.S.H.C. from sending their films out, except
through instructions conveyed to overseas governments warning them about the dangers of the
films.
17
Other officials in the Colonial Office voiced concerns that local censors in overseas
territories would mistakenly believe that the Council’s films had the support of the Colonial
Office and would thus be too timid to interfere. It had suddenly dawned upon them that this
relatively new medium of cinema threatened to escape the limits of imperial control. Leo Amery,
the Secretary of State for the Colonies, issued a circular to most of the colonies in January 1926
alerting them of the film loan service provided by the Council, but also reminding censors not to
hold back or to hesitate in banning films from being screened in the colony altogether.
18
Further
efforts by the B.S.H.C. in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a propaganda
film program for native education in the colonies met an early demise when the Colonial Office
refused to endorse the Council's applications to obtain financial support.

52

The B.S.H.C.'s venereal disease film education scheme in the colonies is essentially a
history of failure in that it did not garner the widespread support that it hoped from the colonial
government nor reach as wide an audience as initially envisioned. Nevertheless, this particular
episode shaped discourse about film and empire for years to follow. The following sections will
discuss how the venereal disease film debate was formative in an “awakening” toward the
politics of cinema and empire in the mid-1920s. State paranoia was grounded in a fundamental
uncertainty toward the relatively new medium of cinema, its place in the colonies, and the
perplexing notion of “native” spectatorship.

Pleasurable Propaganda and The Libidinous Native Spectator

Venereal Disease films proved that the very social function of film was itself unruly and difficult
to pin down. Such films entered the public sphere in Britain in a somewhat indeterminate
position at the tail end of the 1910s. The social distinction between educational and commercial
cinema had only just begun taking shape in the mid to late teens as society began to grapple with
film’s vast potential. Public discourse on the social place of cinema was divided. On the one
hand, films were deleterious to public morals. On the other, they were potent vehicles for mass
moral enlightenment.
19
The emergence of propaganda films, as Annette Kuhn argues,
complicated public understandings about the very nature of film as either commercial
entertainment or non-commercial educational films—but never both.
20
Propaganda films were
potentially both entertaining and educational and were often screened commercially in public
cinemas—venues typically thought of as pleasure-seeking places. The genre therefore disturbed
distinctions between cinemas as destinations of pleasure or sites for education. Film was a

53

slippery entity with various possible social lives.
A genre called the “dramatic” Venereal Disease film, occupied a particularly precarious
position of flux between the categories of education and entertainment. Unlike non-fiction
instructional films, these films followed a narrative with lessons conveyed through a fictional,
dramatized plot. Among the first dramatic social hygiene films to be produced, Damaged Goods
(Samuelson Film Company, 1919) and The End of the Road (1919) were showcased in Britain at
private screenings sponsored by social hygiene organizations as well as at commercial cinemas.
21

These films deployed certain characteristics of the classical film narrative in which fictional
characters worked out conflicts that culminated in a resolution by the film's end. Dramatic V.D.
films, in particular, dramatize the social aspects of venereal disease through characters that
undergo emotionally trying events to rectify a sexual mishap. As Annette Kuhn points out, these
characters were “moral positions” rather than psychologically well-rounded individuals.
22
For
instance, recurring characters include the fallen woman whose loss of virtue results in a life of
prostitution and disease, and the virtuous wife who is often the victim of the third moral
archetype—the misguided, philandering husband trying to make amends for his mistakes. These
characters cloaked the film's scandalous content in a moral message. The films featured
sensational stories and explicit content, yet also claimed to perform the virtuous role of moral
uplift. Mixing entertainment and education anguished censors and moral groups in both Britain
and the U.S. as they acknowledged the educational purpose of the films but struggled with how
their explicit content no doubt promised success in the box office.
For instance, while Damaged Goods was a valiant attempt to provide moral instruction
on matters of sexual health, it had been also produced for commercial profit. This British film
directed by Alexander Butler and based on Eugene Brieux's 1902 play Les Avaries, follows the

54

sexual mishaps of George Dupont who decides to settle down after a series of causal intimate
encounters in his years as a law student.
23
Just before the wedding, he finds out that he has
contracted syphilis from a prostitute by the name of Edith and his doctor advises him not to
marry in the three or four years that it takes to undergo treatment. Taking the advice of a quack
who convinces him that he can be cured in six months, George decides to go ahead with the
wedding. Upon learning that she had contracted the disease and given birth to a syphilitic child,
his wife Henriette leaves him. Meanwhile Edith, a girl from the country who moved to the
metropolis for work, is raped by her boss and turns to prostitution to support her child. After
getting proper medical advice and treatment from a legitimate doctor, George and Edith are
eventually treated and at the end of the film, George is reunited with his wife.
Censors perceived Damaged Goods as an exploitation of vice, no matter how modestly
dressed in reformist intent.
24
As Annette Kuhn argues, the film’s educational function was to
narrativize the acquisition of information and knowledge from legitimate medical sources.
25

Heida Johannsddotir traces the film's troubled beginnings after a rejection of its commercial
release by the British Board of Film Censors in 1919.
26
Their hostile response was predicated in
a belief that the very nature of film as a popular cultural form evoked spectatorships of pleasure
that displaced other loftier forms of watching, particularly among the largely working class
audience in Britain.
Likewise, pleasure-seeking audiences might attend a screening of The End of the Road,
produced by the American Social Hygiene Association, to be amused by perversely titillating
images of syphilitic body parts, a graphic operating scene, and other unwholesome horrors. The
film follows dual narrative strands through the characters of Mary Lee and Vera Wagner. Mary's
mother educates her about the origins of human life, but Vera's mother suppresses all information

55

from her and aims only at finding Vera a good match. Mary goes into nursing where she meets
her husband, Dr. Bell who treats VD patients. “The end of the road” for this virtuous couple is
marriage, home, and parenthood. Vera on the other hand moves to New York to work as a shop
girl. She becomes the unmarried mistress of a wealthy man, but when he learns he has given her
the disease, he abandons her with nothing but a check. Intended for a female audience, the film
compounds good health with sanctity of marriage, while disease is conflated with the
immoralities of sex out of wedlock. The film also peppers its moral message with delightfully
grotesque images. In a scene at a lock hospital, infected women show off weeping sores,
grotesque gaits (due to syphilitic locomotor ataxia), and faces eaten away by the degenerative
disease. The miasma of excessive and deviant female sexuality surrounds this aberrant display of
pathological bodies. Figures such as Edith and Vera are emblematic of the rise in female mobility
in the public sphere after the turn of the century—and the perceived threat to the home and the
family that such mobile women embodied. At the hospital, the mad and vengeful ex-wife of a
mayor vows to spread syphilis to a few more men before the disease takes her to the grave.
Besides these spectacles of the grotesque, the film's inclusion of a love story, sex, and a sordid
tragedy, attracted young women who flocked to see something so sensational on the screen.
27

The film did exceptionally well at the U.S. box office before it was withdrawn from distribution
in the summer of 1919 because of opposition from official bodies and film industry organization
on moral grounds.
28

The anomalousness of VD films was located in the indeterminacy of their spaces of
reception. Society considered cinemas places of “entertainment” and thus, audiences might bring
an unhealthy desire for pleasure to screenings on the sensitive topic of sex and venereal disease.
As Kuhn argues, the venereal disease propaganda film occupied an unstable position in a “no-

56

man's-land” between the genres of the social-problem film and the exploitation film—”claiming
to be respectably instructional and socially responsible on the one hand, while seeming to
promise sensational content on the other.”
29
The problem arose when it was difficult to be sure
that films would be watched for their educational content and not for their pornographic or
titillating potential.
The dangers of these slippery viewing pleasures were particularly pronounced in the
colonies where discourses about the “colonial spectator” were starting to emerge. Rosaleen
Smyth and James Burns amply discuss the formation of colonial understandings about the
perceived inadequacies of the film literacy of “natives.”
30
Studying African audiences in the
1920s, William Sellers, a medical officer with the Nigerian Government, believed that natives
were simply unable to understand cinematically “complex” grammar, mistaking close-ups of
mosquitos for giant monsters for instance. Public discussions of colonial media generated other
such stories about the vulnerability of “primitives” to wrong impressions.
31
Building on Smyth
and Burns, I suggest that colonial officials also believed that “natives” could not discern
“correct” behaviors of watching, and brought a desire to be entertained rather than taught to
educational screenings. Officials were certain that “mischievous”
32
V.D. films appealed to the
“native” spectator not on the educational grounds promised by the B.S.H.C. but because they
were simply titillating and sensational.
Colonial officials were so mistrustful of “native” audiences’ abilities to watch films for
the “right” reasons that even the Council’s efforts to propose films specifically intended for the
non-European viewer was debunked. In 1925, the Council drafted a proposal to the Rockefeller
Foundation suggesting that the foundation consider making a film on venereal disease for “native
races.”
33
Since the Rockefeller Foundation was already in the midst of preparing a film on

57

malaria for use among non-whites and had previously enjoyed notable success with the
hookworm film in certain British colonies, Rolfe had hoped that the foundation would also be
amenable to producing a “simple film-exposition of the problem taken with native backgrounds,
suitable for use in Africa, in Asia and in the West Indies.”
34
Quite aware that a film featuring
European actors and settings would be less appropriate for “native” audiences, Rolfe clearly
states that a film set in a “native” context featuring non-white actors was much needed.
Even so, the indeterminacy between the pleasure and educational impulses of cinema-
going seemed too dangerous for audiences in the colonies. The Colonial Advisory Medical
Sanitary Committee vehemently vetoed Rolfe’s proposal with seemingly irrational anxiety at a
meeting on the 3rd of March 1925. Members present were quite aghast at the notion of using
films that showcased sexual activity to “native” audience. They agreed that they had best not
“put the idea in the natives' heads” in the first place.
35
The committee believed that it was
impossible to produce a film about venereal disease “which could be purely scientific,”
36

cleansed of any titillating and desiring pleasures. They considered it,
[...] dangerous for His Majesty’s Government to encourage the production of
such a film amongst natives, particularly if the film dealt with cases of the
disease amongst Europeans, but hardly less so if the cases with which it dealt
were native cases.
37

The genre of the venereal disease film with its multiple and indeterminate pleasures lent itself
too easily to a libidinous gaze. The untamed desires of “natives” could not be trusted in the
darkness of the cinema, lustful gazes misdirected towards pleasures on the screen completely
subverted the virtuous intentions of the films. According to imperial logics, tropical people were
savage precisely because they were unaware of their sexual bodies, unable to curtail and direct
their desires, whereas ruling-class Europeans “privileged themselves on the basis of their sexual
repression.”
38
Official believed that the very medium of cinema would fail to do educational

58

work amongst “primitive” people. Members of the committee deemed “unsophisticated”
audiences unable to discern correct modes of spectatorship—when one was allowed to watch for
pleasure and when one was expected to see with a detached and scientific mode of looking.
Disregarding Rolfe’s appeal for a film that was specifically made for “native,” non-
European audiences, the Colonial Office denied official approval for the project. The critiques
leveled at the proposal compelled Gilbert Grindle, the deputy Under Secretary of State for the
Colonies, to doubt the feasibility of supporting the Council’s plan. He was anxious that Colonial
Governments would adopt a similar position as the Colonial Advisory Medical Council and
forbid the showing of the films to “colored” populations.
39
The runaway panic in the Colonial
Office toward Rolfe’s plans revealed underlying hysterias in governmental bodies about the
uncontrollable, libidinous looks of “native” spectators. Particularly in the case of dramatic
propaganda films where the distinction between entertainment/education was in flux, “intended”
readings of films could not be guaranteed.
40
Here, viewing for education slipped too dangerously
into viewing for pleasure. The slippery filmic object thus lent itself to an openness of readability
and the risk of illicit pleasures, particular in the supposedly inexperienced eyes of “natives.”

Cinema-Panic and the Question of White Prestige

As I have described, the very presumed nature of “native” spectatorship, with its slippage into
voyeurism and perversion, upset an already precarious balance between education and pleasure.
Since the films featured sexual mishaps among Europeans, colonial officials feared that films
about sexual promiscuity were likely to be misconceived, or worse, condone a derogatory view
of white sexuality (or a view of white sexuality at all). Far from providing enlightenment or

59

instruction, officials feared that watching VD films offered “native” audiences the pleasures of
sexual voyeurism. For the Colonial Office, images of vice and inappropriate representations of
white female sexuality harbored the seeds of political unrest that threatened to destabilize the
racial and sexual laws of empire.
Films were nuisances because they directly challenged the moral hierarchy of race that
was part of the mechanics of imperial rule. The representation of whiteness in venereal disease
films and its effect on what they called “white prestige” in the colonies was foremost on the
minds of members of the Colonial Office. Officials considered the particular genre of dramatic
VD propaganda films such as Damaged Goods and The End of the Road were the most
problematic in this regard as they were produced in Britain or purchased from the U.S. and
featured white actors in Western locations.
For instance, William Ormsby Gore—the Under Secretary of State to the Colonies—
considered Damaged Goods and its depictions of promiscuity and even rape to be highly
unsuitable, even dangerous, for an “uneducated colonial audience.”
41
The B.S.H.C. had
purchased two copies of the British version in 1920 for £120. Hopes that the film's
narrativization of the importance of proper medical care would be useful for audiences in the
colonies where improper diagnosis and treatment of venereal disease by local quack doctors
resulted in delayed or mistreatment and death.
42
Whatever educational benefits the film could
impart, however, were outweighed by the racial and sexual politics that it evoked. Colonial
officials found the fact that the film featured white actors in morally suspect roles and brought
white sexuality (particularly, white women’s sexuality) to the center stage, highly distressing.
The police commissioner forcibly withdrew Damaged Goods the very morning it was scheduled
for screening at a Bombay theater in January 1921.
43
The Colonial Office quickly deemed the

60

small collection of films owned by the Council all inappropriate for screening in “native”
contexts since the films featured European actors only.
44
At a meeting assembled by the Colonial
Advisory Sanitary Committee to discuss the B.S.H.C.’s film scheme, an adviser to the Secretary
of State for the Colonies remarked that showing “films especially of Europeans in Native
Countries would be little short of criminal.”
45

The Committee believed that films depicting philandering and promiscuous Europeans
alongside pathological white bodies afflicted with various assortments of venereal diseases
damaged the prestige of Europeans in the colonies irreparably. The disruption of a race-based
moral hierarchy in the colonies destabilized the very foundations of imperial rule. In an official
letter addressed to Neville Rolfe, Sir Gilbert Grindle (the Deputy Under Secretary of State for the
Colonies) referred to the “undesirable, and even dangerous results” from the wanton display of
films—
[…] in the Colonies where there is a population of mixed races or of natives of
whom comparatively few have reached a stage of civilization comparable with
that prevailing in any European community.
46

Gore chimed in; “I feel very nervous indeed about Venereal Films for native races – especially if
the actors in this film are European.”
47
The Colonial Office was anxious that measures be put in
place to “prevent the risk of exhibition before native spectators of unsuitable dramatic films,
especially those in which the actors are of European race.”
48

The racial politics underlying the Venereal Disease film issue must be understood against a wider
backdrop in which the very popularity of film in the colonies was becoming a subject of grave
concern. Indeed, the venereal disease film debate contributed to an empire-wide panic about the
detrimental effects of commercial cinema on the native mind that had already begun emerging in

61

newspapers in the late 1910s.
49
Soon after the VD film episode, panics about films presenting a
poor image of Europeans in the colonies entered official discourse and circulated within and
between state bodies and public media. Stories of film’s detrimental effects in the colonies soon
became the subject of much interest in the daily papers, as well as within the colonial office.
Public upsets over the morally corrosive effect of cinema began appearing in the Straits
Settlements and Malaya as early as the 1910s. Tucked away amongst government
correspondences on censorship in the Malaysian National Archives, an article from The Straits
Echo bemoaned the pernicious libels exacted on the European race by the cinematic display of
indecently clad European women and the depiction of scandalous love affairs. Written in Penang
on 16th November 1920, the article critiqued films for misrepresenting “European life, its men,
its women, its ideals.
50
The unnamed author feared that the good standing formerly held by the
British community in Asia on account of their “honorable administration, straightforward
business dealings and clean domestic living” would be lost.
51
He held cinema accountable for
this atrocity—
That such prestige has declined to an appreciable extent since the introduction of
the cinematograph to the Far East will not be questioned by anyone who lived out
here in the days before Lumiere’s great invention was being commercially
exploited in our midst.
52

Cinema-panic also loomed large at Whitehall in London. An article published in The Times on
September 18, 1926 ricocheted around the Colonial Office and catapulted the issue of
commercial cinema’s poor influence among the subjects of the British Colony into official
debate. Written by Sir Hesketh Bell, ex-Governor of the Uganda Protectorate, Northern Nigeria,
and Mauritius, “Cinema in the East” indicted films for causing the degeneration of race relations
and respect for Europeans in Malaya, the Straits Settlements and the Dutch East Indies.
53
On his
travels to the East, Bell was painfully aware of a veiled contempt and “undercurrent of

62

impudence” amongst Asiatics towards the white man and attributed this perceptible change in
attitude to the cinema. He directed his unhappiness specifically at American commercial films,
with their “deplorable” stories that plumbed “white society” for sensational tales of crime and
vice, as simply dangerous when shown to “native” audiences in the colonies.
54
Such rhetoric
dictated that simple “natives” fell prey to the fictions of the screen, purportedly leaving the
cinema under the false impression that the scenes of crime and sexual depravity are “part of the
ordinary life of the white man in his own country.”
55
A month later, Bell wrote a second article to
The Times, aptly titled “Perverted Views of European Life,” insisting that the cinema's
detrimental effects in Asia were being suffered in to the African Colonies and Protectorates as
well.
56

At the core of cinema’s menace to white prestige in the colonies was the representation of
the white woman and white female sexuality. Bell feared that in Oriental eyes, the Western
woman was considered immodest and films featuring cabaret flappers in American nightclubs or
women in morally compromising situations did little to dispel this impression.
The deplorable antics of white women in a state of complete nudity, their
prolonged osculatory performances and general immodesty” flew in the face of
the cultivated image of whiteness, where “the white man’s wife and daughters
[were] patterns of purity and virtue.
57

Custodians of white morality, white womanhood harbored the prestige of the race. The link
between the discourse of white prestige and the moral integrity of white women has a particular
historicity. Victorians believed that white women bore a civilizing presence that brought order to
the lives of British men living away from home. Wives were intrinsic to defining Western
standards of civilization and preserving the unity of overseas British communities. Janice
Brownfoot argues that wives stabilized the British image though an embourgeoisment of colonial
communities, turning men away from drink, gambling, and “going native” – all of which were

63

bad for white prestige:
Bearing pure-bred white children, recreating metropolitan domestic and social
life, and enforcing a social distance between Asian subjects and their colonial
rulers, wives were to underline the Europeans sense of a common Caucasianism,
while also establishing more decorous, orderly, conformist communities than
those of pioneering conditions.
58

It was no coincidence that the importation of wives into the colonies at the end of the
nineteenth century coincided with perceived threats to European prestige.
59
The production of a
middle class British colonial identity rested on the shoulders of white women. Ann Stoler argues
further that the arrival of European women to the colonies in larger numbers in the 1920s
coincided with a “significant sharpening of racial lines.”
60
Colonial society believed that white
women, with their supposedly high-strung sensibilities and susceptibilities to the tropical
weather, needed be maintained in comfortable bungalows and sequestered in European social
environments surrounded by familiar and polite comforts. Invoking the presence and protection
of European women engendered new segregationist standards in colonial encounters.
61
Colored
men were perceived as predatory figures, their untamed sexual urges excited by the presence of
European women. Increased police presence, the passing of rape laws, the increased surveillance
of “native” men, and the creation of “white-only” areas and clubs are examples of the ways in
which colonial society consolidated white control for the protection of white women against
perceived sexual transgressions from native men.
Surveillance of desire also extended to the screen. Cinema, as a medium of spectacle with
what Laura Mulvey describes as a “male gaze,” drew “native” eyes toward the body of the
memsahib.
62
The white woman's body on cinema screen united the scopophilic pleasures of both
white men in the colonies and “native” subjects—a shared gaze that frightfully undermined the
state apparatuses that maintained racial-sexual separation. Visual “assaults” on undressed white

64

women by roving Asiatic eyes in the audience perturbed colonial officials. The cinema exposed
private moments of white sexuality—often grotesquely exaggerated—before the supposedly
violating gazes of imperial subjects. For instance, Bell complained that kissing scenes that to a
European audience might seem innocuous, were too risqué for a “native” audience and might
avail the white woman as an aura of sexual availability.
63
The “native” (male) gaze thus acquired
connotations of sexual violence.
Film scholar Poonam Arora describes how the very nature of cinema theaters in the
colonies—with white women in and at the movies—became a subject of active political concern
when “that woman could easily be mistaken for the memsahib and all that that stood for in the
colonial imaginary.”
64
Examining the architecture of the cinema space and the politics of the
veil, Arora argues that whereas Indian ladies in purdah (veils) in the audience could see without
being seeing, bareheaded British ladies were subjects of desiring gazes. In colonial Malaya,
cinemas were unique places of racial mixing where whites and Asians shared a roof. For English
men, such shared spaces meant that European women present were put through the torment of
having to witness the effects of stimulating love scenes on local men. According to Bell,
[...] The prolonged and often erotic exhibitions of osculation frequently shown on
the screen cannot but arouse in the minds of unsophisticated natives feelings that
can be better imagined than described. To hear, indeed, the remarks and cat-calls
which often proceed from the cheap seats occupied by young “coolie”s during
those ‘love passages’ is sometimes enough to make one’s blood boil.
65

Captain T.M. Hussey, the official film censor for the F.M.S. expresses his horror toward films
featuring violent or erotic scenes involving white women:
In days gone by he had respect for the white man because he saw that the white
woman was seemingly well protected and well respected. What does the film do?
It brings within the reach of anyone, who has a few annas to spare the realities --
or supposed realities -- of Western life. […] You see half-dressed Western women
being dragged and pulled about by Western men. Have you ever watched Indians
of Chinese enjoying a scene like that? Indians particularly are greatly affected

65

mentally by them, and the results are not pleasant.
66

For Hussey as well, scenes of white men abusing white women decimated white prestige because
it destroyed the sanctity of white womanhood and the facade of the moral superiority of white
men. As Arora argues, on-screen images of the memsahib and the white man's life destabilized
the carefully constructed discourse of bourgeoisie European identity in the colonies.
67
Stoler
observes how part of the unstable formation of colonial whiteness was cultivated around a moral
hierarchy which elevated loyalty to family and country above sex “by parceling out
demonstrations of excess to different social groups and thereby exorcising its primordial
effects.”
68
“Native” men and women were believed to contain untamed sexual desires whereas
European men practiced admirable restraint and European women were sex-less outside the
marriage bed. In venereal disease films however, wanton harridans debunked notions of passive
and precious white femininity while unrestrained bachelors flouted the rules of sexual good
behavior.
Dramatic venereal disease films were also troubling because their depictions of white
prostitutes were discomfortingly close to British perceptions of sexual vice in the Eastern
colonies. The publication of books such as The White Slave Market (1909) by Mrs. Archibald
Mackirdy and W.N. Willis inflamed public panics over the seduction or kidnapping of white
women into sexual slavery to brown, black and yellow men. For Mackirdy and Willis, white
women were inherently objects of the lust of “Asiatics,” as proclaimed in alarmingly titled
chapters such as “Christian Slaves in the East” and “The Pimps’ Club at Singapore.” Singapore
was “the headquarters of pimps in the East—[…] the burial-ground of thousands upon thousands
of unfortunate white girls.”
69
According to Mackirdy and Willis, white women were the
playthings of wealthy Malay Sultans and Oriental merchants in brothels along the notorious

66

Malay Street in Singapore.
Stories about white women being whisked away for a life a sexual servitude to Asian men
in the East remained alive and well in the 1920s. Embedded in a Colonial Office file filled with
correspondences about the dangers of prostitution in the colonies, a newspaper article from The
Times detailed the League of Nations' March 1927 report on White Slave Traffic stating that the
trade in white flesh was extensive in foreign countries.
70
According to William F. Snow’s inquiry
in the report, women were tricked by promises of marriage or employment, starved and beaten
into servitude. Sex traders and their victims congregated in cosmopolitan centers of the empire—
ports and trading cities where racial mixing took place freely between merchants, laborers and
navy men. Hence, white slave panic was not only confined to the screen or the pages of the
popular press. Its discourses of miscegenation and the purity of white womanhood were a
fundamental part of imperial governments and international organizations and how they
understood mobility, borders, and cosmopolitan intimacies.
White slave narratives were both articulations of social anxieties regarding predatory
foreign male sexuality as well as of mobile, economically active white women. The emergence
of white slave discourse can be tied to the large migration of European, often working-class
women between 1860 and the First World War. Patterns of migration include movements from
the country to the cities, as well as from colonial metropoles to the colonies including South
Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Jo Doezema points out how white slave myths were tied to cross-
oceanic migrations facilitated by the Pax Britannica and the invention of the steamship and
telegraph, which facilitated movements between the “center” and “periphery.”
71
Discourses
about the need for the protection of white womanhood worked on the premise that white women
would never willingly become involved sexually with non-white men.
72

67

In reality, the Ediths and Veras of the world spilled out of the screens and were available
to Asian men on the streets of Singapore for a price. Before 1912, European prostitutes occupied
“patchouli scented”
73
brothels along Malay Street. Though the government maintained a strict
ban on British girls, French, Central European, or Russian refugee background met demand.
74

Though their clients typically consisted of Europeans and British men residing in Singapore,
visits from Chinese and Malay clients were not unheard of.
75
One need not even visit a European
prostitute to witness the misbehaviours of white women. James Warren describes how sailors,
“coolie”s and towkays alike saw a lot to excite them as European women seduced customers
from doorways and street corners.
76
At night, drunken prostitutes fought each other on the
streets.
Traffic in European prostitutes to Singapore continued until the government ordered all
European prostitutes home in 1918.
77
In spite of this, a number of European prostitutes still
remained to ply their trade on the sly, with new arrivals being brought in by male traffickers over
the next two decades.
78
Along with unregistered or “sly” brothels, these independently operating
prostitutes were frequented by Europeans, well-to-do Chinese, and also by members of other
races. Though not allowed under the Contagious Disease act, the police closed an eye toward
such activities. Similarly, though miscegenation was to some extent controllable in registered
brothels (for instance, only Chinese men were allowed in known brothels populated by
Cantonese women, while British men were not permitted to frequent Asian brothels at all)
79
, in
reality whether these stipulations were enforced is doubtful. The world of prostitution in
Singapore was truly a cesspool of cosmopolitan desire.
Furthermore, in featuring wretched white prostitutes such as Edith and fallen women
such as Vera, these Venereal Disease films interfered with the dominant discourse in imperial

68

settings that social diseases were spread by immoral and infecting Oriental women. Phillipa
Levine describes the “woman-native-prostitute” complex, referencing how colonial discourse
invokes the potential for all “native” women to be prostitutes.
80
Health officials in Singapore
sighed about the difficulties of eradicating venereal disease because of the futility of segregating
prostitutes from a sea of generally unchaste “native” women. The figure of the diseased
indigenous harlot is indeed a familiar trope in the history of imperialism, across empires.
According to Linda Merians, pre-eighteenth century writers and eighteenth century authorities
believed that syphilis was brought to Europe from the “new world” by sailors who had returned
with Columbus in 1493.
81
They accused indigenous women for being vessels of venereal disease
because of their uncontrollable lust, promiscuous ways, and unclean habits.
Although concubinage and inter-racial sex between white men and Asian women was to
some degree tolerated (and expected) in the colonies,
82
British men who frequented prostitutes in
Asia were still a source of consternation. British men succumbing to venereal disease in tropical
climates were considered a grave loss to the virility and potency of the “race.” Straits Times
correspondent, W. Pierpont laments the waste of many military men from the Royal Navy
stationed in Singapore:
I have seen many virile, splendid specimens of manhood wrecked and ruined in
the disease-ridden pleasure houses of Singapore. I have watched the gay
procession of carefree youth file past one by one, and one by one they have
plunged blindly into the mouth of disease and decay. [...] Think of it, the fathers
of the sons of future British Empire giving the best years of life in the service of
civilization, away from those dearly beloved, away from the steadying influence
of a happy home, driven into the arms of rotting harlots; seeking comfort and
solace, seeking spiritual and intellectual guidance and finding it not.
83

Asiatic prostitutes contaminated good British men with decay and illness, their genitals a vessel
of disease. As Levine points out, legislations on prostitution and ordinances on contagious
diseases worked to protect racial hierarchies and the power structures of empire by controlling

69

the sexual activities of prostitutes so as to protect British men.
84
Venereal disease films, in their
contextually unsuitable depiction of white prostitutes and immorality, contradicted the rhetoric of
the infected native harlot who leeched the healthy fluids of white men in the tropics, leaving
them wasted and ruined.

The panic over racial prestige conveyed in the press immediately became the subject of
government concern in London. The shape of imperial documents—the inclusions of annexes
and newspaper clippings, and their arrangement between official correspondences and
memorandums, reveal policy in the making through back-and-forth conversations with public
discourse at a moment fraught with anxiety about the new medium and what it meant for colonial
politics. “Immoral Films,” “The Cinema in the East” and “Perverted Views of European Life”
were annexed within government files on the topic of censorship in the colonies and quoted
extensively in a Colonial Office memorandum on the topic of censorship and the influence of the
cinema on “native” minds. Bell’s recommendations were later incorporated within the 1930
Colonial Films Committee Report and repeated multiple times in correspondences on the
question of film censorship.
85
Bell’s articles drew the alarm of King George V who had his
private secretary raise the issue with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, L.S. Amery.
86

Cinema in the colonies became a major topic at the 1926 Imperial Conference at a special
Thirteenth Report of the General Economic Sub-committee entitled “Exhibition within the
Empire of Empire Cinematograph Films.” The committee was largely concerned with the large
number of foreign (particularly American) film imports dominating the colonies, and the much
weaker presence of the British film industry in these markets.
87
Panics in the popular press
journeyed into official organs, government memorandums, and empire-wide legislation

70

effectively rationalizing paranoia as policy.
The Colonial Office associated the cinematic smears on white prestige with a threat to the
larger political fabric of imperial Britain. In being responsible for a perceived degeneration of the
racial hierarchy in the Eastern colonies, the cinema came under fire for disrupting the very social
and political foundations of this imperial formation. In “Cinema in the East,” Bell's anxiety over
the destruction of white prestige laid Southeast Asia open to communist influence.
Those films have weakened the whole platform of respect on which the
ascendancy of the white man in the tropics has rested, and have prepared the
minds of the people for the disintegrating influences of Communistic
propaganda.
88

In the Straits Settlements, cinema’s threat to European authority was compounded by the
appearance of anti-imperial sentiment amongst Chinese nationalists in Singapore in the 1920s.
89

The Colonial Office was hence anxious to exercise racial and imperial authority over the
“native” imagination, and so they were suspicious of the B.S.H.C. who threatened to thwart that
control by allowing its scandalous films to run wild in the colonies.
The cheaper cinema theaters for the masses were purportedly unhealthy from both a
moral and hygienic standpoint. Public theaters in the Straits Settlements and F.M.S. in the 1910
and 20s were reportedly salacious and miasmic places where people would skulk off into a
cramped room “in an atmosphere not fit to breathe, in semi-darkness, [to] sit and look at things
so disgusting, so suggestive that their minds cannot fail to be soiled and their moral tone
lowered.”
90
Opinions about theaters’ deleteriousness was compounded with concerns about them
as fire-prone death traps particularly in Southeast Asia where it was common to house the
establishment in an enclosed wooden structure or atap (thatch) hut.
91
Before air-conditioning
arrived in the 1930s, cinemas in Singapore were cesspools for contagion where the breath and
spit of the working classes carried consumptive vapors and tuberculosis to all present.
92
Local

71

cinema halls in the colonies hence acquired a reputation for being immoral and unhealthy
hotspots.
Cinemas were therefore places that were hard to discipline while films themselves were
delinquent objects that threatened to upset colonial codes of race and sexuality. As things whose
intended effects were uncertain, the cinematic medium was unruly because of the impossibility
of determining how audiences would respond to a film’s intentions. The unruliness of films also
extended beyond issues of reception. As the next section will discuss, films as physical objects
were also deviant in their ability to move across space; indeed, their mobile trespassing across
borders threatening the continued survival of the British film industry.

Economic Moralities and the Threat of Hollywood

Where earlier accounts of cinema’s immoral influence indicated a mistrust of the medium as a
whole, the nature of such discourse began to shift toward a pre-occupation with American
commercial films in particular toward the mid-1920s. Moral panics over the detrimental
representations of whiteness intersected with economic rationales at a point where British
production companies were vying against American films for empire markets. As Priya Jaikumar
argues, political and economic motivations for state control were subsumed by cultural and
moral arguments in this period of late imperialism.
93
Cultural rhetoric decrying the socially
corrosive effects of American films on the fabric of the British Empire veiled economic realities
that saw American films crowding out British productions in empire markets. After WWI, the
European film industry only held a marginal share of the U.S. market, and a small share of its
home market. In the 1920s, American films constituted the majority of imports into the Straits

72

Settlements and Malaya. In 1927, the Straits Settlements imported 4,000,700 feet of American
film that made up 72% of total imports while British imports consisted of a paltry 5.2%.
94
The
system of blind and block-booking for American films marginalized British films miserably.
95

Beyond the threat that foreign films posed to the British film industry itself, the
committee feared that such films advertised foreign products and lifestyles that supposedly
impressionable imperial subjects would clamor for—at the expense of Empire goods. The
committee claimed,
It is an undoubted fact that the constant showing of foreign scenes or settings, and
the absence of any corresponding showing of Empire scenes or settings,
powerfully advertises (the more effectively because indirectly) foreign countries
and their products.
96

American films promoted an American lifestyle that generated demand for American products, at
the expense of goods produced within the British Empire. For instance, officials and tradesmen
attributed a rise in demand for sewing machines and American style clothing were to Easterners
who “wish to dress as the American motion-picture star dresses.”
97
Complaints of this nature
peppered the daily papers in the Straits Settlements.
The subject races are seeing life in terms of the American dollar; of the American
divorce laws; of the American gunmen' of American methods of illegally
obtaining alcoholic liquor. The American it is who is the eternal brave man,
commanding man of business, explorer, reformer, upholder of justice. It is the
American home, the American office, American judicial procedure, not the
British, which are constantly, all-pervasively in the eyes of all the Britons over the
seas. […] It is the American who is the super-man, and the Englishman who is the
nonentity—or worse—in the pictures, which are being shown to Oriental peoples,
very often in pictures with an Oriental setting.
98

The press of course, expressed Hollywood's economic threat in moral terms. Naïve “native”
spectators supposedly could not differentiate between cinematic fiction and reality and hence
were susceptible to scenes of crime and moral depravity that were the topic of many popular
American films. When a schoolboy in Taiping, Malaya burgled a bungalow in the middle of the

73

night, fingers pointed to him being a regular filmgoer and a fan of Douglas Fairbanks.
99
To the
dismay of the British in Malaya, films screened in the picture theatres in large towns were
American films that “present western life in a way which is not only unreal but is frequently
absurdly grotesque.”
100
The Malayan Saturday Post complained; “the bulk of cinema-goers in
Malaya are Asiatic children whose views of western life and culture are obtained largely from the
films.”
101

Educational films from the U.S. were not spared critical onslaught. Residents in the
Straits Settlements derided a Burton Holmes travelogue that falsely depicted scenes of Malacca,
arguing that the mountainous hinterlands featured in the film could not possibly have been shot
at or near the settlement.
102
Members of the public were inflamed about the liberties American
films were purportedly taking in representing the British Empire. As I describe later in this
chapter, such concerns impelled the need for the British cinema industry to take control of the
educational film market.
American films were not the only source of concern. A censor in East Africa complains
about a problem with uncensored films arriving from India. He brought up the case of a
particularly sordid Bombay film by the Khoinor Company, referred to as Telephone Girl. The
film’s protagonist was a girl who appeared European “to all but the most sophisticated.”
103

During the course of her adventures, she was attacked and violated by Indians — a travesty
against white womanhood that was deemed unsuitable for exhibition to the colonies. Another
film was banned altogether for depicting a slave-market where girls “who looked very like
Europeans” were paraded half naked and were flogged by Arabs.
104
These border-crossing films came as a shock to the colonial logics of order. Films were
unruly things, going everywhere, with circuits and circulations that could not be easily tamed. In

74

the early 1920s, there legislations governing the import of film reels were limited and
mechanisms governing censorship were rudimentary. Indeed, the Colonial Office found
themselves short of a legislative arm that would enable them to prohibit the B.S.H.C. from
sending their films to the colonies. Similarly, film's transnational flows meant that films could be
imported directly from the U.S. or other parts of the world, and into the colony without much
interference by way of legislation. It became painfully obvious that existing legislations were
inadequate in managing the slipperiness of cinema. Awakening to their powerlessness to regulate
the movement of such a politically influential medium, the Colonial Office scrambled to figure
out a way to control cinema's vagrant and inflammatory ways. At the heart of the issue was a fear
about the mobility of film so easily across colonial borders.

Colonial Spectators, Censorship and the Audience Census in Malaya

To tame pervasive American cinemas and protect the British film industry, the Cinematograph
Films Act was introduced in 1927. The passing of the act following the recommendations of the
1926 Imperial Conference, sought to protect and support the British film industry by ensuring
that a larger proportion of the films exhibited throughout the Empire would be of British
production. In the Straits Settlements, a bill amended the Theaters Ordinance into a distinct
Cinematograph Films Ordinance, stating that at least seven and a half per cent of the total annual
footage shown in local cinemas from Dec 31 1928 should be British. The percentage was to be
raised to ten per cent in 1929 and thereafter to rise by five percent annually until the maximum
thirty per cent was reached.

75

The economic compulsions behind the quota system—and its subsequent failures—are
amply discussed elsewhere.
105
The point here is that the 1927 Films Act signified a turn toward
active regulations of the colonial cinematic realm as both an industry and a political entity. As
Jaikumar points out, operating through trade terms both implicit and strategic was one of the few
ways in which the British state could assert its economic preferences at a time where it was
politically withdrawing direct control over colonial and dominion governments.
106
The Films Act
was one of many other apparatuses at work to discipline filmic vagrancies and incorporate
cinema within colonial governmentality. This section turns to censorship and the audience
census—two specific apparatuses that sought to control the movement of films and how they
would be seen, through the construction of an imagined colonial spectator as its subject.

The moral debates catalyzed by the venereal disease propaganda scheme spurred the
consolidation of a formal censorship system in Malaya and initiated a colony-wide census
project which identified cinemas as having European, Asiatic or mixed-race audiences. Race
determined who could and who could not access certain films. Audience censuses worked in
hand with censorship to establish where, how, and to whom venereal disease films could be
screened. The inscription of race into the world of the cinema maps state power onto the social
and individual body. Censorship disciplined both the gaze of the collective population as well as
the private, libidinous pleasures of the individual. Drawing on Foucault, Lee Grieveson describes
these “technologies of exclusion” as “the most revealing concrete effect of the play of modern
political technologies on the life of individual bodies and on the level of populations and the way
they reproduce.”
107
In the cinema, this “disciplining of the movement of rays of light,”
108
as
Grieveson so poetically describes, articulates the sovereignty of the state in controlling colonial

76

ways of seeing.
Even the censorship apparatus created colonial cinemas as spaces of state discipline and
surveillance, such spaces were also productive. For Foucault, censorship is a paradoxical force.
In The History of Sexuality, the very repressions and silences around sex in the seventeenth
century produced discourses on sexuality—effecting its “veritable discursive explosion.”
109
My
reading of censorship certainly addresses its regulatory powers but also decouples censorship
from a discourse of limitation to include Foucault's understanding of censorship as productive. In
delimiting the boundaries of what could or could not be seen and by whom, censorship produced
discourses about the colonial spectator—writing its birth into the imperial imagination.

From the start, the primary purpose of film censorship in the colonies was the protection of
white prestige and “native” moral sensibilities.
110
These two conditions were inseparable.
Degrading white prestige was not an issue of vanity but a serious matter of political dissent.
Grindle declares, “Our prime object is to prevent the showing of films tending to bring the white
race into contempt in British Colonies.”
111
The Advisory Committee for the British Film
Producers Company that supplied films to the colonies considered elements “detrimental to the
prestige of the white races”
112
out of bounds for “native” audiences. This included scenes with
“vamps, white people drinking cocktails, women displaying their legs, white “he-men” ill-
treating white women, illicit love, triangular sex dramas, murder by white people and white men
in love with colored women.”
113

Local censors within the colonies also adopted this principle. A state official agrees,
“…the local censors’ duty is to prevent the exhibition of films likely to have a bad effect on the
local population or to render unfavorably on British prestige.”
114
The Chairman of the Singapore

77

films appeal board announced:
The main principle of censorship here is to preserve the prestige of the European
[…] films are censored here for the uneducated Asiatic classes and not for the
European and other educated sections of the community.
115

As the previous section discussed, sex was at the center of the moral and political surveillance of
white prestige. Censorship categories parsed out the political significance of on-screen desire.
The British Board of Film Censors considered “equivocal situations between white girls and men
of other races” within the politically dangerous category while films featuring “liaison between
colored men and white women” were classified as socially problematic.
116
The idea of mutual
desire from both parties was classified as a form of political disturbance along with films that
displayed “white men in state of degradation amidst Far Eastern and native surroundings.”
117
In
the F.M.S. Hussey vehemently agreed.
It is obviously impossible in the Orient to show films which deal with any such
inter-racial intercourse. I am inclined to consider these films in which Western
women are exposed and roughly treated as the most important group with which I
have to deal.
118

If such scenes did not sexually excite Asiatic audiences, they could otherwise be counted on to
offend them. Exhibiting this somewhat contradictory discourse on race, colonial officials were
convinced that even though Orientals lagged behind the West in terms of morals standards,
Asiatics had an easily bruised sense of modesty.
119
Protecting childlike “native” sensibilities as
Arora describes, was part of the conflicting discourse of colonial censorship, even as fears of
libidinous Asiatic gazes rattled censor's nerves.
Other images that threatened white prestige were easy pickings for the censor’s scissors.
This included films depicting Western metropolitan cities as poverty ridden and crime-infested
hovels. Censors attributed the supposed rise of violent crime and firearm use in the colonies to
the influence of the screen.
120
The War Office was particularly concerned that the farcical actions

78

of whites when in His Majesties uniform on film would incite the contempt of “natives.”
121

Drunken, cowardly or dishonorable behavior while in uniform sullied the reputation of the
military and discredited Britain’s authority.
In the mid-1920s, censorship became particularly stringent on topics of fighting,
gunpowder and crime. Local censors in Singapore also were concerned that scenes of fighting
and the French revolution in a British film, The Only Way (Wilcox, 1927), would rouse political
dissatisfaction amid rising anti-imperial sentiment in China and among the Chinese in
Singapore.
122
With such disruptive events being attributed to the cinema in Asia, it was no
wonder that the Colonial Office was anxious to ensure that preventative measures were being put
in place in the rest of the colonies. In a report for the Colonial Films Committee, Sir Hesketh
Bell impressed upon his readers that action must be taken immediately “while there is yet time”
[emphasis in the original] so that the African empires would not incur “the same damage that has
already been done to the prestige of Europeans in India and the Far East through the widespread
exhibition of ultra-sensational and disreputable pictures.”
123

Though it was easy to come to a consensus about what “natives” should not watch, it was far
more difficult to ensure that these measures would be enforced. Officials considered setting up a
central office in London that censored all films destined for the colonies, but such a measure was
difficult to enforce, as many films screened in the colonies were not even shown in Britain. In
West Africa for instance, films moved down the coast through French and British territories
while in films traveled from South Africa and India to East Africa.
124
Furthermore, there could
be no guarantee that a distributor would send the same version of a film to Britain as they would
to the colonies.

79

Censorship bodies located on the ground in the colonies hardly fared better. Ensuring
effective censorship at the level of the individual colonies was no simple task, as many colonies
had not quite established a mature, organized system of enactments and legislations. Prior to the
mid-1920s, official censorship bodies in many of the less developed colonies were rudimentary.
Censorship duties were taken on by administrative departments or, most commonly, by the
police as were the case in North Borneo and Trinidad. The Legislative Council only recently
empowered the Governor of Jamaica to appoint an official censor where previously the job fell
the mayor of Kingston who purportedly let in any film that had been passed in America.
125

Censorship criteria were loosely defined along general guidelines — “films [were] banned or
altered only when they are likely to be detrimental to the prestige of Europeans or good behavior
of the local inhabitants” though what was considered “detrimental” and what was not were left
open to interpretation resulting in widely differing standard between colonies.
126

Until the passing of the Cinematograph Film Ordinance in 1927, a somewhat limited and
outdated 1912 amendment to the Theatre Enactment of 1910 sufficed in regulating public
cinemas in the Federated Malay States. The latter poorly accounted for the problem of white
prestige in the cinema, rather generally stating that theaters be licensed and that a censor survey
films before they could be screened. The Acting Resident in Selangor furthermore did not think
it necessary in 1912 to appoint a central committee to handle film censorship and found it
sufficient to leave this task to the Licensing Officer.
127
Licensing Officers were somewhat
haphazardly employed and the position was typically occupied by the District Officers (the
administrative heads of regions within a state) or whoever the Resident of the particular Malay
state saw fit to appoint. An Official Censor was only appointed in 1923 after the declaration of
Ordinance No. 200 (Cinematograph Films),
128
and even then his authority was limited to the

80

Straits Settlements. Bell pointed out that the majority of films seen in the region were deplorable,
in spite of the existing, rather middling, censorship.
129
E.C.H. Wolff, the British Resident of
Negri Sembilan, voiced his dissatisfaction with existing censorship arrangements in a letter to the
Chief Secretary to Government of the F.M.S. on 28th April 1926. He wrote,
I am of opinion that the present arrangements are almost chaotic: there are a large
number Censors, many of them not particularly suited for the exercise of such
delicate responsibilities and there is no provision for appeal against their
decisions either of approval or of refusal. It is difficult to understand why some
such simple arrangement as is in operation in the Colony cannot be made
applicable to the Federated Malay States or even to each State […]
130

To his relief, the latter half of the 1920s, saw a systematization of the process of cinematograph
film censorship in Malaya. The questions surrounding the suitability of venereal disease films the
colonies and the concurrent debates about white prestige in commercial cinema were a
fundamental part of this process. Following the B.S.H.C.'s film loan scheme, Amery’s January
1926 circular dispatch to colonial governments stressed the necessity for the utmost sensitivity to
local temperament and cultural norms in deciding which films could be screened and to whom
“particularly where questions of race are likely to create special difficulties.”
131
He reminded
local censors that films sent out by the B.S.H.C. must not be exempt from censorship and he
expected colonial governments either to impose screening restrictions or to prohibit them entirely
with respect to local racial and social conditions. Grindle insisted that, “what is wanted is to
stiffen the censors backs and assure them of the Secretary of State’s support.”
132
In response to
the alarm over the sorry state of censorship in the colonies, Amery sent out another circular
dispatch on 20th April 1927 reminding colonial governments that films prepared in America or
Europe might “arouse undesirable racial feeling” by portraying aspects of the life of Europeans
which, however innocuous seeming, are liable to be “misunderstood by communities with other

81

customs and traditions.”
133
Thus, any film, even British productions which met quota
requirements, had to be carefully considered by the local censors.
Meanwhile, the Colonial Office informed the B.S.H.C. that local censors were given the
final authority over whether or not a film could be screened and if any edits were needed. On
their end, the B.S.H.C. had to furnish all prospective loaners with a clear synopsis of the film
before they could be sent out. The Colonial Office even considered putting in a clause in the
Exchequer Grant (which funded the Council's propaganda work in the colonies) to allow the
grant to be withdrawn should the B.S.H.C. fail to meet these terms.
134

Whitehall pressured colonial governments to make sure that censorship legislations were
more watertight. The Federated Malay States, for one, was put in the hot seat. Amery wrote to
the Governor of the Straits Settlements, L.N. Guillemard, in December 1926, forwarding a copy
of Bell’s “The Cinema in the East” to seek some accountability about the state of censorship in
Malaya.
135
Before responding to Amery, Guillemard quickly established the Cinematograph
Films Control Enactment on 17th March 1927.
136
Under this enactment, every cinematograph
film and all pictures, photographs, posters or figures advertising a cinematograph display
intended for exhibition in the Federated Malay States was to be submitted to an Official Censor
located in Singapore. Prior to the formalization of this position in 1920, the job was performed
by temporary, somewhat haphazard assortment of individuals, one of whom was a British man
who had recently lost his job at the Singapore Oil Mills.
137
The Official Censor inspected every
cinematograph film and every picture, photograph, poster or figure advertising a cinematograph
display that was intended for exhibition in the F.M.S. He had the power to grant or deny
authority to screen it. Exhibiting a film without the mark of the censor would be subject to a
$500 fine. The enactment also authorized any police officer without a warrant to search a

82

premise and arrest anyone suspected of not abiding by this law. In addition, an Appeal
Committee handled public complaints and had the power to order that any film or advertisement
material previously approved by the Official Censor be taken off the display circuit indefinitely
or until the offensive scenes were excised. Eight months after receiving Amery's letter,
Guillemard complained that Bell’s “Cinema in the East” was unduly hyperbolic and assured
Amery that censorship measures in the Malay States and the Straits Settlements were already
well in place.
138

Debates about censorship were not limited to questions about what audiences should or should
not watch, but were also about who was doing the watching. The colonial office drew up a
hierarchy of permissibility—who was being permitted the right to look and who was not. As
Nicholas Mirzoeff theorizes though his study of the plantation complex, “visuality supplemented
the violence of authority.”
139
Controlling the realm of the visual controlled power over the
subject where “slavery is the removal of the right to look” and the “overseer” possess the
organizing power of sight.
140

The permissibility of viewing and watching was assessed on a politics of race and
cultural abjection. The Colonial Office decided that the B.S.H.C's collection of dramatic films
could be screened to populations considered more “European” or closer to an imagined cultural
whiteness, but not to viewers in Asia, and under no circumstances to “natives” in Africa for
whom screening venereal disease films “would be most regrettable.”
141
“Native-ness” was an
active category, used in specific ways to delineate the black, brown, and yellow races—those
deemed as being farthest removed from European civilization and most abject on a scale of
otherness. Hence, these measures excluded the Mediterranean territories. Gore Ormsby wrote,

83

Can we confine these – to my mind most dangerous films – to Gibraltar, Malta
and Cyprus and possibly Bermuda. Their use has been prohibited by the
Government of India and I should oppose rigorously their introduction into Africa
where they can only lower white prestige, and where the cinema in all forms has
an unduly exiting influence on natives.
142

The Secretary of State stated that none of the films owned by the B.S.H.C. as of June 1925 were
allowed in any part of Tropical Africa with, to some extent, the exception of medical men.
143

Viewing pathological and sexual European bodies was a dangerous “privilege” that had to be
excluded from a large proportion of Britain’s territories. The films' slipperiness and openness to
pleasurable (and perverse) ways of seeing made them too much of a risk for audiences deemed
too unsophisticated to occupy appropriate modes of pleasure spectatorship.
As a result, the Council could not loan any dramatic films to the colonies that were
intended for non-white audiences.
144
Any dramatic films bound for the colonies were under the
strict stipulation that they could only be shown to European audiences. Before the B.S.H.C.
could make any dispatches, the Council was to send the Colonial Office a full description of the
film with information about whether or not the intended audience included non-whites as well as
whites, or would be limited to only European viewers only.
145

Not only were certain colonies considered off limits to potentially scintillating films
about sex and disease, the Secretary of State also expressed grave doubts about displaying these
films “in any colony with a population of mixed race.”
146
Officials were suspicious that watching
sex and violence on the screen would instigate crimes against whites. Hussey, film censor for the
F.M.S., was repulsed at how the knockabout and dance club comedies popular in the 1920s
featured “inadequately dressed women dancing on the screen [who are] treated with some
violence by the male characters.”
147
In a thinly veiled reference toward rape and sexual violence
by non-whites against whites, he claims,

84

It would be impossible to estimate the harm that might be done by that picture in
a cosmopolitan city like Singapore, where a comparatively small number of white
people, British and Americans, are surrounded by a large number of Chinese and
Indians.
148

Fears that unrestrained libidinous gazes in the cinema bore the potential for inter-racial desire
and violence in real life marked the spectator as a racial body whose dangerous gaze must be
subject to censure, management, discipline, and exclusion.
To facilitate the disciplining of cinematic space, official censuses of all cinema houses in
the colonies collected knowledge about the “colonial spectator.” Following the venereal disease
film debate, it became of utmost importance to find out who attended the cinema. In 1931, the
Film Group of the Federation of British Industries sent out a circular dispatch to all the colonies
requesting information about each cinema’s seating capacity, the average weekly attendance, if
theaters were equipped with talkie equipment and significantly, “whether the audiences are
European or non-European, or mixed.”
149
In response, the F.M.S. and S.S. carried out extensive
surveys, which resulted in the cataloging of each cinema theatre in all the districts in each state.
Sanitary board chairmen and district officers amassed information regarding the racial
compositions and attendance rates in every registered cinema hall under their administration.
Cinemas were identified as “mixed,” “non-European,” or in some cases as “Chinese” or
“Malay.”
Foucault's writing on biopower illuminates the forces at work at this particular moment.
Foucault designates the biopolitical state as one where the control and regulation of the social
body and the individual body was performed through “a continuum of apparatuses (medical,
administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.”
150
The calculated
evaluation and classification of people made possible though demography for instance, rendered
confusing mixed bodies into knowable territories at the level of the social body. As Benedict

85

Anderson argues, the colonial state imagined its dominion through the organization of
knowledge and the population census was a technique of power through which the state
rationalized a governable population.
151
Likewise, the racial census for cinematograph theaters in
the colonies rendered the cinematic space into knowable geographies which allowed the state to
figure out who watched films, and with whom—and to manage this accordingly.
152
Otherwise an
untamed collective of white, brown, and yellow visual appetites, the census allowed the state to
make cinematic watching mappable onto racialized bodies over whom the disciplinary powers of
censorship or white-only screenings could be exacted. At the level of the individual body, these
measures made intimate spectatorial pleasures, and their supposed libidinous desires,
manageable by the colonial state.

The precedent for the racial division of the audience was already established during conferences
held by the Venereal Disease Commission in the early 1920s. From January 17th to 27th 1921,
the Commission made its way to Singapore where it arranged screenings of the film Damaged
Goods. Its runs were limited however—being shown only in the context of Council conferences
strictly closed to the general public. European parents attended separate lectures from parents of
non-European pupils, social workers working among Asiatic groups and local women’s
organizations.
153
A lecture by Neville Rolfe preceded the screening where she emphasized the
importance of addressing venereal disease as a communal problem, much like “tuberculosis and
smallpox.” Addressed to English-speaking audiences at the Victoria and Alhambra Theater at
events restricted to “parents and responsible teachers” of European students at the Y.M.C.A.,
these lectures and screenings were intended for a select demographic rather than a broad
public.
154
Called a “biological film” in the papers, Damaged Goods was screened in an

86

educational context, carefully framed by informational lectures, its potential for dramatic
sensationalism muted and disguised as far as possible. The press found the film remarkable but
doubted its suitability for mixed audiences.
155

In spite of their eagerness to use V.D. film propaganda in the colonies, the B.S.H.C.
capitulated to the Colonial Office’s prohibition on screening films of a dramatic nature to
“native” peoples. Rolfe conceded that the screening of dramatic films featuring Europeans would
be unsuitable for the general public in the colonies.
156
After all, the B.S.H.C. had campaigned
elsewhere to “cleanse the screens” of immoral films which they believed led to promiscuity and
disease.
157
Though the B.S.H.C. had already supplied several dramatic films to Hong Kong and
Singapore in 1924 and 1925, they were sent out under the strict condition that they would be
screened only to European garrisons and not to Asiatics.
158
The films arrived in Singapore from
the Council through the Senior Medical Officer at the Military Headquarters in Singapore who
then passed them on to the Colonial Secretary for use exclusively among Europeans in the Straits
Settlements.
159
In the Dominions and South Africa where the size of the European population
was large enough to justify “special measures of popular enlightenment amongst the
Europeans,”
160
the Council was assured by the respective medical departments that the theatrical
environment in which the films were to be screened could be sufficiently controlled so as to
prevent “the danger of mixed audiences viewing dramatic films.”
161
Hence, dramatic films
showing white dramatis personae could only be loaned to the Dominions and to South Africa
under “the strict condition to the Medical Department borrowing the film that it shall be shown
to white audiences only.”
162
Film screenings and cinema theaters acquired racial borders;
audiences were categorized according to logics of race, which guarded privileges of looking.

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Dramatic VD films used a fictional, narrative format to dramatize the moral dimensions
of social disease. Such films included Whatsoever a Man Soweth (1917), Damaged Goods, The
Shadow (1920s) and The Flaw (1920s). The Shadow was a 40-minute film prepared by the
Community Service for the Council for use in accompaniment with a lecture. “A sense of
personal responsibility is stressed” in the film through topics such as a man’s duty to equip
himself with the proper knowledge of the disease, and the effects of sexual irresponsibility on
innocent lives.
163
The tragedy of venereal disease on the individual and the family is also the
topic of The Flaw and Damaged Goods. The War Office in England sponsored Whatsoever a
Man Soweth for military men in the Canadian Army but screened it for adult men in general. The
film dramatized the sexual temptations of town life and the remorse that followed a good time. A
young soldier by the name of Dick is approached by a wily prostitute at Trafalgar Square but is
interrupted by another officer who warns of him of the dangers of associating with such women.
Tom is unfortunately not so lucky and he contracts syphilis. He infects his wife who later gives
birth to a blind child. Featuring desperate white prostitutes, weak-willed men, and depicting an
iconic London landmark as a destination for sin, it is unsurprising that the Colonial Office
refused to let such films be shown to non-white audiences in the colonies.
The only films in the Council’s collection that Colonial Office guidelines permitted for
use among select non-European groups in the colonies were “medical films” and “biological
films” that were strictly to be used only for the technical education of teachers and medical
professionals only.
164
“Medical films” were technical films used specifically for the instruction
of medical men, nurses, mid-wives and social workers while “biological films” were intended for
the instruction of both European and non-European teachers.
165
These were non-fiction films that
addressed the audience in an instructional manner.

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The strict conditions under which medical and biological VD films could be shown in
Singapore served to restrict the ways in which the films were received as much as possible.
Screening the films only to select audiences, typically within the context of accompanying
medical lectures, encourage a particular (hopefully non-libidinous) type of viewing. Under no
circumstances could venereal disease propaganda films (dramatic, medical and biological) be
openly screened to the general public in the colonies. Thus curtailed, the educational aspect of
venereal disease film was carefully distilled and separated from any potential pleasures offered
by the subject. It sought to function solely for public service and not private voyeuristic pleasure.
When films on venereal disease topics were screened to Asiatic audiences, they were
removed from all contexts of pleasure and entertainment. In the latter half of the 1920s, the
Medical Department in Singapore obtained several such films for screening for non-Europeans,
though these were carefully limited to biological films of a clearly instructional variety, and
framed within the context of a health lecture. Taken out of the potentially pleasurable space of
the commercial theatre, films were preceded by a lecture by the Chief Medical Officer on the
prevention and treatment of venereal disease, and screened behind closed doors at members-only
events at the Victoria Theatre. Audiences could attend by special invite only—by way of being
members in various religious and community associations. The Chief Medical Officer (C.M.O.)
of the Social Hygiene Branch of the Government Medical Department in Singapore loaned about
one film a year from the B.S.H.C. and passed it around from one association to another where it
would be screened to community members. Screenings followed a lecture on Venereal Disease
prevention and treatment, happening on weekday nights from the mid 1920s until the early
1930s. The first in the series of films screened in conjunction with the venereal disease
campaigns, The Gift of Life (1920) was screened in September 1926 to a Chinese audience at a

89

screening and lecture organized by the Chinese Association and the Straits Chinese British
Association.
166
Two weeks later, a screening followed for members of the Eurasian community
through the Eurasian Association of Singapore. Thereafter, it was screened to a Muslim audience
by the Mohammedan Advisory Board and in October, to members of the Indian community
through the Indian Association at the Y.M.C.A. Hall.
167
These same associations screened Youth
and Life (1920s) in 1927, Waste (1920s) in 1928, Success or Failure (1920s) in 1930, and Ways
of Life (1920s) in 1931.
Unlike dramatic treatments of the subject, these non-dramatic biological films de-sexed
sex and venereal disease, placing them within a discourse of science and biology rather than a
world of prostitutes and philandering husbands. Gift of Life for instance “elevate[s] the subjects
of sex and reproduction, putting them on a clean, scientific basis.”
168
The film depicts the
biological process of reproduction beginning with single cell reproduction, the reproduction of
plant and animal life, and finally human reproduction. Unlike plants and animals, the film
claims, man is a master of choice and therefore has control over his/her sexual behavior.
Microscopic shots and diagrammatic illustrations, particularly in the segment on human
reproduction, lend a clinical feel to the subject. The film itself was a teaching tool—the section
on human reproduction could be omitted at the lecturer’s discretion and the film itself offered
suggestions for presenting social hygiene facts to parents and pupils at opportune moments.
169

These instructional films are what Robert Eberwein has described as “the medicalization
of morality.”
170
Like The Gift of Life, Waste is a 20-minute film describing the effects of venereal
disease on one’s health, working capacity and financial security through animated diagrams and
statistical information.
171
Animated images displayed the difference in the costs of raising a
syphilitic child as compared to a healthy one. In 1931 the Medical Department in Singapore

90

loaned another biological film, The Ways of Life, for screening to various local communities
including members of literary societies and the senior schoolboys. Accompanied by an
explanatory lecture, the film demonstrated the biological aspects of reproduction from the lowest
forms of life passing up the scale to the higher vertebrates and finally man. It also stressed “the
necessity of non-contamination of the race in order to produce the highest efficiency and well-
being in a community.”
172
The film rendered good sexual morals a scientific truth as well as a
human responsibility.
While officials took great care to restrict the types of venereal disease films that could be
sent to the colonies, films slipped past the censor's eye on occasion, penetrating permeable
borders through transnational backdoors. Bound for Asiatic audiences, the Social Hygiene
Advisory Board of Singapore made arrangements with Dr. Wu Lien Teh from the Shanghai
Council of Health Education to send propaganda films made in China to Singapore. Fit to Win
(1918) was screened to male members of the Eurasian community and to select Chinese
organizations including the Chinese Association, Straits Chinese Recreation Club, Straits
Chinese British Association, and the Chinese Christian Association in 1929.
173
The Colonial
Office would certainly not have approved of the screening of this film to Asiatics, given its
dramatization of venereal disease among white American soldiers during WWI.
174
Yet, films’
elusive mobilities through routes that bypassed the watchful gaze of the metropole enabled their
entry into otherwise forbidden theatres.

The state's insistence on strictly policing “the right to look” took its toll on the effectiveness of
venereal disease propaganda efforts in Singapore. Although all the film screenings were hugely
popular with some members of the audience traveling from as far as Johore Bahru to attend

91

them, these propaganda efforts were hardly effective in the grander scheme of things. Because
the B.S.H.C. and the Medical Department were bound by restrictions on who could watch these
films, audience demographics at screenings were narrow and skewed. Showing films under the
auspices of certain clubs and associations benefited only a small section of the public—typically
upper and upper-middle class, educated Asiatics who had access to such organizations. Often,
films were screened for associations for the Straits Chinese—a demographic that was relatively
wealthier and more educated than the newly immigrant so-called “coolie” classes amongst whom
the venereal disease problem was the most rife.
175
Even so, the films were most likely to benefit
only those who were able to read the English titles (the medical department was unlikely to have
had the resources to have had them translated), leaving out the majority of the population who
were non-English readers and who were illiterate.
176
The B.S.H.C. and Medical Department
eventually resorted to posters, lantern slides, and accompanying lectures for the purposes of
visual propaganda amongst the uneducated working classes. These “static” visual forms were the
least controversial means of education and so, took the place of cinema that was proving to be
too troublesome a medium for use in the colonies.
This is not to sell short the venereal disease efforts in Singapore. As Kerrie Macpherson
reminds us, the Council agitated reform amongst colonial governments to recognize that the
sexual health of both the Asiatic and European populations in the colony was an issue of
foremost public concern and that colonial governments could not afford to permit racially
exclusive medical treatment in matters of sexual health.
177
Their work pushed for sex and
biological education for the general Asiatic public. Educational efforts took place alongside other
policies that included increasing the number of female immigrants to rectify the sex ratio and to
increase recreational activities for single men.
178

92

More broadly, censoring films on the basis of white prestige also had it critics among the
public in Malaya who found such motivations unsound and grossly out of touch. Many British in
Singapore thought that the racial premise of censorship was downright insulting to their Asiatic
counterparts. A film correspondent for the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser
newspaper, writes,
It seems to me that the intelligence of the Asiatic is under-rated if it is assumed that
he will suffer morally...that a secondhand fictitious story of European degradation
will lead to a revolution in his normal outlook. As we do, the Asiatic goes to the
cinema to be amused; he accepts the story of a film in the same way as we do and is
probably no more effected by it. In a good many ways his views are broader than
ours...”
179

Rex Stevenson points out that whereas Bell clearly felt that Asian audiences were incapable of
discerning truth from travesty in what they saw on the screen, other British who lived in Malaya
believed that audiences in Malaya were “sufficiently intelligent, for instance, to appreciate the
fact that a white man performing ridiculous antics is a deliberate clown.”
180
Chua Ai Lin reports
how local audiences themselves objected to being patronized through such censorship
measures.
181

Malayans certainly did not slavishly embrace the cinema as the censors believed. Wan
Abdul Kadir points out that Malay-Muslim communities in the F.M.S. were suspicious of the
movies because they were thought to promote Western culture at the expense of local tradition
and morality.
182
Asiatic communities in Singapore were concerned about the negative influence
of the cinema on youths.
183
Films distracted young people from study and encouraged so-called
crude American manners of speech. Hence, communities clearly practiced their own forms of
internal, moral censorship. 1931 for instance, a local newspaper warned parents about the ill
effects of immoral Western films and advised them to preview these films before allowing their
daughters to watch them—precisely because they featured salacious love scenes.
184

93

Other members of the public—both European and Asiatic—thought that censorship
should be meted out according to class instead of race. An irate, anonymous filmgoer who had
just attended a screening of The Four Horsemen and the Apocalypse (1921) complained that all
art in film was sacrificed because the censors “treat all cinemas like a Chinatown wayang (stage
play or show).”
185
Censors in Singapore were so eager to omit all love scenes that films became
unintelligible.
186
This writer, known only as “Film Fan” insisted that educated people, whether
from the West or the East differed little in terms of moral taste and ought not to be treated as
adolescents. Many felt that censorship was erratic, varying between unnecessary harshness and
“uncut frankness.”
187
In 1927, 547,000 feet or 12% of total imports were banned and a majority
of the remainder censored.
188
Some filmgoers suggested that a minimum admission charge of $1
be levied on special showings at upmarket cinemas so that the upper classes, whether European
or Asiatic, might see uncensored films.
189

The state’s position remained firm in the face of all the criticism. The editor of The
Straits Times countered complaints with a curt reminder about the moral and social threat of
Asiatics watching the wrong films. “For one European who visits the cinema theatres a thousand
Asiatics do so, and local censorship must bear that in mind. It is not the highest in the land in
England, but with the lowest in the land in Malaya.”
190

The B.S.H.C.’S efforts in formulating a film education scheme for “native” members of
the empire was ahead of its time and in some senses, went uncredited by both the British
government (and in film scholarship) for playing an important role in instigating future efforts in
developing colonial educational cinema. The conversations Neville Rolfe had stirred up between
the Colonial Office, colonial governments and the film industry may have been unwelcome, but
they planted the seeds for discussions about “native” spectators and the need for good,

94

wholesome British films.
191
Discourses about cinema in the empire emerged in state
documents—discourses that eventually led to regulations, enactments and legislations that
marked colonial cinemas as biopolitical spaces and colonial spectators as unique entities.

Conclusion: To Rescue the Empire

This chapter has peered into the genealogy of film's governance in the colonies and its
entanglements with discourse on mobility, cosmopolitanism, and market protectionism.
Economic imperatives about American film imports flooding colonial markets became embroiled
with moral upsets about screening films that featured Europeans prostitutes to colonized
subjects. Furthermore, the specific genre of the dramatic Venereal Disease film muddied the
distinction between entertainment and non-entertainment cinema, thus making uncertainties
about how colonial audiences watched films even more nerve-wracking when their intended
reception could not be guaranteed. I have discussed how censorship and the census are
apparatuses of cinematic governance that produced distinct colonial audiences in their efforts to
tame the unruly filmic medium. Through these debates, colonial cinema would be shaped in
specific ways.
For one, the venereal disease film controversy awakened discourses about colonial
spectatorship that determined educational film policy in the years to come. In 1929, Leo Amery
appointed the Colonial Films Committee to investigate the supply, censorship and exhibition of
cinematograph films in the empire. Their goal was to develop the use of cinema for education, to
encourage the supply of British films, and to secure efficient censorship to ostensibly to counter

95

the “undesirable and disruptive influence” of American films, “which lower the respect in which
Europeans should be held.”
192

In the face of this perceived threat, Britain sought to take the lead in producing and
supplying films of Empire origins for distribution in the colonies. In 1926, the British Empire
Film Institute (later to become the British Film Institute) was set up to originate and organize
support for British films and to disseminate information relating to British films throughout the
empire via a Film Library. Following the recommendations of the Colonial Films Committee as
well, the film group of the Federation of British Industries established the British United Film
Producer's Company in 1931 to supply British films to the colonies at reasonable trade rates. The
company intended to be represent the whole of the British film producing industry and its Board
of Directors consisted of all the principal British film producing companies. Shareholders would
receive a fixed dividend with remaining profits divided among the owners of the films
distributed in proportion to what they earned. Further, the company was guaranteed against loss
for up to £1000 for operations in its first year.
The protection of the British film industry also motivated new legislations on the
circulation of educational films. A 1933 International Convention for Facilitating the Circulation
of Films of an Educational Character also provided a reciprocal basis for the exemption of
educational films from customs duty. Section 7 of the Finance Act, 1935, meant that educational
films imported into the United Kingdom from other countries in the Convention would be
exempt. Written into sub-section 3, customs duty would also be exempted from “a
cinematographic film produced by a person established in any country in the British Empire” of
an educational nature on the condition that, “the laws of that country provide for a corresponding

96

exemption from customs duty of films which have been produced by a person established in the
United Kingdom.”
193

Supporting educational film production within the empire and circulating British
educational films would hopefully correct the bad impression of Westerners left by sordid
American films and instead represent the interests and ideas of the British Commonwealth while
also protecting the British film industry.
194
James Burns recent book, Cinema and Society in the
British Empire 1895-1940, expansively tracks the awakening of educational or “uplift” film
movements in the British empire marked by the establishment of empire wide surveys,
committees, councils, and official bodies tasked to address the question of cinema and empire.
As Jaikumar reminds us however, imperial governmentalities toward cinema must not be
read as narratives of triumph. The Quota Act met resistance from various sectors of state and
industry both in Britain and abroad.
195
The Act itself was riddled with ambiguities, loopholes and
slippages, which mitigated its desired effect.
196
After the fanfare over its inception, the Attorney
General decided that such legislation would be premature and dropped the film quota scheme in
Singapore in July 1928.
197
The Unfederated Malay States also found that customs legislations did
not support the introduction of quota legislations and found the implementation of new
legislations “difficult and unnecessarily vexatious.”
198
A similar quota system would not be
active in the region again until the years under the British Military Administration in the
1940s.
199
Several years after its inception, the British Producer's Film Company also fell apart as
a result of “trade jealousies” when many of the film producing companies refused to allow the
B.R.F.C. to distribute its films in the colonies.
200
The privately owned Gaumont-British Film
Company eventually absorbed the B.P.F.C. in 1933—a defeat that hints at the pre-eminence of
the industry concerns over state desires. While some in the Colonial Office feared that

97

Gaumont's profit making motives would not compel them to increase British films in the
colonies if it were unprofitable, others conceded that:
[...] since the Gaumont British Organization already controls a large proportion of
the British film industry […] it will be better to get that organization into the
colonial market than no British films at all.
201

Ultimately, it became apparent to the state that it was not up to them to tell the industry how to
run their business. The colonial project was not coherent, internal struggles and tensions between
the state and the industry complicated easy readings of a clear imperial trajectory.
Even if legislative attempts to rationalize film's mobilities were troubled, the empire's
awakening towards cinema's educational potential is indisputable. The support garnered for the
educational film experiments in the colonies that followed was in part a response toward public
calls for “good quality” educational films from the British Empire to compete with American
commercial cinema. Requests for quality films for educational purposes, particularly in the
classroom, were already evident in the early 1920s from various education boards in the colonies
and dominions across Malaya and the Straits Settlements.
202
Fears that Western films would
wreak havoc among the moralities, political affiliations, and buying habits of “native” audiences
garnered support for locally produced educational films in the colonies in the later half of the
1920s.
203

Following the venereal disease film upset, alongside similar debates surrounding
Rockefeller health films in the colonies, the concerns about the unsuitability of films produced in
Western contexts for non-Western audiences instigated the push toward the production of
educational films on location featuring local actors in native contexts.
204
Indeed, before the well-
documented Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment from 1935 to 1937, the first large-scale
experiment in the vernacular education of “native” races through film was initially supposed to

98

be conducted in Malaya. Conceptualized in 1930, both the Colonial Films Committee and the
Colonial Office endorsed the one-year Malaya film scheme to be run by R.V. Vernon, an
anthropologist and Assistant Secretary of the Colonial Office who had worked on the
development of colonial film policy at the Commission for Educational and Cultural Films.
205

Vernon designed the experiment as a piece of serious scientific research aimed at
understanding how cinema could be used for the education of the “backward races” and to
counteract the damaging effects of “demoralizing films” on the native mind.
206
Co-operation
with the local Department of Education was well anticipated and the colony already had a good
infrastructure for vernacular education in place that ensured that finding audiences would not be
a problem.
207
Vernon's experiment involved setting up a traveling cinema outfit on a 30-cwt
Morris lorry, with films addressing all tenets of colonial citizenship. While on the road, the
experiment also had the ambition of shooting films of anthropological interest. However, with a
lack of funds forthcoming from within London based bodies, as well as the F.M.S. and S.S.,
Vernon had to turn to the Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropic foundations in the U.S. This
precipitated a sorry end to the scheme when both foundations were unable to fund the project.

Where large-scale projects initiated by Whitehall had met shaky starts, projects started
and funded from within the discrete colonial territories encountered much promise. In Malaya,
other efforts in local film production for “native” education began emerging in the early 1920s
independently of Whitehall's massive empire-wide schemes. Locally produced health education
films, and films on agriculture and financial management circulated around Malaya through
well-organized networks. In the chapters that follow, I leave the behemoth machinations of the
Colonial Office behind to delve into the more intimate film projects that sought to perform
empire's work at from the ground up.

99

1
“Venereal Disease,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 19 June 1925, pp. 11.
2
N.A. CO323/845/10, Notes on the Program of the Venereal Disease Commission, 1920.
3
John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial
South-East Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp.26.
4
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 30.
5
James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870-1940 (Singapore ; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 174.
6
Philllipa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 2.
7
Hope P. Falkner, “Venereal Prophylaxis: Its Meaning and Effects,” The Malayan Medical Journal 1, no.1 (April
1926): 1.
8
Ibid.
9
Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 9. Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in
Colonial Malaya, 1870-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Warwick Anderson, Colonial
Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2006).
Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism” in A Dying Colonialism (Grove Press, 1967), 121-145.
10
Manderson, Sickness and the State, 11.
11
N.A. CO 129/472, Singapore Confidential Report, National Council for Combatting Venereal Diseases
Commission 1920, 440.
12
N.A. CO 273/53/9/5 Prostitution and venereal disease in Malaya: correspondence; report to the British Social
Hygiene Council by Professor Bostock Hill of his visit to Malaya, October 1926. Report to the British Social
Hygiene Council on Visit of Professor Bostock Hill to the Straits Settlements, Federated Malay States and Ceylon,
17th May 1927, 6.
13
N.A. CO 882/11/4, Minutes of the second meeting of the advisory Committee on social hygiene, held at the
Colonial Office, London, 18th February 1925, 27-28.
14
N.A. CO 323/941/26, Circular to all Colonies and Protectorates except Malta and Tanganyika from the Secretary
of State for the Colonies, 9th January, 1926.
15
The Exchequer grant for the year 1928-1929 amounted to £6000. N.A. T 161/564, Letter from S.C. Alford of the
Ministry of Health to J.B. Beresford of H.M. Treasury, 13th May, 1930 and Ministry of Health Circular 1032,
Whitehall, 22nd July 1929. The Exchequer grant was to go “toward expenditure on the dissemination of information
in connection with venereal diseases.” N.A. T 161/564, Letter to J.H. Beresford, H.M. Treasury, Whitehall.
16
N.A., CO 323/943/9 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies, Letter from Neville Rolfe to Gilbert
Grindle, enclosure “Films loaned or sold to the colonies, protectorates, etc.,” dated 17th September, 1925.
17
N.A. CO 323/941/26, Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies, Circular correspondence entry from
O.G.R. Williams, 11th June, 1925.
18
N.A. CO 323/941/26, Circular to all Colonies and Protectorates except Malta and Tanganyika from the Secretary
of State for the Colonies, 9th January, 1926.
19
Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality 1909-1925 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 46.
20
Ibid, 47.
21
Ibid, 66.
22
Ibid, 51.
23
The British version of Damaged Goods was preceded by a 1914 American rendition of the film
24
Aside from a few showings at commercial theaters, the film was seen mostly in public health campaigns. Kuhn,
Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 52.
25
Ibid, 55.
26
Heida Johannsdottir, “Archival Realities and Contagious Spaces: Shop Girls, Censorship and the City in Damaged
Goods,” in Using Moving Image Archives, eds. Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson, (Nottingham: e-BOOK from
Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, 2010), 50.
27
For a fascinating account of young female spectators flocking to cinemas to see films with sensational or
“inappropriate” sex topics see Shelly Stamp, Movie Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the
Nickleodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 41-94.
28
Robert Eberwein, Film, Video and the Framework of Desire (New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers
University Press, 1999), 33. Stacie Colwell, “The End of the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge, and
the American Campaign Against Venereal Disease During World War I,” Camera Obscura 10, no. 29 (May 1,

100

1992): 112-115. For a thorough analysis and historical account of the film's production and reception in relation to
the social purity movement in United States, see Colwell's full article, 91–129.
29
Annette Kuhn, “VD Propaganda, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, and the Production Code,” Film History: An
International Journal 25, no. 1 (2013): 135.
30
Smyth, “The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 1927-1939, with Special Reference to East and Central
Africa”, 437-450. Burns, Flickering Shadows, 37-60.
31
Burns, James. “Watching Africans Watch Films”, 197.
32
N.A. CO 323/946/26 Circular correspondence from Gilbert Grindle, dated 9 November 1925.
33
N.A. CO323/943/2 Use of films in campaign against venereal disease, Letter from Neville Rolfe to Dr. Vincent,
dated 5th February, 1925.
34
N.A. CO323/943/2 Use of films in campaign against venereal disease. Letter from Neville Rolfe to Dr. Vincent,
dated 6th February 1925.
35
N.A. CO323/943/2 Use of films in campaign against venereal disease. Extract from the minutes of the 209th
Meeting of the Colonial Advisory Medical Sanitary Committee, dated 10th March 1925.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Lenore Manderson, Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 49.
39
N.A. CO323/943/2 Use of films in campaign against venereal disease.
40
Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 68.
41
N.A. CO323/943/5, Memo from William Ormsby Gore to Leo Amery, dated 7th May 1925.
42
This is also the case in Singapore where the problem of Chinese “quack” doctors and unlicensed Europeans
doctors were a problem. Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, 143.
43
“Untitled,” The Straits Times, 20th January, 1921, 2.
44
N.A. CO323/943/5 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies.
45
N.A. CO323/943/2 Use of films in campaign against venereal disease.
46
N.A. CO323/943/5 Letter from G. Grindle to Neville Rolfe, 24th December 1925.
47
N.A. CO323/943/5 Memo from William Ormsby Gore to Leo Amery, 7th May 1925.
48
N.A. CO 323/941/26, British Social Hygiene Council films: exhibition of films in certain colonies, protectorates
and mandated territories; local censorship.
49
For a study of cinema and white prestige in India and the 1927 Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) see:
Poonam Arora, “'Imperiling the Prestige of the White Woman': Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British
India,” Visual Anthropology Review 11, iss.2 (September 1995): 36-50. Babli Sinha, “‘Lowering Our Prestige’:
American Cinema, Mass Consumerism, and Racial Anxiety in Colonial India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia,
Africa and the Middle East 29, no.2 (2009): 291-305.
50
“Immoral Films,” The Straits Echo, Penang, 16th November 1920.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
53
The author of the article was identified only as “a correspondent” in the article though historian Rex Stevenson
attributes to being written by Bell. Rex Stevenson, “Cinemas and Censorship in Colonial Malaya,” Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (September 1, 1974): 209.
54
“The Cinema in the East,” The Times, September 18, 1926.
55
“The Cinema in the East,” The Times, September 18, 1926.
56
Hesketh Bell, “Perverted Views of European Life.” The Times, 4th October 1926.
57
Ibid.
58
Janice M. Brownfoot, “Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a British Colony and
Protectorate, 1900-1940,” in The Incorporated Wife, eds. Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, 186-210, (Kent,
Sydney and New Hampshire: Croom Helm, 1984): 190.
59
Ibid., 190.
60
Ann Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial
Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (Nov., 1989): 640. On the arrival of white women in large number to
Delhi see Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 34.
61
Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable”, 640.
62
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no.3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.
63
“The Cinema in the East,” The Times, September 18, 1926.

101

64
Arora, “'Imperiling the Prestige of the White Woman': Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British India”, 47.
65
“The Cinema in the East,” The Times, September 18, 1926.
66
Films in the Orient: Interesting Interview with the F.M.S. Censor,” The Straits Times, 7 November 1925, p.2.
67
Arora, “'Imperiling the Prestige of the White Woman': Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British India”, 39.
68
Stoler, 1995, p.183.
69
Mackirdy, Archibald, Willis, W.M. The White Slave Market, London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1990, p.104.
70
N.A. CO 273/539/5 Enclosure, “The White Slave Traffic: Issue of League Report” from The Times, 10
th
March
1927.
71
Doezema, Jo. “Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the myth of white slavery in contemporary
discourses of trafficking in women.” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (December 1999): 39.
72
Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 132.
73
Quoted from Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, 41.
74
Ibid., 40, 75.
75
Ibid., 40.
76
Ibid.
77
“The Social Problem,” The Straits Times, 15 August 1921: 10.
78
Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, 88.
79
“Social Hygiene: Report of Advisory Committee,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 27 August
1925:14.
80
Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 182.
81
Linda E Merians, “Introduction,” in The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth Century Britain and
France (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 5.
82
See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 30.
83
“The Social Evil: A Malayan Problem,” The Straits Times, 26 December 1940: 8.
84
Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 178.
85
See N.A. CO 323/990/1, Colonial Office Conference, 1927, Cinematograph Films, Memorandum prepared by the
Colonial Office, 1. N.A. CO 273/541/3, Letter from the Governor of the Straits Settlements to Leo Amery, 8th
August, 1927.
86
Stevenson, “Cinemas and Censorship in Colonial Malaya, 212.
87
“Exhibition within the Empire of Empire Cinematograph Films,” Thirteenth Report of the General Economic Sub-
committee, Proceedings of the Imperial Conference, Cmd.2768, 1926: 1-3.
88
“The Cinema in the East,” The Times, September 18, 1926.
89
David L. Kenley, New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in
Singapore, 1919-1932 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 147-162.
90
“Immoral Films,” The Straits Echo, Penang, 16th November 1920.
91
A.N.M. Sel. Sec. 5245/1922 Celluloid and Cinematograph Film Act, ch.35, 1922. A.N.M. Kelantan 712/1939
Memorandum enclosed letter from A.C. Baker to Electrical Engineer, 7
th
August, 1939.
92
Chua Ai Lin, Modernity, Popular Culture and Urban Life: Anglophone Asians in Colonial Singapore, 1920-1940,
PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2007, p.106. Rachel Low documents the British film production
industry's losing battle with Hollywood domestically and abroad. Rachel Low, The History of the British Film:
1918-1929 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.), 71-106.
93
Priya Jaikumar, “More than Morality,” The Moving Image 3, no.1 (Spring 2003): 88.
94
In comparison, Chinese films consisted of 18.8% of imports. CO 273/550/14 Cinematograph Films Ordinance,
1928, Film Censorship in the Straits Settlements, letter from Officer Administering the Government of the Straits
Settlement to C.M.S. Amery dated 25th October 1928
95
Low, The History of the British Film: 1918-1929, 71-106.
96
“Exhibition within the Empire of Empire Cinematograph Films,” General Economic Sub-Committee, Thirteenth
Report of the Imperial Conference, Whitehall, October 1926, 1.
97
“Exhibition within the Empire of British Films,” Brief submitted by the Inter-departmental committee on
economic questions for the Imperial Conference, Whitehall, October 1926, 11.
98
“British Films: A Dying Industry,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 3 March 1924, 10.
99
“The Cinema World: Do Movies Influence Crime?,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 28th
September 1929, 3.

102

100
“Cinema Films,” The Malayan Saturday Post, 12 June 1926, 12.
101
Ibid.
102
“Films and Education,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 19 January 1927: 10. “Cinema Film
Censorship,” The Straits Times, 18 January 1927, 10.
103
N.A., CO 323/1091/10, “Colonial Films Committee: Report, Minutes.”
104
N.A., CO 323/1091/10, “Colonial Films Committee: Report, Minutes.”
105
Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2006), 41-64. Lee Grieveson, “The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations,”
in Empire and Film, eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001): 73-114.
106
Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire, 45.
107
Lee Grieveson, “Fighting Films: Race, Morality, and the Governing of Cinema, 1912-1915,” Cinema Journal 38,
no.1 (Autumn 1998): 52. On Foucault and racism, see Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.
108
Grieveson, “Fighting Films”, 41.
109
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 17.
110
“Films are banned or altered only when they are likely to be detrimental to the prestige of Europeans or good
behavior of the local inhabitants.” N.A. CO 323/990/1 Colonial Office Conference, 1927: suggested censorship
control of films, Enclosure No.1 to Borneo (Sarawak) Dispatch Confidential, 14th December 1927.
111
N.A. CO 323/963/3, Correspondence by Gilbert Grindle, 13th October 1926.
112
“Empire Films: Keeping the Mind of the Native Pure,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 3
November 1931, 7.
113
Ibid.
114
N.A. CO 323/963/3 Exhibition of Cinematograph Films: complaints of undesirable effects; bringing naval and
military uniforms into disrepute, Circular correspondence, dated 29th October 1926.
115
“Current Cinema Chat and Comment,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 12th April, 1930, 3.
116
“Pamphlet issued by the British Board of Film Censors,” in Report of the Colonial Films Committee (London: His
Majesty's Stationery Office, 1930), 20.
117
Ibid.
118
“Films in the Orient: Interesting Interview with the F.M.S. Censor,” The Straits Times, 7 November 1925, 2.
119
Richmond Wheeler, The Modern Malay (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), 174.
120
N.A. CO 323/978/4 Censorship of Cinematograph Films in Colonies Correspondence, August 16th 1927.
121
N.A. CO 323/963/3 Exhibition of Cinematograph Films: complaints of undesirable effects; bringing naval and
military uniforms into disrepute, Circular.
122
N.A. CO 273/534/23 Film censorship in Singapore: protests by First National Pictures Ltd; Telegram from the
Governor of the Straits Settlements to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated 22nd December 1926.
123
Hesketh Bell, “Minority Report by Sir Hesketh Bell,” Report of the Colonial Films Committee (London: His
Majesty’s' Stationary Office, 1930), 24.
124
N.A. CO 323/1091/10 Draft minutes of the thirteenth meeting of the Colonial Films Committee Held at the
Colonial Office, at 10.30am on Monday, June 16th, 1930. See also Report of the Colonial Films Committee,14.
125
N.A. CO 323/963/3 Circular correspondence, dated 6th November, 1926.
126
N.A. CO 323/990/1 Enclosure No.1 to Borneo (Sarawak) Dispatch Confidential of the 14th December 1927.
127
A.N.M. SEL.SEC. 1492/1912. Draft Amendment to the Theatres Enactment, 1910, Letter from Secretary to
Resident to the Under Secretary to the F.M.S., dated 26 March 1912. A.N.M. SEL.SEC. 5672/1911 Secretary of
State's Dispatch Dealing with the Introduction of Legislation for the Purpose of Regulatory Public Cinematograph
Displays, Letter from Secretary to Resident to the Under Secretary to the F.M.S., dated 12th December 1911.
128
Stevenson, “Cinemas and Censorship in Colonial Malaya”, 214.
129
“Cinema in the East,” The Times, 18 Sept 1926.
130
A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 2870/1927, Letter from E.C.H. Wolff to the Chief Secretary to Government, F.M.S., dated 28th
April 1926.
131
N.A., CO 323/941/26, British Social Hygiene Council films: exhibition of films in certain colonies, protectorates
and mandated territories; local censorship.
132
N.A., CO 323/941/26, British Social Hygiene Council films: exhibition of films in certain colonies, protectorates
and mandated territories; local censorship, circular correspondence, dated 9th November 1925.
133
N.A. CO 323/963/3 Exhibition of Cinematograph Films: complaints of undesirable effects; bringing naval and
military uniforms into disrepute, circular correspondence, dated May 8th 1926.

103

134
N.A., CO 323/941/26 British Social Hygiene Council films: exhibition of films in certain colonies, protectorates
and mandated territories; local censorship.
135
N.A. CO323/943/5 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies, Letter from Amery to Guillemard, dated
11th December 1926.
136
An Enactment to Control the Exhibition of Cinematograph Films, Enactment No.3 of 1927, Federated Malay
States, Published in the Federated Malay States Government Gazette, April 1 1927, no.7, vol.XIX, Notification No.
1831: 1-3.
137
W.A. Kadir, Budaya Popular Dalam Masyarakat Melayu Bandaran (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka,
1988), 148. WM Wan Amizah, Faridah Ibrahim, Norman Mustaffa, Maizatul Haizan Mahbob, “Putting Policemen
as Censors in Cinemas: The History of Film Censors in Malaysia,” Asian Social Science Journal 9, Iss. 6, (2013),
44.
138
CO273/541/3 Influence of the cinema in Malaya; Cinematograph Films (Control) Enactment, 1927.Letter from
Governor of the S.S. to Leo Amery, 8th August 1927.
139
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2011), 3.
140
Ibid., 7.
141
CO 323/943/5 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies etc.: indicates reasons why free supply of films
was thought desirable but states a scheme will be submitted if financial contribution by colonies is necessary;
encloses printed copy of 'List of cinematograph films' which shows hiring fees for films, Original Correspondence
from: National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases, Draft letter to Neville Rolfe, 1925.
See also, Slater, A.R., “Colonial Office Conference Report of Committee 'Q' Extract from Cmd. 3628,” Report of
the Colonial Films Committee, London: His Majesty’s' Stationary Office, 1930: 30.
142
CO 323/943/5 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies etc.: indicates reasons why free supply of films
was thought desirable but states a scheme will be submitted if financial contribution by colonies is necessary;
encloses printed copy of 'List of cinematograph films' which shows hiring fees for films. Original Correspondence
From: National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases. Correspondence, 24 March 1926.
143
Ibid.
144
N.A., CO 323 943 9 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies, letter from Neville Rolfe to Sir Gilbert
Grindle dated 17th September 1925.
145
CO 323/943/5 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies etc.: indicates reasons why free supply of films
was thought desirable but states a scheme will be submitted if financial contribution by colonies is necessary;
encloses printed copy of 'List of cinematograph films' which shows hiring fees for films. Original Correspondence
From: National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases. Draft letter to Neville Rolfe, 1925.
146
Ibid.
147
“Films in the Orient: Interesting Interview with the F.M.S. Censor,” The Straits Times, 7 November 1925, p.2.
148
Ibid, 1925, 2.
149
A.N.M. Sel. G. 2246/31 Circular from the High Commissioner for the Malay States, 5th September, 1931.
150
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 144.
151
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised
edition (London, Brooklyn: Verso, 1983), 164.
152
The racial census of the population as a whole has particular significance in British Malaya and will be discussed
in detail in Chapter 4 of this dissertation. Scholars have also traced the history of the “making of race” in Malaya
through colonial censuses elsewhere. See Charles Hirschman, “The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in
Malaysia: An Analysis of Census Classifications,” The Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (Aug., 1987): 555-582.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163-185.
153
N.A. CO323/845/10, “Ceylon—Venereal disease commissions to the colonies.”
154
“The V.D. Commission,” The Straits Times, 18 January 1921, 8.
155
“The Film Display,” The Straits Times, 20
th
January 1921, 7.
156
N.A. CO 323/955/2 Exhibition of film material supplied by the British Social Hygiene Council in the colonies:
guidance relating to the suitability of content of films for release to the general public. Original Correspondence
From: British Social Hygiene Council.
157
Arora, “'Imperiling the Prestige of the White Woman': Colonial Anxiety and Film Censorship in British India”,
45.

104

158
N.A., CO 323/941/26, British Social Hygiene Council films: exhibition of films in certain colonies, protectorates
and mandated territories; local censorship.
159
N.A. CO 323 943 9 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies. Films Loaned or Sold to the Colonies,
Protectorates.
160
N.A. CO 323/955/2 Exhibition of film material supplied by the British Social Hygiene Council in the colonies:
guidance relating to the suitability of content of films for release to the general public, Original Correspondence
from British Social Hygiene Council.
161
N.A. CO 323/955/2 Letter from Neville Rolfe to the Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, dated 6th January,
1926.
162
Ibid.
163
N.A. CO323/943/5 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies. List of Cinematograph Films Owned by
the Council
164
N.A. CO 323/955/2 Letter from Neville Rolfe to the Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, dated 6
th
January
1926.
165
N.A., CO 323/941/26, British Social Hygiene Council films: exhibition of films in certain colonies, protectorates
and mandated territories; local censorship.
166
“Gift of Life,” The Straits Times, 28 September 1926, 9. “Untitled,” The Straits Times, 7 September 1926, 10.
167
“Gift of Life,” The Straits Times, 28 September 1926, 9. “Untitled,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile
Advertiser, 16 October 1926, 2.
168
N.A. CO323/943/5 Campaign against venereal disease in the colonies, list of Cinematograph Films Owned by the
Council.
169
Ibid.
170
Eberwein, Sex Ed.
171
The B.S.H.C. purchased prints and commercial screening rights for the film, along with several others in their
collection, from the American Social Hygiene Association. N.A. T161/564 Photography, Cinematography: British
Social Hygiene Council; arrangements regarding; (1) Cinematograph films (2) Printing work done by Stationery
Office.
172
“The Only Possible Remedy,” The Straits Times, 31st August, 1931, 11.
173
“Untitled,” The Straits Times, 22 March 1929, 12.
174
The film was produced by the American Social Hygiene Association for the education of military men during
World War I. Five young male civilians—Billy, Kid, Chick, Hank and Jack are about to be drafted into the army. At
camp, they receive information on venereal disease though only Billy and Kid take it seriously. Only these two out
of the five escape the clutches of disease, and go on to serve their country. The rest are sent home in disgrace or are
incapacitated during treatment. For an analysis of the film see Eberwein, Sex Ed, 25.
175
On the Straits Chinese see, John R. Clammer, Straits Chinese Society: Studies in the Sociology of the Baba
Communities of Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1980). Khoo, Joo Ee, The Straits
Chinese: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1996). Png Poh Seng, “The Straits Chinese in Singapore: A
Case of Local Identity and Socio-Cultural Accommodation,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no.1 (March
1969): 95-114.
176
“Suppression or control?” The Straits Times, 27 August 1930, 17.
177
Kerrie Macpherson, “Health and Empire: Britain's national campaign to combat venereal diseases in Shanghai,
Hong Kong and Singapore,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society Since 1870, eds.
Davidson, R. and Hall, L.A. (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 186.
178
Manderson, Sickness and the State, 196. At the level of policy, colonial governments bent to the pressures
initiated by the Purity Campaigns in Britain and international attention that followed the B.S.H.C.'s efforts. The
League of Nations also led an international effort to limit trafficking while putting pressure on individual countries
to abolish regulated brothels. Post-WWI plans for the expansion of the British naval base in Singapore hastened the
closing of brothels in Singapore, which were tolerated until 1927. Ronald Hyam, Empire And Sexuality: The British
Experience (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 16.
By 1929, brothels were outlawed altogether in the Straits Settlements with Malaya following suit in 1931. It must be
noted however, that initial measures to control venereal disease in the face of the enlargement of the Naval Base was
through venereal disease ordinances. For an extensive and in-depth study of venereal disease policy in the British
Empire see Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 38.
179
“Current Cinema Chat and Comment,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 12th April 1930, 3.

105

180
A. Gibson, The Malay Peninsula and Archipelago (London: J.M. Dent, 1928), 134-136; quoted in Stevenson,
“Cinemas and Censorship in Colonial Malaya”, 210.
181
Chua Ai Lin “Singapore's 'Cinema-Age' of the 1930s: Hollywood and the shaping of Singapore modernity,” Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies 13, iss.4 (2012): 593.
182
Kadir, Budaya Popular Dalam Masyarakat Melayu Bandaran,148.
183
Chua, “Singapore’s ‘Cinema-Age’ of the 1930s: Hollywood and the Shaping of Singapore Modernity”, 593.
184
Kadir, Budaya Popular Dalam Masyarakat Melayu Bandaran, 148. Amizah et. al., “Putting Policemen as
Censors in Cinemas”, 44.
185
“The Film Censorship,” The Straits Times, 21 August 1925, 10.
186
“Cinema Censorship,” The Straits Times, 12 June 1925,10.
187
“Film Censorship,” The Malaya Tribune, Thursday, October 28 1926.
188
N.A. CO 273/550/14 Cinematograph Films Ordinance, 1928: Film Censorship in the Straits Settlements, Letter
from Officer Administering the Government of the Straits Settlements to C.M.S. Amery dated 25th October 1928,
189
“Letter to the Editor of the Straits Times,” The Straits Times, 26 August 1925, 10.
190
Cinema Censorship,” The Straits Times, 12 June 1925, 10.
191
Bad blood had been stirred between Rolfe and powerful members of the Colonial Office. When considering a
female member to be on the Colonial Films Committee, Gilbert Grindle vehemently insisted, “I would not have Mrs.
Neville Rolfe at any price,” and others on the board were quick to agree. N.A. CO 323/1051/3 Colonial Films
Committee: inquiry into supply and censorship of films to colonies, correspondence dated 26th April1929.
192
N.A. CO 323/1091/10 Colonial Films Committee: Report, Minutes, 1930, Letter from Hesketh Bell to Mr. Snell
dated 17th April 1930.
193
A.N.M. Kelantan 377/1936. Downing Street Circular, dated 17th February, 1936, “Convention for Facilitating
the International Circulation of Films of an Educational Character” held at Geneva, October 11, 1933, London: His
Majesty's Stationery Office, 1935, 6-8.
194
“Cinema Films,” The Malayan Saturday Post, 12 June 1926, 12.
195
Jaikumar, “More than Morality”, 82-109.
196
Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire, 51-56.
197
“Film Quota Scheme Dropped,” The Straits Times, 3
rd
July, 1928, 8.
198
A.N.M. Kelantan 412/1934 Memorandum dated 20th June, 1934, 2.
199
“Report of a Committee Appointed by the Government of Singapore to inquire into the Film Quota Legislation of
the Colony,” Singapore: Government Printers, 1954, 2.
200
N.A. CO 323/1253/1 Letter from Kearney to Biggs, dated 15
th
January, 1934.
201
N.A. CO 323/1253/1 Circular correspondence, Foxen-Cooper dated 23
rd
January, 1934 and R.V. Vernon dated
24
th
February 1934.
202
“Education and the Cinematograph,” The Malayan Saturday Post, 26
th
July 1924, 10. “Malaya’s English
Schools,” The Straits Times, 24 November 1928, 10. “Films and Education,” The Straits Times, 3 August, 1923, 3.
203
N.A. CO 323/990/1 Colonial Office Conference, 1927: suggested censorship control of films, Annex 1: The
Educational Use of Cinematograph Films, note by Mr. Hanns Vischer, C.B.E., Secretary of the Advisory Committee
on Native Education in Tropical Africa, memorandum prepared in the Colonial Office, 7.
204
See Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 116.
205
It was backed by academic and political heavyweights including Professor J.L. Myres—President of the Royal
Anthropological Institute—and Professor C.J. Seligman, an anthropologist from the London School of Economics.
206
N.A. CO 323/1122/16 Films: proposed experimental scheme in Malaya, 1931, Draft Letter of
Application to the Rockefeller Trustees.
207
In addition to already possessing at least 20,000 feet of locally shot film that could be re-edited, the
existing Rural Lecture Caravan scheme, which I address in the next chapter, was also a good indicator of
the work that could be done regarding cinema and the “native races.” N.A. CO 323/1122/16 Films:
proposed experimental scheme in Malaya, 1931, Memorandum.

106

CHAPTER 2

“They Must be Made Problem Conscious”: Economic Citizenship and The Rural Lecture
Caravan

“The Caravan has arrived!” with the speed of a Lallang blaze the glad news
travels through the “mukim.” Malay villagers, Indian tappers and a few Chinese
squatters hurry to the village center. There stands the caravan. The Penghulu, a
dignified figure in ceremonial dress, signals for silence. The Caravan show
begins.
[…] There emerges from its wide awning a khaki clad figure, and under
his practiced fingers, a cinematograph throws a shimmering beam of light.
Open mouthed with fascination, dark brown peasant faces behold the shadowy
pictures dancing on the screen -- it shows them growing rubber trees, luscious
padi fields, exemplary vegetable plots, buffalo herds and poultry yards.
The Caravan is carrying the results of modern agricultural science to the people of
the soil, however far they live from the centers of industry, from the railway or
the trunk road system.
It is the most modern school in the country for the most backward
community in the country, a school on wheels...
— “Caravan Cinema Visits the Kampong,” The Straits Times, 20
December 1936, p.15.

107

The scene recounted above is reminiscent of a typical visit of the Rural Lecture Caravan to a
small Malayan town. Essentially a large, rectangular enclosed carriage mounted on a 30cwt
Morris lorry chassis, the Rural Lecture Caravan traveled from state to state in the western region
of the Malay Peninsula where it stopped at villages and rubber estates to screen films on
agricultural and co-operative subjects to audiences largely consisting of Malay peasants and
Indian immigrant laborers. This traveling cinema truck was first put on the road in November
1930 where it continued to conduct its annual tours around the Southeast Asian British colony
for the next decade up until World War II.
This chapter tells the story of the Rural Lecture Caravan, and the work that this unique
invention performed in 1930s British Malaya. The caravan screened locally produced films that
sought to educate colonial citizens about the economic principles of thrift, co-operative banking,
and productivity for the market. I trace how the film shows of the Rural Lecture Caravan were
part of a well-orchestrated attempt to incorporate rural Malayan lives into modes of colonial
citizenship defined by policies governing economic life under colonial rule. Where geography
films cartographically mapped the contours of empire onto a terrain of capitalist expansion,
agricultural films encouraged “modern” methods of productivity, and hygiene films prepared the
body as a unit of labor, the co-operative thrift films of the Rural Lecture Caravan sought to
discipline the economic lives of its imagined colonial subjects. I argue that the programs of the
touring caravan were part of broader attempts to bring private economic life within the
management of the colonial state.
The first parts of this chapter describe the operations of the Rural Lecture Caravan in
detail, arguing that its travels across the colony constructed the architecture of imperial rule in

108

Malaya by interweaving the principles of capitalist imperialism under Commonwealth
economies into everyday Malayan life. The 16mm film format made for easy portability
enabling films to travel across the peninsula stowed away in the back of a truck. As mobile
objects, the films interlaced audiences from disparate villages together through the shared
experience of watching. Itself an articulation of modernity’s transformative technologies, the
Rural Lecture Caravan Scheme was the product of a joint effort by the Department of Co-
operation, the Department of Agriculture, and the Rubber Research Institute to “uplift” everyday
economic life in the colony. To be most effective, films were scripted and shot according to strict
guidelines about plot, cinematography and characterization. A fascination with the local—
shooting in kampongs (villages), featuring local actors telling local stories in familiar
situations—pervaded all aspects of production. Films sought a certain “psychological realism,”
an authenticity that enabled Malayans to “see themselves” in the characters onscreen. To build
the credibility of the program locally, the co-operation of Malayans themselves was central to
the mobile cinema project. Through promissory visions of Malayans and the British working
hand in hand in creating the machinery for disciplining economic life, Empire’s cosmopolitan
ideals emerged at the same sites as concretions of discipline.
Co-operative thrift and marketing films promoted the fundamental principles of colonial
economy, but in uneven ways to different racial groups. These economic educational films
served to cement the racially desegregated system of labor and economy on which the
architecture of imperial rule in Malaya so tenuously depended. The next sections of the chapter
examine two case studies of thrift films and the work they sought to do. Among Malay
agricultural smallholders in rural villages, films sought to instigate a culture of upward economic
mobility with narratives which portrayed the participation in public economic life as the defining

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aspect of colonial citizenship. The work done by the Rural Lecture Caravan amongst Indian
immigrant laborers on rubber plantation estates was directed at cultivating an immigrant labor
force that was flexible and responsive toward the market’s demand for rubber.
In spite of their empire building intentions however, films themselves invited unruly
possibilities. While Malayan lecturers were often mouthpieces for imperial ideologies, occasions
where translations were loosened from a films’ original intent suggest scripts deviant from those
intended by the colonial state. The possibility of colonial cinema’s other lives has particular
valence when considering the challenging question of spectatorship in the colonies. The ghosts
of rural Malayan spectators gathered before a “cinema under the palms” leave ephemeral traces
in colonial archives; their faint presences crumble at any attempt to derive a singular account of
colonial Malayan spectatorship.
1
Colonial documents reveal an anxiety about who the Malayan
audience was—they were at certain times laughing and complicit and at other instances sullen
and suspicious. Yet, there is much to reclaim from these spectral traces and fractured accounts.
These instabilities suggest genealogies of watching particular to colonial contexts—spectator
subjectivities which moved between social categories and prescribed roles in the colonial form.
The last section of the chapter thus turns to the experience of watching in rural Malaya
and attempts to piece together accounts of the multiple ways in which Malayans watched. As
Brian Larkin argues, understanding mobile cinema experiences in colonial spaces call for
different genealogies of cinema’s beginnings than those offered by scholars who have analyzed
early spectatorial relations with the screen in the context of turn-of-the-century Western
modernity. Classical film histories have located early spectatorship amid the rise of commodity
consumption and its corollary forms of visuality and display, mass transportation, shopping
centers, strangers and chaotic crowds, and factory lines—the “hyperstimulus” of modern life, to

110

use Ben Singer’s words.
2
If metropolitan spectatorship was predicated on the sensory stimuli of
city living, the very different conditions under which rural colonial audiences experienced the
cinema require room for different possibilities of spectatorship and subjectivity. For spectators in
the most rural reaches of the colonial tropics, the visual pleasures of department stores were
unfamiliar, “chaotic crowds” were your neighbors, and the quiet songs of crickets rather than
traffic hummed alongside the whirring of the film projector. This chapter suggests that rural
Malayan audiences were looking for, and seeing, other things in the flickering shadows of the
screen. I position incredulousness as a position of “counter-reception” among audiences who
were taught to “see themselves” in the lessons on the screen.
That is not to say that colonial audiences did not bring to the screenings the wonders,
thrills and expectations of metropolitan audiences and my discussion will certainly borrow from
the themes and discussions that enliven pioneering work in early cinema. Not unlike
metropolitan audiences, Malayan audiences certainly attended these events for a variety of
reasons—some to learn, but many more showing up simply for an evening’s entertainment.
Malayan audiences were using these films in their own ways, repurposing these disciplinary
mediums as sites of leisure. These lived, quotidian encounters with the machinery of colonial
education might or might not offer us grim readings of imperial interpellation or, triumphant
tales of resistance. Yet, they articulate how between garrulous lecturers, incredulous laborers,
and amused spectators, the life of the colonial educational film was larger, and more fascinating,
than its intended purpose.

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“Suloh Kemajuan Kehidupan Kampong”: Building the Machinery for Progress

Though the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme ran in the 1930s, which was certainly not “early” by
metropolitan standards, many Malayans encountered cinema for the first time through the
caravan. The program’s format was reminiscent of that of cinema’s early years—an array of
short films, lectures, and performances. Like early cinema as well, the Rural Lecture Scheme
was predicated on the spectacle of the cinema as modern technology, imparting discourse on
what modern subjectivity means. However, there were distinct differences between both modes
of exhibition and the sort of spectatorial practices they encouraged. Unlike metropolitan
audiences who encountered cinema in an urban space amid competing attractions—for whom a
state of Benjaminian distraction and amusement was part of the turn-of-the century
environment—rural audiences in the colonies encountered films as educational tools. Screenings
occurred at the work place—schools, village centers, rubber plantations—featuring films meant
to produce better workers and colonial citizens. Cinema was built into the very schematics of
colonial policy that sought to govern everyday life long after the lights come on. Thus
complicating genealogies of cinema as sites of leisure and distraction, rural colonial films were
both a source of pleasure as well as an experience of governance. In the wake of the Rural
Lecture Caravan, co-operative societies were set up, agricultural programs put in place, and
district officers dispatched to see that the lessons conveyed on the screen were being
implemented in the field. Educational film screenings in the colonies brought repercussions in
daily life and in one’s community, its influence exceeding beyond the pleasures of an evening’s
entertainment.
Hence, the rural cinema lecture circuit and the sorts of films screened in these spaces call

112

for additional frames of analysis than those offered by classical histories of film. As Brian Larkin
argues, other genealogies of visual reception and ways of seeing outside cinema’s commodity
form are needed when considering films in colonial situations. For many Malayans, the
cinematic experience was tied inseparably to the architecture of governance. As an icon of
wondrous colonial modernity, the Rural Lecture Caravan made the first steps toward rendering
Malaya into a population that could be disciplined visually. This section examines how the
coming together of various elements—the spectacle of the cinema, the caravan as a symbol of
technological wonder, the integration of government policy amid the pleasures of film-going—
made the cinematic experience for many rural Malayans one that was experienced through the
discourse of colonial modernity.
Hitting the road in November 1930, the Rural Lecture Caravan plied its routes in the
Western Malaysian peninsula for a decade until World War II after which the vehicle was
deemed lost.
3
The design of the vehicle went through three transformations over the decade the
scheme was functional. The first version articulated a fascination with the spectacle of the
caravan itself and its various technologies as an all-in-one home and propaganda unit on the go.
As the network of agricultural and co-operative district officers became more widespread in rural
areas, later models were less interested in providing living accommodations for the driver and
camera operator within the van, and increasingly invested in streamlining the functionality of the
caravan as a propaganda machine.
The notion of outfitting a vehicle with cinematograph equipment was discussed at the
1927 Imperial Conference. The committee suggested putting together a dynamo, projector,
switchboard and cables, and screen (all of British manufacture) that could be mounted on a
specially constructed one-ton lorry. They estimated the cost of such a travelling unit to be £500

113

or more.
4
Having no precedents in Malaya from which to develop the blueprints, engineers based
the design of the very first caravan in 1930 on railway carriages. Its construction at the Railway
Central Workshop was performed under the close supervision of the Carriage Department of the
Malay States Railways.
5
The Malay States Railways itself exemplified the successful penetration
of Western modernity and economic rationality into the chaotic, primitive depths of the Malayan
jungles. Like the train, the caravan was a technological marvel, what Brian Larkin describes in
Signal and Noise as the colonial sublime.
6
It embodied the logics of the railroad in its ability to
traverse space, and in its promise to bring modernizing forces to rural parts of the colony. The
allure of modernity was quite literally built into the very architecture of the first Rural Lecture
Caravan.

Fig.1. The first Rural Lecture Caravan, 1930. Image from Singapore-Malaysia Collection

114

National University of Singapore.

The handsomeness and ingenious utility of the 1930 caravan was a masterpiece of the
Malay States Railways. It featured a seasoned Malayan wood body paneled with aluminum
sheeting, spray-painted royal blue below and ivory above, and mounted on a Morris 30-cwt.
lorry chassis. The interior of the caravan exemplified the logical rationalization of space into
utilitarian divisions—every inch of spare room was converted into a productive space. Behind
the all-weather driver's cab, the body of the caravan was partitioned into two areas. Two Asiatic
lecturers who accompanied the caravan on its travels used the larger compartment in the interior
as living quarters. Sleeping bunks were upholstered along each side with storage space tucked
away beneath for personal belongings. Large cupboards for an ice-chest, cooking utensils, and
food provisions were affixed to the partition on the rear end of the caravan. On the left side of
this rear compartment, a cupboard housed the cinema projector, dynamo, screen, film reels,
lamps and so on. In addition to a hanging mirror, “conveniences such as shelves, brackets and
coat-hangers have not been forgotten.”
7

The first design of the caravan exemplified the integration of living quarters within the
workspace—of sweating bodies and their physical comforts beside the mechanical limbs of
portable projectors, switchboards, and electric dynamos. Apart from the impressive variety of
comforts that included a washbasin and cooking stove, the inner living compartment was rigged
with electric lights and a small fan to render the tropical weather more bearable. The windows
could be raised or lowered with revolving handles and detachable mosquito frames could be
mounted to let air in but keep insects out.
8
Part of the technological spectacle of the caravan, like
the railroad, was in its ability to provide all the trappings of civilization—and its attention to

115

bodily hygiene and comforts—within its machinery.

Fig.2. Agricultural Exhibits, trailer attached to the Rural Lecture Caravan, 1933.
Image from Singapore-Malaysia Collection National University of Singapore.

The purpose of the caravan was clear—it was a vehicle of transformation, bringing the
winds of progress and modernity into rural Malayan lives. More than just a truck bearing film
equipment, the caravan was outfitted with exhibits, specimens and displays with educational
value. In 1931, an attached trailer carried cases and bottles of seed, soils, photographs and
models of copra kilns and poultry houses.
9
In later versions of the caravan’s design the vehicle’s
cooking facilities were replaced to make room for more exhibits.
10
A collision on January 3rd
1938 wrecked the original caravan and presented the opportunity to design a new caravan from
scratch. While a temporary covered lorry carried out the rest of the scheduled tours that year, a
sub-committee looked into the construction of a new, even more aesthetically modern vehicle.
11

116

A sharp aesthetic of modernity informed the design of the new 1939 Rural Lecture
Caravan—that of lightness, airiness and minimalist utility. Doing away with the old heavy wood
body, the new caravan was painted a sensible green and made of lightweight and durable sheet
aluminum with chengal wood only being used in the framework and floor. A better established
network of district offices in rural areas with living accommodations for the caravan’s driver
eliminated the need for onboard living facilities making more room available for exhibits and
equipment. There was an emphasis on ventilation and the healthy flow of air—extra large
windows were fitted on the back door, with louvers along the side and a grille behind the driving
cab. In the center of the doors on the rear of the vehicle was painted in gold Jawi lettering the
words “Suloh Kemajuan Kehidupan Kampong” or “the torch of progress in village life.”
12

Fig.3. The new Rural Lecture Caravan, 1939. Image from Singapore-Malaysia Collection

117

National University of Singapore.

True to its slogan, the caravan was specially equipped to screen films to segments of the
populace sequestered in hard-to-reach, outlying areas with no reliable source of electricity. The
first power-system design involved powering a Cine-Kodak projector by a dynamo driven by
running a canvas-and-rubber composition belt over the rear wheel axle of the caravan.
13
When
the engine was run at 13 miles per hour, a voltage of 120 was obtained. When this method of
powering the projector proved unsustainable for the gears and transmission as well as somewhat
unreliable,
14
a Blackstone engine and dynamo were purchased in October 1931 providing a
complete and stable power unit. Nor was the propaganda effort only restricted to areas accessible
by road. In Pahang in 1933 for instance, the cinema equipment and power unit were transferred
to a houseboat for part of the tour so that visits could be paid to villages only accessible by river.
According to the report of the excursion, “Many of the inhabitants had never seen a moving
picture in their lives” and thus, the effects of the films were thought to have left magnificent
resonance.
15

As a moving object, the cinema moved through the peninsula charting cartographies of
governance in its wake. On its tours, the Caravan went from one settlement to the next on a strict
schedule in order to reach the largest number of people in the colony. Tours ran in the drier
seasonal months of late-February or March to October, spending between two to three weeks in
each state of the F.M.S. and the S.S. The caravan’s route began in the coastal districts of
Selangor, moving south to Malacca, Negri Sembilan, turning to the northernmost provinces of
Province Wellesley and Penang, Northern Perak and the Dindings, before winding its way back
southward through Southern Perak, Pahang, Kuala Selangor and Klang.
16
Its travels

118

cartographically mapped out the Western region which constituted the Federated Malay States
and in later years it went further south all the way to Singapore, venturing into the Unfederated
Malay States.

Fig.4. The Malay Peninsula.

It was clear to colonial officials that they had a means of communicating with the
thousands of Malayans and immigrant laborers in rural areas that was simply unprecedented. In
its first year, twelve tours were undertaken on the Peninsula including six in the state of
Selangor, three in Perak including in Penang and Province Wellesley, and one in Malacca.
17

Over a twelve-day tour in the latter three territories of the Straits Settlements, it was estimated

119

that no less than 17,000 people had attended the lectures and exhibits.
18
In the following year, an
estimate of 35,000 Malays, 7,000 Tamil laborers and 2,000 Chinese were thought to have seen
the films in 1931 during the eleven tours scheduled in the F.M.S. alone.
19
As the word of the
phenomenon spread more, scheduled appointments were made for the service and by 1932
estimated total attendance had increased by another 22,000.
20
Expanding outside of the western
peninsula soon after, the Caravan had covered approximately 42,000 miles in its travels between
Kedah and Singapore by 1938.
21

Because of its sheer ability to reach out to the masses, cinema was thought to be the best
means of propaganda, particularly among illiterate audiences. The appeal of the medium drew
crowds larger than could be assembled by any other means and it was also an extremely
economical method of propaganda. In the first nine months of its operation, it drew audiences of
no less that 105,000 people with a film such as Food First costing only $1,000 to produce while
being seen by at least 250,000 people in 1931 alone.
22
Once made, local operators could operate
films cheaply. As the director of co-operation wrote in a memorandum on film propaganda in
Malaya, “There is no other means by which the lesson the film is trying to teach could be placed
before such a large number of people at anything like the same cost.”
23

120

Fig.5. In preparation for an evening lecture and screening at a Malay village,
1939. The new, 1938 Rural Lecture Caravan is parked in the background. A
sleeker version of its predecessor, this caravan removed all living
accommodations in preference for more storage space. Image from Singapore-
Malaysia Collection National University of Singapore.

For the scheme to be effective, the visual pleasures of the screen had to be inextricably
tied to the informational aspects of the program. Films were never viewed in isolation but were
encountered alongside lectures, displays, and other programs aimed at implementing what was
being taught on the screen. As such, the visits of the caravan were well-planned events where
films were the highlight amid much wider mechanisms that sought to establish state policy. In

121

the first few years of its work, several tour programs were experimented with, each to varying
degrees of efficacy. By 1935, a routine program had been established for Malay villages, with
the caravan spreading out its screening and exhibitions over two days at each stop. The journey
was made during the morning with the preparations for the evening film screening taking place
immediately upon arrival. After sundown at 7.30pm until 9.30pm, three films were shown, a co-
operative film, an agricultural film and possibly a rubber or animal husbandry film depending on
the needs of the community.
24
Screenings typically took place outdoors in a clearing or a central
square, except during the full moon when the illumination interfered with the visibility of the
pictures. On such occasions, it became necessary to screen films in available schools or halls.
Because the nature of these films was persuasive rather than instructional, the films
themselves did not attempt to relay too much detail. Rather, the particularities of a co-operative
society or the complexities of animal husbandry were left to magic lanterns shows and lectures
the day after. From 5pm to 6pm the following day, the Asiatic instructors accompanying the
caravan would give a talk on topics such as padi planting, the proper housing of poultry, and the
economic viability of crops suitable for the district.
25
Penghulus (village leaders) and other
prominent members of the community attended the lectures taking notes pertaining to the
specimens of pedigree rice.
26
The visits of the Rural Lecture caravan were also opportunities for
the planters in the audience to place orders with the Agricultural Officer to obtain the strains of
rice for planting. Two more lectures would follow after the evening meal from 7.30pm to 9.30pm
often with the use of lanternslides.
In later years, the program was changed somewhat to account for the popularity of the
film screenings and the relatively poor attendance at the afternoon lectures the following day. By
1939, both lectures and screenings would be held on the first evening, with film shows running

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from 7pm until 12am. The films drew thousands of visitors, many of who trekked for miles from
surrounding villages to attend. The second day was reserved for a question and answer session
where the Malay Agricultural Assistant or the Asiatic Rubber Instructor would be available to
answer queries on the previous day’s lecture and take orders for agricultural supplies.
Screenings at rubber estates followed a slightly different format. Shows usually started at
8pm, after the workers had finished their evening meal and ended by nine-thirty. Weather
permitting, screenings were typically held outdoors in order to accommodate larger audiences,
or, in the event of rain were held in large sheds if those were available. Before starting the
screening, an Indian co-operative officer would speak to the gathered crowd, describing the
benefits of co-operative societies and summarizing the plot for the film that was about to be
screened.
27
Unlike the Malay peasants, educational efforts among the Indian laborers were
limited to co-operative themes, the significance of which will be discussed in the next section.
Apart from towns, villages, and rural plantations, the Rural Lecture Caravan also
screened films at trade shows. At the annual Malayan Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, films were
screened from 7pm to 10pm in a large tent for free. The exhibition was a large affair, open to
both Asiatics and Europeans. It was a site of commerce, leisure and education with exhibits
ranging from Balinese dancers, Malay artwork, coconut recipes, and lectures on cattle raising. As
word of the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme spread, the vehicle began making appearances
outside of the F.M.S., deviating from its scheduled route for special appearances at local events
in the Unfederated Malay States. For instance, the films, lanterns and agricultural exhibits were
borrowed by the Kedah government for a two-day Padi Show at Alor Star in 1935
28
and records
indicate eight shows in Singapore between 1931 to 1935.
29

By the mid-thirties, the Rural Lecture Caravan had been well integrated into the overall

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machinery of the departments’ work. With infrastructure in place and filmmaking guidelines
established, the Rural Lecture Caravan’s tours became part of larger, long staying rural
development schemes. Thanks to the immediacy and immersiveness of film, the work of a
caravan was thought to be particularly potent at introducing new ideas to a district at the
beginning of a campaign. The departure of a Rural Lecture Caravan was followed up for several
months by lectures, demonstrations and advice from officers of the Co-operative and
Agricultural Department, and the Rubber Research Institute. The task of these follow-up
committees was to ensure that the ideas initiated with the Caravan’s visit were implemented in
everyday practice and incorporated into daily life. Departmental annual reports claim success in
this regard with an increase in the number of General Purposes Co-operative Societies in Malay
kampongs as well as rubber sheets of better quality, improved copra quality, extended use of
pure strain padi and better animal husbandry. Films were introductory parts of a much longer
running scheme of economic development in the colony—they were tantalizing nuggets, the
forbearers of policies that were already being put in place by the colonial government. These
films were not intended to be fleeting experiences, to be treated as an evening’s amusement and
forgotten when the night was over. A visit by the Rural Lecture Caravan left an impression on
members in the community long after the caravan had moved on.

“There Go I Mat Bin Idris”: Psychological Realism and the Politics of Cosmopolitan
Camaraderie

I have described how the early cinematic experiences of many audiences in the rural colonies
have been primarily located within the larger machinery of colonial education. Visual pleasures

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were the means of discipline; watching films enabled the governance of people through visuality
itself. To create governable subjects through the experience of film viewing, the films addressed
(and sought to create) ideal spectators though particular understandings of spectatorial
subjectivity. Films themselves were made to address rural colonial audiences in ways that were
somewhat different from the commercial films of metropolitan cities. Wonderment and awe at
the technologies of the camera were intended to go in arm with the recognition of the colonized
and disciplined self in the projected image. An effective colonial educational film would be one
in which the audience would recognize their own likeness in the characters on the screen,
understanding these characters to be referents of themselves. The spectacle of the moving image
was inextricably tied to the recognition of the self as the very subject that was being addressed
(and disciplined). Hence, films featured simple narratives in familiar contexts, with local actors,
and uncomplicated editing and cinematography. Rather than technical excellence and visual
attraction, films sought authenticity and accuracy so that they would “ring true in the eyes of the
kampong Malay.”
30

Film production for the rural lecture caravan was carried out by the Co-operative
Department and Agricultural Department with occasional assistance from the Medical
Department. The Director of the Co-operative Thrift Department, L.D. Gammans, who made
most of the films that formed the repertoire of the caravan’s screening, created a standardized
film practice in Malaya to achieve these effects. To be most effective, the narrative structure,
theme, and aesthetics of films themselves followed strict outlines. The governing principle of
filmmaking was “psychological realism”—that is, audiences had to recognize the film as directly
applicable to their own contexts. The phrase “psychological realism” itself was part of the
language of colonial filmmaking in Malaya appearing multiple times in the press and in

125

correspondences to denote a particular notion of authenticity—an identifiable and empathetic
similarity between the world of the film and the world of the audience. The general rubric for
film production in the colony is outlined in a memorandum on colonial film propaganda.
If the film is to have any appeal to the peasant, it must have a local setting and
must deal with things concerning his daily life. Above all, the films must be in
harmony with the temperament and psychology of the spectators. There must be
no ‘improbable happenings’ and no ‘gaffes’ in dress or deportments of the actors.
Our experience is that technical excellence is of minor importance in comparison
with strict accuracy in matters of detail. This means that films must not only be
produced locally, but must be produced and directed by men who have an
intimate knowledge of local psychology.
31

Instead of making visually interesting or spectacular films, the emphasis on film production for
the Rural Lecture Caravan was to produce more “authentic” films that its intended audience
could recognize as being distinctly local and applicable to their situations. Psychological realism
and the familiarity of the context in which the world of the film took place were thought to be of
utmost importance in the education of Malayans through cinema.
The first principle was that the film had to be specific to the local context and feature
aspects of life recognizable by Malay villagers and Tamil laborers—it had to “reek of the soil in
which it is shown.”
32
For this reason partly, imported films were thought to be ineffective in
addressing local conditions.
33
Films were shot in actual kampongs and plantations, as officials
believed that seeing local and familiar faces would generate a sense of psychological realism and
authenticity. On occasion, the Co-operative Department was known to hire professional
bangsawan (Malay theatre) actors and Food First is one such example.
34
However, films
featured non-professional actors for the most part—government officials and village people. For
instance, the Co-operative film, The Story of Penkalan Lomba stars Che Salleh, the penghulu of a
kampong in Selangor named Kuang.
35
In the film, Che Salleh improves a village’s collective
standard of living by organizing a co-operative pooling of funds for the building of bridges the

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cleaning of common areas, and the construction of facilities. The film was given an air of
authenticity through its intertextual relationship with the real-life success story of Kuang. In his
life off-screen, Che Salleh was seen as an exemplary example amongst Malays—a forward
thinking man who organized the first agricultural show in a mukim (sub-district). The film was
thought to be more persuasive as it was set in the same village—Kuang—where the efforts of co-
operative development were successful. Like the village in the film, Che Salleh turned “a sadly-
neglected fever-ridden kampong into a charming and prosperous little village.”
36
As Gammans
noted, “It is found that simple village people will act quite naturally provided they are
sympathetically handled.”
37

The film’s technical sophistication also had to be pared down in favor of a simple and
straightforward narrative. Special effects, more complicated editing, and elaborate camera work
were thought to confuse “primitive” audiences. Similar discourses about how colonial audiences
watched extend beyond the Malayan context. In experiments conducted among Nigerian
audiences in the 1920s, William Sellers described how Africans were lacking in the visual
literacy required for understanding anything beyond the most rudimentary films.
38
Infamous
accounts how microscope views of hookworms were mistaken for being giant snakes in the
belly, and how enlarged images of malaria-bearing mosquitoes were thought by credulous
African audiences to represent giant insects became cautionary tales for filmmakers in the
colonies—reminders about how shooting for colonial audiences required using only the most
simple and indexical visual language possible in the most familiar contexts. Instead of making
visually interesting or spectacular films therefore, the emphasis was to produce more “authentic”
and realistic films that its intended audience could recognize as distinctly local and applicable to
their situations.

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Films also had to avoid seeming dry and overtly preachy. A simple dramatic narrative
featuring situations familiar to the villager was considered the most effective means of
communication. These “human interest” scenes made the lesson of the film easier and more
enjoyable to watch. Films typically followed two characters, one who made foolish financial
choices, and one who displayed good economic sense by heeding the advice of the government.
Usually friends or brothers from the same village, the former finds himself in a sorry situation by
the end of the film while the latter relishes in success. Audiences were expected to sympathize
with characters whose predicaments resonated with their own. A film would have been said to
have done its job successfully if a spectator could say to him/herself, “There, but for the grace of
the Co-operative Department, go I, Mat bin Idris.”
39

The tactical involvement of Malayans throughout the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme was another
key factor that enhanced the “authenticity” and psychological realism of the films. Indeed,
Malayan involvement was critical to the success of the program. Beyond attesting to the
authenticity of its educational efforts, the involvement of Malayans in the Rural Lecture Caravan
scheme improved the credibility of the British administration as a whole. The scheme was a
superb example of how camaraderie and a sense of cosmopolitan brotherhood between the
British and the Malayans could be put together to achieve the noble ambitions of social
improvement. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, a shift in British colonial policy in the interwar
period saw efforts to “soften” the connotations of empire to define Commonwealth camaraderie
rather than imperial domination. The appearance of native co-operation in these efforts was
crucial in sustaining this image of a progressive-minded colonial government. Thus Malayan
involvement in the scheme was an essential part of the disciplinary project and a matter of

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pride—an example of the things that could be achieved with co-operation between British and
Malayans.
Credit for the design of the caravan for instance, was not attributed to European talent
alone. The two ventilators in the roof and a chimney above the cooking stove were miniature
replicas of similar ventilators in F.M.S. Railway carriages, and according to an article in the local
press, were “ingeniously adapted by Chinese craftsmen.”
40
Applauded as “a credit to [its]
European supervisors and Asiatic craftsmen,” the caravan itself was depicted as the embodiment
of a proper collaborative relationship between colonial officials and their Asiatic laborers.
41

Under good leadership, it was believed, Malayans would have the room and opportunity to push
their “natural” talent and craftsmanship to innovative heights.
Filmmaking in Malaya was also a co-operative project that included Malayan
involvement at many levels of production. Even working with the local actors became an
opportunity for better intercultural understanding. One journalist pondered the possibility of
commercial cinema production among South Indians
42
while another, perhaps in a more
sentimental mood, admits to how the naturalistic acting of the tappers generated a sense of
empathy for the Tamil workers.
Self-consciousness is completely absent, and the actors, both principals and
“extras,” behave with a spontaneity which is especially welcome to a European
town-dweller who has hiterto, as a result of ignorance of Ramasamy's language
and mentality, regarded him as an economic unit rather than a human being.
43

Malayans also had influence over the content of the film and were mediators within the
propaganda process. To verify the authenticity of the world captured onscreen, Malay co-
operative officers critiqued Penkalan Lomba at all stages of its production.
44
Vetting by Malay
officers specifically with regard to the dramatic parts of the film was enabled so as to “prevent
the picture being depicted from a European point of view.”
45
Penkalan Lomba was exemplary of

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how Malayan opinions were included in the various stages of film production.
46
Also produced
by L.D. Gammans, he considered it the masterpiece among his work thus far not because it was
technically sophisticated but because it achieved the highest degree of “psychological realism”
thanks to the input of the Malay staff.
47
Indian co-operative officers also partook in the
production of Malaya—Land of Opportunity alongside European officers.
48

The success of the Rural Lecture Caravan and the co-operative and agricultural schemes
to follow were highly contingent on the co-operation and co-ordination of the Malay penghulus
and the Indian estate managaers. In the official organ, penghulus were Malay officials who
administered the sub-divisions of districts under the guidance of the District Officer.
Communally and locally, the penghulus had the status of the village chief or leader—paternal
roles with similar influence. The presence of the penghulu during Rural Lecture Caravan
programs lent credibility and an element of persuasiveness to the cinema and lecture event, their
opening remarks before film screenings were thought to put the audience in a frame of mind
receptive to learning and implementing new ideas. The role of community leaders in the work
that followed was also central to the success of the program. For instance, visits of penghulus
and members of co-operative societies to padi experimental stations were highly encouraged, as
they were key agents through which information on pedigree strains could be disseminated to the
villagers.
The day-to-day management and running of the Rural Lecture Caravan itself was also left
entirely in Malayan hands. The Asiatic lecturers and caravan drivers were considered the crux of
the program. A report appearing in the papers on the tour of the Rural Lecture Caravan in
Selangor wrote glowingly about the Malay representatives of the Co-operative Department, the
Agricultural Department and the Rubber Research Institute who accompanied the van.

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The very able and convincing manner in which Inche Jaffar bin Mampak carried
out the lecturing and looked after the tour deserved of special mention. I should
also like to draw attention to the manner in which Ahmat bin Haji Abdullah the
caravan driver devoted himself to his work and strove to make the tour a success
in spite of constant trouble with the engine. With a less capable and energetic
man, the tour would unquestionably have had to be abandoned.
49

Inche Jaffar was the Malay Agricultural Assistant of Cheras district who gave the lectures.
Likewise, the lectures surrounding the screening event were conducted entirely by Malay and
Indian co-operative and agricultural officers accompanying the caravan or who were stationed at
various parts of the peninsula. These men would address the audience in their language, on the
story of the film and the benefits of co-operative societies, or agricultural methods. They were
the mediators of the imperial project—empire’s translators. With attendant penghulus, these
lecturers did the work of normalizing the politics of empire within vernacular life. Alongside
Chinese craftsmen, and Indian rubber tappers/actors, they were a proud part of the Rural Lecture
Caravan Scheme, applauded in the press and within government records as being exemplary of a
modern and progressive colony where local Malayan involvement went in hand with good
colonial direction.
The alliance between colonial institutions and Malayan members across social classes in
the making of the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme suggests a Gramsci-an architecture of
hegemony. The production of propaganda media alongside the building of a culture of economic
surveillance through thrift societies, sought to construct a political and ideological consensus by
securing the “spontaneous consent” of colonized groups. The production of culture—of a
particular form of colonial economic citizenship—was made possible through the collaboration
of Malayans in the machinery of hegemony. Certainly, the colonial state was cognizant of this
effect, both in the efforts to create “cultural dimensions” of economic policies, and also in being
careful to include Malayans in the production and execution of the scheme.

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The discourse of “discipline” was thus couched in cosmopolitan and humanist discourses
of progress and development. Indeed, the British administration in Malaya viewed the
educational work that the Rural Lecture Caravan sought to do as an extension of the civilizing
mission. These efforts in social “uplift” were considered by the government to be evidence of the
progressive and humanist ethics of the British administration in Malaya that exceeded the
requirements of imperial and capitalist industry. Going beyond simply the provision of justice,
maintenance of order, and administrative management that was the interest of pre-policy, the
interwar government was invested in assisting the economic development of the peoples for
whom they have assumed responsibility.
50
Indeed the work of the Rural Lecture Caravan was
seen as a philanthropic project—concerned with uplifting Malayan life. When one of these
Malayan films was shown to a group of labor ministers in London they were supposedly
astonished to find that such progressive work was being done in British colonial territories. On
the progressive intent of the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme, the newspapers proclaims: “One
was thus reminded that modern British imperialism is not solely an instrument of capitalist
industry but look to the interest of the peasantry, of the indigenous races, as well.”
51
The story of
a benevolent and paternal empire was told through the very work of the caravan and its noble
intent.
The screening of the caravan’s educational films was thus a multilayered space. For
Malayans it was a space of discipline and leisure, a point that will be discussed later in the essay.
For the British it was also humanist space—producing empathy and identification with the
otherwise nameless brown faces who worked on the plantation fields. Disciplinary regimes were
thus the same sites for cosmopolitan sentiment and both were predicated upon the production of
the colonized subject for the screen.

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Making its way along dusty roads, plantation trails, and marshy rivers of British Malaya, the
films of the Rural Lecture Caravan brought their lessons on good economic habits and
productive agricultural practices to thousands of people. Where the scheme sought to discipline
economic life among colonial subjects, it did so with the intent of supplementing policies put in
place by the departments to address the economic and socio-political needs of the colony. As I
will now describe, the sort of films that were shown by the Rural Lecture Caravan differed
between Malaya’s different social groups. Rural Malay villagers would have watched different
films than Indian workers on rubber plantations due to the specific roles each racial group played
in the colonial imagination. In the two case studies that follow, films were specifically made
about the particular financial scenarios familiar to each of these groups. Not isolated texts
contained within themselves, films were inextricable from the larger social and economic
policies that the colonial government sought to enact.

Making Ahmad “Problem Conscious”: Social Uplift and the Disciplining of Economic Life

To understand the place cinema in empire it is not enough to gesture toward the idea of “empire”
as a general abstraction. Rather, films' production and reception must be contextualized within
the specificities of the particular imperial formation in question. Rural indebtedness was the so-
called “problem” afflicting the Malay villager, making the economic and financial education of
Malayans central to the continued functioning of the colonial architecture of British Malaya. Of
the dozen or so films that made up the modest collection at the back of the Rural Lecture
Caravan, five were produced on topics of thrift and the problem of bankruptcy amongst rural

133

Malays—films which were almost always on the list of all village screenings. To comprehend
the significance of these thrift films on Malayan life, it is necessary to first discuss the race-based
land, labor, and economic policies that had thus far determined Malay life in the F.M.S.
One of the principles of the British system of indirect rule in Malaya was the protection
of a race-based socio-economic class system where the interests of the Malays were to some
extent protected. The Malays were to maintain social and economic privileges as well as priority
over land ownership in relation to the other immigrant Asian races such as the Indians and
Chinese. The British portrayed themselves as stewards for the Malays, firm but tender guides
who, though enlightened administration and wise government, protected these “children of
nature,”
52
as one official described them, in the face of the many challenges of modernity. The
continued role of Malays as loyal and happy underlings played a large part in the warm
paternalist vision of the relationship the British had for the indigenous people of the colony.
53

This responsibility for the continued well being of the Malays even in the face of imperial
economic, political, and social interventions was how the British legitimized their presence in the
colony and kept uprisings down to a certain degree. It was important that the appearance that
“this is a Malay country and not part of a British Colony” be maintained—meaning that at least
in the public eye, the government had to appear to put Malay interests ahead of the imperial
economy.
54

Widespread debt among the Malays was a problem to the continued stability of the
system, particularly where caused by British colonial policy. The Malays were constantly put
under pressure by the influx of foreign capital, goods and labor that was synonymous with the
increasing integration of Malaya into the world economy at the turn of the twentieth century.
Between 1911 and 1931 the government encouraged unrestricted immigration of Chinese and

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Indian laborers primarily to assist the tin mining and rubber export industries.
55
By 1931, the
number of Chinese and Indians outweighed the number of Malays in the Federated Malay States
at some 64 percent of the population.
56
In many regions of the peninsula, Malays were losing
land to Indian moneylenders to pay off debts and were unable to afford the industrial machinery
used by the Chinese and other foreigners to compete in larger scale tin production.
57
In trade,
agriculture, and other areas of industry, the Malays lacked the capital of the Chinese or the
British that allowed these groups to enter less developed states to set up plantations, mines and
trade networks. Anthony Milner observes how the Malays becoming increasingly aware (sedar)
of the “feebleness and degradation of their situation, of the poverty of their lives” in the 1930s.
58

As the Malays continually lost footing against the competition, resentment towards foreign races
developed, particularly towards the other immigrant Asiatic races.
The problem of Malay rural indebtedness was also the result of active efforts by the
colonial government to cast the Malay as a peasant class for whom padi growing was the
traditional primary occupation. Indeed, the colonial state was invested in keeping Malays in the
padi fields and away from the more profitable cash crops—a measure institutionalized through
widespread education and land use policies.
59
For instance, the 1913 Malay Reservation Act was
put in place to limit the amount of cash cropping Malays could do on land that the state had set
aside for Malay use to protect it from exploitation by foreign Asians.
60
The enactment tried to
“protect the birthright and inheritance of the Malays” by discouraging rubber planting among
Malays in these areas and insisting on “more traditional forms” of cultivation such as the padi in
addition to other subsistence crops.
61
Unlike the more lucrative industries of rubber and tin,
capital was difficult to obtain for small-scale rice cultivation. Credit facilities and government
support were directed at European firms involved with the extractive industries, while Malay

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farmers relied on Chinese and Indian moneylenders.
62
Unable to obtain credit on favorable terms
instigated the cycle of indebtedness and loss of property.
The task of the Co-operative Department offered a three-pronged approach to fix this
problem of indebtedness—the provision of rural credit for Malay smallholders, the development
of co-operative marketing, and the eradication of “uneconomic social customs.” Creating a spirit
of economic and productive co-operation amongst rural dwellers was emphasized as central to
this effort and championed as community-led organizations. The movement was initiated in 1922
when the Co-operative Societies Ordinance was introduced in the F.M.S. A British Director,
Assistant Director and Senior Officer led a team of seventeen Malay officers who in turn
managed 126 co-operative societies in 1930.
63
Each society was itself run by ordinary kampong
(village) folk who became members by paying annual dues. Subject to the consensus of board
members, these dues would form the collective capital from which members could apply for
loans. Approval of loans was subject to consensus of board members, which functioned as a
means of ensuring the collective capital was invested towards projects which promised healthy
returns. These sources of community based credit sought to address the issue of cash flow for
Malayans who hoped to acquire capital for investment without the need to approach Chinese or
Indian moneylenders whose loans typically involved high interests, mortgaging land, or pre-
selling rice before the harvest. Unofficial loan systems were difficult to legislate and were a
reason for bankruptcy among many rural Malays. By contrast, systems Co-operative thrift
societies were run by Malayans but represented by officers tied to the colonial government. It
was a means of bringing unruly indigenous banking systems within the “legitimate” terrain of the
state.
Rural Credit Societies particularly sought to deal with the “cultural aspects” of

136

indebtedness amongst rural subjects. Together with educationally driven “Better Living
Societies,” Rural Credit Societies were intended to reform “bad” social habits and curtail
extravagant expenditures on weddings, funerals and other such non-productive things. Weddings
appeared to be a particularly sore point among co-operative officials. Impressionable Malays
were accused of compounding pomp and extravagant habits acquired “from his contact with
other races” on top of his own pricey customs, spending on presumably useless fancies such as
“decorated cars, flood lighting, lavish dinners” as well as European style music parties and
Chinese style bridal chambers.
64
Essentially systems of citizen surveillance, they were
established so as to develop public opposition to these “extravagant” expenditures, making such
behaviors punishable through the general consensus.
65

Disciplinary institutions in the Foucaultian sense, co-operative societies in their various
articulations atomized the various aspects of Malayan private economic life and laid them bare to
arrangement and rearrangement, imposing on it a “principle of compulsory visibility”

beneath
collective discipline.
66
It was about the conversion of subalterns into a governable economic
population—an economic colonial citizen. This was made possible through discourses of
economic discipline and “responsibility”—by permitting spending on certain things, but not
others so that a peasant might buy seed or land, but not spend too much on a funeral. These
societies were seen as community-led bastions of thrift and good investment in the backwaters of
economic “good sense,” supposedly protecting the extravagant Malay from his own financial
foolishness. Kampong folk “traditionally careless and improvident, and who have never known
what it is to do any sort of bookkeeping” were taught to be well versed in the principles of
capital and investment.
67

The Rural Co-operative Credit Societies however, did not take off after their inception in

137

1922 and remained unpopular for the next half-decade for reasons I will discuss later.
68
The
British partly attributed this poor response to the perpetual challenges of getting Malay peasants
and smallholders to want to improve their current standards of living in the first place. To aspire
toward greater wealth and economic standing in the community was, according to colonial
sources, the very thing that was lacking in Malay society. Official discourse in the colonial
period perpetuated the notion of the lazy Malay who was blissfully unaware of his dire economic
situation and perfectly happy to lie about in the sun. “The leading characteristic of the Malay of
every class is a disinclination to work,” wrote Frank A Swettenham, the first Resident-General of
the Federated Malay States and later, the High Commissioner for the Malay states and Governor
of the Straits Settlements.
69
Planting or earning only what was required to meet his daily needs,
and preferring to spend what little he earned on was on weddings feasts and other social customs
rather than on land, seed, and daily necessities, was by English standards considered lazy and
financially foolish.
The perceived fundamental laziness of the Malays was a key tenet of the co-operative
department’s policy. Before hoping for any results with implementation in the field, the
aspirations of upward mobility—central to the ideological functioning of the economic state—
had to be “introduced.” “Before much success can be expected the raiat [community] must first
of all be convinced that his present methods of business and living generally are unsatisfactory
and that better methods are available for the asking. There must be aroused in him the
determination to remedy matters.”
70
The need to rouse the Malay from his state of tropical torpor
pervaded official discourse on the topic of rural Malay education. The then Assistant Director of
the Co-operation, L.D. Gammans, insisted that any propaganda endeavors amongst the Malays
must make clear to its audience the un-desirableness of their own situation and thereafter

138

generate a desire to fix them.
First of all their interest must be aroused. They must be made ‘problem-
conscious.’ A dissatisfaction with things as they are must be awakened. A
determination to adopt better methods must be aroused. Only when all this has
been done can result be expected from the impartation of definite knowledge as to
the methods by which improvement is possible.
71

It was in doing the preliminary work of arousing interest that the film played such an important
part. Hence the visit of Rural Lecture Caravan with its agricultural exhibits and cinema films
initiated the process of “rural rehabilitation.” Laying out the problem and mapping out their
solutions though imagined scenarios and characters, these films drew together collective histories
and possible futures for the purposes of mobilizing affective change amongst the imagined
communities of colonial citizens. As Gammans described,
…the cinema draws the people together, presents to them the problems which
face them in general terms, shows them that better methods of doing things are
possible, and provides that general foundation without which detailed instruction
often proves so disappointing in results.
72

One such film, Mat and Idris
73
was produced by the Co-operative Department in 1929
and was included within the collection onboard the caravan. This 16mm three reeler was the
department’s first attempt at propaganda and was shot with a Cine-Kodak camera. The film was
made by J.W. Hoflin, of the F.M.S. Medical Department and produced by officers of the co-
operative movement.
74
The story is centered follows two carefree schools friends who grew up
together. Mat leads a life of laziness and extravagance, while Idris chooses hard work and thrift.
Like the colonial educational films that were to follow in Africa later with the Bantu Educational
Kinema Experiment from 1835 to 1937 and the films of the Central African Film Unit, the
narrative structure of the film set up a comparison between the “good” Malay and the “bad”
Malay. The first part of the film features Mat's life, showing him rising late, employing workers
to tap his rubber trees, and buying clothing, jewelry, a bicycle, and other items he could not

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afford on credit. Mat refuses to join a co-operative credit society that offers a collecting banking
system where he could save money and borrow from in times of need. With debt piling up, he
instead goes to an Indian moneylender to whom he mortgages his property. Unable to pay up,
Mat's rubber holding is put up for auction and Mat is driven to hardship in the jungle.
Meanwhile, his friend Idris has chosen the ethics of hard work and thrift, choosing to tap
his own rubber, plough his own rice, with his wife putting her labor to good use by making mats.
The second part of the film depicts how Idris refused the invitations of moneylenders to purchase
wares on credit and “plodded perseveringly along,” joining the co-operative thrift society and
paying his subscriptions regularly. When an adjoining rubber estate comes up for sale at a
reasonable price, Idris requested that his co-operative credit society inspect the land and consider
his request for a loan. Shortly after a collective meeting, they approved of its purchase and
advanced him the capital needed. Soon with an expanded source of income Idris built a large
house on his property, spending his evenings “in comfort in the bosom of his family.”
75
Idris is
shown living in comfort and affluence while Mat, dispossessed in the jungle, was faced with the
daunting task of starting all over again so late in life. Both narrative threads merge at the end of
the film, for greater comparative impact. The sense of time wasted versus the use of time in a
“productive” fashion draws attention to the idea of time as a value-laded unit in modern,
capitalist production and addressed a particular concern the British had for the Malay’s supposed
insensitivity towards time and its passing.
Good colonial citizenship involved the responsible management of one’s personal
finances alongside the willingness to subject one’s private economic life to the management of
the public body. The problem of indebtedness among rural Malays was divorced from the larger
contextual circumstances that I had previously described and put squarely in the lap of Malays

140

themselves. According to the film’s rhetoric, Malay indebtedness and land loss could easily be
resolved if they would only pick themselves up by the bootstraps and change their attitudes
towards money. Idris’s success is rooted in the ethics of hard-work, sound financial decisions
and his membership in the co-operative society. Unlike Mat who takes loans from “illegitimate”
sources to fuel his “senseless” consumption, Idris chose to acquire capital through a loan from
the co-operative society to buy land for his rubber estate—deemed a worthier investment. Idris
enters the market system by obtaining capital for producing more goods for the market—a
criteria of good economic citizenship. Financial education was the purpose of the film—
particularly with regards to the joining of a Co-operative Credit Society. The problem of rural
indebtedness was configured as purely the problem of the Malay peasant for being ignorant of
co-operative societies and being too spendthrift for his own good. Mat loses his land to the
Indian moneylender because of his own bad financial choices, and the “wasteful customs and
habits” of his race, “deep rooted in the usage of centuries.”
76

Besides thrift and the incorporation of financial practice among Malayan farmers within
the control of the state, the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme wanted to encourage Malays to
produce goods for the market and coax their entry into market economies. The basis on which
rural Malays were accused of laziness lay with the practice of subsistence farming where Malay
farmers produced only as much as met the family’s needs, rather than producing extra for sale.
Fundamental to the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme was the desire to incorporate rural Malays
into the economic life of the colony through a healthy balance of peasant economies and cash-
cropping. According to L.D. Gammans, director of the Co-operative Department, “the ideal
balance for the Malay peasant is that he should be self-supporting in his food requirements and in
addition have a money crop to pay for his luxuries and incidentally to meet his taxation.”
77

141

Gammans believed that cash cropping and the acquisition of capital even among smallholders
did much to improve the Malay condition.
The films made for and shown by the Rural Lecture Caravan sought to incorporate Malay
peasant labor into these wider market economies. For instance, a major theme promoted by the
Rural Lecture Caravan was “teaching” smallholders about how to market their own cash crops.
A film produced by the caravan, Saving of Haji Hassan (1930s) illustrated the “faults” in the
preparation and marketing of rubber by the Malay small holder who earned considerably less
than the market price for selling impure and poorly graded rubber, and for going through a
Chinese middle-man in his village instead of direct to the large rubber shipping firms. To keep
audiences on their toes, the film incorporated an action sequence when the protagonist, whose
land is about to be sold under an order granted to an Indian moneylender, races to Kuala Lumpur
to stop the sale after having discovered a means to recuperate his losses through better marketing
strategies.
78
The Cooperative Department made this film with the hopes that the rubber produced
by the Malay smallholder could compete with that of the larger estates
79
—an ambition which
complicates Andaya and Andaya’s argument that British discouraged cash-cropping amongst
Malay smallholders for fear that they would undercut the profitability of large estates.
80
The
value of collective marketing was also the central theme of Eggs (1930s), whereby peasants were
taught that pooling their product for the commercial market and bypassing local buyers would
fetch them higher prices. Education in the principles of marketing sought to break the hold of
local, provincial trading to incorporate productive bodies into the larger marketplace.
The government also encouraged the cash cropping of padi in view of the domestic food
shortage in Malaya at the time. An over reliance on rice imports put Malaya at the mercy of other
countries so in the 1930s, effort was put into increasing the farm yields of smallholders.
81
The

142

Agriculture Department launched a series of programs aimed at promoting selected padi strains,
pest control, modern cultivation methods and the benefits of coordinated planting timetables.
82

Films and lectures were considered particularly useful in garnering receptivity towards new
agricultural practices since Malays were also thought to be hopelessly uncomprehending of the
workings of science. Previous attempts by the Agricultural Department to test new strains of padi
were consistently thwarted when cultivators distributed the seed amongst his friends instead of
planting all the material on a specific test site.
83
Films were made to supplement existing work
done by Agricultural District Officers in getting seeds strains and new agricultural methods to
gain traction among planters.
84
Padi (1930s), a film on rice production showed the Malayan
grower what happens to rice after it leaves his fields. The idea was to instill a sense of national
responsibility in the Malay farmer who, if given drained and irrigated land, would then hopefully
produce rice for the market beyond his personal consumption to address the colony’s food
deficit.
85

Gammans’s vision of the Malay however, differs from the accounts of various historians
who have argued that by shaping them up as a peasant class, Malays were deliberately kept
outside of the new economic order of the colony.
86
They argue that British stewardship of the
Malays involved shielding the Malay modern economic life, preserving a notion of idyllic
kampong living protected from the instabilities of the global economy. The “preservation” of
Malay “indigeneity” through this narrative of static, rural peasantry was itself based on the
erasure of a long history of Malay international commerce.
87

Food First (early 1930s) was a film made specifically to discourage cash cropping
amongst Malays and promote a return to simple kampong peasantry. To the chagrin of the
administration, Malays had been consistently converting land initially intended for fruit tree and

143

padi growing into plantations for more lucrative crops such as rubber, gambier and pepper. The
film described how drastic falls in the price of rubber during the depression impacted Malay
cashcroppers. One man, swayed by greed during the boom years converted all his land to rubber
planting only to go hungry after the bust, while the other who kept a good head on his shoulders,
saw the merits of mixed cultivation which helped him weather the storm.
Despite the seeming unity and coherence of the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme in its
single-minded ambition of bringing the light of progress to the kampong, hiccups in the
coherence of its messages suggested kinks in the imperial machinery. Where films such as Food
First encouraged subsistence farming first and foremost, upholding the notion of the idyllic
Malay villager bound to the simple needs of a traditional life, other films such as Saving Haji
Hassan, Mat and Idris, and Padi encouraged cash cropping and production for the market.
Saving Haji Hassan and Mat and Idris in particular films encouraging a form of rubber
production amongst smallholders that, according to historians, was discouraged in other quarters.
Mixed messages in the films of the Rural Lecture Caravan revealed instabilities regarding the
role of the Malay in the colonial imaginary and the place of Malay labor within colonial
economic life. The competing needs of the Malayan colony resulted in policies that were often
fractured and not always coherent. The body of films produced for the Rural Lecture Caravan
was no exception.
Imperial institutions are many-headed medusas whose desires and ambitions were as
varied and competing as the individuals whose labors shaped them. Teasing out the
complications of the colony’s ponderous socio-economic machinery is work best done
elsewhere. The point I take from these tousling visions over the laboring Malay body was how
the regulation of private economic life—how one spent, how one borrowed, how one saved, and

144

one’s habits of production—became part of the business of the colonial state. It was about the
creation of governable populations though the public management of economic life.

“Teaching Thrift to Ramasamy”
88
: Film and the Economic Life of Indian Immigrant
Labor

Apart from the kampongs, the Rural Lecture Caravan also made frequent visits to large
plantation estates to screen their films to rubber tappers who worked there. Where thrift films
amongst Malays was directed at the problem of land loss and market participation, economic
education amongst the “coolie” class was about keeping the supply of labor mobile and
responsive to changing market needs while simultaneously ensuring discipline on the estate lines
amongst laboring groups.
Produced by the Co-operative Department, Malaya—The Land of Opportunity (1929)
specifically addressed the challenge of bankruptcy and debt among Indian rubber estate workers.
Like Mat and Idris, Malaya—The Land of Opportunity was produced before the construction of
the caravan but was easily incorporated into the vehicle’s library of films. In comparison to Mat
and Idris, this was a markedly improved film, both technically and in terms of its narrative
arrangement.
89
It featured rubber tappers from Pilmoor Rubber Estate in Selangor as actors. The
film was structured episodically, following the stories of two young men from South India who
go to Malaya to work as laborers on a rubber plantation. The film opens with a kangani—the
Tamil overseer of a group of laborers working together on a plantation, at a South Indian village,
persuading its inhabitants to look for work in Malaya. After a discussion with their wives and
parents, Muniandi and Kuppan board a B.I. steamer to Port Swettenham in Malaya whereupon

145

they make their way to Sungei Lumpur Estate. The rest of the film unfolds along the lines of the
“good Tamil, bad Tamil” narrative structure of the other co-operative thrift films. Kuppan, the
“bad Tamil” refuses to join the estate thrift co-operative. Frittering his earnings away on his
penchant for cheap toddy, he misses work on several occasions and is fired. He visits an illegal
Chinese samsu (rice wine) distillery where he gets woefully inebriated. Back at the plantation
lines, he gets into a fight and leaves a fellow worker unconscious. A montage sequence shows
Kuppan being arrested, tried at court, and imprisoned for two years while being put to hard labor.
A shot of his parents weeping when the news of his downfall reaches them closes this part of the
story. Muninandi, his prissy companion, joined the co-operative thrift society right away.
90
In
time, he was promoted to head kangani amid much pomp and ceremony and was also made the
chairman of the council of the estate laborer's co-operative thrift society. After much thrift and
hard work, he eventually owned his own cattle and was able to provide his aged parents in India
with funds to buy bullocks. With the substantial payout from the co-op after his years of saving,
Muniandi and his family were able to depart for India with much wealth under their belts.
91

While Muniandi departs in a motorbus in “a positive halo of popularity and success,” Kuppan
was shown hammering disconsolately at the earth with his changkul (spade).
The teaching of thrift to Indian laborers speaks to the peculiar history of Indian
immigration to Malaya, and the need for a non-immmigrant mobile labor force sensitive to the
changing demands of the market. To manage new systems of globalized production, Britain
created channels of transnational labor movement between India, China and Malaya. In the case
of Indian immigration, the abolishment of slavery by the British in 1896 and the Indian Penal
Code in 1860 resulted in a shortage of labor in Malaya.
92
Indian laborers in Malaya were
typically lower-caste men from impoverished districts in southern India many of whom labored

146

under serf-like conditions for landlords who ensured their debts could not be worked off.
93
For
these workers, their only means of escaping generations of servitude was emigration and work
on Malayan plantations was one such solution. Malaya—“the land of opportunity” was
publicized and advertised in Southern India by Malayan planters to meet their labor needs.
Malaya was advertised in glamorous brochures and posters that were distributed in South Indian
villages and railway stations, as a mecca of employment and promise where toddy could be
found for cheap.
94

The scenes in the film where the kangani travels to an Indian village to recruit workers
resonated with a history of Indian labor immigration to Malaya. After the system of indenture
was terminated in 1920,

a newer kangani recruitment system was put in place.
95
Tamil foremen
working on rubber estates were sent back to their villages in India by the planters to recruit
laborers. Unlike the first system, which overlapped with the period of indenture, the new
government-assisted system of immigration recruited Indian labor directly to meet the labor
needs of the plantations.
96
Since the 1908 Tamil Immigration Fund (later called the Indian
Immigration Fund) paid for the costs of travel, workers could arrive free of massive debt and
could thus accumulate their own savings. The establishment of co-operative thrift societies on
plantation estates thus supported the supposedly greater financial control possessed by workers
through the centrally organized kangani system.
The co-operative system also sought to keep the transient labor force mobile and
responsive, in that the workers could pay for their own travel back to India. The Great
Depression caused a fall in the demand for rubber and concurrently, a drop in the labor needs on
plantations. With the oversupply of labor, planters put pressure on the government to reduce the
minimum wage for Indian laborers while the Government in India put forth suggestions to

147

repatriate laid-off workers. Before the late 1930s, settling Indian workers on Malayan soil as a
permanent labor bank was not an option—Indians in Malaya were seen purely as transitional
peoples and not settlers. Hence, suggestions that laid-off or underpaid workers could be given
land for cultivation met with much resistance from certain factions of government. Among the
reasons for objection was the fear that settler Indians would turn to farming for profit, competing
with the “right” of the Malays for ownership of land.
97
As the Resident of Selangor describes, to
allow persons “alien in thought and custom” to settle in Malaya and compete with the Malays
was against the paternal ethics of the British towards “indigenous” Malays.
98
The first
repatriations commenced in June 1930 and by mid-1931, the number of repatriations exceeded
the number of new immigrants.
99
According to the 1922 agreement with the Government of
India, the government paid for costs of passage in the case of the termination of employment. In
1931, the Labor Department had to repatriate upwards of 40,000 Indians while another 40,000
paid for their own passage.
100

These repatriations were costly affairs. Between both Chinese and Indian laborers,
repatriations cost the government upwards of $1million.
101
Having laborers save money and pay
for their own passage home kept state expenditures down while encouraging a more mobile labor
force. The co-operative system among Indian estate laborers was thus designed for the purpose
of saving for old age and the payment of passages back to India. Hence, Muniandi, with his
frugal ways and financial smarts, represented the ideal colonial laborer—stable and controllable
when times were good, transient when necessary, financially self-sufficient, and easy on
government resources.
Contrary to the Malays, Indian “coolies” were thought by the colonial government to
have a natural penchant for saving for as long as proper financial infrastructures were in place to

148

help them do so—”The Indian laborer, generally speaking is a frugal person, and he wants to
save.”
102
Co-operative thrift and loan societies in estates supplemented the sporadic savings
banks in planting districts in the F.M.S. and formed the only “official” banking system available
to laborers in the Unfederated Malay States. The government saw them as a modern and
regulated system of thrift—unshackling workers from the chronic indebtedness and financial
exploitation under the cittu system of banking which left workers particularly vulnerable to
financial abuse by estate kanganis.
103

For plantation owners however, co-operative systems were useful for quite the opposite
reason—it allowed them greater control over their workforce. Laborers with money in a co-
operative were less likely to desert—a common problem resulting from the dismal working and
living conditions on the estate, the miserable wages, and physical abuse.
104
They were also less
able to spend earned income on toddy. In the 1930s, with a higher proportion of Indian labor
being domiciled in Malaya, resistance was increasingly more collective and confrontational with
frequent strikes.
105
With part of their income held in control by the co-operative, gaining
momentum for such resistance was more difficult.
According to the logics of the film, the financially savvy Indian who joined a thrift
society and stayed away from drink was well on the road to financial freedom. While this was
certainly true to some extent, cooperative systems were also means through which a transient and
volatile labor force could be kept under control by the various institutional powers. For
plantation owners, the co-operative system was a disciplinary device to ensure discipline and
orderliness among the workers. For the government it helped create a self-financing labor force,
mobile when necessary to alleviate costs of repatriations.

149

Throughout the chapter thus far, I have discussed how films were incorporated within the larger
machinery of domestic labor and economic policy as a means of disciplining the financial habits
of Malaya’s peasant and labor class. However, to position Malayans so carelessly as mere cogs
in the imperial machine would be to discount the complex and often entangled relations of
complicity, resistance, and all that lived in-between, made up everyday life in colonial situations.
Encounters and involvements between Malayans and the machinery of imperial propaganda was
not always a site of subjugation. Nor for that matter, were they necessarily about resistance. The
Rural Lecture Caravan and its screenings were “contact zones,” what Mary Louise Pratt
describes as places of transculturation—hybrid places which foreground the interactive,
improvisational nature of imperial encounters so easy to ignore in accounts of domination and
conquest told from the imperial point of view.
106
Ann Stoler cautions us against considering
colonialism as “a structure imposed on local practice,” an “abstract force” which organized the
personal and the everyday within the grammar of the institution.
107
In the words of Peter
Limbrick, “we have to train ourselves to look beyond abstractions of colonial power, […] we
cannot simply read off the imperial and onto the field of the local and the everyday.”
108

Mobile films were truly unruly things whose reception enabled untamed lives outside of
the colonial state’s intent. No matter how fastidiously Gammans might have shot the films nor
how well orchestrated the programs surrounding film screenings were organized, how Malayans
watched could not be so easily disciplined. Pratt argues that while colonized people had little
choice about what the dominant party projected upon them, they did have a say about what “they
absorb into their own, how they use it, and what they make it mean.”
109
The final section of this
chapter looks at what happens at the other end of the propaganda machine—its mediation and
reception in everyday Malayan life.

150

Incredulous Audiences: A Politics of Watching and Reception

In the warm darkness of the tropical night in Selangor, a group of Malays made a silent and
attentive audience. They gathered sitting or standing in a field, on the boundaries of which the
plumed outlines of palms hung against the night sky. In the center of this scene stood two little
film projectors, while pictures of Malay rural life flickered across the screen.
110
What went on in
the minds of this silent audience as they saw themselves in black and white? How did the films
of the Rural Lecture Caravan affect everyday life, or did they at all?
The difficulty of performing reception studies among colonial audiences particularly in
rural areas loom large in a project of this nature. Few historical documents remain which can
attest to the effectiveness of these propaganda schemes or describe the nature of the reception of
these films from the position of the Malayan. This is especially so in the various rural villages
visited by the mobile caravan, where such accounts rarely exist in any material form that could
be preserved over the decades. Official correspondences and newspapers are certainly not
lacking in their praise of the effectiveness of educational cinema on Malayan minds, but these
provide only partial accounts of the elusive experience of reception. Even then, imperial
documents offer frustrating ellipses in their reports, sketching the elusive link between
propaganda and practice in only the faintest hand.
Reclaiming the history of Malayan reception in any complete or conclusive form is
impossible. In spite of this however, it is possible to excavate what James C. Scott has called the
“hidden transcripts” within the imperial archive—that which is spoken behind the back of the
dominant.
111
In seeking the “often fugitive political conduct of subordinate groups,” Scott calls

151

for a way of reading which colonial archives in their multiple forms which uncovers
“contradictions, tensions, and immanent possibilities” as rare and electric insights into the hidden
transcripts muttered under the breath of dominant discourse. As Adria Imada does with her
examination of the hyper-visible yet archivally invisible hula dancer, I work towards reclaiming
unrecorded stories by reading archives for “fragments and the ephemeral” in order to elucidate
the possibilities of Malayan reception.
112
Reluctant penghulus and untrustworthy lecturers skirt
the margins of the archive, but their taunting presences leave their spectral traces on imperial
scripts. At screenings, prickly silences, unexpected whispers and unruly laughter suggest
moments when the actual reception of films becomes suspiciously loosened from their original
intent.

What appeared to me as the most immediate hint that all was not well in these theatres under the
stars were the conflicting and even tense subtexts in the popular press describing Malay and
Tamil audiences at screenings. Descriptions about the Malayan audience in government reports
and the newspapers ranged from infantilizing stories of them as gullible “happy children” sitting
enraptured and excited before the screen, to accounts of sullen and suspicious watchers.
113

Admittedly, most descriptions of audience reception in the press depict the Malay kampong
dweller as co-operative viewer—willing and in many cases eager to adopt measures that will
improve his lot, provided that the knowledge is presented to him in the right manner. The Malay
was deemed particularly receptive to film, with long memories for the content they encountered
through visual media. Describing the particular efficacy of the film on the Malay mind, a report
on the work of the caravan in the field notes,
Any amount of talk about the virtues of co-operative effort will pass in at one ear
of the Malay peasant and out at the other, but these pictures are talked about for

152

six months after they are shown.
114

A Malay audience could thus be counted upon to be silent and attentive,

gathered in “slack-
jawed” awe beneath the dark sky as images came to life onscreen.
115

Other accounts however suggested that Malay viewers were notoriously difficult to
please. Filmmaking in Malaya proved to be a challenge for British filmmakers who often had to
deal with various unexpected cultural sensitivities. For instance, “Eastern” notions of hygiene
and cleanliness were a particularly contentious area. For instance, the handling of foodstuffs by
any Western hands while filming the manufacturing process of particular goods was strictly
cautioned against. Filmmakers also had to be careful to not let a stray pig wander into the scene
on any account. According to a brief guide to filmmaking in Malaya that appeared in Sight and
Sound, these peculiarities stemmed from the alleged belief amongst Muslims and Hindu villagers
that Westerners drink pig’s milk. So, “whether we like it or not, to thousands of Easterns, the
Western Christian is still ‘unclean’.”
116
Part of the insistence of incorporating Malayans into the
film production process and the use of local actors and locations was to avoid making such
cultural missteps.
Though managing the outcome of the film’s reception was to some extent possible at the
production end, cultivating an ideal watching subject was far more challenging. As Brian Larkin
argues, the very nature of colonial cinema presumes an ideal audience—which was often was not
the case in reality.
117
Complaining about the previous mishaps encountered by the films
screenings of the cooperative department, an official expressed his doubts about the real
effectiveness of films on having their intended effect:
The co-op department had a film showing the progress through life of the “Good
Young Man” and the decline and fall of the “Rake.” I have no doubt that for any
Kampong Malay the Rake's problem was the more sympathetic.
118

153

Officials could never quite ascertain which characters their audiences would be rooting for; films
were suspected to have quite the opposite effect of showing “undesirable” characters as the more
likeable ones.
On occasion, audiences would also react in unexpected ways that mystified and disturbed
British officials and journalists attending the screenings. In an unusually candid piece of writing,
a reporter at screening of Malaya—A Land of Opportunity Kampong Bahru describes his
uncomfortable reaction toward the “roar of laughter” heard from the assembled audience in
response to particular scenes in the film, such as when a row of weeders appeared on the screen.
Also reported were “numerous comments” when a very realistic European planter in shorts and
hat appeared to interview Kuppan and Muniandi, “but whether they were complimentary or the
reverse the Indian co-operative officers were too polite to reveal to the writer.”
119
What were
audiences laughing at? What in this image could possibly have been a source of mirth? Almost a
century after their guffaws pierced the excitement of the night, the reasons behind the chuckles
are impossible to reclaim. Yet these moments should not be dismissed. It is a rare glimpse of the
turbulence of Malayan reception that had somehow crept into The Straits Times—the main
English-language newspaper in Singapore. Underlying the confidence of the Rural Lecture
Scheme in all its grand modernity and rhetoric of socio-economic uplift lay indicate a deep
seated anxiety about how Malayans watched film.
Earlier in this chapter, I have discussed how the films of the Rural Lecture Caravan were
less invested in the pleasures of fantasy and visual spectacle (though these were certainly part of
the appeal of the cinematic medium itself as a propaganda vehicle), but instead sought to
encourage audiences to “see themselves” on the screen. It is this unique and peculiar aspect of
how colonial educational film saw itself in relation to its spectator that lends enables readings of

154

“counter-reception”. As I will discuss, cases of querulous brown spectators challenging
depictions of Malayan life represented in films indicated a concern for authentic self-
representation and a suspicion toward the lessons conveyed through films. In this section, I argue
that if authenticity and realism was the dominant discourse in colonial educational cinema, it
follows that self-recognition and incredulity were also corollary modes of reception. I suggest
that incredulity and ridicule were as much a mode of spectatorship in colonial situations as were
the visual pleasures of attraction and shock. Incredulity offers the possibility of agency within
colonial viewing practices, particularly in Malaya where the political work of cinema was
enacted through an appeal to authenticity and the accurate representation of Malayan life.
Made to “see themselves” on the screen, audiences were hyper-aware of their image.
Accounts of viewer’s reactions emphasize the shock of self-recognition on the screen. Tamil
laborers at a Selangor rubber estate appeared to be deeply invested in the authenticity of Malayan
plantation life as depicted on the screen. Various reports describe how the audience became
increasingly excited when the “Malayan” part of the story began—with the steamer bearing the
intrepid laborers to Port Swettenham. Apparently recognizing their own stories on the screen, the
audience was enraptured; “the discovery that mysterious powers had caused these humble and
obscure happenings to be photographed was evidently a pleasant surprise to them.”
120

The screen was more than a mirror however, it was a “transformer of life”
121
made
possible through the camera’s inscription of ideal citizenship upon the likeness of the subject. In
this way, they differed from the early actuality films and street scenes of metropolitan cities
where the audience might enjoy the somewhat benign pleasure of seeing themselves or someone
familiar on the screen.
122
The work of the Rural Lecture Caravan films scheme resonates with
Alexander Medvedkin’s Soviet film-train of the 1930s. The film-train would travel across the

155

country, filming various communities in their everyday activities and then show the film back to
these communities immediately while pointing out the problems in the system. Medvedkin’s
film-train films were interpellative, incorporating the politically unconscious individual into
Soviet citizenry under the Five Year Plan (1928-1932). By showing the spectator his or her own
life in all its problems and grim realities was to instigate a change toward the “better.” As Emma
Widdis describes, “To see oneself captured within this magic mirror must have been both
exciting and disturbing, a process of de-familiarization that would enable a new kind of
awareness of both self and community.”
123

It was this “awareness of both self and community” and the films’ implicit claims
towards authenticity that invited incredulity to become part of the grammar of colonial viewing.
The Mat Bin Idris-es that were supposed to be stand-ins for all of Malayness and Malay life was
a source of both self-recognition and its ensuing rejection. Contrary to the credulous “primitive”
audiences described by William Sellers who believed in oversized mosquitoes and gigantic
snakes writhing in the human gut, I argue that colonial audiences at times exhibited mistrust for
the screen—a suspicion towards the language of authenticity and truth promised in the flickering
image. Indeed, Malayan audiences often proved to be a tough bunch, policing the authenticity of
films set in familiar local contexts. Malaya—The Land of Opportunity and Mat and Idris was
screened in Town Hall, Kuala Lumpur, before an audience consisting of Malay members of the
thrift and loan societies, estate managers, as well as a general Malay populace. Painfully aware
that “an audience such as that was of necessity critical,” the Co-operative Department was
relieved when the films purportedly received approval.
124
Conscious of the projection of their
own image, Malay audiences were a tough and incredulous audience, watchful over the
authenticity of their own representation on-screen.

156

That audiences in the field were also not easily taken for a ride is evident in their
incredulity towards an educational film screened for Tamil tappers about life and work on a
rubber estate. Instead of accepting the various demonstrations of plantation work as educational
lessons, the audience derided the workers on screen. Noticing the details that differed from
systems practiced on their own estate, the audience indignantly pointed out what was being done
wrong by the workers in the film.
125
The estate conductor, who conducted the lecture and
commentary that day, took the opportunity boast about how their own estate was fundamentally
better run and better managed than the one on screen. Departing from the instructional intent of
the film—in fact, veritably inverting it—he carried on with the audience, criticizing the rubber-
tapping methods demonstrating on-screen while complimenting existing methods in their estate.
Instead of being educational, the film “afforded the coolies a heaven-sent opportunity of
criticizing the work of others.”
126
Watched idly by, the European planters agreed that it would be
of no benefit to have their authority in the plantation undermined, and thus let the lecturer loosen
the film from its intended meaning.
127
Chattering audiences and renegade lecturers ruptured the
integrity of the film's intended purpose.
According to a reporter present at a screening of the Rural Lecture Caravan, babbling and
laughing audiences provided other discourses than the rhetoric of the screen, “a continuous noise
of comment and merriment as the story unfolded.”
128
Such laughter, when it occurred, was an
uncertain thing. The reporter makes note of roars of laughter and numerous comments during the
caravan's screening “but whether they were complimentary or the reverse the Indian co-operative
officers were too polite to reveal to the writer.”
129
Borrowing from Stein, “the cinematic
carnival” opens up the possibility of mockery through the politics of laughter.
130
Faced with their
own image, rural audiences in Malaya were skeptical and even suspicious at what they saw, even

157

if the flickering screen also amazed them. Incredulity was as much the mode of spectatorship as
was shock.
Not only were audiences occasionally impudent, they also had a habit of taking a
frustratingly frivolous attitude towards the educational purposes of the caravan. Though film
screenings were hugely popular, there was little to suggest that audiences attended these events
with the intention of getting anything beyond an evening’s free entertainment. Frustrated
exchanges between colonial officials over memorandums and attendance reports at these events
suggest that villagers were turning up for the screenings for the “wrong” reasons. For instance, in
the early years of the caravan’s tours, getting a decent turnout for afternoon lectures at Malay
kampongs was impossible. Audiences would only make an appearance for the cinema screenings
in the evenings. A lecture at Bandar in Kuala Langat for instance had to be cancelled as only the
Penghulu and seven others turned up.
131
The dismal attendance at the more educational segments
of the program suggested that Malays were treating the visits of the Rural Lecture Caravan
events less as an educational opportunity and quite simply as evening away from the routines of
the field. Even so, the rapture and amazement with the magic of the cinema was not an assumed
thing. In the earlier years of the tours, film shows were being constantly disrupted when the
vehicle’s motor engine, which was also used to power the projector, broke down repeatedly.
Audiences were as likely as not, faced with a disappointing evening with truncated programs and
cancelled screenings.
Between flippant viewers out for kicks and miffed audiences who walked hours to attend
a screening only have it cancelled, it was no wonder that the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme
failed to generate sustained involvement in co-operative and agricultural programs beyond the
night’s entertainment. Even though the Departments did their best to follow up caravan visits

158

with integrated educational programs, they faced considerable difficulty in keeping villagers
willingly involved in these schemes. For instance, follow-up adult education schools were
unpopular, attended only by government-paid staff that turned up only out of fear of having their
bonuses cut.
132
The reluctance of Malays to bring the lessons taught by the film into everyday
practice indicates a slippage in the “proper” watching practices expected of colonial subjects.
Watching films for leisure was a subversive and wayward pleasure that frustrated the
disciplinary intent of the film program.
Colonial archives seemingly barren of the voices of imperial subjects offer glimpses of
grumbled words, snorted laughter, and raised eyebrows. Rural colonial audiences were not quite
the distracted amusement-seekers of early 20th century filmgoers in New York, nor the pliant
student upon whom the lessons of colonial economy could be impressed upon by the weight of
visual pedagogy. Audiences in Malaya were as likely to be incredulous of the screen as they
were subdued by its magic. Villagers often considered the screenings an occasion for an
entertaining night out under the stars—the pedagogical purpose of the films secondary to the
other visual pleasures of the screen. Watching with incredulous eyes, laughing, and talking back,
were means through which colonial audiences might have had conversations with the imperial
screen.

In the long term, the effectiveness of the visual propaganda scheme in encouraging rural
Malayans to join co-operative societies was never quite ascertained. While co-operative thrift
and credit movement for Malays was largely successful amongst urban populations, sources
suggest that co-operative activities took much longer to gain traction in rural areas, and even so,
never quite attained resounding success. The number of Malay rural credit societies had

159

stagnated at 86 by the end of 1939.
133
Paul Kratoska states that co-operative societies were
unpopular because they were predicated on and promoted a social order that was alien and
undesirable to local Malay social organization. For instance, the co-operative marketing and
banking scheme was inspired by systems already in place in Europe, which did not gel well with
local customs.
134
These systems also did not respect existing traditions of Malay trade and
industry, not to mention local interpersonal relationships.
135
The reluctance of Malays to adopt
capitalist farming and financing practices, seen as simply “indolent” by the British, might then be
active resistance against partaking in colonial practices ill-suited to local contexts.
136

Furthermore, people were suspicious that the interest generation strategies in co-operative
societies flouted the principles of anti-usury or riba in Islamic law.
137

It must be said however that the colonial government’s co-operative movement cannot
simply be read as a destructive force seeking to maliciously bring colonial laborers into the
domination of the imperializing state. State organized thrift societies arguably did offer a better
source of economic security than did indigenous organizations. As described with regard to the
case of Indian plantation workers for instance, co-operatives provided an alternative to the cittu
system of banking which often left workers vulnerable to exploitation. The progress of Indian
laborers’ credit societies was thus relatively successful with membership growing from about
7,000 people in 1929 to about 68,000 in 1939.
The Rural Lecture Caravan scheme continued to run for a decade until World War II, its
work receiving recognition both within Malaya and in the wider British Empire. This recognition
was much needed at a time when the Co-operative Department was defending criticism that it
cost too much to run for too little and intangible an effect.
138
This chapter has described the ways
in which the Rural Lecture Caravan scheme operated as a technology of discipline, bringing

160

economic life into the purview of the colonial state though visual propaganda and its follow-up
schemes. Exemplary of the modern and progressive forces of colonial capitalism, the Rural
Lecture Caravan— itself a feat of modern engineering—promised the social uplift and economic
discipline of Malayans. Embellishing the success of its efforts through progressive stories of
Malayan-British collaboration at a time when imperialism was under criticism, the scheme
promoted the viability of the Co-operative Department in a “new” empire that looked toward
economic co-operation and mutual respect between colonizers and colonized.
Yet, the Rural Lecture Caravan and the work that it did in managing colonial economic
life was more than just an imperial disciplinary machine even as this was certainly its intent. I
peered beneath its polished veneer to uncover hidden transcripts that told stories of grumbling
spectators and skeptical audiences. Whereas for some, its films were certainly educational,
offering solutions to existing problems, for others it was simply a source of leisure. In colonial
situations, cinema had other lives and performed multiple functions, which ran amok of their
original purpose. Discussing a mode of colonial spectatorship that allowed for an incredulous
gaze to perform works of agency that brought the texture and nuance of the everyday to the other
lives of imperial films, this chapter makes room for the possibility of other modes of watching a
cinema under the palms.

1
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 12 December 1931, 16.
2
Singer, “Modernity, hyperstimulus, and popular sensationalism”, 73. See also Singer, Melodrama and Modernity.
Hansen, Babel and Beyond. Charney and Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Friedberg,
Window Shopping.
3
Carrey, T.F. Annual Report of the Director of Co-operation 1949, Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1950.
4
N.A. CO 323/990/1 Colonial Office Conference, 1927: suggested censorship control of films, enclosure No.4. in
Circular Dispatch dated 1
st
October 1927.
5
“Film Propaganda in Malaya: the Rural Lecture and Cinema Caravan,” The Straits Times, 17 September 1932, 19.
6
Larkin, Signal and Noise.
7
“Film Propaganda in Malaya: the Rural Lecture and Cinema Caravan” The Straits Times, 17 September 1932, 19.
8
Ibid.
9
A.N.M., Sel.Sec.G. 1897/1930, Acc. no. 1957/0265876 “Application for the use of a free license for a propaganda
van,” letter from Director of Co-operation, F.M.S. and S.S. to Secretary to Resident of Selangor, dated 14th July
1931.

161

10
When the weight of the trailer caused excessive strain on the back axle of the caravan and made navigation and
parking difficult, it was abandoned in 1932 and the cooking facilities in the interior of the caravan were removed to
accommodate the exhibits. “The Rural Lecture Caravan,” The Malayan Agricultural Journal XXIV, No.11,
(November 1936): 534.
11
The lorry managed to carry out nine tours for the rest of the year, reaching an estimated audience of 111,450 over
a period of 154 days. Boyd, R, Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies in the Federated Malay
States and Straits Settlements for the year 1938 (Kuala Lumpur: Federated Malay States Government Press, 1939).
12
Boyd, R., Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies in the Federated Malay States and Straits
Settlements for the year 1938 (Kuala Lumpur: Federated Malay States Government Press, 1939), 400.
13
A bracket for the dynamo was clamped onto the offside footboard onto which a portable switchboard with pilot
lamp, ammeter and voltmeter, was fitted. “The Rural Lecture Caravan,” The Malayan Agricultural Journal XXIV,
no.11 (November 1936), 534.
14
In 1931, seven shows at various centers in Selangor were interrupted and had to be cancelled due to engine
problems. A.N.M., Sel. Sec. 818/1931, Acc. no. 1957/0271278, “Tours of the Rural Lecture Caravan in Malaya.”
Enclosure 4a.
15
Tempany, H.A., Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture S.S. and F.M.S. for the Year 1933 (Kuala
Lumpur: Federated Malay States Government Press, 1933), 38
16
Ibid.
17
“Rubber Research in Malaya,” The Straits Times, 15 June 1932, 8
18
“Rubber at the Exhibition,” The Straits Times, 1 August 1931, 6.
19
Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies for the Federated Malay States for the Financial Year
Ending 1931, Supplement to the F.M.S. Government Gazette, June 4th, 1932 (Kuala Lumpur: Malay States
Government Printing Office, 1932).
20
Annual Report on the Working of Co-operative Societies for the Federated Malay States for the Period 1st July
1931 to 31 December 1932 (Kuala Lumpur: Malay States Government Printing Office, 1932).
21
Jones, E.L. “The Rural Lecture Caravan,” Malayan Agricultural Journal XXVII (Jan-December 1939): 399.
22
A.N.M. SEL. G. 2086/1930, Acc.no. 1957/0266059, Report of the Colonial Films Committee including the
Report of the Committee of the Colonial Office Conference which Considered it and the Resolution of the
Conference Regarding the Use of the Cinematograph as an Instrument of Education, Enclosure 10A, “Memorandum
Film Propaganda.”
23
Ibid.
24
A.N.M. Sel. Sec. 818/1931, Acc. no. 1957/0271278, “Tours of the Rural Lecture Caravan in Malaya”, letter from
J.H. Thomas.
25
Like the films, the subjects of the talks were tailored to suit the needs of the community. For instance, food crops
and padi planting were the chief subjects in the Ulu Langat district of Selangor with the larger proportion of Malay
peasantry in the area. Coffee and copra was the topic in Klang and Kuala Langat, and copra and padi in Kuala
Selangor and Sabak Bernam. A.N.M. Sel. Sec. 818/1931, Acc. no. 1957/0271278, “Tours of the Rural Lecture
Caravan in Malaya”, Enclosure 4a.
26
“Film Propaganda in Malaya: The Rural Lecture And Cinema Caravan,” The Straits Times, 17 September 1932,
19.
27
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
28
A.N.M., S.C. 3227/53, Acc. no. 1957/0421119, “Loan of Educational Films etc. for the Kedah Padi Show to be
Held During Zulhijal.”
29
“The Rural Lecture Caravan,” The Malayan Agricultural Journal XXIV, no.11 (November 1936), 537.
30
“Penghulu as Film Actor,” The Straits Times, 6 April 1934, 13.
31
A.N.M. SEL. G. 2086/1930, Acc.no. 1957/0266059, Report of the Colonial Films Committee including the
Report of the Committee of the Colonial Office Conference which Considered it and the Resolution of the
Conference Regarding the Use of the Cinematograph as an Instrument of Education, Enclosure 10A, “Memorandum
Film Propaganda.”
32
“Millions More in the Kampongs,” The Straits Times, 29 March 1934, 6.
33
Other reasons for the anxiety toward using imported films are discussed in Chapter 1.
34
“Notes of the Day,” The Straits Times, 15 August 1932, 10.
35
The film was produced by the Co-operative Department and directed by Captain L.D. Gammans, assistant director
of the Department of Co-operation.
36
“Penghulu as Film Actor,” The Straits Times, 6 April 1934, 13.

162

37
Gammans, L.D. “Film Propaganda in Malaya”, 37.
38
Burns, “Watching Africans Watch Movies”, 201-202.
39
“Millions More in the Kampongs,” The Straits Times, 29 March 1934, 6.
40
“Film Propaganda in Malaya: the Rural Lecture and Cinema Caravan,” The Straits Times, 17 September 1932, 19.
41
Ibid.
42
“Teaching Thrift to Ramasamy,” The Straits Times, 10 April 1930, 12.
43
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 6.
44
“Penghulu as Film Actor,” The Straits Times, 6 April 1934, 13.
45
“Mainly about Malayans,” The Straits Times, 22 April 1934, 2.
46
“Penghulu as Film Actor,” The Straits Times, 6 April 1934, 13.
47
Ibid.
48
“Teaching Thrift to Ramasamy,” The Straits Times, 10 April 1930,12.
49
A.N.M. Sel. Sec. 818/1931, Acc. no. 1957/0271278, “Tours of the Rural Lecture Caravan in Malaya,” Enclosure
4a.
50
Gammans, L.D., “Film Propaganda in Malaya”, 35.
51
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
52
Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 220.
53
Charles Hirschman, “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya,” Sociological Forum 1, Iss. 2 (Spring 1938):
330-361. Paul H. Kratoska, The Chettiar and the Yeoman, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,
Occasional Paper, no. 32 (June 1975): 5. Lim Teck Ghee, “British Colonial Administration and the 'Ethnic Division
of Labor' in Malaya,” Kajian Malaysia 2, no. 2 (1984): 35.
54
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
55
Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 213.
56
Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the
Public Sphere (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 227.
57
Ibid., 263.
58
Ibid,. 264, quoting from Yaacob Ibrahim, Melihat Tanah Ayer (Kota Bharu, 1941), 48
59
Lim, “British Colonial Administration and the 'Ethnic Division of Labor' in Malaya”, 35-44.
60
Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 220.
61
Lim, “British Colonial Administration and the 'Ethnic Division of Labor' in Malaya”, 37.
62
Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 221.
63
“Cooperation in the Kampongs,” The Straits Times, 23 April 1930, 12.
64
“Making Malay Peasants Prosperous,” The Straits Times, 3 November 1935, 16.
65
Ibid.
66
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (NewYork: Vintage Books A Division of Random
House), 199.
67
“Cooperation in the Kampongs,” The Straits Times, 23 April 1930, 12.
68
Kratoska, The Chettiar and the Yeoman, 21.
69
Frank A. Swettenham, British Malaya (London: J. Lane, 1907), 136.
70
“Making Malay Peasant Prosperous,” The Straits Times, 3rd November 1935, 16.
71
Gammans, L.D. “Film Propaganda in Malaya”, 35.
72
“Making Malay Peasant Prosperous,” The Straits Times, 3rd November 1935,16.
73
Sources have referred to the film with varied titles—Thrift and Extravagance, Thrift, and Mat and Idris after the
two lead characters.
74
“Co-operation Film Campaign,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 22 October 1929, 9.
75
“Film Propaganda in Malaya,” The Straits Times, 17 Sept 1932, 19.
76
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
77
“Millions more in the kampongs,” The Straits Times, 29 March 1934, 6.
78
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
79
“R.R.I. Director on Rubber Problems,” The Straits Times, 6 September 1935, 19.
80
Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 221.
81
Paul H. Kratoska, “Imperial unity versus local autonomy: British Malaya and the depression of the 1930s”,
Weathering the Storm: The Economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s Depression, eds. Boomgaard, Peter & Brown,
Ian (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), 282.

82
Ibid.

163

83
The issue of test sites was resolved only through the establishment of experimental stations or land hired for this
purpose, which were put under the close supervision of Department officers. A.N.M., H.C.O. 1035/27,
1957/0510283, “Memorandum on Agricultural Education with Reference to Malaya.”
84
“The advances made in film propaganda, together with the organization which already exists for demonstrations,
agricultural shows and publications in the vernacular, should go far towards bringing home to the cultivators the
lessons to be learnt from the progress of agricultural science.” Quoted from “The Agricultural Journal,” The Straits
Times, 21 February 1930, 14.
85
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16. Gammans, “Film Propaganda in Malaya”,
37.
86
Lim, “British Colonial Administration and the 'Ethnic Division of Labor' in Malaya”, 36. W.R. Roff, The Origins
of Malay Nationalism (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967), 124. Paul Kratoska, “‘Ends That We Cannot
Foresee’: Malay Reservations in British Malaya,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, xiv (1983). In 1934, the
Director of Agriculture remarked, “Our trusteeship of the Malay people demands that we administer the country on
lines consistent with their welfare and happiness, not only for today but for the future ages. That end will be attained
rather by building a sturdy and thrifty peasantry living on the lands they own and living on the food they grow than
by causing them to forsake the life of their fathers for the glamour of new ways which put money in their pockets
today, but leave them empty tomorrow, and to abandon their rice fields for new crops which they cannot themselves
utilize and the market for which depends on outside world conditions beyond their orbit.” Cited in Roff, The Origins
of Malay Nationalism, 125.
87
Joel S. Kahn, Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2006).
88
“Teaching Thrift to Ramasamy” was the title of an article in The Straits Times about the financial education of
Indian immigrants hired as “coolies” or low-wage workers. The nomenclature “Ramasamy” itself refers to the
history of disenfranchisement and the erasure of Indian immigrants within colonial records. Migrants were often
identified only by their generic names in immigrant registers with no further historical or personal information, such
that the common name, Ramasamy, “became a noun of sorts, referring to any plantation laborer in Malaya” i.e. “a
Ramasamy.” Sunil S. Amrith, “Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya 1870-1941,” Past and
Present, no. 208 (August 1, 2010), 238.
89
“Teaching Thrift to Ramasamy,” The Straits Times, 10 April 1930, 12.
90
The character of Muniandi was quite amusingly described as a “revoltingly blameless individual” and “priggish”
in the newspapers. “Teaching Thrift to Ramasamy,” The Straits Times, 10 April 1930, 12. “A Journal in the Federal
Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
91
It is unclear from the synopsis of the film provided in the newspapers, whether Muniandi and his family were
departed for a holiday or to permanently return to India. Although the article “Teaching Thrift to Ramasamy” refers
to his departure as a holiday, judging from the nature of the plantation labor community in Malaya, it was quite
possible that the Muniandi's were returning for good -- the “dream” of the estate laborer as configure by the British
being to make enough money to earn them a decent life back in their home countries. “Teaching Thrift to
Ramasamy,” The Straits Times, 10 April 1930, 12. “A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May
1931, 16.
92
Amarjit Kaur, “Labor Brokers in Migration: Understanding Historical and Contemporary Transnational Migration
Regimes in Malaya/Malaysia,” International Review of Social History 57, no. S20 (December 1, 2012): 227.
93
Kernail Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of their Immigration and Settlement, 1786–1957
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 40, 164.
94
Ibid., 65.
95
Following the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain in 1907, Indian labor brokerage in Malaya followed the
indenture system. Laborers from India signed a contract in India with the Emigrant Agent of the employing colony
that bound him to the service of his employer six days a week for three years. David Chanderbali, Indian Indenture
in the Straits Settlements, 1872-1910 (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree, 2008).
96
The first kangani system was essentially involved the privatization of labor brokerage. Planters would send Indian
foremen back to villages in India to recruit labor directly for the plantations, thus bypassing the fees involved in the
indenture process. Kanganis would front the money for passage and provide a sum to the family of the new
employee. Laborers would thus arrive in Malaya heavily in debt from the outset. Kaur, “Labor Brokers in
Migration”, 233.
97
Kratoska, “Imperial unity versus local autonomy”, 286.
98
Cited in Kratoska, “Imperial unity versus local autonomy”, 253.

164

99
Ibid.
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
102
“The Indian laborer, generally speaking is a frugal person, and he wants to save.” “Coolie Co-operators,” The
Straits Times, 21 April 1930, 10.
103
Cittu loans operated according to a savings and loan system or a system of rotational credit where members
would pool together contributions that would be distributed on a rotational basis. These savings groups were
typically controlled by the estate kangani who often charged exorbitant interest rates and fines for loans and also
dipped into communal funds to meet shortcomings in labor productivity on the plantation. Richard Baxton,
“Governmentality, Bio-power and the Emergence of the Malayan-Tamil Subject on the Plantations of Colonial
Malaya,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14, no.2 (2000): 72.
104
P. Ramasamy, “Labor Control and Labor Resistance in the Plantations of Colonial Malaya,” Journal of Peasant
Studies 19, no.3/4 (April/July, 1992): 100-101.
105
Ibid.,103.
106
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8.
107
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 23.
108
Limbrick, Making Settler Cinemas, 175.
109
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.
110
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
111
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990), xii.
112
Adria Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2012), 23.
113
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
114
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
115
“Opened mouthed with fascination” were the exact words used to describe the enraptured Malay. “Caravan
Cinema Visits the Kampong,” The Straits Times, 20 December 1936, 15.
116
R.H. Wright, “Chop Ruma Besar,” Sight & Sound 7, no.27 (Autumn 1938): 112.
117
Larkin, Signal and Noise, 78.
118
A.N.M., 1957/0290951, R.C. Selangor 254/46, Short Instructional Malayan Films with Local Appeal Enclosure
no.3, author unknown, dated 26 June 1946.
119
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
120
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, 16 May 1931, 16.
121
Emma Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin (Cinema Trains), KINOfiles Filmmakers’ Companions, Vol. 2. (London
and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 30.
122
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 31.
123
Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin (Cinema Trains), 30.
124
“Inculcating Thrift,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884-1942), 1 February 1930, 13.
125
Wright, “Our Picture Show”, 153.
126
Ibid.
127
Ibid.
128
“A Journal in the Federal Capital,” The Straits Times, May 16 1931.
129
Ibid.
130
Stein, Colonial Theatres of Proof, 35.
131
A.N.M. Sel. Sec. 818/1931, Acc. no. 1957/0271278, “Tours of the Rural Lecture Caravan in Malaya,” Enclosure
4a.
132
Kratoska, The Chettiar and the Yeoman, 26.
133
Lim, “British Colonial Administration and the 'Ethnic Division of Labor' in Malaya”, 6.
134
“Millions more in the kampongs,” The Straits Times, 29 March 1934, 6.
135
James C. Scott describes a pre-colonial structure of subsistence ethics at the center of peasant politics. This moral
economy was predicated on complex systems of kinship, neighborly relations, and village social practices which
new co-operative systems put in place by the colonial government did not respect. Scott, The Moral Economy of the
Peasant.
136
Along with Scott, Alatas configures the native’s supposed “indolence” as a refusal to become a tool in the
production system of colonial capitalism. Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of

165

the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial
Capitalism (New York and Oxford: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977), 60.
137
The Co-operative Department was constantly fighting an uphill battle to persuade Malays, somewhat feebly, that
the interest arrangements of co-operative societies were not the same as those forbidden by Islamic law, and that on
the contrary, they sought to eliminate usury by alleviating debt. Kratoska, The Chettiar and the Yeoman, 21.
While an exact definition of what does and does not constitute riba still remains a contested and thorny issue, the
laws of Islamic banking prohibit the charging of “excessive” interest rates made on loans. Mohamed Ariff and
Munawar Iqbal, eds., The Foundations of Islamic Banking: Theory, Practice and Education (Cheltanham: Edward
Elgar Publishing Limited, 2011), 5.
138
“Co-operative Societies Department,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884-1942), 5
November 1931, 8. “A Great Work,” The Straits Times, 22 June 1934, 10.

166

CHAPTER 3

Showing Malaya to the World: Cosmopolitan Dreams and Imperial Citizens in the Filmic
Imaginary

[Films] propaganda value is indicated by the number of Government and public
organizations in England now using it to tell the story of developments they are
proud of to the public. Malaya has more such developments to take pride in than
any other Colony in the Empire, and it would be an excellent thing if the British
public could be made aware of them in a series of documentary films planned
with that express purpose in mind.
-- Mr. E. Jago, Deputy Malayan Agent in London, 1939.
1

On August 8
th
1927, a filming crew from England landed in the port of Penang in British
Malaya. Armed with several motion picture cameras and thousands of feet of film, the crew set
out on a four-month expedition to document the life, culture, and development of the Federated
Malay States (F.M.S.). The resulting film, titled Malaya, told a story about the civilizing effects
of the entry of British capital into the Malayan landscape—how it transformed festering jungles
into ports of commerce and orderly plantations, and interlaced tropical wilderness with roads,
railways, and irrigation channels.
This film was the first of state attempts to create a complete, coherent cinematic vision of
the Straits Settlements and Malaya as a British colony and protectorate. Over two decades, the

167

F.M.S. Government sponsored the production of two other such documentaries. The Government
believed that such efforts would ostensibly generate economic interest in Malaya as an integral
part of the larger British Commonwealth. Another, perhaps more surreptitious motivation behind
financing these documentaries was to defend the continued political legitimacy of imperialism at
times when the need for intra-empire co-operation was at its highest and/or when the entire
premise of imperialism came under threat. These films attempted to legitimize British presence
in the region through a display of the admirable work of colonial capital and administration in
uplifting the country's economy, infrastructure, health care, and social cohesion.
The latter point—that of social cohesion—is particularly pertinent in the colonial state's
narration of Malayan identity. The idea of a plural society and a cosmopolitan colony, in which
many different ethnicities come together in the service of empire, was central to state-funded
documentaries about British Malaya and the Straits Settlements. The peaceful and in fact
profitable co-operation of so-called indigenous and newly immigrant populations in a well-
ordered colonial cosmopolis was, according to these films, the prerequisite for Malaya’s
successful economic participation in the larger British Commonwealth. With its diverse
communities of Malay, Chinese, Indian, and European ethnicities, Malaya was a shining
example of the cosmopolitan happy family that boasted of the merits of capitalist development
under colonial stewardship.
The idea of the colonial plural society found its natural expression via film. In its ability to
suture while paradoxically dissect, these films did not simply “reflect” Malaya’s plural society; it
actively brought it into being for those who watched. The connective tissues possible in the
cinematic language—particularly that of the colonial “voice” embodied through inter-titling in
silent films or as voice-over narrations in sound films—facilitated large-scale “national”

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imaginings of a coherent polity by bringing episodic images of different “races” together. Films
were responsive to changing political attitudes and, taking the agency of films as mediums of
persuasion very seriously, the state sought to materialize this imagined future through films’
virtual bodies. Their screenings both in Malaya and in Britain crafted an idea of a coherent
territory for audiences—even when such a thing did not quite exist beyond of the edges of the
screen.
In fact, this construct of a plural cosmopolis began to unravel after the Pacific War when
films proved to be harder to discipline that the government expected. Disparate visions of what
films were and ought to do caused the filmic object to fall apart when it’s subject—that of
Malaya’s plural society—itself began to burst at the seams. Malayans themselves proved to be
unruly subjects who would not “sit still” before the camera, choosing instead to discredit the
idealized colonial plural society through their own political activism. The tensions that strained
the fabric of Malayan society in the 1940s fragmented films between two competing intentions:
the recorders of reality, and the magicians of possibility. When faced with a broken colony
whose dreams of pluralism were all but shattered, colonial officials became frustrated with the
limits of the camera to tell the story of triumphant nationalism that they instead wanted to tell.
Indeed, film itself was a time-lagged medium. Its journey from the field where the first
images were captured, to the cutting room, and then to the screen meant delays that spanned
months. Weighed down by material bodies that needed physical manipulation and transportation,
films encountered inevitable lags during the translation of the image as it first appears behind the
camera’s lens to its ultimate re-appearance on the screen before an audience. Unable to keep up
with “unruly” Malayans who insisted in forging history on their own terms, films were rendered
out of date even before they were released. Failing to prevent inconvenient truths from

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infiltrating the wide-eyed, time-lagged lens, films proved to be dangerously unruly because they
could not always be bent beneath imperial intention. Cinema was thus not always a transparent
mouthpiece of empire.
Hence this chapter configures films as agentive but ultimately crippled entities that
struggled to construct a society that was larger than life. I trace how three colonial documentaries
sought to envision a “plural society”—from its first utterance in the Malaya film of 1928, its full
throated expression in Five Faces of Malaya in 1938, to its troubled articulation in Voices of
Malaya (1948) ten years later. Produced ten years apart, these films pictured British Malaya at
three specific moments—the formation of the Commonwealth at the end of the 1920s, the height
of intra-empire co-operation in the 1930s, and the reconstruction of Malaya after World War II.
The colonial government sponsored these films with the objective of bringing Malaya’s plural
society to life as a successful case of imperial stewardship under the Commonwealth's
economies. The films' engaged changing themes of ethnic pluralism in order to situate Malaya
within idealized notions of empire at the particular moments of their production. Indeed, filmic
configurations of race shifted drastically according to the changing nature of imperial
involvement in the region over these three decades. Notions of the “plural” were not static, but
rather were in a constant state of negotiation (and rupture) in the colonial imaginary as ideas
about the British Empire and what it stood for shifted with economic and political pressures.
This chapter is a consideration of how films provided the imaginative material through
which Malaya’s plural society was made “real,” and conversely, how film as a medium also
failed to live up to this capacity. In doing so, it takes the reader down some necessary “dead
ends”—strange contradictions in the discourses of the texts themselves, oddities in their
narratives, films that were made but for unknown reasons were not shown. I do not dismiss these

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untidy “tangents,” but consider them essential parts of the story even if their confusing
existences cannot be fully rationalized. These uncomfortable instances reveal cracks in the
machinery of empire as it was articulated through the power of cinema.
The chapter itself is organized as a narrative of emergence, consolidation, and rupture. I
begin with an analysis of Malaya—a film made in 1928 to publicize the region as destination for
business and career opportunities for men in Britain. Malaya was imagined as a spatialization of
British trade; “terra incognita,” to borrow from Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, where ripe virgin
lands are transformed into places of capitalist expansion.
2
The initiation of the British
Commonwealth following the Balfour Declarations of 1926 and the Ottawa conference of 1932
initiated a cultural shift in colonial attitudes in the decade that followed. In the 1930s, Malaya's
multi-racial society became exemplary of the new progressive and co-operative spirit of empire.
Consolidating Malaya as a plural entity, the 1938-film Five Faces of Malaya (available online at
colonialfilm.org) was produced at the height of colonial cosmopolitanism and capitalism. The
last section of this chapter exposes the fragility of this idealized vision of pluralism. The ruptures
inherent in the 1948 film Voices of Malaya (available online at colonialfilm.org) echoed how the
racialized rubric of Malaya's plural society started to fall apart amid the inter-racial tension and
communist uprisings that emerged after the Pacific War. Methodologically, this chapter situates
textual analysis within a broader contextual landscape that takes into account the politics and
economics behind the shifting nature of colonial sentiment as it pertains to colonial national
identity and the imagination of colony and nation.
This chapter utilizes an expanded definition of the term “colonial educational film” than I
have worked with in other chapters in that these films were made primarily as documentaries for
a general public in the West rather than educational tools strictly for a “native” population.

171

Unlike the other chapters in this dissertation, the films’ circulation in Britain takes center-stage
over that in Malaya, as these were the key markets for which these films were intended. As
scholars have shown, “colonial education” did not only take place in the colonies, but also in the
metropole.
3
People from all walks of life in Britain were taught about what it means to be a
colonial citizen at the “center” of a far-flung imperial constellation. As films that looked abroad
rather than inward, these films were not at first intended for “native” education. However, prints
were dissected, rearranged, and returned to Malaya precisely for this purpose. Although
conceived of foremost as informational documentaries about Malaya for non-Malayans, the
material “maneuverability” of the medium—films’ ability to be chopped up, recombined, and re-
titled—enabled these films to be repurposed within the colony, thus investing them with multiple
lives in different places.

A Note on the “Plural”

Before going into my discussion of the films proper, the socio-political formation of the region’s
ethnic pluralism ought to be described. Historians Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y.
Andaya acknowledge certain “Orang Asli” (translated as “Original People”) groups including the
northern “negrito” populations and the Senoi as having indigenous ancestry in the Malay
Peninsula. Until after WWII, colonial records however almost exclusively referred to the Malays
as the original residents of the peninsula before the arrival of the British.
4
Resident Straits
communities of Chinese, Arabs, and South Indians also existed from as early as the 1500s.
However, the economic expansion of the region under the British encouraged massive flows of
migrants from outside the Malay region particularly in the first half of the 20
th
Century.
5
From

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1909 to 1940, some sixteen million Chinese and Indians arrived in Malaya to provide the labor
that sustained industrial and commercial demand for raw materials such as tin and rubber by
Great Britain and the United States.
6
The rubber industry was dependent on immigration from
south India which made up the majority of Indian employment, with Chettiar Tamils, Sikhs,
Punjabis and south Indian Muslims employed in other private and government sectors.
7
Chinese
immigration for the tin industry surpassed that of Indian immigration in terms of scale. Until 1
st

August 1930, immigration to Malaya was entirely unrestricted, “as many Chinese as could get on
a ship were allowed to come to the country.”
8
Though such labor was initially transient with
thousands of people returning to China during the 1930s economic slump, many eventually
settled on the peninsula particular with the unrestricted immigration of marriageable Chinese
women into Malaya until 1938s.
9

The immigration of other Asians into Malaya would determine the social and political
destiny of the territory. In the imperial imagination, European, Malay, Chinese, Indian and
indigenous peoples were specialized social groups though which the British government
understood, classified, and governed local society. Charles Hirschman’s work explains how the
evolution of census making in Malaya is closely tied to the expansion of the British colonial
administration.
10
Ethnic diversity was categorically reduced from thirty-eight different ethnic
categories being identified in the census of 1881, to only six in 1931. At work was a reductive
and unnervingly arbitrary process of classification, in which categories were repeatedly
combined, separated, recombined, sub-headed, or erased altogether from the population.
11
The
population census shaped the way the colonial state imagined its colony. The census itself was a
practice in the logic of separation and rule—a means of power through classification by naming,
categorizing, and defining which Foucault defined as “the nomination of the visible.”
12

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This practice of separation however had a larger unifying ideal in mind—that of the
colonial plural society. Though occupying different roles, the different “races” coexisted within
the same political unit and shared an economic interdependence. The colonial plural society was
a fundamental part of how colonial cities were managed and imagined. John S. Furnivall, a
colonial civil servant and historian on interwar Southeast Asia, describes the plural society as
one with:
[…] three or more component sections, living side by side but separately, and with
no common social life. The plural society has a distinctive plural economy, and a
characteristic political constitution.”
13

A racialized society brought together under colonial government was an essential part of what
Adeline Koh describes as the “foundational myth” of British Malaya.
14
British control over the
Malay region was based on the racialized plural model, a logic by which people were organized,
had access to benefits (or were excluded from them), and carried out political and economic life.
It is however important to distinguish Furnivall-ian “pluralism” from any sense of political
ethnic equality or democracy. Colonial understandings of pluralism did not aspire toward any
sense of equal citizenship until after the Pacific War. Rather, the British kept to the dictates of
their treaty with the Malay rulers to uphold the preferential treatment of the Malays and sought to
build up a Malay elite that would assist them in maintaining “Malaya for the Malays.”
15

Scholars discussing the “birth” of Malaya’s pluralism run the gamut between those who
attribute its formation largely to British orchestration, and to those who distribute this
accountability to local agents. Scholars in the 1980s argued that Malaya’s plural society was a
direct result of pre-WWII colonial administration.
16
These histories have argued that the ethnic
division of labor and the organization of Malaya along racial lines was a fundamental part of the
colonial administrative strategy of rule. The three “Asiatic” racial types in Malaya were actively

174

organized with Malays forming the peasant class working in the padi fields, Indians on the
rubber plantations, and the Chinese as tin miners and merchants. It was hence conscious British
policy to maintain ethnic barriers within this plural society even though, as scholar Maurice
Freedman points out, there was no such “neat hierarchy of Furnivallian “orders” in reality.”
17

Scholars have since contended that the colonial administration was not the sole agent in
the formation of Malaya’s race-based politics, but that government institutions only entrenched
racial divisions that were already present. Timothy Harper for instance, states that the British
lacked the capacity to enforce such rigid divisions, but that administrative categories and
Victorian understandings of race and identity only hardened the loose pluralism that already
existed in earlier years into “new political communities by the later years of British rule.”
18

While not denying the role that colonial institutions had to play in this phenomenon, Sandra
Khor questions the premise that Malayans were at the receiving end of “Western” constructs of
race and argues that Malay intelligentsia were active agents in the shaping of the “race” concept
in ways fitting with local histories.
19

Recent writing has gestured beyond the pre-drawn racial lines of the pluralist model. Su
Lin Lewis for instance, points out that the formation of discreet cultural identities in Malaya
occurred “in parallel with another emerging discourse which was more inclusive, cross-cultural
and cosmopolitan.”
20
Elsewhere, Lynn Holland Lees configures racial identity in Malaya as
slippages and performances, where British-ness was “not an ethnic label but a contested concept”
that could be laid claim to by different people of ethnic groups and political allegiances.
It is not my intention here to enter into this dynamic debate, nor is it possible to do justice
to any of the positions above within the scope of this chapter. Rather, I analyze how the
cinematic medium brought the plural to life amid shifting economic and political motivations

175

internal and external to Malaya. Indeed varied permutations of the “plural” defined the meaning
of imperial citizenship in Malaya at different periods of its imperial history. The idea of the
“plural society” and what it meant, how it was represented in public discourse and why, were
never static things but was continuously being articulated through the colonial (filmic)
imaginary. In other words, discourses of pluralism narrated certain promises about the larger
British Commonwealth as a whole that changed in accordance with world events.

A Country for Colonial Capital: the Emergence of Malaya in the Filmic Imaginary

Malaya, when it was first depicted as a coherent geo-political entity onscreen, was configured as
a spatialization of trade—an extension of British capital and business abroad. A concept put forth
by Priya Jaikumar:
[…] the empire becomes not so much a place as a spatialization of British
industry which disaffiliates territories from their regional politics and economics
only to assimilate them as transnational space for Britain.
21

Film and other mass media imagined the empire as a vast place of economic citizenship. Indeed,
colonial documentary films first emerged in the 1920s at public events and venues where trade
and empire intersected. As Tom Rice describes, imperial exhibitions and trade shows became the
genesis for the production of films promoting a newly configured imperial economy.
22
World’s
fairs and empire exhibitions for instance, rendered the colonial world into a navigable terrain of
trade and industry. In the course of an afternoon's amusements one could visit the rubber
industry in Malaya followed by products from India in a pavilion located a stone's throw away.
Empire trade shows were themselves opportunities for filmmaking. At the 1931 Imperial
Fruit Show at Leicester, Mrs. M.A. Fielden demonstrated the many ways of cooking Malayan

176

pineapples to an enraptured audience at the Malayan exhibit. To boost consumption of Malayan
pineapples, The Malay States Information Agency decided to fund a film that could market them
as exotic fruit, processed with modern machinery, which could be prepared very easily in
English kitchens.
23
After the exhibition, Ideal Film Limited invited Mrs. Fielden up to their
studio to film her cooking Malayan pineapples in “pineapple cocktail, sweets, curried rabbit,
steak and kidney pie, filleted sole, Lancashire hot pot and other savory dishes.”
24
The publicity
move sought to dispel deep-rooted prejudice against Asian foods as being unhygienic and too
foreign.
25
The resulting film enjoyed healthy bookings at commercial cinema screens across
England with footage being reused in a newsreel series by Cinemagazine. The film amounted to
excellent propaganda, for an expenditure of only £14.
26

The job of film then at this relatively early stage, was to publicize Malaya as an extension
of imperial capital. The repercussions of the 1927 Imperial Conference and the significance of
new trade arrangements under the Commonwealth signified a period where the British
government sought to actively strengthen trade and economic ties between Britain, its
colonies/protectorates, and the dominions.
27
The principle of “imperial preference” was
established soon after the First World War, at first through market protectionist measures and
tariffs against non-Empire products. When such measures proved unpopular, later efforts to
boost trade within the empire focused on publicity campaigns promoting Empire produce in
Britain.
28

To encourage trade within the Commonwealth, as I will discuss later, extensive
propaganda and publicity efforts were taken to encourage trade and investment within the
empire. The Malayan Information Agency (known before 1929 as the Malay States Information
Agency) initiated publicity driven projects about Malaya to facilitate trade and economic

177

opportunity with the region. To educate the public in Britain all about Malaya, they managed a
library on Malayan materials, organized events at exhibitions on behalf of the Malayan
government, and even supplied pineapple cocktail recipes to curious tradesmen.
29
Having
previously relied on lanternslides for its educational exhibitions, the Agency began directing its
attention to film production in the late 1920s. The Agency appointed Mr. J.F. Owen, a pensioner
known for his film-work, as the organization's deputy agent in March 1927.
30

Discussion about producing an educational film for publicity purposes had already been
in the works within the Malay States Information Agency. Following the “awakening” of
imperial governments toward the cinema as a vehicle of propaganda, the Agency decided to take
action with a proposal to the F.M.S. government in October 1926 to make a film specifically
about Malaya.
31
After considering tenders from British Instructional Films and the Greville
Brothers film companies, the F.M.S. Government decided to accept the offer put forth by the
Greville Brothers.
32
This British film production company specialized in “Travel, Interest,
Industrial, and Educational pictures” and described themselves in their publicity brochure as
adventuring filmmakers for whom venturing into the “little-known and still savage places of the
world” was no obstacle.
33
The company was particularly proud of being “the pioneers in
applying the camera and the moving picture to the presentation of the vast resources of the
Empire.”
34
For the Malay States Information Agency, the Greville Brothers first agreed to
produce 10,000 feet of film at an exhibition worthy standard at a price of £2,100 to be completed
within six months. They later agreed to shoot an additional 10,000 feet worth of footage, which
could be used in several other films.
35
As distributors, the company assured the Agency that at
least 500 public cinemas in England would be happy to screen the film free of charge.

178

The group arrived in Penang on 8
th
August 1927 to begin the expedition to shoot what was
to become the first multi-reel empire publicity film about Malaya.
36
Mr. H.S. Banner, a publicity
agent for the Malay States Information Agency wrote the script while Charlton Maxwell, an
officer for the Agency directed the group.
37
Government bodies in the Straits Settlements,
Federated Malay States and even the Unfederated Malay States pledged to assist the party as far
as possible.
The resulting Malaya film turned out to be a panoramic explication of the effectiveness of
the administrative system of indirect rule in opening Malaya up to the modernizing effects of
colonial capital.
38
The film opens with an illustrated map of the Malay Peninsula showing
animated ships sailing across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea to converge on
Singapore. Extensive inter-titles describe the history of Malaya’s “founding” and its political
administration. After brief images of the colonies of Singapore, Malacca and Penang, the film
introduces us to the Federated Malay States by way of scenes featuring the “indigenous” rulers
of Malaya and their retinues—the Sultans of Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan, and Selangor. The
Federated Malay States is described as a territory “governed by their own rulers, with the help of
British residents, through a “Federal Council.” A significant scene depicts the British dignitaries,
dressed all in crisp white, standing beside the Sultans for the camera and chatting gamely.
These opening scenes lay out how the system of indirect rule determined the success of the
colony. As the legal framework of British administration in the Malay States, indirect rule was
predicated on an intricate network of direct legislation as well as carefully parsed degrees of
intervention and “advisement.” Under “Indirect Rule,” colonial management in the Malay States
operated through an existing native authority—the Malay Sultans. The British installed a
centralized Resident System in the Federated Malay States (F.M.S.) whereby the British

179

Resident’s advice “must be asked and acted upon on all questions other than those touching
Malay religions and custom” according to the Pangkor Treaty of 20 January 1874. This essential
meant that was that British power could only be consolidated through the indispensable co-
operation of the Malay ruling class over the Western states in the Peninsula.
39
Tribute to the
Sultans and the alliance between them and the British administration was hence an important
opening scene for Malaya.
Following these scenes, the film launches into a display of what Brian Larkin has described
as the “colonial sublime.” Railroads, train stations, factories, houses of government, dams—
“indeed the terrifying ability to remake landscapes and force the natural world to conform to
these technological projects by leveling mountains, flooding villages, and remaking cities”
40
—
were spectacles of colonial rule, inviting the audience into the magical, sublime world of modern
technology. The inter-title reads “glimpses of age-old means of transport on the way emphasize
the work civilization has done for Malaya in opening it up with railways and fine metal roads.”
Motorcars and trains replaced bullock carts and men bearing loads on their backs. Roads and rail
open up vast tracts of virgin jungle while modern bridges cross natural impediments including
wide rivers. A scenic shot of a motorcar carving its way on a winding road cuts a swath into the
dense vegetation. A train, one of a fleet of steam engines belonging to the Federated Malay
States Railways, approaches the Kuala Lumpur a station, itself an architectural marvel with
gleaming towers and ivory parapets. Further shots of impressive colonial architecture linger on
the screen, fetishistic symbols of the new wealth and modernity of the Malay States.
Technology’s wonders similarly transform the natural landscape into productive space for
capital. The camera dwells on a variety of impressive mining machinery in one of Malaya’s
profitable tin mines. A similar conquest over the wild vegetation of the tropical jungle results in

180

acres of rubber plantations. Reels were colored at the cost of ten dimes a foot so as to produce
tints reminiscent of the tropical Malayan landscape.
41

An embodiment of the colonial “voice,” the plentiful, even overbearing, inter-titles
contextualized the images into a narrative of modernization. As film scholar Tom Rice points
out, “the images become secondary and incidental, as the film looks to instruct and inform, not
through the images themselves, but through the written word.”
42
Like the voiceovers that will
become a defining feature of the films that will be discussed later, the inter-titles suture images
of the colony together into a coherent whole. The Supreme Court “standing for British justice”
and Federal Government Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, signify how “villages have been
developed into thriving cities” while the Government House in Singapore evidences its growth
into a governed port city from being a “mere fishing village.” An inter-title states, “the
comparatively short period since Malaya came into close relations with the Empire has been a
period of phenomenally rapid, though steady, progress, covering many fields of endeavor.”
According to its shooting script, the Malaya film then goes into an “ethnographic”
exploration of the life and customs Malay, Chinese, and European inhabitants of the peninsula.
Unlike the trope of the economically driven colonial plural society that we will later see in Five
Faces of Malaya or Voices of Malaya, this film does not yet fully articulate a broader picture of
the F.M.S. as a coherent social entity. It depicts the different communities almost in isolation,
without a sense of the larger colonial cosmopolis that inhabits later films. For the most part as
well, Asiatic inhabitants in the protectorate are depicted as somewhat direly in need of British
guidance. Thanks to European administrators, planters, businessmen, and police officers, the film
announces, “a century's hard work has enabled European influence to develop Malaya from a
vast, unproductive jungle into a thriving land of plenty with an annual trade of £270,000,000.”

181

Indeed, most of the so-called ethnographic parts of the film are spent depicting the so-called
ineptitude of the Malays in managing their own affairs. It pictures their attitudes (“The Malay is
a cheerful, loyal, generous soul, hospitable to the verge of extravagance”), dwellings (“the
Malay's home is characterized by simplicity, for his wants are few,”), and clothing (“They do not
over burden themselves with clothes in early youth”) in a somewhat patronizing tone though
dressed in a pseudo ethnographic sheen. For a brief moment, we then are introduced to the
Chinese as “the backbone of Malayan commerce.” The “industrious Chinese,” says the script,
can be found everywhere in Malaya (“in the tin mines,” “in the carpenters shops,” “in the
marketplace,” and “between the shafts of your rickshaw”). But the Chinese had relatively little
screen time as compared to the lengthy scenes on Malay life. The Indians and Orang Asli do not
feature at all in the film.
In these early visual articulations of the territory before the development of the trope of the
plural society in any cinematic sense, Malaya is configured as an extension of the colonial
marketplace and administration, not quite yet a full-bodied social space. The film Malaya is thus
very much an “old-empire” view of the colonies where the development of the country is
credited to good European management and co-operative local leadership, as opposed to the
shared responsibility of the colonial plural society that will become apparent in Five Faces of
Malaya a decade later. Malaya can be more accurately described as a publicity film about the
protectorate's admirable progress under the management of the British.
Indeed, it was clear from the outset that the government intended the film to be used for
economic publicity. F.M.S. officials argued, “the same arguments which justified us in spending
money on a Malay Pavilion at Wembley would justify the making of a good Malayan film.”
43

Films, like empire exhibitions, were intended to illustrate Malaya’s economic significance in the

182

Commonwealth so as to strengthen imperial trade relations. A London correspondent for the
Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser comments that the value of the film lies “in the
propagation of what I may call the Imperial idea.”
44
In its depiction of the transformative and
modernizing effects of imperialism as well as its indispensability to the economic health of the
Commonwealth, the film served to combat anti-imperial propaganda by organizations such as the
Labor Research Department.
The Malayan government intended that the film be shown as widely as possible to people
in the metropole. Intended for commercial screenings, the Greville Brothers distributed this
edition of the film throughout public cinema theaters in the United Kingdom. Totaling around
6000 feet, Malaya provided a general overview of Malaya in about sixteen minutes.
45
According
to the newspapers, the film could be screened in sections of about four minutes each for cinemas
unwilling to show the full amount at one performance.
46
Rather than being simultaneously
screened across Britain (which would require costly reproductions of reels), the film travelled
from town to town throughout England over several years. The Greville Brothers distributed the
film to commercial theaters in Great Britain for a cut of 25% of the profits, with 40% of profits
going to the cinema houses and the remaining 35% going to the F.M.S. government.
47

A film’s malleable material body enabled it to be re-edited into countless smaller films and
recombined with other films to form new objects. Rather than being a coherent film project,
early scenic-type empire documentary films are probably more accurately thought of as
collections of footage, organized according to various imperial narratives. Inter-titles provided
structure to otherwise loose images constantly being taken apart, combined, and re-used for
multiple purposes and for different audiences. Because Malaya (as an extension of the colonial

183

imaginary) pictured Malaya as a collection of separate industries (tin, rubber, coconut) amid a
loose series of socio-cultural groups (Malay, Chinese, European), it was easy to break the film up
into its constituent parts. The inherent quality of the medium itself enabled the same “film” to
lead various other lives in alternative distribution circuits.
From the full-length commercial edition of the film described above, the Greville brothers
produced a technical version of the film intended specifically for educational and trade
audiences. While the Greville Brothers distributed the commercial version of the film, the rights
to the technical edition fully belonged to the F.M.S. government where they were intended for
screening within educational rather than commercial contexts. The Greville Brothers arranged
28,277 feet of footage into seventeen short “mini-films” meant to be shown independently. They
featured separate topics on industries relevant to the colonial economy (rubber, tin mining, oil
palm, coconut), as well as more “ethnographic” topics about the life and customs of the Malays
and Europeans in Malaya. The series was also used for industry trade gatherings.
48

The technical films received plenty of airtime at the Imperial Institute. The first in the
series to be completed, the section on Malaya’s rubber industry debuted at the Rubber Exhibition
at the Imperial Institute in London in January 1928.
49
Soon after, the sections on “Fisheries” and
“Rice Cultivation” screened on April 12 to 14, 1928 with “Life for Europeans”, “Oil Palm” and
“Chinese Life and Enterprises” being screened from April 26
th
to 29
th
the same year.
50
The
Imperial Institute continued to screen the various sections well into the early 1930s.
Enhancing the usability of the film in educational contexts, each section of the film could
be screened to different audiences for different purposes. These “sub-films” so to speak were
indeed able to lead somewhat autonomous lives. Intended to educate the general public for
instance, the industrial sections of the technical film depicted Malaya as a rapidly modernizing

184

place where industrial technologies are able to harness the unruly riches of nature, converting
impenetrable jungle into orderly rubber plantations and busy mines that would produce the
useful raw material that sustains imperial civilization. The Rubber Industry, the first technical
section of the Malaya film, describes the development of the rubber industry from swaths of
jungle while the second section, Tin Mining, illustrates modern ways of dredging.
51
Section
number 14 of the film titled Life for Europeans served as recruitment publicity depicting Malaya
as one of the world’s most prosperous regions in the empire with plenty of opportunities for
Europeans who could chose to be in the civil service or in the commercial sector.
52
The film even
addressed the notorious effects of the tropical climate on European health, with the inter-titles
stating, “Malaya is not unhealthy for Europeans who take the ordinary precautions dictated by
common-sense.”
53
Recreation was plentiful with golf clubs and polo matches while scenes of
spacious bungalows and breezy interiors evidenced how “European dwellings are designed to
combine beauty with comfort.”
54

The Malaya film(s) continued to have currency in future years, its limberness at being reused and
re-edited into multiple other films being responsible for its multiple social lives. In 1930, the
Malay States Information Agency compiled another six short films from the existing footage.
55

Intended for general audiences, these six films enjoyed screenings in commercial cinemas
throughout England, Scotland and Wales in 1930.
56
In 1933, the Malayan Information Agency
re-edited the footage collected for the Malaya film(s) yet again, setting them against a “talkie”
commentary and extending their circulation lifespans for a couple more years before industry
preferences for two reel sound feels eventually rendered these one-reel silent films out of date.
57

185

The seventeen technical films continued to thrive at the Imperial Institute until the latter half of
the 1930s.
58

While the film publicized Malaya’s industry and products to a British audience, it likely
served another purpose in the colonies. In 1929, the F.M.S. government purchased one set of the
technical series of the film for £148. The Educational Department screened these films in schools
of the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States. Diverted yet again from its “original”
trajectories of circulation in Britain, this set of films served different educational purposes in the
colonies. Malayan schoolchildren were offered the chance to see the Empire through imperial
eyes, and to recognize Malaya within that larger constellation. A screening of Malaya alongside
the technical films on tin and rubber at Outram Schools in Singapore attracted a crowd of 700
clamoring school children and curious adults each day.
59
Such screenings addressed complaints
among parents that school children were taught about foreign lands even before that of their own.
A journalist for The Straits Times wrote,
We should say that an exhibition of the Malayan film in the Malay vernacular
schools would do more to develop national pride and interest in the Malay race
than any other attempt to instruct and inform them.
60

Not only was the film meant to display the benefits of British presence to local audiences, it also
served to educate the local Asiatic community about their own place in the larger network of
empire and as the report says, to “develop national pride.”
61
Scenes of empire’s industry and
modernity could uplift the spirit of industry while the ethnographic sections would allow
Malayans to situate themselves within this view. Short films on the industries that constituted the
colony provided a glimpse of the economic parts that made up the territory while the longer
Malaya film sutured these views within a broader narrative of Malaya as an extension of British
economy.

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In summary, Malaya represented the state's first attempt at picturing the territory as a unique
imperial formation through film. Watched by both the general public as well as trade
organizations outside of Malaya, the film publicized the territory's products and good business
environment, as well as promoted the work that Britain was doing in its overseas territories.
Given extended lives beyond that of being a publicity documentary in Britain, Malaya was
broken up into constituent parts that moved autonomously through theatrical and nontheatrical
circuits in both Britain and Malaya. In Malaya, these mini-films served to educate local
audiences about the various aspects of Malayan life and industry on a smaller scale. The 1928
Malaya film and its various permutations imagined Malaya as an extension of British capital, a
success story of growing economic modernity amid teeming jungles. Though it marks the
beginning of filmic attempts to imagine the region, the fragmented manner in which Malaya was
screened suggests how the colonial imaginary configured Malaya primarily as a collection of
industries rather than a coherent society. It was only a decade later, alongside further shifts in the
texture of British imperialism, that a more coherent vision of Malaya became possible.

“Telling the World About Life of Cosmopolitan Country” [sic]:
62
Consolidating the
Commonwealth Cosmopolis in Five Faces of Malaya

In a deliberate move away from narratives of the colonies as Britain’s exploited possessions,
British imperial ethos in the late 1920s and early 1930s shifted toward discourses of mutual co-
operation, cosmopolitanism, and familial trust as economic policy moved toward a broader-
based consumer, capitalist model. The rhetoric of humanism and cosmopolitan brotherhood (i.e.

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soft power) were as much a part of the imperial vocabulary as were the more familiar themes of
coercion and division. The 1938 film Five Faces of Malaya, which will be the focus of my
analysis in this section, configures Malaya as a charming multi-racial community doing its part
for imperial economies via a well-machinated, plural system of racially divided socio-economic
identities and labor roles. After the somewhat fragmentary depictions of Malayan society in the
earlier Malaya film, Five Faces of Malaya sought to provide a full and comprehensive account
of the colony/protectorate, bringing to life the fantasy of the territory’s plural social scape within
the broader economic landscape from which such discourses of imperial cosmopolitanism
emerged. Intended for circulation in Britain, the US and other British colonies and territories, the
film sought to improve perceptions of the imperial family by showcasing Malaya as place where
many races worked harmoniously together in service of the larger imperial economy.
Ideas of nationhood and race underwent radical shifts in the late 1920s and early 1930s
particularly following the 1926 Balfour Declaration and the 1932 Ottawa conference. The 1926
Balfour Declaration established the equality of status existing between Britain and its Dominions
while the principles of “imperial preference” was set down at the Ottawa Conference. The
necessities of changing imperial trade networks, described in the previous section, called for
efforts to encourage the public to understand what the new British Empire represented. With the
initiation of the Commonwealth bloc and preferential trade within the borders of the British
Empire, intra-Empire allegiances across borders became the empire’s new mantra. As historian
Stephen Constantine argues, publicity campaigns espoused an “extended” concept of Empire,
“British citizens were to be made aware that they were part of an imperial society: There was no
place for Little Englanders.”
63
Leaflets and posters informed the public about how buying
Empire goods had positive repercussions for domestic employment. By supporting imperial

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economies abroad, these economies would in turn consume manufactured British exports. This
mutually dependent relationship was a constant feature of government publicity campaigns.
Slogans such as “Remember the Empire, Filled with Your Cousins” and “Keep Trade in the
Family” were examples of the state’s attempts to rebrand the connotation of “empire” as a non-
threatening and non-exploitative familial relationship.
64

The rhetoric of humanism, intra-empire cosmopolitanism and shared imperial
brotherhood is a direct effect of late stage imperialism and colonial capitalism. At the first
meeting of the Colonial Empire Marketing Board in 1937, its Chairman Ormsby Gore made it
clear that Britain’s trusteeship with its colonies and protectorates would be a relationship driven
by the principles of colonial capitalism.
65
The Board’s job was to publicize empire products,
expand the range of produce offered, and search for new markets. Mr. Clement Davies also
reminded the assembly that commonwealth relations must meet the bare needs of capitalist
expansion, “We should investigate what are the present markets, what are the possible markets
and how can they be opened and reached.”
66

Film became a critical player in the political economy of the British Empire because of
its ability to bring a visual experience of the global empire family to the working class. The well-
studied Empire Marketing Board (E.M.B.), established in 1926 (a predecessor of the Colonial
Empire Marketing Board mentioned above), became the seat of experimentation with the
cinematic medium. The Board mobilized film as part of a drive to persuade consumers and
manufacturers to “buy Empire” and did so in ways which sought “to remodel the perception of
empire from a relationship of exploitation to one more closely resembling a mutually beneficent
cosmopolitan family in the interest of intra-empire trade.”
67
Under the direction of Basil Wright,
films such as Windmill in Barbados (1933) and Song of Ceylon (1934) generate a sense of

189

humanist empathy for the so-called black and brown brothers of empire through their poetic
styles. Elsewhere, I have discussed how the films of the Empire Marketing Board utilizes a
poetic-expository mode of documentary narrative to create a sense of deep emotional connection
to Britain’s colonies.
68
In Windmill in Barbados for instance, the soundtrack and cinematography
create a sense of romantic “gazing” at the people and land of Barbados. Films brought the many
“races” of the Empire to the domestic screen under the umbrella of a shared Commonwealth
family.
The connections between the films of the Empire Marketing Board and liberal imperial
economics have been developed elsewhere.
69
My point here is that progressive discourses about
the empire family emerged out of specific economic and political policies between Britain and its
overseas territories during the interwar years. Anthony Scott describes a series of films by Paul
Rotha for Imperial Airways as:
[…] an example of how a kind of technocratic liberalism was able to weather the
social, political and economic turbulence of the interwar period, as well as a
demonstration of how closely nascent internationalism could be intertwined with
imperialism.”
70

Public representation of imperial citizenship in the 1930s was thus a heady mixture of
cosmopolitan camaraderie, humanist fantasy, and economic duty.
Another driving reason for producing and circulating propaganda films touting the
humanist and progressive face of empire was to uplift impressions of the British Empire in
American public opinion. On a visit to the United States in 1939, Sir William McLean, an
advisor to the Colonial Office, reported back with complaints about:
[…] how ignorant people were in the United States about the British Colonial
Empire, how the general belief was that we got substantial immediate benefits
from our Colonies and how ready they were to believe the worst when they were
told that we exploited our Colonies in our own interests or when they heard that
there were riots and disturbances.
71

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Indeed, the British Empire had come under attack by the American press. Numerous articles in
the New York Times asserted that the British failed to bring education or health to “natives” and
that the empire was held together by force.
72
Even in university circles, misunderstandings
circulated that Britain exploited its overseas territories, gleaning taxes from the dominions and
raw materials for next to nothing from the colonies. McLean’s memorandums gained wide
currency within the Colonial Empire Marketing Board who saw the urgency of generating pro-
British propaganda to correct charges that the British Empire neglected “native” welfare. The
Board thereafter commissioned a film called Men of Africa (1940) that elucidated England’s
responsibility toward subject populations stating that “Britain’s right to govern colonies is
determined by the extent to which she fits them to govern themselves.”
73
The progress that the
colonies made under the caring guidance of imperial “trusteeship” with its purportedly humanist
and progressive intentions publicized the defense of Britain.
Thus, the ethos of imperial economic internationalism underlay the imagination of
Britain’s paternalist relationship with its colonies and protectorates. In Malaya, Britain claimed
to make good on its promise of trusteeship in two inter-connected ways—first through the forces
of relentless modernization and economic development that swept the region during the inter-war
period, and second through the clever management of the region’s multi-racial society to produce
a social ecology of labor that made the former achievements possible.

In September 1936, the Strand Film Company approached the Malay Information States Agency
with a proposal to make a cost-effective film about Malaya and its industries.
74
Since the Malaya
film from a decade ago had become so worn out that it was no longer usable, this proposal came
at an opportune time. Strand had already built a modest reputation for itself as a producer of

191

documentary, educational and propaganda films. Alexander Shaw—who had previously made
films for the General Post Office, the Orient Line (a British shipping company), and the Ministry
of Labor—directed the production in Malaya. George Noble, who would later be a cameraman in
the Gold Coast Film Unit, served as the cameraman. Paul Rotha, a renowned figure during the
British documentary film movement, oversaw all of Strand’s productions. Shaw and his unit
arrived in Kuala Lumpur in late January 1937 and embarked on a two-week filming expedition.
The end result was a three-reel film of 3250 feet that ran for approximately forty minutes.
75
The
Malayan government would have the sole rights for the film, which they could rent or sell at
their pleasure.
The Malayan government agreed to commission Five Faces with clear directives that the
film promote the well oiled social and economic machinery of Malaya and the ensuing success
of its industries; “In the new film much more attention will be paid to the development of the
country under British Rule or protection.”
76
The arrangement of Malayan society into a modern
colonial workforce marshaled into fruitful economic production was part of this fantasy of
British stewardship. Unlike the 1928 film Malaya, which some district officers criticized for
paying too much attention to Malays while ignoring the colony’s other immigrant races, officers
wanted the new Malaya film to feature the colony’s multi-racial society. The central idea was to
create a sense that every race performed specific labor roles fundamental to Malaya—a practice
already fully embraced by the administration in the 1930s. Indeed, Malaya’s plural society
evidenced the good management of Malaya in British hands.
Indeed, the film Five Faces of Malaya is a veritable paean to the humanist, inter-cultural
ambitions of the Commonwealth. Healthy immigration and the ensuing management of race
were the fundamental principles behind the economic progress and modernity that the British

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brought to the region. The film acquaints audiences with the Chinese, Malays, Indians,
Europeans, and indigenous people who each perform a certain socio-economic role within the
Malayan economy. This plural society, the film claims, is a cosmopolitan product of modernity
and empire trade where different races—each having distinct economic identities—live and work
together to further economic prosperity for the larger Commonwealth. Foremost in the empire’s
success stories, Malaya was a model of the empire’s cosmopolitan family, writ small. The film
espoused a particular humanist and cosmopolitan ethic that was an amalgamation of the specific
economic and political rationales of governance in Malaya as well as the marketing rationales of
the British Commonwealth. In the case of Malaya, this ethos of imperial cosmopolitanism was
articulated through the imagination of an economically productive plural society expertly
managed by British hands.
The film’s narrative structure enabled the suturing of disparate communities within the
textual world of the film. The “joining” of images of the different communities on print, edited
together and given meaning by the voice-over narration, exemplifies how imagined communities
were made manifest in very the body of the film itself. Structured as a series of brief episodic
glimpses of the life and customs of the five racial groups in Malaya, the structure of the film
precisely articulates the organization of ethnic labor into a plural community. Each of the five
segments of the film deals with a particular racialized component of social administration and
economic production. First depicting Malaya's indigenous peoples as disappearing before the
advancements of colonial capital, the film them portrays, in turn, the customs and primary
occupations of the Malays, and then the so-called “newly immigrant” Chinese, Indians and
Europeans who co-exist peacefully with the Malays in the rapidly modernizing colony. This
episodic narrative structure within the film itself distinguishes each race as a separately

193

functioning entity, a world upon itself. Yet, these communities are sutured together through an
overarching narrative told through the “colonial voice(over).” The situation of these moving
parts within the larger discourse of the socio-economic geography of Malaya, and the latter
within the even bigger constellation of the British Commonwealth, brings these disparate
elements together in the articulation of the ideal cosmopolitan colony.
The film opens with a sweeping panoramic shot of the Malayan tropical jungles. A voice-
over narrator announces, “This is the heart of Malaya’s mountains and jungles which for
thousands of years have resisted the advancement of civilization, cover the greater part of the
country.” Emphasizing the wildness of this landscape, the film shows us an elephant emerging
from the lush forest, a tiger prowling through the dense undergrowth and impenetrable
vegetation bordering jungle streams. Like the other jungle inhabitants who push through the
depths of jungle to appear before the camera, bare bodied men with blowpipes and loincloths
emerge from the thickets. The Orang Asli of Malaya, are the first of Malaya’s five faces to
appear in the film. The next few scenes describe the traditional customs, hunting methods, and
daily practices of the then nomadic Temiars—an indigenous ethnic group in peninsula Malaysia.
Young men propel a raft down a river while a group of women, in clearly choreographed
synchrony, dip hollowed bamboo containers to collect the river water. Because their nudity
represented an idealized “primitiveness” in the colonial imagination, more lingering (and rather
gratuitous) shots of the bare breasted young women soon follow, including two medium-close
ups, interspersed with scenes from around the village. These women were at the forefront of
publicity material for the film. The Straits Times ran an article titled “Aborigines of Fine
Physique” plastered with numerous stills of semi-nude women from the film. The titillation of

194

nudity in educational film “blurred the boundaries between anthropology, entertainment, and
exploitation,” as film scholar Amy Staples points out.
77

By opening with scenes of Malaya's dense jungle and its indigenous people, the film
positions Malaya’s indigene to stand for the region's exotic and supposedly “primitive”
beginnings. The Temiars represent a “past” Malaya, a Malaya before the entry of imperial
capital. In a sense, the Temiars stood for what Anne McClintock describes as “anachronistic
space,” whereby the colonized people:
[…] do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the
geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic,
irrational, bereft of human agency […]
78

In the face of encroaching modernity with no foreseeable part to play in the modern colonial
economy (at least from the point of view of the colonial government), the Orang Asli are written
out of the narrative of Malaya’s future. Against a shot of the Temiars making their war through
dense forest, the narrator reads “The Sakais in the jungle retreat slowly before this inevitable
invasion.” Portrayed as wondrously exotic but hopeless impervious to capitalist reform, the
Orang Asli are quickly dismissed as irrelevant by the end of the film, melting away into the
jungle before the advance of the supposedly more “modern” races better suited to wage labor
and/or imperial subjecthood.
We are then introduced to the Malays as the existing inhabitants of the land—feudal in
organization, neither immigrant wage labor like the Indians and Chinese (and hence not
completely a comfortable cog in the colonial economy), but also not “primitive” jungle people.
Scholar Daniel Goh describes colonial representations of Malays as “medieval” as opposed to
“savage” or “oriental.” Medievals belonged to an earlier, feudal period of the perceived socio-
economic evolution of society. Goh writes,

195

Unlike Noble Savagery, where the natives were seen as distant in evolutionary
development, Medievalism represented the natives as ready for political
modernization and incorporation into colonial states. Unlike Orientalism,
Medievalism represented racial difference on the basis of commensurable
proportions rather than incommensurable difference.
79

Existing colonial rhetoric accorded Malays the status of the “almost modern”—romantically pre-
industrial but with the potential for modern civilization. The Malays are first described as a
people with a “love of pomp” and ceremonies “adopted from the ancient rituals of India.” We
see the Sultan of Selangor at an investiture at a royal court in Penang. His subjects, new
chieftains, are paying homage to him at an elaborate ceremony. Adorned with gilded clothes and
glittering ornaments while practicing antiquated customs, the film depicted Malays as far from
“primitive” though somehow left behind on the march toward industrial capitalism.
Malay fishermen and farmers represented the romantic image of the simple peasant, the
archetypal pre-industrial-age figure untouched by the corruptions of modern capital. In a
discussion on the making of Five Faces, the District Officer of Klang suggested that footage of
Malay life might represent a traditional Malaya that preceded British-borne modernity.
80
Images
of a quaint Malay fishing village by the sea side, are followed by a shot of small fishing boat out
at sea as the fisher-folk mend their nets on an idyllic beach under the shade of coconut trees. The
narrator describes the inhabitants as:
[…] indolent and optimistic, satisfied by a carefree easy life in the sun. Today as
their people have done for hundreds of years, they sit on the seashore gossiping
and mending their nets.

Other than being fisher-folk, the film features the purportedly “traditional” work of the Malay in
the padi fields, carried out with the help of what the film describes as “primitive” devices such as
a water wheel and a wooden pounding machine. Village scenes shot in the interior regions of
Selangor state depicted “the Malays leading their timeless lives in the ‘kampong.’”
81

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British administrators believed the Malays were suited to “traditional” cultural practice and
would make ideal peasants for whom padi cultivated would be a sufficient way of life.
82
The
narrator reads, “thus the Malays […] live their lives much as they did in the days before the first
Europeans set for sail down the coast of Malaya in the thirteenth century.” Not quite “dead” or
“dying” in the sense that Rony extolls in her definition of the “taxidermic,” the Malays in this
part of the film are still similarly excluded from the so-called life affirming discourse of colonial
capitalism.
83
Located outside modern history as it unfolded, the Malays are represented as
unaffected by current affairs, made drowsy by old ways and customs.
84

The film’s romantic imagery of the Malays disguised troubling racially premised
socioeconomic policies. Forces keeping Malays in the padi fields and away from modern
economies beyond the production of rice were institutionalized through education and land use
policies.
85
While the rubber industry profited British capitalists and Chinese planters, complex
state restrictions on land use and production quotas limited indigenous capital accumulation in
this lucrative industry—an issue that has been discussed in Chapter 2.
86
Embedded within the
discourse of the charming, traditional kampong dweller is the marginalization of the Malay
peasant class from an expanding capitalist economy.
This position is further emphasized by the narrator’s insistence that the Malays made for
lousy laborers; “the Malay’s only clock is the sun and he is generally late on that.”
87
The
stereotype of the lazy native—he/she who refuses to do productive work or organize their day
according to the dictates of economic time—has long been a tradition of colonial literature in
Malaya. Syed Hussein Alatas, along with James C Scott, configure the native’s supposed
“indolence” as a refusal to be a tool in the production system of colonial capitalism.
88
The
stereotype of lazy Malays served the purposes of the colonial rhetoric which wanted to project

197

the idea of the Malays as quaint and picturesque, but ultimately incapable of ruling themselves.
Such a narrative only justified the position of the British as stewards over the Malays, the
Malayan economy and territory—a role well articulated in Five Faces.
In contrast to the Malays and the Orang Asli, Malaya’s “immigrant races” were
configured as the sweat behind the success of Malaya’s tin and rubber industries in the new
economy. The Chinese and Indians represent the wage laborers and capitalists of the
Commonwealth economy—the arm of empire who opens up Malaya’s vast resources to capitalist
expansion. The film celebrates these “immigrant races” as part of a new cosmopolitan Malaya
that followed the arrival of colonial investment. The Chinese in particular, exemplified the new
modern Asian—hardworking wage laborers who “came in the thousands to labor on tin mines.”
Fetishistic images of sweaty, bare bodied men are juxtaposed with impressive modern machinery
for mining and dredging. Their manually laboring bodies, situated amidst these impressive
behemoth contraptions conjure a sense that the men are part of this industrial landscape. Extreme
long shots feature men working with and among the machinery while the editing seamlessly
stitches together human toil and machine-operated work into a poem of industrial productivity.
Shots of laborers digging the earth with no more than the strength of their arms are juxtaposed
with a Chinese man operating an excavator, and finally to impressive shots of a giant tin
dredging machine. Within the landscape of the tin mine, bodily entwined with mining
machinery, Five Faces presents the Chinese in Malaya as indispensable labor in the modern
colonial economy. Portraying them as a newly immigrant labor force (and obfuscating the long
and complex history of Chinese immigration and Chinese capital in the peninsula), the Chinese
are shown to be doing good work for the Commonwealth, tirelessly churning the soil to discover
its latent riches.

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Against sweeping panoramas of rubber plantations, an orderly row of Indian men parade
onto the screen. We witness these men making cuts into the barks of rubber trees, draining the
emerging sap into small cups ready for collection. Tamil laborers were described derogatorily in
a review of Five Faces of Malaya in World Film News as rowdy, drunken and wife-beating
“donkeys” necessary to perform the hard labor that the supposedly idle Malays would not deign
to do.
The Tamil was born to do Malaya[’s] donkey work. Every job that is dirty,
undesirable and monotonous is the Tamil’s. […] Malaya gets more and better
Tamils—and needs them—for Malaya can use plenty donkeys.
89

These scenes served not only to publicize Malayan rubber to audiences in other parts of the
colony, but also functioned as a means of showcasing the logic of racial “management” in
Malaya. Good government divided Malaya’s population into labor roles that serviced the
Commonwealth’s economy.
The British, as the fifth face of Malaya, are depicted as the administrative minds behind
Malaya. However, for being the harbinger of modernity who “brought [Malaya] its peace and
prosperity,” the section on the British is extremely short and the scenes of recreation as opposed
to fruitful work are somewhat oddly chosen. Newspaper reviews note how the European makes a
somewhat scanty appearance in the film—appearing only in short scenes at a golf club in Kuala
Lumpur and at the Singapore swimming club.
90
The omission of overbearing British presence
was quite likely done so as not to encourage ideas that Malaya was being settled by a band of
imperialists. Indeed, World Film News makes much out of the fact that Europeans in Malaya no
longer have an “imperial” presence over the protectorate (“Empire builders and pioneers do not
live here any more”) but are part of the region's middle-class with few intentions of settling
down there.
91

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Unlike the Malaya film, Five Faces of Malaya credits Malaya’s transformation into a
modern, productive economy to the co-operation of all races. Tamil labor brings tea from
Malaya’s tea plantations to teacups around the world. Pineapples (of which a 100 million cans
arrive in England yearly), copra, and timber, are industries that are also being modernized.
Against a shot of high-rise buildings, an airplane and an aerial view of a port, we are told that
meditation and sanitation are conquering the diseases of the tropics while modern
communications has brought Malaya within eight days of London by air. Hydroelectric power
fuels the development of the country. Even the Sultans of Malaya, depicted as feudal lords
earlier in the film, have adopted Western ideas, developing a penchant for afternoon tennis
matches.
In the face of the supposedly transformative powers of colonial modernity, even the
supposedly sun-drowsed Malays undergo a transformation when faced with the irresistible forces
of colonial capital. As metaphorical “almost moderns,” the Malays harbored great potential to be
modernized—a process that occurs mid-way through the film. Invigorated by industry and the
positive influence of modernity, the formerly lazy Malay finds a new place within the new
political economy. From being hopelessly indolent peasants at the beginning, the film then tells
us that Malays have the “intelligence” to be successfully molded into productive imperial
citizens. The Malay, “who had previously never known discipline, nor had ever dreamt of co-
operation,” made good recruits for the newly formed Malay regiment and the police force. Under
the good stewardship of the British, the Malays were able to turn their supposedly unproductive
“love of ritual”–symbolized through traditional Malay ceremonies—into “a new outlet on the
parade ground.”

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By the end of the film, each of the “races” finds their place in this fertile modern colonial
economy. The journey from the depths of virgin jungle where we meet Malaya's “vanishing”
indigenous tribes, followed by the medieval (but developing) Malays, the Asian non-Malays
(wage laborers and business people), and finally the Europeans (capitalists and administrators), is
a journey across anachronistic space on an evolutionary timeline of modernity. Each “race” has a
particular place within this plural system and a certain responsibility toward the wealth of the
territory. Thus cleanly divided by race, economic purpose, and labor roles, the five faces of
Malaya are presented as naturalized components in a socio-economic machine. In the film’s
concluding scene, the narrator reads,
Five races, each one with traditions, faiths and customs of its own live in harmony
in one country and do not encroach upon each other, they all lead their separate
lives, each one respecting the customs and beliefs of the other.

In the world of the film, Malaya blossomed as plural society under the modernizing hand of
colonialism. Malaya’s society was a microcosm of the best of late colonialism’s cosmopolitan
ethos—where the multiple races worked together in the service of the Commonwealth’s
economy. Praising the effectiveness of the film, Kinematograph Weekly ardently agreed:
[…] that the mixture of Sakai (the original primitive race), Chinese, Malays,
Tamils and British lives in perfect harmony on the Peninsula, each race respective
the other’s customs and co-operating in the wealth production, which is here
magnificently aided by Nature.
92

All appeared to be well in Malaya—at least on the surface of the film. Closer inspection however
reveals that in spite of the film’s valiant attempts to suture a coherent colony out of its disparate
elements, social tensions underlying Malayan society in the 1930s troubled this construct of the
modern cosmopolis in subtle ways. Malayans were not quite the docile poster-people of
cosmopolitan empire. Rather, the formation of race-based nationalisms in the 1930s resulted in a
strain of “unruliness” among the population that challenged the discourse of the state.

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In particular, deep-seated unhappiness among the Malays about the very “plural” society
that the colonial government was trying to envision countered the possibility of a straightforward
narrative in the film. The government faced accusations by the Malay intelligentsia that the
various forces of colonial capitalism were threatening Malay ways of life. There was the fear
among Malay communities that the growing numbers of immigrant laborers and the loss of the
power of the local leaders imperiled Malay culture. Malay journalist and political activist
Ibrahim Yaacob for instance, lamented the “damages” caused to Malay culture and
consciousness because of these new economic forces.
93
Sitting on chairs instead of cross-legged
on the floor, and sleeping on beds instead of mats were material representations of a way of life
under siege.
94
As Joel Kahn points out, the development of the concept of Bangsa Melayu
(Malay creed or race) in the 1930s among Malay nationalists was oriented toward inward,
ruralist sentiments predicated on interethnic differentiation or opposition.
95
This was, in other
words, quite contrary to the cosmopolitan dream that the film was seeking to construct.
The colonial imaginary itself was not able to completely let go of figure of the
“traditional” peasant Malay—this figure, as I have already described, being so embedded in state
policy. At the same time, colonial narratives had to evidence the progressive force of the
civilizing mission and indicate the transformative effects that modernity and capitalism had on
the citizens of empire.
These tensions bubble beneath the surface of Five Faces. Narrative inconsistencies in the
film led to criticism from a member of the Malayan press that the film “lacked continuity.”
96

Indeed, the film’s narrative structure—so important in suturing Malaya’s five faces into a
coherent plural society—showed certain incoherencies and contradictions. In particular, its
fragmented depiction of the Malays as an ethnic group revealed conflicting ideas about the place

202

of the Malays in colonial modernity. Indeed, the film’s depiction of the Malays is riddled with
contradiction. After introducing the Malays as “almost modern” near the very beginning of the
film, the Malays are then described mid-way through as becoming successfully “modernized.”
Then toward the end, the film backpedals again and claims that Malay tradition and the Islamic
faith had not been jeopardized in spite of the breathtaking pace of development. At its close, the
film carefully reassures audiences that idyllic Malay villagers maintained their charm and old
ways since, according to the narrator, “Western ideas haven’t altered old customs.” A plethora of
scenes depicting Malay traditional customs and practices dominates the last third of the film—an
ethnic archiving of traditional Malay images and sounds. The very popular folk song “Rasa
Sayang” (“love”) plays on the soundtrack as a game of Sepak Takraw (a ball game involving a
hollow rattan ball) and a Silat (traditional Malay martial arts) demonstration are depicted. The
film spends a considerable amount of time detailing the intricacies of a Malay wedding. The
narrator assures us that:
[the] Malay remains unchanged. He makes no great demands in life, he does not
clamor for recognition. But by force of identity he retains his tradition amidst all
these invaders and plays his own part in the progress of Malaya.

After all the effort to depict a modernizing Malaya, this compulsive harkening back toward the
romantic image of the timeless villager at the end of the film is striking. I read the film’s
narrative disjuncture as a site where different discourses of race conflicted. The figure of the
“traditional” Malay and its counter-figure, the “modern” one, represented two discourses that did
not entirely sit well together. Unsullied by colonial capital and yet partaking in the push toward
modernity, the figure of the Malay is a paradox in this narrative of cosmopolitan society.
Hence, in spite of the film’s creation of the plural Malayan cosmopolis in its suturing
together of the “five races,” other racial discourses strained the coherence of its narrative. Unruly

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populations who would not quietly acquiesce to the government’s socio-economic policy
(alongside contradictory colonial discourse itself) made it impossible for any clear-cut narrative
of colonial plural society to be easily formed. Though such textual tensions are subtle in the case
of Five Faces, they represent the first glimmers of how the medium struggled to meet the
ambitions of the sponsoring officials to create a film that projected a plural modern society while
also attending to competing discourses of race that muddied such as clear trajectory. As I will
discuss later in the chapter, these tensions come to a head in the film Voices of Malaya.

Five Faces previewed at the Gaumont British Theatre to a private audience consisting of the
press as well as representatives from companies with investments in Malaya and other parts of
the British Empire. Upon its release, Five Faces was warmly received by The Times and
Scotsman and well reviewed by film trade publications.
97
After its pre-lease run at the Academy
Cinema in London, the film garnered an audience of 200,000 in about 120 cinemas in Great
Britain.
98
A flurry of reviews surrounding the film provided an inter-textual tapestry that taught
British audiences about Malaya’s cosmopolitan society. For instance, a write-up about Five
Faces in World Film News featured an anonymous doctor’s opinions about the different races
inhabiting Malaya so that the viewer would appreciate the accuracy of the film’s portrayal of
Malayan society.
99
Outside of cinema theaters, the film had many private showings at
universities, film societies, world's fairs, and was even televised.
100
Eventually, American and
Canadian distributors purchased rights to Five Faces and it was also distributed to American
schools.
101

The film continued to have a healthy public life in England and America for years after
its release. After commercial interest waned, the Imperial Institute screened the film several

204

times a year well into 1949. Furthermore, with renewed public interest in British Southeast Asian
territories on the onset of WWII, the British Council revised the film for world circulation as part
of their propaganda about the British Empire.
102
Via the circulation channels of the British
Council’s film library, Malaya’s five faces travelled widely within the empire and also through
the embassies and consulates in foreign countries. The British Broadcasting Corporation even
used parts of the film for television broadcasts.
103

However, it is difficult to ascertain if the film succeeded at serving any larger nation-
building purpose within Malaya itself. While the Sultans of Pahang and Terengganu, and the
Pertuan Besar (chief leader) of Negri Sembilan saw the rough cut of the film at a private theatre
in London in June 1937, Five Faces only publicly premiered in Malaya two years later at the
1939 Malayan Exhibition conducted by the Malayan Agri-Horticultural Association (M.A.H.A.)
in Kuala Lumpur where it played to a 3000 strong audience.
104
This would have been one of the
first times the Malayan general public would have witnessed an on-screen articulation of Malaya
as a complete and coherent entity. Unlike earlier educational films that sought to teach viewers
specific skills or to raise awareness of issues such as thrift or hygiene, Five Faces of Malaya
painted a broader sense of Malayan-ness and Malaya’s place within the empire for this small
local audience. The exhibition itself embodied the plural racial cosmopolis of Malaya as a site
where each of the five racial groups represented their craftsmanship.
105
Echoed in Five Faces,
the very logic of the exhibition was a microcosm of the politics of cosmopolitan pluralism
espoused by the state.
Probably due to a lack of sound projection facilities in the temporary atap-roofed building
in which it was screened, the film had no audio or explanatory captions. Without the voice over,
which performed most of the narrative work and provided continuity in the film, bare images lent

205

themselves to re-scripting at the mercy of the audience. The audience gladly filled in for the lack
of narration with their own commentary with young Malays “shouting excitedly as they
recognized on the screen the regal figures of a Sultan or a demonstration of a kampong game.”
106

It is unclear what alternative accounts replaced the carefully extolled narrative commentary
about Malaya as the empire's cosmopolitan dream. While their words have been lost from record,
this is nevertheless a moment of unruliness. Released from sound though not completely freed
from their arrangement in the reel, these wild images float above the narrative’s meaning-
making, tethered to colonial discourse though not fully submerged within it.
Regardless of how it was received at its Malayan premier, the film continued to lead a very
low-key existence in Malaya. According to my sources, the Malayan Exhibition was the only
time the film was publicly screened in Malaya even though reviewers in Malaya felt strongly that
the film ought “to be shown in every cinema throughout the country.”
107
Apart from the
screening at the exhibition, it had only been viewed by the Sultan and a few privileged members
of the civil service from Selangor during the year of its release.
108

It is unclear why the film was never made available for general release domestically.
Paper trails regarding the film’s circulation run dry when it comes to its distribution in Malaya.
One reason was that sound projection facilities available in schools and other public venues in
Malaya were still relatively limited in the late 1930s making the screening of this film difficult.
Also, unlike the 1938 Malaya film, Five Faces was not edited in a manner that made it amenable
to being dissected into instructional segments about Malaya’s industries. It may have been the
case that this since the film was produced largely for audiences outside Malaya as publicity for
British imperial success, it was aggressively publicized and distributed for an overseas market

206

but not domestically. If released commercially in Malaya, it was unlikely that it would have had
a successful run.
I would argue also that at the level of the F.M.S. Government there was simply little
reason to screen Five Faces of Malaya domestically at that point in time. Until after WWII, the
government had no impetus to foster a “national” identity locally; nor was the idea one that
would have seemed possible. The population as a whole had little reason to have developed a
cohesive “national” spirit. Malayan society was made up of people of different national origins,
religions, culture and languages. The Malays held loyalties to their particular Sultans while the
Chinese and Indians harbored loyalties to distinct clans, dialect groups, or regions.
109
Culturally,
the Chinese and Indians were not as readily assimilated into Malay society, unlike the
Indonesians who were Muslims and shared certain language and cultural similarities.
110
Power
was also divided between two groups, with political power lying largely with the Malays and
economic influence with the Chinese. The idea of a coherent colony was ironically of greater
relevance to those outside Malaya than to Malayans themselves. Furthermore, the British may
have found it strategically expedient that there be no unifying local patriotism amongst
Malayans.
111
United national fronts typically meant anti-imperial agitation that was bad for
business. Cosmopolitan views of Malaya, though useful in projecting visions of Empire for the
metropole and abroad, had less immediacy in fostering national identities domestically in
Malaya. This was a project that the F.M.S. Government would only take up with urgency
following the Japanese occupation.

207

Ruptures of a Time-Lagged Medium: Voices of Malaya and Post-War Nationalisms

Malaya fell under the Japanese during the Pacific War and was occupied from 1941 to 1945.
During the years of occupation, the new Japanese powers used film extensively as a propaganda
machine. Oral histories of the Japanese occupation in Singapore relayed multiple accounts of
how the Japanese brought film cameras during march-ins to film the takeover. British prisoners
of war were made to march before newsreel cameras, while their arduous labors on the Thai-
Burma railway were also captured on film.
112
To discredit the Allied forces while raising public
opinions of the Japanese, these films were later shown as propaganda to Malayans in public
cinemas as well as in schools and housing areas.
113
There is also evidence of mobile films being
used to reach out to the general population. Films arrived via truck at the Endau Settlement in
Johore (also known as the New Syonan Model Farm) where they were screened films at the
school hall.
114
In addition to the propaganda films detailing the fall of Singapore and the Malaya
campaign, the Japanese also brought in cultural films promoting Japanese life, newsreels, and
films on other patriotic themes.
115
The extensive showings of propaganda films by the Japanese
during the Occupation no doubt shaped visual cultures in Malaya immensely. While it is
regrettably beyond the scope of this dissertation to explore this important part of the history of
educational film in Southeast Asia (this dissertation being centered on the British imperial
experience), other scholars have written on this topic elsewhere.
116

In September 1945, the British returned to a drastically changed Malaya. In the months
that followed the return of Malaya to colonial administration, anti-British sentiment thrived amid
desperate food shortages, a shattered economy, and a broken social and administrative system. In
these turbulent years, state, nation and fundamental definitions of citizenship underwent violent

208

transformations even as colonial capital tried to regain lost footing. Scholars mark the post-
WWII reconstruction period as the decade in which racial division openly became a means of
social and political identity. The war had coalesced preexisting ethnic solidarities into racially
distinct nationalisms.
117
Exacerbating inter-racial hostility, Japanese racial policies had adopted a
divide-and-rule policy to obtain the support of the Malays, particularly against the Chinese.
118

Even before the re-entry of British governance in 1945, inter-racial violence in the region
erupted in the lawless vacuum during the interregnum. Sino-Malay distrust resulted in serious
communal clashes across many states toward the last quarter of 1945.
119
Malaya's “plural
society”—once the poster child of successful colonial management—had crumbled.
After the war, Malaya’s pluralism fractured into nationalist alignments divided along
ethnic lines. Described as “The Malayan Spring,” the years between the British reoccupation in
September 1945 and the declaration of the Emergency in July 1948 saw the formation of
ethnically organized political parties and nationalist solidarities.
120
Competing ideas about
political freedom from the British were articulated though the self-interest of ethnic
communities. The United Malays National Organization (UMNO) emerged as the center of
Malay nationalism while various Chinese political parties strived to articulate Chinese concerns.
Yet, even as the social fabric of Malaya was strained by the after-math of war and by
deepening racial solidarities that threatened to cleave society into ethnic enclaves, the British
government in Malaya fervently drove the idea of a unified Malaya. On 22 January 1946, the
Colonial Office published a White Paper declaring that the ten different states that constituted
British Malaya (excluding Singapore) would be combined under a Malayan Union, united by a
common citizenship under the British Crown. This constitution gave equal rights to all races
whether born in the country or naturalized immigrants.

209

The Malayan Union initiated a racial crisis. This declaration flew in the face of pre-war
policy and overturned the principles of British stewardship that held that the Malays would be
given a privileged position as the people of the country above those of the other immigrant Asian
races. Under this new state formation, 80% of the Chinese in Malaya would qualify for Malayan
citizenship, thus granting citizenship rights for non-Malays and immigrant communities.
121

Coming at a point when the Malay community faced an uncertain future, the White Paper
brought on bitter accusations that the British had betrayed the cardinal principle of their
trusteeship—to uphold Malaya as the land of the Malays.
122
Not only were the powers of the
traditional Malay Rulers ignobly confined to being “spiritual and traditional leaders,” many
Malays felt that the status of the rakyat (people) differed little from that of “the Red Indians in
North America and the aborigines of Australia.”
123

The 1948 film, Voices of Malaya, embodies how these racial tensions strained the
government’s aspirations towards an ethnically plural democracy founded on a common
citizenship. Politically awakened, Malayans were ill-disciplined and unruly subjects from the
government’s point of view, rushing ahead with ideas of nationalism and independence,
unwilling to return to being “ideal” colonial citizens who were accepting of their prescribed role
in society. Caught between shifting national formations and unstable citizenships during the
years that lapsed between its filming, post-production, and final release, the film is a strained
attempt to hold together a vision of a country that was threatening to come apart after the war.
Furthermore, conflicting ideas about the work that films ought to do in society clashed in
the making of Voices of Malaya. The Crown Film Unit had initially intended Voices of Malaya
to be a “clear and concise” account of events in Malaya since the end of the war. It planned to
document the Malayan people, their livelihood and the problems they face, “to put forward all

210

sides of the argument to enable a fair judgment to be made.”
124
However, Malayan officials
wanted the film to be shown for educational purposes and so insisted on a film that produced an
idealized concept of the Malaya that they were working toward building. The Crown Film Unit
encountered first hand, the discrepancy between the country that the Malayan government
wanted to portray/produce, and the Malaya that was changing rapidly before the lens of the
camera. As the rest of this section will discuss, the end product awkwardly straddles these two
positions. Sitting between its roles of persuasion and documentation, Voices of Malaya strives to
accurately depict Malaya’s troubles while being compelled to also present the idealized
community that the Malayan government was keen to produce.

Danny Densham and Ralph Elton catapulted into a politically volatile Malaya, camera in hand, a
few days before the official Japanese surrender in 1945. The filming of Voices of Malaya
happened quite by accident. As a detachment from the Crown Film Unit (an army service film
unit that filmed newsreel footage of the war), Densham and Elton had initially been destined for
Singapore but found themselves along the Malacca Straits on another assignment. When they
heard the news on September 3
rd
that the British were going to take over the operation of Penang
island, Densham and Elton paid a skipper to take them ashore. They set their cameras up on the
jetty awaiting the arrival of the first landing party. The filmmakers realized that before them was
“a great opportunity to put on record the history of a country as it unfolded before our
camera.”
125
The crew headquartered in Kuala Kangsar and shot most of the film in that region of
Perak, a state which offered a stunning diversity of urban, rural, and deep jungle landscapes, as
well as sizable representations from each of Malaya’s major ethnic groups.

211

Little did they know however, that the film’s production could not keep pace with the
rapidly changing political climate that took hold of Malaya from 1945 to 1948. Unwilling to
accept the new political conditions that the government dictated, Malayans disrupted narratives
of colonial plural society with ethnic nationalisms of their own. At work here was the “failure”
of the medium to keep up with a history shaped actively by “subaltern” agencies. The non-
immediacy of the cinema—its time-laggedness—the months it took between the capturing of an
image through the lens of the camera and its final edited appearance before a crowd led to its
ultimate redundancy. Ralph Elton, the director, admitted that, “Script writing was very difficult.
We would anticipate history and find that next week we were hopelessly out of date.”
126
At
several points during filming and in post-production, monumental events such as the dissolving
of the Malayan Union and the formation of the Federation, the beginning of the Emergency, and
the rise of ethnic nationalism threw the success story of Malaya’s path toward reconstruction off
track. Owing to these rapidly shifting political situations, it was impossible to shoot to a script.
127

The unit had initially intended to make two 20-minute films, Reconstruction in Penang and
Speed the Parting. The former was intended to be a success story about Malaya’s post-war
rehabilitation while the latter depicted the work of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army
(MPAJA) and Force 136 before the Japanese surrender, the beginning of military administration,
and the eventual handing over by the B.M.A. to the civilian government.
128
However, the unit
deemed Speed the Parting “out of date” even before its completion and so combined its footage
with that from Reconstruction in Penang to form the longer Voices of Malaya.
129
The film took
eight more months of future shooting, and almost a year and a half of post-production.
130

Voices of Malaya begins benignly enough with the first part of the film laying out
Malaya's plural structure before the war. As with Five Faces, Malaya’s plural and cosmopolitan

212

society form the structural logic of the first third of the film, with each “race” being depicted in
terms of their social and economic place in the larger fabric of Malayan society. The Temiars are
again depicted as disappearing “primitives” retreating ever further into the jungle before the
advances of the “invaders”—the term the film uses to describe Malaya's other occupants. The
film introduces the Chinese as hard workers, though increasingly discontent with their lack of
political rights in a country in which they chose to settle. Against the Chendoroh hydroelectric
Dam in Perak and the clanging of a steam engine, a British-accented narrator describes how the
British built 2,000 miles of railways and 2,000 miles of roads, bringing hospitals and law into
Malaya, and “turning Malaya into a most prosperous and contented country.” The Indians, oddly
enough, are given relatively little screen time though the film credits them for assisting the
British as administrators in building up the country. Amid idyllic fishing villages, the Malays
play the part of “easygoing” though increasingly nervous “hosts” to these new immigrants.
Having set up the pre-war plural landscape, the film then transitions toward describing
the complete breakdown of all aspects of civil society during the Japanese occupation. A scene
of a plantation factory in ruins goes by, while diseased and uneducated children present a
discouraging image of Malaya’s future. “Things get overgrown and eaten alive in the tropics,”
says the narrator, “there was nothing but ruin and rot both outside and inside.” The return to the
jungle represented a rupture in the historicist progression of modernity. In 54 days, the narrator
laments, the work of over a hundred years was undone. The unraveling of the Malayan plural
society signified this rupture.
Folded into the native of wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction, the film
positions anti-colonial and anti-Malayan Union activism as a troubling aftermath of the war
rather than the outcome of deep-seated inter-racial tension simmering after decades of

213

problematic social policy under colonial development. For instance, the narrator claims that the
emergence of free vernacular newspapers and the formation of people’s associations and
community councils along ethnic lines were responsible for instigating the ethnic nationalisms
described above. Paraphrase the sentiment on the ground, the narrator asks, “Are the people of
my race, they said, getting their proper place in Malayan life? Who does pull the strings?”
In the second half of the film, unruly Malayan voices rise to the surface, shattering the
illusion of the plural society. The use of “native” voice-over narration, speaking loud and clear in
accented English throughout the film, offers the film an air of authenticity by enabling us to hear
the voices of Malayans themselves as opposed to only English-accented narrations about them.
This self-narration supports the film’s intent of showing a politically awakened, ethnically
diverse Malaya. Here, the film suggests, were the multiple voices in conflict over Malaya’s
future. These discordant voices offered countering views that fragmented any coherent
overarching narrative of national unity. For example, these voices rise against each other when
the film juxtaposes scenes of large crowds at the assemblies conducted by political parties
representing each of the different races. We see each of these assemblies in turn, hearing their
particular grievances. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru addresses a large assembly during a visit to
Singapore and Malaya in March 1946 while a voiceover (intended to be Nehru's) announces that
the world was facing the end of colonialism and that the Indians are now awake to a new
political order. At a Chinese political assembly, a member of the Malayan People’s Anti-
Japanese Army (MPAJA) announces that:
We [Chinese] are nearly half the population. We have worked for Malaya and we
have given our blood for Malaya. Certainly we can asked to be received no longer
as guests but as citizens!

214

The deaths of thousands of Malayan Chinese during the Japanese Occupation for their assistance
to the British placed pressure on the government to support their rights. Right-wing Chinese
chaffed under the continued existence of the Malay Sultans even with the latter’s sovereign
powers clipped. On the Left, the Malayan Communist Party objected the Malayan Union’s lack
of a provision for an elected democratic government.
131

Protesting the formation of the Malayan Union, a Malay speaker before a large rally
argues that Malays were loyal to their Sultans too and were unhappy of being taken advantage of
and “driven under” in their own country. Earlier in the film, a young man with a distinct Malay
accent speaks in a voiceover, “we are the hosts in this country. Others who live here are our
guests. To us Malays, this country is our land.” His voice ringing with earnestness, the narrator
articulates Malay claims to indigeneity and ownership rights over the region that should not be
left aside.
The conflicts that strain the sutures holding Malaya's five races together are represented
through the film’s editing in one particular scene. A rapid montage cuts quickly between scenes
and sounds of the Chinese opera, ballroom dancing, a steam train, a Malayan Communist Party
assembly, men soldering machinery, a farmer in an idyllic paid field, a tribal dance, a Malay
dance, and another ballroom dance scene. This visual and auditory assault of discordant sights
and sounds embody the social upheaval of the times—the struggle between the “races” over
citizenship rights, and between competing ideas of feudalism, democracy, and communism. At
the climax of the film, the fragmentation of the stream of images and sounds into discordant
elements symbolizes the absolute splintering of the coherent colonial society.
And then, after the cacophony of sounds and images, all quietens down again. Nostalgia
for the good old days of simple, almost “pre-political” village life glimmers briefly. Against the

215

haunting tune of a woman humming, scenes of everyday village life (fishing, farming, and the
rebuilding of homes) suggest a desire to return to the imagined idyll of prewar days. Long and
languid takes of a buffalo grazing beside a scenic river harkens back to an Edenic time before
life in Malaya got too complicated. But this scene gives way to the reality of Malaya’s troubles,
replacing images of grazing buffaloes with rubber factories and tin mines struggling to get back
on their feet. The problem with Malaya, the narrator says, is the result of the tensions between
old and new:
In no country today is the struggle between the traditional and the modern world
more intense. Asia like Europe has been ravaged by this conflict of old and new
ideas. By the inability of one race to live with another. By the teething problems
of democracy.

The dire state of Malaya's model plural society, the film suggests, was part of the inevitable trials
of growing up. The film justifies Malaya's political problems as part of the teething pains of a
formative democracy. Learning to live and work in an ethnically plural society, the film argues,
was one of the hallmarks of the progress toward modernity envisioned as the relentless pursuit of
industrial and capitalist development. The political problems surfaced by ethnic nationalism and
anti-imperialism were side effects of modernity, the downside of democracy. Modernity in Five
Faces of Malaya was not the simple march forward but involved disruptive and violent political
awakening that necessarily challenged the colonial state.

In making the film, Elton had tried to recapture the turmoil Malaya was experiencing and
rationalize them according to familiar narratives—the colonial cosmopolis, the tragedy of war,
the nation's subsequent coming-of-age, and tradition versus modernity. By featuring the voices
of Malayans, he had sought to represent some of the political energy among the people—
energies that challenged the colonial government’s formation of the Malaya Union. However, the

216

film’s vision of a conflicted Malaya competed against what the Malayan government intended
the film to be—an embodiment of the ideal Malaya of “future becoming,” as opposed to the
fragmented Malaya that it was. A screening of an advance version of the film in Kuala Lumpur
on 21 February 1948 met with strong displeasure from the audience, which included the High
Commissioner, the Malay chief minister of Selangor, and other high-ranking officials from the
Malayan Civil Service.
These officials found the film to be simply unsuitable for showing in Malaya and were
outraged that it would be shown publicly as an official record of the colony.
132
The committee
accused the filmmakers of making serious blunders detrimental to the political climate of
Malaya. Foremost on their list of woes was that the film’s coverage of political events was at
least two years out of date and only served “to revive old controversies and to accent strongly
inter-racial differences of 1945.”
133
Scenes of Malay opposition to the Malayan Union caused the
whole balance of the political theme to be “hopeless wrong and gives visually a completely
erroneous impression of general agitation”
134
—even though “general agitation” would remain
very much a Malaya’s political scene for more than half a decade to follow.
As I have pointed out, a large part of problem was that filming for Voices of Malaya took
place amid a rapidly shifting political landscape where the meaning and definition of citizenship
and sovereignty was being constantly and violently contested in real time as the film was being
produced. Taking history into their own hands, “unruly” Malayan subjects re-scripted national
narratives in unexpected ways that the medium of film, with its relatively glacial pace of pre and
post-production could not keep pace with. Between the beginning of filming in 1945 and the
edited product in 1948, three eventful years had lapsed. During this time, the ill-fated Malayan
Union was abrogated and a new Malayan Federation had taken its place on 1 February 1948.

217

Under the Federation, a strong central government preserved the unity of Malaya though the
Malay Rulers regained sovereignty over their States therefore preserving the symbol of Malaya
as a Malay country. New citizenship qualifications admitted all Malays but restricted the
proportion of the non-Malay population who had to meet far more stringent requirements.
135

The film also failed to account for new developments in Malayan politics. The unit had
made the grave mistake of shooting the MPAJA at a political assembly as representative of the
sentiments of the Chinese community. The MPAJA was a group that the British government
clearly later began to identify as a “Chinese Communist Organization.”
136
Communist resistance
activities were building up to a fever pitch and Malaya was at the brink of an anti-British,
communist uprising beginning in July 1948 that would later be known as the Malayan
Emergency. Hence, picturing the party and making it synonymous with ethnic Chinese identity
was “thoroughly undesirable to publicize.”
137

The Malayan officials’ desire to use the film as “agent” that envisioned an idealized
Malaya conflicted with Elton’s desire to “document” the Malaya that was taking shape. The
prescriptive and active role that a film could play came into direct contention against its role as a
text that “captured” the world around it. For the rulers of Malaya, scenes of “pre-modern”
Malaya discredited the vision of modernity they sought to pursue and that they believed the film
ought to promote. The committee thought that the film romanticized “primitive” views of
Malaya at the expense of showing off the country’s advancements. Scenes of the Temiar customs
and Malay fishing villages grated nerves while the “one brief view of Singapore and a picture of
a few buildings or a railway engine fail[ed] to give an adequate conception of the development of
the country.”
138
Indignant, Malayan officials felt strongly that a better film could be made locally
by combining leftover footage with the Malayan Film Unit’s coverage of the new Malayan

218

Federation in 1948. The team in fact, demanded that the Crown Film Unit send its footage back
to Malaya so that the MFU could do a more pleasing more up-to-date version.
These political upsets put pressure on the unit to “tidy up” the Malaya story. The editing
team, led by Terry Trench, returned to the cutting room. Mary Heathcott, a columnist for The
Straits Times, reported that an earlier version of the film contained commentary described
Malaya’s internal problems—more scenes exploring the racial and political tensions that
surfaced during the Malayan Union saga. This is also likely to be the version of the film
described in trade journals before its release.
139
But after complaints from the Federation
Government who insisted that “Everything in the garden's lovely,” the commentary was given a
more optimistic spin.
140

The film’s closing remarks were considerably tweaked. A script approved on 9
th
January
1948 reads,
Progress is seldom simple, but Malaya is a naturally rich country with a long
tradition of peace. The chances are in her favor...if the four races can build up a
common loyalty to Malaya.
141

The final version of the film at the Imperial War Museum however reads,
Malaya has a long tradition of peace. The good will with which all communities
have accepted the new constitution gives confidence that her problems will be
solved as the four races build up a common loyalty to Malaya!

Announced against picturesque backgrounds of the setting sun on a beach and a padi field, the
film’s new ending scrambles to paint a positive image of the future of Malaya, as compared to
the somewhat foreboding concluding remarks of the earlier version.
Elton reconfigured the final version of the film to accommodate official discourse about
Malaya's new solidarity and to tone down depictions of civil unrest. The state was invested in
foregrounding how the new Federation was embraced by all races. Grooming Malaya for

219

eventual self-government while stabilizing the region for British business were held as distant
glimmering goals after the more immediate concerns of anti-colonial mass movement and leftist
sympathy were fixed.
142
In light of these issues, it was imperative that officials project an image
of Malaya that acknowledged its ethnic troubles but also emphasized its good progress on the
path toward national solidarity.
After a delay of several more months, Voices of Malaya screened to a private audience at
the Royal Empire Society hall in London, April 1948. Reviewers for the film felt that the
optimistic commentary did not truthfully represent the on-going crisis regarding the outbreak of
communist violence.
143
Yet, nostalgia filled the air as the 200-strong audience, which included
ex-Malayan businessmen and civil servants, relived the beauty of Malaya through the Crown
Film Unit’s commendable photography. In spite of the inaccuracies, Heathcott wrote that the
film “succeeds admirably. It is free from bias, of the faintest breath of patronage, and has a warm
touching humanity
144
[…].” A journalist present at the screening found that even though the film
was somewhat outdated, it adequately encapsulated the post-war troubles in terms of “an intense
struggle between the old traditional ways and the needs of the modern world.”
145
Subsequently,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer distributed Voices of Malaya to 468 cinemas throughout Great Britain
and Ireland in 1949.
After some further delay, the Public Relations department in Malaya passed the film on
to a Malayan distribution company in 1950 where it was screened at the Alhambra theatre in
Singapore, rather unceremoniously, as a second feature to a cowboy picture.
146
An audience
member, identified only as “a Chinese,” encountered the film quite by accident and expressed his
concern that it would disappear into oblivion, given the dearth of publicity surrounding the film.

220

He considered the film a compelling survey of Malaya that citizens should “possess in their
minds […] before self-government can be successfully carried out.”
147

It is unknown why the film's release in Malaya was delayed and why it had been given so
little publicity upon its release in the country. The Malayan government clearly disapproved of
the film for the reasons I have described, and for this alone they would have had little desire to
screen it for educational purposes. By then, Malaya was already in the grip of the Emergency
war where independence was nowhere in sight; a film such as this would have added fuel to the
fire. Commercial distributors themselves found little reason to publicize the film instead of more
potentially profitable Hollywood productions. If the film was indeed intended for domestic
audiences at any point, it certainly fell short of this ambition. Caught between official directives
to paint a promising picture of Malaya and the reality of civil unrest on the ground at the point
during which it was filmed, Voices of Malaya struggled with the limitations of the medium; the
time it took for an image to be shot until the time it took for the finished film to be seen was
enough to make it obsolete. History moved too fast for film to keep up; unruly colonial citizens
would not be still for long enough.

Conclusion

Just as idealized visions of empire families and cosmopolitan colonies cities were once part of
the colonial imaginary in the 1930s, they were just as easily shown to be fragile and ephemeral
things. This chapter has traced the trope of the “plural society” from its first appearances in the
Malaya film of 1928, to the height of its promise in Five Faces of Malaya in 1938 and its
fragmentation in Voices of Malaya ten years later. These three films articulated larger visions of

221

the British Empire through the ways in which the imperial imaginary sought to create Malaya
through the might of the cinematic medium. Malaya was the “picturehouse” of Commonwealth
ideals—racialized co-operation under the unifying goal of imperial capitalism.
The language of the medium—its ability to create an imagined plural society within its
synthetic world—sought to “produce” a Malaya that was larger than life. Voice over narration,
music, and the editing together of scenes from disparate cultures, people, and parts of the
country, crafted an idealized plural cosmopolis that existed more fully within the reel than it did
in reality. In some cases films were repurposed as educational tools within Malaya itself where
they served to teach locals about the various Malayan industries and the cultures of the people
who constituted it. For the most part though, as was certainly the case for the three films I have
discussed, the intended audience was largely abroad (the U.S., U.K., and other British
territories). Malaya’s plural society was perhaps more “real” to those who watched these films
thousands of miles away, than to those who lived in the everyday reality of Malaya itself.
Unruly colonial populations also defied the state’s attempts to discipline them. Unable to
sit gamely before the camera, vocal citizens and nationalist groups rushed ahead to forge a
history of their own. In doing so these cinematic subjects ruptured the narrative of the state that
was to be told on film. Even as films sought to construct an imagined community on celluloid,
they failed to escape the inevitable complexities that muddied the idea of a “successful” colonial
society—as was the case for Voices of Malaya. Colonial educational and propaganda films were
not always transparent mouthpieces for colonial discourse. Unable to keep out and keep up with
the unruly agencies of their subjects, time-lagged films nursed contradictions and instabilities
that unmasked the cinema as a house of glass.

1
“Need for More Films of Malayan Life Stressed”, The Straits Times, 13 June 1939, 16.

222

2
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Oxon: Routledge,
1994),145.
3
See for example, contributions by Lee Grieveson, Tom Rice, Scott Anthony, and Priya Jaikumar in Empire and
Film. These essays discuss various dimensions whereby films made in and about the colonies produced an “accurate
imagination” of colonial spaces among the British public. Jaikumar, “An ‘Accurate Imagination’: Place, Map and
Archive as Spatial Objects of Film History,” in Empire and Film, eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London:
British Film Institute, 2011), 172.
4
Existing tensions between the Malays and the Orang Asli over claims to indigeneity have and continue to have
immense consequences, though it is beyond the scope of this work to enter this debate.
5
Since Malays were primarily farmers and fishermen who (according to colonial rhetoric) supposedly expressed a
disinterest toward wage labor, the British encouraged the immigration of people from other parts of Asia to meet the
demand for workers. Richard Winstedt, The Malays: A Cultural History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1961), 120-121. S. Husin Ali, Malay Peasant Society and Leadership (London, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 15-22.
6
Colin E.R. Abraham, “Racial and ethnic manipulation in colonial Malaya”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 6, no. 1
(1983): 22.
7
Though plantation labor was a key site of economic employment, English educated Tamils worked in clerical
positions, while Sikhs, Punjabis and north Indians worked for the police and other departments. Generally speaking
many “Chettiar” Tamils were moneylenders and while south Indian Muslims were retailers in the private sector. For
an in-depth study see Kernial Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya.; and Sinnapah Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia
and Singapore (Bombay and Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1970).
8
Imperial War Museum, Private Papers of Colonel J L H Davis CBE DSO, Box 6, File 09/4/6, 11/1-11/5, Papers
Relating to Squatters and Chinese Affairs in Malaya, February 1949-May 1951”, Letter to Macdonald (sender un-
named), dated 15th July 1949.
9
The 1920 Immigration Restriction Ordinance and the 1933 Aliens Ordinance restricted Chinese male immigration
into Malaya but had no such restrictions on the immigration of women. As a result, sex ratios became better
balanced and coolies were able to marry immigrant peasant women.
10
Hirschman, “The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaya”, 567.
11
As Benedict Anderson argues, the “fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and
only one– extremely clear place. No fractions.” Anderson, Imagined Communities, 166.
12
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994),
132.
13
John S. Furnivall, Progress and Welfare in Southeast Asia: A Comparison of Colonial Policy and Practice (New
York: Secretariat, Institute of Pacific relations, 1941), 61; cited in Tim Harper, The End of Empire and the Making
of Malaya (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.
14
Adeline Koh, Inventing Malayness: Race, Education and Englishness in Colonial Malaya, Ph.D. Dissertation,
Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, 2008: 19.
15
Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds 1948-1958
(Richmond: Curzon Press, 2002), 7.
16
Lim, ‘British colonial administration and the “ethnic division of labor”, 28–66. Abraham, “Racial and ethnic
manipulation in colonial Malaya”, 18-32. A.J. Stockwell describes how the British strengthened racial division;
manipulating “ethnic stereotypic through administrative practice combined with functional differentiation of
Malaya’s communities to create a plural society during the colonial period.” Stockwell, A.J. “The White Man’s
Burden and Brown Humanity: Colonialism and Ethnicity in British Malaya,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social
Science 10, no. 1 (1982): 60.
17
Maurice Freedman, “The growth of a plural society in Malaya,” Pacific Affairs 33., no.2 (Jun 1960): 167.
18
Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya,14, 27.
19
Sandra Khor, “Common Ground: Race and the colonial universe in British Malaya,” Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 40, iss.03 (2009): 594.
20
Defining “cosmopolitanism” as a “‘double-consciousness’ of global community and local, dynamic,
multiculturalism,”

she points towards 1930s Penang as an example where modern girls practiced hybrid cultural
traditions and cross-cultural dialogue.

Lynn Hollen Lees, “Being British in Malaya, 1890–1940,” Journal of British
Studies 48, no.1 (2009): 77.
21
Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire, 50.

223

22
Tom Rice, “Exhibiting Africa: British Instructional Films and the Empire Series (1925-9)” in Empire and Film,
eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 115-120.
23
The Straits Times reported that exports rose from 1193255 to 1585508 cases in the four years after the Malay
States Information Agency started its pineapple campaign in 1927. “Boosting Malaya”, The Straits Times, 25 July
1932, 10. See also, “Malayan Information Agency”, The Straits Times, 13 July 1931, 6, and “Advertising Malaya's
Charms,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 11 August 1931, 6.
24
“Malayan interests at home,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 23rd January 1931, 8. While
this article refers to the film company as Peerless Pictures, a document from the Malaysia National Archives
identifies the company as Ideal Film Limited. A.N.M. Sel.Sec.G 1499/1931 “Malayan Pineapple Cookery
Demonstration Film”, Letter from J.F. Owen, dated June 2, 1931.
25
Richard A Hawkins, “The pineapple canning industry during the world depression of the 1930s,” Business History
31, Iss. 4 (1989), 55.
26
A.N.M. Sel.Sec.G 1499/1931 “Malayan Pineapple Cookery Demonstration Film”, Letter from J.F. Owen, dated
June 2, 1931.
27
Walter Elliot, “The Work of the Empire Marketing Board”, paper presented at the Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Arts, 11 May 1931, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts LXXIX, no. 4101 (June 26, 1931):738. The
events precipitating the “imperial preference” campaign is described in Tim Rooth, British Protectionism and the
International Economy: Overseas Commercial Policy in the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
28
Stephen Constantine, “’Bringing the Empire Alive’ The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926-
33” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, (ed.) John M Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986),
192.
29
On one occasion, a Publicity Agent at an exhibition had to disabuse an elderly lady who had previously believed
that Malaya was a disease. A.N.M. G.1132/30, F.M.S. Report on the Administration of the Malayan Information
Agency, 1929, no.13 of 1930: 2.
30
Owen, would also become the agent behind the pineapple films. A.N.M. Sel.Sec.G. 2918/1345 Letter from Sd.
Passfield.
31
The emerging awareness of the significance of film in the promotion and education of the Empire is described in
Chapter 1 of this dissertation. A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937, Letter from H.B. Ellerton from the Malay States
Information Agency to The Under Secretary of the F.M.S., dated 28th October 1926.
32
A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937, circular correspondence entry by C.R., dated 1st December 1926.
33
The full description reads, “The Greville Brothers, who are responsible for the unique conception of producing
films of the little-known and still savage places of the world, are both travelers of wide experience and profound
knowledge of the dark and uncivilized regions, and have many times gone in search of big game in company with
famous hunters, including one of such fame as the late F.C. Selous.” British Film Institute, Special Collections,
“Production and Distribution Company Material”, Greville Brothers, Cinematography with a Purpose, London,
publicity booklet, 1927: 1.
34
British Film Institute, Special Collections, “Production and Distribution Company Material”, Greville Brothers,
Cinematography with a Purpose, London, publicity booklet, 1927: 4.
35
Though the Malay States Information Agency might certainly have taken a liking to the Greville Brother’s appeal
as roughish itinerant film professionals invested in uplifting public opinion of the Empire, the Brothers were likely
hired due to the fact that they had ties with the Crown Agents for the Colonies and had proposed to undertake the
Malayan film project for almost £300 less than their competitor, British Instructional Films. A.N.M. N.S.SEC.
217/1927 Letter from V.H. Greville for Greville Bros. to H.B. Ellerton for Malay States Information Agency, dated
26th March 1927.
36
A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937 Circular from A.F. Richards, Under Secretary to Government, Federated Malay States,
dated 21st July 1927.
37
A.N.M. N.S.Sec. 217/1927 Letter from H.B. Ellerton from the Malay States Information Agency, to The Under
Secretary of the F.M.S., dated 1st June 1927.
38
Although, to this author's knowledge, a copy of the full popular version of the film no longer exists, its shooting
script can be found in the Malaysia National Archives. The film Malaya No.12 held at the British Film Institute
archives, is also compiled from footage used in the longer version of Malaya.
39
Unfederated Malay States did not formally accept Residents but were still brought within British influence, to a
lesser extent, through a British “adviser.”
40
Larkin, Signal and Noise, 36.
41
“Our London Letter,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 14 April 1939, 3.

224

42
Tom Rice, Analysis of Malaya no.12, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1656, accessed 19th December 2013.
43
A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937, circular correspondence entry by J.H.M.R., dated 27th November 1926.
44
“Our London Letter,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 28 September 1927, 7.
45
N.S.Sec.Gen. 1242/1929 Letter from H.B. Ellerton from the Malay States Information Agency, to The Under
Secretary of the F.M.S., dated 28th June 1928.
46
“London Letter: The New Malayan Film,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 1 February 1928,
18.
47
N.S.Sec.Gen. 1242/1929 Letter from H.B. Ellerton from the Malay States Information Agency, to The Under
Secretary of the F.M.S., dated 28th June 1928.
48
Soon after completing this project, both Greville brothers died for unknown reasons. To move forward, H.B.
Ellerton of the Malay States Information Agency sought the services of Mr. Bruce Woolf, managing director British
Instructional Films and Pro Patria Films Ltd, to distribute the technical version of the Malaya film worldwide.
A.N.M. G.465/29. F.M.S. Report on the Administration of the Malayan Information Agency for the Year 1928,
No.11 of 1929: 2. A.N.M. Sel.Sec.G. 1169/1929 Letter from H.B. Ellerton, agent from Malay States Information
Agency to the Under-Secretary to Government F.M.S., dated 13th December 1928.
49
“New Malayan Film for Exhibition,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 14th January 1928, 7.
50
“Popularizing Malaya Film,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 5 May 1928, 17.
51
“London Letter: The New Malayan Film,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 1 February 1928,
18. “Our London Letter: The Malaya Film Sectionalized,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 1
March 1928, 16.
52
The film that exists at the British Film Institute at the time of this writing, under the title Malaya no.12: Its
Relation to Empire (1927) is the twelfth installment in the technical series which runs at 2,173 feet. Tom Rice
suggests that Malaya no.12 may also have well have been used as propaganda to encourage British immigration to
Malaya. Rice, “Analysis of Malaya no.12”. http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1656, accessed 19th December
2013.
53
A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937 Enclosure 6A, 1927.
54
Ibid.
55
“Malayan Matters at Home,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 30 August 1930, 8. “Malayan
Information Agency,” The Straits Times, 13 July 1931, 6.
56
In 1931, they managed to screen at least 1282 times after having already had several thousand bookings for the
previous year. The films in this “popular” series were entitled “Through Malaya in Search of the Picturesque,” “The
Land of Eternal Summer,” “The Garden of the East,” “The Land of Golden Sunshine,” “Picturesque Workers of
Malaya,” and “The Country of Perpetual Contrast.” A.N.M. G.1132/30, F.M.S. Report on the Administration of the
Malayan Information Agency, 1929, no.13 of 1930: 6. “Malayan Information Agency,” The Straits Times, 13 July
1931, 6. “Advertising Malaya's Charms,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 11 August 1931, 6.
The collection of films held by the Malayan Information Agency was later taken over by the Empire Marketing
Board Film Library in 1932. The series of six films continued to be shown at cinema houses and the Imperial
Institute though by then they were very much worn. A.N.M. F.S.G.568/33. F.M.S. Report on the Administration of
the Malayan Information Agency for the Year 1932, no.14 of 1933, 2.
57
A.N.M. F.S. 1070/34. F.M.S. Report on the Administration of the Malayan Information Agency for the year 1933,
no.8 of 1934: 5.
58
Ibid., 11.
59
“The Cinema World”, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 9 November 1929, 3.
60
“The Film in Education,” The Straits Times, May 2 1929, 8.
61
Ibid.
62
“Film that Should be Shown Throughout Malaya,” The Straits Times, 8 August 1939, 14.
63
Constantine, “‘Bringing the Empire Alive’ The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926-33”,
216.
64
Nadine Chan, “‘Remember the Empire, Filled with Your Cousins’: Poetic Exposition in the Documentaries of the
Empire Marketing Board,” Studies in Documentary Film 7, no.2 (June 2013): 107-108.
65
Opening speech by Ormsby Gore, Colonial Empire Marketing Board, Minutes of first meeting held in the
Colonial Office Conference Room, Wednesday, 20th October, 1937, p.2.
66
Reply to Mr. Ormsby Gore by Mr. Clement Davies, Colonial Empire Marketing Board, Minutes of first meeting
held in the Colonial Office Conference Room, Wednesday, 20th October, 1937, p.5.

225

67
Chan, “‘Remember the Empire, Filled with Your Cousins’: Poetic Exposition in the Documentaries of the Empire
Marketing Board”, 106.
68
I have explored this argument elsewhere, “‘Remember the Empire, Filled with Your Cousins’: Poetic Exposition
in the Documentaries of the Empire Marketing Board,” 107-108.
69
Lee Grieveson, “The Cinema and the (Common)Wealth of Nations”, 73-115. Constantine, “’Bringing the Empire
Alive’ The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926-33”, 192-231.
70
Scott Anthony, “Imperialism and Internationalism: The British Documentary Movement and the Legacy of the
Empire Marketing Board” in Empire and Film, (eds.) Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (London: Palgrave
Macmillan), 138.
71
N.A. CO 852/228/1 Circular correspondence by C. Eastwood, dated 21 September 1939.
72
N.A. CO 852/228/1 “Memorandum on the need in U.S.A. for Propaganda on the Practical Application of
‘Trusteeship’ and the Social Services in the Colonies” by Sir William McLean, dated 21 September 1939: 1.
73
Richard Griffith, “Films at the New York World’s Fair,” in Documentary News Letter (February 1940), 3.
74
The company was about to shoot a series of travel films for Imperial Airways Ltd and planned to stop at Penang
and Singapore en route from England to Australia. For the historical significance of this series of films see Scott
Anthony, “The Future's in the Air: Imperial Airways and the British Documentary Film Movement,” Journal of
British Cinema and Television 8, Iss.3 (2011), 301-321. A.N.M. K.1132/1936 Letter from Ralph Keane, Director of
Productions of the Strand Film Company to E. Jago, from the Malayan Information Agency dated 19th September
1936.
75
“Five Faces,” Kinematograph Weekly, 24 March 1938.
76
A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937. Letter from District Officer Klang, recipient unnamed, dated 28th January 1937. T
The costs of production were shared between the SS, FMS, and UFMS. The Straits Settlements paid 25% of the
costs. See “Five Faces of Malaya,” The Straits Times, 27th February 1939, 13. The Kelantan Government agreed to
contribute 5% of the total cost on condition that the company film some scenes in Kelantan. A.N.M. K. 1132/1936
Letter from J.S. Marpherson to the Secretary to the High Commissioner for the Malay States, Singapore dated 15th
November, 1936. Though the Malayan government had initially planned for a two-reel film at the cost of GBP1,500,
the extra footage was too good to be tossed and the committee agreed to pay Strand an additional GBP250 for a
three reel product. A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937 Extract from the minutes of a meeting of the Finance Committee of
the Federal Council help in Council Chamber, Kuala Lumpur, on Monday the 28th of June, 1937.
77
Bare-breasted “native” women made for arresting publicity material. Amy Staples, “Popular Ethnography and
Public Consumption Sites of Contestation in Museum Sponsored Expeditionary Film,” The Moving Image 5, no.2
(Fall 2005): 54.
78
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge,
1995), 30.
79
Daniel P. S Goh, “Imperialism and `medieval’ Natives The Malay Image in Anglo-American Travelogues and
Colonialism in Malaya and the Philippines,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no.3 (2007): 325.
80
“The first part of the new film might well be devoted to the jungle and kampong – Malaya as it would have been
but for its development as part of the British Empire. Details of Malay life, customs, industries and pastimes might
be given their place in that part. ⁠” A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937, Letter from District Officer Klang, recipient unnamed,
dated 28th January 1937. A.N.M. Sel.Sec. 647/1937, Letter from District Officer Klang, recipient unnamed, dated
28th January 1937.
81
“Talkie films of Malayan life for world's screens,” The Straits Times, 28 January 1937, 12.
82
Lim, ‘British colonial administration and the “ethnic division of labor”, 37.
83
Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham and London: Duke
University Press), 102.
84
Ibid., 103.
85
In 1912 for instance a “no rubber” stipulation for land acquisitions was established, preventing the purchase of
land for the purposes of rubber planting. This measure purportedly preserved the traditional way of life in Malay
kampongs, though it also had the more insidious effect of keeping Malay smallholders from flooding the rubber
market with cheaply produced rubber. Lim, “British Colonial Administration and the 'Ethnic Division of Labor' in
Malaya”, 37. Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (New York: State University of New York
Press, 2010), 30.
86
In 1913, a Malay reservation enactment claimed to protect the “birthright and inheritance of the Malays” by
discouraging rubber planting among Malays in these areas, insisting on “more traditional forms” of cultivation such
as the padi.

In the 1930s, increasing pressures on kampong (village) smallholdings from the expansion of

226

commercial plantations and Chinese smallholdings made it difficult for Malay landowners to make a living off small
farms.

87
“Five Faces: An exclusive note on the making of Strand’s new film, together with some observations on the races,
customs and love life of the Malayans, by a doctor who spent many years among them,” World Film News 3, no.2
(May/June 1938), 55 (Author unnamed).
88
Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native, 60. James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
89
“Five Faces: An exclusive note on the making of Strand’s new film, together with some observations on the races,
customs and love life of the Malayans, by a doctor who spent many years among them,” World Film News, vol.3,
no.2. May/June 1938, p.55. [Author unnamed]
90
“'Five Faces' of Malaya at holiday exhibition”, The Straits Times, 7 August 1939, p.13. “Film that should be
shown throughout Malaya”, The Straits Times, 8 August 1939, p.14.
91
“Five Faces: An exclusive note on the making of Strand’s new film, together with some observations on the races,
customs and love life of the Malayans, by a doctor who spent many years among them,” World Film News 3, no.2
(May/June 1938): 55 (Author unnamed).
92
“Five Faces,” Kinematograph Weekly (March 24th 1938).
93
Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya, 264.

94
Ibid.
95
Joel S Kahn, Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 68.
96
“Film that should be shown throughout Malaya,” The Straits Times, 8 August 1939, 14.
97
A.N.M. F.S. 1364/39. F.M.S. Report on the Administration of the Malayan Information Agency for the year 1938,
No.17 of 1939: 11.
98
“Malaya Film Screened in Britain and U.S.”, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 27 May 1940,
5.
99
Unfortunately, he proceeded to sketch out his views on the “Sakai,” Malays, Chinese, Indians and Europeans with
the broadest and most stereotypical strokes.” Five Faces: An exclusive note on the making of Strand’s new film,
together with some observations on the races, customs and love life of the Malayans, by a doctor who spent many
years among them,” World Film News 3, no.2 (May/June 1938): 55 (Author unnamed).
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid.
102
“Malaya Film Screened in Britain and U.S.”, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 27 May 1940,
5.
103
A.N.M. F.S. 12411/50 F.M.S. Report on the Administration of the Malayan Information Agency for the year
1949, no.12 of 1950: 7.
104
“Malaya on the Screen,” The Straits Times, 3 June 1937, 10. “A Film Of The Malay States,” The Times, 22 May
1937, 10. “'Five Faces' of Malaya at holiday exhibition,” The Straits Times, 7 August 1939, 13.
105
The “Orang Asli” were represented by a stand of Sakai blow-pipes. Artists and craftspeople from the various
Malay states demonstrated the pottery, basket-making, looming, and silver work that was thought to represent the
artisanal nature of the Malay demographic. The Indians featured rather predictably in the vegetable and horticultural
exhibits while the Chinese put up flowers, photography, art, and vegetable and fruit stands. British officials were
physically visible running things, coordinating the cinematograph screening and parades, and even working in
crowd control. H.L. Barnett, “The Sixteenth Malayan Exhibition”, The Malayan Agricultural Journal XXVII, no.8,
August 1939: 361-370.
106
“Film that should be shown throughout Malaya”, The Straits Times, 8 August 1939, 14.
107
“Malaya Film Screened in Britain and U.S.”, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 27 May 1940,
5. “Film that should be shown throughout Malaya,” The Straits Times, 8 August 1939, 14.
108
“'Five Faces' of Malaya at holiday exhibition”, The Straits Times, 7 August 1939, 13.
109
There were other divisions as well such as whether one was Malaya or China-born, or was English-speaking or
not, while further differences in linguistic and social statuses made Malaya a place of strong communalism before
the war. K.J. Ratnam, Communalism and the Political Process in Malaya. Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: University of
Malaya Press, 1965), 5.
110
Ibid., 4.
111
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge,
M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 100.

227

112
Harold Buchanan Goulding, oral history interview, 27 Jun 1981, National Archives of Singapore Imperial War
Museum Collection, Accession Number E000103. Raymond Savage Percival, oral history interview 7 Apr 1981,
National Archives of Singapore Imperial War Museum Collection, Accession Number E000105.
113
Benedict De Souza, oral history interview, 14 Jun 1985, National Archives of Singapore Japanese Occupation of
Singapore, Accession Number 000329. Lee Kip Lin, oral history interview, 6 Jun 1994, National Archives of
Singapore Japanese Occupation of Singapore, Accession Number 001491.
114
The Endau Settlement was part of a resettlement scheme established by the Japanese authorities to alleviate food
supply problems in Singapore. See entry on “Endau Settlement” at Singapore Infopedia:
http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1221_2006-12-29.html, accessed 27 Jun 2015.
For account of the films screened there see Gay Wan Leong, oral history interview, 16 Mar 1985, National Archives
of Singapore Japanese Occupation of Singapore, Accession Number 000535.
115
Uhde and Uhde, Latent Images, 23.
116
Uhde and Uhde, Latent Images, 23-25. Kurasawa Aiko, “Film and Propaganda Media on Java under the
Japanese, 1942-1945,” Indonesia, no.44 (Oct. 1987): 59-116. Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial
Propaganda (University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
117
Ratnam, Communalism and the Political Process in Malaya, 11-14.
118
Lee Ting Hui, “Singapore Under the Japanese 1942-1945,” Journal of the South Seas Society XVII, no.1 (1961-
1962): 55-65, cited in John Bastin and Robin W. Winks, Malaysia: Selected Historical Readings, (Kuala Lumpur:
Oxford University Press, 1966), 321.
119
Cheah Boon Kheng, Red Star Over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict During and After the Japanese
Occupation, 1941-1946 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983), 232-240. Wan Hashim, Race Relations in
Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd., 1983), 20.
120
Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 56. “Malayan Spring” was originally Han Suyin's coinage.
Han Suyin, “An outline of Malayan Chinese literature,” Eastern Horizon 3, no.6 (June 1964): 6-16.
121
Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 87. Already, Singapore was excluded from the Union for
political reasons. Should the Chinese from Singapore have been included, the Malays were reduced to 44% of the
population, essentially a minority in their own country. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 99.
122
Albert Lau, The Malayan Union Controversy 1942-1948 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), 130-136.
123
“Malayan Press Comment on the White Paper on Malayan Union,” in N.A. CO 537/1536 no. 50823/6/24, cited in
Lau, The Malayan Union Controversy, 131.
124
“The Film Story of Malaya's Recovery”, The Straits Times, 4 August 1946, 4.
125
Denny Densham, “Voices of Malaya,” Colonial Cinema (June 1948): 2.
126
“The Film Story of Malaya's Recovery”, The Straits Times, 4 August 1946, 4.
127
Densham, “Voices of Malaya”, 1.
128
N.A. INF 6/397 Voices of Malaya, COI File. “Documentary Film of Malaya”, The Straits Times, 31 October
1945, 4. “Rehabilitation of Malaya Filmed”, The Straits Times, 15 December 1945, 2.
129
N.A. INF 6/397 Voices of Malaya, COI File.
130
Elton and the lead cameraman, Danny Densham, returned to England in October 1946 bearing some 250,000 feet
of footage. The reels traveled to Pinewood Studios where the team viewed the rushes, and then to the cutting room
at Twickenham Studios. Sound recording took place across a flurry of locations before the crew did the final editing
at Crown Film Unit premises at Beaconsfield. “Malaya's Post-War Film Story Flown to London,” The Straits Times,
7 October 1946, p.3. This report however, states that only 100,000 feet of film were shot while the COI file for the
film at the National Archives states that the total new footage amounted to 250,000 feet. N.A. INF 6/397 Voices of
Malaya, COI File.
131
For Chinese attitudes towards the Malayan Union see Lau, The Malayan Union Controversy 1942-1948, 127-
129.
132
A.N.M. R.C. Sel. 1269/1947 Enclosure 7a “Voices of Malaya (Crown Film Unit Film)”, author unknown, dated
23rd February, 1948, p.1.
133
Ibid., 2.
134
Ibid.
135
John Gullick, Malaysia (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1981), 83-85. “Citizenship is made narrower so that it is
conferred automatically virtually upon the less-competitive, less-advanced Malays,” Andres Roth, “An American
Looks at Malaya no.1: One Country Three People,” Malaya Tribune, 30 September 1948, 5.
136
A.N.M. R.C. Sel. 1269/1947 Enclosure 7a “Voices of Malaya (Crown Film Unit Film)”, author unknown, dated
23rd February 1948: 1.

228

137
Ibid.
138
Ibid.
139
“Voices of Malaya,” Today’s Cinema, 19 March 1948, 11.
140
U.K. Sees Malaya,” The Straits Times, 1 August 1948, 9.
141
N.A. INF 6/397 Voices of Malay.
142
Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 309.
143
“U.K. Sees Malaya”, The Straits Times, 1 August 1948, 9. “U.K. Looks at Malaya”, The Singapore Free Press, 6
October 1948, 2.
144
“U.K. Sees Malaya”, The Straits Times, 1 August 1948, 9.
145
“Voices of Malaya”, The Singapore Free Press, 5 April 1948, 2.
146
From the advertising at Alhambra, this was possibly Conquest of a Nation, or Plainsman and the Lady, or 100
Men and a Girl. Victor Staines, “They Go To So Much Trouble,” The Straits Times, 22 Oct 1950, 14.
147
“Voices of Malaya,” The Singapore Free Press, 18 October 1950, 6

229

CHAPTER 4

Cinematic Afterlives: Films of the Malayan Emergency at the Transition from Empire to
Independence

Proudly Presenting Yong Peng (1954) has led a rich and unexpected life. The film was born in
the town of Yong Peng in the state of Johor in Malaysia where its first images were shot by two
filmmakers with a portable camera. These images then grew into an eight-minute film that
traveled around Malaya industriously doing the work of the colonial government. Worn out
through being played and re-played countless times before thousands of eyes over the next ten
years, it was eventually abandoned. To my knowledge, the film no longer exists in Malaysia or
Singapore. The reproducibility of the filmic medium however, meant that Proudly Presenting
Yong Peng had many incarnations—identical copies of itself that shared the responsibility of
disseminating the information for which it was created. One of these copies survived the test of
time, humidity, and neglect lying dormant half a world away at the Imperial War Museum
(IWM) in London. After encountering this particular film at the IWM archives in the summer of
2012, I requested that a copy be reproduced for me on DVD. Freed from its burdensome 35mm
frame and in a new palm-sized and portable body, the film began its transcontinental journey
with me back to the village of Yong Peng a year later. Awoken from its death-like slumber in the
film vaults, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng has since acquired an unexpected afterlife for the
people of the village through my hands.
The biography of Proudly Presenting Yong Peng spans from its beginnings during the
final decade of colonial occupation to its extended “afterlife” in the present postcolonial era.

230

What was once an instrument of empire during a period of extreme governmental intervention in
the processes of everyday life has now found new purposes upon its return to the place of its
origin. By looking at the “biographies”
1
of colonial educational films from empire to
independence, the final chapter of this dissertation shows how colonial educational films of the
Malayan Emergency harbored unruly possibilities that both acceded to as well as strayed from
their original roles as tools of colonial discipline.
The first two sections of this chapter examine the use of media as an educational and anti-
insurgent propaganda tool by the British government following the Pacific War. Looking at a
specific period known as the Malayan Emergency, which refers to the anti-imperial communist
insurgency that took place between 1948 and 1960, I argue that experiences of film in rural
Malaya became inseparable from increasingly intrusive forms of governance in everyday life
during the transitional years from colony to postcolony. As part of a massive colony-wide
propaganda scheme, the British government in Malaya deployed mobile cinemas to tour the
country screening films such as Proudly Presenting Yong Peng to teach people particular notions
of modern civic society and political democracy. A network of circulating images, these
untethered screens sought to sow the seeds of modern citizenship at a point where the end of
colonial occupation was well in sight. The work that mobile cinemas did to legitimize the
military strategy of resettlement—where over half a million people were relocated into fenced
and guarded living compounds—provides a case study for this argument.
Even as I contend that films were disciplinary entities that sought to bring every aspect of
private life into the realm of colonial governance through the production of modern citizens,
films were also unruly objects that were being received, recontextualized, and re-used by
audiences in ways that exceeded their original intentions. Not simply agents of discipline, films

231

and film screenings provided the opportunity for spectators to negotiate the various political
modernities extolled by the colonial state, the communist party, as well as the postcolonial
government. Malayans were bringing their own interpretations to these spaces, repurposing films
in their own ways and giving them new life in the postcolony. Unruly and ill-disciplined, films
encountered unexpected social trajectories as they met and mingled with local agencies, brushing
up against other articulations of modernity.
Describing the other so-called “alternative” modernities that co-existed with narratives of
the colonial state, the second part of this chapter thus explores what was happening on the other
side of the screen. Drawing from the oral histories of people who had seen these films in their
youth, I discuss how the experience of watching was subject to local negotiations about what it
means to be a modern subject of the state, at the level of the personal and the everyday. As the
films’ intended audience, Malayans were the subjects of the camera, but they also determined
what these films meant and how they were used at the time of their screening.
The final section of the chapter then takes us to the postcolonial present. Through a
discussion of the personal and cultural histories that people retold when I screened the film to
elderly residents of Yong Peng, I show how colonial educational films are now repositories of
personal and cultural memory. Hence, colonial educational films were not closed texts but unruly
objects that undergo re-scripting and repurposing as they move though social space and time.
Within the spheres of the personal and the everyday, these films embodied unexpected
significances that strayed from their original purpose as forms of “colonial” education.

232

A Matter of Hearts and Minds: Cinema and the Malayan Emergency

The frequent showing of programs of films of this kind provides a valuable
education in citizenship.
--- Malayan Film Unit, 1954.
2

Visual popular culture was intrinsic to the formation of colonial nationalism. The phenomenon of
film, in particular, facilitated such formations. For Benedict Anderson, print capitalism and a
shared language engendered the collective consciousness of nationalism.
3
But unlike the solitude
of reading print, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out, cinema was a “gregarious space”
where an audience gathered to be addressed as a collective entity.
4
The film evoked the audience
sitting before it as a provisional community, even as the film itself imagined ideas of a larger
collective polity though its locution. In this space, they argue, “the ephemeral communitas of
spectatorship can take on a national or imperial thrust.”
5
As Tina Mai Chen explores through her
study of Chinese Communist Party films, propaganda films addressed and sought to produce
idealized audiences. When viewed properly, films “completed the process of production of ‘the
people’” by “transforming the individual within the collective.”
6
For Chen, the act of showing
and viewing were as important in constituting ‘the people’ as was the content of films
themselves. Similarly, Malayan Emergency films naturally addressed its audience by presuming
present and future collective identities. In this section, I will address how film became central to
processes of governance during the Malayan Emergency.

233

In 1945, the British returned to a Malaya that was torn apart by anti-imperial sentiment, abject
poverty, and an absolute breakdown of all health, educational, financial, and administrative
services. Public opinion about the British was low. In the eyes of many nationalists, the British
had abandoned Malayans to the onslaught of the Japanese invasion in 1941. Now that the war
was over, many felt that the British were in no position to come back and profit from the country.
As described in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, inter-communal relations were also poor after the
war. While the Chinese felt politically excluded from the country they had made their home, the
Malays resented the economic power of the Chinese and feared being made second-class citizens
in their own land.
In spite of this widespread social unrest, the circulation of Western popular culture
through the screen was one of the first steps toward reclaiming the hearts of Malayans after the
end of the Japanese Occupation. Right after the re-entry of British administration into Malaya,
the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia (SACSEA) issued a directive to get the film
industry resuscitated and returned to normal operations as soon as possible. They believed that
the opening of the cinemas would boost public morale and that the showing of British and
American films would clearly symbolize the return of “the former freedom and the end of
Japanese restrictions.”
7
The government provided financial assistance to theatre owners to get
their cinemas up and running. During the war, the Japanese military had kept all non-Asiatic
films in vaults in Singapore. The British administration converted this collection into a film
combine of commercial Western movies from which exhibitors could loan material until proper
distribution networks could be rebuilt.
8
To drive home the re-establishment of the British
Administration after the war, cinema operators had to play the British National Anthem at the
end of every showing in public cinemas.
9
In addition to these measures, the government also set

234

up the Malayan Film Society in 1947 where members of the public could view English, Chinese,
and Indian films not normally seen in commercial cinemas.
10
The idea behind its formation was
to stimulate public appreciation for film as an art and an instrument of education while sowing
the seeds of a local filmmaking culture.
While assisting the commercial industry to get back on its feet, the government directly
undertook the production and circulation of non-commercial films of educational and
propagandistic value. The years immediately following the war witnessed the formation of a
large-scale educational film program that was to play a major role during the Malayan
Emergency. The administration formed the Department of Public Relations to counter the lasting
effects of Japanese propaganda about Western imperialism and to promote a sense of Malayan
unity and civic consciousness. Film became an important means by which the government could
communicate with the people.
First, the government began building up a collection of educational films to be housed in
film libraries located in the Malay states and in Singapore. In addition to films produced in
Malaya, the library obtained films from around the world. To start the collection, Malaya
gathered close to 200 short two-reel documentaries from the Central Office of Information in
London in 1946.
11
By 1949, the Federal Films Library in Kuala Lumpur had amassed over 500
16mm educational sound films on a wide variety of subjects.
12
In later years, individual states in
Malaya also set up their own film libraries with a collection of several hundred films each.
13

Members of the public could borrow films for non-commercial showings free of charge. In
Singapore, the Public Relations Office began amassing a film library that consisted of over 150
16mm sound films in 1948 that eventually expanded into a collection of 600 films by 1958.
14

235

Traveling cinema units, essentially vehicles outfitted with loudspeaker and projection
equipment, became the means through which these films reached the Malayan people. Their
movements across space cartographically mapped the bonds that tied the far reaches of the
territory to the seat of colonial governance. In 1946, the Department began with ten mobile
public address units equipped with public address and radio equipment.
15
Touring remote parts
of the country, public announcers broadcasted the end of the Japanese occupation and the return
of law and order through the reestablishment of the British Administration. Bearing promises of
rebuilding and restoration, these traveling units also sought to uplift the prestige of the British
among the people.
16
Officials feared that years of Japanese propaganda resulted in anti-British
sentiment and general uncooperativeness toward government policy. As these mobile units made
their way through a war-torn countryside, the announcers not only disseminated information but
also functioned as the eyes and ears of the government. They reported back on the conditions of
villages, the general sentiment on the ground toward the return of the British, what illnesses and
damages plagued the population, and what people’s most urgent needs were.
Soon, film projectors were fitted into these vans while films were incorporated into
touring programs. Portable electric generators enabled films to be shown when electricity was
absent or where the local electric current was insufficient to run both the screen picture and the
soundtrack. Units used 16mm Victor Projectors supplied locally by the General Electric
Company.
17
For a large proportion of these audiences, the films shown by Public Relations were
the first that they have ever seen. Visiting one kampong (village) a day, the programs of the
mobile unit consisted of film screenings interspersed with talks on educational topics in the
evenings.
18
From April to September 1946, at least 465000 people had seen Public Relations
cinema programs in rubber estates, tin mines, and padi settlement areas.
19
With over 50% of the

236

population of Malaya being illiterate in the late 1940s, the importance of the mobile units as a
means of carrying out educational and propaganda campaigns cannot be underestimated.

While announcers provided running commentary in the vernacular languages in place of English
soundtracks, officials soon felt that films ought to be produced in local languages, featuring local
faces, and addressing issues specific to Malaya. The films from the Central Office of Information
in London, which consisted of the majority of films that were screened in the late 1940s, were
not popular among local audiences who much preferred watching local productions.
20

Furthermore, Public Relations officials deemed films of Western origin unsuitable for rural
audiences because of the stark disparity between standards of living depicted in the Western
homes in the film, as compared to the reality of life in postwar Malaya. Officials feared that the
very high standard of living depicted in these films would inevitably invite audiences to compare
the British way of life against their own paltry living situations, instigating more resentment for
the British.
21
Moreover, maintaining a constant and timely supply of new material from Britain
proved unreliable.
22

The government formed the Malayan Film Unit (henceforth referred to as the MFU)
precisely to meet this demand for locally produced material. M.C. Sheppard, the first Director of
the Department of Public Relations after the war, had first conceived of the idea of a government
filmmaking unit in Malaya during his time in an internment camp as a prisoner of war. The
opportunity presented itself when a complete set of film production equipment from the
American Liaison Section in Singapore came up for sale in May 1946.
23
After some initial
reservations among certain government quarters about starting a “very expensive local
Hollywood” were appeased,
24
the Department of Public Relations moved all 100-over pieces of

237

equipment to an abandoned Japanese Paper Mill which became the future studio for the MFU on
Bangsar Road, Kuala Lumpur.
25
Operating on a semi-commercial basis, government funds paid
for the maintenance of the unit while the MFU’s clients paid for any films they wanted produced.
The value of such a team lay in is ability to produce films that spoke directly to Malayan
concerns. Ever itinerant, film crew traveled far and wide to capture events on the ground just as
they unfolded. In the initial months, the MFU made do ex-army heavy vehicles to get around but
the Unit was later able to acquire a Ford chassis and a Willys jeep station wagon for its shooting
needs.
26
Intended to address the dire situation of food shortage throughout the country, the first
few films produced locally were about short-term food production. Health education films on
tuberculosis followed shortly after.
27
As cameramen were encouraged to shoot newsworthy
events, the MFU built up a collection of stock footage from all over Malaya which enabled
newsreels to be produced in a quick turnaround of two and half days. Titled The Malayan
Gazette, these newsreels were screened throughout the region by both mobile film units and in
commercial cinemas.
28

Even more so than with the work of the Rural Lecture Caravan more than a decade
earlier, Malayans were visibly involved in every aspect of the MFU’s work—for reasons both
practical and political. First of all, the war had left a dearth of filmmaking talent from abroad
hence making it necessary to train and recruit local staff. Moreover, as motions toward self-
governance accompanied the rehabilitation of Malaya, postwar colonial policy situated nation
building and the formation of a Malayan identity as central to the movement toward
independence (although of course, these new nationalisms had to be friendly to British business.)
In preparation for independence, “Malayanization” became a catchphrase and concept that left its
mark across a wide array of government management, including that of film production. In

238

keeping with the political climate at the time, the government was intent on showing that Malaya
consisted of free and equal partners and that Malayans had a strong hand in managing their own
affairs. As Hassan Muthalib argues, the MFU successfully articulated the late colonial mission to
promote a Malayan nationalism and national culture through collaborative measures—in this
case, film projects.
29

Indeed, the Department of Public Relations stated that the MFU “is endeavoring to
operate with the minimum number of Europeans on its staff.”
30
The Malayan crew who worked
on the film Voices of Malaya (discussed in Chapter 3) formed the beginning of a skeletal
production unit.
31
Harry Govan, appointed as the Director of the Malayan Film Unit in 1946,
32

was particularly dedicated toward developing local talent for the MFU, an effort that was
continued by his successor Tom Hodge. In 1947, Mr. Ow Kheng Law, a former clerk who had
previously worked with the Crown Film Unit on the above-mentioned production, brought his
expertise in film producing to the role of Production Manager to the team.
33
That year, fifteen
more Malayan apprentices joined the MFU. Staff members were trained in laboratory processing
work while others were given training in directing sets and handling cinema equipment.
34
At the
MFU’S tenth anniversary dinner, Mohammed Zain bin Hussain, Chairman of the MFU Staff
Association, thanked “the loyal but small band of expatriate officers” for guiding the unit toward
success.
35
Such rhetoric reflected late-Colonialism’s ideas about good British stewardship that
led colonies toward future self-government.
The MFU’s multi-racial filmmaking team was a source of pride as it symbolized the
idealized colonial plural society (as discussed in Chapter 3) and the future democratic direction
of the country. The unit’s crew of locally recruited and trained directors, cameramen, editors,
sound men and laboratory workers was “an example of the capacity of the so called ‘colonial’

239

peoples to acquire modern and highly complex technical skill.”
36
As the MFU developed a
reputation for top-notch work that was being recognized at film festivals abroad and receiving
global distribution, the fact that “the Unit of 135 has only four European members” was boasted
about in the Birmingham Post as a symbol of Malaya’s readiness to rule itself.
37
Shown at the
Edinburgh Film Festival, The Kinta Story (1949) (a film about how the corporative spirit in Kinta
Valley kept communist forces at bay) received high praise from the Glasgow Herald. Critics
were impressed by how “all the work was done by local men trained in very recent years in the
complex behind [the] scenes technique of film production.”
38
Elton proudly proclaimed that their
efficiency and quickness in learning “put a lot of English units to shame.”
39
The MFU was a
microcosm of a successful post-war colony where local men, educated well in the manners of
responsible citizenship by years of British management, were now ready to go forth into the
world.

The work done in these immediate post-Pacific war years set the stage for the large-scale
mobilization of propaganda and educational machinery that was to follow. While the Malayan
Film Unit produced large numbers of educational and instructional films on non-Emergency
topics including films on financial education, agriculture, rubber production and the like, the
potential of the medium to catalyze large-scale change among the population was the fully
realized through the Emergency. Films that were both on Emergency and non-Emergency topics
were integrated into holistic educational programs that sought to shape Malayan good citizens in
an effort to contain communism. I now turn toward film during these years of colonial counter-
insurgency. It is within this period of intense optimism toward the power of media in shaping
good citizens that emergency films such as Proudly Presenting Yong Peng were first produced.

240

In the immediate years after the war, mounting tensions rose between the British and the
communist party in Malaya who were pushing for nationalist independence. The wartime
militarization of the Malayan People’s Anti Japanese Army (MPAJA) that consisted mostly of
Chinese communists resulted in the formation of an organized armed force within the civilian
population, many of whom were against the permanent return of British rule. What they wanted
was independence for all Malayan people. Opposition between the MPAJA and the British South
East Asia Command (SEAC) followed the 1945 Japanese surrender and continued into the years
of the British Military Administration (BMA).
40
The MPAJA would eventually form the military
nucleus of the anti-British communist resistance movement in Malaya under the Malayan
Communist Party (MCP). While the MCP tried to maintain non-violent relations with the British
Government for several years, tensions came to a head in 1948 when communist sympathizers
killed three European plantation managers in the state of Perak. This event marked the end of
non-violent negotiation between the MCP and the British. In response, the government declared
a state of Emergency on 16 June 1948. Known simply as the Malayan Emergency, this initiated
the start of a 12-year guerilla war that would become the chief preoccupation of the colonial
government until the Emergency was officially lifted in 1960.
41

Thoroughly planned and artfully orchestrated, historians have argued that Malaya’s
counter-insurgency propaganda scheme was predicated on the intention of “winning hearts and
minds” toward the government’s cause.
42
Kumar Ramakrishna, Susan Carruthers and Richard
Stubbs among others have written extensive historical accounts of how the government used
propaganda as a winning strategy in the Malayan Emergency.
43
In essence, media was essential
to the success of counter-insurgency efforts. State officials believed that raising morale among
all the communities was the key to winning the war. The arrival of Lieutenant General Sir

241

Harold Briggs as the Director of Operations in April 1950 led to the intensification of the use of
psychological warfare against the communists as well as the use of propaganda to raise the
morale of the public.
44
A newly formed Emergency Information Services department took over
propaganda and publicity work from the Department of Public Relations. Hugh Carleton Greene
arrived in Malaya in September 1950 to head this department and improve the output of film
propaganda in Malaya. To meet the propaganda needs of the Emergency, he increased the
number of mobile cinema units in circulation from 23 to 53 in the year 1950.
45
From 1952, ADC
(Alec) Peterson further increased the existing number of mobile film units to 102 during the
period of his tenure as Director-General of Information Services. River units plied the states of
Pahang, Perak, Kelantan and Terengganu while a railway unit also serviced the state of Pahang.
To provide enough films that would supply these mobile units, Greene hired more staff
and purchased new film equipment for the MFU from October 1950.
46
In spite of the relatively
small team, the MFU produced fifty-two films while the mobile units reached an average of
200,000 rural dwellers per month that year.
47
By 1951, the MFU had produced 111 films of
which 24 were on Emergency subjects.
48
In 1954, 92 mobile units gave a total of 14092 film
shows while the MFU produced enough locally-made films that mobile units were sufficiently
well equipped to show MFU films exclusively (though these were still often supplemented with
dubbed films from the Central Office of Information in London.)
49
Meanwhile, Public Address
Units in Singapore screened educational films in schools and other organizations across the
island. By 1958, a fleet of five Mobile Film Units screened films in rural parts of Singapore and
on neighboring offshore islands.
50
With sound projection equipment, translators were no longer
necessary as films could be obtained in English, Tamil, Malay, and the Chinese dialects.

242

The fight against communism was about creating an idea of ‘national’ community.
Western-style “democracy,” in particular, became symptomatic of political modernity. As
Carruthers points out, the campaign to win Malayan hearts and minds merged with the larger
objective of persuading Asian audiences that “democracy was infinitely preferable to the
pernicious ideology of Communism.”
51
Foremost among these goals was teaching viewers about
the mechanisms of government and the importance of cooperation between the government and
the people. Films encouraged loyalty to the colony and a sense of civic consciousness by
publicizing the democratic system and its operation in the Commonwealth. Against this, the
“evils of revolutionary communism and the threat which it represents to the social, political and
religious freedoms and values enjoyed under the democratic system”
52
were starkly contrasted.
To make rural Chinese Malayans feel like they belonged to the rest of Malayan society, films
also encouraged the demolition of racial and communal barriers by depicting non-communal
groups such as the scouts and trade unions and other modern advancements symptomatic of a
“genuinely harmonious plural society.”
53

In addition to the “nation-building” films described above, many films specifically
addressed the war at hand. These Emergency films portrayed the futility of the communist
struggle and the suffering that the so-called communist “bandits” brought upon the people. One
particular objective of psychological warfare was to cause a rift between communist members
and the families they left behind, hopefully enticing desertion from the cells in the jungle.
54
This
would also encourage people to assist the government by coming forward with information about
the whereabouts and operations of communist cells. Officials hoped that depicting a larger
community united in the fight against communism would generate a sense of civic responsibility.

243

Films such as The Kinta Story and The Kinta Spirit (1949) for instance, depict communities
working together to protect itself from guerilla infiltration in the tin-mining Kinta district.
For film propaganda and education to be effective, they had to be enjoyable and of high
standard. The Malayan Film Unit had to master the precarious art of making films that were
sophisticated enough to meet the increasing standards of Malayan film-goers but were also
straightforward enough for rural audiences who were less familiar with the language of cinema.
Even as many new villagers were unacquainted with cinema going, the postwar years saw the re-
establishment of theatres in larger urban settlements across the region. A company called
Caravan Films provided outdoor cinema experiences for audiences on rubber estates, factories
and villages. Going to the movies became a popular past-time as the film industry was
resuscitated. The 1950s and 60s witnessed a boom in the production of local commercial feature
films. A member of the public, writing in to the newspapers states that,
We are all cinema-goers today, even the youngest of us. And we are all critics.
Our tastes have been sharpened by the technique of Hollywood and Rank. It is
going to require equal technique to capture our interest and imagination. Failing
it, the only educational value such documentaries will have will be to provide us
with a cure for insomnia.
55

Gone were the days of bare bones storytelling of the likes espoused by L.D. Gammas and
William Sellers as discussed in Chapter 2. To keep up with audience’s increasingly sophisticated
tastes, the MFU incorporated crowd-pleasing elements reminiscent of the best from Hollywood.
Plot-driven stories, lead characters, and slick cinematography interweaved pleasurable viewing
with government propaganda. In fact, the journal Our Film Critic even lamented that The Kinta
Story had lost its local idiom in spite of the MFU’s Malayan personnel. Its narrative, with its
“taut structure and quickening rhythms is pure Hollywood” was a “sobering reminder of the
habits that the cinema can form.”
56

244

Beyond serving as propaganda and educational tools for Malayans, films were important in
bolstering the counter-insurgency efforts in other ways. Aside from the Mobile Film Units run by
the Information Department for example, an Army Kinematograph van also screened films to
British troops stationed in the jungle. Strapped onto river rafts or bodily lifted by 40 men onto a
multi-drive vehicle to traverse rough terrain, no obstacle would stop the films from reaching the
men. These vans brought news as well as much needed morale to troops who “have the chance of
seeing the outside world and forgetting that they are on the loneliest of rubber estates or in
clearings along jungle roads.”
57
Even when a bullet fired from unseen attackers in the forest went
through the screen, the show went on. The magic of the cinema was therefore not only critical to
boosting morale among the civilian population, but also in keeping spirits high among the troops.
I have provided a brief overview of how film was a central part of colonial counter-
insurgency efforts in Malaya.
58
The next section will focus specifically on how cinematic visual
pleasures became integrated with the escalating governance of everyday life through the
particular experience of resettlement.

Managing the Resettlement: Views of Malaya in “Bright Beautiful Pictures”

To support themselves during the Japanese Occupation, many Chinese had resorted to small-
scale cultivation on unused land on the fringes of forested areas. Referred to in colonial records
(as well as in historical accounts) as “squatters” because they did not have legal ownership of the
land on which they lived, these communities were the life-blood for the communist guerillas who
had established their bases in the thick mountainous jungles that formed the interior of the Malay

245

Peninsula. In 1948 there were 4,000 to 5,000 guerrillas who were organized in groups of 100 to
300.
59
The fighting wing of the MCP was officially known as the Malayan Races’ Liberation
Army (MRLA), though the government often referred to them as “bandits” or “communist
terrorists.” The forces received support from the Min Yuen—civilian agents whose duty it was to
gather supplies and intelligence from the civilian population. Peasants and workers who lived in
small settlements, plantations, and mines close by were particularly at risk of coming under the
influence (willingly or otherwise) of the group.
To cut off this line of support, Lieutenant-General Harold Rawdon Briggs launched what
has now become known as the “Briggs Plan” in June 1950.
60
He realized that the key to gaining
the upper hand in the Emergency was to gain control over the smallholdings, squatter areas, and
rubber estates that were the main lines of sustenance for the Communists. This meant the
resettlement of these inhabitants away from the jungle fringe and into compact, governable
communities that could be protected (or conversely, controlled) with fences, armed guards, and
curfews. The Briggs Plan referred to these new resettlement sites as “New Villages”. In most
instances, people were given a few weeks notice before they had to relocate. In these situations,
people were able to move their possessions as well as building materials over from their old
location to the New Village compound. In situations where communist penetration was deemed
immanent however, relocation would happen within a day under armed supervision. In these
cases, crops and any possessions left behind would be burned or destroyed so that they would not
end up left in communist hands.
The state of Johor led the squatter resettlement project, moving about 500 to 1000
families a month between 1950 and 1951 with the three other problem states, Perak, Selangor
and Negri Sembilan, soon following suit. By the time of the completion of the resettlement

246

process in March 1952, about 85,000 families comprising of about 423,000 persons had been
settled, resettled, or regrouped in 410 new villages.
61
By 1954, 600 new villages housed a
population of 680,000.
62
Given its overall success in containing communism, the Briggs Plan has
been adopted elsewhere. For instance, it is worth noting that the Malayan resettlement scheme
directly influenced the U.S. Government-led strategic hamlet program in South Vietnam, which
involved relocating peasants to fortified villages also as part of the effort to contain
communism.
63

In spite of its success in the context of the counter-insurgency, resettlement was a
traumatizing affair people whose lives it affected. Accounts flourished about how people had to
be forcibly moved while new villages themselves were poorly planned and organized. In some
cases, resettlement occurred in such a hurry that initial village sites had to be abandoned because
they were not located closely enough to fertile soil, or were dependent on water sources that
were too easily compromised. Others were situated too close to the jungle fringes and could not
be protected from guerilla aggression. In the beginning, before the implementation of the Home
Guard policy, new villages offered poor protection from communist attacks. Ramakrishna cites
the example of Mawai New Village in Johore, one of the first resettlement sites established in
1948.
64
After a particularly savage attack from militants in October 1951, the government
declared a shut down of the area and relocated its 1200 inhabitants yet again. This incident
instigated even more anguish and outrage amongst the rural Chinese. Harper cites examples of
how long-established communities were broken apart as people were moved into disease-ridden
compounds with poor sanitation much “like cattle.”
65
Because many had lost farmland and were
made to work with poor soil, food was short.

247

Everyday life in a New Village during the Emergency was also subject to complete and
thorough regulation. The state had a say in every aspect of lived experience—from the layout of
space to the management of time, from the most bodily acts of food consumption to the broad
ideals of nationalism. The village was neatly divided into plots of land for dwellings and
shophouses. In many villages, rice was cooked and distributed daily from a central cooking
station in the village so as to ensure that uncooked rice would not be hoarded and supplied to the
guerillas. Every person was subject to a full body search upon exiting and entering villages.
Being found with a weapon unauthorized would be punishable by death. Suitable villagers (both
men and women) were taught to use arms and recruited as home guards who would patrol the
fenced and bard-wired borders of their own village. Nobody was allowed to leave the village
compound between the hours of 6pm and 6am.
In spite of what may be read as an absolute curtailment of personal freedom, the
government was intent on publicizing resettlement as a process of civic “rehabilitation.” No
doubt, resettlement was an opportunity to uplift standards of living among squatters while
gaining the trust of the people by ensuring their physical and socio-economic security.
66
The
colonial government promised new schools, community halls, and markets as part of the push
toward “modernizing” the ways of life of rural villagers. For instance, a community village hall
within the premises every New Village boosted the morale of the community while its effective
management justified the existence of the local Village Committee so as to counter accusations
by the MCP that the Committees were little more than “running dogs” of the government.
67

In addition to persuading people that resettlement was a win-win arrangement, a key
mission of the resettlement was to generate modern democratic ideals among the people though
the development of community spirit.
68
Publicity for the resettlement stated that the Briggs plan

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had gathered politically unrepresented individuals into communities that would now have
representational access to the government:
An accepted principle of democracy [involved] giving the governed an
opportunity to express their point of view when it is considering its treatment of
them. […Resettlement gives] a lot of scattered individuals the opportunity of
developing the outlook of communities; and of representing their feelings to the
Government through their village committees.
69

By giving rural Chinese with little political representation a point of contact with the
Government, officials proudly justified resettlement as being part of the process of democracy
building.
Indeed, historians have described the Emergency as a battle over the “hearts and minds”
of the people and a war of ideals.
70
As Ramakrishna argues, the key to the success of the counter-
insurgency was Briggs’ recognition that above all else, it was the confidence of the rural Chinese
that had to be won over. In a sense, it was a struggle between different visions of modernity and,
in particular, what democracy ought to look like for Malaya’s future. The ideal modern post-war
Malayan citizen was one who understood Malaya’s allegiance to the Commonwealth, partaking
in the modern world economy. These messages of colonial citizenship and modernity were
therefore expressed particularly through anti-communism. The overarching theme of British
counter insurgency, according to historian Tim Harper, was the creation of community by
drawing “rising social forces into new civic institutions.”
71
In exchange for civil rights, the
citizen was to perform his civic duty through cleanliness, industriousness, and most of all, co-
operation with the government against communist forces. To be “modern” was to participate in
the colonial state’s definitions of democracy and civil society.
To counter the bad publicity around resettlement and emphasize its benefits, sophisticated
propaganda and educational programs became an essential part of resettlement schemes. Films

249

about the resettlement such as A New Life: Squatter Resettlement (1951), The People’s Choice
(1953), and Proudly Presenting Yong Peng sought to persuade people about how New Villages
offered them a more modern existence.
72
A New Life was produced in English and Hakka, with
the Hakka language version directly addressing rural Chinese who were facing resettlement.
73
As
Tom Rice argues, A New Life emphasized the themes that promoted the resettlement scheme so
as to counter accusations from the communists that new villages were concentration camps as
well as to deflect public criticism that resettlement was ill-planned and poorly administrated.
74

The film emphasized safety rather than imprisonment; for instance, depicting how young men of
the village volunteered to be Home Guards who would protect the parameters of the compound.
As Rice notes, no fences or other signs of “imprisonment” were mentioned. Plenty of scenes also
depicted how the government supplied these settlements with social services and provisions for
better food production. A village school paved the way for a new generation who could,
according to the commentator, “read and understand what it means to be part of a growing and
prosperous country, a country in which they have their own stake, their own village.”
Community building among New Villagers was an essential part of anti-Communism, a
means of crafting a democratic outlook through elected Citizens Committees and village
councils. The People’s Choice teaches villagers about the electoral process and the importance of
council elections. Villagers had to take responsibility for the upkeep of the facilities, law, and
order in the community. Symptomatic of modern society, women too had to vote and were
encouraged to stand for election.

To assuage doubts and curb unhappiness about resettlement, the colonial government had to
ensure that these educational and propaganda films would be seen by as many as possible.

250

Evening cinema shows in New Villages became a fundamental part of counter-insurgency
measures. Mobile film units were deployed to every new village, visiting at least once a month
and where possible, one every two weeks to bring the latest news about the Emergency to the
people. The excitement began the moment the unit arrived at the village. Villagers were not
always an easy captive audience, the team had to work hard to publicize the show, get people to
attend it, and retain their interest once they arrived. Beginning an hour before sunset, the vehicle
would tour the village, making announcements for the show that night and drumming up
publicity. Shortly before sunset, the van would park in a clearing, perhaps a football field or a
wide intersection at the center of town, and then team members would begin setting up a white
cloth screen and projector. Instructions provided to the mobile unit operators insisted that
preparation must be completed as quickly as possible and music must be played if there was any
gap in the programming to keep audiences from getting bored.
75
The officials would set the
projector on a table but were careful to erect a wooden fence around its perimeter—village
children were supposedly mischievous and were known to mess with the projection equipment.

251

Fig.6. A public relations mobile address unit arrives, 1948. Image from National University of
Singapore Singapore-Malaysia Collection

Fig.7. Audiences assemble outside a school in Pajam new village. Image from National
Archives, UK.

252

Film screenings commenced after a short announcement by the operator through the
loudspeaker. Usually, two reels of MFU films and newsreels would be shown, followed by a
short cartoon or “cowboy and Indian” film at the end of the line-up. Officers would arrange, in
discussion with local district officers, what selection of films would work for the evening. Topics
varied according to the particular needs of the village and ranged from newsreels to short films
about the Emergency and included world news, disease prevention and other general education
topics. In the village of Jitra in Kedah for example, the unit screened Shot Gun (1953), which the
Home Guards of that village found very informative.
76
The film taught guards about the
mechanisms of a shotgun and how to care for and use it. Interspersed with the screenings, short
lectures discussed the importance of co-operating with the government to eliminate insurgent
influence. These talks had morose sounding headlines such as “Communist Terrorism will be
Wiped Out of Malaya Despite Recognition of Communist China,” “The Re-settlement of
Squatters” and “Death Penalty of Communist Agents After June 1.”
77
Talking points also
conveyed the most up-to-date news and policies regarding the Emergency. To accommodate as
many people as possible, audiences sat on both sides of the screen.
To foster village spirit, evening shows were designed to be participatory community
affairs. After the screenings, audiences would turn around to face a stage erected nearby. The
stage could have been a wooden platform or as simple as the backs of two parked lorries with
their sideboards down. A series of “live acts” would then take place including plays with actors
recruited from the village community itself. These local “actors” could improvise their own
dialogue in relation to anti-communist themes. The idea was to present a comedic and
spontaneous, yet informational session that included members of the community and heightened

253

communal morale. Songs by schoolchildren and short speeches by the village leaders were also
included in the line-up. Toward the end of the program, the mike would be open to the floor for a
“Talentime.” As the Emergency continued, mobile unit programs incorporated speeches and
plays featuring surrendered communist party members. They delivered humorous scripts that
explained government policies during the Emergency, for example, the reason for food control
measures.
78
Their presence in the programs served to persuade the audience that the government
treated ex-enemy personnel humanely upon surrender.
Because the success of the show depended on the willing participation of the village
people, field officers played a crucial role in sustaining a festival-like atmosphere throughout the
program. The Information Department had set up a training school at Sri Menanti to train field
officers in the art of being good live-show entertainers.
79
These local representatives were
intended to change the image of resettlement. As it was, the resettlement quite literally did not
have a local face; out of the fifty-five resettlement supervisors recruited from 1950 to 1952 to
carry out the operation and to supervise the New Villages, only fifteen of these were Chinese
with the remainder being recruited from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia.
80
To
counter perceptions that “foreigners” were running the shows, it was important in “localizing”
the image of resettlement. Films by the MFU featured Malayan actors and dealt with topics
specifically related to the problems of village life. Malayan Field Officers accompanied the
voyages of the mobile film units giving informational talks and preparing the programs for the
evening in discussion with local village leaders. The Public Relations Department also carried
out widespread hiring of translators, announcers, projection operators and drivers from among
the Malay, Chinese, and Indian communities to staff the public address and mobile cinema units

254

that travelled around the country.
81
As far as possible, local staff handled all levels of
programing, from announcement and projector operation, to talking points and films selections.
82

Fig.8. Field officer of a mobile cinema unit gives a commentary in Malay, 1948. Image from
National Archives, UK.

According to journalist Alan Wolstenholme’s article in The Malay Mail about the response
toward government propaganda in the Chinese New Villages, mobile unit shows were roaring
successes. The unit delivered evenings packed with a good three hours of entertainment that
would be talked about for weeks. Quoting a villager who attended the show at Membau New
Village in Negri Sembilan on 17 July 1953, Wolstenholme states that people enjoyed the free
screenings; “He [the villager] said that the Government was very good to the people in the new
villages—‘You see, we get pictures now. Nothing like this happened before the war.’”
83
Officers
were well aware that the mobile units “brighten[ed] up the drab lives led by the majority of the

255

new villages” and there were requests that the films be shown more frequently than the once ever
3 weeks that was the standard in 1952.
84
Singing of as “A New Villager,” from Kuala Lumpur,
an anonymous writer to The Straits Times declares his/her enchantment with the MFU films.
With the majority of his/her village people not reading or writing English, seeing vernacular
language films was a thrill. Moreover, the mobile film units brought views of Malaya not
otherwise available to them; “We feel proud of what we see that is going on in Malaya. I
wouldn’t have a chance of travelling that far to see all those things. Now they are brought to us
in bright beautiful pictures, thanks to the MFU.”
85

A survey sent out to all the districts in 1949 received responses that attested to the
effectiveness of the scheme.
86
Indeed the Public Relations Department received appeals from the
districts to send mobile film units to certain areas faced with social unrest.
87
Village leaders
requested for visits to be carried out more often with some district officers requesting that film
projectors be loaded onto small boats that would be able to travel to isolated settlements upriver
that were inaccessible by road. In Kelantan, the river unit took on a six-day campaign in the
Mengkebang and Temangan areas directed at estate laborers to persuade them to cut off support
for the communists and to come forward with surrenders.
88
The district officer of Pasir Mas,
Kelantan praised the unit for giving the people a “pleasant treat of cinema” while the talks were
so informative that the unit “accomplish[ed] in a few nights by a few tours what they failed to do
for many months.”
89
The police department claimed that the unit’s propaganda helped them
recruit almost 1800 men throughout Malaya while encouraging villagers to come forward with
information about the insurgency.
Mobile units also kept newly resettled areas trouble free. When staff shortages prevented
the routine visits of the mobile unit to the Ulu Kelantan and Tanah Merah districts of Kelantan

256

state, officers were worried that the lack of communication with government voices would put
the villagers at risk of falling under insurgent influence.
90
When troubled brewed in particular
areas, the department would increase tours in the area to neuter the effects of communist
involvement.

In spite of these glowing accounts, colonial documents are notorious for only containing certain
truths and excluding others. Were films truly the perfect disciplinary tools that they were
intended to be? Indeed, as the next section of this chapter will show, colonial educational films
were not always the disciplinary tools of colonial modernity that they promised to be nor were
Malayan audiences the obliging, receptive spectators that officials were hoping they were. Where
colonial films imagined ideal spectators who watched and learned, seamlessly transforming what
the film taught into what was practiced on the ground, films were in truth unruly objects that
invited repurposing in multiple ways. As I have mentioned earlier in this dissertation, screenings
were not just sites of discipline, but “contact zones” where imperial discourse met, mingled, and
were reshaped by local agencies.
91
These contested cinematic spaces enabled Malayan audiences
to negotiate their own understandings of colonial and postcolonial identity.

“Thick” Reception: Negotiating Discontinues Modernities

As discussed in the introduction and in Chapter 2 of this dissertation, colonial archives offer few
accounts of reception and where available, these accounts are flat and opaque, gliding over the
surface of the audience but failing to percolate the intimate encounters of watching. Experiences
of the everyday were flattened in favor of sweeping stories about the success of the propaganda

257

programs or staggering numbers attesting to how well these shows were attended. This data
sheds very little light on how these films were really being watched and how they were
integrated (or not) into personal negotiations of modernity and citizenship.
In situations where colonized archives elide over the nuances of cinematic encounters, an
attention to the “thickness” of reception may serve to enliven these sleeping possibilities.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz, using the term “Thick Description” via the philosopher Gilbert
Ryle, asks that “facts” be suspended in deep webs of significance; one would not simply describe
an action but locate it in the nest of intentionality and meaning from which it engages.
92
While
Geertz’s definition of the term is far more qualitative than what this chapter aims to do, the idea
of locating an action within circumstances, meanings, and motivations that characterize the
episode at hands translates well. When colonial documents speak of excited audiences, for
instance, one might ask why such exuberance was displayed and what intentions lay behind
them.
Looking for accounts that would illuminate the “thickness” of the encounter between the
colonial spectator and the screen, I went to Malaysia in search of people who might have seen
films of the Emergency and experienced touring shows of mobile film units over 60 years ago.
Researchers in colonial photography—often anthropologists or museum curators—routinely take
artifacts back to the sites of their original production to elicit local and alternative knowledge
about the information in the photographs.
93
This technique, called “photo elicitation,” has a
tradition in the scholarly postcolonial turn as a means of recuperating historical knowledge,
where subaltern subjects narrate “contrasting, and even ultimately competing, historical
refigurations, creating […] plural frames of history” though the photograph.
94
Equipped with
copies of films obtained from the Imperial War Museum’s Film Archive in London, I spent time

258

in several Chinese New Villages in the Malaysian states of Perak and Johor talking to people at
kopitiams (coffeeshops) and showing them the films I had brought back on my portable tablet.
Kopitiams are open-air eating-places usually in the town center or along a main street where
people gather for inexpensive food, coffee or beer. Among retirees, men in particular, visits to
the kopitiams are ritual all-day or all-evening affairs, particularly when a horse race was being
shown on the television. Regulars from the village would routinely gather to talk, read the
newspapers, or just nurse a beer or a coffee. As centers of community, Kopitiams offered the
ideal space for me to initiate conversations about these films and the unrecorded accounts of
“thick” reception.
Showing films from my tablet or laptop ensured a lively discussion. A screening might
start out as an interview with just one person but it inevitably would it would inevitably end up
as a boisterous affair. Friends would come and peer over shoulders, onlookers stopped by, people
called out for others at nearby tables to come and see. Many times after showing films at
kopitiams, I would go to the homes of people I spoke with or the homes of friends or relatives
where I would show the film yet again. The private space of the home invited deeper reflection
on the more intimate experiences of everyday life under the colonial and postcolonial
governance.
It is important to note however, that this method did bring about its own drawbacks,
which ought to be addressed upfront. One of the larger limitations that I grappled with by
conducting my research at kopitiams was that, for the most part, women did not did not frequent
these relatively male-oriented spaces in the same way that men did. The women who I did see at
the kopitiams on any given afternoon did not linger but purchased their food and left. The several
women who I did manage to speak with were accessible to me only after a certain amount of

259

trust had been built for their husbands and sons who I would have met at the coffeeshop to take
me to their home. Unfortunately (or perhaps tellingly), only a handful remembered anything
about the screenings at all. Most did not recall ever attending a show. This gap in itself is
somewhat revealing of women’s lives in New Villages of the 1950s. Madam Yap Chin Lian
from Lasah New Village in Sungai Siput said that she had only attending Mobile Film Unit’s
events less than a handful of times.
95
As a 12-year-old girl at the time, she was expected to help
out at home with chores and dinner in the evenings. When asked about what their parents did
during the screenings, the men I spoke with mentioned that their father might have come along,
but their mothers usually stayed home to look after the house or the smaller children. When I
asked one of interviewees (who may appreciate anonymity) to introduce me to his wife, he said,
“woman (sic) at the time just stayed at home. She wont know anything even if you talk to her.”
The stories of women are doubly occluded—buried under layers of patriarchy as well as
colonialism.
96
In contrast, every man I met with vividly recalled the mobile units and the work
that these vehicles did. These discrepancies suggest a strongly gendered dimension to the
programs of the mobile film unit.
Contrary to the accounts in colonial documents that the mobile film units were met with
roaring success, people’s stories indicated that their encounters with the screen were not so
simple. Political currents in local contexts and everyday life resulted in wildly varied experiences
of reception even within the same village. Screenings were productive spaces for personal
negotiations about what modernity and modern citizenship out to be. Indeed, colonial definitions
of modernity relayed through the work of the mobile units co-existed and competed with
alternative modernities and other ideas of democracy—namely that espoused by communist
ideals. The MCP’s New Democracy opined that legislation, justice, and administration were

260

based on the popular will as opposed to the centralization of executive, judicial, and legislative
power in British hands as would have been endorsed by the Malayan Union.
97
For the left,
democracy meant the coming together of the Malayan people on a united front to dislodge the
British from the country. The way forward into a modern future was the actualization of self-
governance freed of the slavish yoke of imperial capitalism. Good citizenship for communist
party members involved one’s responsibility to join the revolution to regain the rights of the
people and free the land of British imperialists. As I will later describe, these conflicting ideas of
what it meant to be “modern” played out in the highly politicized space before the screen.
New villages themselves were not places of homogenous loyalties. Inhabitants arrived
from scattered rural settlements and in many cases consisted of family groups of different
dialects. Political loyalties were uncertain. Villagers were aware that communist members had
set up cells within the New Village but many were unsure of where the cell was located or who
was in it—“it might be his neighbor or his friend in the Home Guard.”
98
As mentioned, the
government provided cash incentives to villagers who would divulge information on communist
activities. At the same time, this fractured dynamics within the village even further because
villagers were also subject to threats of retaliation from the guerrillas if found to be co-operating
with the government. New villages were thus spaces of muddied loyalties where political
undercurrents went unspoken and people learned to “look the other way” to keep the fragile
peace. As it were, many inhabitants of resettlement areas were “united by nothing but the fence
which surrounds them.”
99

For this reason, an undercurrent of fear and suspicion accompanied mobile unit events for
many of the residents relocated to the Chinese New Village of Tanah Hitam. As of 1952, Tanah
Hitam was a moderately sized settlement with 447 families, all Chinese, whose source of income

261

was primarily in agriculture.
100
It was a completely new settlement carved out of plantation and
forested land. It was also one of the poorest villages in the Ulu Kinta region, designated a “Black
Area”—a term reserved for the areas where communist infiltration was the most prevalent. It had
a British military post attached to it and therefore a strong British presence within the village
itself. The area around Tanah Hitam was the site of outright gunfights with several shootings
taking place in the jungle fringes just outside the village fences.
101
A former resident of Tanah
Hitam went underground in 1953 only to be killed in a confrontation with police patrols in
1957.
102
A villager turned up dead one day outside the compounds of the village on his way to
the farm.
103
For the residents of Tanah Hitam, attending a mobile film unit show was not simply
like going to the movies.
Spectatorship was a performative act that signified one’s political loyalties to the rest of
the community. People were fully aware that other villagers were watching their performances as
attendees of a government event. When government representatives were present, audiences
were afraid of showing anything but happy enthusiasm toward the programs of the film unit.
They had to act as if they understood the films and that they participated willingly in the events. I
spoke with Mr. Lieu Poon Khen, who runs a coffeeshop and had lived in Tanah Hitam all his
life, about his memories of attending these screenings. He said, “when they laugh I laugh when
they clap I clap,” suggesting that how he responded to the films was determined by the larger
social consensus. Not only were people wary of the British military personnel living within
village compounds, they were also fearful of neighbors who might come forth with information
about their activities. Unsure of how to react at these public events and not wanting to stand out,
people watched each other for social cues, waiting for others to take the lead. Thus, audiences
too performed before the screen.

262

Immense tensions underpinned life in a New Village with reports documenting
intimidation from communist elements from inside the villages as well as intimidation from
guerrillas who contact the villagers while at work in the fields or plantations.
104
Attending these
shows would be particularly dangerous for whose families had communist allegiances. A Tanah
Hitam local, who wishes to be known only as “Mr. Poon,” claimed that he and his family had
never once attended the screenings in spite of the mobile unit’s almost monthly appearances at
the village.
105
Although he had clearly heard the loud hailers making the announcements that the
film unit had arrived, he had not once stepped out to watch the films. His father would not let
him attend the shows citing that it was “too dangerous” for a young teenager to see the films.
Poon was particularly vague about why attending such events were “dangerous.”
Certainly, attending mobile film unit screenings could put oneself in the way of physical harm.
People said that they were sometimes afraid to go out at night to attend the evening shows
because they might run into guerillas on a secret mission or because they might themselves be
mistaken for a communist. In the New Village of Yong Peng for instance, armed guerrillas had
secretly broken through the surrounding fence to enter the village compound on a night when a
mobile film unit was having a show.
106
The intruders, wanting to obtain food and provisions
from their contact person in the village, had been spotted by villagers and reported to the police.
When soldiers descended on the area, a gunfight ensued. Getting caught in the crossfire was a
harrying experience that made villagers think twice about venturing outdoors to attend the
screenings at nightfall.
However, Poon’s secretive refusal to elaborate further on why attending screenings
would be “dangerous” suggests reasons that are less likely to be talked about in the open. Other
villagers hinted to me that Poon himself had communist connections; rather tellingly, friends and

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neighbors referred to Poon as “Chairman.” When I arrived that evening for my interview with
Poon, everyone else around us got up and vacated that area of the coffeeshop, giving us a wide
berth—something that had not before happened in any of my other interviews. In view of its
politically tempestuous past, political allegiances were not publicly announced in this particular
village; communist connections were never stated openly but inferred and acknowledged among
members of the community. If Poon did indeed have former ties to the communist party (or had
family who did), his attendance at the screenings would have been seen by lurking communist
sympathizers as a loud indication that he was paying attention to the propaganda of the British. If
word got back to communist sympathizers that Poon was towing the government line, this would
of course have brought trouble to Poon and his family. When one were suspected of betraying
the communist cause, retaliation would be swift and certain; being caught or even suspected of
betraying the party could be punishable by death.
At first, Poon refused to see A New Life in spite of my persuasions. Although he
eventually capitulated and watched the film several times with rapt interest, he reacted with
disdain and anger at several scenes. For example, he scoffed at the film’s claim that the
government sent trucks and troops to assist with the move; he said his family received no such
treatment. Looking at the provision shop in the film, he complained that they had to wait a long
time for their market to be built. Poon was literally talking back toward the screen as he re-
scripted its intended narrative with his own experience of resettlement.
At the end of the film, Poon dismissed the mobile cinema shows as a cheap hoax that
tried to seduce the people to be on the side of the government. Whenever the people were feeling
abandoned by the government, he remarked bitterly, you could expect the mobile unit with their
free cinema shows to come by to “seduce them” [sic] again. Poon gruffly remarked that “people

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were not educated and experienced at the time”—they simply did what they were told to do by
the government. Far from being “modern,” in the view of a communist party sympathizer,
gullible audiences were counter-modern—feeble-minded puppets of imperialism.
Audiences however, were not always as undiscerning as either Poon or the colonial
government believed them to be. Phang See Kong, currently the curator of a museum in Gopeng,
recalled that adults would not turn up for the mobile unit events knowing full well that they
would be served a full dish of propaganda. The films were teaching people to be “good citizens,”
one of my respondents said (he used the English words as opposed to the Malay or Chinese
words), telling them not to join “gangs” or secret societies, and to stay away from communists.
107

People were well aware that the propaganda films were trying to “influence them into the
government thinking” [sic] and so they refused to show up.
108
Phang recalled that events were
filled mostly with children whose parents wanted them out of the way for the evening. He kept
his own excursions to the screenings a secret from his father. It wasn’t safe to play around with
“psychology warfare,” his father would say, because communist cells within his village would be
“sure to give you trouble.”
The few adults who turned up had their eyes on the screen but were, in Phang’s words,
“thinking of China.” Phang himself had grown up in a Chinese-educated background and he
believed that while the English-educated Chinese in the cities were pro-British, many Chinese-
educated folk were pro-Communist. In Gopeng, many members of the older generation were
sympathizers of the communist cause. Ties between the older generation and hometowns in
China were still strong in the 1950s with many people from Phang’s parent’s generation being
immigrants from China. Phang recalled his older relatives often sending back money to the
mainland to help support family-members who remained.

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While people may have shunned the propaganda and educational films, others would
willingly swing by for the “cowboy and Indian” movies that the film units would play later on in
the night. These films were typically screened after the propaganda films had been shown so that
audiences would be encouraged to sit through the whole affair before getting to the entertaining
part of the program. While providing some variety to what would otherwise be an unbearably
long propaganda-filled evening, the information officers also chose these films because they
supposedly demonstrated the inevitable strength of Western modernity against “primitive”
cultures.
However, these cowboy films resonated with the crowd for the exact opposite reason.
Even though films depicted white men triumphing over Native Americans, the audience at
Gopeng rooted for the underdog. Understandably or not, audience sympathies were aligned with
the people they identified as being persecuted by white foreigners—the Indians. Referring to the
Native Americans with a term often used by the older generation to reference the indigenous
people of Malaysia, he described the Chinese villagers watching the cowboys and Indian films as
“pro-Sakai.”
109
Being only Chinese speaking at the time, he did not always understand the
English-language films though there was one phrase he distinctly remembered over the years:
“white man kill me people” [sic]—a sentence uttered, presumably, by an outraged and anguished
Native American but that resonated well with the sentiment felt by many rural Chinese at the
time. Intended to uplift British prestige, local political sympathies repurposed films for the
opposite effect, watching them in contrarian ways.
Wary of the seductive abilities of the cinema, other savvy audiences were always on the
lookout for any trickery. Audiences were well aware that “the bias was showing the white man,”
but they would watch the films anyway with a critical mind.
110
Certain members of the audience

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were cheered when Mr. Howse (an official of the Emergency Information Service) delivered a
speech in Mandarin in the film The Way Out, but others insisted that a Chinese person delivered
the speech that was then dubbed over the image of Mr. Howse speaking.
111
People watched for
the pleasure of an evening’s entertainment and to keep up to date on current events, while fully
intending to disregard the propaganda elements of the show. Yet others would pay attention to
the more educational on topics such as good sanitation and agricultural methods, but shied away
from the films with politicized messages.
Even as people described varied modes of micro-resistances toward the screen, the most
common refrain that emerged from many of my conversations was that one had “no choice but to
accept” the propaganda that the government supplied. While some considered the films
themselves entertaining, most were well aware that films were part of what Loh Meow Seong, an
ex-journalist from Jelapang New Village, called “psychology warfare.”
112
In his opinion, people
grudgingly accepted the lessons of the films even if they might not fully believe them. Villagers
had few other alternative sources of news and so had come to accept the word of the government
even if did not fully believe it. Recalling newsreels depicting the dead bodies of communist men
being extracted from the jungle, he said that everyone was aware that it was a scare tactic, a
means of showing people what would happen if they were found to be cooperating with the
communists. He recalled audiences watching with thoughtful attention and he was certain that
the propaganda left its mark on people. Although people might not have swallowed the film’s
message unquestioningly, the screenings, live shows, and speeches articulated the dangerous
political currents and brought them into the space of public conversation. Though people would
never be publicly open about their politics, they would talk about the films among trusted friends

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and family privately, after the event. Loh said that it was possible that people would then pass on
information to the police in secret.
Most people however attended the evening shows because there was simply no other
source of entertainment in the evenings. Curfews meant that people could not leave the village
area and most villagers could not afford television sets. In spite of their heavy-handed politics,
watching MFU films were, for a long time, the only form of visual entertainment than people
could access. Indeed, for most of the people I met through my kopitiam screenings, the mobile
film unit supplied the first films they had ever seen. Loh recalls how the mobile film unit
provided his first encounter with the cinema. He enjoyed attending most of the screenings but
mostly, he showed up because they were free of charge.
113
Visiting his village once every two
weeks and setting up the screen outside the community hall, the mobile vans brightened up
otherwise dull evenings. People animatedly recounted the excitement drummed up by the arrival
of the mobile caravan as it drove around the village announcing in Malay through the
loudspeaker: “ahh malam ada wayang!” (ahh tonight they’ll be movies!) Although they were
audiences aware that mobile unit events were laced with government propaganda, some of
people’s fondest memories were of watching the shows. These events were a chance to spend an
evening of leisure with friends and family. Villagers found speeches boring but the films, plays
and singing events rather fun.
In many cases the pleasure of watching moving images became almost estranged from
the messages these films were trying to convey. Recalling the fight scenes in the MFU’s
emergency films, 80-year-old Tong Cheah noted how attending these screening so often as a
young man had cultivated his love for the cinema.
114
As a boy from the village, these were the
first films he had ever seen at 15 years of age. While he did not understand the language in which

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many of the films were played (suggesting that films were not always translated into the local
dialect), he was entranced by the images. His passion for cinema thus seeded, Cheah eventually
became a fan of martial arts movies. When he moved to the city of Ipoh for an apprenticeship in
his early teens, he scrimped on food just so he could save up for movie tickets once a week. As
he developed a taste for commercial films, he eventually found the repeated propaganda tiresome
after some time and stopped attending the mobile film unit screenings.
Hence, films were folded into the diverse, intimate, and secret politics (or its absence) at
the heart of every person who watched. As discontinuous and dissident discourses of modernity
(colonial versus communist) encountered each other in the spectatorial space before the screen,
screenings were spaces for what Gaonkar calls “creative adaptation.”
115
By this he refers to “the
manifold ways in which a people question the present, a site where a people ‘make’ themselves
modern, as opposed to being ‘made’ modern by alien and impersonal forces, and where they give
themselves an identity and a destiny.”
116
Audiences were picking and choosing between the
different messages of modernity—for example agreeing with modern practices of hygiene but
disagreeing with colonial democracy, choosing to hold on to communist ideals or deciding to
become good citizens of the colonial state. Audiences were hyper-aware spectators who used
screenings to reflect on and perform their own political affiliations. Screenings became spaces
where ideas about citizenship and modernity could be performed and questioned. At work here
was the agency of audiences whose own politics diverted films from their intended life purpose
as disciplinary tools.

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Afterlives: Biographies and Repositories in the Postcolonial Present

When I had first embarked on my fieldwork, my original mission was simply to recover the
“missing” reception history of colonial educational films of the Emergency—to find out what
people remembered about the screenings themselves, what they thought about the films, and how
people around them had responded. I also intended to track down people who had originally
appeared in the film so that I could uncover what went on behind the camera–-missing parts of
production histories that were not recorded in the archives. The decade of the Emergency,
however, exists on the edge of living memory. On several occasions, I had arrived weeks or days
after the passing of the eldest person in the village; everyone who remained was too young to
have any meaningful recollection of the Emergency. In many cases, the fading of memories in
old age dulled the finer details of what people remembered about the screenings that took place
over 60 years ago. Rather than talking about the films, people ended up wandering off on
tangents that, at first glance, had little to do with what I was initially looking for.
While frustrating at first, I came to realize that instead of just information about the films
themselves, what I was also hearing during my screenings and interviews were valuable personal
histories that ranged far and wide. People were investing the images with their own experiences,
using films to tell stories about their lives, the lives of their parents, neighbors, children, and
grandchildren, as well as their concerns about the present. These were also stories about the town
itself, its beginnings and anxieties about its future. As Liam Buckley argues, photo elicitation did
not always result in discussion about what was in the image, but was also about the cultural
dimension circulating around it with relation to the present.
117
Indeed, over the course of the
screenings, the film revealed itself to be what Janet Hoskins describes as a “biographical object,”

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a thing that stored people’s histories and memories, a “pivot of introspection that people used to
tell the stories of their lives.”
118
People narrated their personal stories and private politics through
the film.
In the final section of this chapter, I turn to the New Village of Yong Peng, where the
resettlement film, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng, was shot. Based on the screenings and oral
history interviews I conducted there, I argue that colonial educational films have what I call
“afterlives” in the postcolonial present. Returning from the archive to newfound purposes in the
place of its origin, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng shed its disciplinary intentions as an imperial
instrument to become a repository of personal and cultural memory in the present day. Colonial
educational films also become the space through which people grappled with discontinuous
traditions of political modernity—from colonial government to the present postcolonial state.

Yong Peng New Village was constructed in 1949 in an area of Johor that initially consisted of
small rubber plantations and other smallholdings. According to a 1952 census, Yong Peng was a
relatively large settlement consisting of 794 Chinese, 54 Malay and 2 Indian families.
119
The
primary source of employment was in the rubber industry. The residents of Yong Peng identified
the region as a very “black area” with high communist activity for several years. Accounts from
residents suggest that villagers were relocated twice before moving to the present location. This
was allegedly because the government was unable to protect the area that they had initially set
aside for them.
120

Proudly Presenting Yong Peng features the town in 1953, four years after its
construction. The film presents a story of how the village has grown into a prosperous and
peaceful establishment with plenty of social amenities, a healthy civic culture, and a thriving

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local economy. From “scratching a bare existence” on the jungle fringes, the film claimed,
inhabitants now had access to a school, fresh water, good timber, and plentiful food. The local
economy thrived with many big and small industries—rubber, agriculture, a successful soya bean
sauce business, a wooden clogs shop, and the production of tools for rubber-tapping being some
of the ones featured in the film. Yong Peng was a shining example of how easily the benefits of
modern life could be enjoyed if only people embraced resettlement as an opportunity to become
useful modern citizens. Indeed, the film lauds the cooperative spirit of the town as critical to its
success. A village council election indicates how democratic processes operate alongside a
healthy civic culture in driving the town down an unstoppable path of progress and
“development.” The triumph of colonial modernity as an ideological force is depicted by the
replacement of old atap roofed shophouses with whitewashed brick buildings, and through the
atmosphere of bustling industry depicted by happy, well-fed people hard at work.
Speaking over the film as I played it for them, people’s stories re-scripted the text with
their experiences of everyday life in Yong Peng under the Emergency. Their accounts often
countered the triumphant narrative of the film. Upon seeing the wide expanse of cultivated land
onscreen for example, people recalled the backbreaking work of the stripping fields clear of wild
grasses to make way for development. While the film suggested the abundance of food with
scenes of vegetable farming and pig rearing for instance, villagers spoke of the strict regulation
of food distribution during those years with much consternation. They recounted stories of how
food was cooked communally in large pots so as to prevent people from hoarding food for the
communists. Each family had coupons that allowed them to collect only as much rice as was
needed to feed the family for a day. Family members went to bed hungry during the leanest
years, too hungry to even watch these film shows in the evening. Contrary to being havens of

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safely, villagers recalled how they dug holes under the bed to hide at night as the sounds of
gunfire rang through the air. Incidents of intimidation from the communists were reported while
people were out working in the plantations. Where the film suggested newfound political
freedom with the presence of elected village councils, people spoke of the barbed wire around
the village and the curfews with serious trepidation—if one left the curfewed area, they would be
shot on sight.

While people were eager to speak of about the Emergency, they were more immediately invested
in using images in film to excavate vestiges of the past for the purpose of present day
remembering. More than simply offering “counter-histories” or “vernacular histories” of the
past, the residents of Yong Peng used the films to reconstruct a collective memory of their town
for the present. People insisted on gathering as many passerbys as they could to witness this
“historical” event. Others got on the phone to summon a relative or a friend, telling them to come
quickly. The acts of gathering onlookers, calling acquaintances for a collective viewing,
replaying particular scenes again and again while swapping stories and corroborating accounts,
were an act of active and collective cultural remembering. Yong Peng (the village and its people)
was being reconstructed through the film—not through the bare images themselves, but though
the conversations and connections that were built around them. When shown in the public space
of the coffeeshop, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng took on the role of being a repository of
community history.

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Fig.9. Kopitiam screenings at Yong Peng. Photograph by Nicholas Tse.
There were shouts of surprise when people recognized faces of loved ones who had
passed away or neighbors who were still alive but much older. The film was stopped and
replayed many times so people could simply peer at faces and places. Residents would confer
with onlookers gathered around them as to whether or not this was so-and-so, or so-and-so’s
wife. “Isn’t this Da Song?” someone asked, “Yes it is!” would be the response. Several times
someone would exclaim, “This is Ket An!” and another would interject, “No! That’s his father,
Ya Lu! This is Ket An, the young one. This [film] is very old already!” Children were confused
for their parents, and people had to remind each other that the film was made 60 years ago. They
stopped the film on many occasions to tell me stories about the people who had appeared in it.
After seeing the film several times, long-time residents of Yong Peng remembered old
friendships and mapped out former neighborly relations—the pig seller was someone’s close
friend’s grandfather, a forgotten neighbor who had long since moved away was remembered
once again.
The film itself reconstructed the past, standing in for memories that had been lost. More
than simply eliciting memories, films replaced them. As David McDougall points out, film and

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photography stand in for “a commonality of experience more powerful and consistent as social
memory than the experiences of many of the actual participants.”
121
When 88-year-old Yu Teck
Ee began watching the film, he lamented that he was so old now and things happened so long
ago that he has no recollection of these places or faces. But as he continued to watch, he said that
the film reawakened the details that he had lost through time. The images stood in for those
missing spaces, replacing memories that he had otherwise let go of. Old gustatory sensations
were relived with much excitement. The freshness of the long beans picked from the farms were
revived after seeing the vegetables being harvested in the film, the tastiness of the pork rice sold
at the eating house was agreed upon with much gusto after seeing the pigs onscreen. The images
enabled people to recreate the textures of their life that otherwise existed only as wisps in their
fading of memories.
Colonial educational films thus literally became things that “contained” images of the
past—several people in Yong Peng remarked that the film stored all their memories now. Many
repeatedly emphasized how important and “precious” this film was for their heritage. In the
words of 70-year-old Chen Ming Ching, “to see a photograph was not so precious but to see an
actual film was amazing.” He feared that the history of the town’s origins was already being lost
on the younger generation. He gestured angrily at his grandson—a spectacled teenager helping
out as a server in the fishball noodle eatery—who was barely interested in the film. Summoned
to sit through the whole thing by his grandfather, he watched the film politely but with barely
concealed boredom. For the elderly, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng were important “containers”
of their life’s stories but for the young, they were at best quaint though irrelevant vestiges of the
past. At worst, they were embarrassing reminders of the poverty that these young people longed

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to leave behind, an unwelcome memory that the town where they grew up was once not so
“modern.”
Proudly Presenting Yong Peng, a colonial propaganda film in its past life, now becomes a
record of history and heritage and a promise of continued, collective memory. The film was a
historical treasure and villagers insisted that I make a DVD copy of it for Yong Peng’s
administrative headquarters—represented by the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA). Lim
Tian Soon, the MCA President, wanted to use the copy as a heritage piece, for future generations
who were interested in the town’s history. They expressed much interest in screening the film in
history classes at the local school. It was as if the images themselves replaced these lost and
fragile memories, taking flight and soaring above the narrativizing elements of the film that
relayed its imperial intent.

Proudly Presenting Yong Peng encountered further repurposing when it met with Liow Ket An,
currently in his eighties, who had just been resettled in Yong Peng a year before the film was
made. Though he did not remember the filmmakers who had come to visit, Liow was amazed to
see his very own image in the film. He marveled at his youthful self, but he was even more
astounded to see the image of his deceased father in the film. In this particular scene, father and
son are working at a small soy sauce production factory, preparing the sauce for fermentation in
large vats and storing them in glass bottles for sale. The film had caught his father in motion,
performing the same routines that he had done through many years of his working life, routines
which Ket An had seen everyday and knew like the back of his hand—the stirring of the soy
sauce, the covering of the vats. We replayed that scene over ten times. Liow wanted a copy of

276

the film for himself and for his grandchildren because this was the only moving image of his
father that he had ever encountered. I sent him a copy of the film on DVD.

Fig.10. Liow, on left, is a spitting image of his father, below. Liow’s grandchildren watch the
film. Photograph by author.

Fig.11. The elder Mr. Liow prepares bottles of soy sauce in Proudly Presenting Yong Peng.

Residents also insisted that I speak with Yu Da Song, born in 1933, who also appears in
the film with his elder brother, Dat Chang. In this brief scene, they are making and selling knives

277

for rubber tapping at their shop. I spent an afternoon in his home showing his family the film and
speaking with them about it. At first I had hoped to glean some information about the production
processes of the MFU on location. Yu vaguely recalled the two nondescript looking cameramen
who showed up to film them one day. The men arrived on foot carrying a small handheld camera
that they set up in his shop to capture a few shots of him and his brother at work. They asked a
few questions about the business and left within the hour. To my initial dismay Yu did not
remember anything else about the incident; from his account, it sounded somewhat
unremarkable.
However, what Yu did choose to speak about revealed how the film enabled him to
revisit the contours of his life as a young man. I hardly had to prompt him with questions; when
brought into the private spaces of people’s homes, the film elicited intimate life stories. Aided by
the experience of watching the film but not speaking directly about the images contained in it,
his thoughts slid easily back toward the years of the Emergency. Narrating his personal history
over the images of the film, he spoke quietly about how he would attend the mobile unit shows
after school. The amazement of seeing moving pictures on the screen for the first time would be
forever ingrained in his memory, an experience he shared with his Dat Chang. Yu’s narrative
was peppered with accounts of loss and death. Dat Chang had died 20 years ago. Seeing him in
motion again in the film brought back memories of him when he was alive. In his youth, Dat
Chang was a notorious character in the village, a leader among the town’s boys. Yu talked about
how they would run the shop together with no one to help them because their father had passed
away not long before. Through the film, Yu also recounted his years as a young man. As a Home
Guard, he patrolled the parameters of the village every week but never saw a communist guerilla.
The only ones he saw were dead; corpses that had been airlifted out of the jungle and laid out in

278

the field by the school as a warning to those co-operating with the communists. Yu remembers
being fascinated with the empty holes in the bodies where the blood had drained out of the
corpses. It was a chaotic era and a time of violence so seeing these bodies did not disturb him.
While films brought back memories of loss, they were also objects that preserved these
ghosts of the past, reproducing lost people and places in their visual worlds. [Devoid of its
former imperial intentions, for Yu and Liow, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng “contains” lost
loved ones, reanimated once again through the flickering images. No more a disciplinary tool,
educational films were repositories of dear people and fading memories. Things did not have
fixed identities, but had life trajectories that changed as they interacted with human agents. As
unruly objects, colonial educational films had multiple social lives that danced in-and-out of
imperial regimes even as the object itself underwent multiple material transformations on its
journey from reel to screen to eye. Films transcended their roles as agents of empire, and were
used in unanticipated ways as they moved through social space and time.

Films underwent “re-purposing” in other ways as well. Through stories of decline, abandonment,
old age, and death—told through the people and places that appeared in the film—people
revealed their struggles with the present day postcolonial government. By telling me the
biography of the village—its birth, life, and current decline—residents took the film out of the
colonial past, to speak about the problems that were intrinsic to present day postcolonial
Malaysia. My screenings often led to people taking me on tours of the village where they pointed
out landmarks in the film. Though the remapping of places that have since been demolished or
transformed, my respondents told me stories of how many of the houses and shops that appeared
in the film are now abandoned because their children and grandchildren had left the country for

279

Singapore, Taiwan, or the US. The sawmill, appearing in the film as a bustling symbol of
reconstruction where villagers could obtain timber to build their new homes, had long since been
demolished after its owner had migrated to Singapore. As we passed a nondescript house on the
town’s central streets, I was told that it once belonged to Huang Jing Siew, a former elected
council member. His children had also moved out of Yong Peng though they still owned the
family house.
Though a successful scheme for the counter-insurgency efforts, the New Village model
proved difficult to sustain in the long run. Although local councils were democratically elected to
service administrative and services/maintenance expenses, many New Villages were too small
and poor to self finance these costs. Further, throughout the 1960s New Villages were
systematically left out of Federal and State Governments’ rural development fund allocations,
which were mostly spent on developing rural Malay kampongs instead.
122
The result was a lack
of new public facilities, while existing ones deteriorated under neglect and a shortage of land and
agriculture. Shifts toward the modern economy saw rural New Villages increasingly becoming
out of date and lacking productive employment. The smaller outlying New Villages such as
Yong Peng and Tanah Hitam are greying towns, facing a net outmigration. Its young people have
left for work elsewhere, and many them end up settling down in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur,
coming home to visit on occasional weekends or festive holidays.
Proudly Presenting Yong Peng became the space through which present day conflicts
about the meaning of citizenship and statehood, both colonial and postcolonial, could be
confronted. After watching the film and walking through the many vacant homes and shops
today, my guides cited race-based preferential treatment within government policy as the reason
for why many savvier neighbors and their children had left Malaysia when they had the

280

opportunity to do so. Known as the “Bumiputera” (sons-of-the-earth) policy, this series of legal
and political practices finds its early lineage in the British policy of preferential treatment that
protects the rights of the Malays against that of the other Asian immigrants during the economic
expansion of Malaya under colonialism. The affirmative action programs of the post-colonial
New Economic Policy (1971-1990) aimed to restructure the ethnic and economic imbalance in
Malaysian society where the urban Chinese had significant economic advantage over the Malays.
This policy aimed to “reduce and eventually eliminate the identification of race with economic
function” by supporting “the emergence of a full-fledged Malay entrepreneurial community
within one generation.”
123
Under the policy, Malay-owned businesses received preferential
treatments from the states while Bumiputeras received discounted shares and better financial
packages. In the private sector, 30 percent of the workforce had to be ethnic Malay and Malays
received preferential public sector employment.
I do not have the opportunity here to discuss the merits and failures of this policy or to
trace its continued existence in Malaysian politics.
124
What I instead recount is how my
respondents envisioned the meaning of citizenship in the face of such policy and how they
configured their own citizenship within it. Questioning the very meaning of “merdeka,” (which
translates to “freedom” or “independence”), people expressed frustration and disappointment
with the directions the postcolonial government had taken. Comparing the state of the village
now with how it was in the 50s, Yang lamented that the Chinese had more rights under British
rule then they did under the present Malay government. For Yu, the British were “more fair” and
gave them more freedom to build Chinese schools then as compared to the Malay government
now.

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After watching the film, Chen (owner of the a fishball noodle shop) proudly announced
that five generations of his family had lived in Yong Peng. Chen, who had also served as deputy
head for the village council from 1995 to 2000, stated that he had never left Yong Peng and
intended to be buried there with his ancestors. Angrily, he declared that he was more “bumi”
than many first or second-generation immigrants from Indonesia who, by virtue of being
Muslim, were given public recognition as being “Malay.” “How is that “merdeka”?”—he
exclaimed. Indeed, for many of my respondents, “merdeka” was an ever-retreating promise.
Offered to them by the British and the communist party, followed by the post-independence
government, the meaning of “merdeka” and the democratic ideals that the term encompassed was
mercurial and ever elusive. People questioned their continued citizenship and the value of that
citizenship in the postcolonial state every day.
During the Emergency and even in the present, colonial films created the space for a
politicized spectatorship where audiences grappled with the discontinuous political modernities
that the colonial, communist, and postcolonial powers promised/brought upon them. Freed from
being the mouthpiece of the colonial government, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng became the
means through which people could articulate their own biographies while grappling with
changing ideas of “citizenship” and “democracy” from the colonial to the postcolonial state.

In their “re-screening” in 2014, these films were refigured and repurposed; as Wright describes
“reanimated” in their acquisition of new lives for the people who watched them.
125
Films
harbored shifting meanings as they moved through social space and time. Colonial education
films have been, and continue to be, entangled with the lives of people in various ways. They
housed images from a village’s past for future generations while protecting intimate fragments of

282

personal memory for those who still lived. Just as the films harbored reconstructed lost
memories, they also presented avenues through which concerns about present day notions of
citizenship and democracy could be articulated. An utterance of absolute unruliness, films shed
their old skins to acquire new meanings in the postcolonial present. With “afterlives” in the post
colony, films moved away from their intended imperial trajectories to become repositories of
personal and cultural memory.

Conclusion

In an abandoned wooden house in Kampong Pisang, the words “Malaysian Communist Lieu
Chong Feng” are scrawled across a wooden panel nailed across a door now collapsed from over
60 years of tropical rain, heat, and humidity. The words themselves are washed and faded. The
Emergency leaves it ghostly tendrils across the landscape and in people’s memories of the past.
Like the Emergency films that made a comeback from the archive, these words were a material
reminder of the buried traumas that reached out to touch the present.
This chapter has discussed how the mobilization of media was inseparable from the
increasing intrusion of machineries of governance that brought various aspect of everyday life
under the management of the colonial state during the Emergency. In their effort to construct a
“modern” citizen at the end of empire, mobile cinemas served to connect an urban government to
a rural population though the disciplinary power of film.
Yet, films and screenings were not just disciplinary places, but were also spaces where
ideas about what it meant to be a modern citizen were negotiated through the experience of
encountering the screen. Through the subjective experience of spectatorship, Malayans could

283

grapple with ideas about citizenship and political modernity. These negotiations continued into
the present when old films acquired afterlives in the postcolony as repositories of social and
cultural memory. I have argued that colonial educational films moved in an out of their roles as
agents of empire, and were used in various ways as they met with local agencies. Thus, they
were not closed texts but unruly things whose meanings shifted as they moved through the
course of their intended lifespans and beyond. Films reconstituted these memories as they
traveled from the past to the present, undergoing various material transformations as they moved
from the big screen of a mobile film unit, to the screen the iPad on a coffeeshop table. The
malleability of a film’s immaterial textual body as it is recontextualized and rescripted renders it
a palimpsest—its former lives and previous meanings lying quiet but not quite effaced beneath
newer inscriptions.

1
See “Introduction: Instructing Unruly Empires.”
2
A.N.M. 2007/0043069 Malayan Film Unit Annual Report 1954, 5.
3
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
4
Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 103.
5
ibid.
6
Tina Mai Chen, “Propagating the Propaganda Film: The Meaning of Film in Chinese Communist Party Writings,
1949-1965”.
7
A.N.M. 1957/0341008, S.C.A.O. 110/1945, Publicity and Printing Film Distribution, “Circular to S.C.A.O.,’s
Peninsula Division: Film Distribution,” dated 5 October 1945: 1.
8
Distributors servicing Singapore and the rest of Malaya in 1946 included Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer,
Universal Pictures, Paramount, Columbia, Pathé, Shaw Brothers, R.K.O. Radio Pictures, China Film Corporation
and others. A.N.M., 1957/0622399, Malayan Union 2695/1947, List of Names and Addresses of Commercial Film
Distributors in Malaya and Singapore, Letter form Jack Evans to S.H. Evans, dated 19 March 1947.
9
A.N.M. 1957/0571895 A.D.M./2/5 Welfare Films, Letter from Lieut. Col. F.W. Roe to the Chief Secretary, HQ,
B.M.A., dated 19 Feb 1946.
10
A.N.M. 1957/0342031, R.C. 315/46, Production of Malayan Films, “Minutes of the First Meeting of the
Formative Committee, Film Society, Held in the Preview Theatre, Bangsar Road, Kuala Lumpur, 7 p.m., 15
th

September, 1947.
11
A.N.M. 2007/0043080 “List of 16mm Sound Films in the Federal Film Library”, dated June 1942.
12
A.N.M. 2006/0021084 Publicity Services of the Department of Public Relations, Federation of Malaya, January
1949.
13
A.N.M. 1957/0329830, KLTN STATE SECT 3037/1954, “Kelantan State Information Services Monthly
Report—November 1954” dated 1st December 1954.
14
N.A.S. Edun 187/47, ME 3733, Showing of Films in Schools, Singapore, “Public Relations Film Library,”
undated. N.A.S. DIS/53/57 Policy on Film Production and Screening, Letter to D.I.S. from S.T. Ratnam, dated 24
February 1958.

284

15
A.N.M. M.U. 9222/46, Paper to be Laid Before the Advisory Council by Command of His Excellency the
Governor, no.54 of 1946, Department of Public Relations, Malayan Union, Review of Activities April to October
1946: 2.
16
A.N.M. 1957/0290170 Sel.Civil Affairs 154/1945, Propaganda, “Extract from Minutes of Meeting of Ulu
Selangor District Advisory Council held on 18th March, 1946.
17
A.N.M. 1957/0576072 Chief Secretary 6635/1952 “Film Projectors and Loudspeaker Units for District Officers,”
Letter from J.N. McHugh (Director of Information Services, Federation of Malaya) dated 11 September 1952.
18
A.N.M. 1948 1957/0293590, R.C. Sel. 140/1948, Mobile Unit of the Public Relations Department, “Progress
Report for the Month of May 1948,” dated 16 June 1948.
19
A.N.M. M.U. 9222/46, Paper to be Laid Before the Advisory Council by Command of His Excellency the
Governor, no.54 of 1946, Department of Public Relations, Malayan Union, Review of Activities April to October
1946: 2.
20
A.N.M. 1957/0294109, Sel.SEc.475/1948, Annual Report of the State Public Relations Department of Selangor
for 1947: 4.
21
N.A.S. DIS/53/57, Policy on Film Production and Screening, Letter to A.D.I.S. from N.F.G. Scharenguivel dated
30 May 1957.
22
A.N.M. 1957/0622824, M.U.4212/1947 Supply of Films to Malaya, Letter from M.C. Sheppard, Director,
Department of Public Relations to Private Secretary to H.E. the Governor, dated 24 March 1947,
23
A.N.M. 1957/0610229, M.U. 1073/1946. Public Relations, Letter from M.C. Sheppard (Director of Public
Relations) to Malayan Establishment Officer, dated 17 May 1946.
24
A.N.M. 1957/0610229, Public Relations, correspondence dated 23 May 1946.
25
“Malaya's Post-War Film Story Flown to London,” The Straits Times, 7 October 1946, 3. For a full account of the
formation of the Malayan Film Unit, see Muthalib, “The End of Empire: The Films of the Malayan Film Unit in
1950s British Malaya”. See also Rice, “Distant Voices of Malaya, Still Colonial Lives”.
26
A.N.M. 1957/06222235, Malayan Union no.2053/1947, “Malayan Film Unit, Transport For,” letter from H.W.
Govan to Financial Secretary, Malayan Union dated 24th Feb 1947.
27
A.N.M. 1957/0619557 Malayan Union No. 2076/1946 Short-term Food Production Film, Letter from M.C.
Sheppard, Director of Public Relations, to Deputy Chief Secretary, dated 15 August 1946.
28
A.N.M. 1957/0577102, Federal Secretariat 9272/1948 Malayan Film Unit Annual Report, p.2.
29
Muthalib, “The End of Empire: The Films of the Malayan Film Unit in 1950s British Malaya”, 193.
30
A.N.M. 1957/0629182, Malayan Union no.9884/1946, “Production Manager as Staff of the Malayan Film Unit,”
Memorandum by Director of Department of Public Relations dated 13th February 1948.
31
These crewmembers included Ow Kheng Law, Lee Meow Seong, Yusoff Khan, Jumaat, Wong Kai Weng, and
Osman bin Samsuddin. A.N.M. 2001/0019869, M.C. Sheppard, The Birth of the Malayan Film Unit, undated.
32
A.N.M. 1957/0626503, Malayan Union no.3898/1946, “Appointment of Mr. H. Govan as Director Film
Equipment—Public Relations Department,” letter from M.C. Sheppard to P.A.S. Service Branch, dated 1st August,
1946.
33
A.N.M. 1957/0629182, Malayan Union no.9884/1946, “Production Manager as Staff of the Malayan Film Unit,”
letter from Harry Govan to D.C.S. Secretariat, dated 15th January 1948.
34
A.N.M. 1957/0577102, Federal Secretariat 9272/1948 Malayan Film Unit Annual Report: 1.
35
D.INF.11/56/173 Malayan Film Unit Press Statement, Speech by Che Mohd. Zain bin. Hussain, November 26,
1956.
36
A.N.M. 1957/0575389, Federal Secretariat 13438/1949, “Malayan Film Unit Production at Edinburgh,” dated 28
August 1950: 5.
37
A.N.M. 2007/0043069 Malayan Film Unit Annual Report 1954, Appendix E.
38
A.N.M. 1957/0575389, Federal Secretariat 13438/1949, “Malayan Film Unit Production at Edinburgh,” dated 28
August 1950: 4
39
“The Film Story of Malaya's Recovery”, The Straits Times, 4 August 1946, 4.
40
Cheah, Red Star Over Malaya, 259-169, 170-194.
41
For a full account of the critical period of the interregnum see Cheah, Red Star Over Malaya.
42
This was a phrase that was used widely by the press and by officials during the Emergency.
43
Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-insurgency
1944-1950 (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1995). Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda.
Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948-1960 (Oxford University
Press: Singapore, 1989).

285

Other accounts have since downplayed the significance of the “hearts and minds” argument as a turning point in the
Emergency. See Karl Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as counter-insurgency paradigm,” Journal of Strategic
Studies 32, no.3 (2009): 383–414.
44
N.A. CO 537/7255 Report on the strengthening of Information Services in the Federation of Malaya, “Report on
Emergency Information Services, September 1950 - September 1951,” by Carlton Greene: 1.
45
Ibid., 13-14.
46
A.N.M. 1957/0575902, Federal Sec. 12948/1950 Federation of Malaya Annual Report 1950 Film Unit, 3.
47
A.N.M. 1957/0575389, Federal Secretariat 13438/1949, “Malayan Film Unit Production at Edinburgh,” dated 28
August 1950: 5.
48
Tom Rice, “A New Life—Squatter Resettlement,” February 2010, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/2516,
accessed on 21 April 2014.
49
A.N.M. 2007/0043069 Malayan Film Unit Annual Report 1954, 5.
50
N.A.S. DIS/53/57 Policy on Film Production and Screening, Letter to D.I.S. from S.T. Ratnam, dated 24 February
1958.
51
Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds, 73.
52
A.N.M. 1991/0025732, TPG.P.123/1953 Federal Film Library, “Department of Information—Master Plan 1953
Production,” dated 16 Jan 1953.
53
A.N.M. 19910025732, TPG.P.123/1953 Federal Film Library, “Department of Information—Master Plan 1953
Production,” dated 16 Jan 1953.
54
A.N.M. 1957/0537332 S.W.E.C. TOP SECRET H/1/1950-52 Publicity Propaganda Liaison Officer General
S.E.I.O., Psychological Warfare dated 24 November 1950: 1.
55
Letter written to the Malaya Tribune, September 7
th
, 1948 in response to the September 6
th
article announcing the
Film Unit Advisory Committee, author unknown.
56
A.N.M., 1957/0575532, Federal Secretariat 14041/1949, Manufacture of a Film “Kinta Story,” Extract from Our
Film Critic, author unnamed, undated.
57
“Taking films to the troops,” The Straits Times, 5 March 1950, 8.
58
For further elaboration on the topic see Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda; Carruthers, Winning Hearts and
Minds; and Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare.
59
Counterinsurgency Case History: Malaya 1948-60, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, 1 November 1965.
60
“Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Organization and Armed Forces in Malaya (the Briggs
Plan): Report by COS for Cabinet Malaya Committee,” CAB 21/1681, MAL C (50) 23, Appendix, 24 May 1950;
cited in A.J. Stockwell, ed., British Documents on the End of Empire (BDEEP), Series D, Vol.3, Part II, Malaya:
The Communist Insurrection, 1948-1953 (London: HMSO, 1995), doc. 126.
61
Paper to be Laid Before the Federal Legislative Council, no.33 of 1952, “Resettlement and the Development of
New Villages in the Federation of Malaya, 1952.”
62
Harry Miller, The Communist Menace in Malaya, (New York: Frederick A Praeger, Inc., 1954), 219.
63

Pamela Sodhy, “The Malaysian Connection in the Vietnam War,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 9, no.1 (June
1987): 44.
64
Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 95-96.
65
Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 178.
66
Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 89.
67
Official correspondence, CSP/1119/51 “Village Halls in New Villages,” dated 14 May 1952, Private Papers of
Colonel JHL Davies, Imperial War Museum.
68
A.N.M. 1957/0568677 D.O.I. no. 195/1947, Public Relations Mobile Publicity Unit Visit to Tampin, “Letter from
G.W. Rothery, State Emergency Information Officer, Negri Sembilan to All District Emergency Information
Officers,” dated 21st Jan 1952.
69
A.N.M. 1957/0537332, S.W.E.C. TOP SECRET H/1/1950-52, Publicity Propaganda Liaison Officer General
S.E.I.O. Letter titled Propaganda 1952 from C.W. Rothery to All District Emergency Information Officers, dated
21st January 1952.
70
See Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda; Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds; and Stubbs, Hearts and
Minds in Guerrilla Warfare.
71
Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 310.

286

72
While the catalogue at the Imperial War Museum lists this film as being produced in 1961, the Federation of
Malaya Annual Report for the year 1953 indicates that the film was screened (and likely made) in 1953. Federation
of Malaya Annual Report 1953 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1954).
73
Tom Rice, “A New Life – Squatter Resettlement,” February 2010, http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/2516,
accessed on 21 April 2014.
74
Ibid. See also Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 177 and Ramakrishna, Emergency
Propaganda, 96.
75
A.N.M, 1978/00513, DOI (K/P) No.640/53, Live Shows by Mobile Units, Doc. 11a, “Routine Procedure for
staging of live shows by a team of three persons,”: 3.
76
A.N.M, 1978/00513, DOI (K/P) No.640/53, Live Shows by Mobile Units, Doc.9, “Local Press Statement,” dated
April 19, 1953.
77
A.N.M. 1957/0461877, N.S. State Sec, no.6/1950, “Public Relations Department, Negri Sembilan Program of
Visits of the Mobile Unit for the Year 1950,” Advance Program of Mobile Publicity Unit No.8, dated 17 June 1950.
78
Alan Wolstenholme, “Govt. Show Makes a Big Hit. People Want More Frequent Visits by Mobile Cinema” in
The Malay Mail, Monday 20 July 1953: 7.
79
A.N.M, 1978/00513, DOI (K/P) No.640/53, Live Shows by Mobile Units, Doc.11a, “The Live Show Technique,”
undated, and Doc. 11a, “Routine Procedure for staging of live shows by a team of three persons,”: 3.
80
“Resettlement and the Development of New Villages in the Federation of Malaya, 1952,” Legislative Council
Paper, no.33 of 1952: 4.
81
A.N.M. 1957/0294109, Sel.Sec.475/1948, Annual Report of the State Public Relations Department of Selangor
for 1947: 2.
82
A.N.M. 1957/0343003, R.C. TR 520/1947, Public Address Unit Terengganu, Letter from State Public Relations
Officer to the Secretary to Resident Commissioner, “Terengganu P.A. Unit,” dated 5 May 1947.
83
Alan Wolstenholme, “Govt. Show Makes a Big Hit. People Want More Frequent Visits by Mobile Cinema” in
The Malay Mail, Monday 20 July 1953: 7.
84
A.N.M. 1957/0576072 Chief Secretary 6635/1952 Film Projectors and Loudspeaker Units for District Officers,
enclosure 1, August 1952.
85
The Straits Times, 14 June 1953, Untitled, author anonymous, 10.
86
A.N.M. 1957/0474874, R.C.P.700/1949, Mobile Public Address Units.
87
A.N.M. 1948 1957/0308602, Perak Secretariat 1289/48, Public Relations Department Mobile Unit Visit to
Estates, Circular commentary dated 7 April 1948.
88
A.N.M. 1957/0329830 KLTN STATE SECT/1954, Monthly Report—February, 1954.
89
A.N.M. 1957/0298161, Sel.Sec.2482/1949, Additional Mobile Public Address Units for Work in Rural Areas,
“Examples of Appreciative Comments on the Work of the Mobile Public Address Units,” 15 April 1949.
90
A.N.M. 1957/0329830 KLTN STATE SECT 3037/1954 Letter from G.R. Poynter to the Director General of
Information Services, Department of Information, Kuala Lumpur, dated 8th March 1954.
91
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8. See also Serna, Making Cinelandia, 5-6.
92
Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, 3-30.
93
Liam Buckley, “Photography and Photo-Elicitation After Colonialism,” Cultural Anthropology 9, Iss.4 (2014):
720.
94
Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 98. Elizabeth
Edwards and Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories.
95
Interview with Mdm. Yap Chin Lian, Lasah New Village, Sungei Siput, 29
th
April 2014.
96
In spite of multiple attempts, I was not able to get very far with regard to collecting women’s histories. Though
many were forthcoming about life during the Emergency, most had nothing to say about the work of the educational
and propaganda films. It could be the case that the circumstances of gender call for a different approach to my
subjects—building up a closer relationship with individual women in the private space of the home as opposed to
the public space of the kopitiam for instance. I plan on addressing this shortcoming in future research.
97
Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, 77.
98
Paul Markandan, The Problem of The New Villages in Malaya (Singapore: Donald Moore, 1954), 9.
99
A.N.M. 1957/0470985, S.C.A.PHG 92/1951, Publicity and Propaganda General, Letter from District Emergency
Information Officer to State Emergency Information Officer (Pahang), 3.
100
A.N.M. 1957/0302401, Sel.Sec 2552/1952 “Statistical Information Concerning New Villages in the Federation of
Malaya,” Statistics concerning New Villages, 18.
101
“Bandit ‘brain’ shot,” The Straits Times, 5 March 1955, 1.

287

102
“Bomb Shot Out of a Terrorist’s Hand,” The Straits Times, 24 December 1957, 1.
103
“$10,000 terror boss surrenders,” The Straits Times, 4 November 1957, 7.
104
A.N.M. 1957/0537332, S.W.E.C. TOP SECRET H/1/1950-52, “Publicity Propaganda Liaison Officer General
S.E.I.O, Letter titled “Chinese Police Recruitment” from G.W. Rothery to Chinese Affairs Office, Negri Sembilan
dated 23rd May 1951.
105
Interview with Mr. Poon, Tanah Hitam, 14 March 2014.
106
Interview with Yang Soon Huat, Yong Peng, 4th May 2014.
107
Interview with Wong Lee Chong, Yong Peng, 4 April 2014.
108
Interview with Phang See Kong, Gopeng, 26
th
April 2014
109
“Sakai” is a derogatory Malay term that referred to the Senoi indigenous people—a word that bore connotations
of primitivism and a history of the forced slavery of the indigenous Orang Asli by the Malays before the British put
a stop to the practice. It has since become a very negative term was commonly used in the 1950s.
110
Interview with Mr. Lieu Poon Khen, Tanah Hitam, 13 March 2014.
111
A.N.M. S.W.E.C. TOP SECRET H/1/1950-52 Publicity Propaganda Liaison Officer General S.E.I.O.,
Fortnightly Report to 31.1.52, dated 31st Jan 1952.
112
Interview with Loh Meow Seong, Ipoh, March 15, 2014.
113
Interview with Loh Meow Seong, Ipoh, March 15, 2014. Jelapang in 1952 was a large settlement consisting of
905 Chinese families and 65 Malay families with most occupations in the agriculture and tin industries. Jelapang
was built around small older settlements, which were absorbed into the larger settlement. A.N.M. 1957/0302401,
Sel.Sec 2552/1952 “Statistical Information Concerning New Villages in the Federation of Malaya,” Statistics
concerning New Villages, 18.
114
Interview with Cheah Tong, Ipoh, 15 March 2015.
115
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar
Gaonkar (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 20-21.
116
Ibid.,16.
117
Buckley, “Photography and Photo-Elicitation After Colonialism”, 720-743.
118
Janet Hoskins, “Agency, Biography, and Objects,” in Handbook of Material Culture Studies, eds. Chris Tilley,
Webb Jane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, Patricia Spyer (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 74-84. Janet
Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of Peoples’ Lives (1st edition) (New York: Routledge,
1998).
119
A.N.M. 1957/0302401, Sel.Sec 2552/1952 “Statistical Information Concerning New Villages in the Federation of
Malaya,” Statistics concerning New Villages, 3.
120
Interview with Yang Soon Huat and Cheng Ming Ching, Yong Peng, 4th May 2014.
121
David McDougall, “Films of Memory” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994, ed.
Lucien Taylor (New York and London: Routledge), 262.
122
Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, Into the Mainstream of Development: Gerakan’s Analysis and Proposals on new
Villages, Pudu: Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, 1986: 38.
123
Sharon Siddique and Leo Suryadinata, “Bumiputra and Pribumi: Economic Nationalism (indigism) in Malaysia
and Indonesia,” Pacific Affairs 54, no.4 (Winter, 1981-1982): 662-687.
124
For discussions on this issue see: Gomez E.T., “The Rise and Fall of Capital: Corporate Malaysia in Historical
Perspective,” in Journal of Contemporary Asia 39, Iss.3 (2009): 345-381. Hamayotsu Kikue, “Towards a More
Democratic Regime and Society? The Politics of Faith and Ethnicity in a Transitional Multi-Ethnic Malaysia,”
Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 32, Iss. 2 (2013): 61-88. Sharmani P Gabriel, “The Meaning of Race in
Malaysia: Colonial, Post-Colonial and Possible New Conjectures,” Ethnicities, Pre-published February 17, 2015,
DOI:10.1177/1468796815570347 (ISI-Cited Publication), 1-28.
125
Wright, The Echo of Things, 17.

288

CONCLUSION
Colonial Film’s Biographical Futures

In many senses, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng owes its continued afterlife to the byte.
Presently, the film exists in multiple bodies scattered across the globe. In the Imperial War
Museum (IWM) in London, it continues to exist on 35mm reels where it has been copied several
times for posterity’s sake. In Malaysia, it lives on in the small village of Yong Peng where the
precious memories that it contains are preserved in the DVDs I had left behind. In Los Angeles,
it occupies a compressed though undeniably physical presence in my hard drive and on the
Cloud. Looking back, Proudly Presenting Yong Peng has come a long way from its “birth” in
1954 when it was produced as colonial educational propaganda for villagers in Malaya. Then
caged in its brittle and deteriorating physical body, it could not have had foreseen a life beyond
the one that lay immediately before it. Through various twists of fate that led to its preservation
at the IWM, its eventual material transformations from reel to pixel offered it an extension of life
beyond its original trajectory.
In concluding this dissertation, I revisit the broad concerns that propelled this project
before turning to questions of colonial educational films’ afterlives in the digital age. How do
films, as objects, move through colonial and postcolonial spaces? What role did they play in the
imperial project and conversely, how did empire color histories of film? Moreover, how does the
postcolonial as a framework and a political position enliven the ways in which we think about
films as cultural objects? Through an exploration of film and governance in colonial Malaya, this
dissertation has offered a postcolonial framework for films as unruly things. As physical objects

289

as well as ephemeral projections, films were open to varied vagrancies. They chartered itinerant
paths across space and time while melding with the agencies of those who watched them. More
than simply texts with fixed meanings moreover, films are objects of material culture that moved
through the world in a constant process of recontextualization as they interacted with human
agents at the level of the local and the everyday. As they gathered new meanings and were
repurposed in various ways, films had multiple social lives that spun biographical tales that often
deviated from the original purposes for which they were made.

I began with the premise that colonial educational films were more than consumer
commodities—an understanding that called for a reconfiguration of cinema’s history within
discourses alternative to Eurocentric historicism. Not necessarily encountered through the same
experience of urban Western modernity and commodity culture that is typically referenced in
classical histories of early cinema, cinematic genealogies in the colonies are situated within
discourses of governance and discipline. Indeed, colonial films invariably began their lives as
imperial agents. As a machine of visual spectacle, the cinematic apparatus was certainly part of
the instrument of colonial modernity. Sexual desires, financial habits, health, and political
sympathies were examples of what the persuasive medium of film sought to define. The visual
pleasures offered by the educational screen were not suspended amusements, but inseparable
from the multiple technologies of governance that surrounded it. Screenings took place amid
lectures, exhibitions, and hands-on encounters with government officials who sought to ensure
that the lessons on the screen were implemented in real life. As discussed in Chapter 4 for
example, mobile cinema units brought films to resettled villagers where film shows were nestled
amid anti-communist speeches, plays, and talentimes. These accompanying “amusements” were

290

not quite included in the spirit of distraction and attraction (as per the vaudeville programs that
were a key part of early cinema exhibition in the West for instance), but were instead part of the
larger political agenda of fostering a sense of community amid dislocated peoples as a measure
of counter-insurgency.
While films invariably sought to teach people the mores of modern citizenship, such
“colonial modernity” was an uneven and heterogeneous thing to which different racial and socio-
economic groups had uneven claims. Malay peasants were taught “better” ways to plant padi,
market their crops, and tend to their finances. Tamil plantation workers watched instructional
films on rubber tapping alongside co-operative films that prepared them for lives as migrant
laborers. During the Emergency, relocated Chinese villagers watched films specially made to
persuade them about the dangers of communism. Educated Asiatics were privy to educational
films on social hygiene but such films were off limits to the general population. While urbanites
in Singapore frequented amusement parks with multiple cinema halls, villagers in rural Perak
experienced the cinema amid the silent darkness of the fields at night. Meanwhile, documentary
films publicized Malaya to the world as an example of the successes of late stage colonialism—a
modern plural society where the different races worked together in a cosmopolitan orchestra of
economic productivity.
The medium of film itself—the very grammar of cinematic language coupled with the
wide-reaching capabilities of the visual spectacle—enabled films to function as active agents that
sought to bring about a particular manifestation of empire through their interactions with
audiences. Voiceovers, editing, and sound sutured disparate people, places, and times together
into a coherent entity that came to life in the ethereal world of the cinema. Film’s ability to
conjure images of Malaya(ns) and present these images back at the audiences themselves was of

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key importance in its role as an agent of social transformation. To enable audiences to better
“recognize themselves” in the characters on the screen, films featured local actors and familiar
scenarios. The impetus to produce local films for local people generated on-location film
production in the colonies and a burgeoning filmmaking culture populated with Malayan
filmmakers, cameramen, production assistants, and field lecturers.
While films may have found their biographical beginnings as agents of empire,
unruliness defined the cinematic encounter both behind the camera and before the screen. This
unruliness enabled films to lead multiple social lives. Films were unruly at several registers: as
material objects (reels that sat in canisters) and as ephemeral visions—rays of light on the lens of
the recording camera and on the retina of the viewer. Films led bifurcated lives, existing in two
material states at once. Indeed, each chapter in this dissertation has sought to explore different
facets of film’s vagrancies across its different material forms.
For the colonial government, films were unnervingly nubile objects that slipped too
easily across borders. Traveling by airplanes, trucks, and ships, the very portability that enabled
films to be effective messengers of empire also endowed them with the potential for vagrancy. In
Chapter 1, I explored how the unchecked movement of venereal disease educational films
featuring Westerners in sexual situations into colonial territories initiated concerns in the
Colonial Office about the morality of the cinema at large. The policing of itinerant films on
moral grounds was imbricated in what was really the desire for greater control over the
movements of films as commodities. As film prints moved between permeable borders, they
revealed circuits of commodity traffic that challenged the integrity of imperial trade.
Unruliness also plagued films during the process of their production. Film was
encumbered by its material inscriptions—in the time it takes for light to first stain the stock, for

292

the reels to make their way to the cutting room (at times abroad), the process of material
manipulation where they are cut and rejoined, and for the finished product to emerge and make
its journey out into the world. Chapter 3 observed how film, as a time-lagged object, struggled to
keep up with its unruly subjects who would not be still. The willfulness of Malayans to
determine history on their own terms defied the state’s attempts to picture Malaya as an example
of good colonial management. Documentaries made about Malaya’s plural society failed to keep
pace with the conflicting narratives the films’ subjects were themselves forging.
Films were also unruly at the point of transformation from the reel to the screen/eye
where films “take flight” into the immaterial world of shadow and light. In the space before the
screen, film’s ephemeral bodies were open to the indeterminable forces of reception. Much of
this dissertation has been devoted to unearthing how films were received in unpredictable ways
that frustrated their original intentions. Indeed, one of the primary concerns for colonial
governments was that of the so-called visual literacy of Asiatic audiences. Could they be counted
on to be educated or were they being led astray by unruly visual pleasures? In the case of
venereal disease educational films for instance, officials believed that Malayan audiences would
glean illicit pleasures from watching Europeans behaving badly on-screen. In films about co-
operative thrift, official suspected that audiences would be more sympathetic toward the
spendthrift characters rather than the thrifty ones.
As sites of unruliness, film screenings were therefore not one-way conversations but
spaces of political negotiation—though these “push-backs” were articulated in ways that were
not always recognizable to the onlooker. Archival records offer glimpses of incredulous
audiences who snickered at the screen while “renegade” lectures detoured from official scripts.
My interviews with people who watched the films of the Mobile Film Unit in the 1950s also

293

revealed how people watched government films for various reasons, some having little to do
with the official purposes of the screenings. When read through the particularities of local
contexts, film screenings transformed into deeply political spaces where representations of
Malayan life were up for negotiation by Malayans themselves. In other contexts, screenings were
performative zones where attendance was a means of publicly situating oneself within deeply
local, intra-community politics. Hence, an attention to “thick reception,” as discussed in Chapter
4, makes headway into unearthing the multi-layered ways in which Malayans repurposes
cinematic sites of discipline for their own ends.
Attention to reception also reveals the unexpected afterlives that colonial educational
films have in the present. By bringing Proudly Presenting Yong Peng back with me to the village
of Yong Peng in which it was shot, my agency as a researcher led to what Appadurai has called a
“diversion” in the life path of the film.
1
No longer a disciplinary imperial tool, Proudly
Presenting Yong Peng finds new meaning amid villagers in the postcolonial present. Indeed, the
film was a precious repository of personal and cultural memory. For some, it housed the
animated bodies of deceased family members while for others, its images stood in for memories
that have since faded. Preserved for future generations and shown at the local school, residents
also repurposed Proudly Presenting Yong Peng as a site of heritage—a promise of past images
that could be preserved for the future. Expressions of their ultimate unruliness, colonial
educational films are freed of their disciplinary intentions and find new meanings decades after
the “end” of empire.
As imperial commodities, colonial educational films hence move in and out of imperial
regimes as they meet and mingle with human agents. This dissertation has traced the unruly lives
of colonial films on their travels within and outside of Malaya, at every stage of its life

294

(production, distribution, and reception), and their multiple re-purposing during and after the
course of their original lives. Locally determined and contextually shaped by the people around
them, film’s biographies were potentially as multitudinous as the agencies with whom they met.
The colonial state, the filmmakers, and the audiences were active presences that gave a film
meaning in the past and recontextualized it in the present. Its continued preservation in archives
and museums at the end of its intended life trajectory bear the agencies of archivists, institutions,
and researchers whose investments (intellectual, financial, time, and space) determine films’
survival and promise their resurrection (or continued silencing). The agency of the researcher
who turns the artifact into an object of study, or who in this case brings the archival object back
to the location of its genesis, also bears a mark upon the film’s future life.
By divesting the power of determination from the colonial “makers” of a film and
attributing that agency among these multiple bearers, the biographical approach speaks to the
sympathies of postcolonial historiography by taking films outside of static trajectories and fixed
meanings. In making room for films’ many possible encounters during the course of their long
lives, a biographical framework instead configures films as cultural things-in-motion that shape
and are shaped by human agents. Through this framework, I have argued that even as colonial
educational films actively sought to establish imperial policies, films were also unruly objects
whose multiple social lives interrupted their “official” trajectories as instruments of empire.

Alchemic Media, Digital Biographies

In the introduction of this dissertation I have noted how lost films necessitate a sort of
scholarship that necessarily moves past textual analysis. Material histories involved the

295

establishment of thick context even in the absence of a text—or especially because of it. I have,
perhaps a little harshly, held institutions accountable for not preserving these films but in all
fairness, films’ lack of preservation had much to do with their own material “failures.” Their
brittle bodies left them prey to decay in the tropics. Their existence in physical form allowed
them to be misplaced. Their surface frailties left them scratched, worn out, snapped, unusable.
Brian Larkin notes that it is the materiality of media as objects—objects subject to the
breakdowns, mechanical failures, damage, and theft that plague all entities that exist materially
in this world—that makes manifest the failure of technology as that which embodies the
relationship between ruler and ruled.
2

Even after the end of colonialism, films’ bodies remain vulnerable. Their physicality
leaves them at the mercy of the politics (and ever shortening funds) of the institutions that house
them. Mid-way through my research on this project in 2013, Filem Negara—the successor of
Malayan Film Unit—was absorbed within the larger body of FINAS (Perbadanan Kemajuan
Filem Nasional or National Film Development Corporation Malaysia). The vast collection of
films by the Malayan Film Unit have since then become swallowed behind impenetrable thickets
of bureaucracy and red tape, rendering them virtually inaccessible to outside researchers. What a
relief then, to find that Internet housed a few of these coveted films.
Indeed, in the digital age, many colonial educational films are given the unexpected
chance to live again. Rescued from hibernation (or at least a state of relative anonymity) in the
archives, films have been making appearances on online websites and databases.
Colonialfilm.org.uk—the outcome of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Major Resource
Enhancement research project from 2007 to 2010—provides the most comprehensive collection
of digitized films from the British Empire at present. Cataloging 6,200 films on empire topics

296

housed at the British Film Institute (BFI), the Imperial War Museum (IWM), and the now
defunct British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, the project rationalized floating (and
buried) films into a body of knowledge—a collection of colonial pasts. The project made a
significant portion of these films viewable for the global public via the web. Organized by
geographical region, themes, events, and production organizations, a search under the topic of
“Empires on Display” for instance unearths films from New Zealand besides ones featuring
Delhi. Encircling miles and spanning decades, moving images of the British Empire mingle on
the screen as a marvelous example of time-space compression. In some ways, cinematic visions
of empire attained their full coherence many decades after the “end” of colonialism.
A search for films on colonial subjects also finds them liberally strewn across the Internet
Archive, YouTube, and Vimeo or on channels hosted by various archives. Personal collections of
home movies and amateur travel films shared online also shed light on previously unknown non-
theatrical films. Put into new forms of circulation, colonial films are able to roam the world, on
demand. The surfaces on which these films appear have also changed. Colonial educational films
were once intended for itinerant screens—traveling on the backs of mobile film units and playing
across portable or makeshift screens in hospitals, jungle camps, village classrooms, and rubber
plantations. Now films are truly untethered—roaming the world on aluminum clad devices
transported in suitcases, backpacks, and pockets.
More than being simply resurrected, films are reincarnated in new bodies that permit such
itinerancy. Shedding the weight of the laborious reels that caged them for so long, they appear
now in their “spirit” selves—everywhere at once but seemingly immaterial; visible to all but
most often seen only by those who care to notice. On the verge of near ephemerality they appear
to be weightless phantoms capable of traversing the globe at breathtaking speed. Like ghosts too,

297

films’ digital presences trail the researcher from the archive back to the field, moving from the
reel to a DVD where it might then take up residence on a hard drive or in the Cloud.
The film lives on, intact and many-bodied, in new materials. No less a “thing,” the object
continues its life in digital forms experiencing what Giuliana Bruno has poetically termed
“technological alchemy” whereby “the physicality of a thing one can touch does not vanish with
the disappearance of its material but can morph culturally, transmutating into another medium.”
3

A film’s virtual state enables the object to travel across the surface of different media. As Bruno
states, “in the digital age, materiality can be reactivated, because it was always a virtual
condition.”
4
Indeed it is the film’s surface inhabitancy that enabled Proudly Presenting Yong
Peng to migrate from reel to DVD and then to the iPad on its journey from London to Johor.
Anchored in its virtual form, a film is grafted across many mediums, taking root in various
physical bodies and then moving on, ever itinerant.
Where Bruno dwells on the materiality of alchemic media as “surface,” questions of
storage suggest a meditation on media’s materiality as “mass” i.e. things that can be stored and
that take up space. When films are accessed and stored in digital form, often over the Internet,
they appear weightless but in truth, these forms of storage are no less “material” than reels of
film. Computational storage media that consists of drives, diskettes, and behemoth webservers in
datacenters take the place of the humble reel yet enable films to live incredibly itinerant lives
(travelling globally over the internet) while seeming to promise longevity once freed from the
fussiness of degradable film stock itself. As Matthew Kirshenbaum points out, the digital is very
much embedded in objects such as the hard drive while software too leaves traces and residues—
inscriptions which he distinguishes as forensic and formal materiality respectively.
5
How do
these material transformations determine on how we conduct postcolonial historiographies of

298

media? What do they mean for the biographies of films after the “end” of colonialism? Does
digital storage and dissemination put dead-ended colonial films at the brink of exciting potential
afterlives, or does it precipitate its deadening in dull storage?
It is tempting to think of digital and web-based repositories as the solution to the
fecklessness (and inconveniences) of the physical archive. Rendered as bits and bytes, and “set
free” (or conversely “preserved”) on publically accessible digital formats, films appear truly
liberated from their culpable bodies. Writing with reference to how computers have conflated
storage with memory, media scholar Wendy Chun remarks that the ephemeral has become
meshed with the enduring. For instance, computer “memory” is surprisingly persistent. As
Kirschenbaum argues, digital traces remain, leaving phantom inscriptions on software, code, and
disk master indexes even after their deletion.
6
Yet, that which is not constantly updated falls
rapidly into unreadable obsoletion—the enduring is rendered fleeting and ephemeral. The idea
that films find permanence in their new digital forms is a dangerous illusion. Drives fail and
media too “dies” online, quite literally in fact when links go “dead.” Perhaps one is careful
enough to back-up media in multiple personal data storage banks in the event of hard drive
failures. Backups of backups—a system of deferred expectations of failure. Even if granted
afterlives in the digital world, colonial films tread unpredictable paths into the future.
Beyond the preservational significances of colonial film’s digital afterlives, how
digitization determines postcolonial memory is an ongoing question. Chun argues that “memory
does not equal storage;” memory is not a static collection of material stashed in a physical
location but an active process.
7
Collections of revived films do not, in themselves, function as
memory. Instead, memory is harbored in the “act of repetition: it is an act of commemoration—a
process of recollecting or remembering.”
8
The conflation of storage with memory is one that

299

extends to human collections of cultural pasts; the notion that the access and acquisition of
moving images of the past stands in for memory is a troubled one. In storage, films reside like
inert things that are neither alive nor dead, circulating endlessly in cyberspace, no doubt seen but
ensconced museum-like in a state of mummification. In the absence of that act of
commemoration—storytelling, recounting, and recollection—how are these films any less dead,
or any more alive, in their digital bodies?
In the postcolonial future, who does the work of remembering that would keep these
images in the act of repetition? Two generations after the end of colonialism in Malaysia and
Singapore, and slipping father and father away from the edge of living memory, access to
colonial pasts is increasingly dependent on accounts that remain in tangible form—colonial
documents preserved in archives, films that have been saved and digitized. Cultural memory is a
shifting and evolving thing. With the passing of those who lived these pasts intimately and in the
everyday, the histories written by future students of empire will be increasingly dependent on
collections that render these pasts visible even as they inadvertently or otherwise replicate the
very narratives of empire that we hope to circumvent. Amid my own frantic consumption and
amassment of newly digitized, once-colonial media, the task I then give myself is: how would
we sustain these films as living memory—in a perpetual process of commemoration—rather than
circulating in undead storage?
Still, as Chun states, stores look toward a future.
9
Things are put in storage in the
anticipation of eventual usage. Even as they float inert in webspace or wait quietly in a drive or
in the Cloud, films in storage hold the potential for future afterlives, awaiting the human hands
that will revisit and repurpose them. Ever unruly, shifting between matter and ephemerality,
alchemic media are malleable things that would not be still as they are mechanically and digitally

300

reproduced. As they wait, moving through colonial, postcolonial, and perhaps even post-national
worlds, films’ possible afterlives extend manifold before them. As the many lives of colonial
educational films would attest to, media technologies are as magical as the human social worlds
through which they travel.

1
Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, 17.
2
Larkin, Signal and Noise, 9.
3
Bruno, Surface, 7.
4
Ibid, 8.
5
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2008), 10-15.
6
Ibid., 50-53.
7
Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011), 167.
8
Ibid., 134.
9
Ibid., 133.

301

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