Golden age of Malaysian cinema
The Shaw Brothers, famous Hong Kong producers, set up a branch in Singapore, a venture temporarily interrupted by the war and the Japanese invasion. Their company, Malay Films Production, along with Loke Wan Tho's Cathay-Keris, was responsible for the majority of post-war Malay films. At first, these were entrusted to foreign, mainly Indian, directors. Permata di Perlimbahan (Haji Mahadi), the first film by a Malay director, dates from 1952 and heralds a kind of golden age for local cinema. In the early 1960s, part of the industry moved to Kuala Lumpur with the creation of new studios. One star overshadowed all the others: P. Ramlee, a veritable one-man band, director, actor, composer and singer, when he wasn't doing it all at once, in 66 films. Among them: The Curse of the Oily Man (1958), a kitsch horror film; My Mother-in-Law (1962), an original oscillation between comedy and melodrama; and Turbulence (1970), one of his last and best films, which takes a bold approach to some of the taboos of Malaysian society. Its love and intergenerational triangle is reminiscent of Mike Nichols' The Graduate. Another famous name is Hussein Haniff, responsible for a version of the story of Hang Tuah, a legendary warrior from ancient Malacca(Hang Jebat, 1961).
Malaise and renewal in culture
The 1970s saw production decline, despite government initiatives and the proliferation of production companies in the wake of the huge success of Keluarga Si-Comat (Aziz Sattaz, 1975). The cause: foreign competition, including from Bollywood and Hong Kong, and from television. In 1979, Peter Bogdanovich managed to evade the censors to shoot the excellent Jack the Magnificent in Singapore - the story of an American brothel keeper. The government's creation of a National Council for Film Development in 1981 put an end to China's virtual hegemony in production, and coincided with the emergence of a new generation of fresh-tongued filmmakers such as Rahim Razali, whose filmography traces the evolution of Malaysian society over the decade, Shaharom Mohd, Hafsham, Mansor Puteh and Nasir Jani. With Femme, Épouse et Putain (1993), about a forced rather than arranged marriage, U-Wei Haji Saari demonstrates unprecedented audacity. His next film, L'Incendiaire (1995), inspired by a story by Faulkner, was the first Malaysian film to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival: this story of a Javanese immigrant evokes the fractures that exist across the tangle of cultures that is Malaysia. This taboo subject permeates the most interesting films of the decade that follows. A road trip across Malaysia, De Jemapoh à Manchester (Hishamuddin Rais, 1998) shows a youth seeking to extricate itself from cumbersome traditions and political ruts.
The Little Cinema of Malaysia
The advent of digital cameras has given rise to a deluge of films shot on the bangs of the traditional circuits, using next to nothing. Documentary filmmaker Amir Muhammad is the figurehead of this pseudo-movement, dubbed "Small Malaysian Cinema". Lips to Lips (2000) reveals his maverick temperament, a penchant for satire and offbeat humor, which earned him the wrath of the censors on several occasions, and is repeated in The Big Durian (2003), a docu-drama inspired by a news story that traumatized the country. This revolution conceals another: many directors of Chinese (James Lee, Tan Chui Mui) or Indian (Deepak Kumaran Menon) origin are making films in their own language. A fine film on childhood in particular: Fleur dans la poche by Liew Seng Tat (2007). Meanwhile, a revered figure of Taiwanese auteur cinema, Malaysian-born Tsai Ming-liang, returns to Kuala Lumpur to shoot I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2007), a kind of love triangle filmed in long, almost silent sequence shots. The film demands to be cut so that it can be released in Malaysia. A sign of progress, however, is that the film finally reflects Malaysia's multiculturalism and multilingualism. Another key figure, Yasmin Ahmad, represented an intermediary between this independent, quasi-underground cinema and the most commercial productions. Her beginnings in advertising probably explain the polished form of the few autobiographical films she had time to make before her death at 51. Sepet (2005), the first part of a semi-autobiographical trilogy and a bittersweet romantic comedy about the thwarted love between a Chinese man and a Malay woman, is the best-known, but the others are equally marvelous. At the same time, Singapore is witnessing the rise of a handful of filmmakers. A variation on Taxi Driver, the film Perth (Djinn, 2004) stands in stark contrast to the social success that is the fashionable thing to do. Eric Khoo made his international breakthrough with Be with Me (2005), an interweaving of solitary destinies in search of affection, which earned him a host of superlatives. He followed this up with My Magic (2008) and Hotel Singapura (2015), a sketch film satirizing love and sexual behavior from 1942 to the present day.
International recognition
Typical of this new wave of films is a polished aesthetic, where the influence of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, such as Royston Tan's 4:30 (2005) about an 11-year-old boy left to fend for himself in an apartment, or the much more rhythmic 15: The Movie (2015), which this time probes teenagers also left to their own devices, or more recently Les Étendues imaginaires (Siew Hua Yeo, 2018), a dreamy, languid film noir. Anthony Chen won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes with Ilo Ilo (2013), a sensitive chronicle of the friendship between a Filipino maid and the boy she has to look after, which captures deep class inequalities. Recent years have seen an explosion of commercial cinema in Malaysia, imitating that of Hollywood - the taste for horror (sacrificed by Amir Muhammad) being on the other hand local - with a multitude of franchises enjoying unprecedented success (animated films, proof of Malaysian know-how in the field, also make up a good part of this influx). Perhaps the most interesting is The Journey (Chiu Keng Guan, 2014), shot in Mandarin and English across Malaysia.
