Correspondances: 2008

Saturday 8 November 2008

(MPH) Quill Magazine October 2008

Aaron Siskind, the American abstract expressionist photographer, is quoted as saying “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever...it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”

The same could be said for film/cinema. There is a truism that a country’s character is revealed in the films it makes about itself, leaving residue of reality and permanent reminders of those “little things” which makes a culture unique, none more so than in films made by Malays.

From P.Ramlee’s golden age of Malay popular films, to neo-documentaries by Amir Muhammad, aspects of Malay culture and Malay lives are constantly being revealed and re-defined through films made in Malaysia.

A golden age of Malaysian cinema was truly encapsulated by the films of P.Ramlee. For many, the films of Teuku Nyak Puteh bin Teuku Karim (aka P.Ramlee) were the epitome of Malay cinema, from nasib (1949) right through to his last film laksamana do re mi made in 1972, he died in 1973.

Rumbustious, funny, endearing, romantic, P.Ramlee’s films opened up Malay kampungs (villages) like never before. Malays identified with representations of their culture/personal lives characterised by P.Ramlee the writer/actor/director, from the bumbling and bungling bachelor to the smooth singing Casanova.

Many films were made after the Ramlee era, but none were to get as close to the Malay heart as P.Ramlee’s endearing romps and romances, as he captured both the earnestness and playfulness of the Malay character.

Later, Yasmin Ahmad began to stir the collective unconscious with films like Sepet (2004), Gubra (2006), Mukhsin (2007) and more recently Muallaf (2008). Although critics might consider these works ‘filmy’, or popularist, Ahmad’s films provide an artistic link between Ramlee’s pure entertainment and the documentary style realism which was to come later.

Malay films had already begun to adopt new realism with Ahmad’s critically popular films, concentrating on Malay social issues like romances between a Malay Muslims and Chinese non-Muslims (Sepet), or converts to Islam, in Muallaf. Much of Ahmad’s work, ultimately, is about relationships, revealing the “feeling...touching...loving” which Siskind talked about. While Ahmad’s films are about culture and responses to culture, they are also, primarily, about people.

Yasmin Ahmad’s films breech the gap between popularist and ‘Art’ cinema in Malaysia, while other Malay film makers steer off in directions of their own. It is no surprise that Malay film makers, like Amir Muhammad, should start portraying socially relevant issues in films and documentaries, within both Malay and Malaysian contexts.

While Muhammad’s films, like The Big Durian (2003), question the official line in recent historical events and made authentic attempts to shed new light on Malaysian social traumas, there is no doubt that he is also searches for fresh ways of fusing concepts of documentary with modern popular cinema.

The Big Durian enquires into a real incident of a soldier running amok, in the infamous Chow Kit area of Kuala Lumpur, with a M16 rifle, and questions reasons and reactions about this incident, and its effects on lives of real people.

The voice of the people and countering the official line, seem to have become themes in Muhammad’s films such as lelaki kommunis terakhir (The Last Communist - 2006) and apa khabar orang kampung (Village People Radio Show - 2007). Both were both banned by the Malaysian government, for, perhaps, dealing too honestly with the issues of Communism and alternate histories in Malaysia, and have not been officially shown there.

At times it may be difficult to discern pseudo-documentary from documentary, in Muhammad’s films, and, frequently, aspects of Woody Allen type intellectual playfulness emerges, as with song and dance in The Last Communist. It would be unfair to compare The Last Communist with Bollywood cinema, or even with those song and dance numbers in many of the P.Ramlee films, but aspects of this, intentionally, slip into The Last Communist. This film, according to the official blurb, is a fiction/fact hybrid as it “...combines testimony with song.”

Again, regarding real Malaysian history, Muhammad made Village People Radio Show in a documentary style, interviewing retired Communist Party of Malaya 10th Regiment members now living in Thailand. But, as with the previous films, nothing is quite that straight-forward with an Amir Muhammad movie, and the audience is treated to a Thai play amidst the interviews displayed in this moving film.

P.Ramlee’s playfulness and desire to present Malay culture to the world continues to reside in films made three decades after his demise, whether they are the more popularist films of Yasmin Ahmad, or the fact/fiction films of Amir Muhammad, they all capture those little things, which are remembered long after we all have gone, and this is the beauty of these Malay films.

Saturday 5 April 2008

RUBICON (teaser)

Henri Lee slouched on the side of his hotel bed experiencing the softness of a worn mattress under his naked buttocks, the lurid hotel bed-throw coarse under his supple white-collar hand. Henri’s nude toes nestled in the tousled pink mat adjacent to an aged hardness of cigarette burnt fibres and petrified minutiae of chewing gum, caked solid onto the mat. The twelve by ten hotel room was increasing claustrophobic as Henri mused upon the rasping of a cockroach.

The aphasic rhythm of flashing neon light threw punitive blue light upon Henri’s middle-aged frame revealing the deathly pallor of a Lucian Freud painting - a lumpish carcass, flabby and ill-used. Henri had never been initiated into the cult of body, his only exercise had been the gentle daily walking of Chester, his aging tan Labrador, hence the extra kilos gracing his midriff.

A scratched and scarred silver Samsonite suitcase lay supine on the wooden hotel rest. From its bowels spilled the detritus of Henri’s life. Black Marks and Spencer underpants leaked like Dali watches over the case’s rim melting into still wrapped Pagoda brand vests purchased in Kota Raya Plaza. Fawn socks nuzzled worn Rael Brook shirts as they fondled cotton Gordon Bennett and polyester Van Heusen, cotton Farah slacks petting brown Ecco shoes, all individually and collectively cavorting.

A frowning Henri scanned the melange under the bitter neon light seeing the sum total of his life mirrored in the presenting chaos - Henri wanted to weep, but delayed. It wasn’t yet time.

A middle-aged and middle-class Henri Lee had arrived at the age of 60 two days before arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Sometime between the ages of 50 and 60 something had disappeared from Henri’s life - he ascertained a lack, absence. Henri’s marriage was unravelling gradually as he took early retirement from his career. The couple had no children and Henry had shied away from letting friends into his life. Then from retirement somehow being alone metamorphosed into loneliness, and a meaningful chasm opened in Henri’s life - this he sought to plug with fragmented shards of ill-recalled memory.

For Henri sixty became a chronological marker, a period when life’s accomplishments and failures are evaluated. Being sixty induced Henri to take life’s yardstick, measure, and having measured find him-self seriously wanting.

The return to Malaysia - back to the land of his origin, in this sense was not a home coming. Henri had made his home in London many years earlier, so for him this was an immersion into sepia tinged nostalgia - obscure and oblique reminiscence swaddled in his own gloriously conjured retrospective illusion.

The MAS flight from Heathrow to KLIA was misspent self-medicating -Henri consumed blended Irish whiskey and then lounged bombarded by twelve hours of programming from a minute TV screen attached to a mechanical arm on his seat. Henri’s headphones obscured in-flight clatter and chatter until the tedium and the alcohol drugged him comatose.

Henri had been grateful to pay extra for a seat with additional leg-room and with the adjacent seat being empty Henri spoke with no-one but the air-stewardess – successfully cocooning himself within his anonymity, safe in the knowledge that no one knew him or of him. To all intents and purposes Henri had become not just invisible but intangible curled foetal position inside his mind, secluded from human interaction.

The normally tedious and time consuming dance of baggage retrieval, immigration and customs control were, on this occasion, not an obstacle as Henri slipped quietly into Malaysia and onto the express train bound for KL Central and the Pearl Dragon hotel. While still in England Henri had booked the hotel from its alluring website and, as it was convenient to both Petaling Street and China Town, Henri had not reserved his usual caution thereby landing himself with a twelve by ten foot roach infested shoebox, sans even minimal comforts

Henri’s mother had been deceased fifteen years, and his father five, leaving Henri, an only child, now also an orphan, he had steadfastly avoided aunts, uncles, cousins, and not bothered with family, kith, kin but, instead, had quietly got on with his own unadventurous life in Roman Road - London’s East End.

Nursing had not been so much of a calling for Henri but more of a means to escape family and the identical Malaysian provinciality which he now sought. When at eighteen Henri had applied for and received a place to study nursing in the UK he was away, literally flying into his perceived real world, escaping nosey neighbours, meddling aunties, punishing teachers and pushy parents.

Chen Ri Lee became Henri Lee and successfully flew away from all that he was, reinventing himself as an adventurous new-world citizen hailing a future incipiently pregnant with a myriad possibilities and excitement conjured from the dubious promises of a brighter future, all engendered by western novels, film and TV.

Henri, however, was to discover that ‘real life’ was not as it was depicted in Life magazine or endlessly slick Rock Hudson movies replete with mandatory happy endings. Real life for Henri was about getting up at a ridiculous hour of the morning, braving the aching cold, shivering as he brushed his teeth and missing just about everything he had when he was in Ampang, Malaysia.

Henri’s bravado had soon worn off and longing for Nasi Ayam and Cantonese dim sum soon took over. Weeks of longing turned into months and then years while gradually Henri settled into a British nursing career, first as a student nurse, then as an enrolled nurse and later to become a State Registered Nurse (SRN). In the years which followed Henri climbed the career ladder from staff nurse to charge nurse, ward manager and eventually as a nursing officer and departmental head.

After a life of service to his adopted country, and having completed the requisite number of years in the British National health Service, Henri was in the happy position of either being able to work on until the age of 65 or retire early due to his length of service - he chose the latter. Henri retired to a chorus of farewells from his former colleagues at the London Chest Hospital - who forgot him the moment he passed through the heavy plastic doors exiting the hospital, and returned home to Jane (previously Jin Chiew) his wife of the previous twenty years.

Walking Chester on the same route he had taken to work every morning –down Driffield Road, out onto Old Ford Road and skirting the inviting green of Victoria Park past the wrought iron gates and along the Hertford Union Canal, Henri found retirement difficult. The stress of his new home-life and the adjustments it had required from both Jane and Henri began to tell in their relationship - after a couple of years it was obvious that the marriage was ill and probably would not survive- it didn’t.

After four years of muddling through retirement Henri discovered himself alone. Jane had found it preferable living with Mark - a consultant surgeon, his knighthood, his antique furniture, his vases and paintings, his St John’s Wood apartment and his sleek two-cylinder Jaguar, to being with Henri in the basement flat in London’s East End, and no car.

Entropically existing, walking Chester, drinking alone down The Young Prince and watching young couples flaunt their youth and vibrancy weighed heavily on Henri. He didn’t miss Jane, the last months of that relationship had obliterated all the good that may have gone before, but he did feel something - uneasiness. Gradually the notion of getting away, escaping, fostered itself in his increasingly uneasy mind.

Now Henri was feeling alone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - the world.

Friday 1 February 2008

The Unsocial Worker - teaser

Allen Bond fell.

Allen Bond fell, but not in a philosophical Heideggarian way of falling.

Nor did he fall in a magic realist metaphysical fatwa inducing way.

He fell.

He fell simply because, like the majority of humans, he was unable to fly.

Allen found that contrary to certain beliefs ‘Being’ was incredibly heavy.

Heavy - in the strawberry jam on the pavement sort of way.

Heavy in Allen’s case, as in fifteen stones too heavy.

Allen therefore fell in a real, honest-to-God-listen-to-me-scream sort of way.