Celluloid Singapore: Cinema, Performance and the National by Edna Lim (review)

While Singapore was established as a free trade port in 1819 by the British East India Company, it only became a British Crown Colony in 1867, as part of the Straits Settlements, and an independent republic in 1965. Political changes after independence affected the nature of the local film industry, leading film historians to divide Singapore’s film production into two distinct periods, and to focus on the differences rather than the similarities between them. In brief, Singapore served as a film production centre for the Malay peninsula between 1945 and 1965, producing over 360 Malay-language films. The industry relocated to Kuala Lumpur following Singapore’s independence, however, and only a handful of films were produced in the seventies. Production resumed in 1995, with a Chinese-language cinema revival. Edna Lim, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the National University of Singapore, prefers to adopt a broad, inclusive approach, arguing that specific features link these various periods in Singapore’s film production history.

Lim conceptualizes Singapore as a transnational space given the island’s strategic location at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula, which has consistently allowed it to function as a shipping port, with merchant ships from India and China taking advantage of the prevailing trade winds. The ongoing influence of international trade on the island’s multicultural identity leads Lim to highlight the fact that, despite the linguistic shift between the two main cinema traditions, the particular cultural mix in cosmopolitan Singapore has remained essentially the same, with 74 per cent ethnic Chinese, 13 per cent Malays, 9 per cent Tamil Indians and 4 per cent others. Using the concept of transnationalism, Lim compares Singapore’s previous role as a hub for the Malay-language film industry with its current strategy of producing films in Mandarin for export to the Chinese-speaking world. In both cases, she points out, the local market alone would not normally sustain the production of a dozen or more feature films per year. The book proceeds chronologically, devoting two chapters each to three broadly defined periods in the country’s history: 1945–1965, 1970–1990, and 1995–present. Lim tends to focus first on the political or cultural history of each period, sometimes without reference to cinema, following this with an examination of the film industry or a handful of representative films.

The first section, on the Malay-language films, may be the most successful at integrating these two strands, combining a political analysis of the turbulent postwar period with a discussion of the films and the cultural context in which they were produced. Most interesting is Lim’s detailed analysis of Malay cinema’s cultural hybridity, revealing the joint influence of traditional Malay theatre, or bangsawan, and shadow puppetry, or wayang kulit. Lim discusses dominant themes and narrative structure, using the famous film Penarik Beca (The Trishaw Puller, 1955) as an example, in a way that helps to compensate for the Western tendency to focus on the possible neorealist influence of The Bicycle Thieves. Lim also highlights the impact of Japanese film comedies, and especially the influence of the Bollywood musical form—partly due to the hiring of Indian film directors—thereby underscoring the transnational character of these productions.

The book’s second section covers a transitional period in the seventies and eighties that saw only a handful of film projects, mostly by foreign producers. Lim explains that the government was not inclined to encourage film production due to nation-building efforts immediately after independence. Parenthetically, the perceived gap in the domestic production of dramas and comedies during this time can be attributed in part to a somewhat myopic focus on the part of researchers on theatrical forms of audiovisual narrative, a bias that a history of broadcast television in Singapore, which remains to be written, would help to rectify. In the absence of a vibrant film industry to discuss, Lim devotes a section to describing Singapore’s famous economic miracle, although the relevance of such...