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

This dissertation is a historical study of films as instruments of empire in British Malaya (presently Malaysia and Singapore) from the 1920s until the postcolonial present. With its multi‐ethnic population, Malaya was the site of numerous large‐scale experiments with films for “native” education. These motion-pictures, defined in this dissertation as “colonial educational films,” sought to teach audiences the fundamentals of good colonial citizenship. Made by the Malayan government primarily for local audiences though at times also destined for viewers abroad, films covered topics such as venereal disease prevention, financial responsibility, and loyalty to the Commonwealth. For audiences in the colonies, films were therefore not merely entertainment but were inseparable from ever increasing forms of governance in everyday life. ❧ However, as physical objects as well as ephemeral projections, the volatility of films’ splintered materialities enabled them to lead multiple social lives. Even if colonial educational films were produced as imperial instruments, films chartered errant paths across international borders and were received in ways that troubled their disciplinary intentions. More than simply texts with fixed meanings, films moved through the world in a constant process of re‐contextualization as they interacted with human agents at the level of the local and the everyday. Through in‐depth archival research alongside oral histories and film screenings, this dissertation investigates how Malayan audiences re‐purposed films toward their own ends while endowing films with unexpected afterlives in the postcolonial present. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that colonial educational films were unruly things with multiple social lives that both acceded to and were divergent from their intended trajectories as instruments of empire. ❧ Departing from existing narratives in media history that situate films’ emergence within the contexts of turn‐of‐the‐century Western commodity culture, this research sheds light on an understudied though important history of film as encountered through the particular experience of colonial governance in Southeast Asia. Utilizing interdisciplinary methodological approaches, it also presents a historiographical framework that conceptualizes films as cultural‐things‐in‐motion.

本学位论文为一项史学研究，聚焦1920年代直至后殖民当下，作为帝国统治工具的电影在英属马来亚（今马来西亚与新加坡）的历史。由于族群多元，马来亚曾开展诸多针对“土著”教育的大型电影实验项目。本论文将此类影片定义为“殖民教育电影”，其旨在向受众传授合格殖民公民的基本素养。这些影片由马来亚政府制作，主要面向本地受众，偶尔也供海外观众观看，内容涵盖性病预防、财务责任以及效忠英联邦等主题。因此对于殖民地受众而言，影片绝非单纯的娱乐，而是与日常生活中日趋严密的治理体系密不可分。

然而，作为兼具实体载体与转瞬即逝放映活动的媒介，影片碎片化的物质形态使其得以拥有多重社会生命。尽管殖民教育电影作为帝国统治工具被制作，但它们却跨越国界走上了偏离预设的路径，其被接收的方式也违背了其规训初衷。影片绝非仅承载固定意义的文本，它们在与本地日常层面的人类主体互动的过程中，始终处于不断被重新语境化的流动状态。本论文通过深入的档案研究、口述史资料与影片放映实践，探究马来亚受众如何将影片重新挪用至自身的目标之中，并在后殖民当下赋予影片意想不到的后续生命。最终，本论文提出论点：殖民教育电影是拥有多重社会生命的“失序之物”，它们既顺应也背离了其作为帝国统治工具的预设轨迹。

本研究跳出了将电影诞生置于世纪之交西方商品文化语境下的现有媒介史叙事，阐明了一段未被充分研究却至关重要的电影史——即东南亚殖民治理特殊语境下的电影遭遇史。本研究采用跨学科的研究方法，同时提出一个史学框架，将电影概念化为“处于流动中的文化之物”。