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.