Pontianaks and the issue of verisimilitude in Singaporean cinema

 
Pontianak vampires are merely movie producers' imaginative creation?

 
Ghost images created in local and Japanese movies
 

Dr. Timothy R White
Dept of English Language & Literature
National University of Singapore

During the 1950s and 1960s, Singapore had a thriving film industry, churning out a variety of films in a number of genres, especially horror films, comedies, romantic melodramas and historical dramas. Despite the different genres, these films tend to share one outstanding feature: they are all, by today’s standards, woefully unrealistic, especially in terms of the way they look. At the time of their production, however, they were considered reasonably convincing; the horror films, for example, based on Malay mythology and legends, all seemed quite frightening when they were seen in theatres at the time of their release. Today, however, these films, when screened on television or during rare theatrical revivals, are regarded by Singaporean audiences as camp; this is just as true for older members of the audience, who may well have seen the films years ago and have taken them quite seriously, as it is for younger viewers. Although it is tempting to chalk up the reaction of earlier audiences to naïveté, gullibility or “primitiveness”, it is also insulting, demeaning, and simply wrong to do so. What actually happened is that one conception of realism -- an essentially Southeast Asian idea of what “counts” as realism -- was replaced by another, essentially Western, idea of verisimilitude.

This essay will trace this change in perception in Singaporean audiences, and discuss the implications for the present Singaporean film industry and its future.

In the mid-1930s, two film empires were founded in Singapore. The first of these was Loke Wan Tho’s Cathay Productions, with studios in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and, eventually, Hong Kong. The second was the Shaw Brothers studio, founded by the legendary brothers Run Run and Runme. Beginning with second-hand equipment they had found in an abandoned building in Shanghai, the Shaws built an empire that included film studios, distribution networks, and theatres [1].

Cathay-Keris lacked a star of the magnitude of P Ramlee. Although not directed by “big name” directors such as Ramlee and Haniff, the genre films, especially the horror films, made by Cathay-Keris were popular and worth seeing even today. Better remembered than the more prestige films are such Malay-language horror films as Anak Pontianak (Vampire Child; Ramon A. Estella, 1958), Sumpah Pontianak (Vampire’s Curse; B. N. Rao, 1958), and Orang Minyak (The Oily Man; L. Krishnan, 1958). These films, based on Malay mythology and legends, are just as entertaining today as they were forty years ago, but maybe not quite as frightening, and a little funnier than they were intended to be (although humour was an important part of the genre, as were songs), and certainly not what we regard as realistic. However, they all seemed quite chilling when they were seen in theatres at the time of their release.

It is important to remember that although they are devout Muslims, Malays also tend to be somewhat superstitious (despite official efforts, in Malaysia at least, to discredit these beliefs). These beliefs in the supernatural, the spiritual, and animism – including, for example, the pontianak (a type of vampire who becomes a beautiful woman when a nail is inserted into the back of its neck); the polong (an unfortunate zombie-like creature whose intestines trail behind his severed torso); and the wise, talking mouse deer – are not uncommon today, but were even more prominent during the earlier era of Singaporean filmmaking [2]. The fact that these creatures, as depicted in the films of the time, look totally phoney, with their rubber masks, bad make-up, and unconvincing costumes, is completely beside the point. They represented these supernatural entities, they did not depict them; in the jargon of film and literary theory, they functioned as signifiers to their audiences, not as signifieds. The problem with today’s audiences is that they tend to be signifier-challenged in comparison to their more imaginative and creative predecessors.

One of the more obvious features of Singaporean films of this era is the ubiquitous musical number in movies of all genres. Certainly, the inclusion of these musical numbers was influenced by the films of other national cinemas, and especially by Indian films. To a less extent, we can see the influence of Hollywood musicals also; although by the 1960s the Hollywood musical had almost disappeared, it was common during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the years during which Southeast Asia’s future filmmakers were forming their ideas about what films should be; it is not surprising that this influence is seen in Singaporean films of the late 1950s and 1960s. We should also keep in mind that after World War Two, Hollywood used the backlog of films that had not been seen in occupied countries, including Malaya, to flood these countries with these films. This had the effect not only of stunting the growth of native film industries, but also of saturating filmmakers (and future filmmakers) in these countries with the classical Hollywood style of the 1930s and 1940s, just as Asian nations had been saturated by the style of Japanese cinema during the Occupation.

But the musical number in the Singaporean film is presented in ways that are not quite the same as the ways in which its Hollywood counterparts are presented. Although the Hollywood musical is most often either a romantic comedy or an adaptation of a Broadway musical, that is to say a musical film as opposed to a film that includes some musical numbers, the musical number in Malay films often appears in films and at moments that seem, to the Western viewer, quite inappropriate. It is not unusual for a perfectly serious Malay drama to include songs, and often comic songs, at the most serious and dramatic moments. For example, Anak Pontianak, a vampire movie, includes a song called “The Satay Man,” sung by the satay man himself, with the accompaniment of a group of kampong children. This number serves absolutely no purpose in terms of narrative cause and effect. Instead, it serves as a break for the audience, a moment at which tension is released, after which tension is once more increased. This seems to be the result of the direct influence of bangsawan theatre, which included this sort of musical number not just to release tension, but also to lengthen the performance and give the stage crew time to change the set. Although it was not needed for such practical purposes in film, it seems to have become part of what audiences, and filmmakers, expected to experience during a dramatic performance [3] ; these expectations were based on experiences with a theatrical art form, not on experiences in the “real world”.

Another important difference we can see in the use of musical numbers in Malay horror movies compared to their use in Western films is that in these Malay movies suspension of disbelief is just not seen as a problem. This is because, as I have argued, what the audience at the time believed in was not the mise-en-scene, but the concept of the pontianak, and the emotions evoked by such supernatural creatures. Again, Western audiences have long had the handicap of being unable to look beneath and beyond the simple surface of the visible; to see some kind of spatial depth in the screen is important to us, but any kind of spiritual depth seems to be beyond our grasp.

Other Malay films, however, seem to adhere more to the model of the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood film. P Ramlee’s musical comedy Bujang Lapok, for example, incorporates musical numbers that are not realistically motivated by the narrative (they are not part of performances within the story); but, unlike the bangsawan-influenced songs, they further the narrative by revealing characters’ emotions, desires, intentions, etc. In the same director’s dramatic film Ibu Mertua Ku, musical numbers are realistically motivated, as the main character is a professional musician. And, just as in the Hollywood musical, in both of these films non-diegetic background music accompanies the songs; the audience (or at least most of it) simply suspends its disbelief.

Other influences from Hollywood can be seen in the mise-en-scène of the films, particularly in the lighting. Although the extensive three-point lighting of the typical Hollywood film is rarely seen in Singaporean films of this era, the comedies, in this case Bujang Lapok, tend to adopt the much “flatter” two-point lighting of the Hollywood comedy. In this system, backlights are rarely used, and key lights and fill lights tend to be of almost equal intensity. The result offers the advantage of more clearly illuminating the foreground action (and these films often rely on visual humour) and masks the disadvantage of a lack of depth in the setting. An equally important advantage to two-point lighting is that it is much less expensive, in terms of both equipment and electricity, than is three-point lighting, which requires far more lights, more technicians, and more time to set up; for Singaporean Malay-language films, with their relatively small market and small budgets, this was, and still is, an important consideration. The dramatic films, on the other hand, tend to use the low-key lighting often seen in Hollywood horror films and in films noir (for example, detective and crime films). This style of lighting, seen in Anak Pontianak, Ibu Mertua Ku, and Sergeant Hassan, eliminates the fill light, relying on a low-intensity key light and, sometimes, a back light. The effect is to create a darker, more dramatic mise-en-scène, and, as with two-point lighting, this system is far less expensive than is three-point lighting.

However, unlike Hollywood films, older Singaporean films tend to switch fairly freely between different styles of lighting, as well as from studio to outdoor location shots, without much concern for consistency of mise-en-scène between shots (this consistency of mise-en-scène is extremely important to classical Hollywood films; any inconsistency must be motivated by the narrative). For example, shots in Anak Pontianak frequently alternate between dark interiors and brightly lit outdoor shots, all of which supposedly take place at night. This sort of inconsistency is not unusual in Malay films; obviously, one reason for this is economic, but its acceptance is indicative of a culture that, unlike most Western cultures, does not seek absolute verisimilitude in the consistency of mise-en-scène. Such cultures tend to value performance, or presentation, over “realistic” representation (another Asian culture in which this is seen is that of Japan, whose arts, including kabuki, bunraku, as well as film, also tend to emphasize performance over Western-style verisimilitude).

In 1967, the Shaw brothers closed the Singapore studio of Malay Film Productions. Their biggest star and best director, P Ramlee, had left in 1963 for Kuala Lumpur’s Studio Merdeka (which was subsequently taken over by the Shaws in 1966). Cathay had been in financial trouble since the death of its founder, Loke Wan Tho, in an airplane crash in Taiwan in 1964. When Cathay-Keris folded in 1972, Singapore became a nation without a national cinema [4].

Initially, movies from Hong Kong began to replace home grown films. However, in the late 1960s television became the rage in Singapore, and with it Western ideas and images. Of course, Singaporeans have lived with Western ideas for many decades, and Hollywood movies have always been popular. But with television, the ubiquity of Western culture really began; no longer a relatively small part of the cultural mix experienced by Singaporeans, Western images of reality soon became something approaching the norm. Television broadcasting began in Singapore in 1963; by the end of that year, there were two stations in operation [5].

This made a crucial difference to the way Singaporeans see reality in movies, and in what they regard as realistic. They began to see it more with Western eyes, through which reality lies in the mise-en-scène -- the objects, the characters, etc.; in other words what is visually present in the film, what we see -- and not so much in the ideas, emotions, and relationships among people [6]. No longer was it good enough to present mythical stories that expressed feelings, fears, and traditional beliefs through films that suggested the essences, rather than realistically depicted the images, of people, places and things. An unfortunate exodus occurred as Singaporeans began to reject their own movies in favour of those of Hollywood, which, despite their high production values and visual excitement, said little to Southeast Asians about themselves and their culture.

After the closure of Singapore’s two major studios, few films were made here. The handful that were produced in Singapore, or by Singaporeans, are indicative of the changes that audiences had gone through. In response to the changing perception of cinematic realism and to changing market forces, a few Singaporean filmmakers attempted to emulate Hollywood films, with generally disastrous results. In 1978, independent producer Sunny Lim made a series of action/spy movies, including They Call Her Cleopatra Wong, directed by George Richardson in 1978, and Dynamite Johnson, directed by Bobby Suarez in 1978. These films were obviously made to cash in on the popularity of the spy movie genre (especially the James Bond series), and just as obviously made on shoestring budgets. But it is not the low production values of these films that audiences find so hilarious today; it is the rather crude attempt to imitate Hollywood films that these films so sadly reveal. Hollywood movies have their faults, but one thing is clear: For better or worse, nobody can beat Hollywood at its own game, nobody can make Hollywood films like Hollywood itself can. And although audiences may have enjoyed these films, it was an enjoyment of these films as camp, not as genuine expressions of Singaporean culture.

The few other films made in Singapore at the time did little to remedy this situation. In 1979, Hollywood auteur Peter Bogdanovich, backed financially by Playboy magazine magnate Hugh Hefner, made Saint Jack, set and filmed in Singapore. Although an interesting film, it is hardly a Singaporean film; it merely uses Singapore as a slightly seedy, sordid backdrop for its tale of an American expatriate involved in prostitution and petty espionage.

More recently, 1991 saw a temporary return of Singaporean filmmaking with Medium Rare. Although made in Singapore and featuring a story based on a true Singaporean incident, Medium Rare, directed by Australian Arthur Smith, is just as guilty as are Sunny Lim’s movies of trying to ape Hollywood movies. Singapore comes across as pure “oriental” exoticism; by comparison, the Singapore of Saint Jack is presented in a much more truthful, objective manner. To make matters worse, the filmmakers felt the need to add a white leading actress, in an apparent (and failed) attempt to attract Western audiences and Asian audiences accustomed to Hollywood films.

So where is Singaporean cinema today, in terms of verisimilitude, and where is it heading? After Medium Rare, the Singaporean film scene seemed bleak indeed. However, recent years have shown that not only are there young Singaporeans with a burning desire to make movies that speak to Singaporeans, there is also an audience for these films. The “rebirth” of Singaporean cinema began in 1995 with Eric Khoo’s Mee Pok Man, one of the more interesting examples of truly alternative filmmaking in Southeast Asia in some years.

The influence of Western cinema is certainly not absent from this film, as it owes a fairly obvious debt to neo-realism. This debt can be seen in its lingering shots of run-down flats, complete with peeling paint and depressing void decks, and in the depictions of such typical Singaporean characters as the cabbie who knows the best hotels for trysts with prostitutes; the Chinese fortune-teller, perhaps modelled on the spiritualist of DeSica’s famous 1949 neo-realist film Bicycle Thieves, with his common sense advice, “Just be gentle and patient, and she will like you”; and the mee pok man himself, quietly plying his trade in a small, dilapidated storefront, wearing his singlet, cooking and serving his fish-ball noodles without a word to his customers.

However, this is certainly not the neo-realism of post-war Italy, or of any other neo-realist movements since. It is far closer in spirit and in style to the Mexican films of Spaniard Luis Buñuel. Like Buñuel, Khoo shows little respect for the conventions of alternative cinema. In Khoo’s film, the mee pok man lives in a humble, sparsely furnished public housing flat that would not be out of place in a neo-realist film, but it is a flat that he shares with the spirit of his dead father and the corpse of his beloved Bunny, the dead prostitute slowly turning green and putrid while propped up at the kitchen table.

Mee Pok Man includes scenes that are superficially similar to those of neo-realist cinema, in that they can be interpreted as “slices of life”, existing for the sake of “authenticating” the film rather than adding to the story itself. It is true that these scenes - the prostitute’s teenage brother reading her diary, the pimps crudely discussing women, and the prostitutes themselves filling the boredom between tricks with insults and cigarettes - are like those of neo-realist films in that they give us no vital narrative information. However, rather than the depiction of “life as it is lived”, or the rendering of the accidental or chance event, these scenes contribute instead to the overall structure of the film. In other words, it is largely through these scenes, scenes devoid of any obvious drama, that the pace of the film is established. More like previous Singaporean films than it is like Hollywood film, Mee Pok Man presents a reality that is more subjective than it is objective; in other words, the realism is within the characters and in their relationships, not in the mise-en-scène.

1997 proved to be the best year for Singaporean cinema in the last twenty-five years. Director and actor Hugo Ng revisited the Adrian Lim story in God or Dog, this time with a much more Singaporean slant than that taken in Medium Rare. Although based on an incident involving quasi-religious cults, adultery, and murder, the film avoids the voyeuristic quality of Western films dealing with the same sort of subject matter. More interesting, however, is The Road Less Travelled, by first-time director Lim Suat-Yen. Although lacking a dramatic story that makes a lasting impression, is significant in that it seeks to avoid the sensational subject matter often used by novice filmmakers to attract attention to their films. The Road Less Travelled, although similar in some ways to Hong Kong melodramas, deals with young Singaporeans and their concerns and relationships. Lim made a film that means something to her, that expresses what she wants to say, and not what she thinks will make the most money at the box office by appealing to an audience raised on Hollywood movies.

The other Singaporean film to debut in 1995 is Eric Khoo’s second effort, 12 Storeys, about the lives of various Singaporeans living in a rather old Housing Development Board block. Much more skillfully made than is Mee Pok Man, 12 Storeys, while retaining the mystical quality of the earlier film, relies much less on sensationalism. Gone is the prostitution and morbidity of a dead body rotting at the kitchen table, in favour of the lives (both interior and exterior) of ordinary Singaporeans. Khoo retains the spirituality of his earlier film, in the form of deceased characters who live on, if only in the minds of the characters. Like Lim Suat-Yen, Khoo is more interested in making a film for himself and his friends and neighbours than in pleasing Western sensibilities.

This change in attitude is, I think, indicative of a more general change in the attitudes of Singaporeans in general. This change is a greater sense of pride in being Asian and, more specifically, Singaporean; not just in the wealth and sophistication enjoyed by Singapore, but in the culture, creativity and artistic expression that has been overlooked for too long.

However, these films have tended to be ignored, to a large extent, in Singapore itself, making their marks more on the international film festival circuit. The more popular films in Singapore itself are relatively small films that avoid competition with the big-budget films of Hollywood and the action-oriented movies of Hong Kong in similar ways. These films – Army Daze (Ong Keng Sen, 1997), Money No Enough (T L Tay, 1998), Forever Fever (Glen Goei,1998), Liang Po Po - The Movie (Teng Bee Lian, 1999), et al – generally depict life in Housing Development Board public housing flats, hawker centres, and coffee shops. In addition, they are comedies, in which lapses of verisimilitude are far more easily accepted –- or forgiven -- than they are in dramas.

In addition, there is an interesting trend discernable in these films, both the more artistically ambitious films and the more mainstream, commercial movies. Just as Khoo doesn’t hesitate to appeal to norms and conventions of Buñuelian, surrealistic art cinema, the more commercial films are not afraid to resort to such self-referential devices as featuring cameos of well-known local celebrities playing themselves or, in the case of Army Daze, musical sequences complete with numerous costume changes and even addressing the audience directly. And although we have yet to see the return of the horror genre, Khoo’s films deal with the spirit world, featuring ghosts in both of his films, and Forever Fever features the “spirit” of Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

The fact that Singaporean audiences are embracing the more commercial local films is encouraging, and may be indicative of a growing acceptance of Asian and, more specifically, Singaporean culture as “legitimate”. This acceptance is undoubtedly due, in some degree, to fashion, as local culture is being packaged and sold as a commodity (and this is true of music, clothing, theatre, etc) to consumers. The fact that these consumers have tended to reject Khoo’s films may indicate that despite this new pride in things Singaporean, local audiences may not yet be willing to accept a lack of Western-style verisimilitude in anything other than a comedy. This situation is likely to remain; with today’s “global culture” it is doubtful that the tastes of local audiences will ever return to what they were forty years ago. However, with the growing pride in indigenous culture all over the world (or, if one wants to be more cynical, the growing commodification of this culture), it is also likely that local filmgoers will be more accepting of movies that once may have been an embarrassing reminder of the past. The next few decades will reveal whether this trend is indicative of a more permanent change in attitudes, or merely a passing fashion.


Endnotes

[1] John Lent, The Asian Film Industry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 188; Timothy R White, “When Singapore was Southeast Asia’s Hollywood,” The Arts 5 (December 1997), 21; and Timothy R White, “Pontianaks, P Ramlee, And Islam: The Cinema of Malaysia,” The Arts 4 (June 1997), 18-19.

[2] See the various essays in Wazir Jahan Karim, ed., Emotions of Culture: A Malay Perspective (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990). For more information on Malay folk beliefs and their relationship to Islam, see K.M. Endicott, An Analysis of Malay Magic (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Mohd Taib Osman, Malay Folk Beliefs: An Integration of Disparate Elements (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1989).

[3] For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between Malaysian films and bangsawan, see White, “Historical Poetics…,” 13-15; and Chan Chih Min, “Malay Films: A Cultural Background,” unpublished paper, National University of Singapore, 1993.

[4] Lent, 190.

[5] Mark Hukill, “Structures of Television in Singapore,” Media Asia 25, 1 (1998): 4.

As Kristin Thompson has pointed out, the idea of verisimilitude is important to the classical Hollywood cinema in terms primarily of the mise-en-scène; the primary consideration for the narrative itself, including the characters and relationships among them, is compositional unity, not realism (David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 [London: Routledge, 1985], 175.