THE MALAYSIAN FILM INDUSTRY IS SITTING ON MUSH – WITH NO PHILOSOPHICAL BASE, ITS GROWTH IS STUNTED AND NOTHING TO SHOW OR PROVE!

By Mansor Puteh

Forty years of the establishment of Finas – the national film agency also known as Perbadanan Kemajuan Perusahaan Filem Malaysia.

It is a long and winding name which unfortunately, has not borne anything significant since it was established with the drafting and approval of the Finas Act or 1981 or Akta 244.

I had just been enrolled into the Film Division of Columbia University in New York City at that time; and I didn’t realize that the university was not an ordinary one most other had studied at.

No wonder American strangers I bumped into outside of the campus treated me differently and spoke with me in a different way of expressing themselves in their English language, with an accent I could easily duplicate because I had tuned myself to speak in such fashion if I was with them and to write in the American-English style since I could remember, and especially when I was in Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) where most of the lecturers were American Peace Corps volunteers or Malaysians who had got their graduate education from various American universities, would understand.

And I remember writing to the then deputy prime minister, then Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohammed using the address in the Harmony Hall co-ed dormitory of the university which was very convenient to use since there was no need for me to prove my status as a resident ;of the City of New York and student of the university – an Ivy League one – that I never knew of before. 

I wrote to Dr Mahathir when I heard that the government was going to establish a national film agency called Finas. I got a swift reply from his that also bore his signature when he said ‘the government was drafting an bill or an Act of Parliament to establish Finas’, and nothing else.

I was shocked to receive such a response, and tore the letter.

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I thought if he had some sense, he would have been excited to know of a Malaysian who was pursing his Masters of Fine Art in Film Directing degree from any university in America, even if he was not aware of it being an Ivy League one.

And it turned out the Finas Act of 1981 was drafted by people who never went to any film school or who never did any serious research on what they can have in the Act.

I last met with Tun Ahmad Sarji for an interview for a documentary I am currently completing now called, ‘Taking Shade Under Ivy Leaves’ which is on a group of Malaysians who studied at Ivy League university who relate how they were when they were not yet even in Primary School and what they did when they were in Secondary School.

I have read and studied the Finas Act of 1981 and found it wanting; first it does not have any philosophy in it; so how could anyone who are entrusted to develop the film industry be able to do anything with it?

There is no mention of the need to develop the Malaysian Cinema, to replace and improve further the Old Malayan Cinema that was established not by the Shaw Brothers and Cathay-Keris producers most of who were immigrants from Shanghai with a few local-born Chinese.

They did not establish the Cinema; they only established the Old Malayan Film Industry; and it was the film scholars and film critics who founded for them the Old Malayan Cinema.

And those in Finas especially the senior officials and those in the Board of Finas have never ever asked to discuss the Act itself, because they too would not know how to look at it with sharp eyes; because none of them had studied film in America, where it matters, since there is a lot that we can learn from the experiences of Hollywood, which not many know started not there but in New York City.

So that was why I never thought or wanted to study film at any university in Los Angeles but one in New York City that turned out to be more eye-opening for me when I researched and found out the early beginnings of the establishment of the American Film Industry and American Cinema, as how we know them today.

I was lucky to have a co-chairman of the Film Division in the form of a double Oscar-winner, Milos Forman who won Oscars for Best Director for ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Amadeus’ he won before I went to Columbia and after I returned to Malaysia. So the time I was at Columbia, it was not good for him and the films he directed including ‘Ragtime’ which was shot in most part in New York City that I managed to visit. 

It was also Milos who asked me to take a one-year medical leave so I could recuperate from the two major knee surgeries I had had at two hospitals in Manhattan while waiting for the third one I took in July, 1981.

As for Finas, it is too bad that it was not developed properly because the Act that caused it to be established was flawed; and despite the minor changes that had been made through the forty years of the existence of the agency, they were cosmetic ones with the philosophy that was missing in it still not discussed by people in other disciplines to add various levels to it that can be eventually seen in the types of films produced by local producers and film companies and dramas produced by television stations, all of which can be described as Fake Hollywood.

The Malaysian government had spent around RM1.5 billion on Finas to support the existence of the agency and it is still in a parasitic existence being in full control of the ministry; whereas if the Finas Act of 1981 had been drafted better with my contribution, Finas today would not be what it is now; but an agency to look after film festivals and the film library and archives, with the film industry standing on its own and the New Malaysian Cinema existing proudly to guide the direction for the filmmakers to heed.

But most importantly, the film industry would be able to attract investors and participants from other countries and in the end it can become an income-generating industry and not just a mere agency in a ministry like it is still today!

Malaysia not only lost the opportunity to create a new film industry and the New Malaysian Cinema but also billions in revenue, just for ignoring me when they were drafting the draft of the Finas Act in 1978 when I first got to Columbia! 

But there is still a good opportunity for the present government to undo what was wrong with the Act and Finas and let me rewrite a New Finas Act of 2022 for the government so that the film industry does not continue to sit on mush but on a strong philosophical foundation.