THOROUGH RESEARCH ON THE ARTS NEEDED…TO TURN IT INTO AN INDUSTRY THAT CAN BECOME AN ECONOMIC ACTIVITY AND ALSO AN INCOME GENERATING ONE AND NOT MERELY A PART OF SOME CULTURAL AND SOCIAL ACTIVITIES OF THE COUNTRY AND MOSTLY ORGANIZED BY THE RESPECTIVE MINISTRIES…TO FURTHER ENHANCE THE CONCEPT AND PHILOSOPHY OF 'KELUARGA MALAYSIA'…

By Mansor bin Puteh

Mahathir's 'Look East Policy' turned out to be a mere slogan. Because those who were around him in his cabinet and the technocrats and cultural and other experts did not join in the fray to provide him with ideas on how to create a life around the slogan. 

Ismail Sabri's own slogan of 'Keluarga Malaysia' or 'The Malaysian Family or Clan' can suffer the same fate and described as a mere slogan in years to come if those in his cabinet and the officials in the respective ministries do not put their heads together to further expand the slogan into a philosophy and concept. 

Till now I have not heard anyone in the respective ministry who has submitted ideas on how their ministries could support the concept looking at it from the point of view of their ministry.

The truth is that not anyone can come up with such views or even ideas on how to promote the concept if he is not an expert; the most that he can do is to repeat the slogan and turn it into a mantra like the 'Look East Policy'.

I just received a package of stuff to support the 'Keluarga Malaysia' introduced by Ismail Sabri and saw things that most Malaysians could not see. It is a concept but to make it more successful, it must be padded with a strong philosophy - the Keluarga Malaysia Philosophy.

Unfortunately, not many who support it can take the issue further.

The Keluarga Malaysia Concept or Philosophy had never been discussed or appeared in the Arts, much less in the films and television dramas and staged plays in all these years. In fact, the Keluarga Malaysia did not exist even in novels.

May be it's the right time to introduce it and hopefully with the right approach it can happen and with it become a tool for greater national integration and also and mostly social and cultural and in the end, economic development with the reshaping of new awareness on tastes and attitudes that can be inculcated especially from the younger generations of Malaysians. 

I have not seen any serious analysis on the state of the Arts in the country published by the media in a long time. The problem is that there are not many who can come up with it because sharing expert views on the Arts has been described by others as criticism and not analysis. 

The fact is that experts in the Arts do not criticize; they analysis and only write at their level of awareness and understanding of many issues that escape those who are not trained in any aspects of the Arts!  

The greatest mistake by government and cultural and arts activists is that the Arts in the country are assumed to be not related and the film industry, theater, music, writing and the other branches of the Arts could be developed independently.

Whereas there are inter-related with many who are involved in many of them for expedience and often-times because they are multi-talented and could multi-task too. It could be a simplistic assumption by earlier political leaders to break them into the different categories so that they could be treated independently and not as a whole. It was a mistake. 

So in the end we have the different ministries that foresee the different types of the artistic activities and all seems to not being able to be developed into economic activities and later on become independent of the government.

The film foundation in the Philippines is under the office of the President of the country; where as in Iran it is under the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. And in America it is said to be an extension of their State Department, which means that Hollywood is a massive center of American propaganda.

In Malaysia the film agency is still under the ministry of information and then communications. It should be put under the Prime Minister's Department at the very least or the Ministry of Finance so that the film industry could become an income generating one and not just for cultural purposes. 

When was there ever done a thorough research on the Arts in Malaysia? None that I know of.

There has not even been any public forum to discuss the state of the Arts in the country; the problem being there is really no one who can claim to be qualified enough to be able to do so.

In facts, attempts by groups and individuals to force the authorities to do that came to naught simply because the official authorities did not care about how the Arts in the country had been neglected whereas they could become a backbone of the development of the Arts to become a full-fledged industry which can then become an income-generated one.

The first question that many experts face is how their views have often been described as criticism! They did not know to discern which are criticism and analyses simply because what is discussed is usually went beyond their level of comprehension and understanding or awareness being appointed officials and not true experts who have the proper professional and academic backgrounds!

Malaysia has thus lost billions of Ringgit in revenue to the country from the Arts had it been fully developed decades ago if there were experts who were given the tasks to develop the Arts and an industry.

Till today the Arts are just social happenings when they are economic activities like Hollywood, Broadway and American television.

RTM can only mention that they are seventy-five years old! Other than that they have failed to tell all Malaysians what they had been doing all these years.

By right, RTM should have been developed and expanded its use to become one of the most influential television stations in the World if not just the Entire Muslim World.

CNN and also Hollywood, Broadway and American television were not developed with any Acts of parliament but by individuals with vision much like the Old Malayan Cinema which was established by four persons who did not get any financial or even moral support from the government then.

Two of them came from Shanghai in China and the other two were also Chinese who were born in Kuala Lumpur, who managed to develop their two film studios in to a film industry which in later years were given the status of also developing the Old Malayan Cinema by the few film scholars and critics whose existence has never been officially acknowledged or recognized.

(Photos attached: I was invited to present a paper in a film festival in Iran in February, 1994 - with a personal photo) and to give a talk at a university in Helsinki, Finland in February, 2018 provided by a staff of the Malaysian Embassy.)