Many local films are missing. Anwardi Jamil feels there is a need to establish a national film archive
WHEN the National Heritage Act 2005 was gazetted, various aspects of our culture, traditions and heritage were included and identified as items to be protected, revived, restored and to be promoted.
In the Act, various traditional forms of arts, both tangible and intangible, were listed, such as traditional dances and music.
It states “ intangible cultural heritage ” includes any form of expressions, languages, lingual utterances, sayings, musically produced tunes, notes, audible lyrics, songs, folksongs, oral traditions, poetry, music, dances as produced by the performing arts, theatrical plays, audible compositions of sounds and music, martial arts, that may have existed or exist in relation to the heritage of Malaysia or any part of Malaysia or in relation to the heritage of a Malaysian community.
In another portion of the Act, it states that “cultural heritage” includes tangible or intangible form of cultural property, structure or artefact and may include a heritage matter, object, item, artefact, formation structure, performance, dance, song, music that is pertinent to the historical or contemporary way of life of Malaysians, on or in land or underwater cultural heritage of tangible form but excluding natural heritage;
What if film is an historical object ? No. The Act states that “ historical object ” means any artefact or other object to which religious, traditional, artistic or historic interest is attached and includes any :
a) ethnographic material such as a household or agricultural implement, decorative article or personal ornament
b) work of art such as a carving, sculpture, painting, architecture, textile, musical instrument, weapon and any other handicraft
c) manuscript, coin, currency note, medal, badge, insignia, coat of arm, crest flag, arm or armour or
d) vehicle, ship and boat, in part or in whole, whose production has ceased.
Unfortunately, cinema or film seems to have no importance and significance in our history and culture.
Protecting our cinema history
Our cinema history is just under 100 years old, an industry that began with the first feature film, Laila Majnun, directed by B.S. Rajhans and produced by the Motilal Chemical Company. It was screened in Singapore in 1933. Maybe something that is less than 100 years old is not considered historical?
I find it hard to accept that a historically important movie like Laila Majnun is not considered a heritage item. Film as a form in itself is not that old, just a mere 150 years old today beginning with the first images recorded on film by the Lumiere Brothers who invented the first moving picture camera in 1895 in France.
Yet, while countries like the United States, most of Europe, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Hong Kong (China) consider cinema and film as an important part of their own cultural heritage, we have not yet deemed our own cinema as one.
So when cinema history is not labelled as a national heritage or culture, it will not be protected. What does that mean? It means a whole generation, no, maybe two generations worth of Malaysian cinema will be lost forever and that the future generations will never have a chance of knowing what Malaysian cinema was.
How can it be lost ?
If there are no acts or institutions created to protect our film heritage, the films of the 1940s, 1950s right through the 1990s may be lost forever due to the prints or negatives being destroyed through lack of care and proper storage.
Today, many know and watch the movies of P. Ramlee, which are screened nearly every week on various television channels. Not many, however, have had the chance to view other classics by past masters like Phani Majumdar, L. Krishnan, Jamil Sulong, M. Amin, Hussein Haniff, Salleh Ghani and Omar Rojik.
Laila Majnun is long gone. Not a single complete print is known to have survived. In the same year that Laila Majnun was produced, a foreign-financed movie titled Semarang was also produced and screened in Singapore a month before Laila Majnun. A print of this movie is available in the US and it’s considered historical.
Two early movies were also shot in Sabah around that time. Finas chairman Datuk Mohd. Affendi Datuk Hamdan said that two movies shot by Martin and Osa Johnson titled Jungle Depths Of Borneo and Borneo, were filmed at Abai, Kinabatang in Sabah, in 1935. However, the earliest film footages shot in Sabah, maybe in 1920, when the Johnsons took some footage of the island on their first trip to North Borneo (Sabah) and edited it into an earlier movie titled Jungle Adventures and Wild Men & Beasts Of Borneo.
However, their 1937 feature film, Borneo, was brought to Sabah last year and screened for the first time there at the Borneo Eco Film Festival. The September screening of the 75-minute movie, with sound, was made possible through the efforts of the Sabah Museum and the Johnsons’ Safari Museum based in Chanute, Kansas.
The cultural content in these movies are timeless. Apart from photographs and paintings, no other medium can record our history as accurately as cinema. Of course, movie makers do take creative licence when making movies (like the Johnsons did with Borneo and Wild Men & Beasts Of Borneo), but nevertheless, the films, including documentaries and newsreels, hold great cultural and historical significance.
In the US, an institution called the United States National Film Preservation Board was created in 1988. Under the Board, The National Film Registry (NFR) was formed along with the non-profit National Film Preservation Foundation.
The NFR names up to 25 “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” every year showcasing the range and diversity of American film heritage in the hope that it would increase awareness for its (the movies) preservation in the Library of Congress.
What is unique about this effort is that the American public nominates the films to be considered for preservation and inclusion into the National Film Registry.
Since its creation, the NFR had received thousands of titles that were nominated but to date only 600 titles had been approved for listing and preserved in the Library Of Congress. The oldest is Newark Athlete, a film made in 1891.
Since then both culturally, aesthetically and significant American movies have made the list including Matrix, Star Wars, Do The Right Thing and Raging Bull.
Amongst the latest movies approved last year for listing include Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1914), 3:10 To Yuma (1957), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Dirty Harry (1971) and A League of Their Own (1992).
The Indonesian Scene
Indonesia, which has a cinema history slightly older than ours, established its own film archives called Sinematek Indonesia in 1975, located at the Usmar Ismail Film in Jakarta.
It started as a private endeavour by film critic Misbach Yusa Biran who established, in 1970, a small private office and started collecting old Indonesian films with the help of one of Indonesia’s cinematic fathers Asrul Sani.
In 1973, Pak Misbach, as he is known to friends, received a scholarship from the Dutch government to study the film archiving system adopted by a cinematheque in Amsterdam. Two years later, when Ali Sadikin, the then governor of Jakarta, officially opened Sinematek Indonesia, who better to head it than Pak Misbach. Sinematek Indonesia became the first State-supported film archive in Asia.
Such an archive does not only look for old classic movies buried in vaults or storage containers around the world. Part of its responsibilities is to locate missing cinematic treasures.
According to local film critic and historian, Mustafa A.R. (who is also a vocal supporter for the establishment of a Malaysian Film Archive) an acclaimed Indonesian movie, Apa Yang Kau Cari Palupi ? , which won the Best Film Award at the 1970 Asia Pacific Film Festival in Jakarta went missing.
Mustafa said : “ Years after winning the award, it was discovered that all the screening copies of the movie was missing and even the negatives in Tokyo had been destroyed. They can’t even trace the producers of the movie. There was a real concern that this little gem of a movie has been lost forever. ”
However, in the late 1980s, a single print was discovered but due to the poor storage conditions, only the colour red remained in the print.
Today, Sinematek Indonesia has in its proper archives more than 2,700 titles including cinematic classics directed by Asrul Sani, Usmar Ismail, Teguh Karya and May Priyono.
In the Philippines
In The Philippines, the National Film Archive Of The Philippines was created only recently in 2011. So it’s really not too late for Malaysia.
It is entrusted to collect, preserve, and provide access to the audiovisual heritage of the Philippines. It was created under the auspices of the Film Development Council Of The Philippines and the Office Of The President. In its official site, it announced its creation as that of an institution established and consequently given powers and functions to collect, conserve, and protect audiovisual materials as part of the nation’s historical, cultural, and artistic heritage.
NFAP is also duly mandated to take charge of the collection, archiving, preservation, management, and access provision of all Filipino films and other audiovisual materials produced in the Philippines and/or abroad.
With such an institution existing, film historians and researchers can have a reason to locate missing classics to be archived, preserved and maybe restored for future generations to view and appreciate.
For example, a friend of mine, award winning filmmaker and activities, Nick de Ocampo, went on a hunt to locate a missing piece of Filipino history. An early movie titled Zamboanga, which is said to have been the first Filipino movie to vie for the Foreign Language Academy award in the US in 1936, was nowhere to be found in the country.
His search took him around the world and ended 10 years ago when he found it in the Library Of Congress of the United States.
At the launching of the NFAP last September, the Filipino film industry was once again overjoyed when another discovered and restored 1950 classic, Genghis Khan, directed by Michael Conde was screened. At that launch, the original 35mm prints of Conde’s movie, discovered in the Venice Film Festival archives, was also handed over to the NFAP for safe keeping.
Poor archiving
Meanwhile, we do have our National Archives or Arkib Negara and while it is part of its responsibility to archive print, audio and video materials of our country’s history, it is not geared to become a bona fide film archive institution, one that requires a different set of mentality, system and management.
A quick look via its website’s search engine shows how seriously lacking its archival of our country’s film heritage is. I typed in Hang Tuah in the search engine and what did I see? A reference stating they have a video copy of the movie screened on Astro. Not even a proper DVD copy of the classic 1955 movie directed by acclaimed Indian director Phani Majumdar, what more a 35mm copy ?
What was sadder was that Hang Tuah was deemed our first Eastmancolour movie ever and was the first Malay movie to enter the prestigious Berlin Film Festival and therefore had historical importance.
Actually, according to the National Archives act, every producer is required by law to send a copy of their films to be archived. However, enforcement is sorely lacking and has become something of a voluntary exercise.
For example, I doubt that my directorial feature film debut, Tuah, starring Jamal Abdillah (1989), the only Malaysian entry to win an award at the 1989 Asia Pacific Film Festival in Jakarta, can be found in its original 35mm form in our National archives. However, I know a pristine 35mm copy is kept in the Fukuoka Film Library in Japan which purchased a print from the producer in the mid-90s.
Despite our short cinema history, there are easily more than a 1,000 titles produced since the mid-30s. Many are gone. Some may lie in private collections in Amsterdam, in London and maybe the United States.
Some are destroyed and we will never see them again. A famous story local film historians tell is that of how the late cinema magnate, Ho Ah Loke, in a fit of anger, threw his collection of movies into the sea. The story has many versions. In one, Ah Loke only threw one film, Pontianak, into a river. But it is a fact that Ah Loke did throw some of his films (into the sea or river), and because of that, many Cathay Keris titles cannot be viewed anymore.
There are many missing movies that need to be hunted down, purchased, restored and preserved. This would include the missing The Long House directed by Phani Majumdar in Sarawak. Historically, this 1957 movie is important on many levels. It was Shaw’s second Eastmancolor film and Malay Film Productions first movie to be shot entirely in Sarawak. And it was the first ever local movie to shoot the natives of Sarawak as they were (bare breasted).
After its first screening, the movie was pulled from cinemas because of its risque images and kept by Shaw. Till today, no one knows what has happened to the prints. Did Shaw destroy it or was it kept somewhere in his vast vaults of old movies.
More recent acclaimed and award winning movies like Rahim Razali’s Matinya Seorang Patriot and Tsu Feh Sofia, Jamil Sulong’s Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan, are rare and difficult to locate.
P. Ramlee’s horror movie Si Tora Harimau Jadian is another missing film.
In the early1980s, Cathay Organisation’s then chief Chu Weng Choon, went out of his way to locate and restore a 35 mm copy of Hussein Haniff’s classic Hang Jebat. This was one of the very few times when someone in the film industry had gone out of his way to find and restore a piece of Malaysian film history. The sad thing is though, no one knows where this restored 35mm restored copy is today.
Films are part of our legacy. Films are part of our culture and history and therefore need to be treated as such. We are not asking that every movie be archived and preserved — only those that are historically, aesthetically and culturally significant.
It’s time that a Malaysian National Film Archive is established and people employ those who know how to curate and archive our cinema history — not only the 35mm prints, but also alternatively, high quality restored HD prints, and related paraphernalia like movie magazines, movie posters and photographs.
Only then will future generations know and realise that our film history is actually rich and vast instead of just movies by the late P. Ramlee that television stations keep screening.
Setiap kali menjelang Aidilfitri sudah pasti akan kedengaran lagu-lagu Raya berkumandang di corong-corong radio. Antara lagu yang sering dimainkan ialah lagu klasik " Selamat Hari Raya " yang dipopularkan oleh Ahmad Jais.
Kamu pasti sudah berulang kali mendengarnya pada Hari Raya ini, tapi tahukah kamu lagu ini telah dicipta oleh P. Ramlee dan Jamil Sulong pada tahun 1958 untuk menyokong perjuangan pekerja-pekerja filem yang mogok pada hari Raya tahun itu ?
P. Ramlee dan Jamil Sulong yang kita kenali sebagai pelakon dan pengarah filem-filem Melayu klasik juga merupakan pemimpin kesatuan pekerja-pekerja filem Malayan Artistes' Union yang dikenali dengan nama PERSAMA (Persatuan Artis Malaya)....
HONG KONG : Penerbit filem terulung Hong Kong, Run Run Shaw meninggal dunia pada usia 107 tahun, hari ini.
Kenyataan akhbar Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) menyebut bahawa punca kematian beliau tidak diberikan. Shaw membantu menubuhkan TVB pada 1967. Shaw adalah salah seorang tokoh berpengaruh dalam industri hiburan di Asia.
Shaw Brothers Studios menerbitkan kira-kira 1,000 filem kerana mempopularkan genre kung fu sehingga mempengaruhi Quentin Tarantino dan pengarah handalan di Hollywood.
Studio filem milik Shaw pernah dinobatkan sebagai yang terbesar di dunia turut membantu menaikkan nama pengarah terkenal termasuk John Woo.
Ahmad Nisfu merupakan seorang pelakon dan pelawak berbakat di era zaman kegemilangan filem-filem P Ramlee. Namun ada sebuah cerita yang menyayat hati mengenai beliau.
Siapa yang tidak kenal dengan beliau merupakan seorang pelakon dan pela
wak yang berbakat. Banyak sahaja tagline yang diguna pakai sehingga hari ini antaranya :
“ Walaupun rupa mu tidak ku kenal, tetapi lubang hidungmu tu tetap menjadi pojaan hati ku.. ”
Ini adalah petikan dialog Aziz Sattar dalam filem Seniman Bujang Lapok yang ditujukan kepada tuan director lakonan Ahmad Nisfu. Dalam kita mengenang ramai artis-artis veteran terutamanya, mungkin tak semua yang tahu. Dalam kita mengangkat dan mengagung kan yang sudah pun berada di puncak,namun kita terlupa dengan sekian insan-insan seni yang dahulunya membuat kita ketawa terbahak-bahak tapi masa memamah nama insan seni ini dan terus tenggelam ditelan oleh arus berzaman.
Mengikut arwah Norizan bekas isteri kepada P. Ramlee (dalam satu rancangan tv), Ahmad Nisfu merupakan antara teman rapat kepada P.Ramlee. Buktinya cukup nyata apabila sewaktu kemeriahan studio Jalan Ampas dahulu, setiap filem arahan P.Ramlee, Ahmad Nisfu boleh dikatakan kerap terlibat sama dan memegang watak agak besar. Gelaran Paq Besaq (Pak Besar) juga telah diberikan kepada Ahmad Nisfu oleh P. Ramlee kerana lubang hidung Ahmad Nisfu yang besar.
Pelakon yang berasal dari Tanjong Tokong, Pulau Pinang ini pada awalnya ialah seorang pelakon bangsawan dan telah di lamar oleh Shaw Brothers untuk terlibat sama dalam produksi sebagai pelakon filem. Di sini bermulalah kerjaya Ahmad Nisfu sebagai pelakon filem. Walaupun memegang watak-watak yang kecil, Ahmad Nisfu dikatakan adalah seorang yang sentiasa bersyukur walaupun upah yang diterimanya adalah terlalu kecil. Hakikatnya, wang saku yang diperoleh digunakan untuk menyara dirinya sahaja kerana Ahmad Nisfu adalah seorang yang sebatang kara, tiada saudara mara, keluarga dan juga isteri.
Aktiviti sosial Ahmad Nisfu ini hanyalah dengan beramal di masjid di kawasan beliau tinggal dan juga di sekitar studio Jalan Ampas. Ahmad Nisfu dikhabarkan seorang yang pandai mengaji Al-Quran. Beliau juga merupakan seorang bilal di masjid di tempat beliau menetap dahulu.
Hinggalah penutupan studio Jalan Ampas, Ahmad Nisfu telah menghambakan dirinya dalam dunia lakonan. Selepas penutupan studio Jalan Ampas, Ahmad Nisfu telah hilang punca pencarian hidup. Filem Puaka dikatakan filem terakhir lakonan beliau.
Disebabkan tiada punca rezeki, Ahmad Nisfu hidup dengan bantuan ihsan dari orang ramai. Kerana tiada punca rezeki, Ahmad Nisfu hanyalah menetap di Kubu Jepun (pillbox) di Jalan Labu. Di situlah juga tempat Ahmad Nisfu telah menghembus kan nafas terakhirnya di dalam keadaan yang sungguh daif tanpa saudara mara, ahli keluarga dan isteri. Hanyalah teman rapat.- Balbo
Berikut pula, sedutan dari artikel yang dikongsi oleh penulis yang lain.
Setelah tidak bermain wayang lagi, Ahmad Nisfu sering berada dikedai kopi dipersimpangan Joo Chiat, Geylang Road dan Changi Road. Kedai kopi itu juga dulunya tempat ‘extras’ Shaw dan Cathay berkumpul. Sering juga mereka diambil sebagai ‘pak pacak’ dengan gaji $5.00 ringgit sehari!
Selain meluangkan masa disitu, dia sering ke seberang jalan untuk menikmati ‘sop kambing’ kegemarannya. Kedai mamak sop itu terletak dilorong masuk ke restoran Osman Ghani yang terkenal di Geylang Serai dengan ‘kari ikan’ dan ‘dalca rusuk kambing’nya.
Ahmad Nisfu juga pernah menjadi imam di Masjid Onan Road (sudah tiada lagi – tapaknya diambil oleh Muslim Convert Association). Pernah satu kali, kami anak anak nakal, waktu sembahyang berimamkan Ahmad Nisfu, sedang dalam rukun, kami menyanyi perlahan lahan sesama sendiri “ura Cendana! Pura Cendana!” sambil menggigil gigil menahan ketawa. Habis sembahyang, tak sempat cium tangannya, kami diperambat hingga keluar masjid! “Korang usik aku ya!!! setan!!!” Itulah pengalaman nakal saya bersama ‘Raja Alam Syahbana, raja negeri Pura Cendana’.
Mungkin kerana keuzuran dia tidak lama menjadi imam di situ. Seperti sudah berputus asa, dia hidup berteduh di kubu Jepun di Jalan Labu tidak jauh dari Masjid Aminah di Jalan Nanas off Geylang Serai. Lama juga dia tinggal bersendirian di situ dibawah ihsan orang kampung sekeliling. Tidak lama kemudian dia meninggal, setelah beberapa lama hidup sebatang kara dalam penuh kedaifan.
Rasa sedih pula apabila mengenang kan nasib allahyarham Ahmad Nisfu yang pengakhiran hidupnya amat menyayat hati. Seorang pelakon dan pelawak berbakat hidup dalam kedaifan. Admin percaya, rata-rata semua baru tahu mengenai riwayat hidupnya. Apa yang menyedihkan lagi, beliau dahulunya adalah hidup sebatang kara. Apa-apa pun, marilah kita sama-sama mendoakan agar rohnya dicucuri rahmat. Al-Fatihah
Post time 2-5-2013 02:44 PM
