Contemporary Malaysian Cinema: Genre, Gender and Temporality

Abstract

This thesis provides close, contextualised readings of representations of gender and temporality in a number of contemporary, post-millennial genre films. The focus is on textual analysis of the films, placed within the contexts of their production and critical reception both within and outside Malaysia. This study lies at the intersections of scholarship on Malaysian cinema, film genre, and Asian gender and cultural studies. This thesis argues that the directors’ reworking of genres renders a more dynamic and hybrid nature of generic forms, reiterating certain conventions of old media and cinematic forms such as the culturally-specific mode of melodrama, and elements of magic and superstition. In doing so, they fall outside and question the assumed binary between realist and non-realist genres in US films based on generic regimes of verisimilitude. I further argue that this reworking of genres complicates the dominant notion of gendered subjectivities, which is contained within the binaries of Old Malay and New Malay, Malay and non-Malay, rural and urban, and professional and working-class. In all of the films I examine, such binaries, which have been spawned by the combined forces of the postcolonial capitalist state and resurgent Islam, are destabilised through diverse representations of time, narratively and aesthetically. In the process, they question and fracture the chronology of ‘homogeneous empty time’ that underlies the linear narrative of nation. For example, in romance and horror films, notions of ‘modern’ femininity are represented more ambivalently whereas in comedy and action films, anxieties about modernity are projected on marginalised forms of masculinity. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to reflect upon the ways in which the transformations of both genre and gender lead the films examined to critique contradictory aspects of modernity in postcolonial, contemporary Malaysia.