1. TIME, RACE, AND THE ASYNCHRONOUS IN THE COLONIAL DOCUMENTARIES OF MALAYA
Nadine Chan
ABSTRACT
This chapter uncovers how Malaya’s racially plural society was rearranged on the very material of celluloid. The connective tissues of the colonial documentary (such as editing, voice-over, narrative structure) converged colonial historicism with the mechanical unwinding of cinematic time. Films were rendered out of date, however, even before they were released when they were unable to keep up with Malayans who insisted on forging history on their own terms. Theorizing the asynchronicity of an indexical medium, this chapter argues that although colonial documentary films scripted Malaya through racialized periodizations of modernity, film was itself an asynchronous medium misaligned with the fractured temporalities of late colonialism in Southeast Asia.
In late January 1937, the Strand Film Company arrived in Kuala Lumpur on a two-week filming expedition to document the development of the Federated Malay States and Singapore.1 The resulting film, Five Faces of Malaya (Shaw 1938), told a story of Malaya’s path to progress—how the arrival of modernity through colonialism transformed forests into ports of commerce and orderly plantations and interlaced tropical wilderness with roads, railways, and irrigation channels. Like other such colonial documentaries about Malaya, such as Malaya (British Instructional Films 1928) and Voices of Malaya (Ministry of Information and Central Office of Information 1948), the film maps out Malaya’s journey to modernity through its narrative organization of race and ethnicity. Beginning with Malaya’s indigenous and nomadic forest dwellers whose displacement by new immigrants of the capitalist economy is depicted in the film, the narrative maps a historicist trajectory of time on the racialized bodies of Malaya’s inhabitants and the racial stratification of Malayan society. The connective tissues possible in the cinematic documentary apparatus—such as the editing, the structural rearrangement of sound and image, and the voice-over—facilitated large-scale imaginings of Malaya as a coherent polity by organizing and hierarchizing Malaya’s various “races” as an unfolding of cinematic duration and a structuring of colonial time on the material surface of celluloid. More than simply reflecting Malaya’s ethnically plural society, the colonial documentary brings it into being for audiences in Malaya, Britain, and across the globe, even if such social figurations did not exist beyond the edges of the screen.
Indeed, although the documentary presented colonial cosmopolitanism as already in motion, reality ran out of synchrony with the historicisms in the films as ongoing nationalist struggles, interracial tensions, and countercolonial globalities upended colonial narratives of modernity. Archipelagic Southeast Asia was an asynchronous space of complex intercultural exchange, friction, and contest.2 Malayans were unruly subjects who would not sit still before the camera, choosing instead to determine history on their own terms. The colonial documentary, in spite of itself, registers these asynchronicities. At times failing to prevent these deviant moments from infiltrating the wide-eyed lens, colonial documentaries turned out to be difficult mouthpieces of empire. As a technology that could be either a recorder of reality or a magician of possibility, the cinematic apparatus had to confront its inherently divergent potential within the colonial documentary form.
This chapter theorizes what I call the asynchronous colonial race-time of documentary films. Asynchronicity is realized in convergent and divergent forms in the colonial documentary: first in the problematic convergence between colonial historicism and documentary cinema’s configurations of time and temporality and second in the divergence between the documentary claim and the world outside the frame. The first part of the chapter argues that the documentary form’s time-based notions of past and futurity converge with colonial historicism’s temporalities in the colonial documentary. In Five Faces of Malaya, such convergent asynchronicity is realized through the representation of Malaya’s ethnic landscape as racialized periodizations of colonial modernity, that is, colonial race-time. The second part of the chapter looks at moments of divergence where tensions between the documentary’s realist mode and colonial historicism’s fictive one result in moments of textual and aesthetic rupture and friction. I examine these moments of narrative contradiction and flux, also suggested in the film’s lukewarm reception in Malaya, as possibilities where the various agentive forces in the colonies resisted the temporalizing thrust of the colonial documentary’s project of historicism.
ASYNCHRONICITY: COLONIAL HISTORICISM AND ITS CONVERGENCE WITH DOCUMENTARY TIME
Scholars of the postcolonial have long written about how colonial situations reconfigure spatializations of time and rewrite periodizations of history and pastness. For instance, vernacular experiences of temporality are made to conform to the linear, homogeneous time associated with European ideas of progress and history.3 Temporality in colonial situations is an arrangement of historical time according to a presumed “naturally existing, continuous flow”—for example, what Gyan Prakash calls colonialism’s “History” with a capital H or what Dipesh Chakrabarty terms “historicism”—that which made modernity and capitalism appear global over time, originating first in Europe and then spreading outward, elsewhere (Prakash 1995, 4; Chakrabarty 2010, 7). In Chakrabarty’s configuration, there are two histories of capital. History 1 contains “pasts posited by capital,” and History 2 includes “pasts that do not belong to capital’s ‘life-process’” (Chakrabarty 2000, 655). Historicism works on the supposition of both historicality and futurity—colonized worlds emerge from the premodern past and must/will move forward in time toward a modern, capitalist future.
The colonial documentary is, at first glance, a machine of History 1. It bears the imprint of colonial historicism’s understanding of time in its impulse to record, arrange, and narrate temporality as history and historicality. Familiar since the actuality films of the Lumières, the documentary’s elemental function is “the replication of the historical real, the creation of a second-order reality cut to the measure of our desire” (Renov 1993, 25). Some of this impulse to document historical time has to do with the very indexicality of the camera, which bears witness as a chronicler of time. The documentary, in Philip Rosen’s terms, is “an arena of meaning centering on the authority of the real founded in an indexical trace” (Rosen 1993, 76). Malin Wahlberg designates the trace as “an indexical sign, an existential operator interrelating image, history, and memory. . . a mark inscribed, or a photograph that bears witness of life or events in the past” (Wahlberg 2011, 119). As “an art of record,” the film claims witness as a historical referent (Wahlberg 2008, 33). In collecting references of the past, the colonial documentary’s realist mode fixes that past in the suppositions of historicism, in the forward narrative trajectory of historicality.
Moreover, in its mechanical compulsion to unfold linearly in time, cinematic temporalities find convergences with colonial historical time.4 Indeed, time in the cinema operates through uncannily similar logics of forward “flow.” The inevitability of twenty-three frames per second, the inescapability of the uptake of the reel by the projector, and the very fact of film as movement art that takes place in time all mean that in the cinema, time flows continuously and sweeps all within its frame along with the forward thrust of its duration. As Mary Anne Doane explains, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cinematic technologies made possible a new access to time and its representation—“the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity” (Doane 2002, 4).
Yet the logic (and paradox) of documentary poetics is that documentaries also seek to persuade—as the colonial documentaries of the Griersonian tradition certainly sought to do (Renov 1993, 26). In other words, the documentary aesthetic exists in tension between the pastness of historical reference and the futurity of persuasion. Even as it claims to document the world in its affiliation with the realist mode, the documentary is also a maker of worlds—as we shall soon see in my analysis of Five Faces of Malaya. The colonial documentary was the means through which multiethnic Malaya was visualized as an imagined community within the larger constellation of the British Empire.
Contextually, in the British Empire, colonial documentaries were made to evidence the continuous political legitimacy of imperialism at times when the need for intraempire cooperation was at its highest or when the entire premise of imperialism came under threat. The numerous colonial documentary films of the Empire Marketing Board in the late 1920s and early 1930s, for instance, were produced to shore up consumer preferences for empire-produced goods amid a period of market protectionism and the loss of British advantage in nineteenth-century free trade. Film became a critical player in the political economy of the British Empire because of its ability to bring a visual experience of empire to life—picturing the empire as if it always was and always will be (Chan 2013, 107–8). In that way, colonial documentaries were both documents and possibilities.
Thus, the impulse of colonial historicism shares its ambitions and contradictions with the documentary genre. Colonial documentaries converge a prescription of the real with the peculiar logics of colonial temporality. In the very mediation of the image through the camera, the screen, and the editing, the cinematic sign (what we see on the screen) is always already at a remove from its referent (what existed in the world) (Renov 1993, 26). In that slippage between the actual and the image, colonial historicism approaches a point as documentary time. The discursive conditions that give rise to “nonfiction” and its ensuing “historical” fixity are shot through with historicism’s hold on past, present, and future. In colonial documentaries, the trace asynchronously bears the promise of colonial historicism and is misindexed as a historical referent for a world that has not (yet) happened. If, as Wahlberg asks, the “trace is a trace of something,” an “intentional object” that functions “as inscription of the past within the present,” then what is the significance when trace, document, and history become misaligned in the colonial documentary? (Wahlberg 2008, 35).
I wish to posit the idea of the asynchronous as a means of theorizing this convergence of colonial historicism and documentary time. A term used in electronics or computer programming to denote events that happen outside the main program flow, though often in parallel with it, asynchronicity can arise as a result of external events or may happen concurrently as a program executes. In an asynchronous system, a program can continue running on the basis of a projection of results, even as the computation for said results has yet to occur. The idea of the asynchronous denotes how the world within the documentary film runs in parallel though perhaps at odds with events in the world outside it. Documentary asynchronicity also captures how infrastructures of image reproduction were segregated between colony and metropole in ways that “un-sync” and disrupt the camera’s perceived documentary reproduction of reality as indexical, as immediate, and as a historical referent. Indeed, as I argue, two formulations of time, history, and the future meet in the colonial documentary: the promise of colonial historicism and the historicity of documentary time converge to produce a filmic world that is out of synchrony with vernacular modernities beyond the frame.
To manage asynchronicity in a programming interface, a programmer would provide subroutines—a sequence of instructions that return a parallel program to set data, typically called a promise, that best seeks to represent the ongoing events before the computation is complete. In the way that a promise prescribes conditions in the present on the basis of an indeterminable future, the asynchronous colonial documentary embodies an intended futurity as if these conditions were already in place. Colonial documentaries were exercises in asynchronous promise—less invested in what is than in depicting what ought to be as the terms for the already presently occurring. In other words, colonial documentaries do not document the present but rather the promise, suturing the historical trace with the prescriptions of future becoming. Inhabiting a precarious space between actuality (which is arguably focused on the actual) and propaganda (which manipulates the actual to motivate social outcomes and so has that element of futurity about it), colonial documentaries sought to present the empire according to the progressions of imperial modernity and to frame dispersed peoples and territories within these historicisms.
Discussion on the documentary necessarily confronts its nature as document, but I am less invested here in questions about the accuracy of the documentary versus real life than I am in the distance, disjuncture, and “unsync” that happens between the apparatus of the colonial documentary and the conditions of colonial time. As Wahlberg argues, Bazin’s argument of film as record cannot be reduced to a truth claim. Rather, the “whole aesthetic of objectivity and the development of comprehensive technologies of truth” in the documentary narrates a particular ordering of temporality in Malaya according to the promise of colonial historicism (Minh-ha 1990, 80).
COLONIAL RACE-TIME IN FIVE FACES OF MALA...
