Panggung Wayang; Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film

‘ PanggungWayang’ is a frequently used phrase for cinema and cinema-going in Malaysia. It is made up of two words: ‘Panggung,’ meaning a theater, a stage and even an audience, and ‘Wayang,’ which refers to the traditional shadow puppet theater of the Malay world. Wayang is sometimes also combined with the word ‘Gambar,’ which means a picture, a drawing or a photograph, to signify a movie. It is reputed that P. Ramlee (of whom more below) constructed a word ‘Pawagam,’ made from the first few letters of Panggung, Wayang and Gambar, to designate the cinema (Ché-Ross, 1996), but it appears not to have caught on, although I did see an old Shaw Brothers cinema in Melaka called Pawagam Rex. However, PanggungWayang is a particularly appropriate conjunction, because it combines the two major influences on film in Malaysia: the ‘Bangsawan’ (Malay opera) theater tradition, which provided personnel and stories to the Malaysian cinema, and the shadow puppet theater, a proto-cinematic medium that has been so important in Malay culture, even though its influence on the cinema is quite indirect. Both of these theatrical forms will be elaborated upon in chapter 2.

The book's title, Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film, not only identifies the focus of interest of the argument, it also highlights an important distinction between cinema and film culture. The term cinema, in association with a ‘qualifier’ like Malaysian, Indian, Asian, Malay, Tamil, Cantonese or feminist, refers to a specific film production aggregate based on national, regional, ethnic, linguistic, gender or any other identity characteristic (the limitations of some of these categorizations are discussed in chapter 3). On the other hand, film culture or film refers to the collective film experience of a particular community both synchronically and diachronically. This book will thus consider not only films produced in Malaysia, but also (to a greater or lesser extent) all of the film activities that take place there. For example, Indian cinema will be relevant to the Malaysian film culture, but so will Indian film culture (as well as Indian culture more generally).