And now an era comes near to its close’, announces the British commentator, ‘as the last few minutes of 170 years of British protection over Malaya tick away’. A shot from below of the clock striking midnight is interspersed with the image of the Union Flag, now lowered from its pole. The sound of the chiming clock competes with that of the British national anthem, before both are replaced by the noise of cheering crowds. The camera pans down to reveal a neon sign, stating ‘Merdeka’ (Freedom). The shot fades to black.

This short sequence within the Malayan Film Unit's (MFU) official record of Malayan Independence, Merdeka for Malaya (director unknown, 1957), visualises the country's move from colonial to independent state. This complex, contested and often violent process is contained and imagined throughout this thirty-minute film within succinct visual displays, through public celebrations, airport departures and official ceremonies. The film offers a record of the ceremonial events of independence, illustrating the ways in which states are symbolically imagined through such pageantry. While there has been much excellent recent scholarship on independence ceremonies, I want to think more closely in this chapter about the film record. In doing this, we might usefully examine the spectacle of colonial handover as a distinctly ‘filmic’ moment, one that is organised visually and constructed on film. In short, how is changing statehood visualised through film? Furthermore, what role do government film units play within this process? A closer examination of the production history of Merdeka for Malaya provides a further way to explore the move from ‘colonial’ to ‘post-colonial’ within film. Much literature on film continues to present independence as a point of rupture, a starting point for national cinema histories, but in looking at the personnel, the unit and indeed equipment involved in Merdeka for Malaya, we might better understand the continuities, as well as the ruptures, that mark the very moment of the post-colonial.