An article in the Straits Times in January 1937 reported that a team of three (Ralph Keene and Alexander Shaw, both well known filmmakers from the documentary film industry, and cameraman George Noble) had recently arrived in Singapore to begin production on a film showing the ‘life and industry of Malaya’. ‘Because the existing publicity films on Malaya are so old that no theatre bookings can be obtained for them overseas’, the report began, ‘the…
An article in the Straits Times in January 1937 reported that a team of three (Ralph Keene and Alexander Shaw, both well known filmmakers from the documentary film industry, and cameraman George Noble) had recently arrived in Singapore to begin production on a film showing the ‘life and industry of Malaya’. ‘Because the existing publicity films on Malaya are so old that no theatre bookings can be obtained for them overseas’, the report began, ‘the F.M.S. and Colony Governments decided to have a new one made. They saw the opportunity when Imperial Airways arranged to make a film of Empire Air Routes’ (Straits Times, 28 January 1937, 12).
In 1936 Imperial Airways had commissioned Strand Films to make a series of documentaries, including The Future’s in the Air and Air Outpost, which sought to bind the Empire together and served as ‘hi-tech Empire travelogues’ (Anthony, 2010). During their travels, the Strand filmmakers secured further commissions from trade and State, producing Dawn Over Iran for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and Five Faces for the Malayan Government on their journey home from Australia. Produced at a cost of $11,500, Five Faces was shot in three weeks as Alexander Shaw travelled quickly across the country capturing 8000 feet of film (Straits Times, 27 February 1939, 13; World Film News, May/June 1938, 54). The Malayan Government had commissioned the London-based Greville Brothers to produce one-reel films on Malayan life and industries in 1927, but now sought a two-reel, sound production, primarily intended to present Malaya to British and international audiences.
By May 1937, a rough version of the film was presented in London to a private audience including the Sultan of Penang, the Sultan of Trenngganu and the Yam Tuan of Negri Sembilan, who were in Britain for the Coronation (The Times, 22 May 1937, 10). The film played regularly at the Imperial Institute cinema during 1939 and 1940 and featured at the Tatler Cinema in London as part of Empire Week in May 1940, where it played alongside Men of Africa and Wings over Empire in a programme of films that ‘quietly and undemonstratively do something to explain the responsibilities of Empire’ (The Times, 21 May 1940, 4). The film was also widely advertised for non-theatrical hire, particularly to schools, in Britain and America. It was not widely shown in Malaya, although when it was screened for the first time in Kuala Lumpur in August 1939 at the cinema hall of the Malayan Agri-Horticultural Association’s exhibition, The Straits Times argued that it ‘should be shown in every cinema throughout the country’ (Straits Times, 8 August 1939, 14).
Film historian Scott Anthony argues that Five Faces exemplifies a ‘certain strand of inter-war liberalism’, showing five nations, each defined by a different way of life (or product), working together as one (Anthony, 2010). This formal structure, followed in subsequent documentaries such as Voices of Malaya (1948), endorses an established British policy, which sought to maintain ethnic boundaries within Malaya and build up a Malay elite. At a moment when the Japanese threat was growing ever stronger, the notion of Malaya, with its disparate cultures, united within the Empire, became all the more pertinent. Malaya, to an extent, serves as a microcosm of the Empire at large here, as Shaw recognised in his correspondence with Paul Rotha. ‘After all the nonsense one has heard about the British Empire’, he wrote, ‘at least one can say that if there are going to be Empires, Malaya would serve as a pretty good model for how they should be run’. While it is easy to dismiss the idealism of the film (the final lines talk of the five races ‘living in harmony’ and respecting one another’s beliefs and customs), particularly in light of the post-war Malayan Emergency, Shaw’s correspondence shows his own belief in such a vision. ‘Five races, five creeds – and oddly enough they all get on fairly well’, he wrote (cited in Anthony, 2010).
It is worth noting that the three filmmakers involved on this project would all work on other colonial projects over the next two decades. After producing Men of Africa for the Colonial Office, Alexander Shaw went to India in 1940 to oversee the productions of the Film Advisory Board. Ralph Keene made Cyprus is an Island (1945), then filmed in India in 1947 (producing A String of Beads) and in Malaya during the 1950s, while from 1949, George Noble would serve as chief cameraman and right-hand man to Sean Graham on the Gold Coast Film Unit.
