Publication Date:
1974-09-01
Description:
By the mid-1920s, the spread and popularity of a Hollywood dominated cinema in Malaya, and elsewhere in the Empire, was causing the British considerable concern. The motion picture or cinematograph (as it was then called) was a rapidly growing entertainment and educative phenomenon that transcended barriers of literacy and language in its appeal and was freely accessible to all sections of colonial society. In the words of a contemporary, “it taught the mass of uneducated Asiatics about the white race.” In Malaya, the Government had acted to place controls on the cinema soon after its introduction but by the opening years of the 1920s there was a growing number of travellers and expatriate critics who felt that the authorities had not yet realized the seriousness of the ‘threat’ posed by the cinema and had not acted with enough purpose in imposing safeguards. To emerge as the leading campaigner on the subject was Sir Hesketh Bell, (late Governor of Mauritius) who visited Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies in 1926, on a private tour of the Far East.
Print ISSN:
0022-4634
Electronic ISSN:
1474-0680
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Political Science
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