ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns itself with the essayed films of Amir Muhammad. I prefer the term essay to documentary, for even when the filmmaker himself applies the term he often does so with a muted disclaimer, a sort of cheeky reticence – Lelaki Komunis Terakhir (The Last Communist, 2006) for instance was described in the publicity as “a semi-musical documentary”. Amir Muhammad’s films are largely cinematic statements about either the personal or the very public events and situations that shape his worldview and his palpable experience of contemporary Malaysia and Malaysian life. He has blurred the boundaries that theoretically attempt to define what we know as “documentary” and instead he has sought a sense of truth in a much more literary fashion than those die-hard purists of the documentary film tradition would have once sanctioned. Perhaps his work adheres to the idea that truth is revealed and shaped through fiction and that genre too can play a role in the transmission or revelation of “truth” or perceived “truths” found in memory. Such a Lacanian paradox may indeed not be what Amir Muhammad seeks to convey on his screen, but paradox it remains and there is a brave originality in the young filmmaker’s utility of form and genre in the conveyance of both ideas and images. To tell the truth in Malaysia – about the past, about the traumas that have shaped that past – and given the present political climate in the country, ways in which those traumas and memories can be represented and reclaimed on screen requires a heightened sense of paradox.
