ABSTRACT
The history of Singapore’s film industry is a fractured one, divided neatly into two distinct periods. The first emerged in the 1950s and matured in the 1960s. Falling under the decade before Singapore’s independence, this period has also been considered the golden age of local cinema due to the proliferation of Malaylanguage films produced by the two dominant studios in Singapore at the time, Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions and Cathay-Keris. The second period, from the 1990s to the present, is perceived as a revival or rebirth of film productions after a lull between the 1960s and 1980s, and is best characterised as “post-national” cinema. In contrast to the Malay-language films of the golden age, these films are primarily made in english, Singlish or Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, often with a smattering of other languages to reflect Singapore’s multilingual constituency.
