Movies, Memory and History at the Rex and the Ruby

THE HAUNT PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

Nonfiction by Mike Lim

The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.

— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

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On 13 May 1969, Johan Fernandez went to the cinema after work. It was a Tuesday afternoon and Rachel, Rachel, directed by Paul Newman and starring Joanne Woodward, was playing at the Rex in the centre of Kuala Lumpur.

Not long after it started, the movie suddenly stopped and the word ‘Darurat’ (‘Emergency’) flashed up on screen. Cinema patrons tried to leave but couldn’t—the doors had been closed by the staff. On the other side, a mob was gathering. Eventually, they broke through and some 100 Chinese men flooded into the hall. Their target? The cinema’s Malay patrons.

Caught up in the confusion, all Fernandez knew was that something bad was happening. He followed the crowd as they retreated to the toilets. Then, not wanting to risk getting trapped there he decided to chance his way out. He was Indian, and this confused the men he ran into; they couldn’t decide what to do with him. The confusion bought him enough time and he slipped out. He spent the next few days at a police station waiting out the conflict that had erupted around him.

13 May 1969 has a particular place in Malaysian cultural memory. The Chinese-dominated opposition had won more seats than expected, and the celebrations in Kuala Lumpur turned to taunts that turned to counter-rallies that turned to four days of violence. Of course, there are other histories and narratives underneath this barest of summaries.

The riots were the worst racial conflicts in recent history, and continue to linger in the cultural memory. Among the changes it prompted afterwards was the institution of the ‘Rukunegara’ (‘National Principles’)—a declaration to express unity among the various racial groups in Malaysia.

Not too many years later, my classmates and I would recite the second part of the Rukunegara in school: we declared our belief in God, pledged our loyalty to king and country, reiterated the supremacy of the constitution and rule of law, and committed to good behaviour and upholding morality. These were the five principles of the national philosophy, and they were printed on the back covers of our exercise books.

The memory remains fraught. When the news website Malaysiakini published a 50-year anniversary feature on the riots in 2019, they took pains to explain that it was because of the ‘general silence imposed on the topic’ and to provide a record of the events, which included some oral histories. Malaysiakini felt the need to state explicitly that they were not ‘trying to spark another riot’.

The feature story names three cinemas where the violence converged: Rex cinema, Federal cinema and Capitol theatre. It’s unclear how many people died that day, but estimates say that the number of people killed range from the official count of 196 to other estimates closer to 800.

The first time I realised that KL cinemas had been focal points for the riots was while I was trawling through Malaysian history Facebook groups looking for photos of old cinemas that I went to as a kid. As I read, I saw someone’s post about a ghostly presence they felt in the dark at the Federal cinema. Was this one of the souls of the people who died there during the May 13 riots, they asked? After that, I went looking for more and found a short documentary about Fernandez’s escape.

The Rex cinema is also a central location in Hanna Alkaf’s 2019 novel, The Weight of Our Sky. The story revolves around a Malay schoolgirl, Melati, who goes to see a movie there with her best friend Saffiyah, until a Chinese mob breaks in and separates the crowd by race. Melati escapes—but only because of the help of a bystander, Auntie Bee, a Chinese woman, who convinces the attackers that Melati is Eurasian. Melati finds refuge with Auntie Bee’s family and from there tries to find her mother.

Melati’s plight is complicated by the fact that she’s suffering from undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder and is tormented throughout the story by a djinn that she tries to keep at bay with various rituals. Hanna’s fiction deals with mental illness in late 60s Malaysia, but much like the Malaysiakini story, it’s an effort to articulate and understand the memory that remains. The events from 1969 have been invoked to dampen dissent in a political landscape that’s mostly been divided along racial lines. Literary scholar Show Ying Xin¹ reminds us of other narratives and questions that remain untold and unresolved; according to Show, The Weight of Our Sky is a way of writing against a monolithic understanding of the events from 13 May 1969. Melati finally reacts against the djinn, replacing her anxiety with anger about the unfairness of not being able to live her own life, even if she remains estranged from old neighbours and loses people close to her. But she finds new connections and a renewed sense of courage, arriving at a kind of compromise with her djinn rather than casting it off completely. Show suggests this to mean that:

To truthfully acknowledge the everlasting ghost in one’s body is also to take responsibility, as the novel implies in the Malay proverb: di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung [where we plant our feet is where we must hold up the sky]. By not covering up the feelings of loss and distrust, the novel invites readers to step forward to understand the dark sky of Melati and many stigmatised bodies in the 13 May history.

I was born seven months after the riots. My main memories of it come from family conversations referring to ‘May 13’ or ‘the May 13 disturbances’, and my parents were both in Australia at the time of the riots, so their experience of it was at a distance too, through phone calls and radio news. My father, who is Chinese-Malaysian, had a Chinese friend who was killed while he was taking a Malay girl back to her home. My Anglo-Australian mother would hear from friends at the hospital where she worked about burning houses in the distance. Sometimes I wonder how I would have fared.

I don’t know if that Facebook discussion on ghosts in the cinema answered the poster’s question about whether he had met the spirit of someone who had died there. Some people added comments, with their own ghost stories, while others talked about relatives or friends who had experienced the riots directly; one person mentioned Hanna’s novel.

The Rex closed in 2002. It was turned into a backpacker hostel in 2007, but burnt down that same year. In 2019, the building was renovated into a community and arts hub. In the documentary, Johan Fernandez talks about his experience of escaping the violence while he stands in a mostly barren interior. Amidst the dilapidation, we see a sign on the wall from the Rex’s cinema days: ‘kelas khas / reserved seats’, a ubiquitous fixture in the cinemas I remember from my childhood.

My very first cinema memory might be of my dad taking me to see a movie where a squad of heroes parachutes into the jungle to track the baddies down. One of them brings his dirt bike with an M16 mounted on the handlebars. He gets killed in the battle. When I talked about this with my dad he said, ‘Sometimes you just got to sacrifice …’

I don’t think I ever went to the Federal or Capitol cinemas, but I think I saw Back to the Future at the Rex and was once late for a date to see Police Academy there. I also saw lots of movies at the Odeon, State, Sentosa, Ruby and Cathay cinemas all around KL and its outskirts.

I’d buy tickets at a box office that had a wrought-iron grille, which I would reach through to point out the seats I wanted. The ticket seller would then cross them out on a floor plan and write the seat numbers in big thick pencil on paper tickets. Inside the huge single-screen halls, the floors would crunch underfoot with kuaci shells, sunflower seed snacks, from the previous sessions.

I remember murmuring in agreement with my friends when Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio says she is so cold in The Abyss, because the theatre’s air-conditioning was working too well. I remember going to see The Champ with my mother and sister, and sharing the single tissue we had as we were all crying by the end. I grew up with Hollywood movies, though I’d sometimes also see Cantonese films. I don’t remember what most of them were called, but I can still remember what they were about: a Hong Kong crime story with too much implied violence for my age, a period piece with martial artists fighting about the relative superiority of their weapons, and of course Jackie Chan’s Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Monkey in the Tiger’s Eye. It’s a sign of a life lived in a mostly English-speaking milieu that I didn’t see any Tamil or Malay language films. (Although I was once startled by a pre-movie trailer of a Malay horror film featuring a head and organs floating out of a body; only this year did I learn that the monster was a penanggalan from Southeast Asian folklore, a vampiric creature hungry for humans.)

After the shows, hundreds of people would stream out—they were probably the biggest crowds I’ve ever been in. The carparks would be similarly packed, with no room for individual cars to get out before the post-movie exodus. Some carparks had teams of valets to manoeuvre your car into its impossibly tight space for you for a fee.

At the Ruby cinema in SEA Park where I grew up, not too far from KL, my father once drove into a concrete balustrade as we were entering the carpark, knocking it off the entry ramp. (I saw Aliens there, and Die Hard, and The Fly.) A Google Street View image of the area now shows the shell of the building, fenced off into what looks like a construction site. It allows me, from Adelaide, from I don’t know how long since I was last there, to look right through the doors of the auditorium from one side to the other.

From that vantage point, it looks empty, bereft of matinee crowds and movie posters, and the car park around it is similarly fenced off and overgrown with weeds. It looks like basketball courts had been built there since I remember it, but even these are cracked and disused. The Ruby is a monument to its own abandonment.

The Street View image was taken in September 2020, and a more recent Facebook post tells me that the Ruby is now gone, the land developed. The post includes an old photo of the cinema when it was still in use, with its distinctive roofline. This black-and-white picture shows—at least at an oblique angle—what I’m looking for: giant hand-painted movie posters on the outside wall.

Black and white photo from Ruby cinema in the 1980s, with four large hand-painted posters on the side. Image source unknown. Found at Sue Ee Teh, ‘A weekend in Taman Paramount and Seapark’.

My parents gave me a camera when I was a teenager, and I learned how to use it by taking pictures of the people I knew, of family trips to Singapore, of Chinese New Year lion dances. I wish I’d pointed my camera at those posters when I encountered them then. I’m not sure why I didn’t; I guess they were too ordinary a part of my landscape.

These kinds of posters are mostly gone now. There’s a cinema in Central Java (The Rajawali) still displaying them; in Athens (The Athinaion), a younger artist continues to maintain the tradition. Elsewhere, the Chin Men Theater in Tainan and the Alfred Talkies cinema in Mumbai have elderly artists who’ve been painting for decades. There’s also a lively market for the work of poster artists from Accra, who now mainly paint individual canvases for collectors rather than actual cinema billboards.

The Federal in Kuala Lumpur, which displays a hand-painted poster from *Leatherface*. Credit: The Southeast Asia Movie Theatre Project²

The cinemas I grew up with were buildings in their own right, tall art deco constructions with ample exterior walls to affix the giant painted canvases onto. You could see what was ‘Now Showing’ and what the 'Coming Attractions’ were from across the street. Often, the posters were huge montages of the stars posed together, staring down at the crowds of moviegoers. Sometimes they would mimic the studio’s design, like one for El Cid, with the letters soaring and stacked like a mountain fortress, or the one for Paper Tiger, with lead actor David Niven’s head looming large over an East Asian character bursting through some palm leaves.

Why am I nostalgic for these posters? Are they metonyms for the experiences of my youth? A way to remember the experience of seeing those movies for the first time? A lot of my childhood memories are of the movies. If I’m nostalgic for cinema poster photographs not taken, it might be that because those photographs would’ve been tangible artefacts of my childhood in Malaysia, artefacts I almost could have made. My connections with that past and place are loose now, and these unmade pictures might have been a way to affirm a personal history, to ‘attest that what I see has indeed existed’, as Barthes put it. I’ve now lived much longer in Australia than I have in Malaysia, so there’s little chance of me counting myself as a local to KL anymore.

I can still read Malay, slowly, but what little Cantonese I once spoke has dissipated, the remaining fragments of my knowledge now only useful in pointing out how badly pronounced it is in movies when Western actors speak it. It’s been six years since I last visited Malaysia too—I remember feeling disoriented even then, having very little familiarity with the landscape around me. KL is after all a metropolis that only keeps evolving. The only reason I didn’t get hopelessly lost was because friends and relatives were kind enough to give me rides everywhere.

In 1999 I made a photo series that spoke to the arrest of Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, who was sacked and then arrested for sodomy. I remember being troubled by what seemed like an egregious move by the incumbent government to eliminate a political opponent, and I followed the events as much as I could from Australia.

From my photo series, *I was in Australia when the protests happened* (1999).

Top: ‘Anwar’, from my photo series, *I was in Australia when the protests happened* (1999)—I am standing looking at a cloth screen onto which is projected a television image of Anwar Ibrahim being led away by a tight group of police, while trying to meet Anwar's gaze.
Bottom: ‘Carried’, from my photo series, *I was in Australia when the protests happened* (1999)—I am crouching down looking at a cloth screen onto which is projected a newspaper clipping of a woman being restrained and carried by three police.

Feeling acutely apart from the events, I took some self-portraits where I stood in front of a large screen onto which I had projected images I’d photographed from the TV and newspapers. In one photo I’m standing next to a still taken off a TV screen, which shows Anwar being led away by a tight group of police. As he is looking to the right of frame, I’m standing on the right of the screen, looking to the left. In the photo our gazes meet. In another, I’m crouched down, looking at a photograph from a newspaper, of an Anwar supporter being dragged away by police. Here, I was trying to meet her gaze too; it was my attempt at letting her know that I saw her.

The photo series was a way to signal my concern—as well as my ambivalence—about being so far away, a means to muster a meagre response to key events in a place I once called home. I made these pictures by montaging myself into the fragments of media that I could gather in Adelaide. I was also making the final work in a darkened room, an image projected onto a screen, me as audience, me as participant, another camera taking it in. I was using this constructed cinema to try to reach across, to connect, to understand, to remember.

It was through thinking and reading more deliberately about Malaysian cinemas that brought me to Johan Fernandez’s oral history and Hanna Alkaf’s novel. This is what my nostalgia for old cinema posters has led me to—an acknowledgement of a past I no longer have access to, and the discovery of another not-so-innocent history laid beneath my memories of the everyday pleasures of sitting in darkened cinemas. And in thinking about my own images not made, I’m realising how much of the photo work I’ve done since is about things just out of reach.

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✷ 1—Show, Ying Xin, ‘Narrating the racial riots of 13 May 1969: gender and postmemory in Malaysian literature’, 2021, South East Asia Research 29(2): 214-230.

✷ 2—Jablon, Philip, ‘The Architecture of Dreams’, The Southeast Asia Movie Theatre Project https://seatheater.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-architecture-of-dreams.html, June 2014)

✷ 3—Bristow, Steve and Lee, Edwin, Chinatown Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, Tropical Press, 1994.

Mike Lim is a content designer, editor, writer and photographer. He grew up near Kuala Lumpur and now lives on Kaurna Country, in South Australia. He’s interested in the relationship between still and moving images, and their relationship with memory and history.