Week 9 - Cinema and Television

What is the cinema and television for in our daily basis life? Besides giving the information and the to share the other world culture creativity and knowledge. Television and Cinema sometimes can be harmful to our cultural identity. From my point of view, this is because of the different culture shown in other countries with opposite culture.



Television here in Brunei which only has 4 channels of Radio Television Brunei (RTB) shows some cultural aspect of Brunei people but for some reasons this channel also show a lot series from outside countries which is beyond our culture. Some drama or movie had their own rules and regulations, I know this will sounds funny but in local drama holding hand is not encourage by the RTB authority. For them as a Muslim it is illegal to do so. A man or woman holding hands, a woman with tight outfits or violence will be censored by RTB.



Below is an example. A short film that created my local talent Adam Groves, a filmmaker with a vision.

His major role towards filmmaking is to develop some uniqueness from local point of views by sharing them online as most of his previous short films may not be appropriate. This is a person who tries whatever he could possibly do to achieve good entertainment in the local film industry.


Basically this video is trying to show more or less about the culture in a realistic way by writing the scripts in a proper Bruneian dialect instead of standard Malay which are heard/seen in local dramas nowadays. The creator has also included the typical lives of school boys on a regular day basis once encountering school-breaks. However, most of the additional story-lines are only fiction and for entertainment purposes only nor does the characters are related to any actual events.

As stated by Richard Hoggart, (1990) on his book titled, The Uses of Literacy stated that "Having a good time may be made to seem so important as to override almost all other claims; yet when it has been allowed to do so, having a good time becomes largely a matter of routine. The strongest argument against modern mass entertainments is not that they debase taste - debasement can be alive and active - but that they over - excite it, eventually dull it, and finally kill it....They kill it at the nerve, and yet so bemuse and persuade their audience that the audience is almost entirely unable to look up and say, 'But in fact this cake is made of sawdust'". (p.196-7).



In conclusion, what is Television and Cinema is study for the representation of the culture which may not tell the whole truth. Some of it was not suppose to be like what we see. In fact it is suppose to teach us the meaning of the real life and at the same time teaches us what we suppose to do to correct it. So that viewers can adopt it and imply it in this reality painful life.





Bibliography:



Hoggart, H. (1990). The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.