I’d always harboured the suspicion that early 20th century colonial KL was pathologically camera shy, based on the painful lack of ‘home video’ footage of the city from that period (perhaps it was once horribly gap-toothed, or had a nasty case of Resting B****h Face (RBF)?). I’ve had to satisfy my raging fetish for historical archive footage by viewing teh tarik-stained Depression-period films of teeming New York City, Tokyo and Paris; and to content myself with simply imagining their KL contemporary (equally teeming – with orangutans, T-rexes, piranhas, friendly headhunters and disapproving, haughty colonialists sipping tea).
My imagination muscle was about to suffer a cramp when I miraculously stumbled upon two glorious, ‘vintage’ YouTube movies of our capital, captured by fabled 1900s newsreel-producer, British Pathé (my delightful discovery occurred in the midst of non-stop viewing of cat videos, of course). Minimalistically titled “Views of Kuala Lumpur” and, even more edgily, “Kuala Lumpur”, the two astonishing, fell-from-heaven documentary excerpts depict our deer-caught-in-headlights city in the 1920s and 1950s (today, they would be termed “creepshots”). Presumably in between fending off crocodile attacks, enduring bouts of dengue and fleeing parang-wielding kampong folk run amok, the filmmakers were able to capture sweeping, panoramic footage of not-ready-for-a-close-up KL as it went about its business (as townspeople scratched their heads over why a bunch of mat sallehs with bizarre contraptions stuck to their faces was tramping around).
What we’re treated to is an almost divine revelation – and the experience is comparable to using Google Street View, but with the ‘time travel’ functionality activated. Both videos cast lingering, flirtatious glances at the city’s showcase architecture, as embodied by the then-new, prima donna Sultan Abdul Samad and Old Railway Station buildings (both posing sexily); haphazard and hungover-looking (but defiantly-proud) shophouses; ostentatious parks, lakes and fountains; and candid, slice of life shots of KL-ites, who clearly couldn’t give a **** about being filmed. Rather disturbingly though, there was nary a Starbucks, Uniqlo or Maxis service centre to be seen.
1920s video
The soupy 1920s footage offers views of expansive, unpaved boulevards shockingly free of Protons and Peroduas (what did they use the roads for, then? Buffalo-drawn cart Mat Rempit races?), and overflowing, instead, with briskly perambulating natives and stiffly-stomping uniformed pommies (said with love!) going every which way. The video culminates in a massive gathering of eerily out-of-place, sore-thumb colonialists near the Royal Selangor Club ‘Padang’ (Dataran Merdeka’s pre-racial reassignment surgery moniker) for a military ceremony to unveil a statue of Sir Frank Swettenham, former resident general of the Federated Malay States. No post-event rave, complete with celebrity DJ performance, was recorded (which doesn’t mean it didn’t take place).
1950s video
A generation later, KL is overrun with an infestation of Western automobiles (a new kind of colonialism), weaving dizzily between spiffy art-deco buildings and rows of fort-like shophouses. Mammoth, bricklike Central Market makes a brief, unglamorous cameo as a cluttered wet market (where were the hair and makeup people?); and a bevy of avant-garde structures freshly-mushroomed in the proximity of the (gweilo-designed!) Masjid Jamek also makes guest-star appearances. Interspersed with the architecture-porn (I just totally made that phrase up) are ‘creepshot’ glimpses of everyday life: a hawker heroically maneuvering a woven basket-laden bicycle through traffic (prefiguring the iconic 1980s roti man); a barber over-shaving his terrified customer in the open air, followed by his antithesis – a lady SELLING long locks of (presumably human) hair; and of course, durian (because of reasons).