Investigating Singapore’s elite cinemas during World War II

• Main Author: Joseph, Fernandez Alex
• Other Authors: Scott Michael Anthony
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::History::Asia
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/147303
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This essay investigates the propaganda activities in Singapore’s former elite cinemas: the Cathay, the Alhambra and the Capitol during World War II. These cinemas were at the very top of the hierarchy of cinemas. I argue that these elite cinemas were contradictory propaganda spaces during the Japanese Occupation. The propaganda in these cinemas was aimed at convincing Singapore’s inhabitants of Japan’s superiority and to mould the people’s characters through “Japanization”. Yet the propaganda aims were inadvertently contradicted by propaganda that revealed the flaws of the Japanese administration. This thesis has two aims. First it hopes to add to Singapore’s film and cinema history, in which there is a lack of research on World War II. One argument made is that Japan’s cultural plans were ineffective in Southeast Asian countries and hardly made a mark on the developments in that part of the continent in the post-war period. The second aim of this thesis is to support the first part of this argument - that the cultural policies were ineffective.