Jason on Azhar Rudin's Majidee

I think this was written not too long ago as part of a test for my Film Appreciation course. It took a couple of hours to write. It was kinda cool back then, but reading it again now makes me laugh:)

Realism in Azhar Rudin’s Majidee (2005)

Majidee is a good example of realism film form. The 15 minute short film is shot in one take following two characters’ walking on a busy Kuala Lumpur streets from the bus station to the LRT. The short contained important aspects of realism as outlined by Bazin.

Bazin said in order to be real, cinema must locate objects in space and Majidee exemplifies that point. Here, the camera objectively picks up a subject and follows his brief journey, intersected by another man on the street. Unlike conventional narrative, this subject and its situation can be easily understood by audience because the situation may happen as well to any of us. Our experience identifies the familiarity of the location, the environment, and the progressing conversation as something that we could also have encountered in real space.

Key to Bazin’s attempt to define spatial relationships of cinematic reality is the long take, deep focus, and mobile framing photography. To that point, the cinematography on Majidee held true. Firstly, the short was shot with a handheld camera in one long take with aperture that shows entire frame in focus. The outcome is an emphasize on better audience experience since in reality we also see our environment and subjects for long duration in real time and cannot selectively block our deep vision. Additionally, by the use of mobile framing, the handheld camera intensified viewer participation in the film by inviting us to be any one of the people walking on the street that so happened to be around the two main characters.

The styles emphasized by Bazin and used by the filmmakers in Majidee also added more ways for the audience to interpret the film. Bazin claims that editing presents the point of the director in a more clear and direct way to the viewer. By using longer takes and not relying on editing, a meaning of a film is ambiguous and the audiences are free to decide. Similarly in Majidee, the meanings are open to interpretation, limited only by audiences’ personal knowledge and experience. The film may be about meeting with strangers or act of kindness or even the hardship of communication in a city of cacophonous sounds and language. Even the ending was left open ended; we do not know the fate of any of the characters, just like the way in our real life. Everything is part of life reality.

Bazin said that cinema is perfect when it is the “art of the real”. As in Majidee, it is as every bit real as us walking the 15 minute journey and confronting different facets of our society.

:)