What does it take to articulate a history that has already been forgotten? This is the challenge Amir Muhammad confronts in his iconic and controversial film The Last Communist (2006), where he explores the concept of “absent history.” The question encapsulates both Muhammad’s methodological approach and the dynamic interplay between speaking and forgetting that his film vividly portrays. This essay examines the themes of speaking and forgetting to illuminate the film’s portrayal of Malaysian politics of memory keeping.
In Context
Amir Muhammad’s The Last Communist (2006) centers on Chin Peng, the leader of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), and examines Malaysia’s contemporary political history from the 1920s to the 2000s. The film highlights the CPM’s significant role in the nation’s anti-colonial struggle, particularly its resistance against British rule and Japanese occupation during World War II.
Despite these contributions, the Malaysian government has vilified the CPM, erasing its pivotal role in the anti-imperialist movement from official historical narratives. This erasure operates on two levels: the omission of the CPM’s contributions from mainstream histories and the propagation of misinformation, which misleads the public into accepting a distorted version of the nation’s past.
Chin Peng, the party’s leader, became a primary target of this erasure. Exiled and demonized in Malaysia’s national narrative, his treatment parallels the Philippine government and U.S. imperialist efforts to demonize Jose Maria Sison, leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines—albeit with less success.
The Last Communist intervenes in this contentious landscape, seeking to recontextualize Chin Peng’s legacy while critiquing the mechanisms of historical exclusion.
The Method
One of the most striking aspects of The Last Communist is its innovative method of recontextualizing its subject, which I term “textual enmeshing.” This technique involves the use of text overlays juxtaposed with seemingly unrelated audiovisual imagery to achieve two key objectives: to emphasize that real history cannot be fully rendered cinematically, and to highlight the deconstructive fracture between written history and visualized history.
In its text overlays, textual enmeshing delivers an indexical account of history, objectively narrating the story of Chin Peng and the Communist Party of Malaya in a straightforward, unembellished manner. The accompanying audiovisual layer, however, operates independently—sometimes even in contradiction to the text. This “background documentary” captures contemporary life in Malaysia in the mid-2000s, situating the narrative within and beyond the context of Chin Peng.
Amir Muhammad’s approach creates a compelling interplay between textual and audiovisual temporality, illustrating the tangential yet irreverent relationship between the past and the present. The text overlay functions as a suture, binding the film together. Meanwhile, the audiovisual layer—though temporally out of sync with the historical narrative—supports the text’s historical critique. It acts as a permeable membrane that softens the text’s rigid overdetermination of itself, imbuing it with a sense of humanization.
Through this humanization, The Last Communist becomes a fractured reflection of the lived contradictions within Malaysian society, capturing the tension between historical erasure and the persistence of memory in everyday life.
Speaking as Memorialization
Amir Muhammad’s The Last Communist is fundamentally about the act of speaking up. To effectively deploy its method of textual enmeshing and construct a portrait of the lived contradictions in Malaysian society, the film engages with two forms of speaking: the text that narrates history and the footage of people speaking, which serves as evidence of these contradictions. It is as if the film speaks in doubles—one voice recounting the historical, and the other embodying the present.
Throughout the film, Muhammad employs a multiplicity of “tongues,” refusing to be constrained by a single mode of expression. He further enriches this complexity by introducing moments of relief, where staged characters spontaneously burst into song. These musical interludes amplify the film’s layered approach, intertwining history with present-day reality in unexpected ways. The interplay of these voices resists its reduction to mere artistic expression; instead, its form and style actively engage with the historical process of memorialization and its inherent contradictions.
The film’s use of multiple “tongues” exemplifies memorialization as a multiplicity. It transcends textual rendering, relating tangentially to present experiences and extending across diverse forms. This approach suggests that memory work must not be confined to specific formats or externalized records. Oral histories, for instance, hold significant power to remember and verify the contradictory nature of histories that remain irreconcilable with the lived experiences of the people they concern.
By embracing this multiplicity, The Last Communist challenges us as memory workers to recognize the fluid and contested nature of memory, urging us to engage with its many forms—textual, oral, visual, and performative—rather than privileging one over the others.
Forgetting as Cultural Amnesia
Despite its exploration of the multiplicity of memorialization, The Last Communist delivers a powerful critique of the ideology encapsulated in phrases such as “comfort breeds complacency” and “forgive and forget.” Amir Muhammad portrays a chilling image of contemporary Malaysia—a nation that forgets and misconstrues its history, leaving its people adrift in unresolved contradictions.
The film highlights the dangers of blind acceptance. In one interview featured in the film, a speaker confidently describes communists as “anti-people” and “anti-democratic,” associating communism with rebellion and violence. These claims, shaped by decades of anti-communist state propaganda, are false and misleading. This only shows that the history of communism in Malaysia has been systematically erased, reduced to a vanishing act that disappears into cultural myths and collective amnesia.
The Last Communist presents a counterpoint – a critical intervention, documenting this erasure and exposing how cultural customs and beliefs have been co-opted to obscure historical truths. Muhammad’s critique emphasizes that political stability often breeds complacency, causing societies to forget moments of emergency and strife that shaped their identities. The film challenges its audience to confront this cultural amnesia, serving as both a record and a warning of the consequences of forgetting.
Audiovisual Memory Work as Reparative Work
Audiovisual memory work, such as Amir Muhammad’s The Last Communist, reintroduces the crises buried beneath a nation’s silences and culture of forgetting. Paradoxically, it is reparative by reopening wounds—much like Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), which confronts Indonesia’s unspoken 1960s genocide and its erased communist history.
Marx’s words echo through these works: “A specter is haunting Europe [and Malaysia and Indonesia]—the specter of communism.” State apparatuses continue their efforts to “exorcise” and erase this history. Muhammad’s memory work challenges this erasure by making the spectral presence of communism visible once more. This act of reparation confronts cultural amnesia, resurrecting what the state seeks to obliterate.
In reviving these suppressed histories, Muhammad breathes life into forgotten narratives, which unsettles the state so profoundly that The Last Communist was banned in Malaysian theaters in 2006. Reparation, in this sense, is an act of defiance—it brings the ghost in the flesh and forces a reckoning with the past.
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This essay was completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship.
