Contemporary Indonesian film: spirits of reform and ghosts from the past Heeren, C.Q. van Citation Heeren, C. Q. van. (2009, June 9). Contemporary Indonesian film: spirits of reform and ghosts from the past. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13830 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in License: the Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13830 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). Contemporary Indonesian film: Spirits of Reform and ghosts from the past Katinka van Heeren Contemporary Indonesian film: Spirits of Reform and ghosts from the past Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof.mr. P.F. van der Heijden, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op dinsdag 9 juni 2009 klokke 16.15 uur door Catherine Quirine van Heeren Geboren te Jakarta in 1973 III Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. dr. B. Arps Referent: Prof. dr. H. Schulte Nordholt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Leden: Prof. dr. K. van Dijk Prof. dr. B. Meyer (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) Prof. dr. P. Nas Prof. dr. I. Smits Prof. dr. P. Spyer . The research for this dissertation was carried out under the auspices of the Indonesian Mediations Project, part of the Indonesia in Transition programme (2001-2005), funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). I would like to thank the School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for their financial support. IV There are so many people both in my professional and personal life who have contributed to my thesis that the list is too long to mention them separately. I owe them my sincerest gratitude. In particular, I am indebted to all the persons in the Indonesian film scene who deserve tribute for their support. A special word of thanks is appropriate to the filmmakers for allowing me to use their work in the DVD as a part of this thesis. V Contents Contents Introduction 1 Part One: Film mediation practices 1. New Order and surface Introduction 13 1.1. Production: The attempt to produce Provokator the New Order way 14 1.2. Distribution and Exhibition: Trade and charade in cinemas and film formats 18 1.3. Exhibition and consumption: Film festivals as forums for national imaginations and representation 24 Conclusion 29 2. Reformasi and underground Introduction 31 2.1. Reformation in film production: Kuldesak and film independen 32 2.2. Distribution and exhibition of new media formats: ‘Local’ Beth versus ‘transnational’ Jelangkung 39 2.3. Alternative sites of film consumption: Additional identifications and modes of resistance 45 Conclusion 53 Part Two: Film discourse practices 3. Histories, heroes, and monumental frameworks Introduction 57 3.1. Film history: New Order patronage of film perjuangan and film pembangunan 57 3.2. Film and historiography: Promotion and representations of New Order history 62 3.3. ‘Film in the framework of’: G30S/PKI and Hapsak 68 Conclusion 73 VIII 4. Post-colonial histories, common people, and commercial frameworks Introduction 75 4.1. Counter-history: Changes and continuities in Post-Soeharto modes of engagement 75 4.2. Post-colonial histories and identities; film Islami 81 4.3. Film in the framework of Ramadan 86 Conclusion 91 Part Three: Film narrative practices 5. The kyai and hyperreal ghosts: Narrative practices of horror, commerce, and censorship Introduction 95 5.1. Horror films under the New Order: Comedy, sex, and religion 96 5.2. Horror films for television: New narratives and debates on their bounds 99 5.3. Horror films for cinema and television: Developments of Reformasi 103 Conclusion 109 6. The celebrity kyai and phantoms of the past: Tussling with the bounds of Indonesian moralities, realities, and popularities Introduction 111 6.1. The ban on Kiss Me Quick!: The kyai, the foreigner, and Indonesia’s morality 113 6.2. Censorship from the street: The authority of religion 119 6.3. The Post-Soeharto dispute over censorship: Spirits of Reform and ghosts from the past 124 Conclusion 129 Conclusion 133 Bibliography 147 Notes 179 IX Nederlandse samenvatting 195 Curriculum Vitae 200 X Introduction Introduction The contemporary media shape identity; indeed many argue that they now exist close to the very core of identity production. In a transnational world typified by the global circulation of images, sounds, goods, and peoples, media spectatorship impacts completely on national identity, communal belonging, and political affiliations. By facilitating a mediated engagement with distant peoples, the media ‘deterritorialize’ the process of imagining communities. And while the media can destroy community and fashion solitude by turning spectators into atomized consumers or self-entertaining monads, they can also fashion community and alternative affiliations. Ella Shohat (2003:74) The audio-visual mediascape in post-Soeharto Indonesia is very dynamic; it is marked by a great variety in film formats, genres, and styles, and entrenched by a host of discussions and activities. All sorts of films can be found in cinemas, at cultural centres and in galleries, in cinema clubs at universities, and in other public or private places. Indonesian independent film productions, documentaries, auteur films, popular, and gay and lesbian films are just few examples of what is on display. National television is also animated by a great variety of programmes such as soaps, infotainment programmes, game shows, and reality shows. At first glance, many Indonesian films and television programmes make use of styles, genres, and formulas that are similar to those that can be found all over the world. Even so, all films and programmes which are produced, distributed, screened, or watched in Indonesia are part of a specific complex of discourses and mediation practices. This setting suggests particular ways of reading and understanding film texts. Consequently, notwithstanding the effects of globalization and transnational media flows, similar genres, styles, programmes, and formulas engage in representations and interpretations which tap into Indonesian imaginations of community and nation. In Virtual Geography, a book about the media coverage of the First Gulf War, McKenzie Wark wrote about a staged media appearance by Saddam Hussein. Filmed with Western people whom he had taken hostage, Hussein gently ruffles the hair of one of them, a little boy. Wark asserts that in doing so Saddam Hussein was making use of, and performing, a well-known and widely accepted Iraqi generic style: to give the impression of ‘the noble and respected elder’. In the West, however, that same image had a totally different affect as it tapped into other ‘confounded and most cherished beliefs about genres of television and the kinds of stories they legitimately tell us’. Viewers in the West, brought up on ‘Orientalist’ media literacy, responded with disgust on seeing a vile Arab who harassed a little boy (Wark 1994:4). Wark comments on how people brought up in different cultural frames are geared to other ways of handling information, and have a repertoire of quite different stories with which to filter events. As he phrases it: ‘How could we claim to know what goes on at the 1 Introduction other interzones, in quite other spaces where different flows from different vectors meet quite other memories and experiences of everyday life?’ (ibid:19). In other words, how do we make an image of and imagine the other, and how do they make an image of and imagine themselves? In any nation, the significance and possible interpretations of images and media texts are based on both discourses that circulate in society as well as mediation practices. In this book, I situate film as a social practice (Friedberg 1993; Stacey 1993; Staiger 1992; Turner 1992; Wasko 1994; Willeman 1994) within the shifting political and cultural frames of the Indonesian nation. Exploring historically emergent forms of representation and imagination of communities in the Indonesian audio-visual mediascape, I address the impact of discourses and film mediation practices on the production of collective identities and social realities. My account ranges from discussions on the ‘idealized Indonesian self in television discourses’ (Kitley 2000:12) and film (Sen 1994) under the New Order, to a topsy-turvy heated debate about the representation of the Indonesian nation and the daily lived reality of the people in film and on television in 2007. ‘Discourse’ is a prominent concept in this book. Along the lines of Norman Fairclough’s media discourse analysis, I use the term in two ways. On the one hand, I use it in the sense which is prevalent in language studies: ‘discourse as social action and interaction, people interacting together in real social situations’ (Fairclough 1995:16). On the other hand, I use discourse in the sense which is prevalent in post-structuralist social theory, as propounded by Foucault: ‘a discourse as a social construction of reality, a form of knowledge’ (Ibid.). Discourses appertain broadly to knowledge and knowledge construction. In a combination of these two senses, a discourse is the language used in representing a given social practice from a particular point of view. For instance, the social practice of politics is signified differently in liberal, socialist, and Marxist political discourses (1995:18, 56). In addition, film mediation practices are defined here as the practices of film production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption. There is no one-to-one meaning which clings onto media (McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’); rather, different, culturally imbued practices, mechanisms, and politics lie at the base of all meaning. This is not to say that politics and mechanisms of mediation practices are the key to how a text is read, for it is up to the audience ‘to decide whether to read the image in terms of ‘our’ frame of reference, or in the frame of what we know about the other’ (Wark 1994:5), and there are many other ways of reading from which to choose.