Intermittent Industries: Film Production in Indonesia over Nine Decades
This chapter surveys film production in two eras, the colonial period and the period of independence. Early sections primarily outline the pioneering role of Chinese Indonesians as producer/directors of the majority of the films made in the colonial perio
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Intermittent Industries: Film Production in Indonesia over Nine Decades
Cinema came to the Netherlands East Indies in 1900, but local production of features did not commence for a quarter of a century. Throughout the colonial period, cinema ownership in the Dutch East Indies was largely in the hands of Chinese Indonesians and the Dutch. Actual production of feature films only commenced, in a very small way, in 1926. Prior to that the French company Pathé, and later the Colonial Institute in Holland, had commissioned ‘actuality footage’ to be shown around the world. By the time of the final withdrawal of the Dutch colonial administration at the end of 1949, only about 114 feature films had been produced. Since then, Indonesian cinema has gone through three main periods, paralleling the rise and fall of changing regimes. First, there is film in the Sukarno period following the achievement of independence in late 1949, with a decline during the Guided Democracy period. This was followed by the emergence of a highly commercial popular cinema quite early in the Suharto New Order period from 1970 onwards, which at the height of production on average was making 60 to 70 films per year, followed by a steep decline in the 1990s. Since the early 2000s we have seen the re-emergence in the Reformasi period of a smaller but more diverse and growing Indonesian cinema. This chapter provides a survey of feature filmmaking in the Indonesian islands, over nearly 90 years, as a background to detailed discussion of particular films and movements in later chapters. In doing so it covers a number of specific areas. These include the pioneering work of Chinese © The Author(s) 2017 D. Hanan, Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40874-3_3
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Indonesian filmmakers as producers and directors in the first 25 years of production; the period of the Japanese occupation; the belated entry of indigenous filmmakers, particularly in the 1950s after the achievement of independence from the Dutch; and major directors and genres in each of the periods that followed independence. A recurring issue is the domination of the local market by foreign-produced films, whether it be by Hollywood or, at different times, by Indian and even Malay-language films made in Singapore, or as a result of local monopolies favouring foreign product, thus threatening the viability of the national product in its own market. Much of the historical information in this chapter is drawn from a substantial body of work done by a small number of mostly Indonesian film historians, many of them associated with the film archive in Jakarta that holds the main collection of surviving feature films, Sinematek Indonesia. Early sections of this chapter, which outline the history of film production from 1926 to 1949, are based on information in Sejarah Film 1900–1950: Bikin Film di Jawa (‘Film History 1900–1950: Making Films in Java’) by the founding director of Sinematek Indonesia, a scriptwriter and former film director, Misbach Yusa Biran.1
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