Contemporary Indonesian Film

Contemporary Indonesian Film
Author: Katinka van Heeren
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004253475

This highly informative book explores the world of Post-Soeharto Indonesian audio-visual media in the exiting era of Reform. From a multidisciplinary approach it considers a wide variety of issues such as mainstream and alternative film practices, ceremonial and independent film festivals, film piracy, history and horror, documentary, television soaps, and Islamic films, as well as censorship from the state and street. Through the perspective of discourses on, and practices of film production, distribution, and exhibition, this book gives a detailed insight into current issues of Indonesia’s social and political situation, where Islam, secular realities, and ghosts on and off screen, mingle or clash.

Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema

Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema
Author: Alicia Izharuddin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2016-12-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811021732

This book presents a historical overview of the Indonesian film industry, the relationship between censorship and representation, and the rise of Islamic popular culture. It considers scholarship on gender in Indonesian cinema through the lens of power relations. With key themes such as nationalism, women's rights, polygamy, and terrorism which have preoccupied local filmmakers for decades, Indonesia cinema resonates with the socio-political changes and upheavals in Indonesia’s modern history and projects images of the nation through the debates on gender and Islam. The text also sheds light on broader debates and questions about contemporary Islam and gender construction in contemporary Indonesia. Offering cutting edge accounts of the production of Islamic cinema, this new book considers gendered dimensions of Islamic media creation which further enrich the representations of the 'religious' and the 'Islamic' in the everyday lives of Muslims in South East Asia.

Indonesian Cinema

Indonesian Cinema
Author: Krishna Sen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN:

Indonesia's quasi-military dictatorship has sought since 1965 to mould Indonesian society into a male-oriented, capitalist, Javanese-dominated national framework. Cinema and television are the most closely-controlled mass media in Indonesia, and films for mass consumption have played an important role in the government's vast socio-political engineering project.Krishna Sen describes the background and present-day Indonesian film industry and explores how the country's society and history are represented in its film culture. From a critique of four films, she concludes that Indonesian cinema privileges the military against the civilian, the middle class against the popular classes, and men against women. Backed by careful documentation from cinema literature, this is a radical, in-depth perspective on film - its implications, its vulnerability to manipulation and its artistic and propagandist value.

Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia
Author: David C. L. Lim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136592466

This book discusses contemporary film in all the main countries of Southeast Asia, and the social practices and ideologies which films either represent or oppose. It shows how film acquires signification through cultural interpretation, and how film also serves as a site of contestations between social and political agents seeking to promote, challenge, or erase certain meanings, messages or ideas from public circulation. A unique feature of the book is that it focuses as much on films as it does on the societies from which these films emerge: it considers the reasons for film-makers taking the positions they take; the positions and counter-positions taken; the response of different communities; and the extent to which these interventions are connected to global flows of culture and capital. The wide range of subjects covered include documentaries as political interventions in Singapore; political film-makers’ collectives in the Philippines, and films about prostitution in Cambodia and patriotism in Malaysia, and the Chinese in Indonesia. The book analyses films from Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, across a broad range of productions – such as mainstream and independent features across genres (for example comedy, patriotic, political, historical genres) alongside documentary, classic and diasporic films.

Genders and Sexualities in Indonesian Cinema

Genders and Sexualities in Indonesian Cinema
Author: Ben Murtagh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2013-09-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1135097585

Indonesia has a long and rich tradition of homosexual and transgender cultures, and the past 40 years in particular has seen an increased visibility of sexual minorities in the country, which has been reflected through film and popular culture. This book examines how representations of gay, lesbian and transgender individuals and communities have developed in Indonesian cinema during this period. The book first explores Indonesian engagement with waria (male-to-female transgender) identities and the emerging representation of gay and lesbi Indonesians during Suharto’s New Order regime (1966-98), before going on to the reimagining of these positions following the fall of the New Order, a period which saw the rebirth of the film industry with a new generation of directors, producers and actors. Using original interview research and focus groups with gay, lesbi and waria identified Indonesians, alongside the films themselves and a wealth of archival sources, the book contrasts the ways in which transgendered lives are actually lived with their representations on screen.

Indonesian Cinema

Indonesian Cinema
Author: Karl G. Heider
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 1991-04-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780824813673

A film-goer accustomed to the typical Hollywood movie plot would feel uneasy watching an Indonesian movie. Contrary to expectations, good guys do not win, bad guys are not punished, and individuals do not reach a new self-awareness. Instead, by the end of the movie order is restored, bad guys are converted, and families are reunited. Like American movies, Indonesian films reflect the understandings and concerns of the culture and era in which they are made. Thus Indonesian preoccupations with order and harmony, national unity, and modernization motivate the plots of many films. Cinema has not traditionally been within the purview of anthropologists, but Karl Heider demonstrates how Indonesian movies are profoundly Indonesian. Produced in the national language by Indonesians from various regions, the films are intended for audiences across the diverse archipelago. Heider examines these films to identify pan-Indonesian cultural patterns and to show how these cultural principles shape the movies and, sometimes, how the movies influence the culture. This anthropological approach to Indonesian film opens up the medium of Asian cinema to a new group of scholars. "Indonesian Cinema" should be of interest to social scientists, Asianists, film scholars, and anyone concerned with the role of popular culture in developing countries.

Performing Contemporary Indonesia

Performing Contemporary Indonesia
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2015-02-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9004284931

Performance events have long had a central place in Indonesian societies in displaying power, affirming social relations, celebrating shared values, and at times conveying potent political critique. How have they responded to the momentous social and political changes of recent years - the dismantling of the centralised, authoritarian Suharto regime and its replacement with a more open, regionally-focused political system, the rapid expansion of global cultural influence? Investigations of diverse performance genres from different regions illustrate the way general socio-political processes play out locally, and how particular groups are responding. Exploring performed understandings of identity and community, such studies expand knowledge of a complex, contested period of change in Indonesia and the workings of contemporary performance in giving it expression. With contributions by Chua Beng Huat, Alexandra Crosby, Barbara Hatley, Ariel Heryanto, Brett Hough, Rachmah Ida, Reza Idria, Edwin Jurriens, Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti, Neneng Yanti K Lahpan, Ugoran Prasad, Wawan Sofwan, Aline Scott-Maxwell, Fridus Steijlen, Alia Swastika, Denise Varney.

Traditions Redirecting Contemporary Indonesian Cultural Productions

Traditions Redirecting Contemporary Indonesian Cultural Productions
Author: Jan van der Putten
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527502775

This volume is the result of a conference held in October 2015 in connection with the Frankfurt Book Fair discussing developments that are considered important in contemporary Indonesian cultural productions. The first part of the book reflects on the traumatic experiences of the Indonesian nation caused by a failed coup on October 1, 1965. In more general theoretical terms, this topic connects to the field of memory studies, which, in recent decades, has made an academic comeback. The focus of the chapters in this section is how certain, often distressing, events are represented in narratives in a variety of media that are periodically renewed, changed, rehearsed, repeated, and performed, in order to become or stay part of the collective memory of a certain group of people. The second part of the book explores how forces of globalisation have impacted upon the local and, linguistically surprisingly, rather homogeneous cultural productions of Indonesia. The main strands of inquiry in this second section are topics of global trends in religion, responses to urban development, the impact of popular literary developments, and how traditions are revisited in order to come to terms with international cultural developments.

Indonesian Cinema after the New Order

Indonesian Cinema after the New Order
Author: Thomas Barker
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2019-09-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9888528076

In Indonesian Cinema after the New Order: Going Mainstream, Thomas Barker presents the first systematic and most comprehensive history of contemporary Indonesian cinema. The book focuses on a 20-year period of great upheaval from modest, indie beginnings, through mainstream appeal, to international recognition. More than a simple narrative, Barker contributes to cultural studies and sociological research by defining the three stages of an industry moving from state administration; through needing to succeed in local pop culture, specifically succeeding with Indonesian youth, to remain financially viable; until it finally realizes international recognition as an art form. This “going mainstream” paradigm reaches far beyond film history and forms a methodology for understanding the market in which all cultural industries operate, where the citizen-consumer (not the state) becomes sovereign. Indonesia presents a particularly interesting case because “going mainstream” has increasingly meant catering to the demands of new Islamic piety movements. It has also meant working with a new Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, established in 2011. Rather than a simplified creative world many hoped for, Indonesian filmmaking now navigates a new complex of challenges different to those faced before 1998. Barker sees this industry as a microcosm of the entire country: democratic yet burdened by authoritarian legacies, creative yet culturally contested, international yet domestically shaped. “This is a significant piece of scholarly contribution informed by an extensive range of interviews with industry insiders. This volume is particularly welcome given the dearth of English-language publications on Indonesian cinema in the last two decades. I have no doubt that the book will be extensively used in any future work on national cinema, not just in Indonesia, but Southeast Asia more widely.” —Krishna Sen, University of Western Australia “Indonesian Cinema after the New Order is a marvelously entertaining and important contribution to the study of Indonesian cinema, youth culture, and media worlds in a global context. In fact, I would consider it the best book I have seen on the subject of the Indonesian film industry.” —Mary Steedly, Harvard University