The city that eludes the screen

IF WE are talking about the cinema and the Indonesian city, it is inevitable that we are talking about Jakarta. Indeed, Jakarta has become the center of everything—including film institutions and productions. The capital city holds so many problems, which Indonesian films, ironically, often fail to represent. If the films are yet to recognize and face the city in which they reside, how can they then discuss about other cities? And how do Indonesian films actually present Jakarta? How has the reality of the capital city affects them from one period to the next?

In his essay today, Eric Sasono, a film critic, classify the periods into four distinct phases: The 1970s, when the changes in Jakarta were still suspiciously taken as a huge monster that would swallow all the residents; the 1980s, when films started to accept and simultaneously also reject Jakarta with the help of parody; the 1990s, when the films were powerless vis-à-vis Jakarta; and the 2000s, when there are only very few films that would have anything to do with Jakarta except to use it as the site where lost souls of the dead roam free.

Just as the previous film generation could not smoothly depict the lives of the rich, Indonesian films during the 2000s also fail to portray smoothly the lives among the poor. There is a significant tendency to erase the social from the film. In her essay, Veronica Kusuma—a writer, film programmer, and student in the Media Studies, Department of Film, Faculty of Film and Television, at the Jakarta Art Institute—writes: “Like many other post-1998 films, Mengejar Matahari exists almost without any criticism about the visual expressions of the space that the New Order regime had generated.”

Many things have supported such a shift in the point-of-view. The numerous private television stations dampen the desire to go to the movies—especially in small towns, theaters of the 21 Network are attached to malls and generate a new kind of audiences: the youth, who have been provided with entertainment movies and endowed with the multitude of viewing options from pirated DVDs and film and video festivals. The Indonesian film is no longer a solo player in the country and must have a specific strategy to capture the audience’s interest—no matter what the strategy is.

We can also trace the change in visual experiences in the essay by Ronny Agustinus, "Video: Not All Correct...", which we take from our post-festival catalogue of 2003 OK. Video. In the essay that discusses the phenomena of the video art and new media art, along with the visual culture and technology that form their base, Ronny talks about how we, in Indonesia, have experienced a “gap between the modern art and modern technology”. He discusses about how European grand ideas entered the Dutch Indies as ideas without their material base; while products of European technology arrived as materials without their ideological histories. This has something to do with how we, today, face the modernity unequipped with rationality. Modernity, at the end of the day, could not be accelerated with the help of the New Order’s idea of ‘taking off’, and it was only because of the oil boom at the end of the 1970s that Indonesians suddenly felt that they have become modern. A multitude of new forms of technology entered, as well as computers, music CDs, software, VCDs, pirated DVDs, and delayed MTV broadcast. All of these visual experiences, alongside the young generation who are exposed to them, serve as the background for the emergence of video art in Indonesia. To Ronny, it is absurd and nonsensical if the development in video art in Indonesia is always linked with Nam June Paik, as many critics and the mass media would like to believe. For Ronny, without any less respect for the pioneering works by Teguh Ostentrik and Krisna Murti, it is only in the later generations that the essence of video art has been realized. It is this “generation that share similar visual experiences” which at the end of the day has forced us to reconsider our view on art today. The essay is the first of its kind that discusses video art in Indonesia thoroughly and critically, in terms of the culture, visual technology, as well as the sociopolitical context.

It was also for this edition of Karbon journal that in November 2007 ruangrupa and Karbon journal collaborated with Kineforum, an alternative movie theatre in Jakarta, to hold a program of The Cinema and The City. The program screened seven Indonesian films from the era of the New Order until today; all of which have been borrowed from the collection of Sinematek Indonesia. The program went on for eight days with three screening times each day, and attracted 323 viewers. Besides the screening, there was also a discussion, moderated by Mirwan Andan from ruangrupa. In this discussion, the speakers, Eric Sasono and Veronica Kusuma, presented their essays, which you can now read. We are grateful to Lisabona Rahman, the programmer of Kineforum, as well as to Arif, Petrus, and Anita for their cooperation.

Happy reading.
Happy new year 2008.

Greetings,



Ardi Yunanto
Editor