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- Volume 21, Issue 2, 2010
Asian Cinema - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2010
Volume 21, Issue 2, 2010
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Indonesian Cinema: A Symposium Introduction
Authors: Khoo Gaik Cheng and Thomas BarkerIndonesian film today remains somewhat on the fringes of studies into cinema, film, and pop culture for reasons that we do not fully understand. As Southeast Asia’s most populous country, with one of its more prolific film industries, not to mention its television industry, this strikes those of us who work on this topic to be both a blessing and a curse. The lack of exposure prompted us editors to conceive a forum in which young scholars who work on Indonesian cinema could garner a wider audience and to begin revealing the scope of Indonesian film.
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Historical Inheritance and Film Nasional in Post-Reformasi Indonesian Cinema
More LessWhen Ekskul (2006, Extracurricular) won best film at the 2006 Indonesian Film Festival (FFI), a large group of young filmmakers protested and many returned their awards from previous years’ festivals. Their protest centered on what they saw as the obvious unprofessionalism of the FFI in awarding best film prize to a film that had plagiarized music from other, notably Hollywood, films. Careful to avoid criticism of the director Nayato Fionuala and producer Shankar RS (Indika), they formed the Masyarakat Film Indonesia (MFI, Indonesian Film Community) to direct their concerns about the film industry. Later in 2008, members launched an unsuccessful case in the constitutional court to challenge the legality of the film censorship board. They clearly felt that many of the old institutions still needed reform.
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Imagining “Indonesia”: Ethnic Chinese Film Producers in Pre-Independence Cinema
Authors: Charlotte Setijadi-Dunn and Thomas BarkerIn his 2009 historical anthology of filmmaking in Java 1900-1950, prominent Indonesian film historian Misbach Yusa Biran writes that although production of locally made films began in 1926 and continued until 1949, these films were not based on national consciousness and therefore could not yet be called Indonesian films. He holds up Usmar Ismail’s Darah dan Doa (Blood and Prayers) (1950) as the first such film to reflect national consciousness and signal the genesis of Indonesian film history (2009:45).
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Islamic-themed Films in Contemporary Indonesia: Commodified Religion or Islamization?
By Eric SasonoMuch of the discussion of Islamic content in recent Indonesian films revolves around the idea of religious commodification. Islamic content in films such as Ayat-Ayat Cinta (literally: Love Verses, Dir. Hanung Bramantyo, 2007) is seen merely as the commodification of religion by a mass produced pop cultural form. Islam is commodified when the faith and its symbols are turned into “a commodity capable of being bought and sold for profit” (Fealy, 2007:17). Few have seen Islamic-themed films in the broader context of sociopolitico cultural change of Islam in Indonesia (see Heryanto, forthcoming, for example), because there was little serious academic interest in the religion-film interface until a decade ago (Wright, 2007:11).
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Passing and Conversion Narratives: Ayat-Ayat Cinta and Muslim Performativity in Contemporary Indonesia
More LessThe success of Ayat-Ayat Cinta (The Love Verses, 2008), a major box office Islamic themed film, was one of the key moments of Islamic hype in Indonesia after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. Based on the best-selling novel by Habiburrahman El Shirazy, the film broke the record of Indonesian cinema after 10 years by attracting more than four million people. With an audience ranging from political elites to students of Islamic boarding schools, it exemplifies the dominant Islamic visibility in popular culture after a long suppression of Islam under Suharto’s dictatorship. Some Indonesian Muslims view Ayat-Ayat Cinta positively as a moving melodramatic tale that attempts to spread dakwah (Islamic teaching), yet the film has triggered various debates in the public sphere.
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Reverberations of Kantata Takwa
More LessKantata Takwa is a documentary, recorded concert, a play, a poem, a social commentary, a political pamphlet, and a historical document in one. The film was shot between 1990 and 1994 by a number of filmmakers from the Jakarta Arts Institute, and co-directed by prominent Indonesian filmmakers Gotot Prakosa and Erros Djarot. Due to oppressive New Order politics, water damage, and a lack of funding, Kantata Takwa was only completed in 2008. Its key feature is the concert of a group of legendary rock musicians, performers, and poets collectively known as Kantata Takwa (Cantata of Devotion) in Senayan Stadium in Jakarta in April 1991.
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Indonesian Queer and the Centrality of Heteronormative Family
More LessThis extract from the Associated Press report on the release of Nia Dinata’s Arisan! (The gathering) in 2003 captures the significance of a new phenomenon that began to ripple through the Indonesian film world in the early years of the 21st Century. Long derided on cinema screens as figures of fun, people of non-normative sexualities in films like Arisan! have begun to be portrayed in affirmative and non-discriminatory ways. Some filmgoers found it a familiar portrayal. “It’s very accurate because I’ve got friends like that and gay is not something that is very unusual in Jakarta. Everybody knows that,” commented one viewer to the BBC’s Jakarta correspondent (Harvey, 2004).
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Spotlight on the Films of Indonesian Filmmaker Edwin
More LessThis essay focuses on the works of Edwin, an interesting fringe filmmaker, and a familiar one in the short film circuit in Indonesia, who has consistently made quality short films with a strong conceptualization and visual style. Edwin is not exactly “a household name” as claimed on his Blind Pig website, and this marginal status bears stating as it situates the filmmaker as part of the “truly indie” film world.
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Contemporary Indonesian Independent Documentaries in the Yogyakarta Documentary Film Festival: Notes from the Juror’s Seat
More LessI still have a vivid and clear memory when one of the organizers of the Yogyakarta Documentary Film Festival (Festival Film Dokumenter, FFD) asked me almost seven years ago to write a piece about documentary film for the festival catalogue (Irawanto, 2004). At that moment, I was overwhelmed by a sentimental feeling of being out of place.
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Publications on Indonesian Cinema
More LessMy interest in compiling a bibliography on Indonesian Cinema began in 2007. While doing a Master’s program in Film Studies, at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UVA), I realized that there were only a few (scholarly) articles available in English on Indonesian cinema. As I began work on my thesis in early 2008, my very first task was to compile a bibliography. I found the three key references that are already well known in the academic world: Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order (Krishna Sen, 1994), Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen (Karl Heider, 1991), and Shadows on the Silver Screen: A Social History of Indonesian Film (Salim Said, 1991) all written about 20 years ago. At first, it was very hard to find books or papers related to Indonesian cinema, but with my experience as a journalist, where I was trained to obtain hard-to-get resources, I was able to overcome these difficulties, little by little.
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Song of the Stork into War Movies: Wayne Karlin’s Retrospective Cinematic Techniques
More LessDerived from his journalistic writings as a correspondent in French Indo-China, Graham Greene’s poetic description of the evocative nature of the Vietnamese landscape in The Quiet American parallels features within that country’s literary and cinematic tradition as well as impressions recorded by foreign journalists and writers. It also matches scenes of countryside and the Ho Chi Minh trail during several sequences of Song of the Stork (2003), the first international production shot in Vietnam following the end of the war and that preceded the second film version of The Quiet American (2002), directed by Philip Noyce, also featuring two of the earlier film’s leading actors Do Thi Hai Yen and Quang Hai Ngo in the roles of Phuong and General The.
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From Wooden Masks to Stone Statues: The Influence of Traditional Japanese Theater on Daimajin (1966)
More LessJapanese dai kaiju eiga (literally, giant monster films) are frequently seen as low-brow and “cheesy” by Western audiences due, at least in part, to their often “unrealistic” special effects. Although there are likely multiple causes for this perception that “unrealistic” equals low quality including social, cultural, and political one largely overlooked cause, and the one that will be examined in this document, is a lack of understanding of the cultural referents that underlie the text, rather than any inherent lack of quality on the part of the film.
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“All Memories Are Traces of Tears”: Trauma and the Foreclosure of Testimony in Wong Kar Wai’s 2046
More LessWhile the concerns of Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong’s eminent export filmmaker, have always centered around characters’ familial and interpersonal traumas, Wong’s recent work, such as Happy Together (Chun gwong cha sit, 1997), In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa , 2000), and 2046 (2004), triggers a new sophistication toward issues of traumatic experience.
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De-Heroicizing Heroic Bloodshed in Johnnie To’s Election and Election 2
By Mark WaltersIn 1986, John Woo’s gangster classic A Better Tomorrow revised and revitalized the Hong Kong triad genre in the tradition of heroic bloodshed. In the film, Mark (Chow Yun-Fat) and Ho (Ti Lung) are triads running a successful counterfeit scheme. Ho’s brother Kit (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing), meanwhile, is a rising star in the police service, prompting Ho to abandon his criminal ways. However, after Ho is double-crossed by fellow triad Shing (Waise Lee Chi-Hung) and arrested on his last job, Mark seeks revenge and is horribly crippled, sending him on a downward spiral out of the triad upper echelon.
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Saving Face: Unveiling or Covering Up Asian American Experiences?
More LessThere is an old Chinese saying that “a person needs his face, the tree its bark.” The habit of carrying an image of decency and the tendency to keep personal issues away from the public have become a crucial part in the Chinese culture.
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Stories Written in Sunlight and Water: The Cinema of Yoshida Yoshishige: Part 2 Independence and Independent
By Adam BinghamAlthough its significance would not become apparent for over four years, Yoshida’s fourth film, the literary adaptation Akitsu onsen (Akitsu Springs, 1962), was to be an important, prophetic film in the director’s career and in the evolution of his oeuvre. It was made at the height of his time as a contract director at Shochiku, but nonetheless marked the embryonic beginnings of what would go on to occupy a central role in several of the director’s films in the late 1960s: namely, a focus on fractious marital relationships, sexuality, and desire, and a concomitant use and distortion of the melodrama and the Japanese genre of the gendai-geki contemporary life film.
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Symptomatic Metafiction in Lou Ye’s Suzhou River
More LessMy intention is not to preclude political readings of Chinese cultural production. Any piece of fiction contains the potential for political or social commentary in itself. Rather, what I will try to show in this paper is how fiction, because of its fictionality, is able to provide richer ways of interpretation and social commentary, as long as we read it as fiction.
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Entertainment, Empowerment, and Education in Big Shot’s Funeral
By Jing JiangAmong contemporary Chinese film directors, Feng Xiaogang occupies a somewhat awkward place. As the first mainland film director whose box-office numbers officially exceeded one billion yuan as of January 2009, he is the indisputable box-office king, outperforming the internationally renowned art-house auteurs such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige in the domestic film market by a wide margin. Feng’s unprecedented commercial success as a film director is directly and specifically linked to the enduring mass appeal of hesuipian (New Year’s celebration film), a cinematic genre inspired by industry practices in Hollywood and Hong Kong, and relatively new to the Chinese audience at the close of the 20th Century.
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ShadowLight Productions: “Explorations of the Shadow World” (8 DVD Set)
More LessShadowLight Theatre a unique company based in San Francisco transcends the barriers between 2-D puppets, sets, and human interaction. These imaginative productions invite repeated viewings. Fortunately, this is possible through a collection of eight DVDs entitled “Explorations of the Shadow World.” Founder Larry Reed’s productions breathe new life into stories that stretch back countless years.
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Report on the Sixth Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC). Circuits of Exchange with/in Southeast Asian Cinemas. July 1-4, 2010. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
By Dean WilsonThe 6th Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC) had the makings of an irreverent tradition, continuing seven years after the event’s inauguration in Singapore and two years after the last conference in Manila. In a last-minute change of venue, due to local permit delays, it began on July 1, 2010, and went for four days in one large meeting room at the Golden Central Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 34 (2023)
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Volume 33 (2022)
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Volume 32 (2021)
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Volume 31 (2020)
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Volume 30 (2019)
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Volume 29 (2018)
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Volume 28 (2017)
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Volume 27 (2016)
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Volume 26 (2015)
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Volume 25 (2014)
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Volume 24 (2013)
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Volume 23 (2012)
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Volume 22 (2011)
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Volume 21 (2010)
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Volume 20 (2009)
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Volume 19 (2008)
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Volume 18 (2007)
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Volume 17 (2006)
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Volume 16 (2005)
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Volume 15 (2004)
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Volume 14 (2003)
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Volume 13 (2002)
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Volume 12 (2001)
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Volume 11 (2000)
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Volume 10 (1998 - 1999)
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Volume 9 (1997 - 1998)
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Volume 8 (1996)
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Volume 7 (1995)
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Volume 6 (1993)