What Is Indonesian Motion Pictures’ Identity?

Motion picture has been around with us since the end of the 19^th century. It has made some big impact both in the entertaiment industry and the world of art. Without our realisation, we are part of that big impact; What we dress; How we speak; How we think - were the result of those pop culture in movies. You can’t deny about how you dress these days without the influence of James Dean or Marlon Brando. My lecturer, Kusen Dony Hermansyah M.Sn, told me that motion picture has a genre which will represent a certain theme so the audience will picture themselve with the characters in the movie; they follow the emotion at a certain scene; they felt embarased when a character did something stupid; we cry when we see the father died and the child hugs him helplessly. This means that motion picture can be considered as a “mirror” to the audience.

Each message in motion pictures comes from different filmmakers’ mind. Filmmakers come from different countries, which each country has its own common background; In German, we see German Expressionism in the 1920’s; In Italia, we see The Italian Neo-Realism in the 1940’s; In France, we see The French New Wave in the 1960’s; So each country has its own uniqeness and common style or perspective, which I like to call identity (Indonesian: Jati Diri).

I live in a developing country called Indonesia – the biggest country in the South East Asia. I grew up watching Hollywood movies, which influence me throughout my career. Indonesia has this censorship thing between the 1980’s until the end of Suharto’s reign (1998). The only thing Indonesia people watch were Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (1984). Then, we had a hard time to distribute celluliod film stocks. And most of the motion picture had to be distributed outside Indonesia. So the film industry went down in the rest of the 90’s. In 2004, some filmmakers of Indonesia started making motion pictures again. But back then, it was pretty bad to consider it as a movie. We made some bad horror films and/or love stories. But the great thing about this is that we finally made a progress.

The progress didn’t stop there. As of 2016, Indonesia has made some incredible movies with incredible efforts – some of the filmmakers agreed to be paid only 50,000 Rupiahs (about 4 US dollars) per day. But we aren’t making a movement. We don’t have any certain style. You will see some diversity of style happening in Indonesian movies, which leads to our inconsistency of what theme or message what we wanted to present to the audience. This is what we are facing right now.

Today we developed stories mostly from our culture. But Indonesia isn’t called Nusantara for nothing. Nusantara means a thousand islands, so Indonesia is literary consist of thousands of small and big islands. Because of this condition, we have hundreds of tribe developing everywhere which has its own culture. You can say that Indonesia can be called plural society. Diversity is the problem here – half of us agree at something but the other half disagree. That’s why we are still a developing country. But, I found something interesting – something that connected us as Indonesian.

The answer to the big question above is simplicity or kesederhanaan in Indonesia. Kesederhaan defines pretty much our style. Indonesia is still learning the process of filmmaking. Indonesia can’t make big movies such as Hollywood’s. We have limited supplies of human resources and system – most of filmmakers in Indonesia are independent, which means we are not controlled by big studios or whatsoever, so we make (what Hollywood standard would say) low budget movies. Another thing to remind you is that big cities such as Jakarta and Surabaya are still rare if you consider how big is Indonesia. So modern things are still hard to be reached by most people. I know you can consider us as stingy or often cowards – doesn’t want to make big budget movies (well we wanted to). But that’s okay! We are MAKING movies, and that’s something!

In the next 5 years or so, we will see a more complex version of Indonesian motion pictures. And in ten years, I can assure you that filmmaking in Indonesia will be very competitive with Hollywood movies.

This article is truly my opinion, which I have gathered from informations from many of my experience over the years. If you disagree with this (and that’s alright), you can always tell me how you feel in the comments below and also, thanks for reading!