The melodramatic children: The representation of children in Ratapan Anak Tiri [Lament of Step-Children] (1973), Ratapan Anak Tiri [Lament of Step-Children 2] (1980), and Arie Hanggara (1985)
Article
The New Order’s cultural politics of development of national identity were applied to Indonesian films made during this period as a form of cinema politics. The New Order conceived of cinema as a medium for ideological propaganda which could and should be controlled in order to maintain political stability. Most Indonesian films made during the New Order regime depicted children as part of a discursive strategy to promote national identity within an ideological framework defined by theories of social development and discourses of social and political stability. This article focuses on Ratapan Anak Tiri [Lament of step-children] (1973), Ratapan Anak Tiri [Lament of step-children] 2 (1980), and Arie Hanggara (1985), melodrama genre films that featured suffering children among the main characters was the result of a narrative shift initiated to avoid political problems with the regime. The typical narrative of these films includes the representation of a family with the father figure as the apex, a demonised woman figure, and helpless children at the bottom of the family structure. Primary child characters are predominantly depicted as weak, dependent, and less imaginative. These melodrama films emphasised this pattern in their narrative by presenting an image of the state’s apparatus as a solver of family domestic problems.
A Ghostly Feminine Melancholy: Representing Decay and Experiencing Loss in Thai Horror Films
Article
By analysing significant Thai horror films from 1999—the year Nonzee Nimitbut’s emblematic Nang Nak was released—to 2010, this essay focuses on the presence and representation of female ghosts and undead spirits from traditional Thai myths in contemporary Thai cinema. More precisely, this essay highlights traditional female characters as mediators between horror and love, and fear and mourning, instead of as traditionally frightening entities. This distinction was made possible after the Thai “New Wave.” As ancestral mirror of inner fears and meaningful images reflecting societal concerns, female spirits in contemporary Thai cinema become the emblem of a more complex “monstrous femininity,” merging fear with melancholy, and an irreparable sense of loss with reflections on the ephemeral.
Exploiting Indonesia: From Primitives to Outraged Fugitives
Article
Indonesian exploitation films emerged from a particular political economy of the New Order and its film industry. From Primitif (1979) to Without Mercy (Outraged Fugitive) (1995), about 50 of these exploitation films were produced. Seen within the dominant paradigm of the time, these films were exploitative and contributed nothing to national development or national culture. However, the producers and filmmakers behind these films pioneered new transnational connections as they tried to tap into global film markets and networks. This article explores the historical and structural background to the Indonesian exploitation films, and the aspirations behind their production. By tapping into global film markets, and following genre trends, Indonesian producers hoped to emulate the success of exploitation films globally. By the mid-1990, just as the domestic film market collapsed and the arrival of television, Indonesian film producers had put Indonesia on the map of global cinema. Today Indonesian films of the period have begun to take on cult status as fans and others rediscover this colorful cinematic past.
The Earth is Getting Hotter: Urban Inferno and Outsider Women’s Collectives in Bumi Makin Panas
Article
Ali Shahab’s controversial 1973 film Bumi Makin Panas (The Earth is Getting Hotter) paints a scalding portrait of rapid urbanization and capitalization during Indonesia’s early New Order years. Jakarta, the capital city, if not quite hell, is closer to a Marxian state of truth in which ideology – for Marx a pervasive, camera obscura-like “inversion” of the actual state of affairs under capitalism – appears to have suddenly capsized; set in a seething urban reality of open hypocrisy, exploitation, and violence, the film functions as material nightmare to the vapid moralist-humanist dreams produced and sold by the state and its agents. Yet while Marx sought to ground his critique in “real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process” (1947: 47), Shahab, who also wrote Bumi Makin Panas, perceived a different locus of truth: the brothel and its female laborers. As a magnet for those perhaps most thoroughly (and quickly) dispossessed by Indonesia’s rapid shift to the right following the rise of Suharto seven years earlier – poor, formally uneducated women – Shahab sees in the brothel a central node of the morally bankrupt urban economy. Yet therein lies its ostensibly utopian potential as a collective space in which women simultaneously cater to, and learn to understand, exploit and shield themselves from, the unbridled “male” desire (pervading both men and women in positions of power) that is burning through city and nation.
