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‘Chinese’ Indonesians in national cinema 1

2006; Routledge; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14649370500463877

1469-8447

Krishna Sen,

Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics

Abstract Abstract Through much of post‐colonial history and particularly during the so‐called 'New Order' (under General Suharto), Indonesian citizens of ethnic Chinese descent have been caught in a strangely ambiguous position: they have enjoyed enormous economic power while at the same time being threatened with politico‐cultural effacement. This paper is an attempt to understand that ambiguity in relation to the Indonesian cinema – both around questions of industry history and around issues of representation of national and ethnic identity on screen. The paper traces the presence, the erasure and the absent‐presence of Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority from the establishment of a film industry in Indonesia in the 1930s to the post‐New Order political shifts, opening up possibilities for a new public discourse of Chineseness. I argue however that the openness of current Indonesian culture and politics, while providing the necessary condition for re‐imagining the Chinese Indonesians, does not ensure a radical shift in a politics of representation, deeply embedded in the textual practices of the film industry and more widely in the cultural and political history of modern Indonesia. Keywords: IndonesiaChinese Indonesianscinemapoliticsfilm industryethnicitycitizenship Notes 1. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Teguh Karya, an Indonesian nationalist film‐maker of great significance and to Bwee, who was with me on my last visit to Teguh after his second stroke. Only then did I give up my long held ambitions to discuss with him the subject matter of this paper. 2. The 'New Order' was the self‐proclaimed name of the authoritarian regime that ruled Indonesia from 1966 under the leadership of Major General Suharto, until his resignation on 21 May 1998. 3. Two recent studies, which provide excellent reviews of existing research on Chinese Indonesians, are worth mentioning here: Amy L. Freedman, 2000 Freedman, A. L. 2000. Political Participation and Ethnic Minorities: Chinese Overseas in Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States, New York, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], chapter 4 and Filomeno V. Aguilar 2001 Aguilar, F. V. 2001. 'Citizenship, Inheritance and the Indigenizing of the "Orang Chinese in Indonesia",'. Positions, 9(3): 501–533. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. 4. The gendered language here is used advisedly: there were no camera‐women working in commercial cinema until the mid‐1990s. 5. Chinese Indonesians are commonly categorised into Peranakan and Totok, the latter referring to migrants born in China, as well as implying a greater cultural and racial distinctiveness. But these lines of demarcation are not always clear. Many of the essays in the book, Perspectives on the Chinese Indonesians, refer to the problems of distinguishing these groups in the context of contemporary politics (Godley and Lloyd 2001 Godley, M. R. and Grayson, J. L., eds. 2001. Perspectives on the Chinese Indonesians, Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing. [Google Scholar]). 6. The statistical data here and through most of the first half of this essay are drawn from J.B. Kristianto's excellent film catalogue (Kristianto 1995 Kristianto, J.B. 1995. Katalog Film Indonesia: 1926–1995, Jakarta: PT Grafiasri Mukti. [Google Scholar]). That catalogue itself, as the author explains in the introduction, is incomplete, because of large holes in the archival data on Indonesian cinema. Any actual figures in this essay, then, need to be treated as approximate rather than exact. 7. For a detailed analysis of the role that films played in the political dynamics of the decade leading up to the Suharto coup of October 1965 see Sen (1985 Sen, K. 1985. 'Hidden from History: Aspects of Indonesian Cinema 1955–65'. Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 19(2): 1–50. [Google Scholar]). 8. For details of this law see Coppel (2002 Coppel, C. A. 2002. Studying Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies. [Google Scholar]: 31–47). 9. I have seen relatively few films from the pre‐1965 period and have not seen most of the films referred to in this section. My work here and elsewhere on the early history of Indonesian cinema depends on reviews, scenarios and summaries in the press, detailed references for which appear in Sen (1994 Sen, K. 1994. Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, London & New Jersey: Zed Books. [Google Scholar]: Chapter 2). I have also depended to a large degree on the summaries provided by JB Kristianto (1995 Kristianto, J.B. 1995. Katalog Film Indonesia: 1926–1995, Jakarta: PT Grafiasri Mukti. [Google Scholar]). Reconstruction of film content on the basis of summaries is always unsatisfactory but, for reasons both technological and political, only a very small number of pre‐1965 films have survived. Fortunately, secondary, written records seem to provide enough material for the kind of preliminary argument about the on‐screen presence and disappearance of Chinese Indonesians being attempted in this paper. 10. As the identifiably Chinese roles disappeared, some of the actors survived, appearing as non‐ethnicised 'Indonesians'. Perhaps the most enduring star of Indonesian cinema was a woman of Chinese descent, Tan Kiem Nio, known by her stage and screen name Fifi Young, who dominated the screen from around 1940 and continued to be one of the most recognised on‐screen faces well into the 1970s. 11. It is worth noting that this naming of 'the Chinese problem' is not new to the New Order, but already in use prior to the Second World War, and indeed perhaps part of a wider post‐colonial Asian discourse of 'minority problems', by its very wording shifting the burden of the problem to the minority. 12. The parallel with the 'dwi‐tunggal' (two‐in‐one) founders of the Indonesian nation is impossible to miss: Sukarno and Hatta founded the nation, Ismail and Malik founded national cinema. Anything prior to that is prehistory to be written off in a few paragraphs. 13. These erasures are not of course exclusive to cinema, and they are intertwined in complex ways that are not the subject of this paper. For a discussion of leftist film making in Indonesia and its destruction in the aftermath of the 1965 coup, see Sen (1994 Sen, K. 1994. Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, London & New Jersey: Zed Books. [Google Scholar]: chapters 2 and 3). 14. It is impossible to write about the media in Indonesia in the New Order period without mentioning the acronym SARA, which was used to refer to the types of conflict that the government censored out of the media: S=suku (ethnic), A=agama (religious), R=ras (racial), A=antar‐golongan (literally 'between groups' but best read as inter‐class). Ramifications of these restrictions have been variously discussed; for cinema in particular see Sen (1994 Sen, K. 1994. Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, London & New Jersey: Zed Books. [Google Scholar]: chapters 3, 4 and 5) and Sen and Hill (2000 Sen, K. and Hill, D. 2000. Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], chapter 5). 15. D. Djajakusuma, (1918–1987) dancer, film director and a significant cultural thinker in Indonesia since the early 1960s. 16. See for instance the section called 'Guruku, Sahabatku, Bapakku' (My Teacher, My Friend, My Father), in Riantiarno (1993) Teguh Karya &Teater Populer, 1968–1993, where 16 film and stage stars and directors write about their debt to Teguh. 17. For an account of the Java Wars and the historical significance of Diponegoro see Ricklefs (2001 Ricklefs, M.C. 2001. A History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1200, Basingstoke, Hampshire, , USA: Palgrave. [Google Scholar]: 151–154). For a more detailed reading of the film, from a slightly different perspective, see Sen (1994 Sen, K. 1994. Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order, London & New Jersey: Zed Books. [Google Scholar]: 83–86). 18. Betawi were the indigenous peasant population of the area that became the Dutch colonial capital in Indonesia. The ethnic Betawi population was marginalised from the wealth and metropolitan culture of the colonial and later national capital. In the 1990s there has been quite a lot of interest in recovering the stories of Betawi people in various forms of media texts, including some very popular television drama and comedy. 19. Since the writing of this paper, a new film based on the life and work of Soe Hok Gie, an Indonesian intellectual of Chinese descent, has been screened in Jakarta: Gie, directed by Riri Reza, produced by Miles Production. I have not had the opportunity to see the extent to which this film takes up the challenge of re‐making Chinese identities in Indonesian cultural texts.