S.M.Ameh - on Indonesian film

"The movies made (in the late 50's) were mostly commissioned by government agencies, government enterprises or banks. They used these feature films to propagandise their business activity and some officials were even promoting their own individual image."

Thoughts on Indonesian TV & Advertisements

Indonesian TV is a hybrid of crap American sitcoms, crap Latin American soaps, cheap Chinese Kung Fu, blockbusting TV series like The X Files, variations of TV Gameshows like 'Famili 100'(Family Fortunes), reruns of movies and Indonesian programmes.

Indonesian TV programmes tend to be unrecognizable and far removed from Indonesian culture destroying any suspension of disbelief and therefore credibility. They tend to be set in or around Jakarta in expensive houses where nobody has more than one child, most males have miraculously learnt karate and they contain uncharacteristic violence.

Why? Maybe because the producers have too much control in Production, it is their money, and they think these themes sell.

Digging a little deeper there is a recurrent theme of conflict arising from unrequentable love due to economics, status or rukun (state of harmony and peace in the community). Which at times can be quite alarming when one looks at Kamilla a tale of a man who raped a girl, she got pregnant so he did the 'honourable thing' and married her. Now they live together with their child and he has fallen in love with her. The conflict arises from her relationship with her boyfriend!

The other two most popular themes are the supernatural and comedy. The supernatural explores traditional myths and is often blended with a touch of comedy, which is more popular and either very slapstick (Benny Hill style) notably WARKOP or situational like Project P from Bandung, West Java. Whose series regularly deals with old Ibu's losing their temper, dilemmas that are discussed by the group and transvestites, always an object of humour in Asia. To be slightly different in Asia means you're shunned but to be radically different or crazy is readily accepted. Maybe this ties back to rukun or maybe it's linguistic as there are no words to express those 'grey' areas.

The Western influence is strong and adverts for western products like Carefree, Marlboro and Lucky Strike tend to offer the same package in terms of connotative meaning and on the whole, are better produced. On the other hand, Coke and McDonalds offer home-produced, Indonesian targeted ads - although I'm not entirely sure who wants to buy McDonalds RiceEgg!

MTV Asia as part of its own marketing sells selective slots of its output to AN Teve and reflects the values of Contemporary Culture with retro music programs, the tongue in cheek nature of its presenters and it allows the audience to become producers with 'MTV Out of the Box Experiences'. It is the only station to advertise condoms and its production quality heavily influences the rest of AN Teve's 'video clips'.

MTV Asia 's VDJs have had a huge influence in advertising due to their popularity and their style with Mike Kasem running around Singapore to Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life", Nadya as the top Lux girl and Jimmy doing a rather impressive advert for Close-up toothpaste.

A recent, insipid influence in advertising has been toll charge quizzes which offer the caller the chance to spend thousands of rupiah for the opportunity to win anything from half a million to five million. The profit margin in toll quizzes has meant a spread from 'which square is the ball in' to cheap, radio style, late night TV quizzes which last for hours dragging upto 100 callers live. Fortunately, this has already been investigated by the Indonesian press as some of the quiz companies have neglected to give out the prizes.

Even more despicable, considering the present crisis, is the offer to spend 2000 rupiah/minute for the opportunity of finding work.

Government intervention has played a significant role in the development of TV and film. A case can be made that this intervention has time and time again hindered the creative development of this field. The exceedingly boring drum of Soeharto's monotone during 'Laporan Khusus' (Special Reports) and especially the News, both of which must be broadcasted from the Government station, has naturally killed any competition in this arena.

Although, soccer and badminton do take preceedence over everything, including the news - and why not?

Early in 1998, the Government did two things. One: passed a law stating all foriegn TV must first be dubbed into English and given Indonesian subtitles to avoid the erosion of Indonesian culture!

Two : started a campaign 'Aku cinta produksi Indonesia' (I love Indonesian Products) which aside from a prolific cigarette market tend to be pharmaceutical products or even 'Jamu' (traditional remedies).

Recent campaigns have been to enroll in school for the year ahead, which was a good quality production using Rano Karno from the popular TV series 'Si Doel Anak Sekolah'. The series is about Si Doel (Rano Karno) who is from Betawi (original Jakarta), he is honourable and greatly respected for it. Although it is unusual for people of his background in Indonesian culture to complete a university course - he did it, and is now very successful. Si Doel is therefore the perfect role model to be saying 'Ayo ke sekolah' (Go to school).

From the early days of independence the private sector have been leaned on to promote various government messages through the media. Soekarno tried it with the film industry and in late 1998 various banks seem to be producing adverts not for their product, but to proclaim 'that everything is OK and Indonesians should stick together' etc.

The other recurring and naturally frustrating aspect of trying to develop a film industry was basically 'the cover up'. One of Indonesia's greatest directors Usmar Ismail came across this problem with 'Darah dan Doa' (The Long March), the saga of the march by the Siliwangi Division back from Jogya to its old base in West Java after the Dutch took Jogja in 1948. The army banned it in some areas - a lasting negative effect on the production of historical dramas in Indonesia.

Foucault does argue that History is subjective - history is written by the winners.

Despite all this and the fact that the tax on foriegn films for the last 3 decades has been 'lost', the Indonesian film industry with the release of "Dgaon di atas bantal" (Dress on the pillow) seems to be making steps in the right direction. Good luck to them.