KULDESAK AND THE INEXORABLE PULP FICTION OF INDONESIAN FILM HISTORY

* The author would like to thank the editors and staff of Indonesia and the Malay World for their work in preparing this article for publication.

Abstract

The ‘omnibus’ feature Kuldesak (Cul-de-sac 1998), made by four young film school graduates and spanning the major political transition from Suharto's 30-year New Order to the current reformasi era between its dates of production and distribution, was accused by many critics of unceremoniously severing its ties with Indonesia's 50-plus-year history of national cinema. By closely re-examining critical moments within the cinematic past from which Kuldesak emerges, this article stages an alternate reading. I argue that the film represents an earnest reflection on the very impossibility, indeed the potential deadliness, of freeing oneself from history, despite the obvious allure of its upper-middle-class characters’ bold, Grunge-and-McDonald's-infused attempts to do precisely that. Examining the local effects of globalisation in the late 1990s with a fascinated-yet-repulsed gaze, Kuldesak strongly recalls the indirect, yet scathing, critiques of Suharto staged by many of the films of the early 1970s. Seen in this way, Kuldesak presciently locates itself in a historical cul-de-sac in which the oncoming future of democratic reform is glimpsed through the mirror of a past filled with corruption and violence, and entangled in an international web of dubious promises and onerous commitments.

Keywords:

• Indonesian cinema
• Indonesian films
• Kuldesak film
• New Order
• reformasi

Notes

* The author would like to thank the editors and staff of Indonesia and the Malay World for their work in preparing this article for publication.

¹The review also appears in Kristanto (2007: 399). The original reads:

Sebuah film yang betul-betul ‘lepas’ kaitannya dari sejarah film Indonesia sebelumnya. Keberhasilan film ini menampilkan dunia remaja yang seolah-olah berada dalam dunia realitas dan dunia maya (virtual) sekaligus, seolah-olah bebas nilai. Para pembuat film juga seolah tidak bersikap dalam soal bebas nilai ini. Mereka hanya menyodorkannya begitu saja.

²I refer to reviews, analyses, and mentions of the film in Kristanto (2004: 178–79), which is a reprint of his 1998 review in Kompas; filmindonesia.or.id/Kristanto (2007); Barker (2011: 84–101, 107–20); Clark (2010: Chap. 4); Darmawan (2007); Hughes-Freeland (2011: 7, 13, 27); Imanjaya (2009b); Kartika (2010); Murtagh (2008: 2; 2011: 400; 2012: 2; 2013); Paramaditha (2007a, 2007b: 50–57; 2011: 506–07); Setiyawan (2009); van Heeren (2002, 2012: 52–59, 178, 193); Yngvesson (2011).

³Thanks to the generosity of Miles Films.

⁴See Heryanto (1999); Larasati (2013); Wieringa (2002); and Yngvesson (2011) for detailed analyses of New Order era historical narration and omission.

⁵Most recently, the documentary film Act of killing (Oppenheimer 2012) has demonstrated the political power, as well as, some have argued, the ethical dangers of taking a rigidly polemical approach to the New Order and its legacies by presenting state suppression of the rights and critical voices of Indonesians as more or less absolute and unchallenged (see Dwyer 2014; Paramaditha 2014; Yngvesson 2014).

⁶In the sphere of popular culture, and cinema in particular, the lack of public availability (outside of archives) of most films dating from independence to reformasi and often beyond can facilitate the re/shaping of public memory through sweeping evaluations of large swaths of Indonesia's cinematic past. Murtagh (2011: 400) points to the contemporary tendency to paint past filmic representations of homosexuality or queer identities as stereotyped or negative in comparison to reformasi films dealing with similar issues. As Murtagh (2013: 14) also indicates, Krishna Sen's foundational 1994 book Indonesian cinema: framing the New Order has in certain ways contributed to negative academic and journalistic generalisations about New Order films, particularly with regard to their treatment of alternative genders. In addition to Murtagh, Hanan (1988, 1997, 2009, 2010); Paramaditha (2011); Barker (2011), and van Heeren (2012) have also contributed to the process of re-evaluating the cinema of the New Order, but more such studies are needed in order to methodically complicate our understandings of the ways in which Suharto-era films functioned vis-à-vis national identity and the political economy of the state. See also Imanjaya (2009b).

⁷Over 1000 people were killed, with 168 rapes reported (Purdey 2006).

⁸Leila Chudori, writing in 1998 for Tempo, defended Kuldesak’s perceived lack of interest in the past: ‘Hollywood? America? Come on, they – the actors and filmmakers – are part of an MTV generation who emerged from and live via the multimedia industry. So, allow them to be “young people”’ (quoted in Barker 2011: 93).

⁹Barker (2011: 98) points out that Kuldesak was not produced completely outside of industry structures: its makers, many of whom had spent several years working in television, used their industry connections to help realise the project. In particular, Hatoek Subroto, a film producer since the 1970s, was very supportive of the project, lending the team his equipment in hopes that it would help stimulate the feature film business, which was in decline throughout the 1990s. Furthermore, Barker and local filmmaker and festival pioneer Lulu Ratna (2007: 304) point out that there was an independent movement in filmmaking underway from at least the 1980s. It was headed by likes of Gotot Prakosa, known particularly for his experimental and animated shorts, and Garin Nugroho, whose frustration with the mainstream local industry lead him to seek funding and audiences through festivals and foundations abroad.

¹⁰The story was related by Riza during a Q&A session after the screening of Kuldesak as part of the Workshop on Indonesian Cinema at SOAS, University of London, 20 October 2013.

¹¹Q&A, SOAS 2013.

¹²Q&A, SOAS 2013.

¹³Barker (2011: 90) suggests that the title is ironic in light of the film's breakaway status, indicating what the film leaves behind: its characters’ ‘dead end lives [that] are symptomatic of the cultural impasse of the late New Order’. Clark (2010) takes the ‘cinematic cul-de-sac’ more seriously as a roadblock, but sees little connection with past cinematic efforts to address and work through the dead-end problems it represents. For Clark, the film's dead-end gaze is novel as a local phenomenon, signalling the entrance of a new historical stage, and thus ‘confirming Jameson's theories about the shallowness and pastiche of popular culture in the postmodern era’ (Clark 2010: 79). In Riza's own words (quoted in Setiyawan 2009:103), ‘the sweet irony is that cul-de-sac means a dead end. But for us, Kuldesak was like a new beginning’.

¹⁴In a review of Asrul Sani's 1969 film Apa jang kau tjari, Palupi [What are you looking for, Palupi?], ‘Apa jang kau tontonkan Palupi’, 9 April 1970:

Selama dua djam kita mentjari dalam film itu, maka bertemulah kita dengan kombinasi: seperempat Jean-Luc Godard, seperempat Turino Djunaedy, dan sisanja entah apa.

Palupi, now widely considered a classic, won first prize at the Asian Film Festival the same year.

¹⁵ … ada saja yang cacat pada film Indonesia … Kisah film-film Indonesia boleh dikata 95 persen tidak logis, tidak memenuhi hukum sebab-akibat … 95 persen film kita jelek. Kristanto's sentiments echo those of earlier critics. More than three decades previously, an article by director Usmar Ismail (1953) is obviously responding to a litany of similar criticism of his and others’ initial efforts to develop a national cinema. Actor Sukarno M. Noor, then head of the industry organization Parfi, responded to broad criticism of local cinema with the headline ‘Don't Poison National Film’ (Sinar Harapan 1970). Historians such as Salim Said (1991) and Misbach Yusa Biran (2008) have also long decried the politics, perceived lack of idealism, and prurient focus of Indonesian films.

¹⁶See ‘Mau kemana engkau, Palupi’ in Purnama, 19 April 1970, for a very sarcastic, accusatory critique of Sani's use of nudity into the film. As far as I can tell from existing prints, the nudity was censored, although it was much commented on in the press.

¹⁷Like Kuldesak, Palupi was both rejected by the press as flaky, unclear, and disconnected from local experience (see above) and ‘hailed by Indonesian critics as an art film, rejected by the audience as too arty, and shown around the world as a glowing example of Indonesia's film culture’ (Sen 1994: 141).

¹⁸Sen (1993, 1994: 138–56) argues that the prostitution films trade in a complex, potentially politically resistive, spectatorial pleasure of identification with a reigning culture of victimisation and ‘the inability to act’ (Sen 1993: 208). However, her final conclusion that the prostitutes who are the films’ central characters are consistently silenced in the end, either through death or reintegration into the ruling, patriarchal order, while plausible, is also very debatable. In several of the genre's founding films (such as Bernafas dalam lumpur [dir. Djunaedy 1970], Bumi makin panas [dir. Shahab 1973], or Anjing-anjing Geladak [dir. Pelamonia 1972]) the central female character either stays alive, unattached, and, as in Bumi, highly outspoken, or, as in Bernafas, her death functions to destroy the ideological space of active male/heroic power. In both Bumi and Geladak, it is the male who works to ‘save’ (and thus also possibly ‘silence’ through domestication) the central female who ends up dead.

¹⁹The song appears on a popular music record entitled Masa depan (The future), featuring Emilia Contessa on vocals, backed by Band Marjono and his Boys. It was put out on the Pop Sound label; there is no date listed on most Indonesian records, but this one looks to be from the late 1950s or early 1960s.

²⁰Sani himself, as well as contemporaries like Usmar Ismail, were critical of the left during the Sukarno years, particularly of the left's role in attempting to impose ideological strictures on films through the powerful arts guild LEKRA (see Sen 1994: 27–49; Chisaan 2008: 36–48, 170–200; Salim H.S. 2012: 95–101). After the rise of Suharto essentially eliminated the left by 1967, however, Palupi shows a stark disillusionment with the results of a shift to the right that Sani and Ismail ostensibly supported, and with the potential for political idealism in general.

²¹Sukarno was well known to be antagonistic to most Western-oriented popular culture, notably including rock and roll. Shortly after Suharto took power, rock club scenes begin to emerge in popular films; after Palupi, Usmar Ismail's Ananda (1970) and Turino Djunaedy's Bernafas dalam lumpur (1970), the first two ‘prostitution’ films, both featured dance clubs with rock music as centres of illicit activity and playgrounds of the wealthy and well-connected. The trend was continued in many other films, including the 1973 Bumi makin panas, which featured an especially ‘wild’ variant of the club scene, a tinted, Eisensteinian montage of funky soul music in a club populated by young prostitutes, gangsters, artists, and rich men.

²²Interview with Riza, 4 March 2013, at the Jakarta offices of Miles Films.

²³In Hariolus in particular Clark (2010: 82) sees a ‘masculinity of the margins, providing us with a symbolic rupture’ (82); for Clark this constitutes a reflection of the fluid, buffoonish, and linguistically, hierarchically flexible identities of the wayang clown servants, the Punakawan. In the case of Andre, Clark argues that he represents a more standard take on rebellious, but ultimately positivist masculinity, yet one that is shadowed by its less rigid ‘past’ in the form of Hariolus.

²⁴See Baudry's (1974–75) formulation of the mainstream film industry as an infantilising, immobilising, apparatus of ideological inculcation that entangles itself with spectators’ desire to become powerful, heroic, active individuals, while in reality killing their individuality and freedom.

²⁵The director's name is also frequently spelled Sjuman Djaja, Sjumandjaya, or Sjumandjaja.

²⁶See Ardan (1985: 122–26); <filmindonesia.or.id>.

²⁷See Sjuman Djaya's 1974 film Ateis kafir.

²⁸Recent discussions with Riza and fellow Indonesian film critics Ekky Imanjaya, Eric Sasono, and Tito Imanda have revealed that Lasermania is based on an actual facility of the same name (now closed), which was located in a military complex in the Guntur area of Jakarta, and owned by a wealthy military police supplier with political aspirations. The name of the store's manager in Kuldesak, Aladin, is the same as the manager of the actual store.

²⁹In Indonesia, there are no official or legal family names, and many people go by only one name, or, if there are more, it is unusual that any of them will represent a literal or obvious connection to nuclear family. However, the children of well-known public figures often take one of the parent's names as a second name. This is also true for spouses – at the time she played Palupi, when Farida Feisol was still married to Sjuman Djaya, she went by Farida Sjuman.

³⁰Here, the subtextual hall of mirrors is stretched further still: Aladdin, who is played by the actor Tio Pakusadewo, adds a final name to the historical junk pile: the art-film director Garin Nugroho, who effectively gave birth to Pakusadewo's career. Nugroho is often also thought of as the ‘father’ of Indonesian independent film, although in Kuldesak he is relegated to the status of a knowingly repressed cause that is brought forth playfully as a ‘symptom’.

³¹The two main, upper class male characters, Andre and Aksan, end up dead; when predicting that Andre will find an ‘object’ – the gun – to change everything, Hariolus, the soothsayer who is as ambiguous in his class affiliations as in his masculinity (Clark 2010: 81), also refers to Andre as a pembesar, or a prominent/authority figure.

³²Benjamin (1968: 257–58) writes:

 … a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in [the angel's] wings … this storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

³³I follow Murtagh, Tom Boellstorff and others in recognising a distinction between the Western-based concept of gay identity and its expression, signified by italicising the word, in Indonesia.

³⁴See Murtagh (2011: 397–411) for an in-depth discussion of the film, its representation of gay men in Indonesia, and its local reception.

³⁵ Waria is a conjunction of the Indonesian words for woman and man, wanita and pria, respectively, and is usually applied to cross-dressing male to female transvestites. It is not clear, however, if Karjo lived as a waria off screen as well as on.

³⁶Asrul Sani, Usmar Ismail and Sjuman Djaya were among those who regularly hung out in Senen prior to the advent of the Taman Ismail Marzuki arts complex in the Cikini area of Jakarta in 1968.

³⁷While Varia itself was printed on glossy paper far from the cheap, ‘pulpy’ stock of the novels that gave pulp fiction its name in English, and its price was almost certainly out of reach for most lower-middle, and lower-class Indonesians, once the stories there were published as novels and/or made into films, access was far cheaper, and thus broader. The novels, like their pulpy counterparts elsewhere, were also often printed on rough paper.

Additional information

Author biography

Dag Yngvesson is a filmmaker, lecturer, and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives and many years of film work in the United States and Indonesia, his dissertation explores the relationship between histories of cinema, political expression, nationalism and globalisation in Indonesia. He has published scholarly articles and reviews in Jumpcut, Plaridel, Wacana, and elsewhere. His current film projects include collaborative film/ethnographies on the politics of peace in Aceh, and on migration and labour in the large Indonesian community in Philadelphia. He is finishing post-production on the satirical feature Banyak Ayam, Banyak Rejeki (Many Chickens, Lots of Luck), co-directed/produced with Indonesian filmmaker Koes Yuliadi.