Moments in Indonesian Film History

This book explores Indonesian cinema, focusing on moments of unique creativity by Indonesian film artists who illuminate important but less-widely-known aspects of their multi-dimensional society. It begins by exploring early 1950s ‘Indonesian neorealist films’ of the Perfini group, which depict the ethos and emerging moral issues of the period of struggle for independence (1945–49). It continues by discussing four audacious political allegories produced in four discrete political eras—including the Sukarno, Suharto and Reformasi periods. It also surveys the main approaches to Islam in both popular cinema and auteur films during the Suharto New Order. One chapter celebrates the popular songs and B-movies of the Betawi comedian, Benyamin S, which dramatize the experience of the poor in ‘modernizing’ Jakarta. Another examines persisting Third World dimensions of Indonesian society as critiqued in two experimental features. The concluding chapter highlights innovation in a renewed Indonesian cinema of the post-Suharto Reformasi period (1999–2020), including films by an unprecedented generation of women writer-directors

“In his earlier, canonical work on Indonesian cinema, Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film: Diversity in Unity, David Hanan explored dominant, relatively stable configurations of culture and society. Now he offers us a different kind of national film history, underlining diversity, fluidity and change: not just snapshots of Indonesian film history, but an account of rich, dynamic, influential moments at all levels of filmmaking, from popular culture and allegorical satire to alternative neo-realism and Third World experimental narrative. This is a work of major significance in film studies.” (Professor Adrian Martin, film critic) 

“Political allegory and satire, representations of Islam, third world cinema, films by newly-emerging women filmmakers—David Hanan’s panorama of exceptional moments in Indonesian cinema since independence shows expertise in the inspirational wealth of insights that he offers, in relating key films to the histories, national ideologies, and complex, evolving social formations from which these films emerge, and at times critique, in multicultural Indonesia.” (Dina Iordanova, Emeritus Professor of Global Cinema at the University of St Andrews, Scotland)

David Hanan is the author of Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film: Diversity in Unity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has researched film in Indonesia and South East Asia for more than thirty years. He is currently an Honorary Fellow in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia.