Cavernous weathering vs Honeycomb

In this thesis, I would also like to touch upon a historical reason why documentary films were regarded as a propagandistic instrument of the ruling governments in the context of Indonesia, from the State Dutch colonial (1820-1942)4_{, the Japanese} administration (1942- 1945), the Old Order (Sukarno, 1945-1967) and the New Order (Suharto, 1967-1998) regimes. Across these regimes, documentary films were solely used to deliver the government’s voice, perspective, and justification (Hanan, 2012, pp. 106–107).

During the Dutch colonial (1820-1942) and the Japanese administration (1942- 1945) periods, the governments intentionally made use of documentary films to

4 _{Before 1820, the Dutch through its state-sponsored company, Dutch East Indies Company/VOC had} already colonised Nusantara (present-day Indonesia) since 1619 (Vickers, 2005, p. 10).

propagate their interests although there were a distinct style and approach between the two. The Dutch documentary films such as Moeder Dao (Monnikendam, 1933),

De Merapi Dreight (Balink, 1934)and Het Land van de Overkaant (Franken, 1938)were

ethnographic, exotic and social (Sen, 1994). For example, Moeder Dao, de

schildpadgelijkende or Mother Dao, the Turtlelike is a 90-minute black-and-white

documentary film by Vincent Monnikendam, a Dutch documentarist. It tells about how the Dutch ran its colonies in the period 1912-1933 as a colonial business enterprise. The footage shot without sound shows the exploitation of natural resources by the Dutch. It portrays forests burning, land clearing, oil and gas mining as well as road and railroad constructions. The propagandistic purpose of the film articulates the colonial attitude at that time where the Europeans were the superior while the indigenous were the backward. In most of the footage, the Dutch overseers are always described as the ones who instructed the natives to do the labour for them. They were represented in their white tropical garb standing by commandingly with their walking sticks and cigars (Monnikendam, 1933).

By contrast, the Japanese films such as Celebration of the Emperor’s

Birthday (Nihon Eiga Sha, 1943b), Volunteer for the Army (Nihon Eiga Sha, 1943a),

Berdjoang/Hope of South (Nihon Eiga Sha, 1944a), and Call for Romusha (Nihon Eiga Sha,

1944b) were militaristic and imperialistic (YIDFF Organizing Committee, 1997, unpaginated). For instance, Celebration of the Emperor’s Birthday in the Berita Film di

Djawa No. 2 is a newsreel produced by Nippon Eiga Sha Djawa. It tells about the

celebration of the Japanese Emperor, Tentjo-Setsoe Hirohito in 1943. The footage shot with the sound of aggressive music and trumpet. Voice-over was employed interspersed with intertitles and subtitles in Indonesian and Japanese. The voice-over was also in Indonesian and Japanese languages. This black-and-white footage depicts various places where the Japanese Imperial Army was stationed. It shows a scene of Imperial Japanese

Palace at Tokyo where imperial soldiers and the Japanese masses paid homage to the emperor in a Japanese style of deep bow (Nihon Eiga Sha, 1943b).

During the Sukarno’s era (1945-1967), the regime mainly produced newsreels aimed to record state affairs, national events, and the president’s powerful oratories. As a result, they became the right instrument to boost the personality cult of the president. Sukarno’s political rhetoric always brought out issues and spirits of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and anti-neo- colonialism that captivated the masses (Anderson, 2002, p. 6). Allured by his charisma, the mass media was used to record and capture the president’s speech. This Old Order regime treated the mass media as a tool of the revolution and Sukarno was the supreme leader of the Indonesian revolution.

An instance is Gelora/Independent Enthusiasm (Komite Nasional, 1945). This black-and-white reel shows Sukarno’s speech at Gambir or Ikada Square, Jakarta, on 19 September 1945. The film employs voice of God narration and intertitles in Indonesian and English. The newsreel depicts Sukarno’s oration to the masses that hailed him exuberantly. Sukarno encouraged the masses to be strong and to have faith in him to secure Indonesian independence. The propaganda of this film speaks of the Indonesian freedom from the Dutch and the Japanese that had been proclaimed on 17 August 1945 by Sukarno- Hatta (Komite Nasional, 1945).

When the New Order regime (1967-1998) replaced the Old Order (1945-1967), the New Order banned all records relating to Sukarno from being published and aired (Sen and Hill T, 2007, pp. 84–85). In Suharto’s era, the New Order regime manipulated documentary films as a propagandistic instrument to legitimise power. Most of the government programs were developmental ones and executed in authoritarian ways. Nearly all ministries financed the production of their documentary films to support their developmental agendas. A case in point was the programme of transmigration, moving people mostly villagers from Java, Madura, and Bali to other islands. It was produced by

the Department of Transmigration and the Department of Agriculture featuring the ministers themselves as the main characters in the documentary (Hanan, 2012, p. 107). All governmental programs, including documentary films, were exclusively broadcast on TVRI (Televisi Republik Indonesia), the only state television station in the country at that time (Nugroho and Herlina S., 2015, p. 134).

The extensive use of authoritative voice-over characterised the documentary films during this period, an illustrative map to designate the setting, organic and linear structure, and the absence of subjective and personal narration. It was the government type of documentary film celebrating the developmental process. There were also ethnographic documentary films that illustrated tribal societies in isolated regions of the country. The documentaries showed rituals, customs, and arts that gave the impression of underdeveloped peoples to the rest of modern Indonesians. This kind of documentary only seems to repeat what the Dutch Colonial's perspective did by using “Western's fascination” to disclose their fellow-countrymen living in distinct cultural backgrounds. Meanwhile, another type of documentary film was that of the travelogue aimed to promote the tourism industry. In this kind of documentary film, Indonesia was described as an exotic place with its unrivalled natural beauty and authentic cultures (Mae, 2014, unpaginated).

The domination of the New Order government in the production of documentary films in Indonesia gave rise to highly propagandistic and indoctrinating documentary films. As a result, homogenisation of theme and narrative style of documentary films was inevitable. There were almost no variation and alternative documentary voice made but that of the regime. This situation continued until a non-commercial independent filmmaker, Garin Nugroho, produced a documentary entitled Dongeng

Kancil tentang Kemerdekaan/Kancil’s Story of Independence (Nugroho, 1995). It was

the society and the government for the fate of their lives in the legendary Malioboro Street of Yogyakarta (Nugroho, 1995; Hanan, 2010; Nugroho and Herlina S., 2015).

Kancil’s Story of Independence was considered an attempt to counter the

domination of the New Order government which always held the single narrative of “truth” over public issues in Indonesia (Isla, 2010, p. 461). The documentary was screened in NHK, a Japanese television station in 1996, and in Muslim organisations watched by teachers and public officials alike. Indonesian public officials watching the screening were stunned. They considered the documentary as an exaggeration of the social reality (Kwok, 2000, p. 2). The documentary was then fictionalised as a movie entitled Daun di Atas Bantal/Leaf on a Pillow (Nugroho, 1997) (Uhde, 1999; Nugroho and Herlina S., 2015).The movie was sponsored and produced by Christine Hakim, a famous actress and producer in Indonesia who also owns a film company under her name, Christine Hakim Film Production. She produced the film because she was moved by the documentary and realised she had not contributed much to the public yet. She realised that poverty and injustice still linger on in Indonesia. Therefore, she asked Garin who produced the documentary to be the director of Daun di Atas Bantal

to make the film “true and powerful but also stylish and poetic” (Tanvir, 2009, p. 3). With all of these in mind, what the general populace in Indonesia understands of a documentary is only associated with political, informational, and propagandistic films as indicated below.

Garin Nugroho, who has made prize-winning documentary films as well as features, has described the kinds of documentary films that most people have to see in Indonesia – particularly in the Soeharto New Order period – as mainly propaganda, either made by the state or depicting Indonesia in ways that satisfied state ideologies. In the New Order period, 90 per cent of documentary films were government propaganda […] Another documentary type was the ethnographic documentaries that presented a portrait of lesser-known ethnic groups, showing examples of their rituals or arts. However, at the same time, the documentaries suggested that the ethnic groups were backward recipients of the paternalism of the state and had little engagement with modern Indonesia [and therefore informational only] (Hanan, 2012, p. 107).

Hanan underlines the cognisance of the New Order regime to use the rhetorical power of documentary films politically (see also Sen and Hill T, 2007; Hanan, 2010, 2012). As a result, the general public in Indonesia sceptically perceives documentary films as being propagandistic and boring (Irawanto, 2017, unpaginated). In this regard, I argue that the resurgence of documentary filmmaking in the early period of the reform era provides alternative documentary narratives. These narratives depart from the hegemonic documentary narratives of the state as once exercised during the New Order regime. In other words, there is no single hegemonic narrative of truth in the context of the documentary of this period. The stories of the documentary films are subjective and experimental, including in the representations of cultural identity.