Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia

Abstract

In Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia, I deploy extensive archival, ethnographic, and participatory research on Indonesian mass media as a critical intervention in the study of cinema. Examining Indonesian cinema from independence in 1949 until the present, I focus in particular on complicating understandings of how Western technologies, techniques and ideas have functioned as catalysts or determinants for the development of both nationalism and national cinemas worldwide. I examine local cinematic canons that bear the imprint of centuries of engagement with various transnational networks and forces. In the view that emerges, the pervasive politics of left-right alignment specific to the Cold War appear radically shifted – not simply, however, to a place “between” the binary poles of the United States and the Soviet Union, or within the triad of classical, oppositional, and Third cinemas that articulate their struggle as an epic of superpowers. Instead, following many of the Indonesian cineastes and critics I study, I endeavor to open the reading, viewing, present to an older domain of aesthetics and commodity exchange in which the linear arrangement of events leading to and from the rise of capitalism in Europe is made to coincide with other probable causes of the modern. In this regard, I engage in particular with the discourses and modes of address of Javanese wayang – the conceptual-textual center of shadow play and a critical platform for Indonesian art, politics and historiography, whose narratives and screens are always positioned to “coincide” with the present state of affairs. Far from buried or brushed aside in contemporary geopolitics, I argue that the methods and perspectives underpinning media like wayang continue to act as filters that critically influence the circulation and absorption of aesthetic and political ideas. The lineage of cinema’s development in Indonesia thus defined a form and sphere of influence neither here nor there, then nor now in the broadest terms of film theory and practice.