Centering Peripheries: The Return of Regionalism in Indonesian Independent Cinema

If the idea of the nation as a “dispersed, archipelagic” assembly rather than a clearly defined, homogenous image is taken as an enduring historical fact in Southeast Asia, what are the consequences for the region’s cinemas?¹ Engaging an oceanic history, this essay proposes that in Southeast Asia, filmmakers have always been at work taking apart, recentering, and constructing formative regions within and around the national. Their visions frequently position sub-and supranational areas as constitutive of the national cinematic imaginary. If “national” films are constantly shuttling between regions as both centers and formative peripheries, can the nation be made visible, and to whom does it most matter?

To address these questions, I will contextualize the recent work of independent filmmakers from Yogyakarta, a small yet artistically active city and region in Java, within national and regional cinematic histories. Their efforts to negotiate a position simultaneously central and peripheral to the nation will be compared with the regional-archipelagic focus of Indonesian film-makers under President Soekarno (1949– 1966). Through conversations with Yogyakarta-based filmmakers and close readings of writer-director Yosep Anggi Noen’s Vakansi yang Janggal dan Penyakit Lainnya (Peculiar Vacation and Other Illnesses, 2012) and Hiruk-PikukSiAl-Kisah (The Science of Fictions, 2019), I reveal the ways in which contemporary Indonesian cinema draws on regional and subnational perspectives, positioning these regional “peripheries” as key processors of globalized histories and aesthetic forms.

From its origins in the early 1950s, Indonesian cinema has functioned as a self-conscious paradox. During the Soekarno era (1945– 1967), film-makers like Usmar Ismail, Asrul Sani, and Nya Abbas Akup worked to build critical national consciousness by deconstructing the sanctity of both the nation and the darker aspects of its anti-colonial struggle of becoming. A large percentage of Indonesia’s early cineastes, artists, and intellectuals (including Ismail and Sani) came from West Sumatra. Although a relatively small region, it has had an outsized historical influence as a cosmopolitan center for the exchange of ideas and political paradigms with Egypt and other areas throughout the modern Islamic world. (It was also the center of PRRI, Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia, or the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia, a well-armed separatist movement that was finally put down by a massive strike from the national army in 1961.) Many West Sumatran filmmakers and artists became “national” figures after migrating to another influential hub, Jakarta, the nation’s capital but also officially a “special region” with a unique system of administration and its own funding for the arts.

Cineastes from West Sumatra and elsewhere who lived and worked in Jakarta resisted the imposition of a homogenizing view that positioned the capital as the nation’s true locus. The fragmented and often decentered views of the nation they put on its screens frequently highlight the perspectives of subnational regions like Bandung, rural East Java, or North and West Sumatra. The critical consciousness of the nation these filmmakers sought to build can thus be seen in light of their experience of the geographically and epistemically fragmented, archipelagic nature of Indonesia, of having lived, learned, and thought in and from a number of different regional and island centers. In films such as Ismail’s Tamu Agung (Exalted Guest, 1955) or Djadoeg Djajakusuma’s Harimau Tjampa (The Tiger from Tjampa, 1953), the subnational regions that serve as settings are positioned as if at the center of a series of surrounding “peripheries,” formative loops that encompass the national, supranational, regional, and transnational.² Influences from these “foreign” areas, while inevitable, are rearranged and translated by filmmakers into a particular pattern largely determined by the subnational locality that is positioned as the locus of both screen and diegesis.

The idea that many of the trans/national elements made peripheral in these films are actually “supposed” to be more central was often exploited for satirical humor. Take, for example, Nya Abbas Akup’s Tiga Buronan (Three Fugitives, 1957), which is set in rural West Java. Toward the film’s beginning, it features an absurdly happy musical scene with prancing, singing rice...