Re: Download Sub Indo Film Spectre
Kian Trip
If you grew up under Suharto's New Order regime, your first introduction to communism may have been the turtleneck wearing, godless heathens depicted on a wonderful government propaganda film Pengkhianatan G30 S-PKI (its name roughly translates to "The Betrayal of the Communists" and it's downright brutal). If you were a really lucky kid, then the four-hour long screening was followed up with a field trip to Taman Mini, where you spent another couple of hours breezing through the sad and rundown Museum of Communist Betrayal.
I was never one of those kids. The bourgeois private school I went to never bothered to take us on a field trip to this museum, which opened back in October 1, 1992. I don't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Did my school save me from being indoctrinated by bloody anti-communist propaganda? Or did I miss out on an important cultural touchstone of my youth?
The museum complex itself is massive, and the centerpiece of the entire thing is a broken-down fountain surrounded by a roundabout wider than the main road. The complex is basically all concrete, save for the empty grass field between the Pancasila Sakti Monument and the main building. I parked next to two blue elementary school busses and walked down to the main building, eager to learn.
As I marched through the museum's courtyard, a bored middle-aged woman selling Indonesian military-themed merchandise stared at me from behind her stall. She sold, among other things, a camouflage baby onesie with a gigantic special forces dagger logo stitched on it, because it's never too early to get your baby showing off how vehemently pro-military it is.
The museum itself stands about a hundred meters away from the anti-communist movement's "ground zero," the infamous Lubang Buaya (literally the "crocodile pit"), a hole in the ground where the bodies of six Indonesian military generals were discarded after members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) supposedly tortured them to death in a failed coup attempt back on Sept. 30, 1965.
Opposite the torture hut, a group of visitors were attempting to take a High School Musical-style group picture in front of the Pancasila Sakti Monument. You know, the kind where everyone leaps into the air at just the right time and they all look like they're flying? I watched for a bit and then took their third failed attempt to jump on cue as a sign that it was time to move on.
I had to admit, it was impressive. The artist who created this propaganda masterpiece must've really thought about what a hell run by godless heathens looked like before he got to work. Historically accurate? Probably less so. But action-packed? Sure.
Eager to learn more, I made my way inside the museum in search of higher knowledge. The admission price of Rp 40,000 ($2.68 USD) wasn't exactly affordable, but I held out hope that it was going to, somehow, be worth it.
Inside, my eyes struggled to adjust to how dark everything was. Half the lights were burned out, making the rundown inside of the building stand in stark contrast to its well-maintained exterior. The stench of neglect hung heavy in the air. By the end, I had counted a total of four windows and 34 dioramas that were in various stages of decay.
The dioramas, though, were the work of a serious craftsman. Indonesia loves to use dioramas to explain its history, something we've covered before at this VICE office. This museums dioramas were equally ornate. I started at scenes of mud-caked guerrillas posed perfectly in action with tiny banners frozen in the rippling wind. Everywhere the lights weren't burned out, I saw tiny wax figures, most no bigger than my palm, cast long shadows on plastic earth.
But the storytellers, it seemed, didn't have such a dedication to the craft. The Suharto Museum, in Yogyakarta, at least tries to tell a somewhat coherent, but heavily slanted, narrative of the New Order. Sure, you need to take all of its claims with a grain of salt, but a lot of it is an error of omission, not an outright distortion of historical fact.
At one point, from the corner of my eye, I spotted a sign that read "Museum Library." I thought "ah, here there may be a place I could learn something," so I followed the sign to a dim room. But instead of books and posters, I found stacked crates of bottled drinks instead. I became unsure if this was a library or a kiosk storeroom.
I noticed some shelves with dusty binders along the wall, so I walked over to check them out. But my quest for knowledge was interrupted by the old man with an choppy buzz cut who was standing behind the checkout counter.
I could, though, appreciate the work that went into those dioramas. They probably looked way better back in the '90s too, when the lights all still worked. Or maybe they were just going for that spooky vibe. I'll never know.
Leaving the museum, I could still feel the specter of communism floating over my shoulder. It felt a bit like walking out of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, just with less churros and more propaganda.
Perempuan Tanah Jahanam is more grounded in realism, using atmospheric tension to create a kind of psychological terror that moves it beyond rote jump-scares and into more complex and arguably more chilling territory. Joko Anwar, as he did in the Javanese neo-noir Kala, again invokes local symbols and imagery to tell a story that is superficially about an ancient curse, but is also about how the spectre of past choices can haunt the present and force otherwise good people to do terrible things.
This is classic Joko Anwar style. Throughout his career, Joko Anwar focused on making genre films that are steeped in the ideas, history, and symbols of Indonesian culture and society. Pengabdi Setan invoked the imagery of Muslim burial practices to tell a chilling ghost story, while Kala made the ancient legend of the Ratu Adil a major part of its narrative. In Perempuan Tanah Jahanam, Joko Anwar goes back to this well, imbuing the practice of wayang kulit with malice and turning the rustic beauty of rural Java into a claustrophobic horror set piece. In this way he again draws on the images and symbols of Java, and cleverly deploys them to highlight the beauty and the richness of the culture, while also hinting at deeper, darker, and untold things.
This article is part of a series that will take a critical look at the work of Indonesian director Joko Anwar, with a focus on the ways in which he has used film to promote Indonesian mythology and explore social issues.
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In the opening chapter of this important new book, Ariel Heryanto suggests that in the New Order period, most foreigners reacted with the same kind of hesitation to the Indonesian usage of teror to refer to the discursive power which the New Order regime exercised over post-1965 imaginings of Indonesia's history, as well as its present and future. His sense of unease with the tendency of outsiders to regard "terrorize" in this context as an exaggeration is the starting point for the book. For just as in the case of those who spoke of LEKRA-inspired teror before 1965, Heryanto writes as a participant in the events and circumstances he analyses. As an insider, he was witness to the regime's actual and implied ability to unleash violence of such an intensity and scale that it could only be adequately conceptualized by the term "state terrorism". At the same time, however, he is also aware of all sorts of problems and contradictions in the exercise of that combination of violence and intimidation by the state in New Order Indonesia. In State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia he attempts to find a way of describing the workings of this inherently contradictory system of managing the national imaginary. The result is an extraordinarily [End Page 139] rich and compelling narrative of "a world where signs and the world they represent were believed to be inseparable" (p. 32). The detailed exploration of this theme is handled with clarity and conviction, giving the lie to the familiar charge that the post-structuralist concern with signs and discourses is somehow removed from the materiality of social and political processes. In Heryanto's hands, the attempt to read discursive systems as social texts goes to the heart of the instability that has characterized the exercise of political power in Indonesia during the New Order years and beyond.
Observers of Indonesia between the 1970s and 1990s, as well as those who experienced the New Order at first hand, will recognize the great intimidatory power that stemmed from words associated with what Heryanto calls the New Order's "master narrative". This was the demonizing of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its supposed attempt to subvert the integrity of the Indonesian nation in the coup attempt of 1965, epitomized in the novel, and later the state-sponsored film of the events of 1965, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The treason of the 30 September Movement/PKI). The spectre of the massacres of communists and their sympathizers that followed these events lay behind the fear that a single word such as terlibat (involved) could evoke throughout the period of the New Order's hegemony. From the late 1970s through to the mid 1990s, a series of government initiatives deliberately fostered the social anxiety and watchfulness associated with the master narrative in the minds of successive generations of Indonesian citizens. Yet the impression of a totalizing system of power such an effect might suggest was constantly undercut by counter-indications of slippage, arbitrariness, and a failure of control at all levels. Against those observers who suggest that the arbitrary exercise of violence and intimidation was an effective...
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