Thammasat University students interested in ASEAN studies, Indonesia, history, political science, international relations, diplomacy, peace studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 5 December Zoom webinar on Memori Melompat: Jumping Memory, Popular Culture, and the Indonesian War of Independence.

The event, on Thursday, 5 December at 7pm Bangkok time, is organized by the Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University, the United Kingdom.

The TU Library collection includes books about different aspects of the Indonesian War of Independence.

Students are invited to register at this link.

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pKLNjrXsSM-it0lW8HKO4Q#/registration

The event announcement states:

IAS Residential Fellow Dr. Arnoud Arps delivers a seminar on their research –

This seminar uses Indonesian popular culture (film, historical re-enactment, and online music videos) about the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949) in its aim to understand ‘colonial histories’ from the decolonial non-Western perspective of the formerly colonised. In this seminar, I would like to critically scrutinise the idea that memory travels freely and discuss how a straightforward mobility of cultural memory does not apply to every local context. Memory in Indonesia travels temporarily, briefly, and not far.

As a demonstrative semantic device, the Indonesian term memori melompat (jumping memory) signifies cultural memory formation beyond the West. It emphasises that Indonesian popular culture about the war is indicative of the need for a local reframing of existing memory concepts to better understand contemporary engagements with the colonial past.

Dr. Arnoud Arps is Assistant Professor of Extended Cinema, Film Heritage and Memory at the University of Amsterdam’s Media Studies department, the Netherlands.

In 2021, Dr. Arps posted an article on the website of New Mandala.

It began:

‘The East’ in a transnational context: The Indonesian War of Independence in film

On the 13th of August 2021, four days before Indonesia celebrated its 76th year of independence, Jim Taihuttu’s De Oost [henceforth The East] was released worldwide. This new Dutch film about the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949) follows the war volunteer Johan de Vries (Martijn Lakemeier) as he arrives in Indonesia and joins a special forces unit led by “The Turk” (Marwan Kenzari), the historical and controversial figure Captain Raymond Westerling.

Even before its release the film was disputed (predominantly by veterans and their descendants) and questioned for its veracity, as Westerling and his men used intimidation, violence and terror in a process that Westerling described as “pacifying the Celebes”. The international trailer summarises it as follows: “At the end of WWII, The Dutch sent troops into Indonesia. Their mission was to crush a rebellion and reclaim a colony. All in the name of peace.”

In an interview with Dutch television presenter Humberto Tan immediately after the online press screening of the film, lead actor Martijn Lakemeier said he was surprised to find out that Indonesian extras were so familiar with the events of the Indonesian War of Independence. From an Indonesian perspective that familiarity comes as no surprise.

In addition to being a crucial part of Indonesia’s history, in recent decades a vibrant popular culture has emerged around the occupation and the war of independence. While the Netherlands is clearly still struggling to come to terms with its colonial legacy, Indonesians are widely using popular culture to remember the past—including the Indonesian War of Independence. Film plays a central role in this.

The international release of The East highlights that the remembrance of the Indonesian War of Independence in popular culture is becoming increasingly transnational. The result, however, is composed of cultural objects from various national contexts.

Film perjuangan

Shortly after Indonesia’s independence in 1945, a first wave of war films about the struggle for independence appeared: the so-called film perjuangan or “struggle films”. These films revolve in general around a group of freedom fighters who fight against the Dutch army: the emphasis in these films lies usually in Indonesian heroism and nationalist fervour. These films were an essential part of the birth of the Indonesian film industry.

A significant example is Usmar Ismail’s Darah dan doa [Blood and prayer] about the Siliwangi Division, an elite division of the Indonesian army led by Captain Sudarto. The film is considered the first Indonesian film and 30 March, the date the film first began shooting, has been declared Indonesia’s National Day of Film. Darah dan doa may be the first film about the Indonesian National Revolution, but it has certainly not been the last.

It wasn’t Ismail’s last war film either. In Enam Djam di Jogja [Six Hours in Yogyakarta] he covered the 1949 siege of Yogyakarta known as the Serangan Umum 1 Maret 1949 (“General Offensive of 1 March 1949”). The choice to depict this particular offensive is remarkable from a Dutch perspective.

After Yogyakarta was taken by Dutch soldiers during Operation Crow, Indonesian freedom fighters launched an offensive in the early morning of 1 March 1949. They managed to regain control of the city, but after six hours they withdrew. On paper this seemed like a defeat, but in Indonesian popular culture this offensive is remembered as an ideological tipping point in the struggle for independence, as a soldier in the film concludes: “The news of our attack will echo through the rest of the world, until it reaches the United Nations”.

National identity

During Suharto’s New Order (1966-1968), Ismail was hailed as the “father of Indonesian cinema”, partly due to the nationalistic subjects of his work. According to Indonesian film critic Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu, the earliest post-independence films not only set an example of what Indonesia’s national cinema should be, but also established the Indonesian “us,” who fought against the imperialist “them”. The first wave of film perjuangan ended halfway through the sixties, but a new wave appeared during Suharto’s era and rolled on into the early 1990s.

Typical of the New Order film perjuangan, as film scholar Eric Sasono has observed, is the focus on heroes and heroism to affirm national identity. In Indonesian B-movies about the war of independence that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, and even today, the Dutch are often stereotypically represented as violent, rude and immoral. Indonesians on the other hand are represented as polite, pious and typical heroes of the people […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)