Garin Nugroho, on his way to finding voice<\/p>\n
By Jane Freebury<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): Garin Nugroho looks bemused. He has been having
\na bit of a tough time. Local audiences pinned such expectations
\non his film Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang (And the Moon Dances), the
\nfavorite Indonesian entrant at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in
\nJuly, that he has since borne the brunt of bruised hopes.<\/p>\n
But among the Indonesian filmmakers whose work was entered in
\nthe festival, it is Garin who is the \"director\". His work has a
\nsingular quality. You could say that he is on his way to finding
\na voice -- financial backers permitting -- or that he is slowly
\nbuilding an audience. He can take comfort in the fact that recent
\nscreenings of Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang at Taman Ismail Marzuki were
\nfull to overflowing. He is the Indonesian filmmaker who could
\nbecome a name director, with a signature that signified a set of
\ncharacteristics in the same way as audiences have come to expect
\nspecial qualities in the films of established directors.<\/p>\n
A film by Garin Nugroho could flag the message to expect
\ndistinctive treatment of the contrast between old and new,
\ntraditional and contemporary. For others it might simply flag the
\nmessage \"quirky\".<\/p>\n
He has just completed a sixty-minute documentary for Japanese
\ntelevision NHK about the street children in the Malioboro area of
\nYogyakara.<\/p>\n
A Fairytale about Freedom draws from a well-known Indonesian
\nfairy tale about the tiny defenseless creatures that must survive
\nalongside the tiger and the elephant. He also continues to teach
\nat the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ), to write, and to make
\ncommercials and music videos.<\/p>\n
His 1994 feature Surat Untuk Bidadari (Letter for an Angel) is
\nbeing distributed in Germany, Austria and Sweden as an art film.
\nHis film Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang will be screened at the Tokyo
\nInternational Film Festival this month, the first Indonesian film
\nto be accepted for the international section. It will go to
\nShanghai in November, and has been invited to festivals in Hawaii
\nand Nantes, France.<\/p>\n
Next year he will do some sinetron, making telemovie
\nadaptations of some of his short stories like (The) Student and
\n(the) Woman. The story is about a young man who cannot
\nconcentrate on his studies because of his desire for a beautiful
\nwoman. A kiss is wrested from her, but the outcome has a twist.
\nAnother story, San Francisco, is about a couple in Kalimantan who
\ncollect Coca-Cola bottle tops in hope of winning that big
\noverseas trip to the city on the bay that Tony Bennett warbles
\nabout in his timeless song I Left My heart in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
This month selected writings of his are being published as an
\nanthology of essays on film and television. Kekuasaan dan Hiburan
\n(Power and Entertainment), is drawn mostly from 10 years of
\nGarin's contributions to Kompas daily and the now defunct Tempo
\nmagazine. The eye-catching cover is from a work by Agus Suwage.
\nIt depicts two headless figures (dressed in the audio-visual
\nscreen primaries of red, yellow and blue) who are wrestling over
\na single disembodied head, which appears to have swapped places
\nwith a clock face that rolls around in mid-space. At the moment
\nit is only available in Bahasa Indonesian.<\/p>\n
He turned a story he wrote while in high school into a play in
\n1982. The play, Garin's first experience as a director, is a
\nparable about a king who realizes that his people believe more in
\nthe computer than in his royal self. The electronic upstart was
\nthe king's rival, but to destroy it would also destroy the
\ninfrastructure of his country. The king chooses to destroy the
\ncomputer, plunging his country back to the Dark Ages.<\/p>\n
Garin used the story to illustrate \"how come\" he graduated in
\nsociology of law from university but then turned to film making.
\nHe mentions another milestone: He was talking with the pastor of
\nthe Catholic college which he had attended about the difficult
\nchoice between more law studies at Gajah Mada University and
\nfilm making at IKJ. He had not stated his preference, simply
\nimplied it by saying that the IKJ facilities of the newly opened
\nschool were not yet good.<\/p>\n
\"Forget the facilities,\" advised this mentor, \"Just go
\n(there).\"<\/p>\n
The rest, as it is said, is history. By 1986, Garin was a
\nprize-winning documentary filmmaker. By 1991, he had become a
\nprize-winning feature filmmaker with his Cinta Dalam Sepotong
\nRoti (Love in a Slice of Bread). Garin calls this a \"road film\"
\nbecause it entails a trip across Java and an encounter between
\ncultures, the old and the new. It is a significant coincidence
\nthat Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti stands among the last \"Best\"
\npictures, being recipient of this prize at the Indonesian Film
\nFestival in 1991. The last Indonesian Film Festival was held in
\n1992. This year Garin received recognition for his music video
\nwork, an award from Video Musik Indonesia (TVRI).<\/p>\n
His achievement are impressive, but Garin looks a bit
\nperplexed across the table in a restaurant. He has had to ride
\nthe choppy waves in the wake of the Asia-Pacific Film Festival,
\nand fend off the comments, some throw-away, some uninformed, that
\nhave been made about Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang. In the face of such
\ncriticism he has had to maintain faith in his creative
\ncapacities. It is okay for the director to be \"a little bit
\negoist,\" we agree.<\/p>\n
According to Garin, he is used to criticism. From a large and
\ncultured Javanese family, he grew up among seven siblings who
\nexercised their cultural expression with parents who exercised
\ntheir critical faculties on this output in a productive manner. Most
\nof his brothers and sisters are professionals involved in the
\narts or humanities. Doing law at university then becoming a film
\ndirector is not unusual in a family where a brother who lectured
\nin ceramics at the Bandung Institute of Technology has turned to
\ndance performance and another brother trained in accounting has
\nturned to sociology and television program research.<\/p>\n
Who are his favorite directors? Garin chose five. There is
\nRobert Altman, who from The Wedding through to Pret-a-Porter has
\nmade idiosyncratic Hollywood films which draw attention to
\nfoibles in contemporary U.S. mores. There is Australian director
\nPeter Weir who is particularly skilled at inventing atmosphere
\n(remember Witness, The Last Wave) to make the flesh crawl.<\/p>\n
Woody Allen is another favorite, as is Japanese director Ozu
\n(\"His films are at once simple and complex.\") And lately he has
\nbeen most impressed by the creative verve of Polish director
\nKrzystof Kieslowki of Three Colours Red, Blue and White.<\/p>\n
Of all the aspects of film -- production, exhibition and
\ndistribution -- he finds the lack of audience appreciation in
\nIndonesia the most frustrating. The answer was surprising from a
\nfilmmaker who had to take Bulan to Singapore for processing and
\nwhose award-winning feature Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti only lasted
\na few days on local screens.<\/p>\n
Responding to comments that his film Bulan is either too long,
\ntoo slow or too ambiguous, he says that generally held concepts
\nabout what is good cinema are far too narrow here. They are the
\noutcome of a saturation diet of Hollywood action films that have
\nblocked audience interest in any other type of screen
\nentertainment.<\/p>\n
\"He wanted to change the world,\" says Garin of his publisher
\nfather who ran a small public library of Javanese literature.<\/p>\n
Perhaps a filmmaker will fare better -- he just wants to alter
\nsome perceptions. People have told him he is \"stupid\" to enter
\nfilm production during this \"crisis\" era. That may be just the
\npoint -- that this is the time to do it. What else can you expect
\nfrom someone whose dictum is \"Be adventurous\"?<\/p>",
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