Garin Nugroho, on his way to finding voice

Garin Nugroho, on his way to finding voice

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): Garin Nugroho looks bemused. He has been having
a bit of a tough time. Local audiences pinned such expectations
on his film Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang (And the Moon Dances), the
favorite Indonesian entrant at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in
July, that he has since borne the brunt of bruised hopes.

But among the Indonesian filmmakers whose work was entered in
the festival, it is Garin who is the "director". His work has a
singular quality. You could say that he is on his way to finding
a voice -- financial backers permitting -- or that he is slowly
building an audience. He can take comfort in the fact that recent
screenings of Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang at Taman Ismail Marzuki were
full to overflowing. He is the Indonesian filmmaker who could
become a name director, with a signature that signified a set of
characteristics in the same way as audiences have come to expect
special qualities in the films of established directors.

A film by Garin Nugroho could flag the message to expect
distinctive treatment of the contrast between old and new,
traditional and contemporary. For others it might simply flag the
message "quirky".

He has just completed a sixty-minute documentary for Japanese
television NHK about the street children in the Malioboro area of
Yogyakara.

A Fairytale about Freedom draws from a well-known Indonesian
fairy tale about the tiny defenseless creatures that must survive
alongside the tiger and the elephant. He also continues to teach
at the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ), to write, and to make
commercials and music videos.

His 1994 feature Surat Untuk Bidadari (Letter for an Angel) is
being distributed in Germany, Austria and Sweden as an art film.
His film Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang will be screened at the Tokyo
International Film Festival this month, the first Indonesian film
to be accepted for the international section. It will go to
Shanghai in November, and has been invited to festivals in Hawaii
and Nantes, France.

Next year he will do some sinetron, making telemovie
adaptations of some of his short stories like (The) Student and
(the) Woman. The story is about a young man who cannot
concentrate on his studies because of his desire for a beautiful
woman. A kiss is wrested from her, but the outcome has a twist.
Another story, San Francisco, is about a couple in Kalimantan who
collect Coca-Cola bottle tops in hope of winning that big
overseas trip to the city on the bay that Tony Bennett warbles
about in his timeless song I Left My heart in San Francisco.

This month selected writings of his are being published as an
anthology of essays on film and television. Kekuasaan dan Hiburan
(Power and Entertainment), is drawn mostly from 10 years of
Garin's contributions to Kompas daily and the now defunct Tempo
magazine. The eye-catching cover is from a work by Agus Suwage.
It depicts two headless figures (dressed in the audio-visual
screen primaries of red, yellow and blue) who are wrestling over
a single disembodied head, which appears to have swapped places
with a clock face that rolls around in mid-space. At the moment
it is only available in Bahasa Indonesian.

He turned a story he wrote while in high school into a play in
1982. The play, Garin's first experience as a director, is a
parable about a king who realizes that his people believe more in
the computer than in his royal self. The electronic upstart was
the king's rival, but to destroy it would also destroy the
infrastructure of his country. The king chooses to destroy the
computer, plunging his country back to the Dark Ages.

Garin used the story to illustrate "how come" he graduated in
sociology of law from university but then turned to film making.
He mentions another milestone: He was talking with the pastor of
the Catholic college which he had attended about the difficult
choice between more law studies at Gajah Mada University and
film making at IKJ. He had not stated his preference, simply
implied it by saying that the IKJ facilities of the newly opened
school were not yet good.

"Forget the facilities," advised this mentor, "Just go
(there)."

The rest, as it is said, is history. By 1986, Garin was a
prize-winning documentary filmmaker. By 1991, he had become a
prize-winning feature filmmaker with his Cinta Dalam Sepotong
Roti (Love in a Slice of Bread). Garin calls this a "road film"
because it entails a trip across Java and an encounter between
cultures, the old and the new. It is a significant coincidence
that Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti stands among the last "Best"
pictures, being recipient of this prize at the Indonesian Film
Festival in 1991. The last Indonesian Film Festival was held in
1992. This year Garin received recognition for his music video
work, an award from Video Musik Indonesia (TVRI).

His achievement are impressive, but Garin looks a bit
perplexed across the table in a restaurant. He has had to ride
the choppy waves in the wake of the Asia-Pacific Film Festival,
and fend off the comments, some throw-away, some uninformed, that
have been made about Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang. In the face of such
criticism he has had to maintain faith in his creative
capacities. It is okay for the director to be "a little bit
egoist," we agree.

According to Garin, he is used to criticism. From a large and
cultured Javanese family, he grew up among seven siblings who
exercised their cultural expression with parents who exercised
their critical faculties on this output in a productive manner. Most
of his brothers and sisters are professionals involved in the
arts or humanities. Doing law at university then becoming a film
director is not unusual in a family where a brother who lectured
in ceramics at the Bandung Institute of Technology has turned to
dance performance and another brother trained in accounting has
turned to sociology and television program research.

Who are his favorite directors? Garin chose five. There is
Robert Altman, who from The Wedding through to Pret-a-Porter has
made idiosyncratic Hollywood films which draw attention to
foibles in contemporary U.S. mores. There is Australian director
Peter Weir who is particularly skilled at inventing atmosphere
(remember Witness, The Last Wave) to make the flesh crawl.

Woody Allen is another favorite, as is Japanese director Ozu
("His films are at once simple and complex.") And lately he has
been most impressed by the creative verve of Polish director
Krzystof Kieslowki of Three Colours Red, Blue and White.

Of all the aspects of film -- production, exhibition and
distribution -- he finds the lack of audience appreciation in
Indonesia the most frustrating. The answer was surprising from a
filmmaker who had to take Bulan to Singapore for processing and
whose award-winning feature Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti only lasted
a few days on local screens.

Responding to comments that his film Bulan is either too long,
too slow or too ambiguous, he says that generally held concepts
about what is good cinema are far too narrow here. They are the
outcome of a saturation diet of Hollywood action films that have
blocked audience interest in any other type of screen
entertainment.

"He wanted to change the world," says Garin of his publisher
father who ran a small public library of Javanese literature.

Perhaps a filmmaker will fare better -- he just wants to alter
some perceptions. People have told him he is "stupid" to enter
film production during this "crisis" era. That may be just the
point -- that this is the time to do it. What else can you expect
from someone whose dictum is "Be adventurous"?