On New Indonesian Cinema - Scholar David Hanan reports on two adaptations of novels by Pramoedya Ananta Toer - BUMI MANUSIA (Hanung Bramantyo) and PERBURUAN (Richard Oh)

Pramoedya Ananta Toer in the 1980s

Two Indonesian films, based on novels by the internationally renowned left-wing Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006), were released in cinemas throughout Indonesia in the third week of August, around the time of Indonesian Independence Day celebrations. As film critic for the quality Indonesian weekly Tempo, Leila Chudori, wrote last week, the fact that these two films could have been produced in Indonesia, and then released widely throughout the country by the two major cinema chains is at least one indication that Indonesia wishes to become a country which prioritizes freedom of expression, and as such this is something to be celebrated. Under the Suharto New Order regime, Pramoedya’s novels were banned on account of their alleged ‘Marxist-Leninist content’, and you could be sent to jail if you attempted to sell them. Tempo, in fact, devoted nine substantial pages to the release of the films, including—in addition to Leila Chudori’s reviews—background information about the history of their production, including information about negotiations with Pramoedya’s family over rights, and Pramoedya’s own earlier involvement, before his death, in various discussions of film rights to his novels. 

Pramoedya, whose novels have now been translated into well over 40 languages, was a member of Lekra (Institute of People’s Culture) – an arts organisation that advocated socialist realism in both the visual and literary arts. Pramoedya was arrested in October 1965, at the time of the mass killings and imprisonment of communist rank and file (and numerous ‘suspected’ communists, and others) that followed the abortive army purge of 30 September 1965. Without trial, but due to his known left-wing views and his membership of Lekra, Pramoedya was  jailed for 14 years by the Suharto New Order regime, initially in Java but then on the prison island of Buru in the Moluccas. Even after his release, Pramoedya remained largely persona non gratain Suharto’s Indonesia,  and not allowed to travel in Indonesia outside of Jakarta, nor to travel overseas, despite international acclaim for his books since the 1980s.

The two films released in August 2019 are Bumi Manusia (based on the novel of the same title, known in its English translation as This Earth of Mankind, the first in the series of four ‘Buru Quartet’ novels, all written while Pramoedya was a prisoner on Buru island), and Perburuan (The Hunt), based on an early novel by Pramoedya, first published in 1952. Perburuan was drafted in 1947-8 at the time Pramoedya was a prisoner of the Dutch, during the Indonesian struggle for independence. Although Bumi Manusia was published, deliberately, around independence day in August 1980, it was banned in mid-1981– even after a positive reception in the Indonesian literary world, and ten printings by its publisher. Both film adaptations have been produced by the same company, Falcon Pictures, under the leadership of a young woman producer, Frederica.

Promo for Bumi Manusia, with director, Hanung Bramantyo, and 

Sha Ine Febriyanti (Nyai Ontosoroh) on the right.

The epic, three-hour Bumi Manusia, directed by Hanung Bramantyo,depicts the growing awareness on the part of its young, Javanese narrator-protagonist, Minke —‘a native’ of aristocratic background who is attending a Dutch school near Surabaya—at the intensity and severity of class and racial discrimination under Dutch colonialism. This awareness is deepened, particularly, as Minke gradually comes close to—indeed becomes a part of—a Dutch Indonesian family, headed by a Javanese peasant woman of no education but great percipience, Nyai Ontosoroh,  sold as a young girl by her impoverished father to his employer (Nyai means “concubine”). Nyai Ontosoroh is now managing her Dutch ‘husband’s’  estate and business affairs, after her ‘husband’, Herman Mellema, who has never contracted a marriage with her, has succumbed to a daily routine of visits to a local whorehouse where he languishes for much of the time in an alcoholic and opium-induced stupor. Both novel and film show the extent of racial discrimination, whether it be through the sniping of school friends or insistent shouted demands by Dutch officials that ‘natives’ should not dare to speak the Dutch language, or discrimination within employment, and in the legal system, whether in its inequitable laws or in the behaviour of its judges. 

As in the novel, at the centre of the film is Nyai Ontosoroh, who, in her maternal strength persists in confronting all exigencies that confront her and her mixed-blood daughter, Annelies, whether internal conflicts in the family or in her family’s relation to Dutch authorities or Dutch power. In both novel and film, racial and class discrimination are patently obvious, so rather than being seen as Marxist works, for one does not need a Marxist analysis to see class and racial distinctions under colonialism, the uniqueness of the film and the novel is the tribute they pay to women, as a key source of strength and integrity within the family, even in the Dutch colonial period. The character of the frequently outspoken Nyai Ontosoroh is impressively played (by stage and screen actress Sha Ine Febriyanti), so that Nyai Ontosoroh is the real centre of the film, giving the film a feminist dimension, quite appropriate to Pramoedya's novel. 

Sha Ine Febriyanti, Iqbaal Ramadhan

The film has been criticised by some on the grounds that the lead male actor, Iqbaal Ramadhan, who plays the 19-years old Minke, is not really adequate to the role. Iqbaal, who had appeared in two particularly successful teen movies and who has also worked as a singer in a band, was chosen almost certainly for commercial reasons, as well as his age. Objections have also been raised about some of the sets, particularly the supposedly 20-years old nineteenth century house, where Nyai Ontosoroh and her family live on the estate, which, with its newly-built feel and its sparkling coats of paint, seemed quite unrealistic, and distracts from any convincing sense of period the film achieves elsewhere.

Obviously films based on long novels pose numerous problems of adaptation. While it is now quite some time since I read Pramoedya's novel, I do think that the adaptation achieved by the film's scriptwriters did manage to achieve a clarity of exposition in its focus on the novel's key themes: the problems posed by colonialism in terms of the pervasive racism it sets up, whether inherent in  personal or social relations, or indeed also frequently in legal situations. According to reports, the main script-writer on the film, Salman Aristo, spent two and a half years on the project, and consulted widely during the various stages of drafting the script. There are two climaxes in the film. First, the trial over the death of Herman Mellema, and then the later court scenes of the tribunal in Surabaya examining the question of whether Nyai Ontosoroh’s mixed-blood daughter, Annelies, should be forcibly moved to Holland to live with the family of her Dutch step-brother by a previous marriage of her late father, thus breaking up the family in Java, at the same time making it possible for the step-brother to take over the estate. Both brought these themes out very well and with great cumulative power.

 

Perburuan Poster Launch, Richard Oh far left

The second film, Perburuan (The Hunt), deals with a quite different period, the Japanese occupation of the Indonesian islands (February 1942 – August 1945), a period which Pramoedya himself experienced as a young man. Both film and novel deal with the aftermath of a rebellion by Javanese members of a PETA military unit against their Japanese commanders. PETA (Pembela Tanah Air) or ‘Defenders of the Homeland’ was a military organization set up in October 1943 by the Japanese army to train young Indonesians to fight alongside Japanese forces in any possible invasion by the Allies to retake the Indonesian islands, given that the likely outcome would be not only the defeat of the Japanese, but the re-imposition of Dutch colonialism. 

Much of the film is taken up with depicting a manhunt by Japanese for one particular Indonesian PETA member, Raden Hardo, on the run from the Japanese for six months - from the time of the rebellion in February 1945 to the end of World War II in the Pacific, in August of the same year. Perburuanwas published by Penguin Books in 1991, under the title The Fugitive in a translation by Australian, Max Lane, who also translated the whole of the Buru Quartet.

Perburuan, directed by Chinese Indonesian, Richard Oh, is an unusually nuanced film for a film set during a war. Although there are scenes of violence and killings, Perburuan—like other films by Richard Oh—is imbued with an abiding sense of contemplation of the implications of what is depicted. With the Japanese initially welcomed in Java, having driven out the Dutch colonisers, but imposing over time an increasingly cruel and repressive regime, stripping the country of its resources, human and natural, to fuel their war effort—for Javanese World War II in Java was a period of confusion as to loyalties, filled with unclear, fraught and changing allegiances, allegiances that could change in a matter of minutes. While Hardo and his colleagues in the rebellion are pursued through jungle and cornfields, and along rivers, some local Javanese community leaders assist the Japanese in the hunt, and some seemingly loyal PETA members dissemble in their relations with the Japanese. 

The film then avoids the usual stereotyped oppositions characteristic of a war film, and implies the ambiguities within Indonesia’s own history. At the same time as the film lays out the moral ambiguities of the situation, the rich natural environment in which the film is shot, much of it at night time, heightens the sense of absurdity and irony of the continuing hunt. And rather than concentrating on strategic action and heroism in its central characters, for long stretches of its narrative it mimes the confusion within their over-taxed minds, using interior monologues or dialogue carried on between the fugitives—sometimes between characters within quite different spaces, sometimes not knowing to whom they are talking or listening, or dissembling as to who they themselves are. These are stratagems used at times by directors such as Alain Resnais, but are rarely seen—if at all—in an Indonesian film.

Hanung Bramantyo (right), director of Bumi Manusia, is currently one of Indonesia’s most successful and capable commercial directors. Apart from Bumi Manusia, he has directed at least thirty features since 2004. One of his most successful films, Ayat-ayat Cinta(Verses of Love, 2008), based on a best-selling Indonesian novel, is, like the novel, a lugubrious romantic melodrama set in Indonesian graduate student circles in Cairo, which in the course of a convoluted plot—involving inter-racial romance, abduction, rape, and a court case presided over by Egyptian judges, and even a death sentence—addresses various possibilities within Islam, in particular polygamy and the notion of taaruf(where a woman proposes marriage via an intermediary). Ayat-ayat Cintaachieved an audience of 3.7 million. 

Hanung also made popular historical films (among them a film about Sukarno) and a quite serious film of considerable all round quality, Perempuan Berkalung Sorban(The Woman with the Turban), based on a novel by an Indonesian woman writer (Abidah El Khalieqy), which explores discrimination against daughters—and women in general—in Islamic boarding schools in Java. As a director Hanung appears to work very quickly. His previous film, the two-and-a-half-hour spectacular ‘historical’ epic about the legendary early seventeenth century Central Javanese leader, Sultan Agung, Tahta, Perjuangan, Cinta(Sultan Agung: Throne, Struggles, Love) was released in August 2018, only a year before Bumi Manusia. Sultan Agungwon the prize for the best directed Indonesian film of 2018 at the prestigious Jogja-Netpac Asian Film Festival. 

Sumatran born Richard Oh, director of Perburuan, is a writer, publisher, entrepreneur, bookshop owner and filmmaker. Given the priority he has given to his other numerous activities, his output as a filmmaker has been relatively small, but distinguished. His 2006 film,Koper(The Lost Suitcase) is a poetic work about the mundane routines and the perpetually unfulfilled hopes of lower middle class Jakartans. This film dealt with the difficulties of living in one of the world’s most crowded and polluted cities, but it does not emphasize the most extreme conditions, rather it wryly evokes the subjective experience of the broad masses of lower middle-class people, a very large social group, indeed. 

As reported in Tempo, Pramoedya’s daughter, Astuti Ananta Toer, recalls that at one stage, when Pramoedya was still alive, Oliver Stone attempted to negotiate rights to film the novel Bumi Manusia, presumably offering considerable sums of money for the rights. Pramoedya declined the offer, his reply being that the novel really needed to be filmed by an Indonesian director. Whatever controversies arise over this first film of Bumi Manusia, produced entirely by an Indonesian team, Pramoedya was acting with a characteristic insistence on the importance of local cultural and historical knowledge, and was certainly right to do so. 

David Hanan

Biographical Note

In 2017 David Hanan published (with Palgrave Macmillan) Cultural Specificity in Indonesian Film: Diversity in Unity: click here for publishing information. He is presently completing a second manuscript, a companion volume to the first, entitled Moments in Indonesian Film History: Film and Popular Culture in a Developing Society. He is currently an Honorary Fellow with the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne