XII - Politics of melodrama in Indonesian cinema

Summary

Some years ago I was on a panel discussing Asian cinemas at the Melbourne Film Festival with Tuti Indra Malaon, arguably one of Indonesia's greatest melodramatic actresses, and Teguh Karya, probably Indonesia's most famous living director. The festival had, the previous night, shown their film Ibunda (Mother) (Teguh Karya, 1985), starring Tuti in the title role as the mother. One Australian woman, for whom this was the first encounter with Indonesian cinema, speaking from the floor thanked Tuti and Teguh profusely for making this film, which she said had “entered her dreams last night.” She was grateful because of the way in which the awful conflicts were all magically resolved in the last crucial minutes of the film. In her effusive endorsement of Ibunda, she had opened up the vexed question of the source of the melodramatic pleasure: Does it lie in the expressive excess of conflict (and its attendant sorrow, loss, and pain) or in the reassuring escapism of happy endings? Is it a genre of acquiescence or of resistance, of expressing difference or securing indifference?

This chapter, as a tentative first effort (in the English language, at any rate) to look at melodrama as a genre in Indonesian cinema, will not presume to answer these wider theoretical questions. But rather the questions are there to mark the common grounds on which inquiries about melodrama in different societies can be based and how the insights emerging out of Western theories may inform, and be informed by, work on other cinemas.