Scenes from a studio

Anissa S. Febrina ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Tue, 06/16/2009 10:22 AM  |  Features

Light touch: Yasin copies details from a movie poster onto a sheet, to be hung outside cinemas across the city.

In the cramped, dimly lit painting studios of Jakarta’s kampungs, artists armed with large pieces of white cloth and wall paint are struggling to survive in one of the less glamorous parts of the movie business.

They are painters of under-appreciated art works – art works that give us a glimpse of the latest movies screening at the cinema, tempting us to book a seat on an easy Sunday. They are the last of their kind, as digital printing technology is beginning to displace their work.

Yasin is one of the painters. On a recent afternoon, the middle-aged man put in some overtime – during what was meant to be a weekend break – in Fausta studio in West Jakarta’s Slipi.

Bare-chested, he painted for hours, perspiring from the heat trapped in the second story of a house packed with the wooden frames holding the “canvases” on which Yasin daubed his brush.

“This is due next week. That’s why I’m working on a Sunday,” he said. He spoke without taking his eyes off the details in a lion’s face, which forms part of a poster for the sequel to the children’s adventure movie Bridge to Terabithia.

With his left hand clutching a printout of the movie’s poster, Yasin dipped medium-sized brushes into small buckets of wall paint. He mixed in a little bit of terracotta and a touch of white, until he had the right hue for the lion’s nose.

His easel is the floor and his canvas a two-by-four-meter sheet of white fabric of the cheapest kind stretched between two wooden frames. One sheet bears the movie title and names of cast members; the one he’s working on depicts a princess and supporting characters in a meadow. The two pieces will be sewn together and hung outside cinemas across the city.

Yasin and his co-worker had been working on their posters since the day before. They have a week to complete four copies.

“It takes more time to finish a banner if there are lots of details in them,” said Yasin, who started painting cinema banners and posters some 20 years ago. He can still recall his first work, Anthony Quinn’s Tigers Don’t Sleep.

“A simple one can actually be done in a day.”

What is simple and what is not?

“Posters with only one or two characters are a piece of cake. Something like this is a challenge,” Yasin said, applying detailed strokes to the rough outlines he finished yesterday.

Highlights in each character’s hair, shadows on their faces and glints in their eyes – these are the small elements that combine to make a cinema painting come to life.

Last days: Artists such as Yasin are among the last painters of movie banners, as digital printing technology starts to force the industry to a close.

Yasin paused in his painting. “Sorry, I was wrong,” he said. “Now, this is what you call a challenge.”
He took out a print version of a poster for adventure-comedy Night at the Museum. There are at least a dozen characters in the painting, each with colorful detailed costumes – not to mention a dinosaur, a spaceship and all sorts of other paraphernalia.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s simple or complicated. The price is the same,” tossed in Karyo, another painter. For each poster they finish, each artist receives Rp 40,000, just slightly more than the price for a regular cinema ticket.

As Karyo said, their fee doesn’t change whether a painting requires a few hours or a few days.
Tirta, the owner of studio, said he couldn’t afford to pay his painters any more.

“Orders don’t come regularly, the prices of materials are rising and cinema operators are only paying a meager sum,” he complained.

They all have seen better days – the golden days of the cinema industry and the heyday of hand-painted theater banners and posters, when orders flowed in from theaters and production houses.

“In the early ‘90s, I could buy gold [jewelry] every week with my earnings,” Yasin recalled.
Nowadays, the fate of their profession hangs on a thread even though the national cinema industry is back on its feet again.

Fewer local production companies are choosing to advertise their movies with painted cinema banners and posters when digital printing technology offers instant results with only a slightly higher price.

“Sometimes, we need it fast and painting studios cannot provide that,” said Nuri Wuriya, who works for a Jakarta-based production house.

For the production company’s latest comedy release, they ordered 60 banners from a printing company in East Jakarta, each for Rp 230,000. For hand-painted posters, they would have paid between Rp 180,000 and Rp 200,000.

As in most cases, human hands cannot compete with machines when it comes to speed, accuracy and efficiency. But, also as in most cases, those hands have an added value that machines can’t offer.

It is indeed quite a task, hand-painting cinema banners and posters.

First, the fabric must be stretched on wooden frames. The artists then sketch on grid boxes to help them transfer images from the master printed poster at the right scale and proportion. In the old days, Karyo explained, painters used to project the master poster onto the banner using a flashlight, but now they rely on the grid.

Tools of the trade: Cinema poster artists work with wall paint and sheets of cheap fabric, in cramped, dimly lit studios.

Then begins the easiest part: the lettering, or sketching the characters for the movie title, which will change with coloring.

Next come the images, sketched onto an already painted background. The main characters are done first, followed by the details, highlights and shadows. It’s pretty much the same technique that professional naturalist and realist painters apply.

Perhaps that is why in the past, painting cinema banners and posters was a kind of training ground for apprentice painters. The late maestro Affandi was one of them – he started out painting banners for a theater in Bandung.

But of course, Yasin, Karyo and their colleagues are not as fortunate as Affandi.

“We are just drawers. We are not artists,” Yasin said.

Another reality he faces is something they all know: Their profession is close to its dying days.

Where there were once about 20 painting studios in the city, only five survive. A studio in Central Jakarta does the giant banners for Senen’s Grand Theatre, while one in Depok receives the most orders from a chain cinema operator to be distributed nationwide.

The Depok studio is relatively large, with 10 workers. It belongs to Kemal Rachman, who aims to get an average of 150 to 300 banners a month for the painters to work on.

But the irregular and infrequent orders are only one of the problems leading to the end of the cinema banner and poster painting profession.

If they are the last of their kind, it is because there is no one young interested in taking up the job.
Most of the painters are older than 50, the last generation of painters who started their careers in the early 1980s. Unlike other professions that require craftsmanship and a talent for art, this business doesn’t run in the families. Or perhaps that was the choice of the father.

“Even if my son wanted to do this or had the talent, I wouldn’t let him,” Yasin said.

“Let us be the last. This profession is dying anyway.”

— Photos by Anissa S. Febrina

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