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Jakarta Post

The new law will put films back in the box

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you would have noticed that in terms of annual output, the Indonesian film industry has been growing exponentially

Thomas Barker and Veronica Kusuma (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Wed, September 9, 2009

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The new law will put films back in the box

U

nless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you would have noticed that in terms of annual output, the Indonesian film industry has been growing exponentially. For the first time, the market share of Indonesian films exceeded those from Hollywood by 55 percent to 45 percent this year. In Indonesia, where imported films have historically and consistently dominated the box office, this is no small victory.

The growth of the film industry over the past decade has been consistent with one fact: the complete absence of government regulation (interference or support) with the exception of post-production censorship. This fact alone should make any lawmaker wary of trying to regulate domestic film production. Films have not been free from controversy - Virgin (2004), Buruan Cium Gue (2004) and Lastri (unproduced) are examples that readily come to mind - but this is no cause for reintroducing regulations that read frighteningly similar to the rules imposed on filmmaking under the New Order.

The House of Representatives passed the film bill on Tuesday (Sept. 8). This came as a surprise to many in the film industry, since the Film Law was drafted without any prior consultation with active producers, directors and other relevant parties. In August, film stakeholders, including prominent film producers and filmmakers (Christine Hakim, Garin Nugroho, Mira Lesmana, Riri Riza, Chand Parwez and Deddy Mizwar just to name a few) held a press conference to announce their opposition to the law.

The film bill will do the same for movies that the Pornography Law has done for culture in general: delegitimize diversity and liberalism and give legal ammunition to moral conservatives.

The central problem with the proposed film law is that it reads like a reaction to the numerous social and cultural controversies of the past decade wrapped in the state's sad case of sour grapes at being left out of the film industry for so long. This is not a law drafted by a state serious about promoting a more mature and dialogue-based polity, nor one that supports creativity, free speech and cultural industries.

The second major problem with the law is that it continues the outdated and absurd isolation of film as a medium distinct from all other forms of media. When this distinction was established with the Dutch Colonial Administration's Film Ordinance, it was a reasonable assumption to make because film was the only pre-recorded audio-visual material in existence. Whilst our technological world has changed and now includes television, mobile phones and the Internet, progressive film laws continue to treat film as both separate and more influential than any other type of media.

The use of this "media influence" model, which treats the audience as cultural dupes in need of protection from unsavory images, remains the central paradigm of this new bill. It seeks to control film making so as to limit its scope of creative inquiry and representation. It is patronizing to both filmmakers and audiences and assumes they have no moral responsibility in what they make or watch.

This law gives greater legal authority to those who find content objectionable. It seeks to circumscribe the limits of what can and cannot be filmed in order to preempt potential protest and thus avoid situations in which the state would have to deliberate. Instead of protecting film and the dialogue it can open, it seeks to limit what a filmmaker can imagine on screen.

This goes right to the heart of democracy in Indonesia. The law is being rewritten to appease morally conservative elements in society instead of promoting and protecting the diversity and plurality of ideas and cultures that film can covey on screen.

The draft contains some progressive articles on film censorship (that the Censorship Board will no longer cut films but provide recommendations to filmmakers to cut the film themselves and the implementation of a film classification system) but the regulations governing the film business read as they did under the New Order. A dangerous re-bureaucratization of film making is proposed, stipulating prior approval for films titles and scripts, permission for importing and exporting film, and the compulsory registration of all film making activities. Compulsory written contracts will formalize the relationship between the film industry and the Ministry.

If this is simply a means to put to work idol functionaries in the department, this is a horrible way to do so. It bespeaks of the department's lack of innovation and constructive activity, and heralds their return to the easier gate-keeping function all too reminiscent of the repressive New Order.

Import quotas and minimum screen time allocation for local productions (50 percent; Article 32) seem good on paper, but the lesson of this flawed policy should have been learnt long ago. Local productions have achieved a 55 percent market share without the help of a screen time obligation. Any system of quotas, either on imports or screen time, will adversely affect audiences, who will have less choice at the cinema and will logically turn to other sources of entertainment.

Import quotas will only encourage the import of commercially promising films at the expense of smaller films for specialized audiences. Screen quotas are dangerous because they could threaten already struggling local cinemas by forcing them to play films that might not sell. It would be farcical if productivity in the film industry declines to 30 films a year.

Moreover, such a blanket law would preclude the establishment of art house cinema for example, which might source its films from overseas, or a cinema dedicated to Indian or Chinese films. Cases of local films being pulled prematurely might seem to now be protected, but it is an industry-wide 50 percent quota, and will not protect individual films.

Although supposedly written in the spirit of reform, the film bill reads like it is meant to replace Law No. 8 /1992. It does not address the changes in the media landscape over the past two decades nor the realities of globalization and democracy. Instead it attempts to return film to the box of control and repression from which it has only recently escaped.

The most glaring absence from this law is the lack of state support for the film industry. Provisions are provided for compulsory archiving of material, and the government would continue to promote Indonesian films overseas. But there is no concrete institutional support that would strengthen or even sustain the film industry, either in terms of reaching audiences who do not have access to Indonesian films, subsidizing film production, establishing facilities that would help the industry or promoting film literacy. The only institution that is strengthened is the censorship board.

The government cannot have it both ways. It cannot hope that film will become a vital and productive cultural domain while at the time treating it as a cultural threat and thus subjecting it to a disproportionate amount of control. If this law is pushed through it will be a victory for reactionary politics and a severe defeat to a film industry that has worked so hard to recover from financial and cultural restraints.

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