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Restoring Usmar Ismail’s ‘Tiga Dara’
(Courtesy of Pbs
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(Courtesy of Pbs.Twimg.Com)
On Aug. 11 this year, legendary director Usmar Ismail’s next restored feature film following Lewat Djam Malam (After the Curfew) will hit theaters. The film is titled Tiga Dara (Three Girls).
At this year’s TEDx event in Jakarta, Alex Sihar, a film enthusiast and head of Konfiden Foundation, told a story about restoring Lewat Djam Malam, a legendary Indonesian film from film director Usmar Ismail.
One part of the presentation that caught my attention happened at the end.
In 2012, while he was giving a presentation at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film was chosen as part of the World Classics Cinema program, a man from the audience interrupted him.
“Son, that’s not just Usmar Ismail’s film,” said the man, who turned out to be the 79-year-old Pierre Rissient, a renowned film critic and curator. “The film was written by one of the biggest writers in Southeast Asia, named Asrul Sani.”
What did Alex think of the interruption?
“That didn’t just feel like a punch, it was like a kick.” Earlier, he sadly commented on the ravaged celluloid tapes of Lewat Djam Malam: “That’s my history. Why does it look like this?”
We’ve heard iterations of this story before. From islands to traditional dances, Indonesia is often embroiled in a conflict over its heritage, a heritage that didn’t feel like ours when it was.
Unrestrained words like “Theft!” and “our heritage stolen!” often populate raucous discussions. How often do these debates actually culminate in a real overhaul of thinking; that our culture is ours not because someone else is trying to nick it? Can we share Alex’s pain from the kick?
From his grave, Usmar Ismail, known for his intricate films and his esteemed reputation as Indonesia’s finest director, has been testing our sense of ownership for some time now.
Back in the 1950s, he provoked his audiences by making Lewat Djam Malam, giving a glimpse of what Indonesia looked like after its struggle for independence — and that was when preserving history through art wasn’t a totally foreign concept. Then he did it with his eyes closed as his film was resurrected and screened all throughout Indonesia in 2012.
And on Aug. 11 this year, you may or may not prove him wrong as his next feature film after Lewat Djam Malam has been restored and is ready to be screened in theaters. The film is titled Tiga Dara (Three Girls), first released in 1957.
Through Perusahaan Film Indonesia Nasional that he chaired, Tiga Dara was the movie that Usmar Ismail made (had to make?) to rake in cash to support the losses he’d incurred after making several arthouse, war-based films.
But despite Usmar’s earlier reservations, critical retrospectives for Tiga Dara have been largely positive; up there on the same shelf alongside Darah dan Doa (Blood and Prayers) and Lewat Djam Malam.
As a musical film, Tiga Dara is a drama of the relationship between three sisters — Nunung, Nana and Neni (played by actresses Chitra Dewi, Mieke Wijaya and Indriati Iskak, respectively), who live with their grandmother.
Like most of Ismail’s dramatic films, conflict runs as a core engine and Tiga Dara is no different.
Overseen by SA Films, the restoration project for Tiga Dara took place in the film-restoration laboratory L’Immagine Ritrovata, located in Bologna, Italy. With the cost reportedly reaching €260,000 (including the cost to digitally restore the film into 4K resolution, done by PT Render Digital Indonesia), this heavy project wasn’t just a headache for the folks at finance; it was also a headache for the technicians.
From encountering problems like “tear and dust”, in which images get blurry and compromised from decay to a lack of appropriate coloring, dust and scratches and missing clips (and going through this regimen repeatedly), restoring Tiga Dara and thus, a fragment of Indonesia’s cultural proof, wasn’t easy.
Turns out Tiga Dara was one of Usmar Ismail’s commercially successful films, attracting a massive audience. The film was screened for eight consecutive weeks.
If the restoration project didn’t pan out, would Tiga Dara be able to stake its claim as one of Indonesia’s most daring films?
“One thing that this restoration project confirms: There are Indonesian citizens who care about the legacy that our cinema has left us, and are ready to take care and serve it to the public. And there aren’t a few of these people around,” said Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu, editor-in-chief of the Indonesian film website, Cinema Poetica.
The “people” that he mentioned may work at the Jakarta-based institution called Sinematek Indonesia, currently the only place where Indonesian films are archived.
The ravaged celluloid tape of Tiga Dara is housed in this place. Despite the dwindling quality — vinegar syndrome, where ageing tapes get degraded everyday — and the lost films, Sinematek is the only place whose mission statement is to preserve Indonesian films as cultural artefacts, or time-capsules, if you will.
Citing organizations like Kineforum (a mini-theater in Cikini, Central Jakarta), Adrian said: “There have been a lot of people who have pushed for [film archiving], whether for commercial or cultural reasons, but there remain just a few who operate for the appreciation of classic movies.”
In this case, what is Tiga Dara’s legacy? It isn’t “that old film that earned extra credit for being really old”.
“Tiga Dara highlights the generational shift or relationship between opposite genders at that time, which is still relevant until now,” Adrian said. This may seem a little heavy-handed, but Tiga Dara can also showcase things as simple as, say, the dress, the setting, and the Indonesian vernacular.
And, of course, the music. One of Indonesia’s finest sons, Saiful Bahri, the main composer for Tiga Dara, was responsible for the film winning the 1960 Indonesia Film Festival for best musical arrangement.
Now with the original soundtrack revisited by several musicians — thanks to the music archiving group Irama Nusantara — Tiga Dara has inspired people who truly believe in Indonesia’s history. And if that’s not something all of us can get behind to claim ownership of what’s ours, I don’t know what is.
