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Jakarta Post

Richard Oh’s relentless pursuit of the enrichment of the mind

Richard OhRichard Oh finds his creative fuel through his love of books and casual chats on various topics with anyone he meets

Sebastian Partogi (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Fri, August 23, 2019

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Richard Oh’s relentless pursuit of the enrichment of the mind

Richard Oh

Richard Oh finds his creative fuel through his love of books and casual chats on various topics with anyone he meets.

Indonesian filmmaker Richard Oh takes his intellectual and creative pursuits very seriously.

“At home, he [Richard] reads books incessantly,” said his wife, novelist and writer Pratiwi Juliani.

Visitors of the Reading Room café in Kemang, South Jakarta, can usually spot 59-year-old Richard sitting in his favorite corner. Sometimes, he can be heard cussing and yelling at his computer screen as he plays online chess games against strangers thousands of kilometers away.

The cafe proves Pratiwi’s description of the avid-reading Richard. As its name suggests, it is a reading room filled with thousands of books from various genres and of different languages that visitors can read freely.

Reading various books and talking to a diverse range of people have turned Richard into a versatile conversationalist on various issues, ranging from climate change and human angst to the biographies of great writers and contemporary politics.

When Richard gets enthusiastic about a particular subject, his voice gets louder, accompanied by animated gestures. Richard said he enjoyed learning from other people in mutually enriching exchanges.

For Richard, the casual chats frequently come with a bonus. Supplementing his habit of reading and watching films, these chats also feed into his creative process as a filmmaker.

Richard’s film portfolio includes Koper (The Suitcase, 2006), Description Without Place (2011), Melancholy Is a Movement (2014), Terpana (Transfixed, 2016) and Love Is a Bird (2019).

Recently, Richard’s interest in books and filmmaking intersected again in a major way with the release of his latest movie, Perburuan (The Fugitive), which he wrote and directed based on a 1950 novel of the same name by late Indonesian novelist Pramoedya “Pram” Ananta Toer.

The film, produced by Falcon Pictures, premiered in Surabaya, East Java, and Jakarta in early August, starring Adipati Dolken, Ayushita, Ernest Samudra, Khiva Iskak and Michael Kho. The story centers on Indonesia’s battle against Japanese colonialists who occupied the archipelago in the 1940s.

Richard has long been aware of the highly celebrated yet controversial Pram, who was imprisoned during the New Order era for his sympathy for Lekra, a left-leaning arts collective during the country’s 1965 Communist Purge.

Pram’s novels first came into Richard’s possession in the late 1990s, the time when anticommunist dictator Soeharto’s New Order regime was at its peak and imprisoned anyone who possessed works that had connections with the banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) or its affiliations.

On the run: A scene from Richard Oh’s Perburuan (The Fugitive), which centers on Indonesia’s battle against Japanese colonialists in the 1940s.
On the run: A scene from Richard Oh’s Perburuan (The Fugitive), which centers on Indonesia’s battle against Japanese colonialists in the 1940s.

“I asked my friend who went to Senen Market — which used to sell books by left-leaning publication Haste Mitra in secret during the New Order — to buy his [Pram’s] Buru tetralogy for me,” he says.

He was referring to four books written by Pram during his imprisonment in the notorious Buru Island in Maluku, namely Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind), Jejak Langkah (Footsteps), Anak Semua Bangsa (Child of All Nations) and Rumah Kaca (House of Glass).

The tetralogy was distributed by various underground groups during the New Order era. Australian Indonesianist Max Lane also helped Pram’s tetralogy gain international recognition by translating them into English and publishing them through Penguin Random House.

“The books highlight Indonesia’s perpetual problems, portraying incidents of injustice, racism against Chinese-Indonesians, book raids and book-banning. Post-Soeharto, I felt a higher sense of urgency to study these issues,” Richard says.

At the beginning of the Reform era, Richard, who has a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin in the United States, derived inspiration from Pram and other international authors to craft his own prose.

He has written three novels in English: Pathfinders of Love (1999), Heart of the Night (2000) and The Rainmaker’s Daughter (2004). He also founded the Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa award in 2000.

Between 1999 and 2006, he ran a bookstore chain with a café concept called Quality Buyers World Books, selling well-curated English titles at several outlets across Jakarta.

His endless intellectual and creative pursuits also cause him to hit a snag sometimes. This also happened while filming Perburuan.

“I chose to adapt the novel because it doesn’t contain a lot of internal dialogues that are difficult to [express] in an audiovisual medium,” he explains.

“Adapting a novel into a film requires balancing a fine line between capturing the soul, the essence of the novel itself, while still innovating with it. If your adaptation has exactly the same elements as the novel, why should people watch the film? If that’s the case, they better just read the novel instead.

“However, I have yet to encounter a comprehensive and systematic film studies piece in Indonesia incorporating a proper aesthetic discourse of any film, including mine. Typically, responses on social media only [reflect] people’s personal tastes — whether they liked or disliked the film.” (hdt)

Courtesy of Richard Oh
Courtesy of Richard Oh

— Photos courtesy of Falcon Pictures

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