An appreciation of the work of one of Indonesia's best-known film-makers who died this year
Krishna Sen
Sjuman Djaja
Sjuman Djaja died on 19 July, his last film, Opera Jakarta, incomplete. One obituary described him as Indonesia's 'most important film-director since the establishment of the New Order' (Jakarta Jakarta, 27 July-9 August 1985).
Born in Jakarta in 1933, Sjuman grew up in the lower middle class surroundings of Jakarta's Kemayoran district. In his school days at the nationalist Taman Siswa, he started writing fiction and poetry. He did odd jobs in a film studio and became part of a group of young men who 'hung around' the Senen market (Pasar Senen) of Central Jakarta, drinking coffee, telling tales and dreaming of artistic glory.
Many of the self-proclaimed 'Senen Artists' did become leading cultural figures of New Order Indonesia. But Sjuman Djaja remains one of the best of the 'Senen Artists', not only because he was extremely well-known, but because he carried into his later work that cultural and social awareness about the common people of Jakarta, which he had imbibed from his days in Kemayoran and Pasar Senen.
Many of his friends claim that the seven years in the Institute of Cinematography in Moscow (1958-65), changed him not at all, except to perfect his film-making talents. Nor did official power during his brief stint as a top bureaucrat, Head of the Ministry of lnformation's Directorate of Film, make him forget that he was just an 'anak Betawi’.
The making of a Director
His career as a film director started in 1971, soon after his resignation from the government post.
Sjuman Djaja's first film, Lewat Tengah Malam (Past Midnight) was about the conflict between two brothers set in the early 1950s. Both brothers were nationalists. After independence the younger brother's frustration with the unjust social system and corruption amongst his former fellow-nationalists, leads him to become a high-class thief and confidence trickster. He steals from the rich to provide the poor people on the outskirts of Jakarta with the resources to set up a factory. Meanwhile, his elder brother, has become an uncorruptible police commissioner. Ultimately the brothers meet, the bandit submits to the police and agrees to serve his sentence in prison.
A curious and complex film, Lewat Tengah Malam received a lot of critical acclaim. Given that Indonesian films so frequently take the side of the law-keeper against the law-breaker, Sjuman's first film was remarkably unjudgemental and even admiring of the ' intellectual bandit' hero. The bandit, here, is not a villain. His heart is in the right place, in the service of the people, just like his elder brother's. At worst, the means he chooses to pursue the goals are somewhat inappropriate!
It is possible to speculate about the parallels between the film and Sjuman Djaja's relationship to his own elder brother, who was a member of the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party), imprisoned after the 1 October 1965 coup and eventually sent to the penal island of Buru. I have often wondered if the bandit hero of Lewat Tengah Malam was Sjuman's assessment of his own relationship to his brother, whose political creed he rejected completely, without rejecting the person.
Sjuman had clearly established his anti-PKI credentials well before the banning of that party in 1965. (The story about how he courageously stood up to Madame Aidit, wife of the PKI Chairman, at her meeting with Indonesian students during a trip to the Soviet Union is well known to Sjuman's contemporaries in the film community). That and his closeness to Adam Malik, and perhaps, his enormous artistic talent and personal charm, explain why he is among the very few Indonesians trained in 'communist' countries, who returned easily to the fold of the violently anti-communist political and social order of post-1965 Indonesia.
Images of Jakarta
With his second film, Si Doel Anak Betawi (Doel, the Betawi Boy) Sjuman created one of lndonesian screen's most lovable and unforgettable characters. Based on a children's story first published in 1936, Si Doel was a recapitulation of the old Jakarta in which Sjuman spent his childhood, and which had all but disappeared by 1973 when the film was made.
Anak Betawi is the story of Doel, son of a young widow, growing up in poverty, amongst the petty traders and small fruit growers of 1930s Batavia. The nostalgic mood and the autobiographical element in the film (Sjuman, like Doel, had lost his father at an early age and was brought up by his widowed mother) which so accurately captured the sights and sounds of the 1930s, earned the director the nickname 'Si Doel'!
Anak Betawi had its sequel in Si Doel Anak Modern, where the young village bumpkin blunders into Jakarta of the 1970s in pursuit of 'modernity'. Doel is a misfit in the modern capital. He is lovable but his innocence and his unsophisticated village ways make him a clown in the fashionable urban surroundings. At the same time, Doel's humility and honesty stand as a criticism of the pretensions that pervade the life of the Jakarta rich. Even after Doel acquires the trappings of the social elite he remains at heart the lovable village boy. Friend and colleague, Ami Priyono, sees in both manifestations of Doel elements of Sjuman's own life and personality.
The Misfit
Sjuman's most acclaimed film, Si Mamad, was also about social misfits. Made in 1973, Si Mamad got the Indonesian Best Film award the following year. Nearly a decade after the film was made, the director recalled proudly that international critics had likened Si Mamad to works of the Indian director, Satyajit Ray. Informed observers have also noticed the enormous influence, and even some direct copies, of Soviet cinema, in individual frames of the film. Foreign influences in form notwithstanding, the film is deeply embedded in its social setting: lower middle class Jakarta and its foil, affluent Jakarta.
Pak Muhammad (or 'Mamad'), a product of a bygone era, is one of lndonesian cinema's rare anti-heroes! He is little, bald, bespectacled, nervous and has fond memories of the colonial times. A clerk in a government office, he arrives first and works the hardest, under the smart young men who become his bosses. In the midst of corruption and wealth he remains totally honest and poor. His wife's unwanted pregnancy forces him into petty theft and unbearable feelings of guilt. Mental torment and poverty result in illness and ultimately death.
Mamad is clearly a misfit, not because he is in the wrong, but because there is something wrong with the rest of the society. He has every conventional virtue, none of which, however, is suitable for the contemporary society. Everyone around Pak Muhammad recognises his goodness and his worth, but there is no place for him in the society. The film is a subtle, yet powerful questioning of a society that admires virtues that it cannot sustain. Si Mamad is the innate human goodness being destroyed by a hypocritical social order that ultimately values power and wealth above all else.
Indonesian film-makers who impressed critics often failed to reach mass audiences. In pursuit of box office success, Sjuman made a number of popular romantic films. By 1982, when he made Kabut Sutra Ungu (Purple Mist) he had mastered all the tricks of the trade. Kabut Sutra Ungu sold more tickets than any Indonesian film. It had all the characteristics of popular cinema: leading stars, the glamorous lifestyle of the westernised upper middle class, and it was based on a 'pop' novel with a happy ending.
Censorship
Even while Sjuman was producing romantic formula films, unrelated to any genuine social concern, controversial elements often crept into his work. In 1978 Sjuman made Yang Muda Yang Bercinta (Young and In Love), based on an innocuous love story about two university students. But he chose Rendra, whose 'radical' poetry had been banned by the government, to play the rebellious male student. The film also incorporated Rendra reading his poetry and explicit statements about class conflict in Indonesia. As a result Yang Muda Yang Bercinta was severely truncated during the year it was scrutinised by the Censorship Board. The version released was a simple love story, without the radical poetry or the discussion about class conflict in New Order Indonesia.
The courage of conviction needed to make a statement about class conflict in an Indonesian film can be appreciated only if we understand the extreme sensitivity of the Suharto government to any mention of class and the severe efficiency with which the censorship system carries out the duties of the government's ideological watch-dog.
Controversy surrounded many of Sjuman's films. After a long period of severe illness in 1978-79, Sjuman became a convert to a form of mystical Islam. As an expression of his new faith he planned to make a film about the nine saints, Wali Songo, who are regarded traditionally as having brought Islam to Indonesia. His unconventional interpretation of the history of lslam led to protest in the parliament from members of the Islamic political party, PPP. Eventually, the film was abandoned.
About the same time as this film was being planned (1981-82), Sjuman made Bukan Sandiwara (Not a Play), based on another popular novel about upper-class family life. It was about a young childless couple who join a Japanese artificial insemination program. The central conflict is the embitterment of their relationship after the birth of the child. Many of Sjuman's admirers were disappointed because the film dealt with an issue relevant only to a microscopic elite that can afford the luxuries of modern, foreign medicine. Others objected to the statement on the final frame of the film: 'There is no truth that stands above humanity and humanism.' Misbach Yusa Biran, member of jury of the 1982 Indonesian film festival and a close friend of Sjuman told me that statement amounted to a denial of God! He suggested that it was offensive to convinced Muslims and was the reason why the film failed to win the 'Best Film' award for the year.
Final offering
Sjuman Djaja's last completed film, Kerikil-kerikil Tajam (Sharp Stones), posthumously won the award for Best Original Script at the 1985 Indonesian Film Festival. Once more Sjuman had returned to the theme of the life and problems of the urban working classes. While the central story is a rather feeble romance, the social setting and the issues that emerge out of it are enormously interesting. The women workers in the factory are raped and sacked at the pleasure of the male owners. But the women are not silent victims. They organise resistance and seek 1 support from the Legal Aid Institute. Although the story of collective resistance is lost in the romantic fulfilment, even the mention of workers' protest is rare in Indonesian films .
One other small episode stands out as an expression of Sjuman's understanding of class conflict in the Indonesian society. The hero who has followed his lost betrothed into the capital city becomes the chauffeur of a rich family. The university student daughter of the family who appears to be egalitarian feels attracted to the young driver and insists on being addressed by her name rather than as 'Nona' (Miss). The hero continues to use the respectful 'Nona', pointing out that a change in their terms of address would make no difference at all to the realities of the social relationship between the master and the servant!
The film has raised the ire of the owners of the cement company (PT Semen Nusantana) for depicting labour relations in the cement industry in such an unfavourable light (Tempo, 31 August, 1985).
Tempo, the leading Jakarta weekly, opened its Sjuman Djaja obituary thus: 'He was known as the maker of controversial films - class conflict or contradiction was not, as it were, a taboo for him! The implication is that such matters are taboo lor other Indonesian film-makers. In fact, the range of subjects in Sjuman Djaja's films suggest that there were few issues that he would not address. In the restrictive structure of the New Order government's film censorship, Sjuman tried to expand the limits of expression. For that alone he can stake a claim to the title of one of Indonesia's greatest film directors, and one of those rare New Order artists whose work, against all odds, reflected his social conscience.'
