1970 Bandung, Indonesia

Martanto Hatmodjo
1951
Bandung Indonesia
Interviewed on February 8th, 2023
by Erica Vandenbulcke

(Translated from Indonesian)

The movie I vividly remember seeing in the cinema was The Blind from the Ghost Cave. It was an Indonesian martial arts movie. I was about to graduate from high school, either eighteen or nineteen. I had watched movies before this, but most of them were local neighborhood screenings organized by our mayor. You know how big my family is, you’ve met most of them. I had seven brothers and a sister, and my father was only a soldier. We didn’t have the money to visit the theater, that was simply out of the question for a family like ours.

The movie was based on a comic book that was published several years before. Ganes TH, the book’s comic artist, was a legend of his time. Everyone knew who he was! Children raved about his comics, and it even felt like adults regressed to children when they read his work. His comics were basically like Indonesia’s local Marvel comics. Is that what the young people in America read these days? I couldn’t contain my excitement seeing the characters from the comics come into life on the big picture. After all, these were the comics I read late into the night as a young boy. (He chuckles as he re-enacts for me the dramatic karate-like motions of the comic book characters).

I can’t tell you the specifics of the plot, but the movie was about a magical warrior who goes on a journey across Indonesia, from Sabang to Merauke! (The following phrase is a translation of a famous Indonesian phrase written in the constitution, ‘dari Sabang sampai Merauke.’ It is often used to emphasize the vastness of the Indonesian archipelago, from the easternmost to the westernmost region of the country). He had gone to avenge the death of his wife and his parents who were killed by an evil swordsman. The movie was jam-packed with awesome fight scenes. Indonesia is made up of so many islands, but it is often extremely Java-centric. I think people were moved by the movie’s representation of many, many different provinces shown within the movie. We were incredibly broken as a nation after the Dutch, but I think movies like these gave the people some sense of hope, some sense of unity across the islands.

I went to the movie with some of my classmates that day, a big group of us had decided to go together after school. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but I went to an all-boys high school. I was in my final year of high school, preparing for college entrance exams. The exams are a big deal, you know, a lot of pressure to perform. Especially as a boy, my parents wanted me to attend a top college and become an engineer. I’m getting a bit side-tracked, but what I meant to say is that that going to the movie was the perfect break I needed. It was just fun, relaxing, exciting.

We almost took up the entire row, my classmates and I. We were boys pressured to excel in our impending exams but I could feel my worries evaporating as I sat in the theatre. We oohed and aahed  loudly in fight scenes that were particularly suspenseful. The people sitting around us definitely resented us for being so loud. I even remember the person behind me kicking my seat and hushing me. I probably deserved it, but at the time, I was just a teenager excited to watch my favorite comic on the big screen. The comics were very popular at the time, so it wasn’t surprising that the cinema was completely filled. We had dashed to the cinema as soon as school ended, just to make sure we could secure tickets.

I couldn’t remember exactly what I ate the movie theater that day, but we had certainly bought a wide variety of snacks. I don’t think popcorn came into Indonesian movie theatres until much later. At the time, local treats were sold by small vendors on carts in front of the cinema’s entrance. There were all kinds of nibbles – sunflower seeds, roasted peanuts, and fried bakso on skewers. You couldn’t ignore the crunching noises as the audience nibbled on their peanuts throughout the show, and the ground was littered with sunflower seed shells by the end of the movie.

I think things changed a lot after 1945. I wasn’t even born yet when they were here, but you must know how the Dutch were. They controlled and dictated everything. I was told by my parents that during the Colonization era, most films shown in Indonesia were European movies since the Dutch controlled which movies entered the country. Movie theaters were quite common at the time. It wasn’t about hard to find one, no, no. It was just that it was hard for us to go. When they were around, commoners like us didn’t have the right or the money to go to the movies. The infrastructure certainly was not lacking, though. After all, the Dutch built many movie theaters to entertain themselves. The cinema I had gone to in Bandung’s bustling epicenter was equipped with amazing Western sound system. You could hear the sound vibrating and echoing off the walls. Since it was my first time, there was a part of me that was scared I would go deaf from how loud it all was!

But it wasn’t just about access to the theaters after the Dutch left. Indonesian, art, films, dances – you name it – they were flourishing after the Dutch. After independence, we were free. Free to create, free to publish. You could almost say it was like all the repressed creativity came flowing out. Sure, Ira (his wife) could probably name many, many handsome Hollywood actors playing in movies at the time. The Indonesian girls fawned over these men. I must say some of them are quite attractive! But for me, I can’t exactly describe how proud I felt seeing a movie that our people created, based on a story our people wrote. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as nationalistic as when I saw The Blind from the Ghost Cave. The Dutch may have told us otherwise, but we had our own ideas and imagination after all!