Inside the Fight to Save Indonesia’s Decaying Film Heritage

The scene was something out of a disaster movie. Thousands of films, some of them classics by Indonesian directors like Usmar Ismail and Teguh Karya, were packed onto the shelves of the humid basement. One of the room's two air conditioners had stopped working and remained broken. The air temperature was almost 13 degrees celsius—more than three times the recommended temperature for film storage. Some 35mm prints were so damaged the film had gone wavy, making the movie impossible to show or scan without expensive repairs. Other films were left in stacks on the ground.

"There's no more room," said Firdaus as he pointed to the films stored on the basement floor. The soft-spoken custodian works for less than minimum wage with one other person—cleaning the more than 2,700 reels that crowd the basement of Yayasan Pusat Perfilman Haji Usmar Ismail by hand. His job is to wipe the dust from the loose reels and the circular metal tins that house some of the 35mm prints. Some days he takes a thin blue piece of paper—called an A-D strip—and drops it on the surface of a reel of film to test its acidity.

Firdaus showed me one of the strips. It's about the size of rectangular confetti and strong blue. He opened one of the metal tins and exposed the decaying reel of 35mm film (Usmar's Heboh) inside. Firdaus placed the blue strip atop the reel. It changed color, a sign that the reel is slowly succumbing to vinegar syndrome—an acidic cancer that eats away at old 35mm film, eventually rendering it unusable.

"I was here [in the 1990s]," Firdaus said. "Back then, Misbach [then chairman of Sinematek Indonesia] always wanted the temperature to always be at 7 degrees. If it went to 8, we would get chewed out the next day."

The basement is the vault of Sinematek Indonesia—the country's only popular film archive. The nonprofit was founded in 1975 by directors Misbach Yusa Biran and SM Ardan as an expansion of a previous archival project run through the Jakarta Arts Institute. Then Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin quickly took notice and secured government funding for the nonprofit. The reason for the city's support was that the governor thought more museums would eventually make the capital richer. "According to Ali," Alex Sihar, an executive producer with the Jakarta-based production house SA Films, said of the decision, "prosperous cities are the ones with the highest number of museums."

Today, Sinematek is in a state of near-collapse after a change of Indonesian law canceled its main source of funding: the government. The change has left the archive, now housed in the basement of Yayasan Pusat Perfilman Haji Usmar Ismail, cash-strapped and suffering such neglect that the country's best record of its cinematic heritage is at risk of being lost.

Six years ago, film journalist JB Kristanto and his co-editor Lisabona Rahman were in the middle of making a website out of his book Indonesian Film Catalogue 2008—an exhaustive catalogue of Indonesian films released between 1926 and 2008—when Philip Cheah of the National Museum of Singapore contacted him with a grant to translate the book into English.

The money was instead used to make a website, but Cheah also wanted to restore and subtitle one classic Indonesian film that could be screened at the launch. JB Kristanto chose Usmar's classic 1954 film Lewat Djam Malam—a movie he considers the best film ever made by an Indonesian.

Lisabona found a print of the film at Sinematek . The film, perhaps Ismail's finest work, was in an advanced state of decay. The reels suffered from a long-list of defects. "The film elements are affected by multiple scratches, mold and humidity marks, badly damaged parts, missing frames, as well as vinegar syndrome, a form of decay common in films stored in humid conditions," Lintang Gitomartoyo, of Konfiden Foundation, wrote in the Lewat Djam Malam booklet released in 2012 along with the film's relaunch.

Here was one of the most seminal Indonesian films ever made—a vital part of the country's artistic heritage—left to rot in the basement of a building owned by the foundation that carries his very name.

"When I saw the reels, it didn't really surprise me since I didn't know what healthy reels look like," Lintang said. "I was, however, shocked by the pungent smell they produced. After I saw the Sinematek's maintenance records and the [L'Immagine Ritrovata] inspection report, I realized that those were not healthy reels."

The movie, which grapples with the psychology of a soldier living in the aftermath of the war for independence, was a masterpiece of early Indonesian cinema. With this film, Usmar committed the ugliness of war to tape and in doing so, forever changed the landscape of Indonesian cinema. "The history of Indonesian cinema could not be written without Usmar Ismail's biography," Asrul Sani, a filmmaker and the screenwriter of Lewat Djam Malam, once said.

The team was able to find all of the negative copies of the film, although two of the sound negative prints were missing. Not a single one was intact enough to screen. It took seven-and-a-half months work, and more than $148,000, to restore the classic film. The work was done by L'immagine Ritrovata, an Italian film restoration laboratory known for restoring everything from old Buster Keaton prints to 1980s Hong Kong action movies. The entire thing was paid for by grants from the National Museum of Singapore and Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation.

The restoration laboratory got its hands on another Usmar classic when it came time to re-release the musical Tiga Dara in 4K resolution. That job took 17 months and cost $260,000 (L'immagine Ritrovata restored the film and PT Render Digital Indonesia digitized it). Screened in August of this year, Tiga Dara drew 26,373 viewers by the end of the month—a significant increase over Lewat Djam Malam's 5,000 but still far too little to break even on the restoration costs.

Alex Sihar was part of both restoration projects. He spoke about the projects at a recent TEDx Jakarta conference. Alex said that the films were a part of Indonesian history. In a way, it let us know about who we were. What captured my attention from his speech only lasted less than a minute. He showed us the wavy, ravaged celluloid tapes and with an exasperated sigh, Alex asked the audience: "Isn't that my history? Why is it shaped like that?"

Film restoration is a grueling, labor-intensive process. According to the The Film Preservation Guide published by San Francisco-based National Film Preservation Foundation, film restoration is "comparing all known surviving source materials, piecing together footage from these disparate sources into the order suggested by production records and exhibition history, and in some cases, enhancing image and sound to compensate for past damage." For many, it's a last-ditch effort to save a film that would otherwise be lost to history.

"It's just like a heart surgery," Alex told me. "Why do it if you don't need it?"

But why invest so much in film restoration if Indonesian moviegoers don't seem all that interested in paying to view the product? The highest-grossing Indonesian movie in 2016 was the remake Warkop DKI Reborn: Jangkrik Boss Part 1, which sold more than 6.8 million tickets. Tiga Dara's restoration cost less than one-fifth that movie's budget, but it was still, by objective accounts, a box office failure.

"In a way, what we've been doing is taking a stab at different logics of financing," Alex said. "With Lewat Djam Malam, I discovered the logic of international grants to finance the project. We learned the weaknesses, the issues with international rights and so on."

With the digitization of Darah dan Doa, in 2014, the project received full funding from Indonesia's Ministry of Culture and Education (Kemendikbud). But there were still shortcomings to government financed restorations.

"You can't commercialize the film," Alex said. "What's the point if you can't show it to the public?"

So he went the other way with Tiga Dara by turning to investment and sponsorship.

"Now I understand the logic of all three," he said.

There's also a reason why they went with Tiga Dara, Usmar's reluctant foray into mainstream filmmaking, for this particular experiment; it's pleasant, thematically simplistic and emotionally engaging.

At this point, it was clear that "we're not doing this for profit" was never a hollow, PR-approved feel-goodery. "That in the end we don't make a lot of money out of this, I agree," Alex explained. "But commercializing this film does not mean profiting from it. It means covering all of our spending. Commercialization is just one method."

Lisabona Rahman, who initiated Tiga Dara's restoration project, told me that handing the operations over to the government is the best option—one that Misbach would have preferred. Public funding would ensure that "not only the popular, commercialized films but also the aesthetically esteemed ones that are important for the Indonesian history" get to be preserved.

"Besides," Lisabona continued, "when an institution becomes public, there's a demand for transparency in its management. Unlike what happens now in Sinematek, where the policies are not for the public to see even when in reality, there are many film titles in the collection that belong to the public domain, especially films that were made before the 1960s."

But what do we lose if none of these films are restored? Sure, Sinematek houses a deep catalogue of culturally significant films, but with all of Indonesia's other problems, does preserving films really deserve government funds?

The organization's current chairman Adisoerya Abdi believes that Indonesia is not yet at the point of recognizing the importance of preserving its own cinematic history.

"Usually [film restoration] is for countries of considerable wealth, with well-to-do people, whose thirst for pleasure no longer involves what happened to them in the past," he said. "They're no longer burdened by 'how I eat, how I work, how I own a house.' But our country only realizes occasionally that, oh yeah, we need to do this, but we need to do this first. And that's our problem."

Lisabona disagrees with the assessment. She believes that culture and history are what define national identity. If the works of directors like Usmar disappear, so does a piece of film history that spoke to a certain time's anxieties, fears, hopes, and dreams.

"I think the logic is wrong: That history and culture are luxurious needs and because of that, they aren't suitable to the lower middle-class people," Lisabona said. "They are basic spiritual needs for people of any class, because they define our identities. Besides, Indonesia's economy is stable, although it's still inefficient in its management."

I thought of Usmar's Darah dan Doa, which tells the story of Sudarto, a lieutenant with the Siliwangi Division on a long march. The movie is regarded as the first Indonesian (adj.) film, and it's not only a testament to Usmar's technical prowess, but his grasp on the reality around him—and so the history around us. In a 1963 article written for Intisari the director wrote, "I was interested in telling Sudarto's story because it truthfully tells a story of an Indonesian man without passing for a cheap propaganda."

I kept thinking of this particular sentence—what kind of story could possibly interest a genius? Why does it matter to us now? I asked Alex during our conversation, "after so many headaches, so many troubles, so much spending, why do you still want to do this?"

There was an unnervingly long pause. He then asked me, suddenly, "where are you from?"

"Indonesia."

"How about your family?"

"They're from Indonesia."

"Where do you think you get your Indonesian identity from?"

"My birth place, the language I speak, the ID card in my wallet."

"Say your birth place was taken away. What would you do?"

I suggest a weak answer. "Take it back?"

"Why? It's cost you a lot."

There you go. "What defines us are these films," he continued. "We scavenge our history; we're given fragments of it that we have to connect on our own, like a guessing game of 'who are we?' If what you get are bits or pieces, don't you want to make sense of them?"