Yay! My paper on Layar Tancap/Touring Cinema, Rural Audiences, and Exploitation films during Indonesia's New Order was just published by ournal, no. 4, "Are You Ready for the Country: Cult Cinema and Rural Excess. Edited by Joan Hawkins, Xavier Mendik, Janet Staiger and Glenn Ward. Great edition!
The title of my paper is "Entertaining the Villagers: Rural Audiences, Traveling Cinema, and Exploitation Movies in Indonesia". Link.
You can also download the the PDF of whole journal here: .
Thanks to the editors and anonymous peer reviewer.
Alhamdulillah.
Thank you! Hope it is helpful, particularly to people interested in the Politics of Layar Tancap.
From the Introduction of the 4th Edition of the Journal:
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"While Middlemost concludes her analysis by considering how festivals enhance the cult status of outback horror films, is the rural exhibition practices and viewing patterns that occupy Ekky Imanjaya’s submission. Writing in the article ‘Entertaining the Villagers: Rural Audiences, Travelling Cinema, and Exploitation Movies in Indonesia’, Imanjaya provides a case-study of the travelling cinema (or layar tancap) circuit that became popular in Indonesia during the authoritarian ‘New Order’ era. Here, mobile film screenings for rural based audiences functioned as a direct challenge to the military and political orthodoxy that dominated between 1966 and 1998. The types of production that circulated in these rural contexts alternated between what Imanjaya terms as the “Legend genre” (which recycled popular myths into spectacular action/supernatural narratives) and the Kumpeni genre (that offered more historically specific renditions of the colonial conflicts suffered under Dutch rule). The adaptation of real life trauma for populist entertainment is further confirmed by the additional “Japanese Period Genre” that the author identifies as reflecting Indonesia’s period of wartime occupation, with more internationally oriented productions (combining horror and sexploitation traits) also being marketed to rural audiences through the layar tancap platform. Imanjaya does concede that wider classifications of these Indonesian pulp cinema texts as ‘cult’ did not begin to circulate until the early 2000s, when a range of film titles were marketed to international audiences on the basis of their ‘exotic’ mysticism, generic hybridity and balletic scenes of violence. However, despite differences in content and classification, the author offers a convincing consideration of layar tancap as an Indonesian rendition of midnight movie phenomenon that helped popularise cult material in other global regions. Indeed, the grindhouse exhibition comparison appears confirmed by official Indonesian definitions of layar tancap as a “second class” product that was consumed outside standard cinema venues: “usually the location was an outdoor arena such as a football field.” Although there is evidence of layar tancap screening sessions being exploited by the military regime for propagandist purposes, Imanjaya concludes that these ideological processes remained negotiated and resisted by rural audiences, who favoured the subversive mixture of uncensored film titles that were consumed in a subcultural viewing environment that this form of mobile cinema afforded. As a result, layar tancap and their rural audiences reveal such Indonesian film viewing patterns as a site of cultural conflict between authoritarian state bodies and Indonesia’s resistant regional cinemagoers."
