The book focuses on a 20-year period of great upheaval from modest, indie beginnings, through mainstream appeal, to international recognition. In Indonesian Cinema after the New Order: Going Mainstream, Thomas Barker presents the first systematic and most comprehensive history of contemporary Indonesian cinema. We challenge this common historical construction and assert that in the first decades of Indonesian cinema, ethnic Chinese filmmakers played pivotal roles in forming the images of Indonesian culture and peoples on screen." On the same note, we argue that the narrative tradition that privileges ‘indigenous’ filmmakers as the originators of asli (‘authentic’ or ‘true’) Indonesian culture on screen reflects the dominant yet narrow definition of nationalism as based on ethnic and cultural primordialism. Here, we regard the simplification of ethnic Chinese history in the film industry as part of a broader attempt by nationalist and New Order ideologues to ‘appropriate’ the origins of cinema and ‘national culture’ in Indonesia. In this paper, we aim to re-examine the roles of ethnic Chinese filmmakers in Indonesian cinematic history as a preliminary study in the reconsideration of the early years of the film industry. "Charlotte Setijadi-Dunn and Thomas Barker (2010) Imagining ‘Indonesia’: Ethnic Chinese film producers in pre-independence cinema, "Asian Cinema", Vol.
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