20 Mei 2011-10 Juni 2011_Free Art Ebooks

100 Great Artists: A Visual Journey for Fra Angelico to Andy Warhol
Handbook of Research on Agent-Base Societies: Social and Cultural Interactions
Consumer Culture
A Dictionary of Symbols
Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion
Encyclopedia of Food and Culture
Arts and Humanities: Throug the Eras
Understanding Art

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Mempornokan Perfilman Indonesia

Deni S. Jusmani

Pengantar

Sepertinya, kebijakan pemerintah untuk membatasi ruang gerak film Hollywood di Indonesia, tidak diimbangi dengan pembatasan ruang gerak impor aktris asing. Kenapa? Apakah aktris lokal tidak mampu “menjual” dan tidak se”erotis” artis impor? Atau, memang menyangkut kualitas yang masih perlu banyak belajar kepada artis impor? Persoalannya, apakah dengan artis impor yang makin gencar dilakukan, akan berdampak pada perbaikan kualitas film yang mendidik di Indonesia? Lebih jauh lagi, impor artis erotis lebih mengesankan pemasaran dan pencitraan tubuh daripada persoalan kualitas berakting. Pada akhirnya, pencitraan erotis tetap menjadi ujung tombak wajah dan perkembangan film di Indonesia. 

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Ditengah serbuan film-film asing di Indonesia, membuat kreator film Indonesia harus berjuang ekstra keras, agar film yang diciptakan mampu diterima oleh penonton. Berbagai cara dilakukan untuk menciptakan film-film yang dianggap mampu dan dapat diterima orang banyak, termasuk salah satunya dengan menggunakan aktris asing (porno). Langkah yang sebetulnya salah besar, mengingat potensi aktor dan aktris lokal masih tersedia. Kebijakan pembatasan film asing juga tidak diimbangi dengan serius oleh pemerintah dalam banyak aspek. Seharusnya, (jika mau serius) pada media televisi atau pun media lainnya, juga dibatasi untuk memutar dan menayangkan film asing.

Impor Kualitas atau Popularitas?

Masuknya teknologi semacam televisi di Indonesia, juga diiringi dengan munculnya kebudayaan asing didalamnya, termasuk film. Tahun 1980-an, film asing telah ada diperputaran film Indonesia, mulai film anak-anak sampai film untuk remaja dan golongan dewasa. Ditengah sepinya produksi film Indonesia pada tahun 1990-an, film impor seakan memberikan warna dan tentu saja kemudian membentuk komunitasnya. Secara daya khayal dan ide cerita, film lokal tidak kalah dengan film asing, tetapi secara teknik animasi, efek visual, dan pengemasan akhir, memang perlu banyak belajar. Asrul Sani pernah mengatakan, bahwa film Indonesia itu lebih populer karena keburukannya.

Artis asing Maria Ozawa (Miyabi), pada awal karirnya dikenal sebagai seorang aktris film dewasa Jepang (Adult Video), muncul pada Rumah Produksi Maxima Pictures dalam film komedi Indonesia berjudul Menculik Miyabidan film Hantu Tanah Kusir. Selain Miyabi, muncul Terra Patrick (film Rintihan Kuntilanak Perawan), Rin Sakuragi (film Suster Keramas), Sora Aoi (film Suster Keramas 2), selanjutnya giliran pemain film dewasa asal Amerika Serikat, Sasha Grey yang akan dikontrak oleh produser K2K Production, KK Dheraj, untuk bermain dalam film horor komedi terbarunya. Beberapa nama tersebut adalah aktris-aktris yang populer dalam film porno, tidak saja mereka “dipasarkan” kepopulerannya, lebih dari itu, merupakan bentuk ketidakmampuan kreator film lokal untuk membendung ideologi “porno” berkembang di Indonesia. Persoalan pokok bukan terletak pada aktris asing atau lokal, tetapi pada kualitas film itu sendiri, yang terkadang mengangkat tema-tema dangkal, umum, monoton, bahkan membosankan. Tema horor (berbau erotis), percintaan (yang naif), dan pencitraan terbalik dari realita sosial, membentuk persepsi masyarakat mengenai film Indonesia. Karena, film merupakan pencerminan sebuah masyarakat, ideologi kreator, dan wujud mentalitas bangsa. Tentu, bangsa ini tidak ingin, jika citra porno yang melekat pada aktris asing, juga melekat pada perfilman dan mentalitas masyarakat Indonesia. 

Film Indonesia belum memiliki identitas dan ideologi yang mapan, tidak seperti film Hollywood yang telah lebih dulu memilikinya. Film (termasuk FTV) dan sinetron di Indonesia menganut azas musiman. Tayangan-tayangan yang seringkali meniru dan mencontoh, mengabaikan potensi lokal yang sebetulnya juga layak dipasarkan. Oleh karena ideologi film yang masih samar, menghasilkan film-film lokal yang serba absurd dan mengada-ada.

Ideologi yang Menjemukan?

Kenapa menjemukan? Karena terjadinya pergeseran selera dan budaya menonton; terbatasnya daya cipta kreator film, efek visual dan animasi terlalu sederhana, serta alur cerita dan tema film yang monoton. Pada aspek lain, film Indonesia terlalu mudah di tebak plot ceritanya, super hiperbolis, mengangkat hal-hal yang tidak penting, dan erotisme terkadang lebih dominan. Para penonton telah dibentuk berdasarkan tontonan erotis, sehingga melupakan, bahkan mengabaikan pesan-pesan positif yang (mungkin) tersirat dalam film.

Film Indonesia adalah bentuk mimpi produser yang menjemukan dan sekaligus menjerumuskan. Mimpi-mimpi yang masih harus dibenahi dan disadarkan, betapa film mistik dan horor erotis sangat membosankan dan terkadang terlalu mengada-ada. Tidaklah heran, jika minat penonton terhadap film Indonesia belum memuaskan. Lemahnya minat masyarakat terhadap film Indonesia, dapat dirumuskan karena tiga hal, yaitu: (1) pergeseran selera dan budaya anak muda; (2) rendahnya apresiasi terhadap film festival dan serius; (3) kurang dukungan pemerintah untuk perbaikan kualitas. Memang, kelompok pecinta film horor erotis tersebut masih ada, tetapi tidak sebanding dengan kelompok pecinta film asing. Masyarakat perlu tontonan yang berkualitas.

Ideologi pasar dengan mengabaikan pesan moral muncul pada beberapa film di Indonesia. Orientasi pasar dan mencari keuntungan (dengan meminjam kepopuleran) yang telah melekat pada aktris asing, menjadi tanda kemunduran film-film di Indonesia. Aktris (atau pun mantan) film porno, akan membentuk persepsi negatif terhadap pencitraan film Indonesia, yang dikhawatirkan, merefleksi dan membaur pada konteks masyarakat sosial. Mungkin, impor artis asing (porno) ini akan berdampak lakunya film yang dibintangi, tetapi tidak serta merta membuat penonton menyukai kualitas film yang dihasilkan. Aromanya lebih kental pornografi, daripada persoalan etika dan pesan moral.

Penutup

Masih ada kesempatan untuk berbenah, jika memang ingin memperbaiki film di Indonesia pada masa mendatang. Tentu, tidak semua kreator atau pun produser film di Indonesia mengabaikan aspek moral dan etika. Persoalan pokok, bagaimana membentuk pemahaman positif pada masyarakat terhadap perkembangan film. Impor aktris (apalagi porno) tidak akan menyelesaikan dan lebih memperkeruh suasana perfilman Indonesia. Menggali dan memperbaiki ide cerita film, merupakan hal mutlak untuk dilakukan, sehingga masyarakat tidak memandang film Indonesia atau pun tontonan yang ada adalah replika, saduran, atau pun duplikasi dari yang sudah ada.

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 Idi Subandy Ibrahim, Budaya Populer sebagai Komunikasi: Dinamika Popscape dan Mediascape di Indonesia Kontemporer (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Jalasutra, 2007), 171.

 Lihat, http://entertainment.kompas.com/read/2011/04/12/18150855/Bintang.Porno.Serbu.Film.Nasional

 Idi Subandy Ibrahim, 173.

 Idi Subandy Ibrahim, 177-178.

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The Hat

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

IN NO one article of dress is the ultra-feminine psychology more apparent than in the hat.

For man or woman, the head covering has always been used far more for symbolism than for any of the other basic motives. As a head covering the natural one, hair, has for the most part remained to women. Men, having decided to curtail their hair, demand more of their hats in the way of covering.

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It may be as a protection from sun and wind, and it may be as a lingering rudiment of that ancient psychology of sex which gave to the man his distinctive head-dress, and, owing to which, he still feels less a man when hatless. “Where’s my hat?” is the frantic demand of the small boy. Be he never so much in a hurry he does not feel truly himself unless that inconspicuous, small, often ugly and shabby, but indispensable mark of masculinity, is on his head.

Boys in their continuous scuffling “play,” that innocuous infantile survival of the ancient sex-combat, are particularly merry with one another’s hats. To snatch off the other boy’s hat; to hold it, hide it, trample it; is a favorite form of amusement. The boy thus rudely unhatted must fight for his lost distinction, and does so cheerfully. In the attitude of children toward their clothes we may all too plainly see the proof of the long dominance of the sex motive in our attire; the girl child, trained, flattered, and punished into a premature care of and pride in her over-feminine apparel; and the boy child, needing neither praise nor blame to develop his perfectly natural masculine vanity in the garments which proclaim him Man. His are, to be sure, of a far ruder and more serviceable sort than hers; but his joy in them, his irrepressible pride, is not based on their practicality so much as on their proof of what he fondly imagines to be sexsuperiority.

In the matter of hats, the scope of masculine expression is not large. A hat he must have, of severe and simple outline. In it he may express, (a) sex; and (b) wealth; also, to a very limited extent, personal taste. Those who dwell in detailed admiration on the dress of men speak mainly of the cut and line of their garments, the taste shown in those minor accessories of socks, ties, and a man’s scanty but impressive jewelry.

When they refer to his hat there is nothing to gloat upon but its newness, both in style and recent purchase. The top-hat has always its clear distinction; the crisp straw in summer, the hard hat with the latest roll brim—there is little to boast of. The man, in selecting, tries to choose one suited to his particular style of feature, and sometimes succeeds. So choosing, he generally remains constant to that choice.

We must remember that a man’s sex-value does not lie in his beauty so much as in his purchasing power and in the general qualities pertaining to masculinity—or supposed so to pertain. With the woman it is widely different. While every article of her attire, from the innermost to the outermost, is modified not only by sex-distinction but by the constant fret of change in order to please and hold the varying taste of the male; the hat more than any other article shows this double pressure.

With our naive effort to preserve by force the artificial distinctions with which we have fenced off one sex from the other, we consider it quite incorrect for a woman to wear a man’s hat; for her merely to try one on is supposed to give him the right to kiss her. But still, though for riding costume, yachting costume, and such limited purposes, we do find women wearing men’s hats, or hats frankly mannish in style, we do not, for any purpose whatever save those of roaring farce and coarsest circus humor, find men wearing women’s—to make themselves look ridiculous.

When a woman puts on her husband’s silk hat or “derby,” soft felt or stiff straw, she may look “mannish,” but she does not become a laughing stock. When a man puts on his wife’s “Easter bonnet,” big hat with flowers and ribbons, or small hat with some out-squirt of stiff or waggling decoration, he looks contemptible or foolish. There is real reason for this. The man’s hat, whatever its fault, has a certain racial dignity. It is, primarily, a covering for the human head. It is designed to fit that head. It is simple and distinct in outline, restrained in ornament. None of these things are true of the woman’s hat, which, whatever its attractions, is utterly lacking in that main attribute of racial dignity. It is not, primarily, a covering for the human head. It is not in the

least designed to fit that head. It is not simple and distinct in outline; and—need it be said?—it is not restrained in ornament. A woman’s hat may be anything—anything in size, in shape, in substance, in decoration. Its desirability is based on three necessities; first, it must be “stylish”; second, it must be new; third, it must be “different”; not only different from the previous one, but different, as far as is compatible with style, from the hats of other women. We might add, as a remote fourth, a faint preference for a hat which is “becoming.”

To discover a hat which suits the face of the wearer, which is light and easy on the head, and to wear the same sort of hat as long as one has the same sort of face, would surely be a reasonable thing to do. That is it would if the purpose of a woman’s hat was to make the wearer comfortable and to express personality. Nothing is farther from its purpose. The first, last, and ever dominant necessity is to express as loudly as possible, not the “eternal feminine,” but that abnormal pitiful femininity of ours, a femininity which has surrendered its solemn grandeur of womanhood, and put on, jackdaw-like, the ostentatious plumage of an alien creature.

Study the grave sweet face of some eternally beautiful womanstatue, as of our so familiar “Mother of the Gods,” miscalled the Venus of Melos. Put upon that nobly feminine head some “cute,” “too sweet,” “charming,” “latest thing,” and see how utterly out of place is such monkeyish display on real womanhood. “Yes,” we admit, “but women don’t look like that now. I’m sure Dolly Varden looks just too sweet for anything in that hat.”

A pretty child—of either sex—looks pretty in almost anything. Some fresh-cheeked, curly-headed boy may look as well as his sister with a frill of lace and roses around his face. But a grown woman, a woman fit for motherhood, is no longer a child. Her place in life is as gravely important as her husband’s. Even a young girl, with wifehood and motherhood before her, has a potential dignity, a high responsibility awaiting her, beside which all this capering and fluttering of gay signals is pathetically ignominious. We have enough instances before us, in marble and canvas, in tender madonnas, brave-eyed saints, great goddesses, to show this truth. We have behind that the whole long story of unfolding life on earth, the female earnest and plain, the male skipping and strutting in gay adornment. Even the male mosquito has feathers on his head—not the female.

In ordinary life we have the well-known fact of the lasting beauty that shines in such severe simplicity as the white face-bands of the nun, or in many of the neat and unchanging caps worn by Puritans, Quakers and others. We even know, in that remote shut-off compartment of the mind wherein we keep our articles of faith, that “Beauty unadorned is adorned the most.”

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Explorations in the hermeneutics of vision

Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell

Many of the most creative debates and research programmes in contemporary critical theory, postmodern philosophy, aesthetic theory, deconstruction and cultural studies converge and intersect upon the field of ‘visuality’ as one of the central, if contested, terrains of modern critical thought. Over the past decade or so we have witnessed a veritable explosion of interest in the phenomenological, semiotic and hermeneutic investigation of the textures of visual experience, and, more broadly in a new appreciation of the historical, political, cultural, and technological mediations of human visual perception in the context of a more ‘holistic’ and ‘reflexive’ theory of the human condition. Recently the whole area has received an additional impetus from the impact of a wide range of semiotic theories of representation drawing upon largely continental social and philosophical thought. Indeed we have to speak in the plural of ‘hermeneutics of vision’ when defining the field of visual culture today. From these different sources it appears that the place of perception and visuality in our understandings of human reality and the ‘fate of the visual’ in contemporary society and culture have merged to form the context for new alignments, critical projects, and interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities and critical sciences.

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Many of the most creative debates and research programmes in contemporary critical theory, postmodern philosophy, aesthetic theory, deconstruction and cultural studies converge and intersect upon the field of ‘visuality’ as one of the central, if contested, terrains of modern critical thought. Over the past decade or so we have witnessed a veritable explosion of interest in the phenomenological, semiotic and hermeneutic investigation of the textures of visual experience, and, more broadly in a new appreciation of the historical, political, cultural, and technological mediations of human visual perception in the context of a more ‘holistic’ and ‘reflexive’ theory of the human condition. Recently the whole area has received an additional impetus from the impact of a wide range of semiotic theories of representation drawing upon largely continental social and philosophical thought. Indeed we have to speak in the plural of ‘hermeneutics of vision’ when defining the field of visual culture today. From these different sources it appears that the place of perception and visuality in our understandings of human reality and the ‘fate of the visual’ in contemporary society and culture have merged to form the context for new alignments, critical projects, and interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities and critical sciences. Textuality (1995)). In the light of these contributions we are gradually realising the extent to which the project of modernity has been saturated by the problematics of viewing and visualisation. We are also now fully aware that the latter are themselves open to socio-cultural and historical analysis in their own right. It is one of the characteristic features of this developing problematic that there is no simple way of disentangling the social history of perception from the

arts of observation and the technologies of visual culture. Indeed an adequate hermeneutics of the scopic regimes of modern European culture needs to ‘triangulate’ all three of these themes and to invent new forms of interpretative inquiry that advance this understanding on several fronts.

The field of visuality: the approach of this volume

The emergent research field of visuality outlined above may be analysed in terms of four ‘levels’ or ‘orders’ of visual phenomena. First, the level of meaningful practices in the life-worlds of everyday life or the routine visual categories at work in organising the structures of practical experience, especially in the takenfor-granted political and ethical practices of envisioning others, of routinised perception and day-to-day social experience, but also the role of visual idioms in those practices which take an analytical interest in the organisations and events of everyday life—the arts, journalism, the human sciences, and so on. Second, the emergence of recent interpretative problematics (theoretical narratives which advocate different ‘ways of seeing’) with an empirical commitment to exploring the detailed sociology and politics of the visual order—including a range of novel sciences with a commitment to recovering and grounding their work in the perceptual realms of the life-world. Third, the historical formation of the theoretical sciences and the role of critical thought in reflecting upon the social construction of their problems and practices. And finally, at a more metatheoretical level, the emergence of critical discourses concerned to question and deconstruct the history and implications of visually organised paradigms and the practices, institutions, and technologies these have legitimated. These different types of concern redirect research away from visuality narrowly conceived and focus attention upon the textual and ideological analysis of ‘the hegemony of vision’ in contemporary culture (Levin, 1993; Lowe, 1982). At this point the phenomenology and hermeneutics of vision are transcended by wider contextual concerns with the problems of the authority and power vested in the dominant visual technologies of Western culture, the role of excluded groups in these systems, particularly the struggles of non-European colonial peoples, women, and working classes in relation to the dominant forms of visual ideology. But ‘hegemony’ here should not be understood in a one-dimensional and mechanical fashion. As with other social changes, we see the contemporary situation in terms of differential, heterogeneous, and transformational social practices.

In many respects the increasing centrality of visual culture—especially as this is now mediated through the image technologies of advanced communication in modern societies—has irreversibly encroached upon all other forms of social and cultural debate. Following the work of Richard Rorly, Martin Jay, David Levin, Hubert Dreyfus, D.M.Lowe, David Lyon, and others, we believe that there is a growing recognition of the need to differentiate between different ‘ways of

seeing’ (‘scopic regimes’, ‘discourses and practices of visuality’) and cultural forms, and to interrogate critically the problematics of anti- and postocularcentric positions in the field of visual experience. 

It is necessary to be as clear as possible about where this particular collection fits into this large, emerging research field. We make no claim that the field as a whole is systematically and synoptically represented, or that the full range of issues and problems within the field is systematically addressed. Contributors are only too well aware of the enormous scope of the field, and of the existence of radically different approaches to it. Yet the collection is concerned to open a dialogue within and between some of these diverse positions by exploring some of the consequences of this moment in the developing field of visuality. This is not only from the point of view of theoretical and conceptual concerns but also more specifically with regard to questions arising from the ongoing practice of those concerned with the life of visual experience: including practices of writing, of art, aesthetic criticism, and critical pedagogy.

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