ABSTRACT
At a time when the border-zones of the Indonesian nation are being violently tested by ethnic, religious and regional differences, when in fact it has contracted in relinquishing the world’s newest nation, East Timor, it may be foolhardy to speak at all of something called Indonesian cinema. But the institutional organization of films produced and consumed in Indonesia is such that it is impossible to discuss these except as “national cinema”. Moreover, the current contestations over what constitutes the Indonesian nation allow us to raise new questions about domination and resistance in its film culture – questions which the Third Cinema movement inserted irrevocably into all theorising about films in the “non-western” world.
