Investigating Genre Trends in Indonesian Feature Films

  • 18/12/2019
  • Category: Digital Intelligence Lab EN
No Comments

The industry of feature films in Indonesia can be traced back as far as the 1900s, a period where Indonesia was still colonized by the Dutch. At the time, most feature films that were taken in the Dutch East Indies—the former name of Indonesia during Dutch colonization—were characterized by the fact that they were produced and directed by foreigners. Furthermore, most cinemas at the time until the 1920s belonged mostly to the Europeans. Another anecdote regarding social conditions that may reflect itself in the filming industries includes the fact that production houses during 1939 and 1941 were owned by Chinese Indonesians. In his book, Sejarah Film 1900–1950, Biran discussed many temporal social aspects that were reflected in the filming industry in Indonesia during Dutch colonization, Japanese colonization, as well as later on during the revolution. 

The impact of the movie industry in the modern era is echoed in a paper from Mercu Buana University, where comedy films are deemed to represent a social occurrence in Indonesia where “physical, sexual satire degrading others became a potential joke in public daily life”. At the same time, films are regarded as one of the major influential media in Indonesia. This is reflected in the explicit mention of movie’ influence according to the 2009 law on film censorship, as well as the 2014 Government Regulation number 18. Hence, the paradoxical reflection of social phenomenon between Indonesia’s movie industry and social conditions.

The popularity of film directors such as Joko Anwar in producing horror movies in recent years increases the number of viewers and changes public perception towards Indonesian horror films. The recurrence of Indonesian horror movies in theaters raises a question regarding movie genres throughout the Indonesian film industry history. Hence, this research aims to explore the relationships between film genres over the years by observing the numbers of films released with certain genre(s) within a year.

Due to the vast amount of related information stored in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as well as its reliability, we extract our dataset from IMDb. IMDb is an online database that contains information on films, televisions, and various other entertainment media that was launched in 1990. In this research, data from IMDb were extracted with a constraint of data pertaining to Indonesian feature films. On their page, IMDb explains that on top of crowdsourcing the information, rigorous consistency checks are done to keep submitted information reliable and accurate. Using web crawling and scraping, data were gathered after performing an advanced search mechanism. In an attempt to uncover quantitative analysis between genres and years, statistical methods were used. 

Research Design

This section explains the analysis and design of the environment that revolves around the research problem. It includes the methodology that was designed and implemented in this research.

Dataset Retrieval

Crawling and scraping were done on results generated with IMDb’s advanced title search in the following link https://www.imdb.com/search/title/. We consider the following parameters in the results generated:

  • Title type: Feature Film
  • Countries: Indonesia
  • Adult Titles*: Include
  • Display: Detailed

After obtaining the query results, the following steps were performed:

  1. At the time of the research, the generator produced 2223 results. With a maximum of 250 query results per page, we scrape the page with the GET request &count=250&start=key from the URL by adjusting the variable key in the query through a loop.
  2. Request the URLs using urllib3.
  3. Retrieve the content (Year, Genre(s)) using BeautifulSoup by inspecting the tags in the HTML produced.
  4. Data were cleaned from missing genre values.
  5. Data retrieved were pre-processed by applying delimiter catching and regular expressions.
  6. After clean data are produced, genres are counted grouped by their respective release year.

*Note that given a movie contains two or more genres, it is attributed differently in the computation. Hence, the sum of genres computed in a year does not equal the number of movies produced in the same year.

Data Visualization

Data were visualized with the help of flourish. Since the data retrieved is temporal in nature, a line graph would be appropriate to visualize the data. Using flourish, data could also be filtered and presented dynamically on a website. Furthermore, representation using stacked bar graphs allows an overall visual representation of the distribution of different genres over the years.

Analysis

Statistical methods were used to analyze the data in order to assess the correlations between certain genres and years. There are several components that are being analyzed in this research:

  1. Number of genres in a temporal scheme
  2. Aggregate information in a temporal scheme (mean, mode)
  3. Trends and ranks on the genres as a whole
  4. Qualitative analysis such as the involvement of social cues in the information

After quantitative information has been computed, qualitative information could then be achieved through secondary research on some key periods in which the quantitative information shows significance.

Results

From the analysis, we can observe the following genres by ranking along with their number of occurrences:

Visualizing in a stacked bar graph allows us to see the composition of genres each year.

Through the graph above, we observe that the dominant genres are drama, comedy, horror, action, and romance. We observe that certain years are dominated by a particular genre, in which possible correlations could be drawn.

The top 3 genres in the dataset are Drama, Comedy, and Horror. The 3 genres have shown consistent growth in production throughout Indonesian filming history. Films and other forms of entertainment media have been a form of catharsis, a process of releasing repressed emotions and thereby providing a sense of relief. The result that was shown in this study shows some consistency with the data shown by Managing Partner Ideosource Film Fund (IFF) about the 3 most popular Indonesian film genres from 2008-2018. 

Action movies are the most frequently released in the year 1984. From the data, it is observed that the growing interest in the Indonesian film industry towards producing action films, which had declined since its peak in the 1980s, was found rising again in 2009. Reflecting on the social condition at the time, the Indonesian government’’s totalitarianism brought upon public display of violence towards criminals in the 1980s. At the time, law enforcers were distraught by the growth in numbers of preman (translation: street thugs) during this era. Up until 1982, various operations were done to apprehend this so-called preman that at one point caused economic loss by intercepting and robbing trucks carrying commodities. The operation escalated to a point where preman were assassinated on open streets, with the aim of spreading fear to other preman. In his book that was published in 1989, former Indonesian president Soeharto affirmed that the act of violence was deemed as a solution to the growth of the crime rate. This leads to the existence of petrus (an abbreviation of penembak misterius, or “mysterious shooter), which were documented to run their operation during 1982-1985.

Although to date, no real causation could be drawn from the correlation, the fact that the public was served with publicly shown violence shows an interesting possible relationship with the rise of action films in the 1980s, specifically starting from 1981. Hence, the rise of films with action genre shows a correlation with the actual social phenomenon that may show insights to possible relationships; although it is important to distinguish correlation from causation.

Romantic Indonesian films reached their peak production in 2016. In that year, notable romance movies such as Ada Apa Dengan Cinta (AADC) 2 as well as Rudy Habibie ranked 2 and 4 respectively in terms of predicted grossing. On the account of the best selling movies produced in 2016, both Warkop DKI Reborn Part 1 and AADC 2 do not only become interesting in their own intrinsic values, but they also tap on the nostalgia of their target audiences, being the now-adult population of Gen X. Let’s take a case on AADC 2 as well as Rudy Habibie, both movies that may tap into the audiences’ nostalgic experience in 2 different ways, one being a movie that is a sequel to a popular movie in the early 2000s, while the other enables the viewers to relive the setting of the past. Yet, with the touch of modern cinematography and context, these films are still relatable to the younger audience. The beauty of drama films is that it could take a diverse amount of topics and it is proven to be effective through its consistency in dominating the film industry. Through the represented ideas or topics that are covered in drama movies, we are able to capture the essence of the society in the period.

Conclusion

The course of the Indonesian’ filming industry is trailed by the characteristics of each genre that gives them their color. From this analysis, we can see that drama, comedy, and horror become the trinity of genres in the Indonesian film industry. Through different eras, a consistent rise in the numbers of these 3 genres is flavored with spikes of other genres in some years that denote social sentiments and conditions. Through films, directors and artists can reflect the paradigm during the era and serve it as a part of a complex Indonesian history. Future research might include a varying source of datasets such as filmindonesia.co.id or other databases of Indonesian films. Further investigations regarding the social and psychological phenomenon revolving around other genres and its social feedback might also give further insights on the correlation between popular movie genres and the social phenomenon that surrounds them.

Author: Vidiskiu Fortino Kurniawan
Editor: Josia Paska Darmawan

Reference

[1] I. Mahmood, “Influence and Importance of Cinema on the Lifestyle of Educated Youth: A study on University Students of Bangladesh,” IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 77–80, 2013.

[2] M. Y. Biran, Sejarah film, 1900-1950: bikin film di Jawa. Beji, Depok: Komunitas Bambu, 2009.

[3] R. Briandana & N. Dwityas. Comedy Films as Social Representation in the Society: An Analysis of Indonesian Comedy Films. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. IV. 107-118. 2018

[4] W. Diananto, “Joko Anwar Ungkap Dua Problem Besar Film Horor Indonesia, Apa Saja?,” Liputan 6, 12-Oct-2019.

[5] “Where does the information on IMDb come from?,” IMDb. [Online]. Available: https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/general-information/where-does-the-information-on-imdb-come-from/GGD7NGF5X3ECFKNN?ref_=helpart_nav_23#. [Accessed: 22-Oct-2019].

[6] A, Petrov. urllib3 (Version 1.25.6). https://pypi.org/project/urllib3/. 2019

[7] L, Richardson. beautifulsoup4 (Version 4.8.1). https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/. 2019

[8] Rappler.com, “Mengungkap 10 film Indonesia terlaris sepanjang tahun 2016,” Rappler. [Online]. Available: https://www.rappler.com/indonesia/gaya-hidup/156939-10-film-indonesia-terlaris-tahun-2016. [Accessed: 22-Oct-2019].

[9] F. W. Wirawan and P. D. Hapsari, “ANALISIS AISAS MODEL TERHADAP PRODUCT PLACEMENT DALAM FILM INDONESIA Studi Kasus: Brand Kuliner di Film Ada Apa Dengan Cinta 2,” REKAM: Jurnal Fotografi, Televisi, dan Animasi, vol. 12, no. 2, p. 69, 2017.

[10] Rasni, “Nasib Nahas Preman di Era Soeharto, Ditembak Mati Orang Tak Dikenal, Kondisi Jempolnya Selalu Sama,” Tribun Timur, 07-Jul-2018. [Online]. Available: https://makassar.tribunnews.com/2018/07/07/nasib-nahas-preman-di-era-soeharto-ditembak-mati-orang-tak-dokenal-kondisi-jempolnya-selalu-sama. [Accessed: 22-Oct-2019].

[11] L. Hasibuan, “Ini Deretan Genre Film Paling Diminati Penonton Indonesia,” lifestyle, 04-May-2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.cnbcindonesia.com/lifestyle/20180504090055-33-13588/ini-deretan-genre-film-paling-diminati-penonton-indonesia. [Accessed: 22-Oct-2019].

[12] G.D. ,Walthers. Understanding the popular appeal of horror cinema: An integrated-interactive model. Journal of Media Psychology, 9(2). Located at: http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/horrormoviesRev2.htm. 2004