Word: indonesia
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...often the only, representative of an entire continent, Africa, and a world religion, Islam--though his family was Christian and his heritage Lebanese and Greek. He was both a nationalist and an internationalist, both an art-house auteur and a director of movies that were popular from Morocco to Indonesia...
...Chahine established his early rep in the '50s, when Egypt rivaled India as the Hollywood of the Arabic-speaking world, and stars like Omar Sharif and Faten Hamama set moviegoers' heart aglow in Islamic countries from Morocco to Indonesia. In 1954 Chahine cast Hamama, who had been in movies since girlhood, and the 22-year-old Sharif, a recent college graduate making his first film, in Siraa Fil-Wadi / The Blazing Sky / Sky of Hell. This Romeo-and-Juliet drama set on sugarcane plantations was Egypt's entry at the Cannes Film Festival, and a pan-Arabic smash. It established...
...Despite the hardships under the Japanese, and the ensuing guerrilla war against the Dutch, the 1940s were considered a good time to be an artist. Clustered in Yogyakarta were painters eager to break with the Dutch school of painting in Indonesia, of which the preeminent exemplar was the Bali-based Rudolf Bonnet. The pastoral depictions of Indonesian village life produced by Bonnet and others were dismissed by Sudjojono as so much shallow Orientalism. "For my people, reality is the reality of rice," he wrote in 1950, arguing for a muscular realism. One of the painters who was moved by Sudjojono...
...work often cited as proof is So Was Born the Generation of '66. Painted in that year, it shows a young artist, in a red hip-length jacket, holding up a paintbrush like a peace offering amid a violent streetscape. In the background, graffiti from the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) is scrawled across the walls. The painting's content is explicitly political. "[Sudjojono's] point is that all the artist needs is his paint and brush and he can take on the world," explains Kuala Lumpur gallery owner Valentine Willie. Putting the artist center stage also gave the work...
...success both as an artist and as a communist politician. In the early 1950s, he went on a government-sponsored tour to Europe, where, in Amsterdam, he met a beautiful Eurasian music student of German-Indonesian origin named Rose Pandanwangi. She too was married, but upon her return to Indonesia they began an affair. In 1955, Sudjojono was elected to Indonesia's first parliament under the banner of the PKI, which had become part of a shaky coalition cobbled together by President Sukarno. A few years later, Sudjojono disclosed his affair with Rose to PKI officials, and declared his intention...