Histories, Heroes, and Monumental Frameworks

Historiography is as much about contemporaneous imaginations of society as it is about the past. In this section I discuss representations of Indonesian film history of the New Order and the film genres which represented its ideologies and discourses about the past. Historians and scholars in literary criticism have reflected on the structures of representation and interpretation in historical discourses. Historian Hayden White (1999) in his article ‘Literary theory and historical writing’ considered the way in which the techniques of historiography and literature overlap each other. White argues that historical discourse is by definition an interpretation of past events by