Significantly a third of all films produced over the last decade have been horror films. In the decade following the end of the New Order regime in 1998 feature film making in Indonesia returned to both productivity and popularity after a hiatus in the 1990s. How does YouTube reflect the politics of memory as a contested space and the dominance of certain social memories? Exploring Indonesia’s creation of social memories through YouTube is beneficial, as many countries have experienced similar traumas in the past and have used new media to contest such memories. This study, therefore, asks how YouTube has interconnected with the politics of memory within the Indonesian state. However, not much research has explored YouTube videos related to the 1965/66 tragedy within the context of the politics of memory. Within the context of the 1965/1966 Tragedy, both official and vernacular versions are available on YouTube.
As YouTube viewership in Indonesia is among the highest around the world (Katadata, 2018), the website has thus become one major locus of memory contestation (Ikhwan, Yulianto, Parahita, 2019). In the current digital era, the internet had been widely used to distribute films. However, since the collapse of Soeharto’s New Order in 1998, forty alternative films dealing with the 1965/66 massacre have been released.
Noer’s film Penumpasan Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Eradication of the Treachery of the 30 September Movement/Indonesian Communist Party), more commonly known as Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, has been widely propagated to produce an official memory of 1965/66 and its aftermath (Zurbuchen, 2002 Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019). Owing to its capacity to offer different means of interpreting and remembering the trauma of modern Indonesian history, cinema has become part of the battle for history in Post-Soeharto Indonesia (Espena, 2017: 59). Such media have been distributed through new media platforms, including YouTube (Espena, 2017 Ikhwan, Yulianto, Parahita, 2019). Media, be it fiction (Suryajaya, 2015 Heriyati, 2015 Wirawan, 2015) or factual-documentaries (Paramaditha, 2013), journalistic reports (Parahita, 2014), as well as videos conveying alternative perspectives of the 1965/66 massacres-have been used to enhance social memories of 1965/66.
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