The Enchanted Monkey (1926)

Loetoeng Kasaroeng

Purbasari and Purbararang are sisters and in competition. Purbararang, the elder sister, teases Purbasari about the latter's lover, a lutung named Guru Minang; Purbarang's boyfriend, Indrajaya, is a handsome human. However, the girls discover that Guru Minang is actually a god who is more handsome than Indrajaya.

Date of release
1926-12-31
TMDB
10.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 0m
Genres
Fantasy
Director
George Krugers, L. Heuveldorp

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Lutung Kasarung

Loetoeng Kasaroeng is a 1926 fantasy film from the Dutch East Indies which was directed and produced by L. Heuveldorp. An adaptation of the Sundanese folktale Lutung Kasarung, the film tells of a young girl who falls in love with a magical lutung and stars the children of noblemen. Details on its performance are unavailable, although it is known to have been of poor technical quality and thought to have performed poorly. It was the first film produced in the country and the first to feature a native-Indonesian cast. It is likely a lost film.

Production

The first showing of films in the Dutch East Indies was in 1900, and over the next twenty years foreign productions – generally from the United States – were imported and shown throughout the country. Domestic production of documentaries had begun in 1911 but were unable to compete with imported works. By 1923 a local feature film production spearheaded by the Middle East Film Co. was announced, but the work was not completed.

Under pressure from imported works, in 1926 N.V. Java Film, a production house based in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) which had previously produced a single documentary, Inlanders op de Krokodillenjacht (Native Crocodile Hunters), chose to make a feature film based on the Sundanese folktale Lutung Kasarung. The company's owner, L.

The cast was drawn entirely from the priyayi (noble) class, under the coordination of school headmaster Raden Kartabrata. Among the cast were children of Wiranatakusumah V, the regent of Bandung; he had agreed to help fund the film to promote Sundanese culture, and had previously brought the story to the stage. Further subsidies had come from the Ministry of Defence, which donated trucks to ease filming.

Filming had begun by August 1926, when several scenes were shot in a cave that had been excavated for the production on Karang Hill. Heuveldorp, unable to force the actors to play their roles seriously, shot several scenes with them acting as they wished before showing them the results; upon realising that their acting had been disappointing, the cast began to listen to stage directions.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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