A Full Moon on the Screen

Terang Boelan , Roekiah, and vernacular modernism in the late colonial Malay world

Bibliographic Data

ID8133296
AuthorsTeuku Reza Fadeli (0000-0002-5512-6642, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume54
Issue158
Pages1-25
Publication date2026-03-03
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueIndonesia and the Malay World (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1363-9811 • E-ISSN: 1469-8382
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13639811.2026.2624930
OpenAlexW7133904035
LanguageEN
References cited20

This article examines the film Terang Boelan (Full Moon; 1937) and the star persona of its lead actress, Roekiah, as a case of vernacular modernism in the late colonial Malay world. It argues that the film’s circulation across the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya depended on an intermedial ecology in which cinema, radio, vernacular newspapers, touring performance, and advertising made ‘modern’ entertainment widely legible and repeatable across colonial jurisdictions. Using newspapers and periodicals, press coverage, film magazines, and multilingual advertising, the article reconstructs how the film’s narrative, songs, and publicity travelled through exhibition circuits, and how its title and melody gained afterlives beyond the cinema, including a Penang ‘Terang Bulan’ kebaya promotion. It also shows how Roekiah’s regional stardom took shape through a public image that combined celebrity allure with moral legibility, producing a portable template for modern Malay womanhood that circulated in print and on screen. Instead of centring Terang Boelan mainly as a national milestone, the article places it in a transcolonial media economy and shows how mediated practices of taste such as listening, viewing, and wearing, shaped shared experiences of modernity on the eve of the World War II.

Colonialism · Exhibition · Malay · Modernism (music) · Modernity · Newspaper · Publicity · Taste · Vernacular · Cinema and Media Studies · Educational Leadership and Practices · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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