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128 REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATIONNARRATING THE NATION: MODERN HISTORICALREPRESENTATIONS OF IDENTITY IN INDONESIAN FILMIskandar Sharifuddin bin Mohd. SaidSight/Site And NationThe location for cinema is sight. Everything else comesafterwards and at the same time, in the same space. Inthe cinema, time plays out its scenarios from the fieldsof war to narrow alleyways in small towns, from ruralto urban, tradition to modernity, without the audiencehaving to leave their seats. If we never had to travel, it isbecause film has taken us there, where we have been andwhere we are going, in and through time, a durationthat Victor Burgin has described as “imbricated” oroverlapping time. What takes us there, while we arehere, in the comfort zone of the darkened cinemahall, close to a half awakened/dream state is narrative,structure and organization. It organizes and structuresus, the subject, via our perception of the object/screen.It is also in this sense that cinema is sight and sitespecific. The implication here is the spatial continuumfrom screen/site of visuals to mental/sight of visuality—from screening space to mental space. It is here thatideologies play out their images, and it is also in thissense that space is never neutral and that most thingsare already mediated, if not life itself.The screen presents us with a space unlike but similarto other places that we have encountered in reality,recognized and imagined as image yet never been to,but perhaps close to a place we can call home, countryor nation. It is through the mimesis of realism, that weencounter image as reality and reality as image, as a cycleof reproduction and representation. Put in another way,as a member of the audience, I am the origin and thedestination in the cycle of representation of the imageand its narration.Seen in this light, another dimension can be addedin the way that we can view narrative, especially inthe context of its operations as ideological constructsand their operations within the concept of spatialrelationships. No longer can we think of ideology asa concept out there, separated from the subject as an“instrument of domination wielded by one section ofa society and imposed upon another” (Burgin 1997)but shifted to a broader and deeper dimension where“ideology was now conceived of in terms of a space ofrepresentations that the subjects inhabit, a limitless spacethat the desiring subject negotiates by predominantlyunconscious transactions” (Burgin 1997). J.L. Beller,in discussing the cinematic technology and Vertov’swork, says that the Russian filmmaker “takes the imageas a technology for ‘the organization of the audiencewith organized material’ effectively grasping cinema as asocial machine for engineering the socius” (Beller 2002,71) and thereby rendering “objects and images as socialrelations” where “viewers do not encounter the technoimaginaryonly on the screen, its logic is already insidethem” describing “the enfolding of the image into thesocial fabric” (Beller 2002, 71).In this sense the site for cinema is sight and the sight forcinema is site, the bodied self, the subject. The humanbody is the interface between the object and its image.Everything in this paper that can be imagined andvisualized begins from this space, from the relationshipof screen and self, self and screen.In looking and reading cinema in the context of thenarrating of nation, it seems to me hazardous not toengage in the ideas and theories governing space andspatial relationships, in the ordering and organizingof principles behind those two terms. The nationoften referred to as the nation space points to itsamorphousness, its ether-like quality, that is less aboutits objectness that can be grasped and apprehended thanabout its qualities as ideas, myths and symbols that arearticulated through spatial categories and territories,via cultural texts—print media, novels, art, films etc.—across textual and spatial boundaries. It is in this waythat we can begin to traverse, engage in, map out andbegin to understand some of the ways and elements thatreveal their constructions and imaginings.Space invites categorization, territorialization,demarcations and borders—mapping in various formsand guises—in defining the nation. Those formscan manifest themselves through social and culturalpractices that draw lines of inclusion and exclusion,thereby turning space into place. They originate fromthe body and the body’s engagement through the livedenvironment, via language and the senses—the nose,ears and eyes. In the cinema the eyes have priority:Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows