Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATION 129The current metaphor of landscape as the inscapeof national identity emphasizes the quality of light,the question of social visibility, the power of the eyeto naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation andits forms of collective expression (Bhabha 1994).Film—DissemiNationWhile the West and China and Japan in the Easthave had their history in the birth, construction andestablishment of the idea of nationhood, proclaimingthe death of nationalism once they had gained theirbrand of modernism, the rest of the world is stillcoming to terms with these ideas in the aftermath ofcolonialism, whose inherited problems are still coursingthrough the body politic, whether in border claimsand disputes, or intra-ethnic rivalries over territoriescarved out and established from the landing of the firstEuropean. The idea of the nation as Foucault has termedit is a “discursive formation” and therefore perpetuallya work in progress. It has no fixity, and territories andborders are constructs of historical contingency thatdefy more than they define, including ethnicity, raceand religion. What characterizes a nation is becomingmore important as groups, communities and ethnicitiesin Indonesia, from Maluku to Aceh, became more vocalafter Suharto’s downfall and the advent of Reformasiand ushered in a new era of relative democratic freedomof expression. Not least of these freedoms is the rise intwo areas of Indonesia’s social, political and cultural life:the voicing out of ethnic identity, challenging the unityof nationhood, and the use and spread of media forms,in particular films and video, concomitant with theawareness of those new found freedoms of expressionin promoting issues and contestations of histories thatwere otherwise marginalized.This paper attempts to look at films and their constituentelements and constructions in narrating the nation. Thebirth of nations, always filled with trauma, violence andwars, has invariably been part of almost every nation’shistory, as it defines itself around the idea of coherence.As one of the earliest writers on the question ofnationalism puts it, “Unity is always effected by meansof brutality” (Renan 1990).What is a nation and what is nationalism and whatare its field, perimeters and definitions, can fill pagesbeyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it for me to saythat Benedict Anderson has already given us a brilliantaccount on nationalism and its constituent ideas inhis book, Imagined Communities. His view that thespace and time of the modern nation is embodiedin the narrative culture of the novel and print mediacould extend to include the narratives of most media,including films.Towards this end, this paper looks at two Indonesianfilms of the war genre, Darah dan Doa (The Long March)(1950) and Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treasonof the September 30 Movement and the IndonesianCommunist Party) (1984), which have been identifiedas representative of this genre. Many of the films sharesimilar themes, and many elements act as recurringmotifs expressing abiding concerns and expressions,signifying main tenets in their visual and narrativeconstructions.Beginning / Ending—Birth / DeathThe scene on the screen opens on a vast landscapesomewhere in Java. Two ranking officers are lookingthrough a pair of binoculars. Adam, the more martialcharacter complete with a songkok-like military headgear,passes the viewing equipment to the more casual of ourtwo heroes, Sudarto or Darto, as they survey the scenebelow from their vantage point higher up. Althoughthe camera frames them in a ¾ angle, the subsequentviews of several shots of the landscape from wide toclose, showing soldiers in formation and scramblingacross the terrain, as if from Darto’s point of view/povshot, is in fact framed for and privileges the audience.The audience, to borrow Althusser’s terminology,is “hailed” or “interpellated” to enter the viewingprocess whose sightline is at odds with Darto’s, butclearly signalling and consigning them their space andfunction, emplacing them as witness in the narration ofa historic struggle across the heartland. Darto does notand cannot see what they can, as we see a slight worrycast over his face and by crossing their sightlines, theyare in fact signaled that Darto’s eyesight fails him, asa revolutionary and a soldier, as the film makes clearfurther into the story.Adam sees with his own eyes and he speaks more thanDarto who is merely looking via the “viewing aid” ofthe binoculars. Of the two, Darto is slightly a step lowerin the frame, but as officers they are both at higherground, while their men are scrambling through therough terrain down below, and the audience privilegedin relation to their spatial relationship.Here all spaces have been signaled and demarcated, andpeople have been consigned, in their places (class) andin their spaces, image-cinema screen (object), imagementalscreen (subject), in the words of Michelle Sipein her essay, space as means of social control, framingit as masculine practice, for “controlled visibility andAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows