Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

130 REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATIONthe discrete separation of individuals and the spaces thatdefine them” (Sipe 2004, 94).What Darto is also looking at is himself, at the endingof the film, hence the slight shadow of worry across hisface. He has already seen his own death, at the handsof the audience. In film language and revolution, 24frames per second, cinematic time is not a mystery.It is compressed and imbricated and, for the colonialsubject Darto, split at the borders of cinematic spaceand country, between past and present, death is theonly outcome and mode of being. The nation cannotaccept those that are in between. If Adam is the sacrificethat defines nation, Darto is the sacrifice because hedefies nation.The romantic individualist Darto sees his own demiseat the film’s ending. From the heights of nationalconsciousness in the Javanese highlands to the depths ofthe urban interior, he returns to his small quarters. Hesits down to open his journal, when a shadowy figurefrom a dark corner of the room, brandishing a gun, callsout, asking Darto if he remembers him, giving himself aname. Darto replies that he does not remember. Dartolooks at his journal and we see a montage sequence ofexcerpts of key moments from the film superimposedover the journal’s pages. Accompanying these images isSukarno’s speech.The camera frames the scene for the audience’s pointof view. The assassin is at the extreme edge of frame inshadow so that there is an uninterrupted view of thescene. The framing closes onto Darto while he addressesthe audience. We hear a gunshot as he grabs his chest.This direct relationship to the audience mirrors theopening. The audience has participated and assentedto killing, execution style, of a hero who has failed therevolution, the national struggle.Darto’s bloodied hand falls on the empty page of thejournal. Nothing is written, only blood stains at thejournal’s edges where the beginnings of an entry inhand-writing is seen, representing an unfinished life, asDarto says in his dying breath, “Jangan di ulang lagi,biar aku saja.” (Do not follow my example, let me bethe only one.)Here Darto’s sin is as much in failing martial idealsfor nationalist ends as it is for not remembering hisorders. The empty page in the journal is as much aboutcommitting to memory events in one’s life as it is to fillempty spaces for nationalist text. In this instance thepage will be filled by the audience, the revolutionariesand the people, as testified by the series of penultimateshots depicting his old comrades around his funeral, (afinal communion with the people, achieving only indeath what he could not achieve in life) and low angleshots of soldiers marching straight into the camera.Time needs commemoration and symbols as sacrifices,as Timothy Brennan has said, “Nationalism largelyextended and modernized (although it did not replace)‘religious imaginings’, taking on religion’s concern withdeath, continuity and the desire for origins.”It is in Darto’s open unfinished and blank journal thatthe audience is also invited to write the nation anew.From death and rebirth in the cycle of continuity, andfrom history’s example of every revolutionary society’simpulse to begin anew, from the flight from Medina,the Muslim Hijerah, to Mao’s Long March, to thelong March in this film across Java, from the fall of theBastille to the Khmer Rouge’s announcement of yearzero. This remembering by forgetting is the ritual ofrenewal or, put another way, “this zero point or startingpoint is what allows ritual repetition, the ritualisationof memory, celebration, commemoration—in short allthose forms of magical behaviour signifying defeat ofthe irreversibility of time,” (Debray 1997, 51) invariablycarried out in the collective spaces of the imagination,from grand to daily rituals in the mass ceremony of thecinema to the celebration of meaningful sites and sacreddates.Here death is tantamount to suicide, and in the extendedspatial continuum between the audience and Darto, itis a collective purging. Even as he falls, his back is to theaudience, as an admission of guilt, turning in on his ownnarcissism in turning his back to the masses, the peoplein the audience; his execution and death are an exampleto and lesson for the body politic. If his self sacrificeis of a higher order, it is only to differentiate from thedeath and sacrifices of Adam and Widya and countlessothers in the nationalist struggle, in that, where theirsis at the mimetic level of realist representation, Darto’sis at the level of our/his engagement with the text itself.Not only is he split between borders of territories, ofthe interior landscape of the self, but also of cinematicspace and screen space, between the representation ofreality and representation itself. He is the image thatis sacrificed in the writing and re-imaginings of thenation, with the blank journal as an open invitationto the audience to re-write, re-imagine. Thus the filminscribes the audience into the narrative, and asks theaudience to re-inscribe the text of national imaginings,film amongst other media as part of the accumulationsof sacred text, in the national longing for form.If space, time and memory are the frameworks throughAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows