Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATION 131and in which the text for national and ideological formsare written, then what exactly is that text and how arethey articulated and how do they engage with subjectsin culture and society?For answers to these questions we turn our attentionto my readings of the two films mentioned that signify,inter-text and articulate the nation. Darah dan Doawas made in 1950 by Usmar Ismail, who is consideredto be the father of Indonesian films. The other isPengkhianatan G30S/PKI made by Ariffin C. Noer in1982.Darah dan Doa is a black and white film recounting theIndonesian struggle against the Dutch colonizers in theirwar of independence. It tells the story of two heroes,both officers leading their unit, volunteers and homelesscivilians in a long march, through the treacherous andembattled countryside of their homeland, Java. Itbasically narrates the birth of a nation, and is a primeexample of the genre of “war films” that underpins theconstruction of nation and identity, and in this respectit is a good representation of the collective historical“memory” of the nation. The second is a feature filmre-enacting, in a quasi-documentary mode, the eventssurrounding the night of 1 October 1965, when seven ofIndonesia’s army chiefs were kidnapped and murderedat Lubang Buaya.My research and readings places this film as pivotal inthe film’s (re)construction of history and its enlistmentof documentary codes and conventions in signifying itsstatus and authority on historical truth, and its blurringof the borders between fiction and documentaryas symptomatic of trauma and terror. These filmsconstruct nation and history as a narrative exercise inmyth making.The themes of birth and death and executions, in Darahdan Doa of a father at the hands of his son, while inG30S between internal political rivalries, the forcesrepresenting the father of Indonesian IndependenceSukarno and the sons of the nation. Love is shownin relationships between men and women, filial andfamilial relationships. These aspects of contestationsfind their expressions in different spaces and variousforms, where rivalries manifest themselves as the “enemywithin” of post-revolutionary struggle as much as thosethat betray the military projection of itself as the family,the patriarch and guardian of nationalist ideals from thefields of the Javanese countryside to the interior spacesof the domestic.These events and markings, the gravesites for the warriorsin Darah and the burial hole for the murdered generalsin G30S, mark the land in the rituals of commemorationof sacred places and in the remembering of sacreddates.Concomitant with these themes, in much of these warfilms, is the theme of writing, from notes and journalsto letters of officialdom. This binary oppositioncharacterizes these films, delineating oppositions anddemarcations of power between the public and thepersonal.Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI is a film produced underorders from Gen. Suharto himself. In many ways, theconstruction of nationalist ideology in Darah dan Doafinds its logic and trajectory in the events of 1965,on the night of 30 September, and the subsequenttrauma of political cleansing that spread throughoutIndonesia in its aftermath. There are no less than fivediffering accounts of the events, of which Suharto’sis the officially endorsed and accepted version for thenational polity. The film claims to re-enact history andis thereby a “truthful” account of that night, completewith newspaper clippings, authoritative voice-overs anddocumentary footages of national mourning at the endas evidence of its veracity.The film proper begins in the ailing Sukarno’s bedroomat his palace in Bogor. The first person to be introducedis D.N. Aidit, leader of the Indonesian CommunistParty and his assistant, as they await doctors from thePeople’s Republic of China who arrive to administeracupuncture on the sick president. The first realdialogue to be heard is in Mandarin. The structuringof shots and the ordering of scenes in a discontinuousmanner disorganizes spatial continuity around theabsence of the president’s sick body, which is shown ina series of extreme close-ups accentuating the emptinessin the palace as a symbol of the space of the nationwhile suggesting an absence of power in the president’sbody as the body politic, already threatening to befilled by D.N. Aidit and the Chinese doctors. In fact,the close ups of needles puncturing the president’sbody already suggests the introduction of somethingphysically and culturally alien associated with Aidit andthe doctors from the People’s Republic, all of whom arecommunists.In this cavernous empty palace filled with paintings andstatues of women, where the president is seen alone athis huge desk surrounded by books from Mao to Lenin,the heart of the nation is being drained by corruptinginfluences while a herd of deer, robust and majestic, arerunning in the palace grounds outside, suggesting thatAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows