Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

134 REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATIONconnections into their signifying context, landscape inthis sense, as space, and to signify its context:“landscapes become a process of reflexivity, ofidentity and inter-subjectivity. Their ‘character’ isconstructed by the subject herself from numerous‘things,’ and her own encounter, physically,with bits of landscape. These become engaged asfragments of a wider everyday visual culture, ‘there,’though her embodied and reflexively-embodiedencounter may be most significant. Materialfeatures so encountered are rendered meaningfulthrough our personal engagement with them.What emerges is a geography of spatialization:a process. Understood in this way, landscape,space and place are never ontologically given butdeveloped through practices, discursively graspedin an embodied way. The subject in landscape isspacing, practicing, producing, doing things in andwith space.” (Crouch and Malm 2004, 255)That space is that of our embodying of locations, physicalas well as mental, and this space is discursively practicedin the cinema, although engaged as representations,as image, visuality is central in the mental process viathe ocular, as site for the human subjects’ engagementwith space and its representation. It is here space andits representation is thereby “performed in a processof flows, where combinations of memory, action andmeaning” such as ideological constructs “are complexand performed together” (Crouch and Malm 2004,254).What both scenes articulate are the power relations atwork in the gendering of space as social and politicalconstructs. Sukarno’s palace is the highest signifier ofpower bereft and denied of women, and the martialinfiltration re-claims and re-defines the domestic andfeminized space as its very heart, the reproductive spaceof the nation for ideological struggle.Other spacesIf Darah is the birth of the nation, where the presentreconfigures the past to an eternal future repetition,what its constituents point to is the construction ofits (history’s) own logic; its positive projections ofnationalist ideals in its own image, and its negativebetween the cuts, the spaces beyond the frame, and theimages that it denies and represses in the organization ofnarrating the nation, as a violence that would re-surfacearound the w/hole of “Lubang Buaya” (in the events reconstructed)in G30S. What G30S shows are the strainsthat held the contradictions in the narrating of nationto its breaking point and its resultant violence.The elements and organizing principles drawn out inDarah had to be harnessed and shifted in perspectiveand narrative structure. They were re-aligned in severalways: the inversion of space as the site for political andmilitary struggle from the public spaces of the countrysideto the interior of domestic spaces, partly because thekidnappings happened in the generals’ homes, attestingto historical veracity, but more importantly it indicatesthe effects of and need for authoritarian infiltration andcontrol of all spaces that requires containment via thepolicing of the limits and demarcations of those spaces,between the private, domestic and public, betweengender, class and hierarchy, ethnicities, groups andcommunities, that make up the nation.Romancing the nationThis is of course taken to its logical conclusion andrealized in “G30S” where battles were fought in theinteriors of the domestic realm. Darto is no ordinaryhero. As anti-hero he fails to possess his object of desire,“whether she becomes synonymous with the land, as sheoften does, or with the ‘naturally’ submissive and lovingraces and classes that the hero will elevate through hisaffection, woman is what he must possess in order toachieve harmony and legitimacy” (Sommer 1990, 85).The land shelters the soldiers and military from theenemy, and Widya is the nurse and woman who rescuesthe old injured woman in the field.In Indonesian films, nation building and romance gohand in hand; love is productivity.Writing the nationIn several Indonesian films, scriptural metaphorsconsistently play a part in writing the nation, inauthorizing its narrative around the visible and invisiblespaces of love, emotion, duty orders and administration,and demarcating borders between the personal and thepublic.In the films Pedjuang, Enam Djam di Djogja, LewatDjam Malam, Embun and others, writing in officialletters, orders and reports is highly visible, whereas notesof love and of a personal nature are hidden, silenced orcryptic. Private wishes and desires must be sublimatedto national sacrifice and duty, for the nation.The printed word is linked to power and personalwritings threaten the authority of institutionalizedspace and its organizing procedures in demarcating theAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows