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REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATION 135private and the public. What this reveals is the potentialfor the personal and the subjective to be a source fordisruption.The image of writing seems to prescribe oppositions inthe act and uses of writing as power relations in narratingthe nation. Writing is prescribed and sanction towardsadministrative and authoritative uses that legitimizepower and its implementations. These themes areconsistent in the films viewed and mentioned above;the existing binary between writing as private individualand public acts, endorsing and realizing as fact theIndonesian paper trails of bureaucratic machinery.Personal writing interjects and interrupts the flow ofnational intent: the machinery of information andadministration. The personal has to be sacrificed, if notsubsumed, for the good of the nation.Writing the personal isolates oneself from the publicexpression of nation as narration. What this infersin Darah is the division not only as writing, but thatthe act of writing comes under the scrutiny and theguiding principles prescribed by national ideology.What at another level is exposed from a differentangle, as Benjamin emphasizes in the new rise in printcapitalism, it is confrontational and problematic as thisnew machinery and form of writing distinguishes itselffrom storytelling, bringing about a crises in storytelling(the personal experience) where “this new form ofcommunication is information” (Brennan 1990, 55).The scenario points to the inclusive aspect of nationalideology’s need to keep track of language, media andcommunication, because as Brennan reveals in a 1980UNESCO report, “It has become increasingly clear thatthe effects of intellectual and cultural dependence areas serious as those of political subjection or economicdependence. There can be no genuine, effectiveindependence without the communication resourcesneeded to safeguard it…a nation whose mass media areunder foreign domination cannot claim to be a nation”(Brennan 1990, 60).If we replace the word writers with filmmakers, DorisSommer makes the point that “the writers wereencouraged both by the need to fill in a history thatwould increase the legitimacy of the emerging nationand the opportunity to direct that history to a futureideal” (Sommer 1990, 76). This history was undermarching orders, in Indonesia’s case meaning itsmilitary and martial concepts of the national polity. Itis therefore instructive that the scene of writing is alsothe scene of interrogation, confession, assassinationand death, leading to Darto’s funeral and the soldiersmarching in victory.Thus writing is a “consciously produced and necessarilyviolent filler for a world full of gaps,” (Sommer 1990, 79)where although the film seems to invite the audience towrite, it also denies in death and closure, and if writinginvites a future, that future is already prescribed, notonly in filmic closure (Darto’s death and funeral) butby nationalist martial ideals.These acts in writing propose to guide and controlcommunication as a homogenizing force, in the needfor reconciliation, of difference of language, et cetera,which was merely a consolidation of forces in thetransitory period (a fragile time) towards founding andbuilding a nation.Contradiction surfaces and becomes prophetic,showing the structures at work and the authorities’fears. In proposing that writing should be containedto the private spheres, this very act of writing andreading emerges later under the Orde Baru as the veryspace for disruptive acts, whether hidden sub-textuallyin the novel, as a form of narrating the dissenting andalternative voices of the nation, to their fragmentedpamphleteering calls of resistance across campuses.New places and independent spacesWhat the contemporary generation of filmmakers isdoing is re-claiming and re-covering the spaces whichdefined their lives and practices historically, and theirlived moments and experiences within the community.We cannot talk of nation without consideration ofsocial spaces and their relationship to representationand lived realities, without considering spatial politicsand their constituencies and productivities.If representation has any meaning for nation and identity,and if it has any part in forming ideological constructs,it is that they are constant shifting processes in thecontestation of spaces that can only be derived by realistrepresentations as mythological forms, whose currentstatus is being actively and progressively challenged bythe young, whose subject matter reveals a response torepressed and hidden histories, whose recovery can onlyoriginate within their own subjectivities, as private andpersonal that would counter reigning discourses andrepresentations as public histories and national myths.These fragmented and isolated perspectives within theproliferation of narratives in the current media-scapeattests to previous authoritarian demarcation andAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows