Dag Yngvesson

filmmaker/ PhD candidate

Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Minnesota

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SHADOWS ON THE SILVER SCREEN? HISTORY VERSUS ESSENTIALISM IN INDONESIAN CINEMA

 

How is cinema in a place like Indonesia, or cinema in general for that matter, shaped by “constant” elements operative throughout the history of most regions, such as theater, dance, painting, or even language? Or does cinema, a term born with the emergence of motion picture film in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, constitute a medium with such unprecedented qualities that wherever it was adopted it produced a more or less absolute break with the past? Many early practitioners and theorists, like Bela Balazs, Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, and even Raymond Williams, each in their own way, interpreted the rise of film as a return. Although it was often thought of as an exceptional return, the new technology of communication was understood in relation to past aesthetic techniques and capabilities, and to human drives to capture, communicate, and narrate experience and history. Yet the further we get from the technological advent of film, it seems, the more the emergence of the medium is perceived as a break. For many who study film, and in public discourse about cinema in general, the birth of “cinema” has become a major element of the stark, theoretical lines of separation increasingly drawn between the present and the pre-industrial past. Krishna Sen, among the best-known theorists of Indonesia cinema, takes a similar position, arguing that not separating the present from the pre-cinematic past constitutes an egregious, and highly politicized, theoretical trick: It seems to me that… readings of films premised on a valorization of a putative national cultural past has been persuasive in the context of Western academic writing on Asia, partly because it reproduces the construction of the Orient as unchanging, bound by the ancient and the mythic… However, to give that relationship (between ancient classics and contemporary film texts) primacy may well mean that we fall into an essentialist…mistake of emphasizing continuities and universalities within a national cinema, so that we miss what is more significant––changes, interruptions and disruptions (1994: 3).

 

While Sen makes a convincing critique of essentialism, particularly in the context of Western-based studies of Asia, she simultaneously implies that longstanding artistic practices originating in the pre-cinematic past are themselves somehow unchanging and “bound by the ancient and the mythic.” Furthermore, argues Sen, if typically Indonesian art forms such as wayang kulit, or shadow play (which has been practiced for millennia in Java, and has long been popular in Bali and

Sumatra, among other areas), are still being practiced today, then the fact that the characters appearing in them now sometimes ride motorbikes, while English or Dutch phrases may be added to the dialog, itself marks a fundamental distinction between the modern iteration of the form and pre-colonial or pre-industrial versions (3). The issue at stake, then, is whether, and why, we seek to either separate ourselves from the past, or to see reflections there, however distorted or complexly differentiated, of our lives in the present. The concept of history as a predictable d/evolution – that humans are not only constantly changing, but steadily developing in particular ways – is also invoked in Sen’s view of the transition from pre-cinema to cinema. The result is a more-or-less linear progression from which, despite the ruptures and shifts that inevitably occur, there is essentially no going back: we are placed on cultural, political, and intellectual grounds unavailable to our ancestors.

 

For the purposes of this essay, however, I will play devil’s advocate, and attempt to disrupt such assumptions that the past is safely behind us by briefly reexamining the connections between film and shadow play in Indonesia. Because of the continuing existence of shadow puppetry in Java and Bali, and due to its widespread historical practice throughout much of the rest of the world, including in nineteenth century Europe, the “ancient” medium will serve as an apt point of comparison to further explore the questions raised above. In early twentieth century Prague, a place known for its own rich traditions of cinema, puppetry, and various other arts, Czech film theorist Václav Tille makes an interesting argument in this regard, referring to cinema as the “modern shadow play.” While film was at the time heralded for the base novelty of its ability to imitate visual reality, shadow theater, on the other hand was a “workable and obedient visual medium… [one that] conjures a more consistent and deeper mood, is better suited to fantastic dreams…”1Tille’s contention that film in some sense needed to “catch up” to the older medium in order to become more properly cinematic begins to chip away at the idea of an absolute historical break in the advent of motion picture technology. Furthermore, if we view film, as many theorists do, as a medium premised on drawing in and distracting audiences while they are plied with subtle, or not so subtle, ideological messages, we may find some surprising similarities with still more “ancient” iterations of shadow play in particular. In Java, a court poet of King Airlangga (1035-1049) wrote of the power of wayang kulit to elicit a kind of pleasurable, collective suspension of disbelief: “There are people who weep, are sad and aroused watching the puppets, though they know they are merely carved pieces of leather manipulated and made to speak. These people are like men who, thirsting for sensuous pleasures, live in a world of illusion; they do not realize the magic hallucinations they see are not real” As Helen Pausacker shows, pre-colonial era Javanese kings also used shadow play to disseminate royal propaganda, seeking to promote themselves and strengthen their positions with subjects and nobility throughout the region. Later, following the establishment of Dutch control in Java, a new style of puppets, known as buta, were added to

the already diverse wayang cast of characters, which is loosely drawn from the Hindu epics the Ramayana and Mahabarata.

 

The new addition (perhaps comparable to the occasional appearance of motorcycles today), was a pointed response to then-current events: the puppets consisted of a collection of giants and demons that, Pausacker writes, featured “big teeth, bulbous noses, and red hair and may well have been intended to represent the Dutch.”3 Seen in this way, the premodern history of shadow puppetry begins to seem less monolithic, static, or essential, and perhaps far more similar to our understanding of the dynamic nature of contemporary media, in that what is basic to its existence is precisely a constant barrage of “changes, interruptions and disruptions.” Like film, contemporary wayang with its motorcycles and other signs of the times may be entirely consistent with the way shadow play was used to process and communicate the complexities of history several hundred years ago. However, we have not yet escaped the thorny question of historical continuities or “universalities” that Sen refers to above. If the consistency of shifts and ruptures paradoxically brings the past and the present closer together, might there also be other, more basic, elements that influence the function and character of media across different technologies and times? And if so, are there regional, national, or cultural variations that may lend particular aspects to the character of media in a place like Indonesia, for example? Linguist A.L. Becker’s analysis of Javanese wayang provides a potentially enlightening case study in this regard. For Becker, wayang is structurally related to the temporal and causal configuration of the Javanese language, in which the key texts of shadow play are still most often studied, modified, and performed. Becker argues that language shapes some of the most basic elements of the character and identity of wayang as a media form, particularly in terms of the understanding and expression of the movement of time and the potential for human agency over time. The reason, Becker argues, has to do with the way tense (i.e. past, present, and future) is established: the organization and expression of tense, and thus time, in both Javanese and wayang is highly distinct, for example, from typical linguistic and classic dramatic forms in Europe and elsewhere in the West. The result is a difference not only in the way people speak, but in the ways in which historical perspectives are established and expressed. In Europe and America, Becker writes, “clarity and coherence means to speakers of these languages linear temporal/causal sequencing… past, present and future are taken as facts about the world rather than facts about language.”4 In Javanese and modern Indonesian, as in wayang, however, the grammatical relationship between past, present and future is far less rigidly defined, and “tense” is normally established through context or by juxtaposing – and thus placing “together” and comparing – events, forces, and ideas from disparate locations or times.

 

Following from this, in shadow play and other local dramatic forms, individual characters, even those considered to be powerful or heroic, are rarely positioned as the root cause of historical or political transformation: in wayang, one cannot simply act in the present, triggering a sequence of events effecting a positive, predictable change or development in the future. Instead, the past always lingers in the present, its influence inescapably embedded in every gesture or word. The

ideals of individual agency and the linear motion of time are of course not completely absent from either wayang, or a worldview shaped by Javanese, Indonesian, or other local languages. But they are constantly, implicitly juxtaposed with the force of history, which is in some sense always inescapable or impossible simply leave “behind.” It is therefore the coincidence of disparate elements, forces, and times – in which individual actions play a role, but are rarely definitive – that, from a linguistic, and often a philosophical and artistic perspective, drives historical change. Appropriately, the word for “coincidence” in Javanese and Indonesian, and thus in wayang, is kebetulan, which is based on the root word betul, or “truth.”5 Returning now to the question of cinema, and of factors influencing the particularity of national or regional cinemas, we must ask whether this linguistic perspective that Becker locates in wayang is capable of “jumping” from one media technology and embedding itself in another. In the transitional moment described by Tille above, such a movement between otherwise distinct media would indeed seem possible: early film, in order to fulfill a pre-existing ideal of the screen as a space of fantastic, and philosophically rich, dreams, must essentially learn to imitate, adapt, and potentially expand what is already possible within the “workable visual medium” of shadow play. In the early years of Indonesian national cinema following independence in 1949, founding writer-directors like Usmar Ismail, D. Djajakusuma, Asrul Sani and Nya Abbas Akup also consciously adapted the tropes and techniques of

wayang and traditional theater to the silver screen in order to make film a more powerful medium of mass communication on the local level. Furthermore, a large percentage of influential artists, writers, and filmmakers of the revolutionary generation were trained in the nationalist Taman Siswa school system, which infused its dynamic conception of modern nationhood and identity with a strong basis in Javanese philosophy and arts. Particularly in the area of cinema, however, a more globalized, “Hollywood” conception of modern aesthetics and styles of expression – one in which, in general terms, it is possible for a heroic figure to act “alone” to change history – began to rear its head almost immediately. As early as 1953, Usmar Ismail found himself writing a public rebuttal to the numerous critics for whom the films made by himself and other Indonesian directors were failing to provide the uplifting sense of excitement provided by the dramatic and aesthetic techniques deployed in movies imported from the West. Yet the problem was clearly

not due to “mistakes” or lack of ability on the part of Indonesian filmmakers: it appeared instead to be something far more inherent and troublesome, a stubborn predicament from the distant past that can be seen as among the root causes of the myriad shifts and ruptures in the modern history of Indonesian cinema: precisely what Sen would have us paying close attention to. Perhaps the best example of the “trouble” is a statement made in 1984 (and reiterated in 2004) by JB Kristanto, who since the 1970s has been Indonesia’s best known film critic: “there is something defective about Indonesian films… the narratives of 95 percent could be said to be illogical, they do not adhere to the laws of cause and effect…95 percent of our films are bad” (2004: 4). Within this sweeping

indictment of what is essentially an entire national cinema, Kristanto’s invocation of the “laws” of cause and effect is particularly relevant to the questions at stake here. Clearly implicated by Kristanto as the standard of comparison by which Indonesian films are judged generally deficient is the linear temporality and logic of classical Hollywood cinema. Not unlike Becker’s formulation of the structure of Indo European languages, scholar Miriam Hansen characterizes the basic qualities that define Hollywood form (which, appropriately, she also refers to in linguistic terms, as a globalized “vernacular modernism”) as “thorough motivation and coherence of causality, space, and time; clarity and redundancy in guiding the viewer’s mental operations” (2000: page). Hansen sees classical Hollywood as among the most basic elements of what cinema is in its essence, yet what she sees as most foundational is something very different than what occurs in wayang, and, it seems, in Indonesian cinema. By comparison, as Kristanto indicates, Indonesia appears out of step, indeed, in violation of the logical continuity of modernity itself. To say that Indonesian cinema is bad, or somehow not sufficiently “cinematic” in structure, however, raises still thornier questions. There has been a local film industry, at times a thriving one, for the last hundred years or so; are the images it projects infected by archaic shadows of an ancient, monolithic language and artistic structure? Looking into the past and present of both shadow play and local cinema,

it would seem this is not the case. Both media engage in critical and self-reflexive ways with Indonesian political and social life, and with the various other traditions, powers, and languages that have become embedded in local discourses and practices. Unlike shadow play, Indonesian cinema continues to be the subject of divided opinions, yet has retained a large audience base that has generally grown stronger in the last fifteen years. It would seem, then, that when studying cinemas, even as we focus on the key changes, interruptions and disruptions that define the medium, we should keep certain continuities in mind. The ruptures that constitute a particular national or regional cinema may be difficult to fathom if one is simply looking for the local emergence of another “vernacular modernism.