. . . chopped up at the blink of an eye, whether relatives or friends, cleared out completely . . .
(Bowen 207)

These lines, quoted from a performance staged in 1978 to applaud the achievements of the Suharto regime, celebrate the massacre of between 500,000 and 2 million people that clinched the victory of Suharto’s forces in purging Indonesia of communists in 1965.[1]  Under Suharto’s program of the civic function of the army, strategies of control and intimidation infiltrated onto the micro-level of daily life and cultural activity. The recruitment of the popular form of didong, the sung poetic duels renowned among the Gayo people of central Aceh, as a tool of the New Order, exemplifies this pervasive influence. John Bowen, the scholar of Sumatran poetics and politics who quotes these lines, has documented how, as the army spread its tentacles in the 1960s and 1970s down into the grassroots of local cultures, local government recognised that a popular art form such as didong could become a dangerous tool of dissent. Didong had evolved through the middle of the 20thcentury from a folk form into a tool for engaging the modern world in a popular idiom, a form characterised by humour and word-play which used the veiled language of metaphor as a vehicle for incisive political criticism.[2] Bowen traces the attempts by the central government under Suharto to counter this potential threat by enlisting didong in its service. Despite the “distaste” that, according to Bowen, many Gayo felt on hearing these lines, their framing within the poetic form of a didong performance provided a potent mnemonic device to keep an awareness of the price of dissent vividly in the popular imagination.[3]

It is no accident that A Poet: Unconcealed Poetry (Puisi Tak Terkuburkan), the first Indonesian film to revisit the 1965 massacres, works back up from the grassroots of didong to reclaim this history, to give testimony to the trauma of those who lived through it. As a work of mourning, A Poet, directed by Garin Nugroho, affirms the other tradition of didong – the powerful humanist tradition of a poetic form for emotional expression which “gives dignity to humanity” (SAPFF).[4] The film starts from the ballads of didong poet, Ibrahim Kadir, an eyewitness to the massacres of 1965 who plays himself in the film, and works with many non-professional actors from the Takengon area of central Aceh who also experienced the events and whose relatives and friends were among the victims.[5] Far from the callous gloating of the 1978 performance, accounts of the production of A Poet tell of a process of filming marked by tears and grieving (SAPFF).

The difficulties of making a film that could do justice to the scale, the enormity of the trauma of 1965 must have been a daunting task to the crew of A Poet. Facts, statistics or chronologies could never measure the scars left on a community, a culture, by such a history. The solution Nugroho has found to this challenge is to work on the smallest scale, to focus on the raw experience of a few dozen people caught in the mesh of the rampaging army – rice farmers, fishermen, housewives, mothers. The film revolves around the memories of Kadir, arrested at the height of the massacre and held in custody for 28 days before being released, and follows the inmates of two cells as they struggle to make sense of what is happening and to keep a sense of their own humanity even as they await execution.

The Indonesian title of the film, Puisi Tak Terkuburkan, means poetry cannot be buried, cannot be surrendered to the grave. The English translation, A Poet: Unconcealed Poetry, acts almost as a euphemism as it misses the vital link to the earth, grounded in the knowledge in an agrarian culture of the gritty reality of bodies consigned to the earth. Indeed, the fragile physicality of bodies is ever-present in A Poet. The space of the film is the space of incarceration, shot entirely inside two prison cells and the guard’s foyer, a murky amorphous space shot in low resolution, black and white digital video. Fear seeps out of the dingy, musty cell walls – a palpable, all-pervasive fear amplified by the claustrophobia of the camera which pries into tightly crammed corners filled with sleeping bodies, pins people against the cell walls and creeps listlessly in close-up across the startled eyes and clenched faces of prisoners waiting to learn of their fate.

The sound of the film, as if in contest with the tight, rigid, closed-in space, is fluid, mobile – a vehicle of transport – both tugging us in to the space of terror and drawing us back out into the space of survival. The sense of duelling voices, central to the performance of didong, animates the structure of Nugroho’s film, as it alternates between the sounds and voices of authority and menace, and the songs and melodies of resistance, of a humanity under duress.[6] Sound echoes the terror of entrapment. The clanging of the prison gates, chains and locks wracks the bodies of the prisoners, ricochets as if through empty shells that can no longer protect the vulnerable organs within, leaving limbs quaking. The voice of the guard calling the names of the inmates to be taken is like an invisible string reeling in unwilling captives. As he recounts the terrible experiences of 1965, Kadir is still haunted by bodily memory of the sounds of slaughter – the “crak crak crak” sound of bodies being severed by the parang, the short sword, as head is separated from body. The memory of a woman shot with her baby at the breast is carried by a scream across shifting levels of reality:

I looked at the moon and from it there came a cry
The moon and the stars were crying just like my own child.

Even in the face of this horror, as a ceh, the leader of a didong group, Kadir’s accounts of the events are infused with the spirit of the oral tradition of storytelling, drawing on all of the emotional registers of the voice, and sliding effortlessly from speech to song and dance. The richly layered soundtrack carries the film across invisible boundaries, shifts the mood from the atomised space of isolation and terror, and draws people from the confined space of the cell out into the expanded space of memory, from bewilderment and disintegration back out into the space of communal affirmation.

The animating power of didong continually breaks through the surface of the film. Even as the inmates are held captive, the rhythm, the allusions of the storytelling mode take hold of them, transporting them across time and space, beyond their physical confinement, to evoke the sensuous qualities of memory. Lured into the space of pleasure, of warmth and laughter, they recount stories of courtship, tell jokes and break spontaneously into dance and song. If you could say that in A Poet the sound is the air that we breathe, then this life-giving force is in music. The opening credits of the film shake with the pounding rhythm of a group of didong singers as they beat pillows in accompaniment to their singing and rhythmic swaying in a joyous communal performance. In the cell, the rhythm of a prisoner anxiously knocking on the wall becomes a counterpoint to the melody of a song that gives voice to the fear of the inmates:

I fear your fate is that of the little chicken, its heart trembling for fear of the hawk,
Happy are the waterfowl that even in murky water can float.

The tremulous song of someone attempting to stay alive is taken up by the group like a lifeline that rekindles and sustains the spirit. At the end of the film, the haunting voice of the singer reintegrates the painful memories once again into the strength of the communal tradition, driven by the rhythm and the vigour of didong performance. It is not just poetry that has refused to be put in the grave, but a poetics, a way of life lived within the ambit of a sensuous poetic tradition.

The intensities of the film are channelled through tightly controlled and paced theatrical performance, cycling around a limited set of stylised motifs. As Kadir tells another inmate of the executions he has witnessed, his hands mimic the sharp slicing movement of the sword decapitating its victims. Hands are involuntarily transformed into tools of violence: Kadir is forced to tie the hands of the other inmates before they are taken to be killed; a bloodied hand scraped across the wall in anxiety symbolises the fracturing of daily life:

Why do these hands no longer knock on doors in greeting?
Why is a knock on the door now frightening?
Why do these fingers not point out the many kindnesses?
Why do these fingers betray?

The overcrowded platform on which inmates crush together to sleep, a stage for storytelling and dancing, itself becomes a motif as it is suddenly sparse, the few remaining bodies spread out, separated, empty spaces between them. Sacks made for storing rice are transformed into hoods as group after group of prisoners is masked and led out to be killed, a ritual that punctuates the film over and over. The steady supply of sacks brought into the jail dries up, as villagers realise how they are being used and refuse to sell. At the close of the film, one of the last remaining women finally refuses everything the sack stands for:

Tie me up if you will . . . but don’t put that sack over my head . . .
Whatever life is, I want to see it.

It is in this willingness to look, to take off the mask, that the historical importance of A Poet lies. The film forms part of a wave of long-repressed criticism of the crimes of the Suharto regime unleashed since the fall of Suharto.[7] The film could not have been made during the Suharto era, and Nugroho admits that its 1999 release in Indonesia would have been unlikely if Habibie had been re-elected as president (Ryanto 1999).[8] The new scrutiny of public life has coincided with a critical time for the Indonesian film industry. Economic crisis and the collapse of the rupiah at the end of the nineties, which closed cinemas and at first threatened the demise of the movie industries, in fact opened up new opportunities for cheaper local films, and for a new social realist cinema. (Ryanto 2000; Moreau). Described as “a one man ‘new wave'” (Rayns), Nugroho survived through this period, shooting A Poet on the cheaper digital video format and winning numerous awards with the film.[9]

Although one commentator has written that Nugroho has “graduated” from working in documentaries to making feature films, his work has in fact alternated between both modes. Before making A Poet, he made a documentary on the life of Ibrahim Kadir, and alongside his earlier feature about street kids (Kancil’s Tale of Independence), he also directed a documentary about life on the streets in Jogjakarta. Nugroho clearly chooses the medium appropriate to his task: as Tony Rayns writes, “each film is radically different in form and theme from others” (Rayns 2). While the titles at the beginning of A Poet state that “a fair and neutral investigation of [the murder of the seven generals that sparked the massacres] was never conducted”, Nugroho does not attempt this kind of investigation. In A Poet, we never see the perpetrators of the atrocities, and as for the cause, we are left only with the confusion and questioning of the inmates, “why is this happening?”, “what has gone wrong?”, “why are our lives so out of kilter?”.[10]

Embodied cultural forms

Walter Benjamin writes, of the process of storytelling:

It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand.
(Benjamin 161)

A Poet embeds this story in the lives of the listener-viewer in a profoundly embodied way, inscribed through the texture of the cell walls, the restless pace of the camera, the emotional qualities of the voice, the cyclic structures of repetition. Bowen argues that the western idea that history or politics can be understood as objects distinct from cultural and aesthetic forms is inadequate to address the embodiment of politics in cultural form. Certainly, the disembodied voice of history exists in contemporary Indonesia, but Nugroho emphasises his choice to avoid the historical approach (sejarah), and to work with the emotional registers of “the verbal tradition” (SAPFF).

The film bears the marks of two storytellers, the filmmakers and Ibrahim Kadir. Kadir’s performance sees him acting a highly stylised role. It is a performance, and a masterful one at that, winning him Best Actor awards at two international festivals, but it is also much more. There is an intensity to his performance, a complex dialectic between distance and proximity in his role representing both himself and the voice of the storyteller. Kadir, the storyteller, is the potter whose bodily memory marks the “earthen vessel” of the story. Just as Kadir does not locate himself outside the events re-enacted, nor does Nugroho, the other storyteller, take up an authorial voice outside or above the experience of these events, the “judicial” voice of interrogation which would present a case, but render culture, experience and feeling as artefacts or objects to be scrutinised. The trajectories of a history that meet in the experience of Kadir and his fellow inmates are not separate from the cultural histories that weave through the tradition of didong. Nor are these events removed from the experience of them, or the deep incisions they have left in the bodily memory of those who survived.[11]

Bowen claims that, in the 1970s, “the poetic medium [of didong was] deemed to be ‘cultural’, and thus somewhat safe from direct suppression”, despite its political criticisms (Bowen 202). He does, however, document the strategy of the New Order regime in the seventies and eighties “to subsume all social movements and cultural expression under the Pancasila, the Five Principles that form the state ideology” (125). The New Order strategy of appropriation of didong went hand in hand with an attempt to mute the voice of didong into a folkloric one, subsumed under the broad rubric of cultural diversity within the nation state (126 ff.).[12] With resonances that go way beyond the 1960s into the current struggle in Aceh against the central government, didong  grounds A Poet  in the sense of local culture and cultural affiliation as the life-blood of a people, the vital core of resistance to decimation by military might. Kadir’s performance embodies both the refusal to bury the memory of the victims and a refusal to surrender a rich poetic tradition to the homogenising demands of a national culture.[13] By working with the multi-layered affective tradition of didong , Nugroho embeds his film within the complex mesh of layered meanings in contemporary Indonesian cultural politics.

A Poet  must be seen within the context of the “homogenised image of national identity” pervasive in Indonesian media under Suharto (Hanan 2004 161).[14] An exploration of regional cultures was a feature of some of the pioneering works of Indonesian cinema: H. Misbach Yusa Biran, for example, has traced the use of local traditions and sayings in the films of Djayakusuma in the 1950s, and the integration by director, Nya Abbas Akup, also in the fifties, of the generic forms of 19th century Betawi theatre (Biran 223-4).[15] Krishna Sen recounts, however, the disappearance of “regional cultural forms, local images and casts” after 1965 (Sen 41).[16] Nugroho’s work with local non-professional actors, regional languages and cultural forms picks up the fractured threads of this cinematic exploration of Indonesia’s cultural and aesthetic diversity and can be seen as a part of what Sen has described as the “re-emergence of the local as a site of resistance at the end of the New Order”.[17]

Nugroho has described himself as “a Javanese living amidst multiculturalism” (Trimarsanto 231) and he has consistently declared the importance of pluralism in the multi-ethnic, multicultural society of Indonesia.[18] While Nugroho has made films exploring Javanese culture, such as And the Moon Dances (Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang), both his films and television work have also demonstrated his commitment to this vision of a pluralist Indonesia. His second feature, Letter to an Angel (Surat untuk Bidadari), explored in great detail the cultural life and rituals of the eastern island of Sumba. Both Sen and anthropologist Janet Hoskins describe Letter as a blend of fictional and ethnographic elements, and Sen claims that it was the first film made under the New Order to challenge the prohibition on the use of regional dialects (Sen 40, Hoskins 130 ff.).[19] Nugroho’s documentary television series, Children of a Thousand Islands (Anak Seribu Pulau), explores the diverse cultures of Indonesia’s children in what he describes as “a medium for early multicultural education (Trimarsanto 222).[20] Perhaps the most politically and culturally challenging, Nugroho’s most recent film, Birdman Tales (Aku Ingin Menciummu Sekali Saja), is set in West Papua (Irian Jaya) against the backdrop of the independence struggle, and is the first Indonesian feature to be set in Papua and to have Papuans in lead roles (Keshvani 29).[21]

Hoskins recounts the extensive research Nugroho did into “styles of [local] play, body movement and entertainment” in the preparation of Letter to an Angel and his commitment to “capture ‘the richness of local culture”’ (Hoskins 131).[22]  When Nugroho discusses this attentiveness to the local, he describes it in terms that go beyond representation and into the specific embodiment of those cultures in the forms of daily life:

If I employ local actors, this is because local actors are the library of local gesture, oral language and culture . . . gesture and oral language are the manifestations of space, time and cultural environment.
(Trimarsanto 220, 219)

I. Bambang Sugiharto writes that, in Nugroho’s films, “[e]motion and sensation are touched neither through identification with the characters nor through the power of words. They are touched through the exposition of images and poetic scenes” (Sugiharto 190).[23] Sugiharto describes this, following Brecht, as “social gesture: illustrating basic problems hidden behind the daily social behaviour” (190). If we look at the ways emotion and sensation are developed and explored in A Poet, however, it is clear that gesture, sound, movement, time and space do not only represent the characteristics of a culture, they embody it in a profoundly affective way. While the affect of the film is, of course, tied in its broad lineaments into the nationally-shared tragedy of the massacres of 1965 and the memories long suppressed in the public culture, the film works on many layers. The recuperative elements, those which re-integrate the grieving process into the present, derive on one level from the assertion of community, but on another from the structure of feeling set up through the ways the viewer is drawn into an embodied engagement with the space of the cell and the bodies in that space. The registers of feeling that the film produces are carried by the movement, the gestures of those bodies – the fluidity of gesture and dance – and the quality of the sound – the shifting emotional resonances that slide through the film across the emotional transitions of the voices, the singing and the soundscape.

These embodied forms – song and dance – are the stuff of a mimetic engagement – that process by which the viewer is drawn in close to the film in a tactile, bodily way.[24] This embodied connection is the core of an affective engagement with the film that works on recognition, affinity and memory. It is here, in a mimetic engagement with image, gesture and sound, that the politics of the local is most definitively grounded.

A Poet does not just represent a regional culture – representing Indonesia in its diversity for a national audience – it speaks to cultural diversity, addressing a plural audience on levels that are also profoundly local, specific and grounded. Sen describes how Letter to an Angel “constructs a concrete [ . . . ] local community identity in opposition to the imagined national Indonesian one” (Sen 35).[25] A Poet addresses the specificity of local culture in ways that are not just thematic and do not just rely on the use of regional languages. It embeds the local and the local viewer in the film affectively through the embodied cultural form of didong.

Bowen recounts the transformations in the use and significance of didong through his period of study in the late 1980s, as it became “a highly lexicalised shorthand for cultural knowledge” (177). He claims that, in the 1980s, “didong became the center of efforts at cultural revival among urban Gayo living in Jakarta” (207), and was “a relatively transportable art form that [could] be used to recreate cultural identity in an urban setting” (209). To trace the contemporary inflections of the form as a marker of cultural identity and affinity would require updating Bowen’s study. Similarly, to read the nuances of this affect of the local/regional would require an audience study that is outside the scope of this project. Indeed, such a study might reveal many complexities in the reception of this mode of address.[26]  However, my argument is that, through the embodied forms of didong, the film offers points of connection and affinity that speak specifically to a local viewer, and that any consideration of the politics of the film must ask this question about the embodiment of its cultural forms.

Indian documentarist, Amar Kanwar, has talked of the diversity and heterogeneity of audiences and his desire “to create a constellation of experiences that have the capability to relate with the multiplicity of life and audiences” (Rutherford 118). He talks of creating spaces in his films that operate on intellectual, emotional, rhythmic, sensory and other levels and, in this way, addressing a heterogeneous audience on many intellectual and experiential levels.[27]

This recognition of the heterogeneity of audiences in a pluralist society is not, in itself, a challenging concept, but the most common response, historically, to this diversity has been to pare down a film to essences that can supposedly offer a universal mode of address to an imagined common denominator. The innovativeness of Kanwar’s approach is his attempt to deploy all of the aesthetic registers of a film to establish different points of connection for different audiences – instead of paring down the modes of address, to multiply them.

In A Poet, Nugroho also works with these many levels of a film – intellectual, emotional, sensory and rhythmic – through the performance, the camera and sound, the use of space and time, dance, gesture and music, and the ways they engage memory and cultural affinity. The film’s mode of address, while accessible on a national/transnational level, is not unified, not homogenised. The way that Nugroho envisages and addresses his audience – this shift from simply representing regional culture to incorporating modes of address that have the potential to speak specifically to a regional audience – gives another dimension to the politics of the film. It is here that the cinematic significance of Bowen’s argument about “the embodiment of politics in cultural form” must be understood.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Cultural Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. 324-339.
Biran, H. Misbach Yusa. “The History of Indonesian Cinema at a Glance.” Film in South-East Asia: Views from the Region. Ed. David Hanan. Canberra: Screen Sound Australia, 2000. 211-252.
Bowen, John R. Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History, 1900-1989. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1968. 155-200.
Cheah, Philip, Taufik Rahzen, Ong Hari Wahyu and Tonny Trimarsanto eds. And the Moon Dances: The Films of Garin. Jogjakarta: Bentang Pustaka, 2004.
Cheah, Philip. “It’s About Loving the Other.” Cheah et al eds. 117-120.
Griswold, Deirdre. Indonesia 1965: The Second Greatest Crime of the Century. New York: World View Publishers, 1979.
Hanan, David. “Garin Nugroho: Refusing the Stereotype, Challenges Posed by Indonesia’s Filmmaker of the Year.” Cheah ed. 144-179.
Hanan, David. “Regionalism and Politics in the 50s and 60s”. Cinemaya 38 1997. 39-44.
Hoskins, Janet. “Letter to an Angel: An Indonesian Film on the Ironies of Modernity in Marginal Areas.” Cheah et al eds. 124-140.
Ishizaki, Kenji. “Garin Nugroho: Fighting with Films.” Cheah et al eds. 100-116.
Kadane, Kathy. “Ex-agents Say CIA compiled Death Lists for Indonesians. After 25 years, Americans Speak of their Role in Exterminating Communist Party.” States News Service, 1990. Accessed 25.9.2001http://www.namebase.org/kadane.html.
Keshvani, Nazir Husain. “Bird-Man Tale.” Cinemaya 58 2003. 29-30.
McGee, Ralph. “The Indonesia Massacres and The CIA.” Covert Action Quarterly 35: 1990. Accessed 25.9.2001www.covertactionquarterly.org.
Phillips, Richard. “To Explore One of the Dark Episodes in Indonesian History: Interview with Garin Nugroho.” World Socialist Website, 19 September 2001. Accessed 25.9.2001 http://www.wsws.org.
Moreau, Ron. “The Back Beat of Hard Times.” Newsweek International 8 Mar. 1999: 44ff.
Rayns, Tony. “Now We Are Ten – BIFF’s Asian decade.” Senses of Cinema 15. 2001.http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/01/15/biff_ten_years.html.
Rutherford, Anne. “‘Not Firing Arrows’: Multiplicity, Heterogeneity and the Future of Documentary: Interview with Amar Kanwar.” Asian Cinema 16: 1 Spring 2005.
Ryanto, Tony. “Poetry Unveils Truth.” Variety 6 Dec. 1999: 25ff.
—–. “Local Pics Break Out.” Variety 13 Nov 2000: 97ff.
Scott, Peter Dale. “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967.” Pacific Affairs 58 (1985): 239-264.
Sen, Krishna. ‘What’s Oppositional in Indonesian Cinema?’ Re-Thinking Third World Cinema. Eds. Anthony Gooneratne and Wimal Dissanayake. New York & London: Routledge, 2003: 147-165.
Strassler, Karen. “Stories of Culture: Difference, Nation and Childhood in ‘Children of a Thousand Islands’, an Indonesian Television Series”. Accessed 4.11.04 http://cc.joensuu.fi/sights/karens.htm.
Sugiharto, I Bambang. “Garin Nugroho’s Films and Social Transformation”. Cheah et al eds. 184-194.
Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York & London: Routledge, 1993.
Trimarsanto, Tonny & Taufik Rahzen. “Garin Nugroho’s Contrasting Colors.” Cheah et al eds. 216-223.
Sydney Asia Pacific Film Festival 2001 (SAPFF) press kit for A Poet.

Films mentioned

Puisi Tak Terkuburkan (A Poet: Unconcealed Poetry) Dir. Garin Nugroho. Screenplay: Nana Mulyana, Nugroho; camera: Winaldha E. Melalatoa; editor: Rahmat Tepe; music: Tony Prabowo; production designer: Tonny Trimarsanto; perf. Ibrahim Kadir, Bertiana Fibrianti, Jose Rizal Manua, Ella Gayo, Fuat Idris. Production: S.E.T. Audiovisual Workshop & Garin Nugroho, 1999.
Letter to an Angel (Surat untuk Bidadari) Dir. Garin Nugroho. Production: PT Prasidi Teta Film, 1993.
And the Moon Dances (Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang) Dir. Garin Nugroho. National Film Council and SET Film Workshop, 1995.
Bird-Man Tale (Aku Ingin Menciummu Sekali Saja) Dir. Garin Nugroho. SET Film Workshop, 2002.
Children of a Thousand Islands (Anak Seribu Pulau). Production: Miles, Garin Nugroho & Mira Lesmana, 1995.
Kancil’s Tale of Independence (Dongeng Kancil Tentang Kemerdekaan) (1995). Dir. Garin Nugroho. SET Film Workshop-Japan’s NHK, 2002.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this essay was published in Senses of Cinema 17, 2001, as “Poetics and Politics in Garin Nugroho’s A Poet“.
I would like to thank Adrienne McKibbens for assistance in accessing resources on A Poet.

Endnotes

[1]  In the 1960s, Indonesia had the third largest communist party in the world, with “an estimated 3 million members. Through its affiliated organisations such as labor and youth groups it claimed the loyalties of another 17 million” (Kadane 7). While official New Order explanations of the events of 1965 claimed that the purges were a response to an attempted communist coup, substantial evidence has been presented to discredit this account, and to suggest the role of factions of the army in staging the attempted coup as a catalyst to overthrow the government of President Sukarno (Griswold; Scott). Statements by CIA-linked operatives in the 1990s have admitted the role of the US, in the context of the Vietnam War, in supporting the annihilation of the Indonesian communist party, the PKI, going so far as to make up death lists and check on the progress of eradicating those on the lists. (Kadane; McGee). While the army was the instigator of the extermination campaign, it recruited and armed civilian groups. See Scott, “political liaisons [of the army] with civilian groups [‘the civilian administration, religious and cultural organizations, youth groups, veterans, trade unions, peasant organizations, political parties and groups at regional and local levels’] provided the structure for the ruthless suppression of the PKI in 1965, including the bloodbath” (Scott 10). The resulting slaughter was one of the largest massacres of the 20th century.
[2]  Bowen describes the shifting nature of didong. In the early part of the century didong was performed at weddings and other rituals by individual performers and focused on verbal play. By the 1970s, it was performed as a contest between teams or clubs, as key attractions at social events, with the emphasis on competition. He describes the value given to didong in the 1980s, for its “ability to express the issues or emotions of the present through allusion and imagery” (194).
[3] Bowen notes that, in the Gayo area, “although all those killed were accused of affiliation with the Communist Party” the denunciations followed previously existing fractures in communal life, motivated by both political and personal rivalries. He writes that, “by the 1980s, men and women were reluctant to discuss the killings” (121). Though the silence was partly due to shame, he argues, it was also fear: “the memories and fears the killings generated were a critical psychological element in New Order strategies of political control” (119): “to question the moral soundness of the killings, even in the 1980s, was to challenge the legitimacy of the New Order itself” (121-2).
[4] Quoted from the SAPFF press kit for the film. Nugroho has said that, as “everyone in Indonesia lives under this shadow, [he] made this film to show that what happened was against all of humanity” (Phillips).
[5] The film also works with many actors from Jakarta.
[6] Didong is staged as a duel between two competing voices or groups.
[7] Ron Moreau, writing in 1999, discusses a parallel revival of activist work in theatre, citing in particular the public staging of Marsinah, a play by writer Ratna Sarumpaet, which is about a labour activist killed by the army. After its first staging in 1998, the writer spent four months in jail; in 1999 she was featured as a speaker at a government-sponsored conference.
[8] Despite this new openness, Nugroho has discussed the dangers of making this film, and the fears of his friends and family that he would be killed for it (Phillips).
[9] The film won a Silver Award at the Locarno Film Festival in Italy in 2000, Best Actor award for Ibrahim Kadir in the Cinefan 2001 Awards in India, Best Actor and also the jury prize for best film at Singapore Film Festival, 2001.
While Nugroho is not part of the younger DV generation (Mira Lesmana, and younger Jakarta Institute of the Arts cohorts, known as the Kuldesak generation after their film, Cul de Sac (Kuldesak), 1998, Khoo Gaik Cheng argues that his work and garnering of international attention paved the way for the younger group’s work in the international arena (personal correspondence).
[10] Nugroho has discussed the importance of generating “a dialogue, without revenge, about our history” (Phillips).
[11] Ibrahim Kadir also had an important role in the 1988 Indonesian anti-colonial film Tjoet Nja’ Dhien, “the story of the national heroine, Tjoet Nja’ Dhien, who led a band of guerrillas against the Dutch in the mountains of Aceh at the end of the nineteenth century” (Biran 240).
[12] This process is remarkably reminiscent of the process described by Arjun Appadurai of states “systematically museumizing and representing all the groups within them in a variety of heritage politics that seems remarkably uniform throughout the world” (Appadurai 331).
[13] This reading of the film must be tempered by Nugroho’s stated “concern that events in the Balkans could happen in Indonesia, which is also a multicultural society” (Phillips).
[14] I. Bambang Sugiharto writes: “as a result of the totalitarian political regime of the past, plurality has never been properly valued and what is called ‘harmony’ has become very artificial and has lost the two-way communication in the midst of a rich variety of cultures while the body and soul have never been respected” (Cheah (ed.) 192).
[15] For a discussion of this work, see also Hanan, 1997.
[16]  Sen has written of the centralisation of the industry in Jakarta and the prohibition under the New Order of films made in regional languages: “films were forced to speak the national language. Films were not even allowed to use regional languages or even dialects of Bahasa Indonesia (the national language) as the principle diegetic language” (Sen 37).
[17] David Hanan also locates Nugroho within this tradition, noting that Djayakusuma was in fact one of Nugroho’s teachers (Hanan 2000: 155). Hanan points out that Nugroho’s work redefines the regional film. He argues that, in Letter to an Angel, Nugroho does not just explore regional specificity, as he claims Djayakusuma’s films did, but explores the transformations of these cultures through the impact of both globalisation and the ongoing influence of the Indonesian state (Hanan 155). See also Hoskins 125.
[18] Nugroho has said in an interview, “if a certain ethnic group cannot appear on TV in a country claiming to be multi-cultural, we are on the verge of bankruptcy” (Ishizaka 113). He has talked of the promise of digital technology to break down the centralist control of Indonesian film and video production: “We hope ethnic groups will have their own video camera as a channel to avoid the oppressing force. Only in this way can the video play its role as a weapon in the digital era” (Ishizaki 114).
[19] Sen writes that “no other film in the New Order had used local casting to nearly this extent” (Sen 40) and that no film used so much local culture and minority language.
[20] For a discussion of Anak Seribu Pulau, see Strassler. Strassler argues that, although the series “[rejects] the most virulent ideologies of capitalist expansion and national homogenization . . . [it constructs] a pluralistic yet homogenized vision of diversity” (4, 6).
[21] Philip Cheah writes that, “what [Birdman Tales] brilliantly does is to invert the roles of Indonesia and Papua. Because there is only one Indonesian actress . . . Indonesia inadvertently becomes the minority culture here” (Cheah 117).
[22] This research included living in the area and having the non-local actors “become part of the traditional community.” Hoskins quotes Nugroho here: “he wanted their ‘acting to become part of the geography, of the ways of tending livestock, making a living . . .’ ” (Hoskins 132).
[23] Sugiharto here argues that it is not significance, but sensation that matters most in Garin’s work, arguing (from Susan Sontag), that “what matters most is not primarily its ‘hermeneutic’ aspect, but rather its ‘erotic’ matter” (189).
[24] I use mimesis here in the sense of the term explained by Michael Taussig. Michael Taussig describes one aspect of mimesis as a kind of contact – a mode of sensory, tactile perception that breaks down the distinction between the viewer and the object in an experience of contact with the image. Taussig argues that mimetic perception closes the gap between the spectator and image, and generates a bodily response in the viewer, a kind of “visceral experience” that is experienced as a “porousness” between one’s own body and the image (Taussig 21 ff.).
[25] Both Sen and Sugiharto make clear that Nugroho does not equate the local with tradition, but explores the “local that has been worked over by modernity” (Sen 36).
[26] This argument about the film’s mode of address is not intended to claim cultural authenticity or cultural correctness for the film. In her study of Letter to an Angel, Hoskins examines the film from an ethnographic perspective and finds various weaknesses in it, not least the fact that the mix of local and non-local actors means that the dialogues sometimes take place with two characters speaking different languages to each other. Her interpretation of this is that the film enacts a drama of “discordance and strange juxtapositions” (135). An ethnographic account of A Poet may well uncover similar difficulties. And, of course, cultural/ethnic identity does not necessarily mean an identification or affinity with that cultural heritage.
[27] Kanwar says, “If you’re able to see the complex inner diversity and heterogeneity within individuals and therefore in audiences, then you’re able to see the many dimensions of communication itself. Film is an unbelievable medium – you can do what you want with sound, music, ambience, image and colour. You find that when you start putting these together it is possible to create a constellation of experiences that have the capability to relate with the multiplicity of life and audiences” (Rutherford 118).

Created on: Friday, 1 December 2006 | Last Updated: 8-Dec-06