Gotot Prakosa and Kantata Takwa

Kantata Takwa was an extremely interesting film with regard to its structure and content. It's unlike any film I've seen before, as it incorporates elements of live concert footage, filmed plot scenes, disjointed scenes that don't truly fit in anywhere, recited poetry, and staged performances. It's less a documentary and more a politically-toned fever dream on Indonesian history. Which, it turns out, Gotot Prakosa is extremely interested and tuned into. At his talk, he spoke a lot about the cultural and historical practice of Wayang, traditional drama and puppetry. I had wanted to ask about when he became so politically inclined, but the opportunity never presented itself. He did mention that in film school, his teacher had him study Wayang, and that it’s still a fairly common practice in film school for students to study Wayang, even though in some places it is endangered and bordering on extinction. So he has probably been tuned into Indonesian history and politics since his interest in films began, although his early experimental films which they screened at his talk were about as far from politics as you can get. In a sense they were closer to Wayang, with the play on light and shadows, and more abstract shapes. The best way I can describe it is an epileptic fit as depicted by watercolor paint.

They also screened this movie about the battles between the island of Aceh and Holland, where the rebels of the island of Aceh were led by a woman and her husband, but after the death of her husband the woman carried on with the rebels, leading them. I don’t know the nature of the woman in the film because we only watched a clip, but I wonder if she depicted different from Western female heroes, like Joan of Arc. I wonder if our theories about Medusa and her application to women in Western cinema also apply to women outside of Western discourse. Did Freud intend for his psychoanalysis to apply universally to people of all cultures? Or are we at the point know where globalization has effectively rid us of those nuances? Do we all share a kind of collective unconscious now? Most classes I’ve had in HMCS about theory usually only apply those theories to film and literature in the West, and don’t venture to apply those theories to African or Eastern or Latin cultures. In Kantata Takwa, I feel like we can’t try to apply those theories we’ve been studying in class because of how esoteric the format and content is. I suppose, though, all of the men are active in the development of the “story”. When that guy sings the song to the children, the children are all male. The people who are getting chased down, who we follow as individuals, are all male (there are some women who are part of a group that get killed, but those that we *follow* are all male). The only women we really see are entirely passive and distant from the action; in fact, they arguably aren’t even real. They don’t intervene and they don’t speak, and at times they simply disappear. I wonder why Prakosa chose a woman to portray passive spectatorship, if those themes we talked about are manifest in that decision.