Prakosa

Filmmaking in the West is not generally understood to have a history that extends more than a century. While the laws of composition are similar for most visual arts, I would argue that most people traditionally consider film and photography to be profoundly modern artistic media. Gotot Prakosa challenged this perception in his talk. Many times, Prakosa emphasized that film is an international language. While it may seem a little bit to be an empty phrase, Prakosa focused in on the ability of film to convey a sort of universal subjectivity or elaborate on elements of the human condition that can be understood by everyone.

Although I’ve portrayed his interpretation of film as a language as a little flat for now, I think that his understanding of film, both as a formal technique and artistic medium, helps frame some of the reading for this class. More specifically, I think that it offers a better way of understanding spectatorship than is offered by bell hooks. I was a little frustrated with the bell hooks reading. In her critique of the ahistorical psychoanalytic subject, I feel that she tends to focus a little too much on the specifically temporal historical/cultural subject. While there is no doubt that traditional Hollywood cinema is constructed in such a way that ignores minority views, I think it’s going a bit too far to suggest that inter-subjectivity is impossible. I think it’s playing into the hands of identity politics to suggest that the experience racial or gender categories, although obviously important, are entirely unreconcilable or somehow fundamentally and essentially different. bell hooks doesn’t necessarily come out and say this, but it’s a vibe I get from her reading.

To be more specific, I think Prakosa’s comments on film frame the medium as both a cultural experience and a universal experience that speaks to some fundamental human subject. Despite his comments that film is an international language, Prakosa was very conscious of the fact that his own construction of films is inextricably connected to the Indonesian Wayang theater. For Prakosa, Wayang is an almost filmic medium, and its focus on the light image is intensely reminiscent of film. Further, as film student, Prakosa noted that his study of film was inseparable from his study of the formal structure of Wayang. Although I am by no means an expert on Wayang on Prakosa’s film, he claims that the structure of Wayang is consciously reflected in his film.

So, while I think that film necessarily is constructed from a historical or cultural position and it is in some ways impossible to escape that, there is another level on which is can project a more consolidated meaning. I certainly don’t believe in the stable meaning of any text or some sort of meta-language through which we can express meaning, but nonetheless I agree with Prakosa that film can express some fundamental things about human subjectivity (e.g. desire). Kantata Takwa emphasizes this for me. Obviously I have no understanding of what it’s like to be an Indonesian dissident, but its formal structure, its experimental technique is an aesthetic experience that I think provides a surplus of meaning beyond the historical/cultural understanding of the film.