Reaction to Godot Prakosa

Watching Kantata Takwa, I was struck by the way the performers talked about their music and about social change.   The recurring references to self-control, keeping to one’s conscience and checking one’s self against the wishes of Allah and the needs of a community or nation contrasted in my mind with the themes of widespread mobilization and freedom.  I didn’t expect the role of the personal and the artistic to take the shape of such deliberate individual commitment and for it to be such a foundational tenet to collective action for change.  I found myself caught off guard by the overt politicization of music, film and faith.  

The question I ended up posing to Godot Prakosa addressed what felt to me like this underlying contradiction.  I wanted to know how he approached intention, self-checking and control versus (divine) guidance and surrender in his own work.  Given my own confusion and the ambiguous way I presented it, I was surprised how wholly he seemed to understand.  I am probably completing misusing his words, but what I think Godot said is that the people of Indonesia believe in the environment and the mountains, that given the stability of these things there is the opportunity for things to come back and to happen in the future.  These things are bigger than us and in some ways don’t depend on us.  But at the same time, while we are here in the world, we use our power to affect what we can.  He answered my paradox with reverence and hope.

At one point, someone asked Godot about the symbolism of the woman in hijab, who is present to all the violence and struggle nearly constant throughout Kantata Takwa but never speaks or intervenes.  When we first watched the film, I found myself seeing this character as representative of a lack of agency, as passive and characteristically feminine.  In this, I was doing her – and the film in general – a huge injustice.  In his answer to this question, Godot talked about the need sometimes for not everyone to be involved directly in violence.  He implied that there is insight that comes from the shadows and margins, not just the front lines, of struggle.

In addition, Godot related her presence to his own position as filmmaker.  I had been so focused on the obvious, active presences in the film that I forgot the very silent gaze and invisible vision that made the work possible.  Listening to Godot helped me see the film and perhaps filmmaking itself as testimony to the power of bearing witness.   Sometimes I forget that agency and silence are not irreconcilable.  Just as some of the feminist film scholars we’ve read see female spectatorship as meaningfully ambiguous, I want to keep in mind that there are many different paths to struggle and different manifestations of power, that subjectivity is necessarily complicated.  The seer and seen never exist separately from each other, and neither is the sole agent of either vulnerability or power. 

I want to end with one more thing Gotot said that stuck with me: that filmmaking makes him happy.  When asked what his favorite movie was that he made, he answered “all of them”, that he loves them because they’re his.  Having only seen Kantata Takwa, a powerful political critique with deep social implications, I don’t think I would have envisioned his relationship with film as based on joy.  Maybe this can speak to the idea that personal creation and happiness and social justice are mutually contingent or dialectically related, just like object and subject, self and world.  I hope I can hold onto the idea of the mountains, that this world will exist with a sort of rhythm all its own, but that my place in it – as both witness and actress – still matters, in some way.