Observational Documentary Comes to Indonesia - Aryo Danusiri's Lukas' Moment

8/12/2019 Observational Documentary Comes to Indonesia - Aryo Danusiri's Lukas' Moment

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Edited byTilman Baumgrtel

INDEPENDENT

SOUTHEAST

ASIANCINEMA


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SOUTHEAST ASIAN

INDEPENDENT CINEMA


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Hong Kong University Press

14/F Hing Wai Centre7 Tin Wan Praya Road

AberdeenHong Kong

Hong Kong www.hkupress.org

Hong Kong University Press 2012

ISBN 978-988-8083-60-2 (Hardback)ISBN 978-988-8083-61-9 (Paperback)

All rights reserved.No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information

storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound by Liang Yu Printing Factory Ltd., Hong Kong, China


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Notes on Contributors

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia

ilman Baumgrtel

I Essays

1. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema: Independent of What?

John A. Lent

2. Imagined Communities, Imagined Worlds: Independent Film fromSoutheast Asia in the Global Mediascape

ilman Baumgrtel

3. Hinterland, Heartland, Home: Affective opography in Singapore Films Alan Bin Saat

4. Stealing Moments: A History of the Forgotten in Recent Singaporean

FilmBen Slater

5. Fiction, Interrupted: Discontinuous Illusion and Regional Performanceraditions in Contemporary Tai Independent Film

Natalie Bhler

6. Cinema, Sexuality and Censorship in Post-Soeharto Indonesia Intan Paramaditha

7. Independent versus Mainstream Islamic Cinema in Indonesia: ReligionUsing the Market or Vice Versa?

ito Imanda

Contents

xi

xv

xix

1

13

21

33

51

59

69

89


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viii Contents

8. Observational Documentary Comes to Indonesia: Aryo DanusirisLukas Moment

David Hanan

II Documents

9. Four Manifestos Khavn de la Cruz

10. Why Ciplakended up being made Khairil M. Bahar

11. Singapore GaGaours Singapore

an Pin Pin

12. Te Downside of Digital: A German media critic plays devils advocate ilman Baumgrtel et al.

13. I Sinema Manifesto

III Interviews

14. An inexpensive lm should start with an inexpensive story

Interview with Brillante Mendoza and Armando Bing Lao ilman Baumgrtel

15. Digital is liberation theology Interview with Lav Diaz ilman Baumgrtel

16. I make lms for myselfInterview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul

ilman Baumgrtel

17. I loe making lms, but not getting lms madeInterview with Pen-ek Ratanaruang

ilman Baumgrtel

18. I want the people of Indonesia to see a different point of view, whetherthey agree with it or notInterview with Nia Dinata

ilman Baumgrtel

19. I do not have anything against commercial lmsInterview with Eric Khoo

ilman Baumgrtel

105

119

125

131

141

151

155

171

179

191

201

213


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Contents ix

20. Te Page and the (Video) Camera Conversation with Amir Muhammad Davide Cazzaro

21. I want you to forget about the race of the protagonists half an hour intothe lmInterview with Yasmin Ahamad

ilman Baumgrtel

Notes

Bibliography

Index

227

245

253

263

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8

Observational Documentary Comes to Indonesia

Aryo DanusirisLukas Moment

David Hanan

Curiously, we both have the same experience o many people asking us,Why didnt you interview the military? Te government? Why onlythe victims? And my answer is the same as inos, that these lms arededicated to the minority, the powerless people.

Aryo Danusiri 1

In the USA and in Europe in the 1960s there appeared a new movement in docu-mentary, taking various orms and with a variety o different names. In the USA themovement commenced withPrimary (1960), a lm that ollowed chronologically

John Kennedys election campaign. Albert Maysles, who was one o the camera-men who worked onPrimary, and later made Salesman(1968), called the move-ment Direct Cinema. In France in 1960 there emerged a somewhat different butrelated movement, known as Cinema Verit, with Jean Rouch and Edgar MorinsChronique dun Et, a sel conscious ethnology o lie in contemporary Paris, notedor provoking situations with its human subjects, and asking questions about thekind o reality created by documentary. Te anthropologist Rouch had, earlier on,made participatory ction-documentary lms with Arican subjects, lms such as

Jaguar(1955) andMoi, Un Noir(1958), using in both cases a 16mm camera andpost-synch commentary rom his subjects. Te Direct Cinema and Cinema Veritlms made use o light portable cameras and portable sound-synch tape recordersto produce documentaries that ollowed stories using long takes, direct sound, no

voice-over or voice-o-god narrator o any kind, creating reality effects o extraor-dinary immediacy, based in slices o real time, and ofen a sense o minimal inter-

vention by the lmmaker. Frequently they do not even use articially producedinter-titles providing orientation, this being provided as ar as possible through

pro-lmic material only. It was to highlight this effect o immediacy that AlbertMaysles used the term Direct Cinema.Te Direct Cinema movement had some notable achievements in the 1960s,

or example, Dont Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1965), a record o a tour oEngland by the young Bob Dylan, at that time just coming into the height o his


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ame, the lm showing his capacity to talk back to an envious and blandly criticalEnglish and American media. Also emerging in the 1960s was one o the most per-sistent exponents o this kind o documentary, Fred Wiseman, originally trained

as a lawyer, who made remarkable portraits o the interace between Americaninstitutionsa hospital, a juvenile court, a welare agency, to name a ewandtheir clients, providing invaluable portraits o rarely documented aspects o theUSA. Wiseman, whose lms were ofen unded by American Public elevision(PBS), rejects the term Cinema Verit, insisting that his lms were not unmedi-ated truth, the large amount o material he shot being edited in such a way as tobring out a dramatic structure.2In act Rouch and Morin had derived their termCinema Verit (Cinema ruth) rom the Russian lmmaker, Dziga Vertov, who

believed the camera eye to be scientic, but who oregrounded the lmmakingprocess in his lms.Chronique dun Etemulates a reexivity about the lmmakingprocess ound in Vertov, but rarely engaged with by exponents o Direct Cinema.Rouch and Morin were also prepared to interview their subjects, to include mon-tages in their lm, and to preview and discuss their ootage on screen with their

participants. Te varieties o this new kind o documentary o indirect address arealmost as varied as the number o the lmmakers using this ramework.

Another term or these broad developments, which recognizes its basicapproaches, using long takes and no voice-over, is observational documentary.Tis is the preerred term used by Indonesian lmmaker Aryo Danusiri or histwo most recent documentary lms, Lukas Moment (2005) and Playing Between

Elephants (2007). In this essay I will explore the rst o these two lms, LukasMoment, a lm made in Merauke in the province o West Papua. Tis essayocuses onLukas Momentor two undamental reasons. Firstly, apart rom a smallnumber o lms by some very distinguished lmmakers (and some student work),Indonesian cinema is singularly lacking in experimentation in documentary ormand has never beore produced a documentary o indirect address. Secondly, the

issue o the absence o West Papuans in the Indonesian media, except as stereotypes,is recognized as one o the most important challenges acing the Indonesian media,an issue recognized in the mid-1980s by the great Indonesian director o eaturelms eguh Karya, when he made a eature lm,Ibunda, which was partly aboutracism towards West Papuans living in Jakarta. Tis essay will situate Danusirisrst work o observational cinema, Lukas Moment, in the context o the work oa number o key lmmakers who pioneered these interrelated documentary move-ments, among them, Jean Rouch and Frederick Wiseman, and an Australian docu-

mentary collaboration with Aboriginal people made in 1981, wo Laws.A chronological sketch o the history o documentary making in Indonesia

rom the beginning o the twentieth century has been provided by Gotot Prakosa.3Documentaries were mainly made in the Dutch East Indies by Dutchmen, andthey appear to have been made or a home audience in Holland to introduce them


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Observational Documentary Comes to Indonesia 107

to their colonial possessions, and to record cultures, usually within an imper-sonal colonial representational ramework characterized by distance o ramingand little emotional closeness to their subjects. Only one indigenous Indonesian is

listed as having made a documentary lm or the Dutch, R. M. Soetarto, in 1939.Some Dutch documentaries were made or Indonesian audiences, but according toone reputable source, these lms came to be known as Film Pes (Plague Films)because the earliest o them dealt so requently with issues o hygiene and disease

prevention.4Te Japanese occupation saw the production o inormation and pro-paganda lms produced by the Japanese to support the war effort and the integra-tion o the Indonesian people into their hoped or Greater Asia Co-prosperitySphere, and they developed portable projection equipment and screens to take

these lms into villages.Documentaries were made in Indonesia by Indonesians rom the early inde-

pendence period on. Tere is one notable documentary record (Pandit NehruVisits Indonesia), running or more than an hour, o an historic visit by IndianPrime Minister Nehru to Indonesia, in June 1950, only six months afer Indonesiaachieved independence, in which Nehru is shown traveling through Java and Bali,accompanied by Indonesias rst president, Sukarno. Tis lm shows remarkableootage o a people newly liberated rom colonialism. But even this was a state-unded documentary, as were most documentaries made in Indonesia over the next50 years. In the 1970s there did develop a tradition o experimental documentaries,rom within the Film School at the Jakarta Institute o the Arts, and anthropolo-gist, Hadi Purnomo, shooting on 8mm made lms that engaged politically withissues such as land dispossession.

However, leading contemporary Indonesian lmmaker, Garin Nugroho,who has made prize-winning documentaries as well as eatures, has described thekinds o documentaries that most people got to see in Indonesiaparticularly inthe Soeharto New Order periodas mainly propaganda, either made by the state

or depicting Indonesia in ways that satised state ideologies. In the New Orderperiod 90 percent o documentaries were government propaganda, according toNugroho.5 Tey were usually unded by a ministry, and they celebrated devel-opmental projects initiated by a ministry (e.g., the Ministry o Agriculture) andexhorted people (ofen rom the villages) to join in and support them, requently

presenting the minister himsel as a key protagonist. Another documentary typewas the ethnographic documentary that presented a portrait o a lesser knownethnic group, showing examples o their rituals or arts, but generally at the same

time suggesting that they were backward recipients o the paternalism o the stateand had little engagement with modern Indonesia.

All o these were constructed in what Bill Nichols terms as expository docu-mentary: a range o material gathered together and structured by the discourseso the lmmaker under the mask o objectivity, using a persuasively authoritative


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the effectiveness o measures put in place by this agreement: the establishment inall districts o Joint Security Committees (JSC)consisting o representatives oboth the Indonesian army and o GAMto set up Zones o Peace and to inves-

tigate inringements to the peace agreement.9Danusiri has in act pioneered theinvestigative current affairs documentary in Indonesia, dealing with issues, people,and regions that are below the horizon o the offi cial media in Indonesia, becausethey are regarded by the media as topics that are too controversial, embarrassing,and even dangerous. Te two most recent lms by Danusiri are observational docu-mentaries, the rst ever made in Indonesia. Not even Garin Nugroho has tried hishand at observational documentaries.

Figure 8.1 Poster o Aryo Danusiris Village Goat akes the Beating(1999)

Te rst o these lms, the 60-minute documentaryLukas Moment, explores

over a number o months the efforts o a young West Papuan student, workingcooperatively with other indigenous students rom his tribe in a group calledMitra

Mandiri(Independent Partnership), to develop (as a way o subsidizing their edu-cation) a trading venture o their own in prawn shing and marketing. Te second,

Playing Between Elephants (2007), running some 87 minutes, graphically shows,using ootage shot intermittently over a twelve-month period, the complicated

processes involved in rebuilding housing in the village o East Geunteng in Pidie,East Aceh, an area devastated in the tsunami o December 2004. aking as its main

ocus the village headthe charismatic Geuchik Abdurrahman the lm providesperspectives on the complicated administrative and decision making processes andthree-way negotiations (and conicts) involvedbetween the village head and hisclients, the villagers; between the village head and the sponsors and unders o the

project, UN Habitat; and between the village head and the suppliers o materialsand the builders.


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110 David Hanan

As in much o Direct Cinema, Lukas Moment uses a minimal crew (in actonly Aryo Danusiri himsel, recording both visuals and sound), and long takes, no

voice-overs or non-diegetic music, and simply ollows events, neither intervening

nor organizing reconstructions o situations. While two inter-titles are used earlyin the lm to establish the context, and superimposed titles are sometimes usedto indicate new locations, the effect o the lm is o a story unolding chronologi-cally in real time and space, an aspect o the lm perhaps underlined by the titleitsel,Lukas Moment, the moment (or series o tense moments, ofen with no clearoutcome) when Lukas dees the status quo and his own ignorance and limitedexperience, to see how ar he can make change in his own environment and theeconomic environment o his ellow indigenous Papuans by committing their time

and limited unds to the venture.Lukas is an indigenous Papuan, a member o the Marind tribal people who

have occupied this point along the coast or generations. He and others speak ohim, simply, as aputera daerah(son o the region). With unding and encourage-ment rom an NGO in Holland and its local representative, Ibu Esi, he has ormed

Figure 8.2 Poster o Aryo Danusiris Te Poet of Linge Homeland(2000)


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a group consisting o upper high school students, like himsel, who have begunto catch prawns along the coast, and to sell them as a way o earning money to

pay or their education, the Dutch NGO paying the cost o the expensive nets.

Prawn shing is dominated in this South Western part o West Papua, by non-Papuan Indonesian transmigrants (i.e., migrants rom other parts o Indonesia,usually migrating within the ramework o the government ransmigrasipolicy),here Bugis people originally rom South Sulawesi, reerred to in the lm as theDaeng. Many o the Marind people are employees o these Bugis people. It hasbeen Indonesian governments policy to encourage transmigration to West Papua,as a way o diluting the inuence and ultimately the rights o the West Papuanindigenous people.

Both the Dutch initiative and Aryo Danusiris lm have a common purpose,which is in different ways to support and understand the efforts o Papuans tobecome economically equal by competing in trade with the more experienced trans-migrants rom wider Indonesia. It is well known that in much o West Papua, whilebasic arming o primary produce is in the hands o the Papuans, transport andmore protable aspects o trade are almost entirely in the hands o the Indonesiantransmigrants. Te lm is in keeping with Danusiris earlier concerns, voiced in his2002 essay Filming Indonesia: Between Mythical and Critical Multiculturalism,

where he argues that the various Indonesian governments have developed out othe national motto, Binneka unggal Ika (Unity in Diversity), a mythical multi-culturalism based on rozen and static media stereotypes o regional cultures,

without any consideration or either the living cultures in these regions, nor or theeconomic welare o the inhabitants o these regions and their rights to their ownresources, dominated as they are by integration within an aggressive nation state,

particularly that constructed within the Soeharto New Order period, and in effectsurviving into the Post-Soeharto Reformasi period. In his essay Danusiri initially

writes o the situation in Aceh. He then goes on:

Te same thing also happened in West Papua . . . In the Post-SoehartoReformasi era . . . [the] government strategically changed the nameIrian Jaya to Papua, which was also one o the demands o the Papuan

people, or Irian Jaya was a made-up name given by Sukarno. Howeverthe change stopped there. Te government even tried to divide the

province o Papua into two provinces, which would effectively meanchanging the imagined community o the Papuan people. Aferwardsthe government neglected the many cases o human rights violations,

and orgot to reconsider the status o the Freeport Company (anAmerican mining company licenced by Soeharto) that had been takingall the prot o the goldmines in the Central Papua mountains withoutsharing any o its wealth with the Papuan people . . . Tis mythical mul-ticulturalism, which tries to build an illusory diversity based on cultural


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stereotypes, without addressing issues o justice and o genuine decen-tralization o economic and political power, just as was done by theNew Order, is still in the air in Indonesia today.10

In this same article Danusiri affi rms that his project in the lm Te Poet ofLinge Homelandwas to demonstrate in what ways Acehnese didongperormanceswere still part o the living Achenese culture, in contrast to the stereotypes oregional perormances which were part o the V schedules during the NewOrder. Regional cultural perormances on Indonesian television almost never showthe relation o the perormance to a community, but present highlights o peror-mance styles, as television numbers, ofen in a collage with perormances romother regions, as collective symbols o the national ideolog y, unity in diversity.

Early scenes in Lukas Moment show the process o prawn shing along thecoast, Lukas and his riends establishing rapport with the lmmaker by occasion-ally speaking to him, although Danusiri is not seen. Te key narrative developmento the lm occurs at about 15 minutes, with the sudden initiative put orward byLukas not only to sell the prawns at the local Merauke market, where the pricemight be even as low as 3000 rupiah, but to seek a market in Jayapura, the provin-cial capital, where the price may be as much as 20,000 rupiah per kilo, and perhapsto seek even wider markets such as Jakarta, where many o the prawns sold have

been armed, and where reshly caught large sea prawns can etch Western prices.Lukas and his uncle take 30 kilos o prawns packed with ice to the airport, hopingthey can get a reduced price or reight. Tere a surprising thing happens. Afera period o considerable uncertainty and conusion, a local who is to board the

plane offers to pay the cost o airreighting the young mans prawns to Jayapura. ForLukas the cost is prohibitive360,000 rupiah (US$36) or the airreight alone.

Figure 8.3 Scene romLukas Moment(2005)


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On his arrival at the airport Lukas appears not to know what the likely chargewill be, but he hopes he can come to a special deal with airport offi cials, paying aslittle as 20,000 rupiah. But his contact at the airport ails to show up. Te sudden

appearance o the local is a godsend.Te second hal o the lm deals with the question o the effectiveness o the

transaction. Inormation about the deal coming rom Jayapura is scant. EventuallyLukas receives a bank transer or 150,000 rupiah, not the 400,000 rupiah heexpected. His hopes are dashed. He and his uncle question their NGO contact,Ibu Esi, going to her well-urnished home in the town, rom where she phones

Jayapura. It emerges that she believes the initiative to sell to Jayapura should havebeen organized with her mediation, given the contacts she has there and her

knowledge o trade. But this was not done, and she remonstrates mildly with them.Te Jayapura people claim they did not expect the delivery o prawns rozen withice, and not having a reezer, distributed them quickly at a reduced price. Eventhough the Jayapura NGO does send urther payments, in instalments, Lukas hasnot covered his costs or the prawns themselves, together with packing in ice. Telm ends with Lukas acknowledging his partial ailure and the need to retreat toselling only in the Merauke market, but with plans to develop his cooperative soit become important as an independent trading group, rather than its memberssimply becoming employees o others.

Te good luck that intervenes, in the course o the lm, is that a local who hasmade it, and sees himsel better off than his indigenous Papuan brothers, decides tohelp at the airport. Te local identity gives his name as Aloy Yopeng. Earlier he saidto his traveling companion: I think it is our responsibility to help the little broth-ers. He sees Lukas as indigenous, rom a local tribe, like himsel, and sees him astypically economically disadvantaged and lacking in contacts and experience. IsAloys deed also a deed done or the camera? Tis is a question that ofen excitesaudiences o the lm (or example at the Jakarta International Film Festival in

2005), and one pertinent to the whole venture o Direct Cinema, and to CinemaVerit, a question about the effect o the presence o the camera, an issue posedby Rouch himsel at the opening o Chronique dun Et. Te answer in the case oYopeng is perhaps yes and no. But not or personal reputation. It emerges that theenergetic and articulate Aloy Yopeng is the regional head o a youth training bureauin the Merauke area (as the subtitles translate it: Head o the Basic EducationBureau). Te deed o goodwill is done because he has both a personal and a proes-sional sense o responsibility, and a sense o solidarity with his own people, includ-

ing probably the sense that it is his responsibility to give a good example.Tis scene at the airport is a remarkable one, lasting just on 14 minutes,

nearly a quarter o the running time o the lm. In this scene, the camera ollowsmoments o conusion as well as the moments o clarity and revelation, as theunpredicted events unroll in ront o the camera, even as (at one important point)


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children scream protractedly in the background with the departure o relatives tothe waiting aircraf. Tis scene also shows the way in which Lukas, at an early stagein the course o making the lm, had begun to understand Danusiris project and

its signicance, and to actively co-operate with him. Tere are numerous scenes,particularly when the prawn marketing venture appears in jeopardy afer the dis-patch o the prawns to Jayapura, where Lukas allows himsel to work through hisown diffi cult emotions in ront o the camera. At the airport, too, afer Yopeng has

paid the cost o the reight, Danusiri holds the camera on Lukas surprised ace,as Lukas, both astounded and moved, thinks through the many implications o

what has just happened. Ten Lukas says directly to Danusiri behind the camera:Ask him why he did this. Ask him yoursel, is Danusiris response. It is then that

Yopengs answer is provided. Tis is a orm o participatory documentary as wellas observational documentary, in which the protagonist, Lukas, understands theimportance o both continuing to initiate his own project, and o letting thingshappen in ront o the camera, as they occur. Tis role o the lms central pro-tagonist as initiator is something that Rouch had explored in his earlier lms. But

Lukas Moment has little o the reexivity o Chronique Dun Et, and the mainsubject o Danusiris lm is the consequences o actions, rather than existentialquestions o personal happiness, memory, and authenticity o perormance that

preoccupy Chronique dun Et.Lukas Momentdeals with a highly pertinent set o questions. How do mar-

ginal people (very ofen indigenous), in distant regional societies, begin to partakeon equal terms in a national market? How do inexperienced, ofen indigenous,

young people, begin to improve their prospects? Te lmmaker ollows onecase as it unolds, a case where lack o knowledge and experience dominate, but

where there is initiative and daring, and where some luck intervenes. Once againDanusiris subject, as with his lms in Aceh, is people who are below the horizono the Indonesian or international media and who are relatively powerless within

the social structure o their marginalized region. Te lm is respectul towardsthe culture and circumstances o the West Papuans, ree o the stereotypes o theirrepresentation as a backward or exotic people, but showing their very basic anddenuded modern living conditions in houses dispersed on sprawling monoto-nous rectangular estates o the kind also built or transmigrants. But its primaryinterest is not culture and environment, so much as the economic advancement omarginalized indigenous people, in accordance with Danusiris earlier argumentsthat, in the Indonesian media, discourses o culture are propagated without consid-

eration or the actual social wellbeing and economic rights o the people o theseregional cultures.

In Direct Cinema, because the lmmakers ofen ollow one central characteror line o interest, rather than a plurality o points o view, the question o whereDanusiris camera is positioned is critical. I we compare Lukas Moment to the


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work o a Direct Cinema practitioner, such as Fred Wiseman, whereas Wisemanrequently puts his camera on the interace between the individual and an institu-tion, Danusiri has chosen to place his camera continuously and without anything

distracting him, at a highly signicant conjuncture within the social structure oWest Papua, the key phases o a small project that is being developed or the eco-nomic advancement and nancial independence o a small group o young WestPapuans, as a response to their economically disadvantaged positionand whereno offi cial institutions are assisting them, except one oreign NGO.

It would be a mistake to suggest however that the lm is objective in somesense, just because it uses long takes and because Danusiri appears reluctant touse editing to make points (the lm uses ar less cutting around compared with,

or example, the Maysles brothers lm, Salesman). Lukas Moment is unasham-edly partisan. Danusiri does not ollow any o the activities o the community with

whom Lukas and the Marind students are competing, the people originally romSouth Sulawesithey do not appear in the lm. Fred Wiseman has objected notonly to the term Cinema Verit, but to the term Observational Cinema, sug-gesting that this term has connotations o the lmmaker just hanging around withone thing being as valuable as another and that is not true.11ButLukas Momentisentirely in accord with Danusiris views on mythical multiculturalism and the needto engage with the actual social wellbeing and economic rights o the people othese regional cultures. Te lm in effect jointly undertakes affi rmative action or

young people rom a community that is marginalized in its own land.What does Danusiri gain by casting Lukas Moment in the orm o observa-

tional documentary? In the rst place he reduces the temptation to speak oror, on behal ohis Papuan subjects, which would have occurred even i he hadused Lukas voice-over as narrator, but set that voice-over to an expository struc-ture organized by Danusiri himsel. In its avoidance o a voice o authority speakingdirectly or the West Papuans,Lukas Momentis similar to an Australian documen-

tary portrait, wo Laws(1981), made collaboratively with the Borroloola peoplein the Northern erritory (deliberately using a wide angle lens to encompass theirkinship-based group sitting arrangements), one o the rst Australian documenta-ries that allowed Aborigines to talk at length, without non-aborigines speaking ontheir behal.12Secondly, the singular narrative line, resulting rom the decision touse long takes, ollowing one small group, in chronological order, as is customaryin Direct Cinema (rather than reporting on the experiences and perspectives o arange o people, using a narrator to link them, as occurs in expository documen-

tary), allows the viewer to trace through the options open to a young man in thisparticular social situation and to see what results rom action undertaken by himand his groupwhat effects they can produce rom acting in their society, whatknowledge or experience they have or lack, what opportunities do or do not seemto be open to them, how they might react, even to their ailureand to identiy


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116 David Hanan

with them in this venture, rather than identiying with the views and perspectiveso a narrator. Te lm is about the possibility o agency or a young West Papuanin West Papua, and one might even surmise that in this case the presence o the

camera may just have stimulated more initiatives rom Lukas than may otherwisehave occurred. Tirdly, the tolerance o dead time, characteristic o some exampleso Direct Cinema, a movement which emerged in the early 1960s, at the same timeas dead time began to be increasingly tolerated in eature lms (or example in lmsby Antonioni and Resnais and later, Akerman), allows the lmmaker to concen-trate on Lukas emotions in the second hal o the lm, when very little action isoccurring but when his disappointment becomes so apparent and is protracted bythe inconclusiveness o the transaction.

Who in Indonesia cares about a West Papuans emotions, given the customaryrole o West Papuans in the Indonesian media has been to appear in sanitized tribalcostume (without thekoteka, the penis gourd) perorming dances that support theIndonesian states ideology o unity in diversity? In Lukas Momentthe true isola-tion o the West Papuans in their own society is apparent. Tis is not just due to

political repression, where since 2001 it has been clear that political outspokennesswill not be tolerated and may result in deathso no political statements are madeby a West Papuan in this lm.13But West Papuans are a people who in numerousother ways the Indonesian government has tried to divide and marginalize, andreduce their inuence. Bureaucratic initiatives, such as the shifing o populationssince the 1960s, and since 2002 a reduced role or a central indigenous provincialassembly, with regional districts competing with each other or unds, all havecontinued to reduce the power (and the capacity to unite) o a people or whom

political outspokenness has always been dangerous.14 Tese are the unspokenassumptions that lie behind Lukas Moment, and give impetus to the eeling that

West Papuans need to be represented on their own terms. While Danusiris richlyobserved recent lm about Aceh,Playing Between Elephants, has at its center a very

engaging central character, and presents on screen overall a more complicated situ-ationthe rebuilding with United Nation unds o a village o at least a thousandinhabitants afer a tsunamiwhat we see inLukas Momentraises more undamen-tal questions about social structure in Indonesian society and media representationo regional groups, than does the later lm.