Film Festival Confessional

As many who pay close attention to local news know by now, the Jakarta International Film Festival (JIFFEST) will not take place this year unless its organizers are able to secure more funds, and it seems that its very existence is in question. My Twitter feed recently informed me that the festival would have been the only venue to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright), and Waiting for Superman (Davis Guggenheim) in a cinema, two films that I would have gone out of my way to catch with an audience. An article in the Jakarta Globe points out some of the differences between government participation in JIFFEST as compared to the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, and unsurprisingly, the main difference is the amount by which the festival is subsidized. Some may think it's a waste of money, but the same article goes on to point out the many fringe benefits which the Busan Festival has brought to the city. Indeed, there is a multitude of ways in which the local city administration could improve the city, not least of all being to make it more attractive to tourists. Something that also sprang to mind immediately when seeing the two festivals compared is that when comparing Korean and Indonesian films that I've watched, I must say that the former have been close to 100% better, and it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to conclude that this situation would also benefit from a higher level of government participation in terms of funding, and less in terms of mandating what cinematic content is suitable for the youth of Indonesia.

I attended JIFFEST a few years back and without a doubt, it was one of the happiest fortnights of my life. Having bought the gold pass, I had a nicely full schedule of titles to see, averaging three a day for the duration. This may seem meagre in comparison to the number taken in by an industry professional, but alas, my day job does not involve going to the movies. However, there are advantages to having to limit the number of films you watch; you are less likely to have to sit through clunkers, and you are able to fully experience the film and all it has to offer, letting your senses absorb much more of the detail being transmitted from the screen and sound system, with longer intervals for reflection.

Any notion that there is no market for this type of event in Jakarta was belied by the immense numbers of people at almost every screening, the exceptions being free showings of older movies like The Blue Angel (Joesef von Sternberg), which I went to see again as previously I'd only seen it with an English soundtrack. But despite the fact that such titles with limited popularity among modern crowds were being shown at lesser venues, via extremely poor digital projection, there was still a significant audience for them. All titles being shown at bona fide cinemas were packed to the rafters, with people even sitting on the floor at certain screenings.The festival had eschewed the usual - very agreeable - practice of Indonesian cinemas, of allowing assigned seating when purchasing the ticket, and consequently, long lines formed in front of most of the films up to three hours ahead of start times, in order that festival-goers might get optimal seats. To be a part of such enthusiasm was fulfilling in itself, never mind the fact that some of the best movies of recent times lay ahead.

While the festival was very well organized (people formed long, orderly queues! in Jakarta!), there was at least one area for reasonable complaint. Some, though not all, of the prints were in pretty bad condition, which again is testimony to the film's lack of funding if they are having to acquire prints that have been screened more than fifty times, thus showing excessive signs of decay. There were also a few films at the main venues (which cost money) that were again shown in very shoddy digital, so bad in fact, that items in the background would become completely undiscernable. The promise of classic silent films being shown with live music sounded like an unmissable opportunity on paper. So it was with deep disappointment that I tried attending one such screening of City Lights (Charlie Chaplin), only to find that it was being shown right in the middle of Plaza Senayan shopping mall, so not only did  the sound of shoppers distort the quality of the music beyond recognition, but in a moment of decision making lacking any foresight whatsoever, the screen had been placed in front of a very large window, so light was streaming on to it, making the film literally unwatchable.

As for the films themselves? I will always remember watching the following films not just with a very large audience in cinemas, but with an audience who were bubbling over with an express joy at being able to participate in an important cultural event: Pan's Labrynth (Guillermo Del Toro), The Queen (Stephen Frears), Match Point (Woody Allen), 3-iron (Ki-duk Kim), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola), and Volver (Pedro Almodovar). I would have liked to have seen some of the documentaries on offer, especially Murderball (Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro), a film about full-contact paraplegic rugby, which I have yet to see. However, all the documentaries were being screened for free at the main venues, were subject to massive hordes of interested parties, and I couldn't see any way of getting into these screenings shy of sleeping outside the cinema's entrance.

There were a great deal of Indonesian films being shown, and other than Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho), their titles, contents and posters all gave the unwavering impression that they were absolutely worthless. Opera Jawa was another film sans admission charge, with an inderteminable line of starved-of-art punters waiting to get in - many very young. I thought that its being an Indonesian product meant I would easily get another chance to watch it, but bizarrely its theatrical run consisted of one single day. Since then, the only Indonesian titles I've noticed playing at cinemas have been more ponderings on the supernatural, and teenage romances. Their titles alone hardly inspire confidence; Hantu Puncak Datang Bulan, anyone? Or, Menstrual Cycle Peak Ghost, not the best translation perhaps, but the source provides little to work with.

A quick look here indicates that the fate of JIFFEST is not destined to be a happy one, inevitably meaning the same for the future of Indonesian cinema in general.

Lift Etiquette

 or  

A Guide to Eloquent Elevator Usage

1. Above all else, allow passengers who have just finished their short journey to alight first. This is only good manners and will lead to lower levels of stress amongst all. Fighting one's way out of a lift is a ludicrous action to have to perform on a daily basis. Imagine a world where you know that a clear path awaits you when you get to the ground floor. The self-gratification when reciprocating this act for others should be equally rewarding. In addition, when there are fewer obstructions, the lift's progress will surely be expedited. Those of you who prefer to go barging your way into lifts full of people who are trying to get out are only slowing down everyone's day with your belligerence – including your own, which must defeat your ostensible purpose.

2. When calling a lift, press only the button that meets your need. Pressing both the up and down button concurrently is a road to nowhere. Even on the USS Enterprise, no one ever manages to beam up and down at the same time. Again, by doing this, you are only slowing down the lift by adding unnecessary tasks to its list of things to do. There is also a 50% percent chance of slowing down your own journey by making the lift take you up before you go down, stopping again on your own floor to pick up nobody on the way.

3. Only press the button once. Now, I must admit, that I've never been presented with evidence to support this one. However, when I see people bashing away at the buttons, I think, this can't be good for the lift. Perhaps there is evidence, in that said lifts are so often out of order. I think we can safely say that bashing equipment (except tube television sets on their last legs and automobiles suffering from certain problems) does not produce the desired effect. If your computer crashes, you don't suddenly start repeated bashing of the keys, do you? Well, perhaps you do, but in that case there is even less hope for you.

4. If there is a separate lift for goods and service, don't use it! Yet again, you are only adding to lift congestion by doing so. How? By summoning two sets of lifts at the same and therefore sending one on a fool's errand. If people carrying goods or providing service all stick to their lifts, and everyone else sticks to the other ones, both sets of lifts could presumably go doubly as fast as they would when being misused. There are exceptions for this rule. When one set of lifts is out of order, naturally you have no choice but to use the other one. Also, if the other one is waiting at the floor where you are about to start your lift journey before you have summoned your designated lift, then you will not be creating congestion by using it. This can work both ways, but construction workers bearing equipment and those carrying other heavy loads should always prefer the service lift.

In my work, I once came across a text informing me that in Japan the rear left portion of the lift is prime real estate and should be reserved for the most important person in the lift – if you are the most important person, you should wait to be directed there and profusely refuse this honor bestowed upon you, before accepting it. I don't know whether this factoid is really true or not (I'm afraid that if I research its veracity, I will be let down by what I find), but I do know that the four tips above which I have just shared with you will improve everyone's quality of lift if they become the accepted way of doing things.

The Voice of a Lady

Uniqueness is a valued commodity in the world of popular art, often having the ability to outweigh the importance of artistic ability. Having said that, it is difficult to come up with the names of even a handful of real originals. Much of the time when you hear of a well-known figure being referred to as such, what is being considered is a way of life rather than artistic output. Not to diminish his work in any way, but John Huston is a name that immediately springs to as someone who lived a rather wild and colourful life very much of his own choosing. But if I wanted to recommend Huston's most famous films; The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, at least in the case of the former I would be able to say, 'well, if you liked The Big Sleep, you'll love Maltese Falcon', and I could go on with a long list of films that came out before and since to act as points of reference, putting aside cinematic devices that Huston is commonly thought to have pioneered on Maltese Falcon, that is. Mind you, Sierra Madre is a different kettle of fish, and could easily be described as a unique work in the annals of cinema, but having seen most of Huston's films I'd venture to say that the story, and its telling, stand alone as such amongst his works.

Yet there is one whose artistic voice can be compared to no other singer for means of reference, this is because when trying to come up with a list of names of women who sound like Billie Holiday, what you are inevitably left with is a list of singers who are doing their very best to imitate the frightening intensity of Lady Day, who was a true original.

 Lady Day

Holiday's life was one comprised of extreme hardship; as a child she was abused, as a teenager she was forced into prostitution, and unsurprisingly, as an adult she became a substance addict. Throughout all of this she was a an African American woman born long before the Civil Rights Movement. At least in her case, it is possible that great suffering was the muse of great artistry.

Because not only did Holiday have supernatural timing when singing, not only was the timbre of her voice unlike that of any of her contemporaries, but the incredible despair which she was able to evoke in her recordings so long ago is something impossible to fabricate. The jazz standard, usually such a lighthearted display of escapism, becomes a crushing, passionate cry in her possession. It helped that she was often given songs with lyrics that seemed tailor-made for her talents, such as her anthemic Sophisticated Lady:

They say, into your early life romance came

And in this heart of yours burned a flame

A flame that flickers somehow, then dies

Then, with disillusion deep in your eyes

You learned that fools in love soon grow wise

The years have changed you, some how

I see you now

Smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow, nonchalant

Diamonds shining, dancing, dining, with some man, in a restaurant

Is that all you really want? 

No, sophisticated lady I know

You missed the love you lost long ago

And when nobody is nigh you cry

Having met a few sophisticated ladies in my time, when Billie sings the above words, I am drawn into the music as though I were staring into a pair of grief-stricken eyes.

Not all of the songs Lady Day sang were depictions of life during the Jazz Age. She is largely responsible for an early, powerful cry of protest against injustices toward her race in America. The song Strange Fruit is remarkable not only for its depth of meaning, but the fact that its primary vehicle of delivery was a young black woman, herself a resident in this age of systematic, cruelly enforced, discrimination:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Who knows how much the above lyric and its delivery by Holiday influenced the general public at the time? However much, it is fair to say that taking a clear stand against these horrors took incredible guts, especially given that she was a potential target herself. To use her voice toward such an end could in no way be attributed to self-aggrandizement, and I must say that I have deep doubts about the motives behind the charitable deeds of many modern performers. And while it may seem hackneyed to point out the absence of comparable musicians among the current crop on offer, I can't help but feel that the young singers of today, with their childish behaviour and desperation to retain their spot in the sun simply don't hold a candle when compared to Billie Holiday. In 2010 is there a singer renowned on several continents simply for the pureness of her voice? In the unlikely event that there is, will that voice reverberate fifty years after its owner's passing with an inimitable hunger of the soul?

On Great Silence

My world is a noisy one; I work with large groups of children who are at the peak of their powers in this respect, and when I come home it it is to a small boy with little appetite for restfulness and vocal chords similar in strength to the famously loud ones his father possesses. The streets of Jakarta are always awash with racket, and it really is a city that never sleeps. Something that I feel will be a contributing factor to an early grave for me are the two-stroke engined bajaj and the occasional races they have under my apartment window at 2 a.m. Going to the cinema is an experience often marred by people taken by the need to joke and giggle throughout a feature, loudly. Ironically, I recently sat through a sparsely inhabited screening of The Ghost (Roman Polanski), during which a couple of middle-aged ladies talked incessantly, but their banter took the form of a running commentary of on-screen events, so they couldn't be accused of not paying attention. Ewan MacGregor's unsheathed derriere drew particular interest. And then there has been occasion when I've been party to what I felt was very encouraging noise during a trip to a cinema, in the form of gasps of admiration when I sat amongst a full house on a Saturday night for a showing of Spike Lee's Inside Man, its dazzling sleights of hand having the power to impress the audience to the point where they became lost in themselves en masse.

When the cinema was still in its infancy, in an age before netbooks, ipods and smartphones, how did people behave? Like the bicycle and the radio, is it possible that silent film is actually more suitable to the modern pundit than its successors? Would someone's annoying ringtone be less irksome if it weren't interfering with some choice dialogue by David Mamet? Given that ringtones have the ability to arouse one's inner vandal whatever the setting, it seems unlikely. I only get to see silent films at festivals and art-house screenings where audiences tend to behave with greater composure than your typical crowd. It would seem that until it is realized by financiers and audiences alike that the medium would only be further enriched by implementing all of its possibilites, we will only get an extremely limited idea of how interestingly devices such as black & white and narratives sans spoken dialogue might be applied by today's filmmakers, and film will continue to be the art-form most glaringly ignorant of its past.

Silent films represent my greatest gap in knowledge of the movies, although I've watched a few, and most of them have been memorable experiences. Some films that stand out as must-see items: The Crowd (King Vidor), The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau), The General (Buster Keaton), Metropolis (Fritz Lang), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene), City Lights (Charlie Chaplin), The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer) and Pandora's Box (G.W. Pabst). 

I once struggled through D.W. Griffith's controversial, but much lauded, silent epic The Birth of a Nation, and felt nonchalant about whatever innovative worth it bears, its repugnant racism being the only thing capable of holding my attention. Even if you're that interested in the craft of cinema, the film could be left very low down on the list of priority. While I've heard it mentioned as a counterpart technical watershed to Citizen Kane and Star Wars, both of those films are infinitely more enjoyable; perhaps consequently making their innovations similarly easier to appreciate.

Apart from Chaplin and Dreyer, the names on the above list of silent classics are all German and American, and even Chaplin, long before he was unjustly flung out of the country, worked from within the Hollywood studio system. It would seem true that at the birth of cinema, these two nations were leaders and while Germany's UFA studios floundered after the silent era (for obvious reasons), the Hollywood juggernaut continued to capture the imaginations of people around the world for long afterward despite the difficulties of language the 'talkies' presented. Somewhere during the 80s Hollywood finally lost its way, unable to maintain the fine balance of enduring quality versus instant success at the box office. Its big budget films have got worse and worse to the point where we now appear to live in a much more democratized landscape of cinema, where small films made on small budgets from big and small countries compete against one another on the same playing field.

Louise Brooks

But back to those silent classics, and it is a German-American collaboration that to my mind is a strong contender for best silent of them all. Pandora's Box with its German director and iconic American star Louise Brooks. Many of the hallmarks of German silent expressionism are well utilized by Pabst and his status as a director would have been solidified had he made this film alone, but it must be said that the film belongs to Brooks. I am uncertain that any star, male or female, has ever had the same amount of diabolical magnetism as Louise Brooks. Every frame that she is in (most of them) is set on fire by her mysterious seductive charm. There is something about her sculpted face with its lush lips and penetrating gaze that put her in a category of greatness of which she is the only member. Some find it difficult to keep track of a silent film's narrative, and it is true that, as with books, when you are not receiving a full frontal assault to the senses, a little more patience is required. However, in the case of Pandora's Box, the story is clear enough, and its plays on morality are enough to raise the eyebrow of a modern viewer, as Lulu, the 'Pandora' of the story, essentially uses her sexuality to make her way through life, to the detriment of the men whom she encounters. This tale of a woman possessed of such spellbinding powers is wholly convincing, given that we, as viewers,  are completely taken in by the silent imagery of Louise Brooks who is captivating at every turn.

The spectacle of cinema in 2010 is bigger and better special effects, which when they first began arriving on the scene were a sight to behold. But now that precedent has been set, computer generated imagery is usually perfunctory. I have no desire to watch any more 3D films having sat through a handful of blurry ones, and suffering from very bad headaches due to at least a couple of them. 

But these vivid documents from the past, with the knowledge that what we are seeing was filmed nearly a century ago, actors and directors who manage to conjure mystique in ways that are often inexplicable - I am always surprised by the fact that the most surprising films I watch are the ones that were made long before I was born.

Debriefing

I've been back in Indonesia as of last night, after spending a grueling three days in Singapore, and have been trying to collect my thoughts about the ordeal. After sustaining excessive mental anguish, there is some light at the end of the tunnel which I've been trying to exit to escape my immigration woes, at least for the next eleven months - after which point I may very well have to relive a similar experience.

The assignation of blame throughout the process has come up frequently, and I feel like I've been targeted for far more than my fair share by those who've been bearing the brunt of the costs attached. Not that I haven't been left far more out of pocket than anticipated. As in my previous post on the topic, I balk at describing all the sordid details involved, complicated as they are.

What I have definitely learned is I don't enjoy being stuck in Singapore with a small child who has an unparalleled ability to generate commotion. We seemed to get far more dirty looks on that well managed island country than on this wild sprawl of an archipelago, indicating that perhaps a tolerance for a lack of order does have its benefits after all.

I received no hassle from public officials on either side of the crossing, but I can't help but feel that making tired travelers jump through at least three different hoops while they're worried about making that flight on time is an unsuitable solution.

Money lost, my son's lost school days, the stress of uncertainty, having to go on an unplanned trip to another country - all caused by man-made markers, rubber stamps and a paper trail.

All of the above brings me to one conclusion and that is that after all, I agree that a world without borders would be a far saner one. I mentioned this to a friend whom I met on the plane to Singapore (who didn't have a very different reason to me for his journey). When I included the possibility that such a scheme might have a negative impact on the world economy, he replied 'who cares?'. Callous and seemingly unthinking maybe, but who really does care anymore about preserving an economy in the manner designated by those in charge? Can they really claim that it's been working?

There could well be a period of adjustment, collateral damage, and a lot of angry nativists (nationalists, whatever, take your pick of euphemisms for veiled bigotry). I don't even enjoy traveling much myself, all I'm asking is for the right to stay put where I have lived for approximately half of my thirty-one years, in the country which is my mother's native land. Preservation of ways of life be damned, culture is not something that exists by design, and only becomes richer with diversity. I have no British friends who don't rate curry among their favourite cuisines.

Who do the controls help? If they are helping anyone at all, it is obviously not those who need help the most. Instead there are people literally dying around the world due to restrictions on freedom of movement. Children going mad in detention centres for boat people. And my own hardships which are so relatively paltry that I hesitate to draw any kind of comparison. However, the fact remains that they are woven from the same cloth of absurdity.