Sleeping with your devil mask
The movie Viking Zen and I watched tonight was Opera Jawa (2006). We found it just as we were about to give up on Netflix's ability to provide on-demand films that we hadn't already seen and actually wanted to; it is a tragedy shaped around an episode from the Ramayana and contemporary Indonesian politics and I will attempt first to describe it by analogue, although if I tell you that it reminded me, at varying points, of Chunhyang (2000), The Fall (2006), Prospero's Books (1991), Titus (1999), The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), and Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), I am not sure how much that helps. Siti and Setyo used to be traditional dancers; she was famous for her performances of Sinta, the wife of Rama, abducted by the demon-king Rahwana, recovered by her husband, tried for her fidelity by fire. She has not danced since their marriage. Setyo is a potter now; Siti keeps his house, sees him off to the city, finds herself still drawn to the tensile grace and stances of wayang orang, the art she gave up. When she attracts the attention of Ludiro, the charismatic local butcher whose employment of street thugs in a faltering economy is starting to make him something of a warlord, Siti and Setyo's lives begin to mirror, darkly, the epic they once played onstage.
All the dialogue is sung. The only spoken lines belong to a television carved from stone and offered to with flowers and rice as at an altar. Here is Siti at prayer in a spiral of coconut husks, menaced and lured by rice-steamers come man-sized that whirl like hobby horses on May Day. A street singer with a ukulele is a haruspex, foretelling in a pig's liver how the puppets will dance. Here is Setyo twisting from his wife's hands into a crabwise thing of anguish and jealousy; the soft red fabric of his T-shirt stretched up and over his head makes him blind, terrifying. Ludiro is no ten-headed brute, but lithe, hard-hipped, intimately attentive to the small calibrations of a dance, the slow close and open of a woman's eyes. He steps out from a side of beef, carnality incarnate. Here is Siti on Setyo's wheel, slicked with clay-slip as he tries to mold her—wrong-way Pygmalion, a golem in reverse—into the woman he longs for. Here is Setyo in the mask of his wife, until with a turn of the wrist it is haunting him, arched above him in its long black hair like a hungry ghost. A billow of red silk unrolls for miles. The aftermath of a popular uprising: charred and shattered figures of terra-cotta and wax, hollow inside, burning. White scarecrow bodies hang by the side of the road; in a slaughterhouse, the dead are gunmetal mannequins with heads of scarlet wax dripping down across their bodies like the sashes of court dancers, stiffening like blood. Here is the fire that tested Sinta, a cone of saffron-gold embroidery snapping in the sea wind. A funeral procession moves across the sands, carrying grief in their hands like stoppered jars. I cannot make you hear gamelans and voices, the arch and twine of singers trained in traditions I don't know and a smoky moment of blues and Fosse jazz. I have no idea if it resembles any other of Garin Nugroho's films and I do not care. I think it might be one of the purest ways I have seen a myth put onscreen in the language it deserves.
All the dialogue is sung. The only spoken lines belong to a television carved from stone and offered to with flowers and rice as at an altar. Here is Siti at prayer in a spiral of coconut husks, menaced and lured by rice-steamers come man-sized that whirl like hobby horses on May Day. A street singer with a ukulele is a haruspex, foretelling in a pig's liver how the puppets will dance. Here is Setyo twisting from his wife's hands into a crabwise thing of anguish and jealousy; the soft red fabric of his T-shirt stretched up and over his head makes him blind, terrifying. Ludiro is no ten-headed brute, but lithe, hard-hipped, intimately attentive to the small calibrations of a dance, the slow close and open of a woman's eyes. He steps out from a side of beef, carnality incarnate. Here is Siti on Setyo's wheel, slicked with clay-slip as he tries to mold her—wrong-way Pygmalion, a golem in reverse—into the woman he longs for. Here is Setyo in the mask of his wife, until with a turn of the wrist it is haunting him, arched above him in its long black hair like a hungry ghost. A billow of red silk unrolls for miles. The aftermath of a popular uprising: charred and shattered figures of terra-cotta and wax, hollow inside, burning. White scarecrow bodies hang by the side of the road; in a slaughterhouse, the dead are gunmetal mannequins with heads of scarlet wax dripping down across their bodies like the sashes of court dancers, stiffening like blood. Here is the fire that tested Sinta, a cone of saffron-gold embroidery snapping in the sea wind. A funeral procession moves across the sands, carrying grief in their hands like stoppered jars. I cannot make you hear gamelans and voices, the arch and twine of singers trained in traditions I don't know and a smoky moment of blues and Fosse jazz. I have no idea if it resembles any other of Garin Nugroho's films and I do not care. I think it might be one of the purest ways I have seen a myth put onscreen in the language it deserves.
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It was. Seriously, in another thirty seconds we would have been watching Julie & Julia; Netflix has very odd ideas of what people want to stream off their computers. This was so much better.
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Okay, I am seeing it today.
(seriously; that is aMAZing sounding.)
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Filed under German film for some unfathomable reason: it was commissioned by Peter Sellars for the bicentennial-and-a-half of Mozart's birthday (which I will admit is fairly WTF), but that doesn't make it not Indonesian. The next question is whether it's on DVD, in which case I will covet it.
Okay, I am seeing it today.
Please let me know what you think!
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Oh, cool. I would love to hear your thoughts; I know very little about gamelans except what they sound like, and even then I know that there's an incredible range of tunings and styles.
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But, to address the tuning aspect. Yes, there are many different tunings in that there is no standard tuning in the A=440 sense. However, there are only two different tuning systems in the sense of sets or systems of pitches: pelog and slendro.
I have a book and several recordings you can borrow about gamelan, and I will probably have a couple more to recommend as soon as I finish them myself.
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I can wait for the post.
I have a book and several recordings you can borrow about gamelan, and I will probably have a couple more to recommend as soon as I finish them myself.
Thank you!
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It was amazing. I had no idea, moment to moment, what to expect from it, and I don't think I was ever disappointed.
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Sorry to miss Readercon, at least in part because I haven't seen you in person for ages. Well, there's always next year.
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I'm not even sure I can convey the full effect. It's endlessly full of images, but movement is as much a part of them as composition, and there is also a genuine sense of strangeness, which is sometimes numinous and sometimes like things you dream; and I think they would read as strange to an Indonesian viewer, too.
I'll make a note of this to see, since we're getting Netflix on demand at some point this summer. It sounds right down my alley.
Awesome. Enjoy!
Well, there's always next year.
All right: next year in (God help us) Burlington!
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Holy crap. That is the most awesome assemblage of story DNA. Further, your description is breathtaking. I have added the film to my queue.
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I can tell you exactly which pieces after you've seen the film, too.
I have added the film to my queue.
I hope it lives up to your expectations!
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I have good news: I managed to find a copy of Peter Brook's Mahabharata- the six-hour version...
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Forgive me! It was very late at night!
I have good news: I managed to find a copy of Peter Brook's Mahabharata- the six-hour version...
I guess I know what we're watching for the next few weeks . . .
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**See? This is the kind of time lag there is between your recommending something and my actually getting to act on it. But slowly and surely....
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I am very glad! I await at least a partial report.
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On that note, this brief entry was very funny. It's yesterday's meme telling us who wrote various portions of Hamlet.