この『航跡（スービック海軍基地）』は、ドキュメンタリー二部作『For Example, The Philippines（たとえばフィリピンでは）』の後編にあたる。前編の『飛行機雲（クラーク空軍基地）』は2010年に公開された。二本合わせて9時間に及ぶこのドキュメンタリーは、米軍基地の跡地における環境汚染問題を軸に、歴史の忘却、植民地支配、野放しの軍国主義がもたらす結果といった問題を考察している。シネマ・ヴェリテの手法と、フィリピン人被害者やその家族、環境活動家、地域の活動家に実際にインタビューした映像を織り交ぜつつ、米比戦争の時代の古い写真、パルチザンの歌、歴史資料、風景写真を組み合わせたふたつの映画は、いずれも、この人道・環境危機の実態と、その解決策の複雑さが理解できるような作品を目指している。
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Adrian Jonathan Pasaribuさん（講師）による批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
For the Few, Not the Many: Linda Nursanti’s Seeking Justice for Lakardowo
Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu（講師）
One might live without hope for a week, but one could not live without water for a day. Lakardowo, a small village in East Java, has been surviving without both for years. Seeking Justice for Lakardowo (Lakardowo Mencari Keadilan), a debut feature by Linda Nursanti, documents another episode of the masses being violated by the classes in Indonesia. The message is clear: in the struggle for public welfare, the privileged few has the law on their side.
The film makes no disguise of its political stance. From the very first minute, the screen belongs to the oppressed. Sama’ati, a middle-aged woman, complains about the chemical substance that’s been polluting the water in her village—it’s hot and toxic to the skin. Minutes later we see a man, Suhan, criticize how PT PRIA—the evil big corporation of the story—dump its waste on the village and bury the poison underground. In total, the filmmakers recorded statements from more than fifty people, with half of them coming from the dwellers of Lakardowo. With the film lasting around sixty minutes, that amounts to almost one person per minute.
Among the myriad noises, Sutamah takes the central stage, at least for the early half of the film. Through the roles she serves in the story, we witness the anatomy of collective struggle that unfolds throughout the film. At the beginning, we see her with her family, in her morning routines preparing her daughters who are about to go to school. Then we walk with her around the farming grounds, as she narrates to the camera about the development projects in her village, and the itchy skin that her people has been suffering due to the improper waste disposal of PT PRIA.
Gradually, toward the latter half of the film, Sutamah blends with the masses. We see her among her people—collecting donations, cajoling and consolidating her peers. Then many other characters flood the screen. We see Sutamah’s peers staging demonstrations, presenting data to the government, providing further explanations to the camera about the debacle. As the film progresses, the film is less about Sutamah and more about Lakardowo as a community in distress.
Lakardowo plays like a Kafkaesque nightmare. Throughout the film, we see the villagers stumble from one meeting to another meeting, from one demonstration to another demonstration. For every step forward the villagers made, the bureaucracy forced them to take two steps back. For every data they presented, the government and the corporation doubted them with their own set of data. In the end, there is no distance left to run—a political cul-de-sac.
Sure, Lakardowo could be very overbearing in its message, that one might easily dismiss the film as a typical social-justice-warrior documentary. To be fair, the film does bear many tropes of political documentary in Indonesia. Scenes of children crying, check. Shots of protest banners, check. Protest songs playing over montages of demonstration, check. On-screen texts with fist-pumping messages about social justice, check.
For years, since the regime-toppling events of 1998 Reformation, political advocacy has been the raison d’être of the Indonesian documentary scene. Very little of the nation’s documentaries are personal. The preoccupation is with the social and Lakardowo is no different. What makes Lakardowo worth noting, especially in Indonesia’s current political climate, is its portrayal of the power relations. The filmmaker puts great care to humanize the oppressed villagers, and delve deeper into the structure of power in the region and how it influences the struggle of the masses.
Political documentaries in Indonesia tends to oversimplify social conflicts into two points: the victims and the state. Such narrative usually puts great emphasis on the number of people affected and declares that the state is responsible for them. Consequently, most documentaries about social conflict in Indonesia boil down to the absence of the state, yet fails to investigate how the power structures and their relationships to the people allow such tragedy to occur in the first place. Romanticizing the state, or its absence, is not only misleading but also socially irresponsible.
Lakardowo treads more carefully, more patiently. The filmmakers accompanied the villagers in every ring of bureaucracy they must went through, from local, regional, to national government. In every meeting, the villagers repeated the same data over and over again. It only led to the government suggesting more field investigations, that in turn incited more public protests. In one of the protests, the filmmakers managed to record the villagers negotiating with the police, which in turn threatened the village head. “Do you want your village to be safe or not?” said the authority. Moments later, the crowd dissipated.
Such subtle moments make the message of Lakardowo not only relatable, but also relevant. The state is never one coherent structure of power. Inside it lies a complex ecosystem of power struggles, which presents an endless and repetitive maze for the people who seek justice. By mapping the power relations within the state bureaucracy, Lakardowo makes the rebuttal of the villagers’ protest by the corporation even more powerful. There is one scene in the middle of Lakardowo where the villagers observed PT PRIA factory from their village. They are only separated by several meters of land and a wall. Yet, the villagers must go through several layers of state bureaucracy just to meet the corporation’s representatives and face a political dead-end.
Given the history of human rights violations in Indonesia, one might anticipate the people’s eventual failure, but the film’s narrative had done enough to contextualize the audience with the struggle. The film’s message feels earned, rather than imposed by the filmmakers, which is usually the case with other films of its like.
Lakardowo might never win any award for its artistic merit. Indeed, the most obvious criticism we could address to the film—and most political documentaries in Indonesia—is the awfully basic and rather blurry camerawork it employs. Lakardowo’s greatest strength lies not in beauty, but clarity. In the age of post-truth that we live in, that is more than enough.
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Chris Fujiwaraさん（講師）による批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
Marine Metropolitan: Jewel Maranan’s In the Claws of a Century Wanting
Chris Fujiwara（講師）
A sheet of multicolored fabric, pulled across a wooden post, forms a slanted ceiling. Under it, a woman and a small boy gaze out at a thin triangle of crepuscular sky. In this hallucinatory image near the beginning of Jewel Maranan’s In the Claws of a Century Wanting, the ceiling might be a sail, the dwelling a raft, and the mother and son navigators embarked on a voyage. Sea and land mingle in the world of the people of the film, residents of the seaside slum of the large container port of Tondo, Manila – a community to which Maranan devoted an excellent previous documentary, Tondo, Beloved: To What Are the Poor Born? (2011).
Inside the residents’ dwellings, Maranan catches peculiar haphazard framings created by their jerry-rigged interiors – how glassless windows reveal skies like Turner paintings or let in glimpses of some ongoing irrelevant movie of purposeful human activity. The world of the community is in flux: walls rustle or rattle, or (if of cement) will soon be knocked down. The government wants to get on with a large-scale construction project – the “claws” of which (to use the word of the title), menacing giant cranes, are the first things seen in the film – and has slated the area for clearance. Though presented to the Tondo residents as a benefit, relocation appears likely to worsen their lot, since they will be obliged to pay off government loans for their new housing, whereas as squatters in Tondo they live rent-free. At a meeting where they are told about the relocation, a group of mostly female listeners offer a tableau of silent faces to the camera, each expressing a personal variation on the theme of So-how-are-they-going-to-screw-us-this-time.
Mostly female: in the community as Maranan depicts it, there are men, too, but they are passive, unwilling to talk, sometimes hardly mobile. Preoccupied with television and eating, they have surrendered initiative to the women; the adult males with fight in them must have all fled or been taken away. Perhaps one way to read the enigmatic title is to think that the next century will be a century of women. In any case, Maranan makes it clear that for her, the women of Tondo are not victims, but the heroes of the film. One woman, told that her application for relocation will be disapproved if she can’t present a house for demolition when the wrecking crew comes, gets up and exclaims: “Disapproved? I’ll go berserk before the chairman.” Maranan immediately cuts to something else; the anti-sentimental cut makes of powerlessness a political stance, a potential suspended in non-realization.
By the term “form of life,” Giorgio Agamben designates “a life that cannot be separated from its form,… a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.”1 Determined to show the life of her heroes in just this way, as pure form and possibility, Maranan finds in this life an essential innocence. The people of Tondo are engaged only with their own existence, with the few things they own and the materials they can salvage and sell. They hurt no one; they don’t even expect anyone to help them, although they know they need and deserve help.
Amid the turbulence of their lives, a stability is affirmed – in the human gesture as the expression of a will to focus, to hold something. This gesture takes various forms: the calm of a midwife during the endless minutes before a childbirth; the intentness of the pregnant woman as she lights a candle. Because of this gesture we are forced to say that these are not people who are adrift, who belong nowhere, and who are simply subject to being moved around at the will of the powerful.
The unattributed epigraph to In the Claws of a Century Wanting reads (in the English subtitles’ translation of the Tagalog text): “For is it not true that the times have a mind, and all that lives a time is lived by this time, too?” This impersonal consciousness that apprehends, thinks, and expresses itself through the beings that compose it is the subject of the film, and the film is this consciousness before it is anything else – before it is, say, a narrative of events that succeed one another as causes and effects. The continuity of the film is almost entirely the work of the soundtrack, an oneiric tapestry of offscreen speech and noise, whereas the images are fragmentary and self-contained. Unlike the brightly colored city of containers, which Maranan films in extreme long shot to show its abstract nature, the scenes of the Tondo dwellers never connect up into a total space: each image retains the singularity of a moment that was lingered over and that has been preserved.
Maranan is one of the documentary filmmakers (with the Pedro Costa of In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth or the Wang Bing of Three Sisters, for example) who prove that to document is not something instantaneous and impulsive, but an act that gains in intensity over the time that it takes. In the continuity of the fragments she captures, Maranan evokes such a strong and precise sense of human freedom that it’s possible to believe that the heroes of her film are equal to the struggle with catastrophe that continues to be their everyday life.
________________________
“Form-of-Life,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 4.
山形国際ドキュメンタリー映画祭で行われている「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ」。映画祭というライブな環境に身を置きながら、ドキュメンタリーという切り口から、映画について思考し、執筆し、読むことを奨励するプログラムとして好評を博してきました。今回、この批評ワークショップがインドネシアのジョグジャカルタで開催されました。「ヤマガタ映画批評ワークショップ in ジョグジャカルタ」より、Vema Novitasariさんによる批評をご紹介します。英文のままの掲載となること、ご了承ください。
Order in Chaos: Ieva Ozolina’s Solving My Mother
Vema Novitasari (Indonesia)
A man looks worried, stuttering sometimes, claiming his current condition is “because of my mother.” In a room that almost looks like a garbage dump, with trash and coins scattered all around, Solving My Mother introduces us to Raitis, a gifted 32-year-old Latvian mathematics scholar facing a hard time getting through his adulthood. While other men of his age are married already, Raitis has problems getting along with women. Solving My Mother follows Raitis’s struggle to resolve his difficult relationship with his mother, Silvija.
Solving My Mother begins by indicating Raitis’ hoarding disorder, but as the camera reveals more aspects of his life, hoarding proves to be not the only problem Raitis is facing. While other people in the frame seem relaxed, Raitis makes awkward gestures, speaks fast, stutters, has difficulty maintaining eye contact, and barely seems comfortable. The camera approaches Raitis in a calm and patient manner, inviting an intimacy that Raitis never seems ready to accept.
As if intentionally making a contrast, the filmmaker cuts directly from the scene of Raitis’s hoarding in his room to the introduction of Silvija. A single mother of two sons who left her professional career to take care of Raitis and his brother, Maris, Silvija seems more balanced than Raitis. She speaks of him smilingly, and the tone of her scenes is warm. Her brown blouse well-suited to her hair colour, in a room with warm lighting, she is portrayed as a responsible and loving mother. Again and again throughout its first three quarters, the film reveals the contrasting convictions of Raitis and Silvija. Raitis blames Silvija’s rude and pushy behavior and her threat to commit suicide for his inability to get along with others. But it is questionable if Silvija is actually responsible for Raitis’ condition.
Irony is the main feature of Solving My Mother. Raitis desperately files a report to a local police station to “tell my mother to stay away and not shout at me again.” At such a level of desperation, asking the authorities to back him up to solve a domestic problem, Raitis’s own power compared to Silvija’s becomes obvious. Probably the best response to such a request from an adult man would be smirks and awkward laughter.
More irony is apparent in the ensuing Easter holiday scene. While continuing to argue, Silvija insists on painting Easter eggs; she tries to bring the family together while at the same time she shouts stubbornly at them. Whereas earlier the film has followed Raitis and Silvija separately and listened to each of them individually, now the opposing sides are in the same scene, shot in a way that feels similar to a reality show. The camera angle feels like peeking, as it now captures more sensitive and crucial matters than just hoarding and awkward gestures.
For at least 45 minutes, the focus on Raitis-versus-Silvija feels quite frustrating. As the film widens out and steps back a certain distance to add more of a sense of irony, it becomes clear that, despite the title, nothing has been “solved.” The best way to approach Solving My Mother is probably to see it through the concept of order in chaos. Through this basic idea, Henri Poincaré proved that some problems have no analytical solution. No fixed patterns or mathematical reasoning allow us to explain or predict the weather, stock markets, and various kinds of natural changes. The universe is never smooth, but rough, twisted and intertwined. These qualities are the essence of how a thing is.
Raitis’s obsession with order and solving his problems has to be measured against the reality that not every chaos should be answered by order and completion. Such a viewpoint is also found in Hirokazu Koreeda’s films. Frequently, his depiction of reality provides no solutions. In After the Storm, Koreeda introduces us to a single father’s difficulties in supporting his child while he longs for his ex-wife. The storm mentioned in the title brings no definitive resolution to the conflict. The hero’s gambling on lotteries is like Raitis’s meetings with his psychiatrist: in both films, opportunities and struggles fall into nothing.
Solving My Mother somehow provides a liberating experience in reminding us how irony, failure, complexities, and unpredictable results exist as things to be accepted. The film doesnot bother to offer any encouragement or to harmonize the absurdity of life, instead providing a sharp depiction of how humans make decisions and react to situations. The lack of solution makes the film very moving in its absurd and raw approach to capturing reality.
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