Presentation by Indonesian filmaker Gotot Prakosa March 2, 2012

Filmmaker Gotot Prakosa will screen a selection of his short works and excerpts of Kantata Takwa, and discuss his work, his experimental aesthetics, and the conditions of working in Indonesia since the 1970s.

Known as Indonesia's first independent, avant garde filmmaker, Prakosa has produced numerous short films and experimental animations, as well as documentaries and feature films. He began his work in the 1970s as a student and then professor at the Jakarta Institute of Arts (IKJ), Indonesia's main film school, where he now serves as chair of the film and television department (FFTV). His films have played in festivals and other venues throughout Indonesia, Asia, Europe, the US and Australia, and are known, among other things, for their innovative combination of an experimental film sensibility with the traditional, conceptual/artistic landscape of Indonesia, and Java in particular.

As a film teacher, Gotot Prakosa recently held a residency at the California Institute of the Arts (November 2010). A longtime painter as well as filmmaker, last year Prakosa also participated in a group show entitled "Contemporary Art of Indonesia" at MOCA Shanghai (7/22-8/19/2010). His film Kantata Takwa (Cantata of Devotion 2008) played at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2009 and played at over 30 festivals throughout the world, winning 8 international awards.

As a trained dalang, or shadow puppet master, Prakosa explores the formal connections between that highly cinematic, screen-based traditional art form and the practice of animation in particular, a matter he takes up in detail in his latest book, A Basic History of Animation in Indonesia (2010). He is also the author of Film and Power (2004), Short Films and Social Engagement (2001), and several other books. Like dalang in Java and Bali, who frequently act as community-level political commentators, on a national level, Prakosa's films often use experimental technique to symbolically critique the government, censorship, or the sociopolitical status quo. Prakosa is also a co-founder of the popular, controversial current affairs journal Detik (Period), which was banned by the Suharto government in 1994 for its openly critical take on state actions and policies.

Prakosa's best known, recently released, film is Kantata Takwa, an incisive, epic combination of rock opera, film-poem, and pointed political protest. Co-directed with Eros Djarot, another major figure in Indonesian cinema, the film is built around a massive, 1990 concert-cum-demonstration by several of Indonesia’s most popular musicians and artists (including Iwan Fals, Sawung Jabo, and the poet WS Rendra with his infamous experimental theater group, "Benkel"). Shot with a massive cast and crew and more than 25 cameras, the film features live performances intercut with poetic sequences based on the "dreams and obsessions" of each member the group as coveyed to Prakosa and Djarot, who adapted and dramatized them with poet WS Rendra. As Katinka VanHeeren writes in an article on Kantata Takwa in the Winter 2010 issue of Asian Cinema, in addition to the dark visuals that depict an awful, totalitarian future under the continuing dictatorship of Suharto, the film provides a fascinating example of the changing discourses of Islam, gender and political radicalism occurring in the transition between 1991 and the present. In particular, she argues the film adds a much-needed historical dimension to heated, contemporary debates over Muslim women wearing veils or headscarves: In the context of Indonesia in the early 1990s, the veiled woman, a central symbolic figure in the film, was understood as a strong sign of political resistance to the dictatorship of Suharto. The then-president's claiming of his own Muslim identity was in stark contrast to the strict controls he instituted over the practice of Islam, aimed at quelling its perceived potential to foster populist rebellion against continual state violence and repression. The long-suppressed potential of Islam, in combination with the massive, national popularity of the members of Kantata Takwa thus becomes the point of departure for the film's experimental political intervention. While the concert featured in the film was allowed to go forward, and was attended by a crowd of over 100,000, due to pressure from the declining Suharto state, the film was shelved and not finished or released until 2008. Although still banned in certain areas, Kantata Takwa has now been publicly screened in Indonesia, and played at numerous international festivals where it has received several awards.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu