The Evolution of an Indonesian Family

With the last part of his trilogy about the life of the Sjamsuddin family, Leonard Retel Helmrich concludes nothing less than a filmic monument. Over a period of about 12 years, Helmrich followed the lives of Grandmother Rumidjah, Uncle Bakti and his little niece Tari as their lives were exposed to the never-ending metamorphosis of a society in turmoil. Torn between Jakarta and the countryside, Christianity and Islam, Dictatorship and Democracy, Indonesian traditions and (post-)modern Capitalism, the Sjamsuddin family became the prism through which Helmrich peeks in order to unfold the contradictions and complexities of modern Indonesia.

As diverse as the trilogy’s topics are, as megalomaniacal as its scope, so daring is its visual style. Through his incredibly flexible and mobile camerawork, Helmrich’s images interact with their subjects and the environment up to a level of aeshetization and immediacy that is normally associated with fiction films. The trilogy is a celebration of the camera as total subjectivity, participating in this life as much as human beings do. It is a visual spectacle, a real-life soap opera like nothing ever seen before.

Form and content are totally inseparable here, and they should be treated as a unity. It is a tense unity, often equivocal, often cacophonic - just like life in Indonesia.

Childhood: Stand van de zon

Welcome to the playground of images! Here, the hunt for a rattlesnake turns into a scene of primordial confrontation between man and beast, a train journey offers millions of angles to feel the speed and the danger of falling down, and a simple conversation lets the camera shoot through space, from close-up to long shot to detail and back and forth. Helmrich says about his takes that he always tries to infuse a narration into them: a beginning, middle and end. The shots of the trilogy’s first instalment narrate a celebration of movement, of roaming in space, and of trying out everything even at the cost of a victory of style over substance. If the camera is really the “translator of all movement” (as French thinker Deleuze once wrote), then Helmrich speaks all languages: he can extract movement from virtually anything, from human bodies and animals, from trains, cars, rickshaws and motorcycles, from water, steam and smoke. Hop onto the train of life…

… and meet the family. The first movie is about getting to know each other. Grandmother Rumidjah was still raised in the countryside, and she often seems lost in the beehive of people that is Jakarta. Her son Bakti is a good-for-nothing, betting on animal fights, getting drunk all the time. And little Tari, who lost her real parents and now lives with these two as a patchwork-family: she will be the character whose evolution most literally displays the changing of Indonesia. The spirits of the ancestors still haunt her: once she wakes up from a bad dream and grandmother Rumidjah assures her that this was her great-auntie who came to pay a visit.

These are troublesome times: Rioting in the streets, the poverty-stricken population demands change and the right of participation. During the time of shooting, dictator Suharto steps down, and society does not yet know where to turn. Dirty times, with people fighting for small sacks of rice, beggars tumbling through in the middle of the highway looking for some charity, and a camera that apparently never gets cleaned. A dirty lens looking onto a shaken-up world.

Primary School: Stand van de maan

The times of childlike, hyperactive experimentation are over. Though still jumping around like a sack of fleas, the images cool down, and a will to actively dramatize emerges. The narration of the shots and of the scenes is now under stricter control. Moments of fictionalisation appear, with techniques such as the superimposition of scenes from a house on fire onto the face of sleeping Bakti. The boundaries between dream and reality become permeable, as do those between documentary and fiction.

The second part is by far the most erratic of the three. The camerawork is intuitive, the editing associative, and it feels like Helmrich does not yet fully comprehend where his style will lead him. He constructs relations through editing that sometimes makes sense, sometimes seems arbitrary. It’s a trying-out of different combinations, with no unifying idea.

Everything gets relative in the lives of the Sjamsuddins. One by one all family members, once Christian, turn towards Islam. Bakti follows his older brother and converts to marry a Muslim woman. Grandmother Rumidjah feels isolated in the bustling Islamic metropolis and decides to return to the countryside. And little Tari, now a schoolgirl, is still too young to understand what is going on, but nevertheless she feels the change. When she finally realizes that their trip to the country will be a farewell form her beloved granny, she bursts into tears. It is the pain of letting go that which you got used to, the old life.

Indonesia is in transition. Bakti walks over a high bridge and could fall down any second. The society takes its first steps into modern democracy, and the outcome is yet unclear. Will the people manage to construct the biggest Islamic democracy of the world?

Adolescence: Stand van de sterren

The last part is where everything comes together. Without exaggeration: this movie is a masterpiece, the document of a director mastering a form. Helmrich draws conclusions and streamlines the methods: the playfulness of part 1 meets the controlling dramatization of part 2. The celebration of mobility does not feel like showing off anymore, but reflects what is going on in Indonesia: the hyperworld of Capitalism came and with it the acceleration of a society. The insecurity of part 2 gave way to a speed of movement that knows only one direction. As if one would like to guard oneself from peril by just keeping on running.

Tari has become the most self-indulgent version of a teenager one could imagine. It’s all about mobile phones, karaoke with the girls, and watching the boys doing tricks on their motorcycles. But all hopes rest on her: she must go to University, master the situation and find a way out of the misery, for her entire family and also for Indonesia. Uncle Bakti (now neighbourhood manager but still addicted to gambling) cannot handle her anymore, so Grandmother has to come back from the countryside. But she too is unable to keep track with the speed of change, and cannot connect to her beloved grandchild. Nobody wants to go to church with her, where she sits and sings with the aging Christians.

Indonesia now bears all the signs of a Western country, with shopping malls, internet cafés and beauty ads lining the streets. In the countryside, the population is aging. The Islamists demand the Sharia. Everything is happening at the same time, everything seems connected, and every connection is valuable. Indonesia is a space of unthinkable narrative richness, of motives flowing about waiting to be picked.

Here, Helmrich’s style can finally flourish, embracing the intensities and contradictions of this life, celebrating every single shot and every potential montage combination. Stand van de sterren is a movie which takes parts out of reality, and does so deliberately to tell stories. It is neither documentary nor fiction, because the two do not contradict each other. Instead, they belong to each other. They have to be fused into one, writing the storybook of some out of all the potential stories of life. Good luck, Indonesia!

By Nino Klingler