Let’s be clear: this is not "The Making of Gie." It features members of the crew and cast, but Amir’s questions here are not about Gie, more about their memories of the Soeharto years, their feelings about the upcoming elections and their hopes for the future of Indonesia. There are plenty of discursive asides (the sequence devoted to the legend of the crawling nurse somehow sticks in the mind), and Amir presents most of it in split-screen images, so there’s always plenty to look at. The result is impressionistic rather than journalistic, but it reveals plenty about Indonesia today. And it confirms that Amir is cinema’s most interesting essayist since the heyday of Chris Marker. - Tony Rayns
-The Year of Living Vicariously (Amir Muhammad, Malaysia / Indonesia) [v/m]Ostensibly less radical than Tokyo Magic Hour, The Year of Living Vicariously is more directly engaged in the immediate demands of the social world. If TMH could be seen as a partial extension of certain tendencies in Chris Marker's work, such as the "Zone" segment of Sans soleil, The Year combines elements of Marker's behind-the-scenes looks at filmmaking, such as A.K., with leftist documents like A Grin Without a Cat. A one hour documentary presented in split-screen, The Year examines, on the one hand, the production process of Riri Riza's film Gie, a dramatization of the life and death of Soe Hok Gie, a radical student activist and anti-corruption crusader in Indonesia. Although we see brief clips from the film, mostly the filmmaking is kept as a kind of background, against which Muhammad interviews various Indonesian citizens associated with the production of Gie. Muhammad's half-and-half method, although it lacks the formal interplay of Tokyo, dramatizes a paradox. While the Indonesian film industry is pooling relatively huge resources to fund a film lionizing a radical dissident (and Gie is Indonesia's official submission for the 2005 Foreign Language Oscar), many of those people who are involved with making the film express ambivalence about the transition between Sukarno's authoritarian leftism and Suharto's right-wing dictatorship. In fact, those who don't shrug politics off altogether tend to concede that Suharto was tough to live under, but got things done. While most interviewees stop short of outright nostalgia for the Suharto regime, it's hard not to think of Fassbinder's conversations with his mother in his segment of Germany in Autumn, in which she expresses longing for a kindly fascist despot. Muhammad tends to stay out of things, his voice audible on the soundtrack only once. But as a Malaysian observer, he clearly conveys a sense of wry detachment, trying to decipher Indonesia's troubled political history as it played out on the ground. Although The Year is too open-form to draw firm conclusions, Muhammad implies that like his split-screen technique, authoritarianism works because when you try to look at your own situation, you are always implicitly forced to look at something else. Muhammad lives vicariously through the Indonesians, working out a sociological and creative problem by considering their lived history. Likewise the Indonesians he interviews appear to experience their own political past as vicarious experience, whether or not they are involved in the making of Gie. Whether Riza's film will serve as a bulwark against amnesia, or amnesia's official manifestation, remains to be seen, but Muhammad is staking out a more direct strategy against forgetting.Michael Sicinski
