Perhaps the most surprising of these days, among others, is: our unexpected results of the excavations of the past often make us face another narrative, which seems even more sinister, about the present world. Or rather, it is about an unrealized ideal of the particular events, of which its absence is now merely a thing to be regretted and often causes anxiety, and then its disclosure is frequently avoided. It is something that has been, intentionally or not, eliminated by the system of power while contemporary constructive narratives are continuing to shape our perceptions over time.

But is it true that such a past paranoia is the only inevitability of the foggy memories that are increasingly being distorted by the power relations complexed by centralized factors?

The three films included into this curatorial, with their respectively different approaches, present a reflection from and about the subject traversing the labyrinth of their vague memories, whose journey haunted by photographic anxieties, a trauma of violence, and fear of discard. They relate to each other in representing how the further impact of modernism—which has been determining human existence, social relations, social behaviors, legal provisions (or rule of law), freedom of space, and capitalist’s discretion, as well as communal neglecting and abandonment—ultimately not only perpetuates a system of confinement but also simultaneously cornering us to the point of crisis.

Dangsan is the retrieval of memories of past anxiety among traces of the lost factories in the Dangsan sub-municipality; the memory that disappears as modern development drowns the city’s past, except for the sacred tale of the gingko tree the savior. The rambling narrative from a psychotic ex-convict freed from capital punishment after 48 years serving a prison sentence for being mistakenly sentenced to death for mass murder, in 48 Years – Silent Dictator, is an excavation of systems overlapping between factual narrative and the delusional one. While in the third film, Sub Terrae, the camera leads us through a maze of cemeteries surrounded by vultures, and the trek ends with a view of a garbage dump.

In Dangsan, a seemingly futile quest for such deleted memories spawned a relief that could neutralize the toxic of anxiety as well as open up new opportunities for critical reflection on the contemporary urban landscape. In 48 Years – Silent Dictator, we can perhaps see Iwao Hakamada’s decision in affirming his delusional world as an option which is not in the sense of escaping the trauma of legal violence, but rather as Hakamada’s subjective resistance to the law itself. This film shows a kind of affirmation of an ‘irrational world’ that philosophically functions as a mirror that suits us in rationalizing the real world—that is a world controlled by a system of power owned either by the state or corporation or generated by people’s indifference. As the Sub Terrae poetically echoes by showing us such a terrifying terror: a dystopian imagery of the foreseeable future, which is being seen from the current death chamber where the people of the past buried, signifying the contemporary global crisis in the present.

Through those films we can understand that the attempts to unravel existing historical conundrums and the optimism in reaching the solution from the labyrinth of undercurrent memories, or at least the affirmation of the anomaly of the peripheral minds—though often have not yet succeeded to explain what is vague in our rational eyes—are the small disruptions that we can trust will crack the bars that imprison the meaning of a truth. Cinema, in this context, plays its most essential role in creating an elastic sense or multiplying the effects of the disruptions; to offer relativity as well as the parallelity of a narrative. And more often than not, cinema poetically terrorizes the conformity of humans.

But indeed, the cinematic disconformity is an alternative narrative for us to rethink. Referring to the cases raised by those three films, this curatorial tries to understand that, in the sense of cinema, a cul-de-sac maybe is a way out. These three films will show a common thread: if the absolute truth and correction of the system will not be achieved yet, “the act of pursuing it” itself is perhaps the true goal. Interpreting Dante’s Inferno, Canto I, we ought to believe that under any crisis conditions, at least, humans should always find the right path in order for staying alive and behaving justly. For in that quest we will be more triggered to see, listen and scrutinize more closely so that we can appreciate the paranoia of the past from a different, more empathic point of view.



Manshur Zikri (Curator) / The 6th Arkipel International Competition 05