DOCUMENTARY AS MONTAGE

Abstract

The documentary work of Malaysian director Amir Muhammad is characterised by the montage-like style of his films. This article will consider Amir's The year of living vicariously through Walter Benjamin's notion of montage found in The arcades project. The year of living vicariously is based on a variety of interviews carried out by Amir in 2004 on the set of the Indonesian film Gie. The interviews are with the cast and crew of the film and the film itself is organised around a split screen. In addition to the continuous simultaneity of the split screen, often the film situates the production of the past (in the filming of Gie) juxtaposed to anxieties of the present. In the interviews and stories presented by Amir a number of ambivalent themes emerge, including the future role and power of the military, the role of corruption in Indonesian politics, the unresolved questions and politics surrounding 30 September Movement (G30S), apathy, or consumption. I will argue that this film provides a limited yet insightful account of the ambivalence of post-authoritarian Indonesia and in doing so it highlights the potential for montage to serve as the foundation for new forms of documentary.

Keywords:

• Amir Muhammad
• Walter Benjamin
• cinema
• montage
• Indonesia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹The Barisan Alternatif was a coalition of opposition parties formed after massive protests in 1998 in defence of the deposed Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.

²Generalising such ambivalence to the electorate as a whole, however, risks misrecognising the effects of malapportionment and electoral constraints in Malaysia's electoral system. This misrecognition would point to a wavering sensibility of the electorate that regularly votes in favour of autocracy, rather than understand the political limitations of electoral choice. For a discussion of the ruling United Malay Nationalist Organisation's electoral dominance, see Wong et al. (2010). Hence, these two initial readings are ‘cursory’ in nature.

³Amir, himself, is aware of how unique this transnational engagement is as he has stated: ‘This is the first time that a long-form documentary is made as collaboration involving a Malaysian director on an Indonesian subject' (2006: 256).

⁴In fact, Baumgärtel (2011: 58) refers to a Southeast Asian ‘democratic cinema revolution’.

⁵Comparative relations are articulations of disparate politics (in this case defined by national contexts) that enable political judgement (Bonura 2013: 35). In this argument, the turn to Indonesian politics (in the myriad ways that something called Indonesian politics is manifest throughout Vicariously) potentially allows for an implicit comparison to contemporary Malaysian political conditions.

⁶Because of the use of the split screen, discrete scenes in the film rarely occur.

⁷Or as Lee (2011: 327) has summarised it, there is a presumption that the political context of ‘one regime change (the fall of Soekarno in 1966) [is] substituted for another (the fall of Suharto in 1998)’.

⁸In his own analysis (Carnegie 2010), however, it is not always clear what role uncertainty and non-linearity play in so far as his conclusions regarding the complex nature of post-authoritarianism often remain similar to much of the existing literature.

Additional information

Author biography

Carlo Bonura is Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London.