The Last Photographs Before The Apocalyptic Tinge In The Horizon

juga mempreteli ideologinya sendiri sambil makin memendekkan jarak realitas kehidupan umat manusia dengan representasinya. Aksi yang sungguh dinamis sekali. Setelah meredupnya keberadaan teknologi seluloid, video mengambil tempatnya dengan pasti dan merangsek, menguasai dunia produksi gambar. Hal ini bisa dilihat dari tilikan film-film yang hadir di ARKIPEL tahun lalu. Saat alat produksi rekam sudah tidak secara eksklusif dipegang oleh kelompok tertentu, video, dan kemudian internet, menjadi alat yang mampu bicara secara massal dan horizontal, di mana semua ukuran persisi harus menyesuaikan dirinya dengan ketidakteraturan: mengungkap politik kebertahanan para penghuni tepi-tepi, para Bromocorah.

Pada ARKIPEL tahun lalu, walaupun masih ada usaha para sutradara mempertahankan keteraturan kerja teknologi perekam dengan mempersembahkan hasil hitungan yang pasti dalam bingkai-bingkai filmnya, namun banyak sekali ditemui gambaran yang lebih jauh daripada sekedar persoalan hasil kerja teknologis dari perangkat yang terukur itu sendiri. Karena politik ketahanan negara-negara non-Barat, penggunaan kamera menjadi bergeser ke fungsi sebaliknya, yaitu mengabaikan keteraturan. Struktur sistemik hanya tersisa di dalam perangkat kamera dan layar, karena benda-benda tersebut memang lahir dari Rahim teknologisme. Penghancuran ide penyerupaan realita makin dilakukan oleh para pemegang kendali sirkulasi citra-citra terhadap aksi mengimitasi kenyataan, hingga ke limitnya.

Lalu, Apa yang Dilakukan Para Pembuat Film Sebelum Dunia Kembali Temaram?

Dari kumpulan film-film yang terseleksi tahun ini, kita dapat melihat bagaimana sebuah usaha reproduksi kenyataan sudah mengambil peran untuk menyelidiki unit-unit pembentuk peradaban. Film telah menjadi metode bagi para pembuatnya untuk memberikan bukti kepada publik, bahwa sistem yang hingga kini bekerja tidak pernah lepas dari kejahatan penguasa di masa lalu dan dilanjutkan di masa kini.

Film-film yang terseleksi tahun ini menyajikan penggambaran ide-ide penelusuran kejahatan dunia yang bersifat global. Jika ilmu apapun tak bisa digunakan secara menyeluruh dalam menyidik kejahatan, sepertinya film, dengan semua permainannya, mengambil alih sebuah keagesian dengan lebih leluasa dalam mengungkap gelapnya kejahatan (di masa lalu). Jika kita mengasumsikan pandemi yang sedang terjadi ini adalah sebuah malapetaka, maka penyebabnya sungguh tak mudah diurai karena masa lalu sudah menjadi gelap. Sebagaimana hasrat manusia meninggalkan jejak ingatan dengan gambar-gambar, maka film berhasrat untuk menelisik apa yang ada di dalam gelap. Sebelum peradaban bertemu zona temaramnya, sinema seperti memiliki keharusan untuk melakukan kerja forensik terhadap peradaban.

Peradaban diibaratkan sebagai sebuah corpus delicti (tubuh kejahatan), sekaligus sebagai sebuah tempat kejadian perkaranya. Para pembuat film ini mengkonstruksi tanda-tanda sebagai barang bukti yang mengarahkan persepsi kita untuk melihat bahwa telah terjadi suatu tindak kejahatan di sana. Konstruksi tersebut juga menunjukkan modus operandi yang telah melatarbelakangi kejahatan. Dengan caranya sendiri film bisa menghubungkan persepsi kita untuk mengidentifikasi pelaku, korban, dan saksi-saksi, dari kejahatan peradaban.

Rupanya, runutan peristiwa dalam sejarah peradaban sekarang ini mengantar kita sampai di situasi yang kita alami sekarang. Peradaban ini pulalah yang memaksa kita untuk duduk diam di rumah sambil melempar seluruh diri kita ke dunia yang saling terhubung dalam jaringan, sebagai komunitas data biner yang siap terkomputasi untuk menjadi diri kita yang artifisial.

Setelah peradaban menemui kehancurannya yang berulang, mungkin esok kita harus kembali mengais peradaban yang baru dengan menggunakan kumpulan gambar yang sempat direkam sebelum peradaban kembali temaram.

Lenteng Agung, 26 Oktober 2020

Otty Widasari

Twilight Zone

I wonder what the directors did before submitting their films to ARKIPEL 2020’s selection desk. Looking back, they were sending their last portrayal before everyone in the world had to retreat to their own homes and shut their doors. In the future, we will face a completely different social reality.

This year’s ARKIPEL selection team called for submissions on February 5, 2020. These directors could submit their films until March 31, 2020. During those times, most countries in the world had enforced the lockdown policy on its citizens. But none of the films brought up the coronavirus issue, which had started to plague the world at the time. Also, none of them focused on the production mode that depicts quarantine. Most likely, these directors sent the films they made before the pandemic.

Therefore, we had selected thirty films that depict humans’ last musings before the civilization went into twilight.

Today, we are witnessing the complexity of global civilization which has progressed beyond humans’ capacity. It turns out that globalization has also spread the pandemic evenly. The situation has shaken down many established ideologies, systems, and concepts. The tipped scales of global discourse have been balanced. We have heard that nowadays, not only the citizens of developing countries are being suspected and sub dominated when entering the territory of developed countries. Now, citizens of the countries that have always felt superior experience the same bullying, suspicion, and disturbance anywhere they are.

Historically, cinema experiments with its language and medium to break away from the domination of the centralized discourse. The most essential thing from such experimentation is to continuously reproduce reality until it gets further away from the truth. Through these ways, cinema can become a critical discourse against the established electoral risk. It also functions as an apparatus to construct a grand illusion of authority, then regressed when media technology thrives unstoppably, progressing along with the civilization. More sophisticated recording technologies were massively produced to facilitate everyday life and become an apparatus of power. The circulation and mechanism of these recording technologies have produced information that constructs culture and eventually fuses the central ideology in the world. Ugeng T. Moetidjo (2016) wrote in the catalogue of ARKIPEL social/kapital that, “Motives, forms, and impacts of our media behaviour do not concretely put us at our original position as sometimes we tend to admit, but put us through a big intermediary that fixes our each portion of media behaviour.”

We are inseparable from the waves of social and kapital fusing into the lives of the global community. Our contemporary behaviours are under control that pushes us into uniformity. This is our actual form of imprisonment in the simulation room’s penal colony, resembling a giant hot air balloon. We live inside it as wanderers, thinking that this is our nature. We belong on the verge of consciousness of the uniformity in the horizontal corridor filled with the reciprocal relations between reality and its reproduction as experience - replication - information - construction - absoluteness. However, cinema, being the cultural agent of the world civilization, attempts to criticize this life, which has become so far from our nature.

Amidst this imprisonment—in fact, when triggered by this imprisonment, cinema has the opportunity to become another agent, provoking the every day by deviating from the corridor. The opportunity to be involved in the democratization of technology revealed human nature as homoludens. Through playing, reproduction of reality leaps into a direction where the concepts of avant-gardism are being reversed. Somehow, we have arrived at a stage where

our spatial and temporal situation is always mapped quickly and mediated. Our daily life becomes essential. Conventional directors put much effort in arranging non-everyday images to convey their message, most of the time just to be met with little to no audience and appreciation. While nowadays, we can see people getting thousands of responses on their social media page just by pouting their lips in various expressions for 60 seconds. What kind of situation is this? The kind which draws the bromocorah to come out, appear in the flesh, and give their opinion.

Since their days of hunting and gathering, living in tribes, then living under a centralized power, harnessing their power to control the nature and even each other; this civilization has always been built by humans, leaving their artefacts in the form of images. These artefacts have always been created by humankind’s instinct to forage food. They keep creating images, even when their instinct evolves into its most complex form. These images were born out of human’s desire for their love of memories.

Throughout the history of human civilization, the desire to create images was always halted by many things that destroy civilizations. One of them is the plague. Some Christian literature mentions “the four horsemen of the apocalypse” as the foreshadows of the destruction brought down by the antichrists, an analogy for God’s punishment for humankind’s disloyalty towards Him. The four horsemen stood for the four disasters, which were the external factors of the collapse of civilization: war, famine, plague, and death.

Today, everyone stays at their homes for months due to the pandemic, as if the third horseman is visiting. The most terrible thing from this plague, which has not happened before in history, is its global spread. Once again, the civilization goes into twilight.

Yes, it goes back into twilight. Right in the moment where the attempts to imitate reality have arrived at the furthest shifting point, where the mechanism of technology disassembles its own ideology while shortening the distance between human’s reality and its representation. What a dynamic feat! While celluloid technology fades away, the video takes its place with a thrust of certainty, dominating the production of images easily. We can take a glance at the films presented in ARKIPEL last year. When the recording devices no longer belong exclusively to a particular group, the video—and then the internet—become the tools that speak massively and horizontally, where every precise measurement must adjust to disorderliness: revealing the politics of tenacity maintained by the peripheral beings, the Bromocorah.

In ARKIPEL last year, some directors still sustained the order of the recording technology by serving precise measurement in the frame. Yet, we also saw many images that were travelling far beyond the discussion regarding their state as a