“Membangun Jejaring Pengetahuan”

Panel 1 - “The Possible Languages of Cinema”

Moderator Anggraeni Dwi Widhiasih

Panelists Pujita Guha (India, curator and scholar) Afrian Purnama (Indonesia, writer and curator)

At least in almost the last decade, the development of technology to watch films has led to a more individualized cinema culture through video-on-demand platforms. This situation grew more intense when the COVID-19 pandemic occurred and forced the emergence of distancing policies which caused the shutdown of conventional cinema spaces that generally required physical presence in groups in the cinema room. On the other hand, social media platforms that provide various features for producing and watching videos have also encouraged the emergence of diverse locutions in the moving image discourse.

If we look at the relationship between crises and changes in human civilization, we can note how crises always have a significant role in triggering the emergence of new things. Along with the sense of urgency, there is also a space for emergence. Emergencies are no doubt often associated with emergence, as they are etymologically connected. A crisis is thus closely related to the emergence of an aperture for changes.

In relation to cinema, crises and limitations have long been the levers capable of stimulating the emergence of inventions and novelties in motion picture production. As a technology, camera is the embodiment of the birth of innovations that significantly change the way humans perceive the world. It also grows as an apparatus that continues to evolve and so the languages that emerge from and/or as a result of this technology also continue to evolve.

It can be said that both technologically and in the language of the medium itself, crises and limitations often allow cinema to gain the impetus to explore language possibilities. One might presuppose that the contingencies and uncertainties arising in a crisis as the intervals and dark spaces of cinema that allow speculation and imagination to emerge for the possibility of language.

In this panel, Pujita Guha will about cinema as a medium that records the social and ecological phenomena of the region that is able to offer not only a way of seeing from the periphery but also non-human gestures in our ecosystem. Then, Afrian Purnama will elaborate on the experimentation of cinema by relating it to the practice of cinema in Indonesia, as well as its relation to the development of recording media in the context of today’s Indonesian society.

PUJITA GUHA AFRIAN PURNAMA