Faozan soothes with 'Zen' filmmaking

Faozan soothes with 'Zen' filmmaking

Zhuang Wubin, Contributor, Singapore

A one-line narration opened Aries -- A Poem for Katia, something like a mission statement: "I came from your existence."

The film's director, 32-year-old Faozan Rizal, defines his first full-length feature film as "a meditation of a relationship". There is no script, no preconceived structure.

Filming took place over four days in 2004, when he sent his crew and cast on a road trip to scout a location for the experimental film.

In Cirebon, West Java, when they pulled up at a gas station to use the toilet, the stark scenery beyond -- of windmills scattered across a wide, open plain -- caught their attention.

Japanese actor Nobuyuki Suzuki, 42, who plays the title character Aries, told Faozan he could see himself motionless in a scene set against the motion of the wind, seen indirectly from the spinning windmills. Faozan then turned to actress Ri Kaode and asked if the scenery inspired any feelings in her, to which she replied that she felt guilty. So, Faozan added her to the scenario and asked her to transfer her emotions into the shoot.

This was how Faozan "constructed" one of the scenes for Aries, which premiered internationally on April 17 during the 18th Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF). The rest of the 70- minute film was shot in much the same spirit in Wanagama Forest, 30 minutes from Yogyakarta.

Aries was shot entirely on expired 35mm film stock bought cheap, which was desaturated in a bleaching bypass process to remove the reddish tint that tends to discolor expired film.

"We would walk in the forest and see what nature would bring us, and we would develop the 'action' from the emotions," Faozan explained to a premiere audience of 20. "The `story' was then carved out in the editing suite."

He added, apparently amused: "I'm happy to show Aries in Singapore. When I showed it during the Jakarta International Film Festival, 50 percent of the audience left the theater. But I can understand. This kind of film has its specific audience."

"Aries is not necessarily an Adam-and-Eve story. We only labeled it this way because that's how some of our viewers feel (about it)," Faozan continued. "At the end of the day, what is important is not the message of the film, but rather, how you felt before, during and after the screening."

The opening scene is a visual metaphor of polarity -- a pair of hands, one holding rock salt, the other holding blackened beans -- sets the tension and intimacy of the "relationship" that is meditated upon and explored throughout Aries.

While Faozan and Suzuki may have found the backdrop to the film in Wanagama, the two were also trying to recreate a landscape they recalled from the outskirts of Tokyo in 2000. At the time, Faozan and Suzuki were in the Japanese capital studying Zen meditation.

The esthetic aspect of Zen philosophy as visually manifested in "strong paintings" has always fascinated Faozan, who had been a Javanese dancer for eight years before he turned to painting.

But then, in 1993, Faozan met Gotot Prakosa, a veteran experimental filmmaker, who encouraged him to enroll in Gotot's department at the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ). Unknowingly, Faozan had signed up for his initiation to experimental animation.

The curriculum included dismantling a camera and fiddling with the internal mechanisms. Faozan tampered with the pressure system that controls the film's stability when the camera is rolling. As a result, his stock flapped wildly. With the modified camera, he made a short film, Light Poem, which was shown at last year's SIFF.

"It suddenly occurred to me that I was painting with light in a real and 'reel' way," the maverick director recalled during the interview in Singapore, the day after an unofficial retrospective of his work. Yasujiro Journey, along with Of Lilies How They Grow and three other shorts, were featured in the retrospective.

In 1998, Faozan received a scholarship to the French National Film School (FEMIS), the leading European institute for experimental film. He met a well-respected Japanese painter in France who explained the essence of Zen to him: "If you want to paint spring, you don't have to paint the plums or the willows. Just paint spring."

Returning to Jakarta in December 1998, Faozan first met Suzuki at a 1999 screening of his comedy-film at the IKJ. They clicked immediately on the subject of Zen, and Suzuki explained the concept of nothingness and the need to empty oneself in order to achieve enlightenment.

Suzuki was a theater student at IKJ, having followed his late brother, a painter of Indonesian landscapes, to "continue his work in Indonesia".

In Tokyo, Suzuki took Rizal to see a Butoh master, Kazuo Ono. Butoh is an avant-garde Japanese art form that fuses theater, dance and improvisation.

"We saw an old man talking to an audience that included Westerners via a translator," Rizal remembered. Here was a bunch of dancers and Ono was telling them to move in a way that the audience couldn't see them move, but could feel them move."

The statement struck him deeply and Rizal has more or less been trying to translate the idea into his films since.

Afterward, Suzuki took Faozan to a monastery by the railway station. The hour-long meditating sessions became easier as a train would pass every 15 minutes, meaning that Suzuki and Rizal could chat and pace themselves. Even then, the experience was very enlightening.

"After a while, everything became very slow," Faozan said. "We could almost see the slow movement of the dew and fog around the monastery." When Rizal showed his films at the very same monastery, they were received well.

In comparison with his earlier Yasujiro Journey, a 50-minute short film starring Suzuki as a Japanese soldier during WWII, the audience at the monastery felt "the quality of meditation in Aries" was better because "it was more open".

Shot on 16mm film in Parang Kusumo, Central Java, Yasujiro Journey toys with the possibility of a Japanese soldier being stranded on Java.

"To make a statement about the war, I designed a scene in which the soldier sang the Japanese anthem at sunset instead of sunrise," said Faozan. "The scene raised a bit of controversy when the film was shown publicly in Japan, but I elaborated my stand that any form of colonialism -- be it Dutch or Japanese -- can only bring about Indonesia's sunset."

On another occasion, when Faozan showed Yasujiro in Bogor, a doctor who works with drug users requested 500 DVDs of the film, because it would "help in the healing process".

"There you have it, the main audience of my films are people from mountain monasteries and drug users," Rizal laughed.

"Every now and then, we notice someone as prolific and exciting as Faozan Rizal. He is very much the Renaissance man of Indonesian cinema, as he teaches film at the IKJ and works as a cinematographer, director, screenwriter or an actor in different movies," said SIFF programmer Philip Cheah. Philip felt that although the turnout at the premiere was not ideal, those who have watched Rizal's work would be "crazy about it".