Two contrasting recipes for 'visual poetry'

Paul F. Agusta , Contributor/Jakarta, Pfa0109@yahoo.com

On a recent afternoon, with the Jakarta Film Festival (JIFFest) a week away, Ravi Bharwani, 39, the director of Rainmaker, and Faozan Rizal, 31, the director of Yasujiro Journey and Aries, sat down to talk about their films.

What resulted was an exchange of radically different formulas for composing visual poetry from light, color, movement, sound and elements of the human spirit.

First, you take a story. Well, maybe. More like an idea or a vision.

Ravi stared upward, sighed and said, "I have never started with a story I wanted to tell.

"I've always started with a feeling that I've wanted to capture. I never decided where, but then the feeling took me to Java, to Gunung Kidul, its dry arid landscape and it's mood."

Faozan Rizal, or Pao, as he is usually called, leaned forward, smiled and began speaking animatedly. "I was a young kid; my grandfather always told me stories about Japanese soldiers. He also had a best friend who was a Japanese soldier he'd met in prison.

"After Indonesia gained its freedom, the two never met again. His name was Yasujiro. I never knew his family name. Then one day I was looking through American papers when I found something on Zero Sen Toki pilots who didn't want to go to Pearl Harbor and got lost somewhere along the way.

"And so, maybe one landed in Indonesia, so the story comes from there."

Then you add a cup or two of inspiration and a pinch of structure.

Ravi explained: "We started with abstract ideas, with feelings we wanted to convey. Java and Gunung Kidul fit the feeling. We began with visual fragments. We didn't start shooting until the script was finalized."

Pao interjected: "I call my writer my script developer because he didn't want to write a scenario; he just wrote a script outline and we shot from that. The good thing is, my DoP (Director of Photography) is my assistant when I work.

"As a professional, I also work as a DoP, so we have the same mood, the same feeling for visual images."

After that, you need a kitchen, a place or location to start "cooking".

"Finding locations was the worst nightmare; I expected it to be dry. But their (the villagers') perception of dryness and mine were different. Dryness in film, you'd see as similar to African deserts -- brown everywhere.

But there were a lot of green things everywhere, so we had to choose the right angles. We had limited angles and limited locations to play around with," Ravi stated.

Pao said, "We came to the decision, `Lets do it, but not in Jakarta or in a suburb of Jakarta because that's not too good for a location.`

"Then we went to Yogyakarta. We went location hunting with an Aaton 16mm camera, with just two cans of film. And when we arrived we saw the location and I thought, `Oh, we must shoot here, this isn't just hunting.' So I called all my friends in Jakarta and told them to come with another can and we started shooting."

Finally, you need an oven to bake it all together.

Ravi explained the complexity of the production process and costs. "This is when it gets complicated. Some funding I got from friends. For some things, I was given 'friendly' prices for services.

"Some people provided services free of charge. So the numbers are a bit biased. Then it took around four years to complete it all, even though we shot it in just 15 days."

Pao's film, as he explained, was entirely self-funded: "We had no help from anywhere else, because the budget was only Rp 40 million after the DVD release.

"But then I got really confused when Pusan called and asked me to send the print in 35 (mm). I would really have loved to print it in 35 but I couldn't afford that."

Then you serve the finished product to the audience.

Rainmaker, Yasujiro Journey and Aries, a surrealistic retelling of the Adam and Eve story, will have their JIFFest premieres on Saturday, Dec. 4.