Traces of the Other Form of Life

Verena Meyer

doi:10.1163/22134379-bja10031

Abstract

Abstract Candra Aditya’s short film Dewi pulang (2018) shows how Dewi’s life in Jakarta is in tension with the life of her Javanese village, to which she returns when her father dies. Understanding Jakarta and the village as Wittgensteinean ‘forms of life’, I argue that the film portrays the two as simultaneously antagonistic and mutually intertwined, as each form of life is present in the other as a trace. The film uses the Javanese literary convention of sěmu, through which subtle messages are simultaneously revealed and concealed, to suggest that the transcendence of the conflict in the final scene defies reification through language because it seems impossible. By pointing to the reality of the unthinkable, the film proposes an understanding of incompatible forms of life and social locations as connected through complex interplays of presences and absences.

Highlights

‘Father is no longer here’, Dewi says defiantly to her mother in a key moment of Candra Aditya’s short film Dewi pulang (2018)
I use the term ‘form of life’ for the organization or structure of these two cultural locations, a term I take from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, somewhat obliquely, discussed forms of life in terms of ‘[w]hat has to be accepted, the given’, pointing to the rules that define a range of possibilities of what it is in any specific situation to speak or act correctly and meaningfully (Wittgenstein 2009, pi ii:238)
Wittgenstein elaborated that these rules are not universal or a priori but based on communal activity: ‘[I]t is characteristic of our language that the foundations on which it grows consist in steady forms of life, regular activity

Summary

Introduction

‘Father is no longer here’, Dewi says defiantly to her mother in a key moment of Candra Aditya’s short film Dewi pulang (2018) She is spending several days in her family’s house, having abruptly returned from her Jakartan life, job, and boyfriend upon learning about her father’s sudden death. The film presents us with a binary that characterizes the life of many young Indonesians today: they move from their home towns to the cities, adopt urban forms of life and, even as they remain connected to their places of origin, become increasingly estranged from them This simple binary is not accepted in the film, as its narrative brings to light a complex relationship between these different social locations.. I will examine how the film depicts these complex relationships between and across different forms of life: how is the binary first constructed and undercut? What kind of resolution of the tension between them do we see at the end? And how can we, with and beyond the film, conceptualize the presence and absence of each form of life in the other?

Two Forms of Life

The Trace of the Absent