Kamapala Through The Forbidden Scenes – Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema, Berlin, July 2023

Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema
silent green – Kulturquartier & Berlin Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin
20-23 July 2023

Presented new video essay as part of expanded presentation developed with Bunga Siagian and Akbar Yumni for the Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema symposium at silent green in Berlin.

Film Undone. Elements of a Latent Cinema gathers artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists to present and discuss elements of a latent cinema: Film projects left unfinished. Films that remained unseen. Film ideas realized in non-filmic media. Their heterogenous materialities and precarious traces upset notions of what cinema consists of – its materials, institutions, and professions, its socio-political functions, histories, and futures.

https://www.latent-cinema.net/

In 1962 Bachtiar Siagian submitted to the Balinese Historical Council the concept for a film to be called…KARMAPALA

He had begun work on the film with support of the governor of Bali and of President Sukarno. As Krishna Sen describes ‘Karmapala is about the making of a revolutionary.’  It was to be his most ambitious film to date. He was arrested in October 1965 and the film was left unfinished until his death in March 2002. In Hinduism ‘Karma phala’ refers to the fruits of a person’s actions that can influence their next life.In the year of Bachtiar‘s death, Karmapala was reborn as a ‘cinetron’  TV series. While bearing the same name, it is far from his revolutionary ambitions.

But some say the past life of the film can be detected in these six forbidden scenes….

Karmapala Through the Forbidden Scenes is a speculative investigation of an unmade film by Bachtiar Siagian, imagined in dialogue with archival fragments of his lost film Daerah Hilang (1956), which was heavily censored by the Indonesian government for its social critique. Bunga Siagian, Akbar Yumni, and George Clark will stage encounters between the imagined Karmapala and a re-enactment of the forbidden scenes of Daerah Hilang.

Bachtiar Siagian (1923–2002) was a member of the leftist cultural organization Lekra (1950–1965). Active in the network of Third World filmmakers, his cinematic realism was anchored in the social realities of the Third World. Most of his films were lost during the anti-communist purge of the authoritarian Orde Baru (New Order) regime.

Thanks to Philip Widmann and team for invitation.