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Review of Hughes’ Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia
date: 12/17/2009
"One I loved was Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia. Indonesia Calling is also the title of a 1946 film by Joris Ivens, the peripatetic Dutch filmmaker who as a fierce socialist made activist films in social struggles around the world." Patrica Aufderheide
Review of Hughes’ Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia
“Out of the hundreds of films available at IDFA, I saw a handful, and was glad I did. I hope to find them later in theaters, on public TV’s Independent Lens or P.O.V., on Netflix or online, and maybe I will.
One I loved was Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia. Indonesia Calling is also the title of a 1946 film by Joris Ivens, the peripatetic Dutch filmmaker who as a fierce socialist made activist films in social struggles around the world. Ivens had been sent to Australia by the Dutch government to take part in the Dutch East Indies propaganda service, which like the rest of the Dutch colonial apparatus was lodged in Australia during the Japanese occupation of what would become Indonesia. He was supposed to document, with Allied victory, the Dutch installation of a progressive regime transitioning to Indonesian independence. The Dutch were already backpedaling on their commitment, though, and Ivens’ colleagues, with their Australian conservative allies, discredited this left-wing filmmaker. When Indonesian and Indian dockworkers discovered that they were loading munitions to arm a repressive returning Dutch regime that would suppress independence, they went on strike. Ivens, kept from resources and access by his conservative compatriots, quit his job and made a film about the strike.
Australian filmmaker John Hughes tells the improbable story of how Ivens made this 17-minute film, which became part of the Indonesian independence movement. (By the time a U.S.-backed coup brought in the vastly corrupt regime of Suharto, Ivens was off to other liberation struggles.) To do it, he ends up providing a mini-biography of Joris Ivens, a legend in his own country and to doc folk but unknown to many many more; a sketch of the geopolitics and independence history of the region; and a close-up study of how a film is made. All the stories are immensely worth knowing.
Ivens is a polarizing figure, because of his politics (sometimes Communist in the Russian style, sometimes Maoist in a Chinese mode). Hughes returns Ivens’ complexity to him, without excusing or justifying any of his decisions. He shows how Ivens made the film, which was re-enactment—in this case, significantly after the fact. He notes the differences between how things happened and how Ivens restaged them. In one case, Ivens—with a skeleton cast, since most of the dockworkers had by that time left—re-enacts how a small flotilla of Indian dockworkers surrounded a departing strike-breaking ship and convinced them, shouting urgently in a variety of Indian languages, to stop working; the ship turned around. In the reenactment, it’s one boat, with a couple of non-Indians speaking English. It’s simpler than the reality, easier to understand, and incidentally more in accord with our notion of individual heroics, as well as being a pragmatic choice. It’s just not faithful to the way things happened.
And then Hughes locates the drama that Ivens caught within the wider one. He reveals the internal, red-baiting politics (aided by J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI was spying on Ivens while he was in the U.S.), which only got worse and affected the lives of everyone who worked with Ivens. He showcases the unsuspected courage of the Australian government in backing the Indonesian independence struggle against the interests of Australia’s traditional allies, the English, Americans and Dutch. He shows how the film was used, and why people in Indonesia thought it was so important. At the end, you also know that the filmmaker himself is an artist committed to making media that matters, and sophisticated in weighing the consequences of storytelling choices.
When I asked him why he made the film he said, “I really made it for a new generation of Australian filmmakers. I wanted them to see what was at stake for Ivens when he made this film, and what kind of difference it made. And I wanted them to see that government agencies can subvert as well as support filmmaking.” Hughes does indeed restore memory, but it’s not just for Australian filmmakers. This is also a story with global links. It recalls the intensely political moment of transition from colonial status to independence, in a Cold War context. It is a story about institutional politics, familiar to anyone who’s ever been institutionalized. And it’s a story about storytelling that matters. I hope Indonesia Calling gets distribution everywhere documentary history is told. Hughes tells me he’ll be self-distributing an NTSC version shortly.”
Patrica Aufderheide
Center director Patricia Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the author of, among others, Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), The Daily Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (Guilford Press, 1999). She has been a Fulbright and John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival among others. She has received numerous journalism and scholarly awards, including career achievement awards in 2006 from the International Documentary Association and in 2008 from the International Digital Media and Arts Association.
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