God Shiva
film, 11 min, 1955
featuring Raden Mas Jodjana directed by Bert Haanstra
A god sits atop a rock, suspended between sea and sky. Alert and upright, he listens to the prayers of the people below him who are crying for salvation. He stands, stretches, folds back into sitting. His chest is bare and he wears a sarong around his waist, with a large shiny belt. The film is in black and white, but the bracelets, necklaces, and anklets that adorn his limbs are presumably gold. He wears a leather-winged headpiece and a crescent-moon crown. We can clearly see him listen, and watch, and pluck the poison from the world: he brings it to his mouth with an expression of disgust that, almost imperceptibly, turns into a grin. His movements are mimetic, stylized, and lithely shifting between the stillness and exacting gestureof Javanese dance.
The film God Shiva (1955) continues for five short scenes, each introduced per voiceover in Dutch: we see Lord Shiva as the saviour of mankind, as the ultimate destructor, Shiva as creative fire, flowing water, creator of the heavenly bodies. Aside from some initial footage of clouds, air, and water, we mainly see the dancer Raden Mas Jodjana alone onstage in a kind of infinity cove, where the clouds of the background appear to go on forever. Jodjana is not always as statuesque as in the firstscene—close-ups reveal his feet pattering back and forth, his hands rippling to the rhythms of the drums and the gong. To create the planets in the final scene, Lord Shiva punches the air and leaps about the stage. His facial expressions melt into one another in surprising, and sometimes alarming, ways. The film ends shortly after Jodjana disappears, with a smile and a bow, hands at his chest in a sembah gesture.
Raden Mas Jodjana was 63 years old when he starred in the experimental short film God Shiva. A prodigious dancer, he had come to his greatest renown in the 1920s and 30s, touring Europeas a solo performer. His signature dance improvisations were infused with the movement styles he had grown up with in Yogyakarta, on Java, son of an aristocratic couple with relations in the palace. In Javanese costume, he would perform the king Kelono Sewandono, Tjantrik, or Vishnu for first Dutch, then European audiences (Cohen 2014, p. 245). However, Jodjana’s dances were his own creations, making use of a movement vocabulary from the archipelago but searching for an individual mode of expression that was very familiar to Europe’s expressionist art movements of the interbellum years. To put it in his ownwords:
‘Ik vind voor mij, dat de modern-Javaanse danskunstenaar niet mag aarzelen om, indien hij een persoonlijk inzicht heeft, dit ook in zijn kunst naar voren te brengen, ook al zou dit in strijd zijn met de conventionele regelen van zijn land. Hij moet alleen dan de traditionele bewegingen en gebaren toepassen indien hij deze werkelijk voelt – als een noodzakelijke uiting van het ritme dat zijn diepste innerlijk trilt – anders is zo’n gebaar dood en dus overbodig.’ (Raden Mas Jodjana, quoted in Biënko n.d.)
His dances were thus inspired by Javanese dance, but he made dances of his own, drawn from his deep inner essence.1 This made Raden Mas Jodjana something of an anomaly, straddling the worlds of modern dance and classical Javanese dance uncomfortably. Traditionalists rejected him as his dance did not represent classical Javanese repertory (Cohen 2010, 106-108). Indonesian nationalists found him problematic, as his close cooperation with Europeans and his focus on Javanese dance contraindicated their efforts to create a unifying Indonesian culture (ibid.). At the same time, his dedication to Javanese costumes, subjects, and the movement vocabulary itself bears an undeniable stamp of otherness for a Eurocentric viewer… or is it just me?
I am struck by the discrepancy between the ostensible Lord Shiva, Creator of the Universe, and the elegant, ageing and undeniably mortal Jodjana, dancing alone in God Shiva. Raden Mas Jodjana was contested in his heyday. Was he an innovator, taking the classical repertory of Java into a modernist discourse? Was he an opportunist, a flunky to Europe’s colonizing gaze? Was it ever possible to see the costume, the ukel movements of the hands, the undeniably Hindu god, and experience the dance as being from the Netherlands? Jodjana moved to Europe at 21 years old and never returned to Indonesia. His entire professional career was on the Continent.
The film God Shiva feels both old-timey and timeless. This has film-historical reasons: 1955 was at a point when films were beginning to be produced in color, but this one is black-and-white. Some of the editing choices could easily have been from the 1930s: the superimposition of Jodjana’s flame hands into the frame, his sudden appearance on a “rock” in the sea. With its simple studio set-up and reduced cameras, the performer himself, despite the Javanese-ness of his movements and costumes, is not tied to a specific place. Clouds are his backdrop and Jodjana is hovering, neither here nor there. Perhaps the floating, anachronistic feeling of the film reflects the historical moment in which it was made.
By 1955, the Republic of Indonesia had declared its independence from the Netherlands and fought a bitter war to keep it. The Dutch East Indies were gone, and Dutch-Indonesian relations were disintegrating, but Indonesia had not yet abrogated the Hague Agreement and thrown the Dutch out of Western Papua. All remaining mixed-race people living in Indonesia had not yet been declared “dangerous to the state”, forcing them to leave the country. This final exodus of 50,000 Eurasian “Indo-Nederlanders” to the Netherlands created much of what Dutch society would come to know as indisch: the three generations, the Zwijgen, the Tong Tong Fair and the Late Lien Show. Raden Mas Jodjana, in contrast, was in 1955 a symbol of a path not taken in Dutch-Indonesian relations. As a young man, he had held a more moderate stance than the anticolonial and ultimately victorious views of many of his countrymen. He had taken the view that the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies were to continue to associate intimately, but on equal footing, learning from each other the best their cultures had to offer. It would be nice to think that, today, Indonesia and the Netherlands have acquired something of this relationship, rather than the justifiable antagonism that dominated in the 1950s.
However, all this was not known in 1955. In 1955, the future was very opaque. In 1955 a man danced as he had danced his whole life. Gestures reduced to their ideal version; music as perfect punctuation to elbows, ankles, wrists; pure illustration with a light touch, a deftness that defies landing. It should be noted that Jodjana had been deeply influenced by the teachings of Sufism: he saw his work as extending beyond art into the realm of the spiritual, the essential. Perhaps with this view he also transcended political questions, questions of authenticity of which there can be no right answer. He looks into the camera and sees us, coolly, kindly, and wholly aware of both our difference and our equality, across time and space.
A man sits atop a rock, suspended between sea and sky, waiting to see what his legacy will be.
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