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Capturing The Moment
With ‘Position Among the Stars’, documentarian Leonard Retel Helmrich has filmed the final chapter in his epic and poetic trilogy of films following an Indonesian family over 12 years.
"I was not even thinking of focusing on people, but what I was doing was just by intuition shooting everything that drew my interest." This is how Leonard Retel Helmrich describes the start of his journey documenting contemporary Indonesia. "Actually, I wanted to focus on the bigger picture... But then I thought that what was happening in that family was so representative of what was happening in the whole country."
As it turned out, that intuition led the Dutch director to spend 12 years following the lives and times of the Sjamsarddins, an extended family from the slums of Jakarta, during a time of political and social upheaval and economic crisis. The result is a dazzling, groundbreaking and wonderfully human documentary trilogy comprising The Eye of the Day (2001), Shape of the Moon (2005) - winner of a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance - and this year's Position Among the Stars, which premiered in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival in June; it screened again last month at the Brisbane International Film Festival and at OzDox in Sydney with Helmrich in attendance as a guest. Though it's the final chapter in the three-part saga, Position also stands as a compellingly watchable film on its own.
The word ‘documentary' isn't enough to communicate the intrigue, insight and devastating beauty of Helmrich's films, which are characterised by an unorthodox blend of "vérité" and whimsical formalism. The story is frequently interrupted by his camera's joyous, swooping explorations of the background and periphery - gorgeously composed shots of flora and fauna, architecture and inanimate objects forming a sublime, meditative vision of the land that encircles the human subjects. Occasionally it's obvious certain scenes are partially staged - such as the memorable sequence in Position in which Helmrich captures a little boy running through the streets from a number of angles - challenging the definition of what a documentary is.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this sideways approach, Helmrich's portrait of inner-city life in Jakarta (with occasional excursions to rural villages) is so vivid you can practically smell and taste it. Importantly, Helmrich never loses sight of the people in his stories. The vérité scenes of interaction between the Sjamsuddin family - centred on their cramped, dingy but cosy ground-floor flat in Jakarta - are remarkably candid and intimate, and filled with natural drama and comedy.
Though he relies on his intuition to determine what he shoots, Helmrich has a specific methodology, which he calls ‘single-shot cinema.' Based on the idea of uniting the various components of a scene into one fluid shot (generally filmed with a portable digital camera mounted on a lightweight, homemade steadicam), it's a discipline that ensures his visual musings and epiphanies are anchored to the craft of storytelling.
I met Helmrich earlier this year in Abu Dhabi, where he recently took a position teaching film at the local expansion branch of New York University. The soft-spoken, unassuming director sat down for an interview to discuss his techniques and his experiences filming the Sjamsuddins - whom he counts as friends - off and on for 12 years.
"My background is actually fiction, but what I didn't like in fiction is that everything is fictionalised. Which is a crazy thing," he laughs. His lighthearted, rambling manner conceals an incisive cinematic mind. "But why is it fictionalised? Because the camera was originally fixed - you couldn't carry it around, so they invented a way of shooting where you have certain camera angles fixed in a vocabulary or film language... I wanted to be able to move around. Now we are free, now the camera is light, and you can move around freely, so why should you use the language developed for fiction? That's why I created single-shot cinema - capturing the moment in one shot."
After developing these techniques on a number of documentaries, Helmrich settled on Indonesia as a subject quite naturally. Half Indonesian himself, he was raised in a small town in the Netherlands. After his mother died in 1998, he travelled to the village in Java where she was born to meet her family. There he rediscovered an affinity with the language and culture - a factor which surely informs the loving detail of his work.
Inspired by the place and the people, he started filming everything he saw. It was just at this time that a popular uprising forced Indonesian dictator Suharto from power, an event that resonated far beyond the region, in part because Indonesia has the world's fourth-largest population.
Helmrich kept filming. "I just went to everything that was interesting. There were so many things in politics happening, so I was following it. But also when I was just sitting there waiting for a moment, I saw insects crawling on the ground, I'd see cats interacting with each other, so I just started filming them. DV tape was so cheap, so I thought - why not shoot it?" He ended up with an insane 300 hours of footage, from which he somehow mined the brilliant 90 minutes that make up The Eye of the Day.
While editing that film, he noticed that the ‘thin red line' of narrative interest was the story of Rumidjah Sjamsuddin, an elderly woman he met and befriended in his mother's village, along with her two sons, Bakti and Dwi, and their families. So they became his de facto subjects in the editing room; when the film was widely acclaimed and he won a grant to make another film, having already earned their trust he returned to film them again. Thus a documentary epic was born.
"It took time to build that trust for them," he says. "But on the other hand, I've also noticed, it's all up to yourself." Helmrich credits his unobtrusive filmmaking technique with allowing for the family's remarkable openness. "It enables you to be very much part of the moment, what you're filming, and also to be invisible... It's a kind of mindset also, it's like body language you express towards the person you're filming. I don't film them so impolitely to their face, I'm standing next to them and filming them [indirectly]. But then you can't look freely in the eyepiece; so I taught myself how to shoot without looking in the eyepiece."
Being part of the moment is also what made him comfortable living in a humble flat in the same slum as the Sjamsuddins while filming Position Among the Stars. He gladly lived on the food cooked by Bakti's wife Sriywati, a street vendor. He got to know the family so well he was sometimes tempted to help them financially - giving Rumidjah money to keep her couch from being repossessed, and paying some of her medical bills. But his artistic instinct dictated that his charity not interfere with the narrative. "The health problems Rumidjah has were not part of the story. She often had to go to the hospital, but since I didn't use that in the story, I paid for it."
This dedication to storytelling is what allows him to justify his sometimes-controversial formalism. "Some people have problems with it; they say we should stick to a documentary style." When asked about the shots of the boy running, he says, "We had some nice footage which we got spontaneously. I wanted to build it into a symbolic scene, fading from vérité into something more symbolic. I even built a crane for it out of bamboo sticks... It was a good symbol. You could say he represents the future of Indonesia - he's still stuck in this narrow infrastructure which was built by the past, and he wants to escape it. So that's why the camera does what it does - why the crane shot goes out and you see these rooftops. Because it builds up to this symbolic scene, I thought, this is necessary, I have to use this."
Helmrich says that the lines between documentary and narrative will continue blurring. To this end he aims to take his work in another direction. "I'm planning to make a fiction film according to single-shot cinema; I want to prove how that works in fiction also - even better, because you can really organise it, you can organise the choreography with the camera and the actors and you can be flexible and go through space with them."
For more information on Position Among the Stars, head here.
Picture caption: Helmrich, courtesy of Getty Images/Carlo Allegri.
