And.....Donald Friend’s Opera Savon continues.....
If this is the low season then I suspect Bali had record numbers of visitor arrivals last month filling hotels and restaurants and clogging the roads. What with two excellent back-to-back cultural events in the shape of the Writers Fest and the film Balinale, followed by the Asian Beach Games, I look forward to checking-in with Jack Daniels’ unfailing commentary on visitor arrivals to see if October 2008 is indeed a record month. Bali’s high season almost runs July through first week of January, with a couple of weeks off in November. It also seems to me that visitors outside the traditional high season months of Jul/Aug are a much more well-heeled bunch, the kind of people who can afford to get over the stress of family holidays and then flee their godawful climates for tropical climes. Such people actually buy things in shops.
Ubud Writers - Strength to Strength
To have a major writers and film festival on the international calendar in Bali every October I think is just great for Bali in all the right ways, not sure I could really say that about the Beach Games. Hats off to Janet de Neefe and her team plus the host of volunteers who together have made the UWRF such a notable and established success, just getting bigger and better each year. High points for me were the coming out of Bali’s very own hotlier/poet John O’Sullivan and conversations with Moni Mohsin, London-based writer born in Pakistan author of “The End of Innocence” and Peter Zilahy from Hungary, author of “The Last Window-Giraffe. Ms Mohsin felt the UK would over time, as it historically always has, manage to transcend current problems with race and religion. She was deeply pessimistic about Pakistan and the future for the educated middle class there. Hungarian Peter Zilahy was fascinating on the mystery of the Magyars, the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, most vivid, his personal experiences of the disintegration of the Soviet empire & Yugoslavia. The final night honoured Donald Friend with an exhibition of his paintings opened by Warwick Purser, who knew him well (and one of the few among us quite well treated by Donald in the diaries) and belatedly saw the “Asian” launch of the diaries (Vol 4 covering his time in Bali). I do hope they managed to sell some. The Australian actor Terry Clarke did a great job in difficult circumstances reading from the diaries. “Rather like channelling Donald in a marketplace”, he remarked to me later.
Oh! Bali Balinale!
We all owe a huge debt of thanks to Deborah Gabinetti and her Gang of Four, the women who helped her put the Balinale film festival firmly on the map. With the new snappy ‘but of course!” name, the quality of the movies shown, the calibre, and level of interest already shown by overseas directors and other movie people ensures the Balinale is well on its way and, all things being equal, headed for a great future.
High point of the film for me festival was a re-acqaintance with Charlie Chaplin and the ‘Charlie in Bali’ aspect of the program, taking us beyond the much quoted Noel Coward doggerel of the period - “As I said to Charlie in Bali.....”, and leave it at that. Ably positioned by the engaging Kate Gyonvarch who runs the Paris-based Association Chaplin and who theorised from her research that Chaplin, on a world-wide sabbatical tour in 1932, was in the process of a creative and personal breakdown as he made the transition from silents to talkies and his love affair with the American public became a great deal more nuanced, the loveable tramp morphing into a real man who, not only spoke, but addressed the burning political issues of the day. Chaplin’s crise even ran to the extent of quitting movies and going into politics, Kate Guyonvarch speculated. Scheduled to stay in Bali for a mere 3 days, Chaplin, with brother Sydney , managed to escape the clutches of the colonial stuffed shirts and extend the visit by three weeks aided and abetted by Walter Spies, with whom they explored the island. The 40 minutes of surviving footage shot by Sydney is interesting but unremarkable, lots of sly footage of young bare breasted maidens, reflecting Sydney’s enthusiasms which greatly exceeded Charlie’s not inconsiderable interest in that direction. The footage shot by Sydney is, alas, probably substantially less than what he took due to their having left the film in Java for processing, where it underwent possible bowdlerisation and commercial ‘slippage’. From what Chaplin and Spies both shared on the visit, it is clear that Chaplin was deeply affected and creatively restored by Bali of that time. He returned to the US via Japan and back to Hollywood.
The Balinale went on to show “The Gold Rush” (1926, 96 mins) one of Chaplin’s most famous features and an excellent documentary “The Life & Art of Charles Chaplin” (2003, 97 mins), directed by Richard Schickel, narrated by Sydney Pollack, packed with interesting comments from directors Pollack, Milos Forman, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Richard Attenborough, actors Claire Bloom, Johnny Depp and Richard Downey, his daughter actress Geraldine Chaplin, son Michael and brother Sydney. It was this movie that succeeded in rekindling my interest in Chaplin, to the extent I really wanted to re-read his autobiography, published in the 1960’s, and see some of the movies like Verdoux and The Great Dictator we somehow never got to see as kids. Instead we got City Lights crammed down our throats. The endless unexceptionable shorts combined with a later tendency to preachiness and sheer over familiarity served to consign one of the 20th Century’s seminal figures to cultural limbo. What the movie did was show clips from all the great silent movies like “The Kid” but also the later ‘message’ movies and the interesting development of his life and career, having quit the US in disgust in the early 1950’s thus removing himself from the harassment of J. Edgar Hoover, who hated him.
Right at the end of the Chaplin evening there was one of those lovely moments spanning generations when Rima Melati, one of Indonesia’s great beauties and a star, came up to Kate Guyonvarch and shared that she and Chaplin’s son Michael had met and enjoyed a close friendship some 40 years back when he came to Indonesia, asking how he was and to be remembered to him.
Among many interesting films and workshops one other movie touched me. Having managed to miss ‘Because God Made them Blind”, a prize-winning documentary by Australian Richard Todd on the work of John Fawcett with blind people in Bali, as part of the festival program, I caught up with it as a ‘fringe’ event organised by Tina Ardie for the Western Australian government. I’m so glad I did. It was screened in the garden of Donald Friend’s house in Batujimbar and it was a perfect evening. Discussing the movie earlier in the day with a friend who’d seen it, she told me she loved it but she felt there was some arrogance involved in big Western medicine overruling traditional Balinese ways. Having seen the movie I saw what she meant but that, it seemed to me was a large part of the point and what made the man and the movie so interesting. I particularly enjoyed seeing John Fawcett’s process in coming to grips with this. The up-country Bali scenery was a salutary gift and reminder, and the background score after Samuel Barber worked very well to underline the cultural value clash, I felt.
One last thought for the organisers. It was just lovely (rain having permitted) to watch a movie outdoors in a beautiful Bali garden under a Bali moon.
Donald’s Ashes - Redux
The opera savon of el Donaldo’s ashes continues. A fortnight ago I shared the little I knew of the ‘mystery’ surrounding the return of il maestro’s mortal remains to his house in Bali sometime in the early 1980’s, and which occasioned such Omothian twittering up in them thar’ hills. The saga goes on, I Iearn.
A few nights ago at a party in Batujimbar in conversation with someone present at the time, conversation turned to the subject of Donald Friend’s posthumous whereabouts. What this person shared was that the painter’s ashes, or some of them (?), had indeed come back to Batujimbar but that Wija Wawo-Runtu vetoed the idea of burying or scattering them in his house, he wanted them thrown in the sea instead. Because, some said at the time, he didn’t want to be haunted by Donald’s ghost seeking recompense from the beyond. A fun story possibly, but frankly I doubt it. Having been only slightly acquainted with Wija Wawo-Runtu in the last decade of his life, he did not strike me as a man much prey to superstition. In fact, I feel it is altogether in character of the man that, wishing to respect and be true to his friend’s wishes, he suggested scattering his ashes at sea because that, as I understand it, is the final destination of all Balinese.
A few days later I got an e.mail from someone who’d read my earlier piece who had known Friend well, with even still more to share. Some two weeks back, he wrote, in or during the Ubud Writer’s Festival he’d been invited to an exclusive gathering in the grounds of the artist’s house to listen to a reading by Terry Clarke from Friend’s diaries and to participate in a Balinese ceremony, prior to the scattering of Donald’s ashes.
“So there you go, another story on the mystery of Donald. I knew him well and he wouldn’t have had it any other way”, he concluded.
That’d be right, I reckon. I can almost hear the old reprobate, from whatever vantage point he currently enjoys, having a great giggle and hooting with derision at appropriate moments of Omothian sententiousness. The idea of the Artist as Holy Relic is curiously fitting, though for the life of me I can’t put my finger on why?
Shades of Vagabond Scholars perhaps?
