
The Making of Tamu (The Guest)
Ian Stocks
Genesis of the Project
In early 1970 the idea of making a film in Bali came to myself and Jane Oehr, who was my production partner. We were interested in exploring a close-knit community and had read a lot about Bali, which had been a destination for artists and anthropologists since the 1930s. We did some initial research in Amsterdam and London and while we were doing this we started to learn about Donald Friend in Bali, through the writing of Robert Hughes. It seemed to us that Donald could give us a focus on life in Bali and be an interesting and engaging subject himself. Donald had travelled widely and lived outside Australia most of his life. So we started to make plans to film and got a crew together. We tried to contact Donald, which in itself was a mysterious process—we wrote, we even tried to phone, but that was a futile process, communication being what it was or wasn’t at the time.
Not knowing where we stood, we still went ahead with our plans and to our surprise we finally got a letter back from Donald saying he was, quote: ‘old and fat and ugly and can’t think of why anyone would be interested’. In any case, we took this as an indication he would consent to us making a film. So a few months later we flew out to Bali. Initially we stayed in a local hotel—losmen—while we made contact with Donald. We needn’t have worried, as Donald immediately took to Jane with her art history background and we moved into one of the guesthouses on his estate. Work started in a leisurely fashion on the film. Initially we had meetings with Donald and talked about the best way of depicting his life in Bali. As it turned out, we spent five weeks with Donald, although it took us another year to finish the film because of the rich material we gathered to work with.
Shooting the Film
We realised that Donald was a superb raconteur, so each night we would meet and listen to his stories which we would tape—and start to plan the shooting. Donald was very helpful and, while we were cautious about interrupting his work schedule, things went very well and we started to get some wonderful images from Batu Djimbar which he owned in conjunction with Wiya Worowontu, his Indonesian business partner. We also met the household, which comprised the six or seven boys who worked for him and acted as personal servants with duties on the estate. We started to meet some of Donald’s regular visitors, who were Europeans resident in Bali.
Permission from the Indonesian government had been crucial to actually filming the project and initially we worked under observation from a local government tourist official. Donald introduced us to a traditional Balinese painter, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, who lived and worked on his estate and produced some magnificent work. His work with its ribald humour inspired Donald.
Donald had made himself familiar with the social needs of the villagers around the estate and had become deeply entrenched in the community. He was regularly giving them advice and support where it was needed on cultural matters. One major thing he had done was sponsor a local group to reassemble their gamelan orchestra and later this was to become an important sequence in the film, as they performed a traditional Topeng play for Donald and for us.
Donald also informed us about ritual events, such as the cockfight, and we were able to film this through his help. What we were trying to do was reflect the fabric of Balinese life, with Donald acting as a guide and mentor. Quite often we would go off and film things to illustrate Donald’s accounts of the nature of the Balinese community.
Donald’s house had been built to his own specifications and he told us that the house was literally tailored to the owner—standard measurements were taken of arm length and the house adapted to these measurements. No nails were used. It was built of bamboo and carved wood.
Most days some antique dealers—dukuns—would visit, seeking to add to Donald’s collection of artefacts, and some spirited joking and bargaining would ensue, which of course we filmed. Donald had an excellent knowledge of Balinese life and culture and knew exactly what he was doing in building up a range of thematic objects—notably statues, masks and small bronzes which found their way into his work. The dukuns’ visit was a highlight of any day, as they brought out items which had significant social importance and came from some of the oldest families on the island. Donald would integrate statues and smaller works into his paintings, and in a way he followed Gauguin in trying to depict the social and religious life of the islanders and their iconography.
One of his major acquisitions was the mobil antik, a 1920s Chevrolet that went at a stately pace. It had been hidden in a tunnel in the side of a mountain by one of the local princes during the war and the Japanese occupation—so Donald had bought it and had it restored and he was able to travel in princely style when he left his compound, which was not that often.
Usually, however, he was happy to give us time in the afternoons and evenings, when the ritual gin jeruk (gin and tonic) was served. We recorded many rich stories about his early career which we were unable to fit into the film for reasons of length.
Donald’s Mode of Work
Donald took inspiration from what was happening around him:the life of the village, fishermen on the beach, a kite-flying ceremony, shipwrecks and storms. He also frequently sketched the boys of the household. There are dozens of ink and wash portraits of them. He always worked in inks and watercolour on paper. He spoke at length about his work and how he felt he was regarded. He betrayed a certain vulnerability about the way he was perceived in Australia.
Donald followed a fairly rigid routine: retiring to the studio to paint in the mornings then, when the day got hotter, he would retreat into the cool of the interior of his house. Then he would move around the house for the rest of the day and receive visitors. He also sold paintings to collectors and he was on a sort of tourist trail as it then existed in Bali. Visitors arrived frequently from the island and internationally. Donald told us how he had helped Mick Jagger to buy an ancient kris.
Our conversations with Donald at night were very wide-ranging; he was expert on many areas of art and the social milieu of Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s, quite apart from his own residence in exotic locales such as Africa and Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. We tape-recorded these interviews and later used them as commentary in the finished film, so there was no need for an external narrator. We followed a structured series of questions on his earliest days and followed through to what was then the present day. When we thought we had enough material for a sequence, we would make plans with Donald for the next morning’s filming and he would provide or arrange what props we needed and have an input into the design of the sequence we were going to film. So it was very much an intense collaboration with Donald and his views.
As we had relatively little film stock to shoot—not enough for extended interviews—we culled the best statements out of the audiotapes and got Donald to repeat these on camera as a series of statements rather than interview as such. This worked extremely well and gave us more film to use on the rich visual life of the villagers.
At one stage we went up to the kampong at Peliatan and spent a couple of days recording the daily routine of a family living in an extended family situation; this seemed to us to exemplify the particular routines and rituals of Balinese life. The Balinese adhered to a hierarchical system which extended theoretically down from the gods and gave each person a particular place in the scheme of things. Each person had a responsibility to make the appropriate offerings to the gods and make sure that the rituals were observed which would bring happiness and prosperity to the family unit and the village. Each person was also expected to be as good at being who he or she was in order to please the gods. Gifted people were treated like anyone else; their gift was not their doing, but bestowed on them by the gods, and it was up to them to use it as well as possible.
Donald had a place in all this as a patron, and the villagers frequently came to him for advice or material support for something they wanted to do. After discussion, Donald would find a way of helping them out: paying for tooth filing ceremonies or medical needs. In a sense he was a sort of honorary raja but still a guest, which is why we named the film Tamu, which means guest.
There was such a richness of events that aspects of the island life that we filmed would often have to be dropped due to considerations of length. One of these was a trip to an island where turtles were kept in pens, another was a visit to Yeh Pulu where there had been some remarkable ancient bas-reliefs carved into the side of the mountain. These greatly inspired Donald and he spent a day there in extreme heat drawing and sketching them.
Mythology of the Balinese
In his happy moments Donald described himself as the rajah mahal—the expensive rajah. In his worst moods, when things were not done to his satisfaction, he was the demon king—the Raksasa—and given to rages and fury, though not very often. But the two extremes are found in his work.
What we tried to do was make a film that reflected the actual rhythms of daily life and showed events that reflected the Balinese belief in animism. Their daily environment is rich in legend and belief in spirits and demons. One night, after a few too many gin jeruks, we went out into the grounds and the beach to film what we hoped would look like ghosts and demons emanating from natural forms. The boys wore some of Donald’s mask collection and we filmed by lantern light. The finished scene made it into the film.
However, Donald was the main focus of the film—his life and work and knowledge of Bali.
The film needed an ending which summed up the essential characteristics of Balinese life and Donald’s place there. We were searching for a scene which brought these elements together when we learned of Donald’s sponsorship of a dance troupe in a nearby village.
We were thus able to finish the film with a record of a masked Topeng play that Donald had sponsored. The play is performed by ordinary local people—farmers and artisans—and the whole village gets together to watch the elemental struggle between good and evil where local villagers play a range of masked roles. The play itself is taken very seriously and the forms of dance and story are based on antiquity. But the play also carries topical references, like mention of tourists and local politics and motorbikes.
The Topeng performance demonstrated the Balinese respect for their own traditions and the strong community structure which we found so impressive about life there. Donald knew he could never be Balinese, much as he would have liked to be reincarnated as one. The Balinese, as he said, ‘belong to a very special club and only they can come back as Balinese’. He thought he might be lucky if he came back as a bird or a cow.
We were lucky to be able to film at a turning point in Balinese life, before in some ways the community began to be sacrificed in the cause of tourism. We could only hope that the Balinese would be able to sustain their traditional values. At the time, Donald was a champion of the society and probably smoothed the way for less traumatic changes in his area—but, as we know, his stay there was cut short, for reasons that were not quite clear then.
One story went that his Indonesian partner sold him out after making a couple of lucrative land deals for the building of hotels; another was that the government was worried that Donald was assembling a martial arts group there for seditious reasons. This hardly seems likely.
In any case, Donald returned to Australia and began work on publishing his many books and commenced a new mode of painting. I guess we are the richer for that.
Our aim was always to have the film shown on the ABC, but this later took months of negotiation. In those days the ABC rarely bought in local documentaries. In the end we made a deal where they would provide facilities and a small amount of cash, and the rest of the money came from the Australian Film Development Corporation.
When we did start work with the ABC they were very supportive and gave us an excellent editor. They made very few comments on the content and I think were happy with the end result. My partner Jane Oehr supervised most of the editing.
We felt very privileged to have spent this crucial time with Donald, to have entered into his world and the world of the Balinese. We still count it as one of our seminal filmmaking projects—a time when all seemed to go well and we entered the life of a remarkable painter and artist.
