Bali: A Paradise Created by Vickers Adrian;

Author:Vickers, Adrian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 991746
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

John Coast at rehearsal for his tour of Balinese performing arts

While Coast was engaged in the struggle for Indonesian independence, Colin McPhee, the expert on Balinese music, was writing one of the best of the Bali books attempting to capture the lost paradise. His was an autobiographical account, A House in Bali, full of loving details about the music of Bali and about the brilliant musicians and dancers with whom McPhee had worked, particularly the young man, I Sampih, whose talents he had recognized when Sampih was still a boy and had nurtured through exposing him to the best dancers of the day.111

In the post-war era Bali was one of many balms to soothe a traumatized world. In this era of renewed interest in both the East and the Pacific, Broadway hits like The King and I and South Pacific gained enormous popularity first on stage and subsequently on screen.112 The 1950s version of these ideal places was more removed from reality than the 1930s images. As a kind of over-compensation for the hell of the Pacific theater, a world of jungle warfare and tropical disease, Broadway and Hollywood produced images that would try to recapture the lost world of the pre-war era. In doing this, they created something that never was.

In the Hollywood of the pre-war era the Indies were regarded as one part of the South Seas Islands, and were most memorably featured as the place where the gigantic gorilla King Kong was founding the film of the same name.113 A map at the beginning of the film locates King Kong’s island in the same position as the Mentawai islands, just off Sumatra. The image of dark-skinned primitives in this film is also based in part on the culture of the Mentawai islands, which had excited some anthropological interest in the 1930s. In the 1930s Primitive art and culture were at the heart of both intellectual and popular interest, featuring in the art of Picasso and the Surrealists as well as the dances of Josephine Baker.114 One aspect of this interest in Primitivism was the emphasis on the sexual and magical aspects of Bali. By the 1950s Hollywood was replacing them with more idyllic pictures.

A film which marks the transition between the “primitive” view of the Indies from the 1930s and the idyllic vision of the 1950s is an adventure film of 1948 starring John Wayne called Wake of the Red Witch.115 The film was based on a racist and sexist novel of the same name by Garland Roark,116 and featured Wayne as a private trader who ran foul of corrupt and nasty Dutch officials in Batavia. The scenes of the film set on Bali show the island as a composite of Indian and Pacific islands, à la South Pacific. In one particularly memorable scene a volcano erupts just as primitive Balinese (Americans in black faces) sit around in a circle chanting, an imitation of the kecak dance. The focus of the chanting is a strange pagan rite, directed at statues based on Easter Island figures.

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