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Letter to Eros
a film by Josko Petkovic
16mm, 56 min, 1995
The narrative of Letter to Eros anchors itself in the ubiquitous discourse of love, written in transit during an “exotic” journey between East and West, between here and there, now and then, him and her, and between countless other oppositions which span the space of the logical Either-Or relationship. The film moves quickly from the Tropic to the Pole, from the internationalism of Sukarno and Tito to the ethno-cleansing bombardment of Dubrovnik.
The trans-national lover’s discourse, in turn, invokes other journeys, other points of origin and departure, and other destinations. Consequently, the film’s iconography is crisscrossed with journeys and oppositions of various types. There are outward journeys and inward journeys, biographical and historical journeys, ethnographic and photographic journeys, tele-visual journeys, abstract journeys, theoretical journeys, “Imaginary” Lacanian journeys, nostalgic Derridean journeys, Zarathustrean journeys, between peaks of Nietzschean aphorism, journeys along a Thousand Plateaux, journeys Beyond the Pleasure Principle, noisy, marginal silent journeys.
Placed together in a narrative, these journeys constitute a metaphor of a post-modern delirium, in which boundaries and oppositions of every kind merely signal a source of semiotic surplus value in a supermarket of enchantment. Implicitly, the film suggests that the post-modern world is tending towards the condition of the Imaginary – a condition, like a dream, tolerates contradictions and which has little to do with Either-Or logic of analysis. It is, above all, a condition in which we, as enchanted subjects, exist in an acute state of dependency.
It is possible to discern a number of preoccupations in this narrative flux: How different is the delirious nature of the contemporary Imaginary from its ancient Eastern counterpart? Could the practices of enchantment from the deep past inform us about the nature of the delirium still unfolding and still to come?
Half of the film’s journey directs itself towards the Jaranan trance dance of Kediri (East Java), and the Reyog trance dance of Ponorogo (East Java). These are often juxtaposed with the early photographic performances of Charcot’s enigmatic hysterics. The juxtaposition suggests that the institutional convergence of the contemporary Imaginary with its Eastern counterpart begins with the invention of photography. Many new questions and possibilities arise from this hypothetical convergence.
What are the consequences of the postmodern delirium and where is it leading us? Why is it that so many Either-Or type discourses of the Old Order have been replaced with discourse of origins, ethnicity, race and religion, in the New Order with such “ethnically clean” but deadly consequences? Could it be that by following in the footsteps of the postmodern prophet Zarathustra, by going Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and by going beyond the disjunctive Order of Either-Or, the postmodern world is rediscovering death in the very heart of love?
John Darling, David Hill, Eros Jarot, Des Alwi, Josko Petkovic
References and Links
ScreenAustralia page for Letter to Eros.
Garry Gillard | New: 2 March, 2022 | Now: 2 March, 2022
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/joskopetkovic/eros.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.