Uncovering the missing history of a Balinese ceremonial dagger stolen over a century ago is an arduous task that would send archeologists on decades of field research. Bringing that story to the screen together with someone from another culture than yours living thousands of kilometers away seems like an impossible feat. And yet that’s exactly what Hattie Wade and Taufiqurrahman Kifu pulled off with their documentary Sharp Objects.
Both were scouted by the Bandung-based art collective Indeks and wysiwyg, a screening platform from The Hague, for their transnational film collaboration Beyond Provenance. The project is a response to the announcement in 2023 by the Dutch government of the restitution to Indonesia of invaluable cultural artefacts stolen during the colonial era. Among these features the Keris Klungkung, a Balinese royal ceremonial dagger that bore witness to the fierce resistance of the King of Klungkung and his people to the Dutch colonizers, especially its gruesome end, as all the Balinese followed their king into death, taking their own lives in a mass ritual suicide known as puputan, rather than surrender. Following the kingdom’s demise, the keris was looted and found its way to the Netherlands, unceremoniously archived among thousands of other objects. Meanwhile in Bali, the Dutch attempted to rehabilitate their severely damaged international reputation by transforming the island into a touristic paradise.
Sharp objects retraces Hattie and Kifu’s quest to uncover the forgotten history of the keris and in the process delivers an indeed sharp critique of the far-reaching consequences of Dutch colonialism on Bali’s loss of its own heritage and constructed touristic development. The topic of restitution is all the more important to address in this context that it is still ingrained in the Indonesian psyche that their former colonizer would be better suited to care for their own
heritage than Indonesia itself. This particularly interested Hattie, whose previous work has been questioning how nationalist stories and myths are constructed around cultural artefacts or landmarks, using them as a tool to perpetuate existing dominant social and institutional narratives.
Both approached their subject with respectful humility. Hailing from Sulawesi, Kifu was concerned about how Balinese people would react to him making a film about such a significant part of their history and heritage, but marveled at how open and willing to share about their knowledge they were. Hattie knew that she had a lot to catch on and put herself in the position of a student. “Being aware of my presence on a topic I am removed from also means understanding my connection to it, coming from a colonizing country. I had to make sure I understood that history.”
From the onset, something became clear: the keris’ story remained a total mystery, erased from memory. Instead of a dead end, this realization further determined the filmmakers to give the keris its rightful place back in Balinese history, while connecting past and present. The filmmaking process was a tour de force in itself, as both filmmakers worked together yet totally remotely, literally stitching a four-hand documentary into existence, one still at a time. While
Hattie researched extensively in the Netherlands, Kifu followed the lost trail of the keris in Bali. Sadly, even the current King of Klungkung’s own household could not give him more information about the precious heirloom that had disappeared such a long time ago. From there, the filmmakers entered the realm of speculation. “It made it interesting though, because it gave us that space to listen to every perspective about the keris”, muses Kifu.
Everything turned around thanks to a leaf. Kifu met a Balinese keris master, who shared his deep knowledge of the philosophy imbued in that sacred dagger and revealed that the very shape of the keris was inspired by a spiky local plant called jeruju. As it is now hard to find in its natural environment in Bali because of rampant touristic development, Hattie set out to search for it, but could only find dried, lifeless specimens in sterile archives in Leiden. The plant thus became the perfect metaphor for the film, embodying the disappearance of Bali’s wealth of local wisdom and traditional culture, buried under the island’s colonial past and man-made touristic paradise.
The power of the film lies in its experimental approach, physically embedding the missing link connecting past and present into the film. Kifu shot tourists at the beach on celluloid, the same medium the Dutch used to record their presence in Indonesia. Flipping the narrative, he literally scraped away the developed film and added visuals of the jeruju underneath, literally peeling off the veneer of tourism born from colonialism to reveal the lost, yet alive, Balinese heritage within. The film culminates with the equally experimental and ingenious recreation of the puputan. Highlighting the irony of history, Kifu filmed at the site where the massacre took place, where the Bali Hotel – the first international hotel built by the Dutch on the island – now stands. Shooting people playing in the hotel pool or jumping around, Kifu then created a collage of chopped frames, using the celluloid’s negative to turn blue water into red blood and transform tourists having fun into agonizing victims. Hectic and eerie, the scene is as hypnotizing as it is dread-inducing.
In the end the film is a puzzle in every sense of the word, perfectly embodying the complexity of its subject. Past and present, celluloid and digital, all intertwine. Cold records of history in a foreign land contrast with a rich living heritage. The keris, and with it, the wealth of Balinese history and local wisdom finally resurfaces under the veneer of modernity.
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