Volume 40, Number 19 · November 18, 1993
Soul Food
By Ian Buruma
The Phantom Empire
by Geoffrey O'Brien
Norton, 281 pp., $20.00
Wayang Kulit, the Javanese shadow puppet theater, is a form of cinema that goes back at least a thousand years. The stories of Wayang are mostly from the Hindu epics, brought to the Javanese kingdoms from India after the second century. The characters are timeless and still appear in various reincarnations on our own movie screens: the good man trapped on the wrong side, the romantic hero, the wicked schemer, the wise servantclown, and so on. The Javanese believe that the puppets represent the ancestral spirits and that the dalang, or priest-puppeteer, enables the audience to communicate with the tribal ancestors by projecting their forms on the screen, and mimicking their voices. The audience sits on either side of the screen: some like to see the shadows flickering through the cloth, but the cognoscenti prefer to sit on the side of the dalang, to watch his technique.
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