Go to → Susheela Raman

‘Going Down’ is sung from the perspective of somebody dying on a battlefield, killed by an almost invisible enemy, whatever the side they may be fighting for. The music is a fascinating composition, with Gunarto’s hypnotic non-traditional Gamelan arrangement, setting off an infinite Escher-esque downward spiral. The transition from the dissonance of the gamelan to the celestial choir is a very powerful moment, where the music evokes a life ebbing away. Filmed in Java between the court city of Surakarta and the cold atmospheric Dieng Plateau .The film takes us from the Joglo where the Gamelan are performing, masked and solemn, to a series of flashbacks and to a mountainside landscape, disappearing into the cloud.