Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia

by Sandeep Ray

How should colonial film archives be read? How can historians and ethnographers use colonial film as a complement to conventional written sources? Sandeep Ray uses the case of Dutch colonial film in Indonesia to show how a critically, historically, and cinematically informed reading of colonial film in the archive can be a powerful and unexpected source—one that  is more accessible than ever today because of digitization. The language of film and the conventions and forms of nonfiction film were still in formation in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Colonialism, Ray shows, was one of the drivers of this development, as the picturing of the native “other” in film was seen as an important tool to build support for missionary and colonial efforts. While social histories of photography in non-European contexts have been an area of great interest in recent years; Celluloid Colony for the first time brings moving images into the same scope of study.
 

288 pages, Paperback

Published May 20, 2021

Reviews

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative and enjoyable to read. It is also delightful to see how the archives of colonial-produced propaganda films can serve as an interesting subject within the context of historiography. With the exception of Mother Dao, a contemporary production, I have not watched the colonial filmmaker productions discussed in this film in their entirety – I have only seen fragments of some of them.

What is particularly worth reflecting upon, however, is the propaganda context in these films: the extent to which they were staged, how much the camera exploited its subjects, and the degree of involvement of the Indonesian people. I am very interested in natural documentaries and scientific films during that period, and I imagine that during the making of the Krakatau film, for example, there must have been several indigenous people involved as porters. The role of porters in the production of colonial films is something I have continually pondered. These seemingly minor roles are, in fact, crucial to the formation of knowledge—whether in the form of films, as in the case of colonial cinema, or even as interlocutors, such as translators in anthropological work (the interlocutors for Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, for instance, come to mind).