Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia by Sandeep Ray (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia by Sandeep Ray Josh Stenberg Sandeep Ray. Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press, 2021. Celluloid Colony is an important and salutary book, both for the way it uses film to analyze late colonial Indonesian society and for its intervention in the debates surrounding the role of film in historiography. Ray's object of study is the corpus of films made on location in the Dutch East Indies at the behest of institutes, agencies, and corporations intent on building support back home for the colonial enterprise. Viewed mostly in the Netherlands, they were preserved more or less fortuitously in the Colonial Institute archives and then long ignored before being brought to light from the late 1980s by a new generation of researchers and artists who discovered them in the Filmmuseum (now the EYE Filmmuseum), where they had been transferred in 1975. Slated for partial digitization as part of a larger initiative in 2006, this archive now makes for fascinating viewing, much of it accessible online. But, as Ray persuasively argues, it also represents a trove of important primary sources for ethnographic information and social history that allow us unique access to several areas of late colonial history. A historian at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Ray worked in Dutch archives over many years (this monograph evolved from his 2015 National University of Singapore doctoral dissertation), viewing not only the finished films but also consulting surviving offcuts and production information. Ray has spent the interval well, for the monograph shows no tell-tale traces of the dissertation genre and is accessible, assured, and compact. The hard yards have paid off: his most fundamental contribution consists in providing an initial chronology and typology for the considerable corpus of Dutch East Indies cinema and laying out the commercial, administrative, political, and religious concerns that created them. His period ranges from the earliest films made in 1912 until 1930 and covers Colonial Institute, corporate, and religious films in the three substantive middle chapters. This is a signal achievement, for the gap it begins to fill is vast, there being no comparable work about Indonesia on film in this period. In the first two chapters, Ray situates his study as an answer to the question of how and why historians in general can and should make use of filmic sources and why historians of colonialism in particular should set about it. The framing and argumentation for doing history with documentary film is swift and jargon-free and the point made so persuasively that I found myself finding little but knee-jerk conservatism or text worship to oppose it (although diplomatic Ray's tone is never impatient). There is no reason to think that using documentary film to do history is a naive endeavor any more than the use of colonial documents is, and film's intended and incidental evidence can provide compelling information on the experience and mindset of those living in the colonial period. These literal glimpses can in turn corroborate, adjust, or challenge claims made based on textual materials alone. In some cases film also records practices that can be used to validate or even assist in reviving tradition, and moments of "inadvertent ethnography" (62) show us sides of Indonesian lives that would otherwise be permanently inaccessible to us. The colonial films served many masters—from movies intended to show scientific progress to those soliciting funds for [End Page 183] Catholic missions to Flores—and they can serve the historian now, too, hopefully for very different purposes. Documentary films seem especially useful and urgent in the case of Indonesia, due to the lacunae in early cinematic history produced by the survival of little or any colonialera fiction films and what Ray takes to be disinterest among the historians of modern Indonesian film in overtly colonial work. But acknowledging the salience of these materials by no means signifies that they represent comfortable viewing, and it is likely precisely the awkwardness of the films for us—from this historical vantage point, these films are not by the "right" people...