Celluloid colony: locating history and ethnography in early Dutch colonial films

representing Purbo’s own conceptual frameworks for his artistic practice. While working in Jakarta, Emerson travels weekly to Solo, where she maintains a house, making her very much part of the Solo arts circle. The book benefits from this as well – she quotes nimbly from experts on Solo-style wayang and the Indonesian-language scholarly literature produced by academics associated with the conservatory in order to tease out Purbo’s artistic reputation and aesthetic contributions. Inevitably, in a book on a major artistic figure, there are lacunae. There is relatively scant attention to Purbo’s politics or ideology – for example, his patronage from Golkar in the 1990s or the troubling misogyny which crops up in his banter with female vocalists and his representations of female characters (see Cohen 2016). We learn in passing that Purbo holds substantial collections of antique puppets, but are not told about his collecting and conservation activities nor the ways these old puppets inform his own practice. Purbo’s upbringing in rural Pacitan is briefly noted, but little is offered on either his relation to his father (a puppeteer and teacher) nor on how Pacitan figures into his identity as a puppeteer. It is to be hoped that these gaps will inspire others to write more on Purbo and the other puppeteers who revitalized wayang in the late twentieth century, making it relevant to Javanese audiences again.