Een met de Nobelprijs voor literatuur bekroonde dichter, de katholieke missie en de tabaksindustrie zijn ingrediënten van films over de voormalige kolonie Nederlands-Indië. Onderzoek naar deze bijzondere films is inmiddels ook buiten Nederland opgepikt, de afgelopen maanden is filmmaker en onderzoeker Sandeep Ray (National University of Singapore) de archieven ingedoken. Wat is zijn fascinatie voor de Nederlandse koloniale geschiedenis? Hieronder geeft Sandeep een beknopt verslag van een half jaar onderzoek in de collectie van Beeld & Geluid.
In 1999 while working at a small office in Boston called Documentary Educational Resources, I saw Dutch filmmaker Vincent Monnikendam's compilation film Mother Dao The Turtlelike (Moeder Dao de Schildpadgelijkende) (1995). I knew little about the East Indies at the time yet I was amazed at the scope of the original material the collage-documentary had been sculpted from. The images were approximately from the 1910s and 1920s, an early period in the history of cinema.
Fast forward to more than a decade later – I had earned a MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Michigan, spoke some Indonesian and was considering applying to doctoral programs. I could not shake those black and white images from Monnikendam’s film. Combining a whim with a hunch, I wrote a proposal to study the historical value of those films and to engage with the broader discourse of using film as primary source materials in the field of history. The National University of Singapore gave me a fellowship and soon an excellent academic committee comprised of Timothy Barnard, Barbara Andaya and Jan van der Putten agreed to supervise me. But I was racked with insecurity – what if the sources of those images were limited? What if there were just a few hours of film? Would there be enough research material to justify a dissertation?
In August of 2012 I finally arrived at the sleek, modern, towering office of Beeld & Geluid in Hilversum. Their collection was beyond expectation. There were not just a few films, there were hundreds of titles covering a vast area - Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and several outer islands of eastern Indonesia. I learned that through a preservation and digitization program launched in 2007 called Images for The Future, a vast amount of footage from the original inflamable nitrate film has been recently made more widely accessible. Thus with the guidance of Bas Agterberg at Beeld & Geluid, Rommy Albers at the EYE Film Institute and frequent informal meetings with colonial film specialist Nico De Klerk, I began to explore and excavate the digital archives. My goal: to try to watch everything surviving from the first two decades of filming in the Dutch East Indies.
But before I could harbor any illusions of pioneering work, I realized that I had already been preceded by an army of film restorers, archivists and annotators who had meticulously created this astounding digital repository. I have spent the last six months looking at this footage and then searching for written materials in the form of books, pamphlets and newspaper articles that corroborate or add to the information in them. Hundreds of scenes of Indonesia's history and colonial past, sometimes difficult to watch, at times exciting because of the information that tumbles out, are captured by several erstwhile and adventurous cameramen – Johann Lamster, Willy Mullens, Isidor Ochse, Simon Buis, Willy Rach, Hendrik Tillema to name a few. My interest is twofold - to understand the context in which these films were made and also to situate them in the broader historiography of primary visual evidence for social scientists.
There have of course been several memorable moments during my viewings – I will touch on a couple. Early in my search I was amazed at the quality of filming by the Soeverdi missionaries in what would be Eastern Indonesia today. A particular sequence in the travelogue film Bali-Floti made in 1926 stands out. It is a meticulous coverage of a whale hunt filmed off of a remote island. The quality of cinematography and editing in this piece is extraordinary, especially when compared to Robert Flaherty's famous Nanook of The North from just three years prior which is considered the start of "documentary" film in almost all textbooks. How many film historians are aware that a far more authentic and technically better produced whale hunt existed from the same period? Very few I contend!
Another tingly moment – while looking at a documentary from Bali made in 1926 I caught a few seconds of the Noble prize winner Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore walking around the island! Such is the nature of archival research sometimes - one finds something completely unexpected. I believe the possibilities of academic inquiry into this material are endless and it is a treasure trove for historians and anthropologists or for that matter, any lay person who may have a passing interest in that region of the world. This portion of the vast film collection touches on colonial cinema, Dutch cinema, visual histories of the former East Indies and the very evolution of non-fiction film.
I leave for Singapore having seen a lot of the past trapped and preserved in rectangular black, white and grey movements. I am inspired by historian Marc Bloch's words, "The past is, by definition, a datum which nothing in the future will change. But the knowledge of the past is something progressive which is constantly transforming and perfecting itself." As much as I just love watching film, I must now make sense of all this information and write something coherent and useful. The first presentation I will make from this material will be at the 15th Annual Southeast Asian Studies Graduate Conference at Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program March 1-3, 2013.
I encourage others to spend the time view this remarkable collection and avail of this resource now available to us.
