Celluloid Colony

Abstract

Sandeep Ray ’ s Celluloid Colony is a critical historiography of film in colonial Indonesia. The book sets out to address three core concerns. First, it provides a close reading of a comprehensive selection of Dutch ethnographic films shot in the vast colony between 1912 and 1930. Secondly, it seeks to illustrate how motion pictures can function as primary source material for historical and ethnographic research. And thirdly, it aims to bring to light unexplored materi-als from colonial archival records. Methodologically Ray offers an alternative historiographical approach to studying colonialism, arguing that these archival films are relevant to analyze, as “ the tensions between colonial rule and native life surface in these films ” (4). The author, who is also a novelist, has a succinct and accessible writing style, with the potential to attract an audience beyond academics. The envi-sioned audience for the book however appears to consist primarily of historians and anthropologists. The purpose of a large part of the introduction and the first chapter, “ Situating Early Non-fiction Film in Colonial Studies, ” is to encourage these categories of readers to use moving images as source material in their studies. The objective here is to demonstrate that filmed sources pro-vide unique and detailed material not only for film historians and cinema scholars, but also to anyone working in other fields of historical enquiry. The author emphasizes