Contribution short abstract:

This paper studies two Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company films in Sumatra during the 1920s. It aims to understand the imagination made by industrial power in the colonial era that lingers to this day—peculiar imaginations and, simultaneously, crucial markers of people's lives.

Contribution long abstract:

What can we learn from films made under the notions of capitalism in a location colonized by a European power and later transferred to the hand of a sovereign and modern nation-state? This paper hinges on two different poles of colonial imaginaries by examining the film made by an industrial power during colonial times: the imagination of the maker and the imaginaries transplanted to the colonized. To the people that never considered existed in the first place when the industrial power made the imaginations. In this case, it is the people of Sumatra island, which today is part of the Republic of Indonesia. This paper focuses on Island of Yesterday and Conquering the Jungle, produced by Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and released in the 1920s. These films tell stories of the modern achievement of a United States company on a far east island which also showcased the life and custom of the people. By studying the archives of Goodyear’s operation in Sumatra, the Dutch East Indies colonial, and modern Indonesia, this paper aims to understand the kind of imagination that lingers after the end of the colonial era. The imaginations relate to how the people in a young nation such as Indonesia constructs and sees themselves as part of a globalized world. A part reality, a part imagination. Both are peculiar as they are not rooted in the tangible facts the people know and have. Yet, their lives depend upon that imagination; however strange and foreign those imaginations are.