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Contribution short abstract:

This paper examines dance and performance in colonial film from early 20th century Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies), focusing specifically on the representations of the dancing and performing body in the “official” documentary films produced by the Dutch colonial government from 1912-1942.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper examines the representations of the dancing and performing body on film from colonial Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies), focusing specifically on the “official” documentary films produced by the Dutch colonial government from 1912-1942. Similar to the colonial expositions and museums that were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the films were used primarily to display the wealth, strength and scope of Dutch imperialism, a filmic inventory of the empire’s vast proprietary and economic holdings, including its colonial subjects. According to Ian Aitken and Camille Deprez in the anthology The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia, “the highest number of non-fiction films made by any colonial government was, in all probability, produced by the Dutch in the East Indies” (2016: 10). Given the size of the Dutch colonial film archive, and the ubiquity of Indonesian people in motion, dancing or otherwise, on celluloid display in the films, there has been insufficient critical inquiry and study on the corporeal dimensions and implications of documenting and representing colonized subjectivities on film. This paper seeks to address this lacunae by interrogating the ways in which cinematic technology was used by colonial systems of power to shape and control the construction of knowledge surrounding the colonial subject, performance, and embodiment. While the film format enables audiences to view the surviving colonial films even in the present day, the sharing and circulation of digitized and further decontextualized versions of the films online also produce novel implications and complications.