Tag: Southeast Asia and Indonesia

137 mins., b&w (tinted), silent

Source : EYE Dutch East Indies collection, viewable here

Ethnodrama. Production year 1930.

EYE catalogue entry:

Christian mission propaganda film about ‘a slice of heathen life, with the bamboo bush people of Borado-Likowali’ on the island of Flores.

Keli is forced to marry Wesa but has a lover in another village. This causes war to break out between the two villages and Wesa is killed. Wesa’s father Meo now wants Keli to marry his other son. Keli refuses and the hostilities continue. Just when the authorities have locked up a number of troublemakers, Father Jacobs arrives. The missionary tries to win the confidence of the locals but becomes embroiled in the conflict. An assault by Meo’s men leaves him dangerously wounded. The villagers stop fighting and Meo asks the dying missionary’s forgiveness. Peace is restored.

Text : Appels 1997

Stub – requires work

 

13:23 mins., b&w, silent – Dutch intertitles

Production : Koloniaal Institut

Source : EYE Dutch East Indies collection,  viewable here

Informational film about Batak dry-rice cultivation. Well-made, follows process in a neutral way. One of a number of films made about the Karo-Batak by L.P. de Bussy: this was probably his longest film. Shot in 1917, but according to EYE website first screened in public in 1923.

EYE catalogue entry:

“A documentary that shows the various stages of rice growing in the dry fields among the Karo-Batak.

The film opens with an “introduction”, in which a picture is given of “the landscape, the village, and the people”. This is followed by the stages of rice growing: cultivating, ploughing, sowing, and harvesting. These stages are shown very neutrally, without any background information. The harvest festival, with which the film ends, gives picturesque images of victory carts being pulled to the village and women in festive attire taking part in a dance competition”

Stub – requires further work

7:54 mins., b&w (tinted), silent

Source : Penn Museum, viewable on-line here

Initial dances are series of performances for the camera, seemingly in some public location (at a  museum perhaps?). Subsistence activities (pounding grain, smelting metal)  in village seem less contrived. Nice shot of teenage girls attending to one another’s hair. Also of young couple washing in a stream. Followed by sequences of mock combat, musical performance, women working in the fields and carrying produce home on their heads, locusts, men sitting by a large jar (?), harvesting of grain by hand.

Information from Penn Museum:

Photographed by Charles Martin and produced by Dean C. Worcester. It may be that the footage here has been re-assembled and cut by unknown parties over the years.

Location: Cordillera (region);

Groups: Bontoc, Igorot, Ifugao, Kalinga.

 

6:22 mins., b&w (tinted yellow) silent, intertitles in Dutch.

Production : Koloniaal Institut, Amsterdam

Source : this film is viewable via the EYE website here. It can also been seen via a private YouTube playlist, with added music and commentary, here.

This film was shot by J.C. Lamster, a soldier in the Dutch colonial army and the first person to shoot moving images in the Dutch East Indies.  Although he had trained briefly with Pathé Frères in Paris, he would still have been a relative beginner. In the circumstances then, it is a creditable effort and  the film holds a certain historical significance, though from an ethnographic point of view, it is difficult to construe.

The film begins by showing a highly decorated archway and a long line of women carrying neatly stacked piles of fruit on their heads. These will seemingly constitute part of the offering. One shot frames a young girl in a circle, a device reminiscent of studio photography (see above) and perhaps a sign that Lamster is still a relative newcomer to film-making.

This is then followed by a sequence showing a pig being prepared as an offering. This cuts effectively from a mid-shot of the pig having its belly sewn up to a wider shot of it being stuck onto a pole. However, neither the reason for these offerings, nor the deity to which they will be offered, is made clear.

There is then a sequence of a cute group of children taking tea in a courtyard, but the link with the remainder of the film remains obscure.

This is followed in turn by a sequence showing a line of people carrying banners, and eventually the pig hanging from its pole, apparently entering a temple (though this doorway is quite different to the archway shown at the beginning of the film). They are then shown coming out again, but the camera never enters the temple itself to observe the making of the offerings.

After a brief shot of a gamelan orchestra, the final minute of the film, somewhat underexposed, shows two “temple girls”, elaborately addressed, with headdresses and waving fans, performing a dance in front of a seated group of onlookers, both male and female. But again, the connection with the making of the offerings remains unexplained.

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6:40 mins., b&w, silent – intertitles in French

Production : Pathé

Source : Gaumont-Pathé Archives, catalogue no. PR 1929 22 2

A simple descriptive film showing a few scenes from the life of a group of monks at an unspecified pagoda in Cambodia.

After some preliminary shots of pagodas, the monks are shown bathing in the water of a holy pool, eating a frugal meal of rice and praying. In one of the longest sequences, cutting from wide to close, a young monk is shown using a steel scalpel to incise holy texts on a small rectangular sheet of tin. This is then tied together with others to make a sort of book.

The film ends with a series of portraits of individual monks, suggesting in an intertitle that the peace and tranquility of their life has left on the faces of the older monks, ‘the imprint of a gentle philosophy’.

6:38 mins., b&w, silent

Production :  Pathé Frères

Source : Gaumont-Pathé Archives, file no. CM1673

Throughout the 1920s, Pathé produced a series of short films of around 6 minutes, which, under the general title, Indochine, offered a series of scenes of life around the French colonies in Southeast Asia. Although Europeans might occasionally appear in these films, they were mostly about the life of the local people. The technical and aesthetic standards of these magazine films were generally high.

In this film, offered here as an example, the principal theme is of local arts and crafts: a traditional form of fishing with nets, embroidery, wood carving and finally, a brick factory.

15:07, b&w (tinted sepia), silent, with French intertitles

Production : Pathé-Revue

Source : Gaumont-Pathé archives

A very well-made but anonymous film that follows the elaborate series of ceremonies were involved in the funeral rites of Sisowath, the King of Cambodia.

The intertitles explain that after the body of the deceased king has been  lying in state for seven months in a golden urn in the Royal Palace at Phnom Penh, the rites associated with his cremation should bring public mourning to an end, and even be a cause for celebration since the deceased king’s spirit will be ‘rejoining Buddha in paradise’.

The film then shows the golden urn being transported to the royal crematorium, followed by the new king, Sisowath’s son, Monivong, and vast crowds, including columns of elephants. Here the urn remains for another seven days while monks recite prayers.

The flesh of the corpse is then carefully separated from the bones and taken to the Silver Pagoda to be cremated in the presence of Monivong and his invitées, who appear to include some French officials. The camera does not follow the separation of flesh and bones, but it does offer a close up of a small open container where the flesh is smouldering.  While ‘the fire does its work’, as the intertitles put it, outside the crowd prays and musicians play sacred music.

The bones are then cremated in turn in a more public ceremony and the following day, again accompanied by his invitées, Monivong washes the ashes and then carries them down to the Mekong, where they are carried out in a canoe to be  thrown into middle of  ‘the sacred River’, thereby liberating the former king from all his earthly attachments.

6:46 mins., b&w (tinted?), silent with English inter titles

Production : Pathé Frères, production no. 4616

Source : CNC at the BnF

Background : the Murut are an ethnic group who  live widely distributed across the northern part of the island of Borneo, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah in the extreme northwest, but also in neighbouring parts of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, in Brunei and the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan.

Traditionally, they lived in hilltop long houses, were slash and burn cultivators and practiced headhunting. They were renowned also for their body tattoos.

Although this appears in the Pathé Frères catalogue, given the remoteness of the region, rather than send their own operator, it is possible that they bought this film from the Charles Urban Trading Company which sent cinematographer Harold Lomas (c.1873-1926) there on three occasions: in 1903, 1904 and 1908. The fact that the intertitles are in English lends greater credence to this possibility.

Lomas’s expeditions were paid for by the British North Borneo Company, a trading company which administered the then-colony of North Borneo. In 1915, led by a charismatic figure claiming supernatural powers, the Murut attacked the offices of the company.

Content: The film itself  is very simple. It is shot from a single static position, though with some variation between wide shots and close-ups. The inter titles are factual and explanatory, for example: “The Muruts live in tribes from fifty to sixty individuals dwelling together in the same hut”.

At first, the subjects pose, obviously ill at ease. A man makes a cigar from leaf. A family climbs into a long house. We see some jaw bones, said to be of animals (but given their history of headhunting, perhaps they are human?). A chief’s grave is shown from a distance. Then they show their weapons.

The film concludes with various dances (which are said to be “diverse and have a certain originality”), on a patch of grass beside a house, to the unheard sound of gongs. Men and women dance in a circle, a young girl plays on a flute with several heads, another girl does a sort of scissor dance between two bamboos operated by two other girls. A man dances alone with a long sword.

In the copy held by the CNC, the film ends in mid-dance, with no end credits, suggesting that originally it may have been longer. The subject matter of the last part of the film provides further evidence that this material may have been filmed by Lomas since the title of one of his films in the Urban catalogue is entitled, Head-Hunters of Borneo at their Peace and War Dances (1903).

Text: McKernan 2013: 51-52.