A war without representation a 1912 cinematographic reenactment of the 1898 Pedir expedition, Aceh

In 1911, the association ‘Koloniaal Instituut’ in Amsterdam decided to sponsor a series of information films about colonial Indonesia, at the time known as the Netherlands East-Indies. In February 1912, the institute commissioned J.C. Lamster, a captain in the colonial army, to make film records of a variety of topics, traditional as well as contemporary. The assignment came with detailed instructions: a list of topics that were to be recorded true-to-life. The problems the latter requirement inevitably presented were solved in ways common at the time. But Lamster crossed a line when, for a film about the Netherlands East-Indies army, he staged reenactments of an episode of a decade and a half earlier in the long Aceh War: the Pedir expedition of 1898 and its aftermath. Firstly, I describe the military and geographic circumstances that prevented the recording of actual combat during the Aceh War and this expedition. Secondly, I sketch the way the Koloniaal Instituut positioned itself, or rather felt forced to position itself, in the Dutch film exhibition business. As well I relate how its detailed instructions revealed the institute and its filmmaker’s lack of experience in filmmaking, and in faraway place at that, and how the footage that was sent back to Amsterdam was evaluated. Finally, I propose considerations why the Koloniaal Instituut, after its refusal to enter the reconstructed scenes in its first film catalogue of 1914, restored them in its subsequent catalogues of 1918 and 1923: by that time the scenes had gained an unanticipated topicality, while the screening practices the institute adopted in 1918 – with obligatory readings from preprinted texts during projection – attempted to bring the film’s performance into line with the other, less controversial information films Lamster had made

Spanish Civil War · Asian Studies and History · Military History and Strategy · Philippine History and Culture

• Years of Image Control

  Nico De Klerk•Early Popular Visual Culture•2013

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