Category: Films

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.