A special piece of history can be seen in the EYE film museum. Or actually composed history. The Hungarian artist Péter Forgács mixed pre-war private films from the Dutch East Indies with letters from the same period to create the film installation 'Slumbering Fire'.
Péter Forgács had nothing to do with the Dutch East Indies – no roots, no knowledge, no idea really – before he started this project. Yet he was the right man to work with the extensive collection of private films from the Dutch East Indies.
Since the 1980s, he has been converting private films into works of art, with which he sheds new light on the history in question. He has also done this before with Dutch history, such as De maelstroom:a family chronicle of amateur films from the 1939-1942 period about the Jewish family Peereboom who died in the Holocaust.
A long run
Forgács has been working on the Dutch East Indies project for almost 20 years. Initially, the amateur film material would be edited for television. This plan was shelved because the subject was still too sensitive. 15 years later, the EYE dared to dedicate an exhibition to the subject. The film museum owns more than 100 hours of amateur footage from the Indies and wanted to show it to the public, but how do you approach that with amateur films?
Péter Forgács chose to design an installation instead of making a one and a half hour film. This enabled him to show much more archive material:a total of 6 hours, spread over 15 screens. Each screen “forms a universe in itself”, says Forgács:it tells a story in its own right. The videos you see are accompanied by comments from letters. These letters were written in the same period as the amateur films were made and were sent to relatives in the Netherlands. The letters mainly come from the collection of the Royal Institute for Linguistics, Land- and Ethnology (KITLV) in Leiden.
Research in letters, books and film archive
Eveline Buchheim, researcher at the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), has studied the collection and selected the letters for the project. In some cases the image material and the letter are from the same hand, but more often Péter Forgács has brought the two media together and edited it. He does not pretend to show 'true history'. His work is not an objective documentary but a personal interpretation of colonial history.
In order to understand the complexities of culture and history, Péter Forgács studied all the books he could find about the Dutch East Indies. He has come to the conclusion that history is not black and white:“You Dutch people don't have to romanticize the Indies, but you shouldn't be ashamed about the Dutch role in the East either. It's not just black and white, good versus bad, but a big gray area." Not a romantic paradise, but not a despicable colony either.
This vision is also reflected in the installations. We see happy Dutch people who behave kindly to their servants and talk smugly in the letters about the fact that there are servants at all. Many Dutch who had moved to the Indies were not used to that from home. That their children born in the Archipelago were, and treated the servants a lot more forcefully, is also reported with a tinge of shame. But it is just as easily written that the Indonesians do not have a nice character:hot-tempered, jealous and all in all a bad influence on Europeans.
Eight abortions
It is also special to see how white Dutch (totoks) and Indos (cross of white Dutch and Indonesian) interacted. According to the images, the colored Dutchman resembles the white Dutchman:they party together, drive a car together (of which there are many more drivers in the Dutch East Indies than in the Netherlands) and eat together. But in the meantime an anonymous Indo girl tells that the Dutch boys run away from her when it concerns an honorable relationship. In the end, she manages to marry a 'real' Dutchman, but she had to pay a high price for this. In her efforts to ensnare a thoroughbred Dutchman, she has had eight abortions since she was a teenager and, in fact, she is in love with someone else entirely.
According to the Dutch letter writer Willem Walraven, the inferiority complex of the Indonesians runs deep and they all want to be white. The Indonesian women that the Dutch men hang out with for fun do not assume that they will become legitimate wives. To the letter writer's surprise, they find that no problem, as long as the man continues to take care of the children when he has had enough of her. (Walraven came to India as a KNIL soldier in 1915 and married the Indonesian Itih in 1922.)
All in all, the 'Slumbering Fire' exhibition is a special mix of penetrating stories and mainly cheerful images. However, it is not a historical or political statement:with his project Forgács wants to show normal life in the Dutch East Indies during the heyday of the colony. How Europeans treated each other and the Indonesians, the parties, family life, the extensive rice tables... In this way Forgács wants to add a new layer to the historiography of the Dutch East Indies and has succeeded in doing so.
- Willem Walraven, Letters – To family and friends 1919-1941, Publisher G.A. van Oorschot - Anonymous letters in Paul W. van der Veur, Race and color in Colonial Society:Biographical sketches by a Eurasian women concerning pre-World War II Indonesia in In Indonesia 8 (October 1969), p 69-80.- Other letters from the collection of the KITLV