Gustav Deutsch’s WELT SPIEGEL KINO # 2
Nico de Klerk – Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
The film that inspired the second episode of WELT SPIEGEL KINO is called SURABAYA. TRAFFIC ON THE GREAT MARKET, 15 JULY 1929. Besides a detached record of the city’s traffic, it also shows one of the city’s cinema entertainments – the Apollo – announcing THE UNHOLY THREE, starring Lon Chaney, and Fritz Lang's SIEGFRIEDS TOD.
For the characterization of a historical period some images are considered, if not intended, to be more meaningful. The excerpt of SIEGFRIEDS TOD in this episode is meant, I think, as such an image. But WELT SPIEGEL KINO handles such moments with care, never reducing them to mere common knowledge. Rather, the episodes are meant to get across a sense of contemporariness. The selected scene from SIEGFRIEDS TOD, in which Siegfried slays the dragon, is significant in the context of pre-independence Indonesia. It would be easy, of course, to conceive of the dragon as representing colonialism and of Siegfried as Indonesian nationalism. But for a non-European spectator in Surabaya, at the time, surely this would have been a reading from which all local colour has been erased, what with the cultural distance created by the very Caucasian hero. That is the reason, I suppose, why the editing forces the spectator to make a detour, by first situating these images in a local context to make such an interpretation more probable. Therefore, just before Siegfried's fatal blow to the dragon, the excerpt itself is interrupted by a clip from a Dutch East-Indies news film of a pageant featuring a Chinese dragon. Thus the dragon in SIEGFRIEDS TOD is transformed into an association likely to figure in the local, non-European reception of this German film. Only then can this scene be meaningfully connected to the ideal of independence. This way of editing, incidentally, was also used in Deutsch’s FILM IST. I would call it ‘cognitive editing’, as it traces thought processes. The sequence's significance, then, is marked by the intercutting and juxtaposition of these two clips of typically and western and typically eastern imagery. It is the only moment that their typicality has been purposefully deployed. After all, most images in this episode are a far cry from stereotypical colonial imaging. As a disinterested record of traffic, SURABAYA TRAFFIC… is one of the most ‘un-colonial’ films of the Dutch East-Indies. The other clips, however, have been culled from films of more explicit colonial intent. So what has rendered their purport inoperative?
The editing of the dragon sequence directed the spectator to an allegorical reading, a reading where meaning prevails over image. But the other archival excerpts are more equivocal, because their pictorial qualities have been foregrounded. Of course, as spectators we cannot eliminate our knowledge of this historical era, but the film has prevented these scenes, too, from being subjected to our preconceived notions. They mainly show people engrossed in an activity. All these measures contribute to present the scenes selected for this episode on their own terms and liberate them from well-known schemata. The clips are presentational rather than representational: they show people for what they are, not for what they stand for. Most of the other material inserted in this episode, then, depends for its effect on the transcultural nature of film images. The fact that most of the activities recorded involve an acknowledgment of the camera makes them appear even closer to us. The transcultural postulates contact; their posing points up their transculturality.
By virtue of that, WELT SPIEGEL KINO is an 'unknowing' film: it refuses to burden its images with destiny. Thus it evokes that the portrayed, everyday moments only vaguely register the monumental events that are the stuff of history books. On a given day in anyone's life, their significance is easily overlooked, denied, hence: inconsequential. So they challenge the spectator to take what he sees as mere situations, not determined by a wider social or historical frame. Not all colonial cinema is colonial all the time. And no colonial society is colonial all the time. And while the spectator is thus enabled to relate in his own way to the people he sees in front of him, he may realize that these moments contain possibilities somehow not pursued.