Through montage, Beerends employs archival images to authenticate the film’s narrative around these topics, and to reveal the power relation between the Dutch and the Indonesians that lurks just below their surface.
The montage that perhaps does this most clearly and affectively comes halfway into the film, when WWII has broken out and news reaches Indonesia that the Netherlands are occupied by Germany, and the Dutch start to lose their grip on the colony. In her voice-over, Alima explains: “More and more people around me wonder why they are still in charge here, as if a suitcase has been opened up, full of hidden grief and suppressed thoughts.” As she speaks about the suitcase of hidden grief, the camera focuses on a young babu sitting by a playing Dutch child (fig. 48). The camera cuts to a close-up image of the girl’s face, revealing her mournful expression, just as Alima says “suppressed thoughts” (fig. 49). Melancholic music swells, and a montage of different footages of babus follows. One sequence shows a babu being kicked over by a Dutch man as she bends over a pile of kapok fibre in the garden, and another shows a Dutch man mimicking and mocking an Indonesian woman as she faces him (fig. 50-51). More sequences follow of colonials being carried or served by Indonesians, lingering on the tired facial expressions of the workers as they do so. These segments interject footage of a winding road, filmed from a car navigating its many twists and turns, adding a sense of endlessness and entrapment to the sequences it cuts between. Montage here functions as a means for Beerends to deconstruct one memory of colonial Indonesia and substitute it with another. Instead of the romantic picture of benevolent colonials treating their servants like family, the film here presents its audience with the darker side of colonial households —from the point of view of the colonial subject.
According to Stoler and Strassler, this ‘Dutch myth’ of the loving, gentle babu who felt herself as part of the family and ‘loved the Dutch child as her own’ generally does not match up with the accounts given by babus themselves (Stoler & Strassler, 2000; 18). The cozy images of servants holding Dutch babies in the Javanese
‘gendong’ manner (carrying an infant in a long cloth wrapped snugly about the woman's body) found in Dutch family albums or footage clashed with the descriptions given by former servants about performing childcare tasks, the majority of which said they had not been allowed to hold the babies in their care in this way (Stoler & Strassler, 2000; 19-20). Most women were surprised and skeptical when told about these images, telling stories not of cozy intimacy but of how contact between children and servants was carefully controlled; one interviewee recalled wet nurses being required to change into clean white clothes before breastfeeding Dutch babies so that the infants would be protected from the seep of their sweat (Stoler &
Strassler, 2000; 22). Only a few recalled snapshots being taken; no one had a picture of herself with the family for whom she worked. When asked if she had been photographed with her employers, another
interviewee scoffed that “Dutch people would never have wanted a picture with Javanese!" because Javanese and Dutch were simply not allowed to “mix”. As their findings seem to suggest, the Dutch colonials filming their servants were perhaps those more comfortable or fond of them, and more open to Indonesian ways of life than what was generally the attitude among colonials. It also suggests that cozy imagery was enjoyed and cherished by Dutch colonials exclusively, and that these images are mostly at odds with the memories former servants have of domestic labour (Stoler & Strassler, 2000; 20).
An ethical approach to archival appropriation
Given that the narrative of They Call Me Babu may not reflect the general experience of babus, the ethics of remediating archival material to support it come into question. What would the persons whose image is being used within the film feel about this remediation? Is it right for They Call Me Babu to use the images of real women, real families and their households, in order to support our imaginings of the life of a fictional woman?
In Ethics & The Archive, Ciara Chambers writes about the ethics of ‘archival appropriation’, arguing that the context of the film and its intention oftentimes determines whether its appropriation of archival footage is acceptable practice (Chambers, 2020; 135). In formulating an ethical approach to media culture, Nick Couldry suggests that accuracy, sincerity, and care are the three key values underpinning media ethics (Chambers, 136). According to Couldry, professional producers and ‘anyone who acts with and through media, including digital media platforms’ must respect these key values (Couldry, 2013; 40).
They Call Me Babu certainly has good intentions, in that it aims to tell the history of babus that would otherwise be forgotten. It approaches its subject matter with sincerity and care, as its main aim is to put forward the stories of the many young Indonesian women that worked for Dutch colonial families that would otherwise go untold. What is more, the Dutch version of the film includes a disclaimer in the after credits, which reads: “The archival images are merely used to tell a fictional story. Its content does not rest on the real lives of the persons pictured within them” (my translation). This disclaimer makes clear that the narrative is fictional, and its sincere intention not to mislead audiences or harm stakeholders.
Yet rather than attempting to offer historical accuracy, the film seems to blur fact and fiction. The archival footage is given a personal story as if experienced from the Indonesian perspective, yet this story may obscure the stories of the real people in the footage. The film relies heavily on the family films of one family in particular, with the images of their life and travels between Indonesia and the Netherlands serving as the backbone of the film’s narrative. Although the same family members feature over and over again in the film and become recognisable to the audience, they are rendered anonymous stand-in figures for the story being put across. The film makes no mention of who this family is, in the credits or anywhere else — and perhaps not without reason. Within the narrative, Alima’s employers are often shown expressing common Dutch attitudes of the time. For instance, upon returning to Indonesia from the Netherlands where she was given free time, Alima asks the mother of the family for a day off. She responds by angrily telling Alima that different rules apply here, and later into the film she cries that Indonesian independence fighters are “stealing our land”; harbouring the belief Indonesia belongs under Dutch rule. The film’s narrative thus speaks of the tense relationships between Alima and the family she works for, yet the audience has no idea of the real relationships between the persons of this family, or the attitudes they held. As such, their anonymity protects surviving family members and stakeholders of this original footage from moral judgement; rather than referring to the conduct of this particular family, the images are taken to show the general trend of colonial life. Thus, the fact that these images have been included within the national archive, travelling from personal into public memory, is precisely what makes They Call Me Babu possible. Due to this shift in their
signification, Beerends is able to utilise these images without offending or ‘calling out’ the families who produced them. The anonymity of the real persons pictured affords Beerends the freedom to construct a new personal and particular narrative, supported by real and ‘authentic’ imagery.
Reworking colonial traces
Archival footage of the Dutch East Indies and its inclusion within national archives establishes colonial living and Dutch colonial nostalgia as part of the Dutch heritage. These nostalgic colonial films oftentimes celebrate colonial life, while obscuring the darker side of their history. Colonial era footage oftentimes presents exotic others, romanticising and fetishising the colony and its subjects. As a result, the preservation of such films can fuel social sentiments and political movements that seek to ‘return’ the individual, the nation, or the world to an idealised past (Baron, 2014; 169). It is precisely because of the power these colonial images hold that makes the telling and retelling of the stories surrounding them so vital.
Compilation films have the ability to use propagandistic imagery and ‘turn it against itself’, as Noordegraaf says (Noordegraaf, 2009; 8). In reworking colonial footage, compilation films transform the symbolic investment of coloniality within them (Schefer, 2016; 26). In the case of They Call Me Babu, images that originally celebrated colonial life now demonstrate the circumstances in which young babus lived. Where these images focused on the experiences of Dutch colonial families, they now give rise to an imagining of what the experiences of colonial subjects might have been. By cutting and editing the archival footage, the film disrupts the original function, meaning and ideological representation of the images, and attempts to retell the colonial history from an Indonesian perspective.
In this way, the film draws the audience’s attention to the fact that the focus has not been on the figures in the background; that this film is artificially trying to do so by lingering on the sparse images of babus, making them the subject rather than part of the scenery. Absent from the archive as subjects in their own right, the images that are available of these women are always lacking as they are taken from the colonial perspective, in the interests of colonial families and the memories they wanted to preserve (Baron, 2014; 157). Beerends attempts to fill this lack, by bringing the fictional personal story of a babu to bear on these lacking archival documents, to give them new meaning. The film places ‘a single fictional figure in a space in which many very real figures once stood but were not acknowledged or their traces preserved in the archive’, and hereby fleshes out the missing histories of babus (Baron, 2014; 158). Alima functions as ‘a placeholder for those women who existed but were never admitted into the archive’, except as part of the backdrop of the colonial home. She becomes ‘a metaphor for the literal women whose stories are irretrievable.’(Baron, 2014: 158)
As we lose access to the stories and testimonies of those who lived during Dutch colonial times, researchers continue to struggle to make sense of the traces that remain. When it comes to collective memory, Paul Ricoeur points out that archival documents are just as instituted and no less edifying than monuments are, with regards to power and those in power (Ricoeur, 2006; 68). Ricoeur argues that it is the task of the researcher to discover the monument hiding behind the document. Beerends, who is of both Indonesian and Dutch heritage, occupies a unique position as an intercultural film director. According to media theorist Laura Marks, this position allows Beerends to interrogate the historical archive in order to read intercultural histories in its gaps, ‘or to force a gap in the archive so that [she has] a space in which to speak’ (Baron, 2014; 160). Instrumentalising the voice of Alima, Beerends has taken many creative liberties in order to breathe life into the archive, and force a gap in order to open up a future space from which postcolonial filmmakers can speak.
Despite the inauthenticity of its narrative, They Call Me Babu thus still offers what Baron calls 'an entry point into a past that has been obscured’ (Baron, 2014; 160). Enmeshing its many archival segments, the film transforms them into false metaphors that nevertheless serve an historical, political, and emotional purpose (Baron, 2014; 160). Rather than trying to contain the intended meanings of its appropriated films, the film appropriates them in order to imagine what the experience of a babu herself may have been. They Call Me Babu attempts to offer one coherent narrative by way of them, yet it is also made clear that the persons in the images are not Alima, nor are the images used reducible to her particular story. According to Baron, a confrontation with the gaps in the historical record is that which can touch the audience, producing an
‘affective charge of investment in the awareness of what cannot be retrieved’ (Baron, 2014; 160). As Baron theorises, the affective power of archival images lies in their partiality, which in turn gives rise to the archive affect. Just as with Landsberg’s ‘affective engagement’, the archival affect can only take hold if a
fundamental distance to the past is maintained. In other words, the unbridgeable gap between past and present, and that between past events and the partial traces that remain, is made visible. By maintaining this awareness of the inaccessibility of the past yet still enacting the uncanny partial presence of the past through its traces, compilation films like They Call Me Babu create a powerful nostalgia which allows the audience to imagine and enter into a past that not only can never be recovered but, at least in its idealised state, also never was (Baron, 2014; 169).
Furthermore, the disembodied voice of Alima adds another element of distance. While the personal story in this emotive voice affords the film a sense of intimacy and an aura of authenticity, we never see the ‘real’
Alima as her thoughts, feelings and experiences are constantly being expressed through different stand-in girls, women, landscapes, or even the camera itself. Alima’s voice is a ‘voice of abstraction’; ‘a voice which proclaims its absence with each word’(Stewart, 1993; 22). Through her voice, Alima and her experience is to be found in everything, and yet she herself is located nowhere in the images. They Call Me Babu presents the story of Alima almost as a kind of melancholic dream, where the viewer can step into her emotional world. It does not pretend to explain the colonial era, but simply aims to offer a new account. The fictional narrative sheds new light on the images it incorporates, changing the questions we ask of the footage. For instance, when Alima travels to the Netherlands and is flooded with new words, impressions and experiences, the audience is made to see everyday things from her perspective. Upon seeing footage of a babu seeing snow for the first time, they are made to wonder, what must this have been like for this woman? Although perhaps not a straightforward media witnessing text, They Call Me Babu hereby does stand in for the absence of experience, paired with the awareness that we can never truly know the experience caught on film. The audience is herein the ultimate addressee and primary producer, as for each spectator it will have a unique
‘montage-consciousness’, piecing together the meaning of the compilation film and its personal narrative for themselves (Noordegraaf, 2009; 11).
Conclusion
Constructed entirely from archival footage, They Call Me Babu presents a new narrative concerning the Dutch colonial past with Indonesia. Predominantly made up of footage taken from Dutch colonial family films and building on the authentic traces within the archival material itself, director Sandra Beerends remediates these traces in order to support her fictional story of a young Indonesian babu. Speaking softly in Indonesian, the voice of Alima guides the film, stringing together the various footages to tell the unheard story of many babus. Alima’s voice-over lays an alternative narrative over the top of the interpretations of the footage intended by the original producers of the footage. While the footage itself was originally taken from the colonial perspective, its images now serve to bring into focus the story of a colonial subject told from her own perspective. The archival footage speaks of the colonial experience, but now it is made to speak to that of the colonial subject — making present that which is glaringly absent from the archive.
The film herein replaces the original colonial nostalgia behind the footage with a new kind of nostalgia; the intimate, personal monologues Alima directs to her late mother express her sense of loss, and her words imbue the images with a nostalgic yearning. By telling a singular personal story, They Call Me Babu creates affect, hereby bringing the colonial past back into the realm of the personal and the particular. The accounts and stories Alima tells are also evocative of Indonesian folk tales and traditions, and involve themes such as listening to the Indonesian landscape. By way of these Indonesian elements, music and voice-over, Beerends hopes to show the colonial history from a new, Indonesian perspective.
However, Alima’s voice-over is perhaps problematic precisely in that it stands in for the voices of the
thousands of Indonesian women who worked as babus. It herein alludes to the notion of a singular, authentic, homogenous Indonesian voice that can encompass all of theirs (Brunow, 2015; 140). It privileges this single voice which, along with the music of the soundtrack, connects the collage of archival fragments through the creation of sound-bridges. Questions concerning the people in the footage or the people filming are rendered irrelevant, because it is not their particular stories that are the focus for the genre of colonial home movies, nor for this compilation film. Nonetheless, even though it may not be reflective of the general experience of babus, They Call Me Babu’s fictional narrative is based on ‘authentic’ testimonies, and its voice-over, music and sound design together create a powerful affect in the viewer. The ‘inauthentic’ creative liberties taken by Beerends in the creation of this story give rise to an authentic imagining, as the interplay between narrative, images and sounds speak to the imagination and empathic sense of the audience. The cultural elements to the narrative play into this also, with Indonesian folk tales, traditions and arts providing further insights into the differences between Dutch and Indonesian attitudes.
Through the film, the audience is invited to feel for and identify with the fictional Alima, encouraging the Dutch public to perceive of colonial times as a shared history with Indonesia which is worthy of
remembrance. The narrative it presents challenges Dutch audiences, but also Indonesian and international audiences, to further investigate the complexities of colonial history, and how it was experienced by the people who lived it. As this history becomes less and less readily available to us through live witnesses, compilation films can act as a powerful tool to reimagine these histories, and to push for the construction of a new, shared memory frame around them.
THESIS CONCLUSION
As this thesis demonstrates, film projects such as the Anne Frank video diary and They Call Me Babu can be seen as responding to the so-called ‘end of the age of witness’, which poses new challenges to Dutch
memory culture surrounding both the Holocaust and colonial histories. Both case studies pertaining to this thesis put forward a personal story, told through an affective personal mode of address. By offering a singular, emotive account and highlighting particularities, each aims to shift the perspective on the traumatic histories they represent, and to enable an ‘authentic’ experiencing of the past. Through the interplay between images, music and narrative, they evoke feelings of melancholy and nostalgia in the viewer. The telling of a personal story in this way humanises a victim of historical events, and invites the audience to relate to their experience.
The case studies involve both fictional and ‘authentic’ elements, which allow their personal stories to impact audiences. The Anne Frank video diary achieves its unique affective mode of address by way of a fictional premise. This creative liberty allows the series to remediate both the diary of Anne Frank and contemporary vlog culture, bringing a younger generation into contact with her story and by extension the history of the Holocaust. Through this new medium, the story is presented to the audience as if directly relayed by Anne to the camera in Dutch, cultivating a sense of intimacy and encouraging them to identify with Anne. The stories put across within the series are authenticated by the ties to real diary passages, real spaces of Anne Frank’s life and real traces within the Anne Frank House. The narrative of They Call Me Babu on the other hand is entirely fictional, albeit based on real testimonies and told by way of authentic archival footage from Dutch national archives. Through the medium of compilation film, director Sandra Beerends constructs the personal story of Alima; an Indonesian nanny to a Dutch colonial family. An intimate voice-over spoken in Indonesian which supposedly represents an Indonesian viewpoint, is brought to bear on footage originally captured from the Dutch colonial perspective. The original footage from the Dutch East Indies authenticates the story being put across, and the emotive voice of Alima invites the audience into her experience, hereby encouraging them to look at Dutch colonial history from the perspective of the colonial subject. In the remediation process of both, hypermediacy serves to create immediacy. Both projects forefront the way in which they rework earlier media, promising their audience a more immediate and authentic experience by way of this remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999; 17).
However, the process of remediation behind the two case studies differs greatly due to the current position their respective histories hold within Dutch memory culture. While the Anne Frank video diary reenacts the well known story of Anne Frank as told in her diary, They Call Me Babu re-appropriates archival material to reveal stories that up until now have received little exposure. Within the Netherlands and Europe, Holocaust remembrance has been given a central position in the culture. The Holocaust proved instrumental to the formation of the European Union as a shared cultural trauma constructed out of the memory of WWII, unifying all of Europe as its memory community. Colonial histories, however, mostly fall outside of national or European remembrances. Lacking a clear memory frame that allows it to fit in with the dominant
discourses of Dutch history, Dutch colonial memory has not been given an official narrative, and the events of Dutch colonial history are still often contested. In the case of Indonesia, there is still no fixed memorial