In film records of the Dutch-East Indies, the isle of Bali takes up a special position. Here, more traditional colonial and exotic imagery takes precedence, representing the island as a kind of pre-lapsarian arcadia, an exotic – and erotic – idyll. Where most of the films of the Dutch colony showed a westernized country (as ‘a Dutch town during a heatwave’, as one writer put it), with modern factories and architecture, in the films of Bali all that has been edited out, irrespective of whether the film crews were from Holland, Germany or the United States.

Nico de Klerk