Abstract
The first fully-fledged documentary about the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca was produced in 1928 when the Dutch filmmaker George Krugers (1890–1964) accompanied Muslim pilgrims from the Netherlands East Indies to the Arabian Peninsula. In the late 1920s, when the film project was carried out, an increasing number of Muslims from the archipelago embarked on the hajj journey, which was closely supervised and administered by Dutch colonial institutions. To uncover the “colonial gaze” engrained in the film, this article addresses the filming circumstances, the documentary’s visual content, its intended audiences, and the reception of the moving images in the Netherlands. It draws on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, foregrounding the social, political, and technological agents and networks that undergird Krugers’ pioneering film project about the hajj.
1 Introduction
Although the history of film and cinema in the West has been thoroughly traced in recent years, early Southeast Asian film production and reception have remained largely unexposed despite the rise of postcolonial film historiographies. Consequently, the work of George Eduard Krugers (1890–1964), the editor of the first local Dutch East Indian film, has received only passing mention in scholarship about early Indonesian cinema (Biran, 2009; Woodrich, 2016). Nevertheless, his work, shaped in a spirit of technological innovation and ethnographical enquiry, deserves closer academic attention. Besides his involvement with establishing the nascent local film industry, Krugers was also the author of the first Dutch documentary about the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The hajj film, titled The Great Mecca Feast (Het Groote Mekka-Feest), is the only one of his seven major films not considered lost today. It was filmed, edited, and presented in 1928. Regarding its global scope, it can be labeled the most ambitious project of Krugers’ career as a filmmaker. For its realization, Krugers followed Muslim pilgrims from Bandung in the Dutch East Indies to Jeddah on a steamship and then further on camelback towards the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, recording his impressions with a cine-camera. Soon after his journey, he turned the moving images he had captured into a documentary of seventy-four minutes,2 which was presented to audiences in the Dutch East Indies and Europe.
A portrait photograph of George Krugers, photographer unknown
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.021In this article, I will critically investigate and contextualize this ground-breaking historical hajj documentary, offering an insightful contribution to academic discussions in a field of research situated at the intersection of colonial history and Islamic and media studies. Central to this article are the questions of why, how, and for whom Krugers produced the film. Following a recent call within media studies urging researchers to move beyond national boundaries towards a multi-dimensional and interdependent approach, which brings into the picture the histoires croisées of film and cinema (Biltereyst and Meers, 2020), I highlight the global and colonial circumstances in the early twentieth century that brought The Great Mecca Feast into existence. In the highly entangled world of the late Dutch colonial period where the film project was rooted, more Muslims were ruled by the leading imperial powers of the day than by any single independent Muslim state (Motadel, 2014). Krugers’ documentary, as my analysis will show, is imbued with these far-reaching colonial structures of the time and demonstrates how the Dutch, similarly to other contemporary Western colonial powers, tried to establish themselves as vigilant yet considerate guardians of the hajj (Vredenbregt, 1962; Chantre, 2009; Kane, 2015; Slight, 2015). The underlying imperial interests in the Muslim pilgrimage turn Krugers’ moving images from Mecca into a particularly elucidating case of a film marked quite literally with a sharp “colonial gaze.”
Instead of placing Krugers as the film producer in the spotlight of this analysis, my article approaches him as one of the many agents that made the realization of the film project possible. In fact, Krugers was connected to an enmeshed network of political actors, colonial agents and associations, and key figures from the academic world. These socio-political relations undergirded and determined Krugers’ entire documentary project surrounding the hajj. The network he relied on provided the logistical means for the film project, which is reflected in the production process and the reception of the hajj documentary. Importantly, Krugers’ film is not solely embedded in a human web of associations. Instead, his documentary project was made possible through heterogeneous agents including elements of the non-human material world such as the colonial institutions, economic circumstances of the day, political relations, and the technological advancement of steamship and film technologies. To trace this complex web of associations as threats binding together the film fabric, I draw on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) in Reassembling the Social (2005). Latour’s approach is enlightening for my case study because he pays as much attention to the human components of a network as to non-human actors, both of which he perceives as equally “social.” The expansion of science and technology, Latour asserts, has particularly transformed society and created new social relations. Therefore, he calls for a new social theory that does justice to the decisive impact of technological innovations. As my analysis of the film will show, human as well as non-human networks greatly affected the dynamics between Mecca, the Netherlands, and the Dutch East Indies and left an indelible mark on Krugers’ hajj film.
This case study is based on the visual and textual content of the film and archival research in the EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam, preserving the original film rolls and related material, as well as in the Special Collection of Leiden University Library, holding the archive of the Krugers family. I also refer to information from the Jeddah Situation Reports (1924–30), digitized by the Qatar National Library.3 In July 2020, I interviewed the filmmaker’s son, Dr. Jan Krugers, who provided further insights into his father’s motivations and the circumstances of the film’s production. To evaluate public reactions to the first film screenings in the Netherlands, I studied a selection of twenty-three Dutch articles appearing between 1928–39 in newspapers in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies. Analyzing this journalistic material allowed me to understand how the broader public received and discussed Krugers’ modern perception, technological mediation, and Orientalist portrayal of the hajj. All the newspaper entries were retrieved from the online archive Delpher www.delpher.nl with one exception found in the archives of the EYE Film Museum.
2 Colonial Era Film
When Krugers filmed Muslim pilgrims journeying from the Dutch East Indies to Mecca in 1928, he recorded and framed this annual long-distance trip and Islamic ritual through moving images for the first time in history. The “colonial gaze” shaping his portraiture of Mecca and the pilgrimage is also characteristic of photography – film’s sister discipline in terms of visual culture – of the Middle East from that period. Before turning to the development of silent film technology in the Dutch East Indies and sketching Krugers’ prominent position in the early history of the Indonesian film industry, I will elaborate on contemporary discussions within academia about new visual technologies of the nineteenth century and their intertwinement with the colonial project.
2.1 Photography, Film and the Colonial Gaze
A recent body of theory on visual material from the Middle East suggests that the development of new media technologies from the nineteenth century is tightly interlaced with colonial agendas and ambitions. Indeed, when studying the history of film’s precursor, photography, beginning with the Lumière brothers’ presentation of the daguerreotype to the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris on August 19, 1839, one notices a striking temporal congruency between the medium’s emergence and the reinforcement of colonial structures (Hahn, 2018). Despite their diverse manifestations, colonial photographs from the nineteenth century can be regarded as objects that carry power relations and shape European colonial forms of knowledge (Engmann, 2012). Photography was widely perceived as a “scientific” knowledge production machine, and therefore gladly used as a documentation technology to map terra incognita. Empires repeatedly employed photography to stress their hegemonic power over colonized subjects (Ryan, 1997). In the Dutch East Indies, the government saluted the camera as an object able to truthfully record Java’s antiquities, factories, hospitals, offices, schools, and the new railway lines and city trams (Taylor, 2015).
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when film technology was still in its infancy, photography was already closely related to archeology, art, and travel, and was often employed to stand at the service of empire, global politics, Orientalist scholarship, and war. Much of the scholarship foregrounding colonial domination and knowledge production in early photography and film is based on Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978), where he addressed the power dynamics between East and West, suggesting that imperial politics profoundly shaped Oriental imaginaries. Soon after its publication, scholars of art history have fruitfully engaged with Said’s theories to trace the entangled histories and interrelations between visual representation and a nineteenth-century European fascination with the “East.” The Saidan position was first prominently injected into the historical study of photography with Linda Nochlin’s The Politics of Vision (1983) and Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (1986). Said’s arguments have also been taken up in more recent theoretical debates within the field. Ali Behdad, one of the leading scholars in the field of Middle Eastern historical photography, convincingly argues that “photography transformed Europe’s distinctly Orientalist vision of the Middle East into images received as objective fact, a transformation that proved central to the project of European involvement in the region” (2016: p. 1). Behdad draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s work Imperial Eyes, in which she coined “contact zone” as the “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (1992: p. 4). Even though the photographic lens is not a unidirectional gaze, Behdad reads it as a “[signifier] of an unequal gaze between the European colonizer and the colonized” (2016: p. 8). It is “a racially constructed [way] of looking” (Belknap, 2014: p. 74) which in this article I refer to as the “colonial gaze.”
While Behdad maps local photographic production as part of the wider Orientalist project, other academics have taken a clear distance from the Orientalist approach to photography from the Middle East foregrounding the colonizer. Lucie Ryzova and colleagues (2015) call for an image “sans Orientalism” to highlight Middle Eastern agency in the photographic project. However, in my discussion of Mecca, a city of major colonial interest, the Orientalist framework that Behdad provides continues to be helpful. Inspired by one of Behdad’s articles where he uses Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to examine photographs from the Middle East, I aim to analyze the deeply colonial net of actors, institutions, and practices that shaped my case study. I broaden Behdad’s definition of the photographic camera as “an actor that made significant contributions to the orientalist network” (2017: p. 373) towards the cine-camera.
Pilgrims on the Arabian Peninsula in preparation for ʿĪd al-ʾAḍḥā, George Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Eye Film Museum, FOT54038Film and photography are two closely intertwined disciplines. From the onset, both disciplines were extensively used in correlation. In many colonies, film production often went hand in hand with photography. The example of the filmmaker Johann Christian Lamster (1872–1954) demonstrates this relationship famously in the case of the Dutch East Indies (Taylor, 2015). Krugers likewise engaged in photography besides his film project during his sojourn on the Arabian Peninsula. Thirty-one of the photographs that Krugers shot are found in the archive of the EYE Film Museum (FOT 54028–FOT 54060). Eleven more hajj photographs are kept in Krugers’ family archive in Leiden’s Special Collection (Or. 27.021). Some of these contain the inscription “MEKKA FILM” on their right button and are enumerated (Figs. 2, 6–7, 10–2).4 The available photographs feature Dutch East Indian pilgrims, including three portraits, and the local population of the Arabian Peninsula; they contain views of the cities Mecca and Jeddah and also bring the steamship companies into the picture. Some of the photographs were later used by Krugers for promotional purposes on his company’s customized letter and envelope paper (Fig. 13). Although film had replaced photography as the most advanced visual medium of the time, these images demonstrate that photography continued to be a handy tool, also for filmmakers.
2.2 The Emergence of Film Technology in the Dutch East Indies
The history of film technology dates to the 1890s when the medium was first invented. In 1895, the Skladanowsky brothers showcased their Bioscop, an early movie projector, in Berlin, and the Lumière brothers displayed their Cinématographe in Paris (Chapman, 2011). It was not long before this technological novelty entered the Dutch East Indies, where Krugers was born and raised. As early as October 1896, only ten months after the Lumière brothers’ premiere in Paris, the first moving picture shows were organized in colonial Java. Commentators writing in Dutch for early twentieth-century newspapers in the East Indies were quick to portray this technology as something inherent to “modern sciences,” thereby identifying modernity as both novel and innovative (Ruppin, 2017).
Movie, and by extension cinema, were the most modern forms of entertainment available at the time, and soon after the moving picture’s arrival in the Dutch East Indies, it became a popular leisure activity among urban residents particularly eager to embrace a modern lifestyle, and to be perceived as “cultural citizens.” As Ruppin (2017) has shown, the new moving picture technology appealed to audiences of all levels of colonial society – disregarding class, education, gender, and racial predispositions. Similar to earlier entertainment forms, cinema “helped to create temporary liminal spaces where audiences [from all strata of society] mixed” (Tofighian, 2013: pp. 46–7). Ethnicity, and more importantly, income, nevertheless remained important factors of segregation as spatial separation was maintained within the cinema.
In the early decades of Dutch East Indian cinema, the film program consisted mainly of movies imported from France, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and later also China (Woodrich, 2016). The moving images from abroad provided audiences on Java – despite their diverse cultural and economic backgrounds – with “the sense that they were on par with the great metropoles of Europe” and thus “participating in an ‘imagined community’ (…) forming bonds with anonymous cinema-goers in other parts (…) of the globe” (Ruppin, 2017: p. 478). The medium of film also opened up new ways to broadcast colonial propaganda. The Dutch colonial government largely funded informational films that brought into the picture an unhurried, peaceful, and well-managed quotidian perspective and an appealing image of the East Indies (Ray, 2021).
2.3 George Krugers, a Film Producer of the Avant-Garde
Krugers is to be situated in the realm between a local cameraman and a Western filmmaker. He was born in 1890 in Banda Neira, an island in the Dutch East Indies, to a Dutch family. His father, Johan Krugers, was a school principal born in ’s-Hertogenbosch while his mother, Aline Burgemeestre, came from a family with a long-standing history of involvement in the region.5 Little is known about Krugers’ childhood except that he was fascinated with technology. He studied architecture and gathered experience with photography, sound recording, and film. The latter discipline became the main object of his career as he turned into one of the first notable figures of the locally emerging film scene on the archipelago.
Dutch East Indian domestic film production began with a few trials in the documentary genre in 1911. However, it was only in 1926, with the release of Loetoeng Kasaroeng (The Misguided Monkey), that the local film industry of the Dutch East Indies started to become established. This film was produced under the direction of L. Heuveldorp, head of the Java Film Company, in cooperation with the cameraman and lab technician George Krugers. Only six months later, again under the banner of the Java Film Company, but this time with Krugers as an independent cinematographer, director, and screenwriter, the second domestic production was released: a film titled Eulis Atjih (Woodrich, 2016). Fueled by the positive reception of his work, including compliments from the famous and pioneering Dutch film producer Willy Mullens (1880–1952),6 Krugers decided to quit the Java Film Company in order to create his film business, the Krugers Filmbedrijf.
Once forming his independent company, the first project that the one-man Krugers Filmbedrijf launched was the documentary about the hajj. Krugers must have been aware of the extensive curiosity surrounding Mecca. For Westerners, on the one hand, as newspaper articles from that period suggest, the closed city epitomized Orientalist secrecy as well as colonial ambitions for political and religious controls. For Muslims, on the other – the majority unable to afford the costly journey – Mecca represented first and foremost the holy essence and origin of Islam and constituted a center for Islamic religious education. In light of this keen interest in Mecca, Krugers must have recognized a film project about the hajj as a lucrative avenue for starting his career. As a result, he decided to seize the opportunity and satisfy the presumably widespread quest for visual information about Mecca and the Muslim pilgrimage, both in the Dutch East Indies as well as the Netherlands.
Krugers during one of his film recordings, photographer unknown
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.021The Java Film Company, photographer unknown
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.0213 Filming the Pilgrimage to Mecca
Equipped with his Bell and Howe Eyemo 35 mm camera, Krugers commenced his film project in Bandung on February 3, 1928. The film he set out to produce forms part of the long-standing history of the documentary genre typical for the Dutch. According to Pattynama, “nowhere else in the world had there been such a long tradition in which film is used as a creative medium to capture reality” (2014: p. 137).7 To understand the personal, political, and religious circumstances shaping the documentary’s content, in the following, I will address the status of the city Mecca and the possibilities of hajj transportation before shedding light on Krugers’ colonial network of support enabling him to produce the film. Having direct access to the film material allows me to critically analyze the sequence of the hajj rituals and the portrayal of Muslim subjects presented in the documentary.
3.1 Mecca, the Pilgrims’ Destination
The Quran repeatedly establishes the special status of Mecca. With the holy sanctuary of the Kaʿba at its heart, it is considered the most sacred place in Islam. According to Islamic belief, one verse revealed in the year when Prophet Muhammad returned triumphantly to his native city declares Mecca as a place where unbelievers, including Christians and Jews, may no longer set foot (Hashmi, 2003).8 Only a limited number of advantageous European travelers – one of the most infamous having been Francis Richard Burton (1821–90) – managed to circumvent the rules, presenting themselves as Muslims at the city’s ports. The majority of non-Muslim Europeans could for centuries only create an image of the holiest city in Islam based on written travel reports or scarce paintings of Mecca available in Europe at the time.
Although Muslims were in theory allowed to enter Mecca freely, many didn’t have the chance to visit the holy city during the early centuries of Islam. Only a minute number of Muslim believers were able to embark on the arduous journey to Mecca and perform either the lesser pilgrimage, the ʿumrah, undertaken at any time of the year, or the greater pilgrimage, the hajj, occurring once a year during the last month of the Islamic calendar, ḏū al-Ḥiǧǧah. The expansion of transport networks over the course of the nineteenth century brought about significant changes in hajj mobility. With the proliferation of Western-originated technologies, Muslim societies underwent a ground-breaking phase of globalization, transforming Islam and the ummah into an increasingly global reality (Gelvin and Green, 2014). Muslims arrived in unprecedented numbers – nearly 300,000 by the turn of the century – to the Arabian Peninsula, transmuting Mecca into a city of global scope (Kane, 2015). While Mecca attracted skyrocketing amounts of pilgrims, the hajj traffic also grew exponentially in political and imperial importance.
Pilgrims from the Dutch East Indies had already engaged in the hajj during the nineteenth century, with an average of 2,000 pilgrims per year by the middle of the century. The number continued to increase in the last quarter of the century. From 1910 onwards, Dutch East Indian pilgrims at times accounted for about half of the total number of overseas pilgrims to Mecca. Following WWI, a series of active push-factors considerably animated the interest in the hajj. Increasing prosperity, improved hygiene, and enhanced security conditions figured among those factors, leading to a rise in the number of pilgrims (Vredenbregt, 1962). Consequently, the Dutch East Indian pilgrimage witnessed a significant boom and reached record numbers between 1926–7, unsurprisingly, the years directly preceding Krugers’ 1928 hajj film.
It is not only the city’s religious significance and the obligatory character of the hajj ritual that attracted elevated numbers of pilgrims from the Dutch East Indies during the nineteenth century and later. Vredenbregt (1962; 1964) claims that the hajj also had an emancipatory and unifying function as it offered new ways of communication between the disparate islands of the archipelago. In some cases, the journey to Mecca served other political purposes, allowing, for instance, the muqīms, those who prolonged their stay on the Arabian Peninsula after performing the hajj, to escape the jurisdiction of colonial authorities. Furthermore, for the newly emerging self-confident Indonesian middle class in the villages accumulating wealth through commercial activities such as rubber cultivation, the pricey pilgrimage became an expression of social status and a symbol of prestige.
3.2 The Kongsi Tiga and the Dutch Shipping Monopoly on the Hajj
During the late nineteenth century and thereafter, pilgrim travel from the Dutch East Indies to Mecca generally happened on board the Kongsi Tiga, a joint venture between the so-called Nederlandsche Stoomvaart Maatschappij Oceaan, the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, and the N. V. Rotterdamsche Lloyd. Together, they formed a hajji shipping pool known as the “Trio Line” (Alexanderson, 2014). Krugers’ photographic and filmic recordings reveal his active interest in Dutch steamship companies. This interest may in fact be explained by his family ties. It is plausible that the idea for his hajj film originated, at least partially, with his newly-wed wife Elisabeth Schut who had previously contributed in different ways to her husband’s cinematographic undertakings. Their son reported:
my mother’s father was the concierge of the Scheepvaarthuis [shipping house]. That was a big building in Amsterdam which housed the headquarters of five shipping companies. My mother cleaned the rooms of the directors of the shipping company. (…) Undoubtedly, she must have told them that she was going to Indonesia to marry a man who did filming and the shipping companies paid for her tickets when she left in 1925. (…) Even though my mother never explicitly told me, I am convinced that the Scheepvaartunie [Shipping Union] was really involved in this film.9
Krugers’ 1928 journey to Jeddah happened on board the freighter SS Madioen, a shipping machine of the Koninklijke Rotterdamsche Lloyd. He must have received gratis tickets if his son’s suspicions about Dutch shipping companies partly sponsoring the documentary are true. This assumption is indeed valid for cogent reasons: the directors of large shipping companies, as several newspapers reported, were present during the film première.10 One newspaper even explicitly states that Krugers created the film on behalf of the Kongsi Tiga (Bataviaasch niewsblad, 1928; 1929). Forms of collaboration between transportation and film companies were not an exception at the time when Krugers shot his hajj film. Many films produced in the Dutch East Indies were a colonial propagandistic type commissioned by various agencies (Ray, 2021). In its early years, film offered powerful opportunities to promote travel and tourism. Transport companies perceived lucrative opportunities for marketing their travel packages through the medium of film. They often agreed to offer film companies a helping hand in exchange for promoting their services in the film. They collaborated on film projects, “sponsor[ing] these films with the specific intention of encouraging tourism along their routes” (Gunning, 1996: quoted in Martens 2020: p. 8).
The couple George Krugers and Elisabeth Schut, photographer unknown
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.021Even though the hajj, as a religious ritual, cannot be labeled a conventional form of tourism, its organizers were similar to other travel agents searching for different ways to advertise services and maintain a monopoly over hajj traffic. After all, transporting pilgrims from the Indian Archipelago to the Arabian Peninsula was a lucrative business that colonial powers repeatedly targeted to fill state pockets. Besides the financial benefits, the Dutch also aimed to remain a dominant maritime player for political and imperial reasons. In the context of increasing anxiety over their undermined power position in Southeast Asia, the Dutch, like other imperial powers, aimed to present themselves as “patrons of the hajj” to solidify their colonial control position.
Nederlandsche Stoomvaart Maatschappij Oceaan, one of the Kongsi Tiga steamship companies organizing pilgrims transport from the Dutch East Indies to Jeddah, George Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Eye Film Museum, FOT54037Pilgrims and Dutch colonial officers on board the Kongsi Tiga, George Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Eye Film Museum, FOT54043However, throughout the 1920s, Indonesian Muslims increasingly welcomed the idea of indigenous shipping companies headed by Islamic organizations deemed more amenable to pilgrim interests. The Kongsi Tiga began to be publicly criticized in local Muslim newspapers for squeezing Muslim pilgrims into their ships like “herrings in a tin” and not accommodating the religious passengers with adequate circumstances proscribed by the Islamic religion, such as the segregation between men and women on board, among other reasons. With the arrival of non-European competitors dedicated to the needs of Muslim customers in the market, the Dutch hajj transportation monopoly started to be seriously threatened (Alexanderson, 2014). Good advertisements were an arguably efficient means for the Kongsi Tiga to keep offers attractive to Muslim pilgrims and not lose customers to newly emerging and indigenously-owned shipping companies. The medium of film was highly popular and fashionable in the Dutch East Indies, thus allowing it to reach wide pools of potential clients. In this context, it is unsurprising that Krugers was asked to produce a film, about the Muslim pilgrimage. Commissioned by the Dutch-owned shipping conglomerate, it at least partially served promotional purposes.
3.3 A Colonial Network of Support
Filming in Mecca posed political and religious challenges for Krugers, who was raised in a Roman Catholic family. Before embarking on the three-week ship journey through the Indian Ocean, he carefully prepared his trip. To prevent attracting unnecessary attention as a non-Muslim, Krugers got circumcised11 and much like other Dutchmen who entered Mecca during the late colonial period,12 adopted a common Muslim name, Abdul Wahid (Jeddah Situation Reports, 1924–30). Krugers used a tightly-knit social network that connected the Dutch East Indies with Mecca and the Netherlands to gather information about the Muslim pilgrimage, its itinerary, the special clothing, and the political peculiarities of the time. While still in Java, he consulted the influential religious figure Haji Agus Salim (1884–1954), who later became a driving force behind the Indonesian independence movement. Haji Agus Salim had intimate knowledge about the hajj, which he performed five times while living in Jeddah. Based on his rich experience of the Arabian Peninsula, he could inform Krugers – probably better than anyone else in Batavia – about ritual aspects of the Muslim pilgrimage (Laffan, 2003). Together with other members of Šarikat al-Islām, Haji Agus Salim signed a recommendation letter to facilitate Krugers’ quick admittance to Mecca (Jeddah Situation Reports, 1924–30).
Upon arrival on the Arabian Peninsula, Krugers was further assisted by several people who, in one way or another, helped him with the film production. Some, similar to Haji Agus Salim, supported his project by serving as intermediaries, others possibly as actors or by providing him with useful news about local events. For one scene, Krugers was located on an elevated rooftop position with his camera, the exact right time to capture Ibn Sāʿūd’s festive arrival to Mecca by car, proof that he was surrounded by a benevolent network of informants who helped him to spot the most favorable camera angles. The local authorities were evidently informed about the filming project but confidently assumed that Krugers took no interest in political questions (Ibid.). King Abdul Aziz must even have appreciated the promotional potential of Krugers’ film work for his political agenda.
The presence of Daniel van der Meulen (1894–1989), the Dutch consul in Jeddah, imprints, similarly to King Abdul Aziz’ appearance, the political and late colonial power dynamics of the day onto Krugers’ hajj documentary. At the end of the documentary, when the pilgrims are settled on the ship ready to travel home, he makes an ostentatious entry into the scene. Distinguishing himself from the pilgrims transported by traditional dhows, the diplomat made use of a modernized vehicle: a motorboat. Another Dutchman leaving an undeniable mark on the film is the Orientalist scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), at the time undoubtedly the most influential “spider” in the web of connections between the Dutch East Indies, Mecca, and the Netherlands (Krugers, 2017). Throughout his entire career, he used to be current with all activities relating to Islam in the archipelago, including the hajj. Considering the similarity in the titles, there is no doubt that Krugers was acquainted with and inspired by Snouck Hurgronje’s dissertation about the hajj named The Meccan Feast (Het Mekkaansche Feest) published in 1880, more than thirty years before his almost homonymous film The Great Mecca Feast saw daylight.
3.4 The Portrayal of Hajj Rituals
The film produced from Krugers’ journey is divided into four acts. In the first scene, a handful of men, possibly actors, book the hajj journey with a local travel agency. Accompanied by other Muslims, they travel via train from Bandung to the crowded harbor of Tandjong Priok where they board a steamship. Before crossing the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea area to arrive at the port city of Jeddah, the ship picks up passengers from Palembang and Sabang. The second act offers insights into different facets of life in Jeddah, showing some of the city’s consulates, its inhabitants, marketplaces, and suburbs. Camels are prepared for the trip through the desert in the direction of Mecca. The first images of Mecca – street views, the Zamzam Well, a local school and, most importantly, the Kaʿba – are revealed at the end of the act. The following act begins with a short but relevant episode of King Ibn Sāʿūd’s arrival to Mecca by car. Krugers’ camera then follows the pilgrims performing religious duties such as the Friday Prayer, the ṭawāf, the saʿī, i.e., the run between Marwa and Safa, as well as the sacrificial slaughtering. Krugers likewise shoots the pilgrims’ journey to Medina, the prophet’s city, and shows how they pitch tents on the plain of ʿArafāt. The fourth and last act displays the pilgrims’ overnight stay at Muzdalifa and the subsequent visit to Mina for the ritual lapidation of the devil. After a farewell visit to Mecca, the pilgrimage is completed, and pilgrims set out for their journey home. The film ends with a glorious reception at their home ports in Belawan and Tandjong Priok.
The documentary contains no sequences filmed within a mosque. Al-Masǧid al-Ḥarām, filled with people performing ṭawāf,13 and in another scene, the ǧumuʿa prayer, is recorded only tentatively and from afar. In two instances during the film, Krugers shows a close-up of a small community of men and another of women praying together outside. Moments of personal invocation, duʿa – images that were prominently staged in Orientalist photography (Christian and Mittermaier, 2017) – are absent in Krugers’ film, even within the context of the ziyāra to the prophet’s grave. Instead, in Medina, the camera draws attention to the exterior architectural peculiarities of the Green Mosque.
Despite the assistance Krugers received in preparing his documentary, the portrayal of Muslim hajj rituals is not entirely accurate. For example, an incorrect sequence of the hajj rituals leads the audience to erroneously believe that the prescribed slaughtering of the animals occurred before the day of ʿArafāt. Krugers likewise does not distinguish between mandatory rituals, farḍ, and those that are optional, sunnah. Surprisingly, the wuqūf, or act of standing in prayer on the open plain of ʿArafāt for the majority of the day, does not figure in the film even though this element constitutes a crucial part of the hajj (rukn al-ḥajj); its non-performance invalidates the entire pilgrimage.14 Neither are the communal ʿīd al-Aḍḥā prayers and subsequent shaving or cutting of the hair portrayed. Furthermore, The Great Mecca Feast remains a somehow ironic title since the festive character of the ʿīd day is not put forward in the images. The most celebratory scene in the film, aside from Ibn Sāʿūd’s orchestrated entrée onto the decorated streets of Mecca, of course, is the recording of the Jeddah street festival, which according to Krugers’ captions, resembles an “old-Dutch fair.”
A street view of Jeddah where the pilgrims prepare for their journey through the desert, Georges Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.021A caravan of pilgrims traversing the desert to reach Mecca, Georges Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.021A festive scene, George Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Eye Film Museum, FOT540394 Reception of the Film
The Great Mecca Feast was anchored in a tightly-knit colonial network spanning the Dutch East Indies over Mecca to the Netherlands. The colonial aspects are not only reflected in the film’s content and the social circles supporting the project but it is likewise illustrated in the reception of Krugers’ work in the Dutch East Indies and the Netherlands. In the following, I will turn to the audiences of the documentary and also shed light on public reactions to the film material when it was shown during the late 1920s–30s.
4.1 Showing Mecca in the Dutch East Indies
After staying abroad for almost half a year, Krugers returned from Mecca to Bandung on July 8, 1928. He quickly turned the raw material he had carried from his trip into a documentary, which reportedly was shown all over Java.15 On August 17, 1928, a screening – presumably the very first one – was scheduled at the Deca-Park in Batavia (Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, 1928). Under which circumstances this and other early film shows in the Dutch East Indies occured and what kind of audiences they attracted continues to be a subject for further inquiry. What his Muslim public in Java, especially those who had traveled to the Arabian Peninsula themselves, thought after watching the documentary also remains unknown. Did critical voices rise to address the slightly distorted portrayal of hajj rituals and the very colonial perspective on the pilgrimage, or was the audience primarily fascinated by the silently moving view of the holy sites? Considering the further development of Krugers’ career, I can at present only make a couple of tentative assumptions about The Great Mecca Feast’s reception in the Dutch East Indies.
Krugers held close, but in the colonial context ambivalent, connections with the local community of Bandung. He targeted most of his productions towards indigenous audiences instead of some colleagues in the field who preferred aiming for the more affluent ethnic Chinese or European populations of the archipelago (Woodrich, 2016). Having been born and raised in the region, Krugers possibly identified as “native enough” to capably perceive and respond to the filmic interests of locals. His films definitely engaged with current topics ranging from popular culture to religion. Nevertheless, Krugers’ productions did not always meet the tastes of the locals. In many ways, his work was typical for European filmmakers in the Dutch East Indies who were, to quote Woodrich, “enthralled with ethnographic imagery” (2016: p. 12) on their quest to record reality, and therefore, less successful than the Chinese. It is known about some of Krugers’ movies that the audience spotted and criticized culturally inadequate elements. For example, in his 1931 film Karnadi Anemer Bangkok, an urban story adapted from a novel, Krugers included scenes of the main character eating frogs. This sparked an outcry among members of the Muslim community who considered frog meat ḥarām or forbidden. The incident heavily affected Krugers’ career; it brought him into financial difficulties, and some argue that it eventually led to the collapse of his company (Woodrich, 2016).16 In October 1932, his bankruptcy was publicly announced in the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad (1932).
Many of the films that Krugers intended for indigenous audiences, Woodrich notes, “were presented through the othering gaze of ethnography, and were thus generally received with indifference by their target audience” (2016: p. 9). Whether an indifferent attitude applied to the audience of the Mecca film is questionable considering the powerful images it contains from Islam’s geographical and spiritual center, a place of longing for countless devout believers in the Indian archipelago. Yet, Krugers’ position as a Dutchman in Mecca turns him into an anthropological outsider and his “othering gaze” lingers throughout the documentary. It can be best read in the 113 intertitles accompanying the images. In Dutch, the language of the colonizer, they guide the audience through the silently moving pictures. Often, they serve to make up for color and sound, the inevitable technical limitations of the day. When Krugers travels on board the steamship, for example, he records black-and-white sunsets that the viewer’s imagination can color with the help of his captions. When in Medina, Krugers records how the muʾaḏḏin of the Green Mosque calls the community for prayer. Krugers’ written notes, in combination with the prolonged camera shots, almost provide a sensation of sound, certainly to the Javanese audiences who must have recognized the melody of the aḏān from domestic mosques.
4.2 The Film Première in the Netherlands: A Red-Carpet Event
A man of adventurous, entrepreneurial, and very ambitious character, Krugers wanted to gain a good reputation in the Netherlands for his work on the hajj. On September 12, 1928, he set out from Bandung via Marseilles to Rotterdam accompanied by his wife Elisabeth and their first son (De Locomotief, 1928; De Indische Courant, 1928). While they all stayed with his wife’s parents in Amsterdam, Krugers prepared himself to present his work to Dutch audiences. The first film screening of The Great Mecca Feast in the Netherlands was scheduled for November 8, 1928, in the foyer of Leiden’s Stadsgehoorzaal (city auditorium) (Het Vaderland, 1928a). The film debuted within the framework of the “Indian week” (De Tijd, 1928b), and considering the aristocratic audience, it may be labeled as the climax of Krugers’ filmmaking career.
The première was a red-carpet event with an honored and learned society invited (Het Vaderland, 1928a): “a large number of professors and representatives of the student corporations” and the then nineteen-year-old princess Juliana with a couple of her university friends (De Tijd, 1928a). Two weeks after the première, a newspaper reported that “almost all professors of the university (…) accompanied by their family [came to watch the hajj documentary], in addition to some hundreds of students” (Ibid.; 1928b). Alongside academics, representatives of the shipping companies and officials of the colonial services were eager to watch the film. Among them was the minister of colonies with representatives of his department, the former governor-general of the Dutch Indies, the Dutch consul of Jeddah, and members of the Eastern Society (Het Vaderland, 1928a). This audience manifestly highlights the colonial framework in which Krugers’ film project was embedded.
The most prominent and influential person present at the first screening of the film was the 71-year-old Snouck Hurgronje. After a notable diplomatic career in the service of the Dutch colonial government on the Indian archipelago, he was at the time of the film screening professor at the University of Leiden and enjoyed a remarkable academic reputation as a distinguished scholar of Islamic and Oriental studies. Despite his age, he was still deemed to be an absolute expert on any questions related to the Dutch East Indies, especially the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1885, he had spent more than five months in the holy city under the name of Abdul Ghaffar.17 With the assistance of the homonymous Meccan doctor Abdul Ghaffar, some of whose photographs he published under his name, Snouck Hurgronje became known as Mecca’s first Western photographer (Van Koningsveld, 1987; Van der Wal, 2011; Vrolijk, 2013; Van den Doel, 2021). Due to his intimate knowledge of Islam, the hajj, and the city of Mecca, Snouck Hurgronje was invited to hold an introductory lecture to Krugers’ “scholarly film.” Some press agencies emphasized the professor’s presence at the film première by having his name printed in a special font (Het Vaderland, 1928a). In view of his photographic and phonographic undertakings on the Arabian Peninsula, Snouck Hurgronje was considered Krugers’ precursor in terms of using new media in Mecca and as “the only one who is capable to judge over the cultural and technical value of this great film work” (De Tijd, 1928b).
As the newspaper entries published in the days following the film première suggested, during his inaugural talk to the film, Snouck Hurgronje must have underlined the role that the Dutch consulate in Jeddah, established in 1872, played in the hajj procedure: “the aim of [the consulate] is twofold, in the first place to monitor the huge number of Dutch subjects, but also, if needed, to provide help and assistance” (Het Vaderland, 1928a). Snouck Hurgronje himself had intensely collaborated with the consulate in Jeddah, which provided him with an important political network (De Tijd, 1928a). Another topic repeatedly mentioned in press articles concerning Krugers’ documentary is the discussion about the pre-Islamic rituals of the pilgrimage. Some newspapers proclaim that “the feast comprises remnants of stone worship, circumambulations, and running courses, now with a Mohammedan slant” (De Telegraaf, 1928; Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 1929). Krugers’ film itself reveals little about the pre-Islamic origins of the hajj; this information is a direct allusion to the oral introduction of Snouck Hurgronje, who had defended his doctoral dissertation on this topic in 1880.
4.3 Evaluation of the Film in Dutch Newspaper Articles
In general, The Great Mecca Feast was received very positively by Dutch audiences. During the première, the people attentively watched the film and loudly applauded (De Tijd, 1928a; Het Vaderland, 1928a). Krugers’ film was valued as a significant accomplishment, particularly for its mysterious content unveiling images “which otherwise stay completely concealed to the non-Mohammedans” (Het Vaderland, 1931).18 The newspaper De Tijd reported: “the intrinsic worth of this film work lies in the fact that it was produced in the focal point of Islam, where it is forbidden to photograph, let alone to film and where no Western ‘infidel’ is allowed to stay” (De Tijd, 1928b).19 Viewing the holy city through the documentary was a privilege felt by the audience and journalists who were fueled by the mysterious assumption that a film “is something special in a country where the Quran forbids making images of living beings” (Algemeen Handelsblad, 1928). In light of the “forbidden character” of Mecca, speculation arose about the circumstances of the filming procedure on the Arabian Peninsula. While some reviewers estimated that “Mister Krugers played a substantial part in the recordings, albeit many difficulties and great dangers had to be overcome” (Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, 1929), others seemed to have difficulties believing that all of the recordings had been made by Krugers himself: “insofar as it can be assumed that the entire recording, including those [scenes] in the forbidden holy places, were made by Mister Krugers, they form an eloquent example of his outstanding technique as a cameraman and film developer” (Ibid.).
A photograph of the Great Mosque surrounding the Kaʿba, George Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Eye Film Museum, FOT54034A street view with camels and children, George Krugers
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Eye Film Museum, FOT54046Negative critique about the Mecca film was addressed to “the weak, often troubled light” and the “redundancies” (Ibid.). Technical aspects were in fact the object of the most direct critique: in the recensions, one reads that the film missed “technical refinement” and that the captions needed “thorough revision” (De Telegraaf, 1928; Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 1929). Repeatedly, the film was accused of tediousness or “monotony” (Ibid.) and “long-winded repetitions” (Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, 1929). According to the taste of some, the first part of the documentary including preparations for the journey and the arrival in Jeddah, “should have been a little less detailed, which would have improved the clarity” of the film (Het Vaderland, 1928b). However, the critique was attenuated due to the presumed dangers that went hand in hand with the filming process:
of course, there are no cinematic qualities to praise here, yet one cannot expect too much when one reckons with the dangers that Mister Krugers had to contend with. If discovered, death penalty would most certainly have followed (Ibid.; 1931).
Even though at the time of the film’s release in the late 1920s, the hajj was – alongside mosques and the position of Muslim women – the most discussed topic in connection with Islam in Dutch newspapers (Docter, 2018), most articles of my sample study on The Great Mecca Feast did not demonstrate a profound understanding of the Islamic rituals connected to the hajj and the beliefs behind the embodied practices. These elements attracted little attention in the advertisements and reviews of the film. Only a handful of newspaper entries explained the procedure of the pilgrimage and gave more detailed descriptions such as “the pilgrim’s special garment, a cloth around the loins and shoulders, the visit to the holy house, the circumambulation including the salutation of the holy stone, and the walk between two sacred sites” (Het Vaderland, 1928b). Journalists, presumably out of ignorance about the subject matter, hardly ever referred to the respective Arabic terminology: the Kaʿba, the iḥrām, al-ḥaǧar al-aswad, and the saʿī between Marwa and Safa.
An envelope with a view of Medina that Krugers printed for his company
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.0214.4 Fading Interests in the Film
Krugers saw a glowing future in The Great Mecca Feast. As soon as the film was released, he “negotiate[d] the right to exhibit [it] in different European countries and America” (Het weekblad cinema en theater, 1928, no. 253). In 1929, he furthermore expressed his intention to present the documentary at the International Colonial Exposition in Paris, 1931. Krugers’ chances of acceptance to the World Exhibition were in fact considered quite favorable (Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, 1929). However, despite the initial interest that audiences expressed in his film work, it did not yield the results Krugers desired. The film was screened a couple of times in different cities around the Netherlands before eventually fading into obscurity. It is only on the eve of WWII, after almost a decade of silence about The Great Mecca Feast, that the film reappeared shortly in the Dutch press. In October 1938, Krugers’ documentary was scheduled for a cinema show in The Hague (Haagsche Courant, 1938). Two months later, on Christmas, it was screened again, this time in the Northern Dutch city of Groningen (Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 1938). In the interim, Snouck Hurgronje had passed away, and the film was introduced by Van der Hoog, a bacteriologist by profession who had spent some time on the Arabian Peninsula where he, according to the press release, served as “physician of the Bedouin prince Ibn Saoud” (Haagsche Courant, 1938).20
The revived attention in 1938 for Krugers’ work may be best explained by another event that occurred earlier that year, a film project about Mecca undertaken by an Egyptian film company. In May and June 1938, a couple of Dutch newspapers21 published the headlines “Egyptian film society will lift the veil of secrecy” (Het Nieuws van de dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, 1938; De Tijd, 1938), a title somehow surprising considering Krugers’ earlier work. One of the articles stated that “[t]here are still places on earth that have hitherto stayed concealed from the human eye,” implying that Mecca was one of them. If one considers the expression “lift the veil” and “hitherto concealed from the human eye,” Krugers’ accomplishments seemed forgotten in 1938, at best sidelined, by the even more modern plans of an Egyptian film company that used an aircraft for filming.
Nevertheless, Krugers remained steadfast in pursuing a career as a filmmaker. After returning to the Dutch East Indies, he bought a sound camera – the latest technology of the day – and in 1931 he released Karnadi Anemer Bangkong, a comedy considered the first talkie of the Indies. The quality of his sound movies was not flawless, and alongside other factors, contributed to his bankruptcy. In 1935, he went to Hong Kong with renewed hope and the intention to sign a contract with a Chinese production company; however, the cooperation never took place as his business partner suffered a heart attack and passed away on the day when the work contract was to be signed. The family had no choice but to hastily quit Hong Kong for the Netherlands, leaving all equipment and film material behind.22 Het Groote Mekka-Feest might be the only one of Krugers’ productions that was not lost. Krugers had safely stored it in Amsterdam intending to gift it to the future queen of the Netherlands.23 After he died in 1964, his wife Elisabeth found the film rolls and offered them to the Dutch historical film archive where they are kept today as Krugers’ most significant legacy.
The Krugers family leaving Hong Kong for the Netherlands, photographer unknown
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.021George Krugers’ and Elisabeth Schut’s return tickets to Europe on the Japanese steamer Nippon Yūsen Kaisha
Citation: Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 3, 2 (2022) ; 10.1163/26666286-12340033
Leiden University Library, Or. 27.0215 Conclusion
This article analyzed and contextualized the first fully-fledged documentary about the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Krugers’ work illustrates how film technology, much like its sister discipline photography, formed part of the Dutch East Indian colonial structure, supervising the hajj during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The imperial politics of the day unmistakably affected Krugers’ portrayal of the religious ritual and also framed his depiction of the colonial other. I have argued that his film might be labeled an expression of a “colonial gaze” directed towards the hajj. This “colonial gaze,” as my case study has demonstrated, is deeply anchored in the imperial workings of the film’s production, distribution, and exhibition. To understand better the operational mechanisms of colonialism, I suggest following Latour, expanding the classical view of the “social” in the direction of technology, thereby identifying camera and film as social actors. Instead of seeing Krugers’ documentary merely as a documentation tool, I propose to view it as an element actively shaping public knowledge about Mecca and reaffirming colonial supremacy over Dutch East Indian pilgrims.
Drawing on Latour’s actor-network theory, I also demonstrated that Krugers, rather than the sole creator of his work as an individual filmmaker, relied on a tightly-knit network of support. The production and reception of The Great Mecca Feast encompass a broad network of human actors, including the filmmaker himself, Haji Agus Salim, Snouck Hurgronje, Van der Meulen and Van der Hoog. It spans further to embrace expansive colonial institutions such as the shipping conglomerate Kongsi Tiga and the Dutch consulate in Jeddah. Even the emerging power of Ibn Sāʿūd and Leiden’s academic audience left an indelible trace of the documentary’s production and reception. Through Krugers’ film, it becomes clear that technology in the early twentieth century was an important player in helping to weave together the complex transnational network connections of the hajj. Reaching Mecca, the powerful nodal point of that web, is what Krugers himself saw as one of the most notable achievements of his career.
About the Author
Rukayyah Reichling has a bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages (Univeristé Libre de Bruxelles) and holds dual master’s degrees in social anthropology and Islamic studies (KU Leuven, Belgium). Since 2019, she has been a doctoral student at the University of Amsterdam and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the European research program “Mediating Islam in the Digital Age” https://www.itn-mida.org/. Within the framework of that project, she investigates how new media technologies were employed in the late Dutch colonial period to portray Mecca.
Bibliography
Alexanderson, K. (2014). ‘A Dark State of Affairs’: Hajj Networks, Pan-Islamism, and Dutch Colonial Surveillance during the Interwar Period. Journal of Social History 47 (4), pp. 1021–1041.
Alloula, M. (1986). The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Behdad, A. (2016). Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Behdad, A. (2017). Mediated Visions: Early Photography of the Middle East and Orientalist Network. History of Photography 41 (4), pp. 362–375.
Belknap, G. (2014). Through the Looking Glass: Photography, Science and Imperial Motivations in John Thomson’s Photographic Expeditions. History of Science 52 (1), pp. 73–97.
Biran, M. Y. (2009). Sejarah film 1900–1950: Bikin film di Jawa. Jakarta: Komunitas Bamboo and Jakarta Art Council.
Biltereyst, D., and Meers, P. (2020). Comparative, Entangled, Parallel and ‘Other’ Cinema Histories. Another Reflection on the Comparative Mode Within New Cinema History. Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis 23 (1–2), pp. 1–9.
Chantre, L. (2009). Se rendre à La Mecque sous la Troisième République. Contrôle et organisation des déplacements des pèlerins du Maghreb et du Levant entre 1880 et 1939. Cahiers de la Méditerranée 78, pp. 202–227.
Chapman, J. (2011). Researching Film and History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. In: E. Margolis and L. Pauwels, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, Los Angeles: SAGE.
Christian, W. A., and Mittermaier, A. (2017). Muslim Prayer on Picture Postcards of French Algeria, 1900–1960. Material Religion 13 (1), pp. 23–51.
Docter, K. (2018). Exoticism, Criticism and Appropriation: Framing of Muslims in French and Dutch Interwar Press. European University Institute: Ph.D. Thesis.
Engmann, R. (2012). Under Imperial Eyes, Black Bodies, Buttocks, and Breasts: British Colonial Photography and Asante ‘Fetish Girls’. African Arts 45 (2), pp. 46–57.
Gelvin, J. L., and Green, N. (2014). Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gunning, T. (1996). ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions. In: R. Abel, ed., Silent Film, London: Athlone Press, pp. 71–84.
Hahn, H. (2018). On the Circulation of Colonial Pictures: Polyphony and Fragmentation. In: S. Helff and S. Michels, eds., Global Photographies, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp. 89–108.
Hashmi, S. (2003). Political Boundaries and Moral Communities: Islamic Perspectives. In: A. Buchanan and M. Moore, eds., States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 181–227.
Kane, E. (2015). Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Laffan, M. (2003). Between Batavia and Mecca. Images of Agoes Salim from the Leiden University Library. Archipel 65 (1), pp. 109–122.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martens, E. (2020). A Daughter of the Gods (1916): Film, Tourism and Empire on Location in Jamaica. Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 23 (1–2), pp. 1–40.
Motadel, D. (2014). Islam and the European Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nochlin, L. (1991). The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. London: Thames and Hudson.
Pattynama, P. (2014). Bitterzoet Indië: Herinnering en nostalgie in literatuur, foto’s en films. Amsterdam: Promotheus.
Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge.
Ray, S. (2021). Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press.
Ruppin, D. (2017). The Emergence of a Modern Audience for Cinema in Colonial Java. Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania 173 (4), pp. 475–502.
Ryad, U. (2017). On his Donkey to the Mountain of ʿArafat: Dr. Van der Hoog and his Hajj Journey to Mecca. In: U. Ryad, ed., The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire, Leiden: Brill, pp. 185–216.
Ryan, J. R. (1997). Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. London: Reaktion Books.
Ryzova, L. (2015). The Image sans Orientalism: Local Histories of Photography in the Middle East. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communications 8 (2–3), pp. 159–171.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Slight, J. (2015). The British Empire and the Hajj. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, J. G. (2015). Ethical Policies in moving pictures: The films of J. C. Lamster. In: S. Protschky, ed., Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-colonial Indonesia, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 41–70.
Tofighian, N. (2013). Blurring the Colonial Binary: Turn-of-the-Century Transnational Entertainment in Southeast Asia. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis.
Van Den Doel, W. (2021). Snouck: Het volkomen geleerdenleven van Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. Amsterdam: Promotheus.
Van Der Wal, D. (2011). Snouck Hurgronje: The First Western Photographer in Mecca, 1884–1885, Manfred and Hanna Heiting Fund. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.
Van Koningsveld, P. S. (1987). Snouck Hurgronje en de Islam: acht artikelen over leven en werk van een oriëntalist uit het koloniale tijdperk. Leiden: Documentatiebureau Islam-Christendom, Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid, Rijksuniversiteit.
Vredenbregt, J. (1962). The Haddj: Some of its Features and Functions in Indonesia. Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde 118 (1), pp. 91–154.
Vredenbregt, J. (1964). Bawean Migrations. Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde 120 (1), pp. 109–139.
Vrolijk, A. (2013). An Early Photographer of the Egyptian Mahmal in Mecca: Reflections on Intellectual Property and Modernity in the Work of C. Snouck Hurgronje. In: V. Porter and L. Saif, eds., The Hajj: Collected Essays, London: The British Museum Press, pp. 206–213.
Woodrich, C. (2016). Inside Gazes, Outside Gazes: The Influence of Ethnicity on the Filmmakers of the Dutch East Indies (1926–1936). Plaridel 13 (2), pp. 1–21.
Newspaper Articles
Algemeen Handelsblad, November 21, 1928.
Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië, January 16, 1929.
Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, August 16, 1928; October 30, 1929; October 12, 1932.
De Standaard, November 9, 1928.
De Sumatra Post, July 20, 1938.
De Telegraaf, December 17, 1928.
De Tijd: godsdienstig-staatkundig dagblad, November 9, 1928a; November 23, 1928b; May 14, 1938.
De Indische Courant, November 12, 1928.
De Locomotief, September 11, 1928.
Haagsche Courant, October 11, 1938.
Het Nieuws van den dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, June 27, 1938.
Het Vaderland: staat- en letterkundig nieuwsblad, November 9, 1928a; December 16, 1928b; February 28, 1931.
Het weekblad cinema en theater, 1928, No. 253.
Nieuwe Appeldoornsche Courant, November 27, 1928; May 21, 1938.
Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, November 9, 1928.
Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, December 24, 1938.
Films
Krugers, G. (1928). Het Groote Mekka-Feest. Bandung: Krugers Filmbedrijf.
Krugers, J. (2017). Life and Times of G. Krugers. Rijswijk: Aspect Video. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Krugers.
Notes
This article was made possible with generous support from the European Research Council’s Innovative Training Network “Mediating Islam in the Digital Age,” a Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska- Curie Action (ITN-MIDA 813547). I am extremely thankful to Prof. Gerard Wiegers, Prof. Umar Ryad, Prof. Ulrike Freitag, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful literature recommendations and perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this article. I furthermore extend my gratefulness to the filmmaker’s son, Dr. Jan Krugers, for our long conversation about his father’s work.
The length of the historical film rolls, kept at the EYE Film Museum under the identification number FLM26102, comprise 1570 meters on 35 mm. With eighteen pictures per second, the result is a film length of seventy-six minutes, including a few minutes of blank leader.
These reports were found online https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100084998360.0x000088. The originals are in the India Office Records and Private Papers Collection at the British Library under the archive reference number IOR/L/PS/10/1115.
Due to the high number in the numeration of photographs, it is evident that Krugers, during his sojourn to the Arabian Peninsula, had taken many more pictures. Unfortunately, these have been lost.
According to the description in Krugers’ family archive, the first records of the Burgemeestre family date to 1764, when Diederik Christiaan Burgemeestre – born in the Dutch village Lobith in 1734 – settled in the Netherland East Indies due to his work for the Dutch East India Company.
Krugers must have dearly kept the card with felicitations he received from Willy Mullens. It is still preserved in the family archive at Leiden University Library.
This Dutch translation and the following in this article are mine.
The referred passage is Surah Al-Tawbah, Q 9:28, indicating that the mušrikūn, due to their “uncleanliness,” are henceforth forbidden to access al-Masǧid al-Ḥarām. Islamic jurists have drawn conflicting conclusions from this verse. Abu Ḥanīfa, for instance, held that pagan Arabs were prohibited to access the Kaʿba only during the hajj season, while Al-Shāfiʿī allowed ahl al-ḏimmah to visit the Hijaz for at most three days. For further elaboration, see Hashmi (2003).
I have slightly changed some phrasings following the interview for ease of language.
For example, see De Standaard or Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 9 November 1928.
Leiden University, Krugers family archive, Or. 27.021.
For instance, consider Snouck Hurgronje, who among Muslims was known as Abdul Ghaffar or Van der Hoog, who adopted the name Mohammed Abdul-Ali.
The ṭawāf is shown several times during the film.
One of Krugers’ captions even suggests that the pilgrims don’t have the patience to stand in prayer at ʿArafāt. He writes: “because of the jostling crowds, [the pilgrims] miss the opportunity for pious contemplation.”
Personal interview with Dr. Jan Krugers.
Woodrich refers to Biran (2009), who based this information on an interview with Joshua Wong, a filmmaker of Chinese origin in the Dutch East Indies.
Very few newspaper entries concerning Krugers’ film disclose Snouck Hurgronje’s Islamic name Abdul Ghaffar and his half-year-long experience in Mecca. For example, see De Telegraaf (1928) and Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië (1929).
I have purposely translated the Dutch “niet-Mohammedaan” into English “non-Mohammedan” to purvey the awkwardness of the expression.
The same article was published again a couple days later in Nieuwe Appeldoornsche Courant.
For more about Van der Hoog, see Ryad (2017).
For example, see De Tijd (1938) and Nieuwe Appeldoornsche Courant (1938); in the Dutch East Indies, reports about the Egyptian film were published in the Sumatra Post (1938) and Het Nieuws van den dag voor Nederlansch-Indië (1938).
Personal interview with Dr. Jan Krugers.
An email communication between Dr. Jan Krugers and Christopher Woodrich (August 6, 2015); I warmly thank Woodrich for sharing the email exchange with me.
