Indonesia Calling: A Film on the Crossroads of Four Continents

Abstract

Like the rest of the historical world, labour historians have, somewhat belatedly, discovered the importance of films and other audio-visual products as historical evidence. Still photographs, films, videos and sound recordings are seriously being collected by labour archives. Labour history periodicals like Labor History (USA) and Le mouvement social (France) are regularly devoting space to films and television programs. Cornell University Press has recently published Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff. An Organised Guide to Films about Labour (how many film titles can you spot?), compiled by Tom Zaniello. And last but not least a body of serious academic work on labour's (often problematic) relations with the audiovisual media is now seeing the light of day. In this article I would like to examine a single film, Indonesia Calling a very controversial film, made by Dutch documentary film maker Joris Ivens in Australia in 1945-46 and released in that country in 1946, to see what it can tell us about an actual historical event the blacking by Australian waterside workers unions of Dutch ships that were heading for Indonesia, or the Dutch East Indies as it was still known to many and about the history of an individual film maker, but also about the relationship between film and the labour movement and about notions on the film maker's role in society during and after the Second World War. I think that I am justified in calling Indonesia Calling a film on the crossroads of four continents. Its origins were in the USA, where Ivens had moved to in 1936 and where he intended to be operating from, even though he never applied for US citizenship. The film was shot in Australia with financial support coming from the Waterside Workers Federation. The film's subject was Indonesia. The fact that it was made and shown soured the relationship between Ivens and his native country the Netherlands for four decades.