The New Woman as Ethnographer: Lola Kreutzberg in the Dutch East Indies

In 1926, the German zoologist, photographer, and filmmaker Lola Kreutzberg toured the Indonesian archipelago, gathering material for her now lost film Bali, das Wunderland (Bali, the Isle of Wonders, 1927). Promoted as the “first expedition film directed by a German woman,” the film offered viewers a glimpse of the flora, fauna, and peoples of the celebrated island, then on its way to becoming a tourist destination. This article follows the traces of Kreutzberg’s expedition film in order to examine how the filmmaker and the wider illustrated press constructed the image of the European New Woman within a wider colonial context. To do so, it considers both the cultivation of Kreutzberg’s media persona and her representation of indigenous Balinese women, who appeared in the most widely circulated images from the expedition. If the now lost film sparked a short-lived media sensation, its fascination was located as much in the novelty of Kreutzberg’s status as a female expedition leader, camerawoman, and adventurer as it was in the orientalist exoticism of its images. Kreutzberg’s film and its reception thus offer a valuable opportunity to consider how the newfound—if still highly circumscribed—freedom and mobility of white European women were articulated and enacted against the background of colonial subjugation. As I argue, Kreutzberg’s work not only cultivated an image of the New Woman as ethnographer, it also participated in a broader turn to ethnographic media as a vehicle for the expression of female sensuality and desire. More than simply offer a recovery of a lost film and neglected filmmaker, then, this article offers a critical reading of the construction of the New Woman in interwar mass culture.