Still: The Clearing - Sabine Groenewegen

When Dutch director Sabine Groenewegen was in her early twenties, she came across a photograph of her great-grandmother Helena. What seemed strikingly obvious to Groenewegen was that Helena was of Indonesian heritage. Not surprisingly, the director’s curiosity was piqued.

Some years later, she was researching early depictions of the Dutch colonial ‘project’ in cinema, and came across Indonesian actress Amsy Moina, whose entire performance had been excised from a Dutch film named Rubber (1936), a colonial melodrama about the life of rubber planters in the Dutch East Indies.

The book on which the film was based, written by Madelon Lulofs, was highly critical of the plantation set-up, but after the Dutch premiere, scenes depicting the relationships between the Dutch planters (known colloquially as White Suits) and the Indonesian plantation workers, were cut.

All of this, in itself, could have provided more than enough substance for a feature documentary, but for Groenewegen it is a mere entry point into a much deeper examination of the oppressive nyai system within an Indonesia that was under colonial control, the ongoing oppression of women and the systemic silencing of female voices. 

“The removal of Amsy’s character is kind of a mystery, but then I became more interested in the ‘crime scene,’ and to understand that place, its history and the narrative machine around it,” says the director.

The workers in the plantations were lured to Sumatra following a thumb-print “signing bonus” which, in effect, consisted of a loan that had to be repaid. On arrival, it became obvious that any notion of worker or human rights was delusional. Under the Penal Sanction the planters could have workers arrested, imprisoned, or inflict corporal punishment under criminal law, granting them state power over the indentured labourers. As the ‘White Suits’ were, most of the time, there without wives or girlfriends, whose presence would have rendered the plantation operation “unproductive,” the Dutch masters were encouraged instead to satisfy their sexual needs with the female workforce. 

“They would pick women brought over under such contract, and bring them into their households, and when they had enough…they just kicked them out, so it was temporary, but it was omnipresent, and it was denied at the same time,” explains Groenewegen.

 Groenewegen notes how, in an autobiographical piece that Madelon wrote, the author described being the only white woman on a plantation and not being allowed to talk to the women living with her husband's colleagues because they supposedly didn't exist. 

For the film, which world-premiered at FID Marseille before picking up the Best Film Award in Human Rights Dox Competition at DokuFest, Groenewegen deploys a method of critical fabulation, a research and writing process introduced by cultural historian and Saidiya Hartman. “It is based on research and on sources, but it's a fictional character that is speaking this lived experience,” she says.

“It’s a way to work on women's history when all that we have are very incomplete traces of archive that was designed to silence them.”

Another fascinating and dynamic aspect of The Clearing* is the use of the constructed language Láadan, initially devised by feminist sci-fi writer Suzette Hardin-Elgin in her novel 'Native Tongue.’  

“Basically, her [Hardin-Elgin’s] idea was that existing languages under patriarchy work from a worldview inadequate for expressing women’s experiences and perceptions,” says Groenewegen. “Láadan opens up a fundamental feminist question: what experiences remain unrecognised when a language does not have precise words for them?”

In the film we encounter many examples of words created with this principle in mind - that of plugging the linguistic gap - such as ‘thaleben,’ which denotes ‘the signs exchanged between women that convey solidarity and care, and break their enforced segregation while keeping an appearance of compliance to the structures which subjugate them.’

“This also ties back to the structure of the film, which became a way of showing the silences and making visible what has been erased and what we do not have the right names for yet,” Groenewegen ends.

The Clearing is produced by near/by film.

Find out more about IDFA here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund