A Colonial Gaze on Mecca: Networks Surrounding the First Documentary about the Hajj

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.