From “Crocodile City” to “Ville Lumière”: Cinema Spaces on the Urban Landscape of Colonial Surabaya

Abstract

The development of exhibition spaces in Surabaya, from canvas and bamboo tents to luxurious cinema palaces, between 1897 and World War I demonstrates the burgeoning movie-going scene in this major colonial-era port city in Eastern Java. The evolution of these venues on the modernizing urban landscape came in the context of other processes of development and social change, which informed both the decisions of cinema entrepreneurs and the mobility of spectators. As a site in which technology, race and colonialism converged, the cinema represented a liminal space in Surabaya’s multiethnic and increasingly polarized colonial society.