Amongst Gods and Demons: The artistic collaboration of Friedrich Dalsheim, Victor von Plessen and Walter Spies
Forgotten and dusty - for decades, film reels of highly flammable nitrocellulose film were stored in a wooden box in the horse stable and in the cellar of the manor house at Gut Wahlstorf estate, the home of the explorer, ornithologist, painter and filmmaker Victor Baron von Plessen (1900-1980), who grew up at Gut Sierhagen, in the bay of Lübeck. In 2012, Sophie von Plessen raised the alarm and informed Martin Koerber, Head of Audiovisual Heritage at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. Martin Koerber traveled to Wahlstorf to check the condition and quality of the film reels. They were copies of the ethnographic semi-documentaries co-produced by Victor von Plessen and Friedrich Dalsheim: The Island of Demons (1933) and The Headhunters of Borneo (1936). In the attic of the manor house in Wahlstorf, there were also several metal suitcases for transporting the film equipment, overseas suitcases as well as a locked leather suitcase that had survived unnoticed. After a locksmith was able to open the red velvet-lined leather case, a bundle of documents, letters and pictures relating to the films was revealed. Among them was a central letter that Plessen had written to UFA (Universum-Film AG) in Berlin at the end of December 1945 in search of the negative film material from The Headhunters of Borneo: "I would be grateful if you would remember that the name Dalsheim must be mentioned in the opening credits of the film. In the Third Reich it was not possible, but now it is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, he was also one of the victims of this horrible time, but at least this way we can preserve his memory. He is responsible for directing and, together with me, for the script. As far as I remember, the film was called a Plessen film, with me as the expedition leader. Now all that remains is to add: Director and script: Dr. Friedrich Dalsheim."
The connection between Plessen and Dalsheim leads back to Berlin in 1930, where Plessen had begun studying painting as a master student of Wilhelm Blanke (1873-1936) in 1920, followed by a training as a taxidermist with the zoologist Professor Erwin Stresemann (1889-1972), who was head of the ornithological collection at the Zoological Museum Berlin (now the Museum for Natural History) from 1921 onwards. In 1924, Plessen embarked on his first expedition to the Malay Archipelago on behalf of Stresemann. Surprisingly, he succeeded in tracking down the Bali starling, a very rare bird species first discovered by Stresemann in 1910 and now almost extinct, in an unexplored habitat. On his first expedition, the 24-year-old Plessen thus moved the Wallace Line, named after the zoologist Alfred R. Wallace, which separates the Asian and Australian flora and fauna, four kilometers to the west. The last stop on his journey was Yogyakarta, where Plessen met the exceptional artist Walter Spies (1895-1942), who had been living in Indonesia (at the time a Dutch colony, Dutch East Indies) since 1923. This encounter became a close friendship and a lively artistic exchange, particularly with regard to painting.
Victor von Plessen, who spoke fluent Malay and Dutch, met the filmmaker Friedrich Dalsheim in Berlin in 1930. Dalsheim had just made his film debut Menschen im Busch (1930) in co-direction with the Berlin ethnologist Gulla Pfeffer (1897-1967) in Togo. Plessen remembers: "In 1930, Dr. Dalsheim called me in my studio and asked if I would like to make a film with him in Bali. I [...] immediately agreed, of course without knowing what it meant to shoot a film at all. Somehow he had learned that I knew Bali well and had lived in Indonesia for a long time." A short time later, Victor von Plessen and Friedrich Dalsheim set off for Bali to shoot their first film together: The Island of Demons. At the time, Indonesia was a Dutch colony, known as the Dutch Indies. Indonesia only became independent in 1945.
Plessen acted as expedition leader and co-producer, Dalsheim as director, screenwriter, cameraman and co-producer. Walter Spies took on an important role as artistic advisor, arranging crucial contacts with the Balinese community, suitable filming locations and providing the film crew with accommodation. Above all, however, he arranged the Balinese dances, in particular the Sanghyang Dedari and the Kecak, which was only danced by men. Spies had left Europe in 1923, moved first to Java and then to Bali in 1927, where he spent the rest of his life - fascinated by the variety of virtuoso artistic creativity - living among the locals and studying Balinese culture, music and dances intensively. He built a picturesque estate in Ubud, which became an international meeting place for artists, scientists, aristocrats and wealthy individuals, including Charlie Chaplin, the writer Vicki Baum (Love and Death in Bali), the artist Miguel Covarrubias, the filmmaker André Roosevelt, the dance researcher Beryl de Zoete, the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. In the early 1930s, a huge tourism boom broke out in Bali. Why Bali was perceived as the newly discovered "last paradise" depended on the one hand on the unique diversity, intensity and energy of artistic creation and late colonization, and on the other hand on the consistent marketing by travel and transport companies, in particular the Dutch shipping company Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij (KPM), as well as the media exposal of the Bali legend through photography and film.
The Island of Demons (1933) depicts the everyday life of the Balinese village community living in harmony with nature, their gods and demons and tells the love story of Wajan, son of the village witch, and Sari, daughter of the rich merchant Lombos, who have to overcome demonic forces for their love. At the center of the story is the Balinese belief in demons, as Victor von Plessen notes: "We are used to imagining Bali as a happy, shadowed paradise. In reality, the life of the Balinese people is happy in the perfect harmony of man, nature and the gods, but this life also has its worries and fears. The fear of the forces of nature gives rise to the belief in evil demons that haunt the land and the people as a force of nature or even in human form. The film aims to show the workings of such a demon incarnate, a Balinese witch - Leak."
Following the example of Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), The Island of Demons strives for a transcultural collaboration in order to ensure the greatest possible ethnographic authenticity: the script was developed on location over months of work by Dalsheim with Plessen and Spies as well as a Hindu priest and with the support of the indigenous prince, based on knowledge of the way of life and in exchange with the Balinese villagers. Only Balinese lay actors were cast. The Jewish film critic Lotte Eisner (1896-1983) immediately recognized what was special about this approach: "Far from the main road, Victor Baron von Plessen, the expedition leader, and Dr. Dalsheim, director and author, searched for the real Bali - and found it. [...] In this film, the people are not staffage for some studio fable, they are allowed to play themselves, to breathe their existence. No white star is made up to look brown, no falsification of feelings takes place. The natives themselves helped to write the story of their movie. The supernatural, the demonic play a natural role for them, who still experience things between heaven and earth that our school wisdom is unable to resolve."
After eight months in Bali, Dalsheim and Plessen returned to Berlin with 15,000 meters of film for post-production. When The Island of Demons premiered in Berlin on February 16, 1933 as the first film about a foreign culture after the Nazi takeover, Dalsheim was still named in the credits despite his Jewish origins. A few months later, he was banned from his profession and excluded from German productions as a "non-Aryan".
Dalsheim was able to shoot two more semi-documentary films abroad, first The Wedding of Palo (1934) with Knud Rasmussen in East Greenland, then again with Victor von Plessen The Headhunters of Borneo (1936). Once this film had been shot, Dalsheim was no longer allowed to be named in any capacity if the film was to be shown in the German Reich. Despite numerous desperate appeals in letters, he was consistently refused to work on the editing. By the time Die Kopfjäger von Borneo premiered in Berlin on August 4, 1936 to great acclaim, Dalsheim had long been in exile in Switzerland. Like so many emigrants from Nazi Germany, Dalsheim wanted to emigrate to the USA, but failed due to a lack of support and, financially ruined and desperate, took his own life in Zurich in August 1936. Barely two weeks after the film premiere.
Victor von Plessen set off on his last expedition to Nusa Penida in 1937/38 and took over the Wahlstorf estate in Schleswig-Holstein in 1938. To this day, his ethnographic collection from Indonesia, which was mainly created during film productions in Bali and Borneo, bears witness to his multifaceted life and his open-minded approach to cultural exchange with Indonesia.
At the end of the 1930s, the socio-political climate in the Dutch East Indies also intensified. The Christelijke Staatskundige Partej demanded that the colonial government take tougher measures against homosexuals. Walter Spies was accused of having sex with minors, arrested in early 1939 and sentenced to eight months in prison. When the German Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, they took revenge and arrested 2,500 Germans in their colony of the Dutch East Indies, including Spies. In the course of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 by the Japanese, who were allied with Germany, the prisoners were to be transported away by ship. It was not until January 18, 1942 that the third ship, the Van Imhoff, left Sumatra for Ceylon with 478 Germans and 110 Dutchmen on board, including Spies. As a result of a bombardment by a Japanese fighter jet off the island of Nias, Spies and 411 other German prisoners perished, while the captain and crew of the Van Imhoff reached safety in lifeboats.
These dramatic facts about Friedrich Dalsheim and Walter Spies frame the production of The Island of Demons and The Headhunters of Borneo. The corresponding impressive correspondence from the attic find in Wahlstorf was decisive for the realization of the book Friedrich Dalsheim. Ethnography - Film - Emigration, which I was able to publish in 2022 in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin, after long international archive research. A book dedicated to the life and work of a forgotten pioneer of ethnographic film. An attempt to restore Dalsheim's credits and thus his place in film history. Almost 100 years later, his approach to transcultural collaboration is still remarkably relevant. Thanks to the astonishing work of Deutsche Kinemathek, The Island of Demons (1933) and The Headhunters of Borneo (1936) have been restored and digitized in 2021 and 2024.
©Louise von Plessen