"[Ray's period of focus] ranges from the earliest films made in 1912 until 1930 and covers Colonial Institute, corporate, and religious films in the three substantive middle chapters. This is a signal achievement, for the gap it begins to fill is vast, there being no comparable work about Indonesia on film in this period. The book's clarity and brevity make it a good text for documentary film or archive courses, or in tandem with other materials for teaching the Indonesian road to independence. Use in the classroom is facilitated by the fact that many of the materials analyzed by Ray are now available on the YouTube channels of Eye Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld & Geluid). Ray admirably completes the important task, as Karen Strassler has done for photography or Matthew Isaac Cohen for theater, of providing an analytical survey of how one genre sheds light on the not-so-far-distant late colonial past.".