This film is quite astonishing. Indeed I found it to be overwhelming. There is such density of incident and meaning and history that you can't really take it all in one sitting.
There is footage from literally hundreds of documentaries shot in the Dutch East Indies between 1912 and 1933, over this there is a soundtrack which combines sound effects to match the previously silent images, and also some poetry which I think is Persian in style. The poetry concerns a creation myth. Before the world existed there was apparently only Mother Dao, who was turtlelike. She became dirty, and gleaned the dirt from her body into one mass which she pressed into a ball on her kneecap using her thumb. This is our world. She also gave birth to a man and a woman, who first inhabited the earth. As the poem in the earth goes, when she died, she turned into dust, and all the dust rained down on the earth and filled all the chasms, and gave rise to all different forms of peoples and creatures, who did not know that they were brothers and sisters. I've a penchant for this type of stuff from reading about it as a kid. This particular myth comes from the islanders of Nias, actually for them the world was just their island and Mother Dao is the sea, but the way it's described in the poetry of the film is far better. If you ever saw Forugh Farrokhzad's The House Is Black and listened to her poetry, you will get the idea of what happens during Mother Dao. There are other poems too, with which the film will delight you if you manage to track it down.
I could not quite believe some of the sequences, you have for example a crocodile hunt where somehow a group of quite unprotected native individuals working under white men have corralled around fifty crocs into shallow water, and are killing them with long poles. The crocs are thrashing furiously through the water and move very very quickly when trying to escape, it is a wonder no-one was hurt! Then you have an interior scene with a Dutchman dressed in a white pith hat, and a white suit, shining out of the screen like some sort of god amongst furrowed-skin muscular half-naked brown locals.
You get awesomely unsafe factories with huge machinery, a worker dips his hand through a gap where a piston engine is revolving, totally casually, seemingly unaware that is he gets it wrong he will finish his shift down one arm. In other miscellaneous scenes you get workers high up on huge warehouse skeletons totally without protection, volcanic explosions, dynamite blasts, beautiful and intricate stone artifacts from pre-colonial times.
Really unmissable, and should be seen more than once.